i'd have laughed at this comment in mu foolish young college days, but anyone today who thinks being broke is the worker's fault is wrong most of the time. Likewise, a lot of those who brag about being so smart and hard-working are primarily merely lucky.
This is, of course, somewhat off topic regarding investigators and sick days if the sick days are to be used when you are really sick or have a family member sick and need to take real care for them as provided under the FMLA.
A retired self-employed attorney, i.e.,, small businessman, I could tell you lots of employee, and many employer, horror stories. The problem is that a prospective employee is unlikely to discover what a louse an employer company or boss is before it's too late,
Many people end up at the ends of terms of elective office etc. with so many accumulated leave days, not contractually or legally tied to actual illness, that they can and practically must take accumulated leave or just quit the day after their last elected term or they end up working those days free. It helps if the contract is clear on such points. The trouble is that, except for elected politicians and other government workers, the "at will" doctrine means the employer can change the deal any time it suits them.
Actually, notwithstanding federal and state law, you are very likely to get fired on one pretext or another if you, or your child, actually get sick and put in a legitimate claim for self-insured contractual medical benefits, or those under an insurance policy, or they find out you have any actual or potential disability. If you have been living in a cave and still believe the legal system works for ordinary people much of the time, or that either party or most politicians care about anyone like you, or treats their own family members, much less others, decently, you're in for an awful shock.
If you're fool enough to be unfaithful to your wife, and/or fall into your own employer's or his detective's honey trap, you're equally likely to fall into one set by a competitor after your and your company's information, making you a bad risk. If your wife can't trust you, who can? And use your head!
As a retired lawyer, I know, and any junior high civics student should know, that subpoenas are issued as a matter of right and a routine, ministerial act by court clerks or, for that matter, by attorneys and Notaries Public, in both private and governmental civil as well as criminal cases. The judge normally doesn't even know about them until later if at all.
Search warrants, on the other hand, are issued only on some actual or alleged showing of probable cause and may be issued either by a judge or by a mere magistrate, which is a legally trained person in the federal system but can be the town mayor, who knows no law, in state law.
Very, very few applications for search or arrest warrants are turned down either in the federal or state legal systems according to the available statistical data.
The government got the Supreme Court to hold, a generation ago, that bank, credit card, and other records even of your more intimate personal transactions are the institution's records, not yours, and they can obtain them without even notifying you and order the institution not to tell you. See also the paradoxically named federal Privacy Act, which mostly requires that you be notified that they can pretty much get whatever they want. The American voting public let them get by with this, instead of demanding enactment of real privacy protection, without even much of a whimper from most people.
I have not found the document mentioned or other evidence indicating precisely what credit card records are being tracked by the government, for what purposes, and subject to what, if any, internal safeguards. Hopefully, even the federal government has some limitation upon its technical capacity to monitor everyone’s credit card and financial activity, and would only go to the trouble of doing this, with or without a warrant, in kidnapping, missing persons, terrorism, imminent threat to human life, major organized crime, major fugitive, and other such cases in which a court would likely find the process reasonable and thus Constitutional and lawful. But it would be safer if we had the protection of warrant requirements before they could track such records.
By the way, the new AACA, “Obamacare,” health care bill requires even the smallest businesses to file IRS Form 1099 for either single or aggregate purchases of $600.00 or more, a great burden, allegedly to catch $19 Billion in alleged tax evasion. There are those who would love to see the government track every transaction. Of course, that would give them your religious, ideological, and political information, a detailed picture of your personal and business relationships, and a virtual dictatorship.
It is far past time that the ACLU, if it really stands for what it claims to stand for rather than a leftist totalitarianism, some of the conservative groups that really care about conservative principles and liberty rather than just the profits of big contributors, the privacy advocates, etc., wake up, see where this is heading or could end up whether or not actually so intended, and get together and defend personal privacy, without which liberty cannot exist.
If you think that only guilty people have anything to fear from government or corporate invasions of privacy, you’re wrong. I was put on a CIA list of suspected Soviet sympathizers and spies as the result of a ‘Mail cover” in which the courts hold that the government may monitor and keep dossiers and databases on who we correspond with and who writes to us, especially from outside the U. S., by old-fashioned “snail mail,” and now by Email, etc. They did this so clumsily that we learned about it right away, so any real spy would have, too, but they lied to my U. S. Senator and me about this whole sordid affair until 1983. If our much-vaunted CIA can’t tell the difference between a conservative college student doing research into the Russian-Argentine balances of trade and payments for an economics research paper, with the full knowledge and active cooperation o
For a post on SlashDot, I would have expected a citation to the original survey data, methodology, questions, maybe which university degrees and differences between them, etc., also definitions, significance, etc. Since different people would exhibit different changes in respiratory or heart rate, skin conductivity, etc., how would you get accurate, measurable, and comparable calibrations of the level of fear of death or of anything else?
Most of the answers address neither the subject, the fear of death, any real analysis of why the survey might show those with university degrees fear death less, etc.
A couple of responders did note, aptly, that there could be a number of factors involved including university graduates possibly facing fewer consciously immediate life-threatening situations than slum dwellers, those in war zones, etc.
This one reminds me of the old psych department joke about the experiment with the male rat given a choice between food and a female rat, various adjustments in electric shocks, etc., and some student raises the question: Did anybody ever try testing the results after changing female rats?
Fear of death in the abstract where the odds approximate the life insurers’ mortality tables is one thing. Too many teenagers, some of whom are in college, and some other people, in our culture, have somehow convinced themselves that death will not actually happen to them, at least for a long, long time until after they get old, and thus too many lose their lives or are severely injured young because they take foolish, useless risks, seek thrills by so doing, etc. I have known some young recent university and professional school graduates to take risks they should be smart enough and know to avoid and die, in one-car accidents, etc., as a result.
Actually facing, or having good reason to believe that you are, or likely are, facing imminent death is something quite different, and I doubt that many of the survey respondents were actually in such a life-threatening situation at the time they responded. What percentage of those in each group had ever actually faced their own imminent death, not as an intellectual exercise but a stark physical reality, as children, or as graduates or at comparable ages?
I have some expertise as a child and adult with very credible, serious, imminent threats of murder, etc., and some other momentarily frightening situations ranging from near drowning to violent accidents, before and after acquiring bachelor’s and an earned juris doctor in law. I don’t believe that education had that much effect upon such fears from events before and after graduation. The fear from two armed robberies in which the robbers told me that they were there and intended to kill me in any event did not really get hard to control until the next day, but these were not my first real threats or fears of imminent death, or worse.
Maybe the survey should have covered college and university graduates compared to those without degrees in similar battlefield situations etc.
Professionally in my law practice, and in other parts of my life, I have known and dealt with a significant number of people suffering with expertly diagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder before and after treatment,. I don’t think the specific fear of imminent death would check out as being that much more a factor than other traumatic experiences they have dealt with including seeing buddies killed, being wounded, and a lot I have known in privileged and confidential relationships who had suffered mostly incestuous child sexual abuse, or rape at older ages. I have not tested this, but in significant privileged communications with a lot of survivors of various such traumas, I have not found any particular reason to believe that education would prove to be a significant variable either in frequency of such events or resulting PTSD, etc.
I have also had some limited samples of multiple contacts with child and adult patients, of varying ages, the latter with and without degrees, facing imminent death
Amen. Setting up test cases is an old and well-recognized, and permitted, practice. We studied several examples in law school, and, as long as there is a real case or controversy with real adverse parties, it's legal.
I was not involved nor privy to the process, and don't even agree with a lot of their agenda, but there is very good reason to believe that the "gay" plaintiffs in Edwards v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court converted private consensual sodomy from a crime at common law into a Constitutional right, was arranged, i.e. set up, by the "gay" parties through an apparently false domestic-violence or disturbance call so that they would be caught in the act when the police thus entered the apartment lawfuly. You had to work hard at it to get vcaught for such offenses and, according to the state, tere appeared ot have been no arrests or prosecutions for this offense outside of public lewdness, which is a different crime, in many years before the arrest that set up the test case. But sometimes you have to get arrested or held in contempt to test a law or a judge's ruling. There ought to be an easier way, with less risk, but there isn't.
The people trying to set up a Supreme Court test case about IRC 501(c)(3) and IRS regulations under it restricting pastors' speech about moral and politial issues and politicians have so far been frustrated because the government. apparently afraid that the law will be held unconstitutional, have so far refused to act against any of the pstors who have sent them tapes of sermons that violate the rules.
Speaking of protesters wanting the authorities to over-react, we wouldn't have this current issue if the DHS and TSA hadn't over=reacted, precisely as the terrorists hoped when they sent a chump of a shoe bomber so the TSA would make everyone take off their shoes, etc.
I know an attorney whose throat was cut, nearly fatally, in a secured courtroom, by a client who had brought it from a high-security jail where body cavity searches etc. that we hopefully don’t have for flyers or visitors to the White House yet are commonly used. We’re kidding ourselves if we think the next big attack will be done just like 9/11 using Arabs or other foreign-looking engineers etc. as suicide hijackers, or that our enemies can’t get through any such mass screening that includes little old ladies and three year old kids but doesn’t do an intelligent, rather than unintelligent wide-loop, job of intelligence gathering and profiling.
Back in the days of computer punch cards, our fool CIA put me on a list of suspected Soviet spies, saboteurs, and sympathizers, did it so clumsily that we found out about it right away, never checked the facts, lied to my U. S. Senator and me about this for about forty years that they maintained this list, and eventually admitted the truth and told me that they had told Nelson Rockefeller about this several years before they quit lying to my Senators and me. If they can’t tell the difference between a conservative college student writing a research paper—for which the Department of State etc., with full knowledge, had declassified bales of documents—and a Communist, it’s no wonder they made certain spectacularly fatal errors over the years. Other government agencies and officials, and keepers of medical records, have done equally illegal and utterly stupid things in dealing with me over the years using incomplete and otherwise bad computerized data. Some, including a heart attack I never had, appear to have been clerical errors, but nobody living can correct that one, while others include statements I never made to people I never met, are fake and defamatory, and the makers and keepers of those records know it.
There is often no real and practical way to find out what is or has been in your records, kept by government entities, data miners and sellers with contracts with TSA and other federal and state agencies, public and private hospitals and other medical providers, etc., get a copy thereof, get a copy in a format your new doctor can read, or get errors corrected. We discovered that X-ray and other medical and billing records on at least nine people, covering two races, two sexes, over a foot differences in height and ages from about nine to about ninety, some with and some without breaks, bullets, pins, etc., had been combined into mine, only because a radiologist asked about a bullet I could write another book on credit bureau errors. The law on this subject, written by the large campaign contributors, is woefully inadequate and needs to be brought into the current and future real world with more input from people with more computer science expertise than this retired lawyer has.
Having been born with occipital lobe damage and agenesis of the corpus collossum, meaning the wiring that usually connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain was never there, which, when discovered, late in life, led two experts to believe I had become too mentally disabled to live independently much less practice law or do any gainful work, I find this fascinating. Once they realized that tests just done put my verbal abilities in the 97th percentile way past middle age and while being treated for major depression, this was congenital and long before I had been a National Merit Scholarship finalist and graduated in the upper third of my selective law school class, practiced law including trials and appeals, etc., they began to understand and explained why, despite trying hard to go into engineering, I never could do higher math--or subtract, for that matter, and I have been having "senior moments" since first grade 65 years ago. . Especially in the very young, the brain has amazing powers to rewire and preprogram itself that even the neurologists and computer experts are only beginning to think about understanding and using outside the brain.
One of the questions nobody who buys into the current orthodoxy will address is how and why this level of redundancy and adaptability would and could ever have evolved and become widely distributed since the occasions for it to be beneficial would and do arise so rarely and, in a primitive world, would have left those like me at grave survival disadvantages.
Furthermore, do any of those of you with better computer science backgrounds know of any computer that can, on its own, create multiple partitions, directories, and subdirectories, some with and some without cross-access to deal with overloads and other problems that would otherwise destroy data etc., as the human brain does in dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder in response to childhood trauma, and particularly those that require the brain to deal with contradictory authoritative messages? I know some experts in and some people with this condition. Some don’t believe it is real, but anyone who has seen dissociation at that level knows that it is.
If either political party or the officials and candidtes both palm off on us were honest, competent, gave a Continental about mere citizens and their children, and the fundamental, albeit unenumerated, privacy rights without which a free democratic country canot exist and function, this would have been stopped early on, or, less effectively, right now, and all lsuch collections of data would be seized in dawn raids tomorrow and destroyed.
One solution might be for somebody to do a thorough data mining job on all our incumnbent and would-be elected and high appointed officials, and those at the companies involved in or helping with this, and start by publicly disclosing the whole lot about a few of the worst and announce that more would follow until we citizens get what everybody I know, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike, really want from Congresss and the companies with regard to privacy protection.
Not everything that adds to the bottom line of anything that calls itself a business enterprise is either legitimately conservative or good policy.
A lot of data on individuals held by government and business entities also happens to be false and defamatory. The CIA took over 30 years after we caught them to quit lyingto my Senator and me about having me on a list of Soviet spies and sympathizers, which was not only libelous and could easily have been checked but ludicrous.
One solution might be to flood the system with false and scandalously defamatory data, some of which couuld be obvious and some not. Years ago, I was general counsel to a bank and discovered, for exmple, that we had amde a six-figure loan to the broke flake son of a wealthy family thecreditbureau had combined files and listed as married to hnis mother, a piece of data that got interesting when I asked him if he was still marriedf to and living with her in the process of trying to collect. I also saw the scandalous libel about the socialite daughter of the then smaller credit bureau's owner that a crook had planted todemonstrate his access while rigging his own credit report and seling that service to others.
I use a lot of ad-supported services on line but am very displeased that researching things like child sexual abuse, mental illness, and substance abuse, money laundering, or whatever in my strange and eclectic law practice, etc., got me flooded with ads I don't want for things for which I'm not in the market, for years.
Too much of our First Amendment jurisprudence dealing with commercial speech, advertising, and entertainment, has departed completely from the original intent of the Framers. When the Court included commercial nude lap dancing in the same protection as core political speech in 1981, things really started to go awry. Interestingly, most of these cases benefit not the poor disenfranchised little guy who might need protection but the wealthy and influential. One has to wonder how much that has to do with the Supreme Court granting First Amendment protection to “virtual” child pornography, for example.
Whatever other protection the Constitution provides, or ought or ought not to provide, for sexual activity, for example, it simply isn’t “speech” or “press,’ nor is it a modern version thereof, hardly being a modern invention or innovation, so it does not fit within the text, intent, or framework of First Amendment jurisprudence, any more than the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment do. The logical place to put most sexual liberty would be under the Fourth Amendment, but you can’t fit a right of publicity or very public activities under that. Driving on a public street and running a red light is not protected by either amendment, either, contrary to some people who know better but argue that red light cameras which capture open activity on the public roads are somehow unconstitutional.
If something that wouldn’t lead you or me to do something destructive, tortuous, or criminal, even if we listened to or watched it, reasonably arguably might be likely to cause, lead, or encourage a small minority of minors or other particularly susceptible people, not readily identifiable in advance, to do so, and these are commercial and don’t really have anything to do with ideas except exploitation of base tendencies and incitement, it would be entirely proper to uphold a law regulating this conduct that 72% of the people in our democracy within a republic favor. This has no positive value.
Now one real practical legal and Constitutional problem with trying to reduce the amount of such pollution by legislation was aptly summed up by the late Justice Potter Stewart in his famous comment, “I may not be able to define it [pornography, in words], but I know it when I see it.” Why, however, do we require impossible perfection in the drafting of such laws when they might affect the profits of a very profitable industry targeting minors? Of course, unless you believe that not only all members of Congress but their legal staffs are ignorant idiots, you have to ask yourself why, so often, the bills touted as solving all the world’s ills always seem to wind up having either gaping loopholes or obvious defects the courts have already ruled rendered other laws, and would render any new ones, unconstitutional, unenforceable, and void. When I was in law school, our famous Dean liked to quote Will Rogers: “Whenever Congress tells a joke, it’s a law, and whenever they pass a law, it’s a joke.”
Please provide access, in English, to all of the materials you folks are using to teach primary grade students there in India, to educators, including home-schoolers, and others here in the USA. If you have really achieved that kind of literacy rate among your entire student-age population, rather than just a select few of them, you have got onto something we need desperately, becuase our average high school graduate can barely read, can't write a simple business letter, and can't balance a checkbook much less do math or anything but play games with a computer,and an awful lot of them are altogether functionally illiterate and have also never leanred to study, work, etc. We have a few who have taught themselves more about computers than I know, but the key variable is home environment rather than anything most public schools are doing. Consider the problem of teaching a smart 12th grader, or senior, to alphabetize, compose business letters, balance a checkbook, etc., as I have had to do with many of the better ones I hired--you should see the ones we couldn't or had to fire--and you get some of the picture of teaching them to use even dedicated commercial law office software.
Your piece made reference to some computer programs, etc., with which I am not familiar here. I'm an older fellow, retired lawyer. I learned to do some things in DOS, simple batch files, etc., but can't even do that in Windows, and Windows and Office often frustrate me. The only Linux expert I knew,way over my head in math--I'd have been an engineer insrtead of a lawyer but my talent is not really in math while I'm in 97th percentile in verbal ability--taught it at the local university but coulnd't make enough and had to work another job, and has since died. I would love to take some basic courses in how to get computers and programs to do what I need them to do at the local university but, among other problems, I have a life-long uncorrectable vision limitaitn and the textbooks are not only incomprehensivel to me but printed in type too small and compressed for me to use, and nobody at the university knows a solution to that problem, either.
The First Amendment, like the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, or Tenth does not grant, and was never intended to grant, any rights. They were added to guarantee fundamental, unalienable human rights, generally accepted by those supporting and those opposing the Constitution as granted by or derived from “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The same argument that the Tenth Amendment was a legal nullity because it was “merely declaratory,” could be made, and exposed as fallacious and false by making, the same argument about the First Amendment. Of course, the Constitution deals only with governmental action, but, in this case, there was pressure to stop this demonstration, applied by General Petraeus as Commander of our war effort in Afghanistan, the Secretary of Defense, the White House, and many others influenced by them, so the governmental-private distinction
Some smart and thoughtful conservatives, as well as liberals, on and off the Supreme Court, realized that laws against burning the American flag as a political protest, however repugnant the act, violated the intent of the First Amendment. The opinion failed to mention that the same law would also have criminalized the burring of the flag of North Vietnam with whom we were then at war, the subject of that protest, the Nazi flag, the red flag and hammer and sickle of Communism, etc. The same problem arises with many laws intended to protect other “venerated objects,” the damaging or destruction of which causes particular hurt and anger, beyond the economic value of the object, which laws would protect cemeteries and headstones, religious symbols, Bibles and Qurans, etc. Our law does recognize many instances of intentional infliction of severe emotional distress. Intriguingly, the opinion also appeared to overlook the fact that the flag burned in that case did not belong to the flag-burner, which raised another issue altogether.
A retired Texas lawyer, I’m not up on the laws of Florida or wherever Rackspace is based, but a contractual provision against a customer of a web host, an ISP, a media outlet, a publishing company, a quick print shop, or a supplier of chicken feed using the service to promote anything likely to get the web host, etc., entangled, fairly or not, in someone else’s fight, would appear to be reasonable and valid. This could, however, certainly be abused. Microsoft, Google, etc. are big enough, and virtual natural monopolies, that their refusal to deal with someone who disagreed with them or their favored candidate for President could raise some very significant issues, but that’s not the case here. Now what I would want to know, in order to judge Rackspace’s action, might include who else, pushing whatever else, they are and are not willing to serve. Al Qaeda and some other violently militant Muslim terrorists, with whom, unlike “Islam,” we really are at war because they are at war with us. Child porn distributors. People and groups who promote hate and violence. Scandal sheets that habitually invade privacy or publish libelous lies under color of the public-figure rules. I would prefer not to do business with an ISP, a hosting company, a telecommunications company, etc., that don’t guard and take action against such abuses. There were clients I wouldn’t represent in their ongoing business activities when practicing law, though I had no ethical problem representing criminals in court after they got caught or charged, about which there are rules prescribing what defense lawyers may and may not do.
I happen to agree with the prevailing view, across the religious and political spectrum, that this Quran-burning protest is wrong for several reasons. I can find nothing in Christian scripture or belief that sanctions it, and it can and will be used against us not only by our real enemies but by others in the Muslim world with whom our country is trying to conduct necessary relations. It could well incite deadly violence against Americans and harm our war effort. It also appears to be a publicity stunt.
Like checking for gas leaks with a match, this theory has already exploded. Only days ago, we read of another dangerous sex offender who simply cut off his GPS ankle bracelet, left the prescribed location, and went on another violent interstate crime spree before being caught. Tampering with your GPS tether is supposed to get you arrested immediately, but, too often, it doesn't happen.
Now that's for the small percentage of people locked up today who we really need to lock up, or lock up for the long times people spend in jail awaiting trial, much less being punished afterward. I've done criminal law, and been the victim of armed robberies--one led by someone already on parole from two successive life sentences for armed robbery--and other serious state and federal crimes, and there are some people who never should get out of prison but will, but we're kidding ourselves and wasting a fortune on a lot of incarceration. In my bitter personal and professioanl experirence, a huge number of the worst criminals will never be reported becuase the victims are too frustrated with the system, won't get caught, won't be investigated and prosecuted vigorously, etc.
We're using jails and prisons to house a lot of mentally ill people who would not pose problems, much less danger, if properly treated--and the evidence is clear that most mentally ill people are no more dangerous than other people.
As for substance abuse, which also figures in a lot of incarceration, there is something irrational, crazy, when the first thing the inmate does upon supervised release is get drunk or high again.
Now when somebody comes up with a reasonably priced, effective, and accurate real-time monitor that includes not only GPS but substance abuse, which figures in an awful lot of other crime as well, that can be incorporated into all cars and also used for specific people for GPS etcl, the left would scream but we could save some lives.
The numbers here are meaningless because of variations in cost of living, whether or not you have a paid-for house, medical bills, etc., not to mention health problems of their own, their spouse’s, or their child’s that no amount of money would fix, and other unmeasured variables, but the so-called “research,’ the criteria for which are not revealed here, must have been fun.
Happiness, like the economic value of artichokes or many other goods, is, subjective, or the sum of the subjective valuations of potential buyers. I don’t know how one would quantify happiness, but the subjective nature of value is elementary economics 101, or was when I majored in it.
Looking back over my life, or my adult life, I don’t think my personal and largely subjective assessment my happiness or unhappiness tracked my monetary income, assets, or net worth, which have all gone up and down.
I used to have a running conversation with the wealthiest man in America at that time when we officed in the same building and rode the elevators at odd hours. He often talked about things like having followed bad medical advice with respect to his brilliant first-born son with schizophrenia, and I am sure that he was nowhere near the happiest person I knew casually or otherwise, but notably unhappy.
I have read survey data that indicated that the average person, across the income distribution, believed that he would be happy with thirty percent (30%) more disposable income. I’ve seen some who started out making fun of others who let their families go chasing more money and ended up doing the same thing, and ending up broke and worse.
You've obviously visited someof the same sites I have. Why are you following me around on the Web?
The trick with a Do Not Track Me list is that nobody would let you visit their site and find out anything if you were on it, or clicked "no" on site.
Try checking out both candidates' sites, or the pro and anti groups on issues, and getting their alerts, without being listed as a supporter. I got an Email thanking me for signing a petition for the side I oippose after doing some research on their open site though I most assuredl did not sign their petition.
I'm a retired lawyer who unexpectedly found myself dealing with many survivors of certain horrific crimes, and legal research on such cases can and does get you some targeted stuff you and I really don't want. Some of it's illegal. Try to find and buy a good product, new or used, and it can be hard, though you may get some ads for some, but it's most often useless. Research a sexual issue for a client's case and you wouldn't believe some of what you get.
Furthermore, when I Google the Acme Widget Corp. the US DOJ ADA, or the National Conference of Con Artists, that's what I want to see first and wish Google would quit putting them down on page four below the name I'm searching. WQhile thery;re at it, the FTC should make the federally required free site for credit reports come up instead of FreeCreditReport.com that isn't free at all and is a scam based on that law under their administration.
Now Video Professor is a Scam really ought to come up before Video Professor. OK, I'll look at some ads--most ofwhich I now block--if they'll let me specify at least what I might be interested in, because they get that wrong most of the time.
I can understand the DEA and Department of Justice needing people who can speak and translate “Ebonics,” or black slave English and its latest mutating manifestations, in order to understand communications intercepted in drug and other criminal investigations. It would sometimes also be useful if undercover agents working in certain black communities were fluent in “Ebonics.”
I practiced juvenile and criminal law. Trust me on this one, most of the people who actually speak “Ebonics” are either in, recent graduates from, or will soon be inmates of, juvenile and adult prisons, making those among the most logical places to find such people. Speaking this “jive” is probably the surest guarantee that someone is or will soon be involved in crime and the criminal justice system.
The fun problem here is going to be finding many people who are genuinely fluent in so-called “Ebonics” who either know or can be taught enough spoken and written actual English to be able to translate this “jive,” much of which is code used for criminal purposes, into English so it can be used by anyone on the other side.
One additional problem is that there are an infinite number of varieties of this and some of them are not spoken and cannot be understood by anyone outside of one isolated neighborhood or, at best, locality.
Now part of this was originally invented used by slaves to resist and evade restrictions on their free speech by their masters, or, later, restrictions in prisons or the like. “Bodiesburg,” was one of the terms invented in the infamous Tucker Prison Farm in Arkansas to talk about the murders and secret burials of prisoners by the guards and administration, as in “They say he escaped; I heard he went to Bodiesburg,” or, later, “You talk about Bodiesburg, you go there.,” for example. However, very few situations like that still exist.
I have represented enough speakers of one or more versions of “Ebonics” in my law practice to have learned some things about it. One is that anyone who uses this as a primary language is not trying to talk to me, his lawyer, and not going to tell me the truth, nor is he a candidate for any manner of juvenile or adult probation. Jive-speakers don’t make it through diversion or probation programs even with black probation officers, etc. Sooner or later, they all cycle through the juvenile and adult prison systems. Then they make the same stupid mistakes and get caught again.
My wife was a trained public school speech therapist. Rules in the education racket specifically prohibited correcting any speech problems in English that might be traceable to black slave English, “Ebonics,” “AAVE” or whatever some academic or politician decides to call it, or, for that matter, Spanish, which, of course, had exactly the same effect as the old laws against teaching slaves to read. Simon Legree would approve, but we don’t.
I had one client, who was black, with a serious mouth deformity never treated because his mother pulled him out of school after the first day, who spoke only a private “language” understood only by him and his mother. When she died, he, then 41, was lost and existed by stealing and lived like a wild animal until he bounced back and forth between the criminal and mental health systems.
President Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Anderson, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, or just about any black, or Hispanic or other, person you ever heard of doing anything with their life in America may be able to shift into the vernacular of a subculture for effect but made the effort to learn and use standard English. It’s no accident, but entirely natural and predictable, that the need of federal law enforcement agencies for translators of “Ebonics” etc. is to decipher and deal with criminals.
This interests me. Having an uncorrectible life-long vision problems, and fairly large hands and fingers, I find the tiny keyboards on Blackberry and other cell phones, etc., unusable, so use my roughtly 20/50 corrected vision, touch screen, etc., but would prefer something that let me touch-type on a smaller device since they seen to be taking over. The market for disability-accessible computer hardware and software, and computer textbooks and other manuals, is larger than many seem to realize.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you
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Child Porn As a Weapon
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This poster is either a child molester, a willing aider, abettor and encourager and supporter of the making of child porn, or an ignoramus and an idiot. The Constitutional presumption would be that he is the latter. The post is also wildly off topic as the issue was how easy or hard it might be for someone to frame someone for possession of computerized child porn.
It is impossible to make child porn without, among other things, a very real child labor law violation. Those who "only" buy and sell it are, among other things, just like people who knowingly buy and sell stolen tangible property, or maybe at least pirated IT.
The poster's argument that distributing child porn on line is a victimless crime, and that the harm to the child victims really arises out of the conduct of their parents and the authorities, are palpably false and deceptive. Either the poster is a child abuser or he is willfully ignorant, but that statement of his and others’ is made either with knowledge of its falsity or with utter and reckless disregard thereof, so that, either way, he is a liar. How many children used in child pornography does he know? How many of them have also been subjected to indecency by contact, and how many aggravated sexual assault, as children?
After his conviction and sentence for sexually assaulting and murdering several young women, and having no further motive to lie, Ted Bundy noted that pornography is where he started on this course. The same fact has been proven in the investigation of many, many other violent sex crimes against children and adults, including the very common finding of child pornography on their computers searched under warrants.
In my law practice, and certain other privileged and confidential relationships, I very unexpectedly found myself representing and otherwise dealing with a large number of survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I know survivors of physical child sexual abuse who were not used in child pornography, but none of the smaller number I know or know about who were used in child pornography were not only taken improper advantage of in the context of child labor law, but also physically molested by those involved. A lot of child porn could not be made without committing felony sexual offenses.
After unexpectedly finding myself deeply involved in such matters professionally, I have taken courses on child sexual abuse from nationally recognized experts who have, for example, explained the symptoms, which I have seen, of a child having been sexually abused [whether in the course of making child porn or by a socially, economically and politically prominent parent] before they were old enough to talk, much less understand the nature of these crimes.
Why would anyone but a fellow pervert try to minimize the seriousness of the problems of child pornography, or to defend consumers of this evil and harmful product?
This is a very important legal issue, much broader than its narrow “gay” context, and the FTC is right!
Some bankruptcy courts have permitted companies in Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcy to sell the private information their members or customers have shared with them, in reliance upon privacy policies and guarantees, free and clear of those privacy guarantees to raise money for administrative expenses and to pay creditors. This is not that new an issue, but is one calling for such attention.
It is generally accepted today that purely personal and private information, the public disclosure of which would be highly offensive to a hypothetical reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities, is subject to rights of privacy which have developed at common law and by statute. The late conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote at least one of the key Supreme Court opinions establishing this point.
Contrary to the impressions of some posters here, the issue and potential legal precedent here transcends the "gay teen" context in this particular bankruptcy proceeding and is very likely to affect an awful lot of us "straight" adults, not to mention teens, Consider just a few of the possibilities, e.g., a site for, for example:
Survivors of childhood sexual assault including incest;
Survivors of sexual assault as adults;
Persons with medical conditions;
Persons with mental health issues;
Lawyers, doctors, hospitals, drug makers or testing labs, or pharmacies, medical records storage and retrieval firms, etc. who go bankrupt holding your personal, private, and confidential data;
Personal or business financial data transfer or storage;
Persons seeking lawyers or legal advice;
I’ve been there. Trying to check some data on Russian – Argentine trade for an academic research paper when both currencies had multiple exchange rates and were legally non-convertible got me on a CIA list of suspected Soviet spies, long before the Internet, and our government kept me on that list and lied to my U. s. Senator and me about it for a generation before finally admitting it to me, years after they said then that they had told Nelson Rockefeller about it. .
My law practice very unexpectedly came to involve representing an awful lot of survivors, and a few perpetrators, of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, mostly heterosexual incest. Some were members of the immediate and near extended families of, and molested by, prominent persons including elected and high appointed officials palmed off on us by both political parties, who, of course, never got investigated much less busted. Childhood incest survivor clients of mine, and I, have had occasions to go to, register, and post on sites we hope nobody ever connects us with. I have also represented a “gay” teen charged with the murder of a “gay” adult, among other occasions I have had to research both sides of controversial “gay” issues.
The first time I addressed a committee of the Texas Legislature in support of a bill protecting the privacy of individuals undergoing psychotherapy, and my proposed amendment to ensure that this would cover group therapy sessions with or without the licensed therapist present but at his direction, not one member, practically all lawyers, realized that Texas did not yet have any settled legal protection for the privacy and confidentiality of doctor-patient communications yet. HIPAA notwithstanding, there are still an awful lot of gaps, not to mention unsettled areas, in medical and psychological, among other areas of, privacy law. I read on one computer-related site, to which I have lost the citation, that legal counsel for one of the large companies developing computerized medical records, proposed by Bush and provided for in the new PPAPA “healthcare” bill, has said that HIPAA does not protect the privacy of such stored records.
Sale in bankruptcy of personal and private data obtained under a promise of privacy protection presents a very different issue than the closer one, t
How many of the big tax-and-tax, snend-and-spend, liberals, on both sides of the aisle, actually were or are lawyers? How does their percentage compare with the percentage of lawyers in any given elected legislative body, federal or state?
Remember, Shakespeare's character who is often quoted for "First thing, let's kill all the lawyers," was bent on creating a dictatorship.
Nobody likes taxes, and they only encourage the big spenders to spend money for the primary purpose of getting themselves re-elected, i.e., buying votes with the people's onwn money, but sooner or later the issue of giving Internet selelrs and sales a tax avantage over local stores must be aderessed somehow.
The terrorists have indeed had a great victory out of 9/11, the shoe bomber, and other such things, primarily because both of our political parties and just about all of our politicians and Homeland Security types have let them in order to be seen by other fools as doing something. Now the professionals have done some good intelligence work , headed off some attacks, and caught the perpetrators of some of the others. They didn’t do it by having a bunch of hacks make us all take off our shoes, putting a U. S. Senator and a six year old kid on the no-fly list, and the like.
Hey, security absurdity, or theater, is nothing new. When I was a child, living within walking distance of the Atlantic Ocean, in downtown Washington, D.C., and in east Texas not far from the big oil field, during World War II, we had to have black plastic covers over the top half of our headlights to prevent the Germans from following them to the oil fields, but you could see the natural gas being flared off, blazing high into the sky, and above the clouds [which my Dad told us the day would come when we wished we had that gas] a hundred miles from the actual wells and just about to the coast. Lindberg navigated and flew across the Atlantic to Paris with less in the way of navigation aids than available even before radar, loran, and GPS. In my older public school days, we had asinine drills for atomic bomb blasts with instructions that wouldn’t have had any real effect. I suspect they had similar public relations gimmicks thousands of years before Homeland Security told us all to stock up on Duct Tape. It took me over twenty years before the CIA admitted to me, in writing, that they had put me on a list of suspected Soviet spies or sympathizers in college, and lied to my U. S. Senator and me about that, based on nothing but open research for a thesis is international economics and the Russians having sent me something that we already had in the college library, although any number of people from the college, the Department of State which had declassified bales of documents for that research paper, top management of American companies in Argentina, etc. could have confirmed that I was an active conservative Republican and most certainly no Communist or Communist sympathizer. Of course the funny part of this was that their Top Secret mail cover and blacklist were done in such a way that I knew about it all along and they still lied to my Senators and me about it for years, through administrations of both parties.
Right! This is just one more place where B. O. has made the same kind, and some of the same, false political promises they all make, and made the same bad move of announcing in advance exactly when we intend to give up and go home, giving the other side not only encouragement, aid and comfort but valuable intelligence information, and which, like the deadline to close Gitmo laid down before anybody thought really hard about what to do with the terrorists there, is subect to prospective and retroactive change without notice
Every Presidential nominee of either party since "9/11[01]" has solemnly promised that he, and he alone, could and would capture Osama Bin Laden, thereby proving all of them, and both political parties, not only fools utterly ignorant of the history, geography, and geopolitics of that part of the world, the "graveyard of empires" since Alexander the Great's time, but bald-faced liars.
Polls commissioned by organizations with political agendas are notoriously unreliable, in significant part because they know all too well what their clients want to hear and publish, and it is all too easy so shade questions over into a "push poll" the questions in which are either subtly or blatantly structured to tip the responses in the desired direction by choice of language, etc.
Of course, polls on many socio-economic and political subjects start out with the fundamental problem that a huge part of the population being sampled more or less well doesn't want to let on that they really don't have a clue about the people or issues upon which they express opinions. The polling on Supreme Court appointees is a particularly gross case in point because a majority of Ivy League students or graduates, much less the general population, can’t name and tell you anything meaningful about three of the nine current Justices, doesn't know any more about the realities of "original intent," "living constitution," or any other real or made-up system of actual or purported Constitutional interpretation, can't identify the five primary rights guaranteed--which most mistakenly think are granted--by the First Amendment, much less tell you anything about recent opinions. A majority of voters who show up at the polls, much less the general public, can't name both their U. S. Senators, much less tell you anything significant about each of them, either.
I've been a voter since 1959 and been "professionally" five times, all five of them asking me, the same night, while "Love Story" was on TV, what I was watching. I have never seen any design for a political polling sample that did not start out with the expert pollster's preconceived ideas of what factors were going to be outcome-determinative in that upcoming election, based, of course, on what had happened in prior elections. I have worked with the best canvassing and other data my party had in my precinct in a major metropolitan area, and, at least at that time, but probably still today, I seriously doubt that anybody, with the possible exception of Google except that their data covers only serious Internet users like me, has had the kind of detailed demographic data that just might permit a brilliant expert to put together a sample of a thousand or so likely voters that would constitute a fair sample on enough of the things that might influence the votes of swing voters, for example, especially in a year like this one with some rather unprecedented factors and developments. .
I happened, years go, to have been doing something else that led to my being at the offices of a major polling organization and they got positively furious that, making conversation, I asked the receptionist a simple, basic question about the process about which I was genuinely curious.
I somehow lucked into a B in statistics, but higher math is definitely not one of my talents. I’m sometimes amazed and cannot understand how the polling can be as accurate as it sometimes is. I don't have a clue how the experts cited caught on to the particular bad polling work for Daily Kos, which they would
I AM a retired lawyer. I'm also a free-enterprise conservative except where the religious, ethical, economic, and legal training and experience that made me one tell me the conservatives today have got on the wrong side of something.
Burying significant health risk like this, even where you also bury the oroject but know or should know that someone else is likely to pursue that or similar ideas gets pertty close to the way the maker and seller of Thalidomide buried the information that it could and did cause terrible birth defects sevral eyars ago. This is the kind of information that should, as a matter of common decency, not to mention liability prevention, have been sent to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and to key people in the field of children's health and eye health, some of whose identities these people should have known, and post at least the basics of the situaiton on the Internet where others in the field are likely to see it, head off anyone else putting anything like this on the market without solid assurance that these issues had been eliminated.
One of the problems with proprietary research is also that, becxuse it is so often not shared even when you are not going to use it to patent, make, and sell something, potentially large amounts of others' time, expertise, effort, and expense--which [like a lot of pure consumer rip-offs] count as part of Gross Domestic Product just as though it had actually resulted in adding new real value to the economy and for consumers, although they are effectively wasted, duplicative effort, not to mention the fact that, without such disclosure, somebody, herre or in China, is likely to put the same or a similar product, or another with similar dangers, on the market, causing serious personal injuries, here to children, as well as economic losses.
Right! If you believe Google, Yahoo, or either of our purchased and perverted political parties' protestations of innocence about this, which remind me of Shakespeare's "Methinks thou dost protest too much!!," I would like to talk to you about a great deal on a bridge in Brooklyn.
I depend upon a lot of ad-supported Internet content, so can't complain about ads, and it is only natural that the advertisers want to target them to users more likely to buy their stuff, so acertain degree of targeting and the data collection necessary for that must be expected. It doesn't bother me if I look up new cars and get ads from Ford and Toyota instead of Purina Puppy Chow, while I get puppy food ads when I look up the specifications for a fence for a Jack Russell, computer-related ads if I go to Dell or Microsoft sites, etc., provided, and only provided, that they do not save or pass on such data ina form that can identify me. This gets a whole lot more troublesome if, in the course ofmy law practice or other research, I happen to be researching medical or mental health issues, child sexual abuse and STDs which uexpectedly came to figure in my law practice and other privileged and confidentil relationships, erectile dysfunction, or specific legal issues and strategies for an upcoming case against the government or a big company. I quit using one site geenrally regarded as reputable on sexual and other medical issues because, when I went there to check some data on sexually-related matters, I quickly started getting a lot of spam for fake viagra and the like telling me, falsely, that my wife, whose name and less common spelling thereof they guessed right, had said, in gutter language she never would have used anywhere, that I was no good in bed, etc. My wife has a separate user page on this computer and separate Email accounts, user accounts and "handles" for various sites, etc., and on her cell phone.
Members of Congress and Presidential candidates of both parties have repeatedly assured us that they have already passed effective legilslation dealing with spam, phishimg, computer and ohter privacy, child sexual abuse including child porn, etc., not to mention health insurance for small businesses like mine before I retired, and that they and only they would promptly catch Osama Bin Laden and bring about prosperity and world peace when eelcted. . Both candidates promised in their 2008 campaigns to pass one law that they had bragged to me about haing passed alrady years earlier. Obama VP Joe Biden and McCain both introduced separate bills to protect children from abuse during the 2008 campaign cycle, shortly after passing the comprehensive Adam Walsh Act that was supposed to cover that subject.
OK, I do want the authorities to be bel to investigagte and enforce ourlawsagianst terrorism, child sexual exploitation including but not limited to child porn, and malware distribution, and to be able to do what is necessary to deal with the use of the Ingternet to accomplish that. Nobody I know wants eihter the government or business firms ["leviathon and Leviathom, Inc., as one perceptive writer put it] to be allowed to collect or disseminate detailed profiles on individuals, even to enforce a lot of the literally innumerable laws, rules, and regulations on the books. I need to know if a prospective employee is a thief or a spy, but it is essential to freedom and democracy, and the exericse of our fundamental, unalienable, God-given rights, that we must be free to post our thoughts in our own names or anonymously, and to make a fool ofourselves now iand then which is perhaps the most essential right guaranteed by teh First Amendment and certainly the one most people are mostlikely to exercise, without exposing oursleves to unfair and ilelgal discrimination in employment, etc., inevitable when employers nad prospective employers go into our political speech, disclosures of ourrace, sex, age, religious or political affiliations or beliefs, juvenile indiscretions, and credit scores, etc.
Just as with the pending financia
Amen. I'm a retired lawyer who came late to the computer revolution in the eighties and none of my computerliterate friends will teach me to hack into things, write viruses and torgans, etc. and the textbook at the local university is wirtten in type too small for me to read and copy the code, but I have watched as the law got more and more to the point that, to even get exemplary damages against a corportion orLLC, etc., , now prctically always limited to three times your "economic" damages not including many very real elements of injury, loss and damage, you pretty well have to prove that the Board of Directors voted to do it at a duly called board meeting and included this in the minutes, which, of course, never happens, and getting a criminal convictin agianst a corportion is tougher yet and the fines are rounding errors in the financial statements of big corproations like IBM. You never do find out which individuals within these large entities, corporte or government, actually decided to do and did things, so as to even begin to prosecute them, even when it is part of something that cashes not just Wall Street but the real economy and hurts a lot of people. Nobody is really likely to invest the money and manpoer to track this malware exploit to its source and take real action agianst the people and corporation culpable. Another reuslt is that anything that calls itself a business corproation can rip off a million people for several hundred dollars apiece secure in the knowledge that nobody victimized can afford to get thelegla sysetem to call them to account much less put a real dent in their wallet so as to discourage future such behavior. As for our two political parties doing anything about this, both are in bed with the private-sector crooks for money and my nationally known law school dean liked to quote Will Rogers: "Whenever Congress tells a joke, it's a law, and whenever they pass a law, it's a joke."
What I can't figure out about these people who write and sprad a lto of malware that doesn't capture data, etc., is what motivates and who pays them to do it?
Some good points. However, when you say "'you' go ahead and do it [post cartoons against Mohamed]," who is "you"? I rarely visit YouTube and have no clue who created this fool cartoon site, even whether the person who did that, or those posting such cartoons, are Muslims, western Christians, atheists, people who for whatever reason want to incite hatred and riots, etc. I don't agree with them, any more than I agree with those who ridicule and attack my own Christian faith, most of whom don't know what they are talking about.
Given that I understand youTube has blocked other sites and postings on it for much less offensive content, and for content opposing abortion with the general thrust of which I agree but I did not see the postings am not familiar with the specifics, it would seem to me that they could work out some arrangement to take down and block just this or other sites clearly blasphemous. Now what about Al Queda recruiting sites?
I think our Supreme Court has sometimes pushed our unique First Amendment protection of expression too far, farther than the Framers who wrote it would have intended or expected, including holding that a well-known Christian activist could not sue for a cartoon depicting him having sex with his mother, the straight out allegation of which as a fact would clearly be libelous under our law, but, after seeing some cases from Europe where people were arrested or held liable for things we believe are within the zone of protected expression, I'm glad we have it. America has also become known for some things both the devout Christians and Muslims alike agree are wrong and destructive but are nevertheless legal or openly promoted, not to mention some others that are crimes but still problems here.
The reality is that the U.S. welcomed Muslims before American Christians or Jews were allowed or not attacked in some Muslim-controlled countries and places. Unlike fifty or so years ago in my younger days, there is a lot more interaction between Christians and Muslims, and between countries in hwich each tend to predominate, so we had better try to understand each other and work out some bases on which we can get along peaceably despite or deep and fundamental differences.
There are clearly still deep, bitter, and sometimes violent conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The Muslims conqoured much of the world by force and got to the gates of Vienna eaThefight between what we both rlier before being driven back. There were wars between Catholic and Protestant Christians just a few hundred years ago, and now the 9-member Supreme Court of the predominantly Protestant Christian U.S. has 6 Catholics, 3 Jews, and no Protestants, and nobody worries about that but they fight over some religious issues like abortion and some other basic issues when it comes time to replace a Justice.
The fact is that, hardly for the first time in history, we in America were attacked, and are still facing warlike, violent attacks, by Muslims and Muslim groups, motivated by Muslim ideology and doctrine, clearly very popular within the Islamic parts of hte world [who, ironically, are also trying to take over those countries]. I'm not defending our response by attacking Iraq and Afghanistan either legally or practically, but one fact that led to these wars, with the overwhelming votes of both parties in Congress, was, as is now known, poor and insufficient intelligence knowledge because those societies were and are closed. Ours is sometimes too open to protect itself.
Short of world conquest and dictatorial rule by one side or the other, which would be a disaster, it isstill true, as Jesus [who I understand Muslims recognize as a prophet] said, "they know not the way to peace." I have Muslim friends living here and somebody ought to be able to work this out based upon principles both faiths agree upon, with shared control of the TempleMount and the Dome of the Rock as there has been with other sites for centuries, but it would take someone with a lot beter knowledge and understanding of Islam and that part of theworld than me.
Right on! Never thought I'd encourage a demonstration or maybe a peaceable riot at Berkeley, but this is a looming disaster for your career and life andI'd love to be in it waving a sign.
Once it's out there, it isn't yours any more but belongsto the state andthere is, as a prfactical and legal matter, nothing you can do to cotrol it or even know how it gets leaked or misused until you don't get hired and can't find out why. The courts have already held that which political, religious, etc. groups you write checks to is the bank's and not your record so you have no kick if the government wants to rummage through it. Where do you think all the thousands of student records that get actually or allegedly stolen periodically end up? ChoicePoint and Axcium most likely and they providedata to the government, employers, and two phony colelction agencies set up by the Mob that we know about.
Your DNA, your medical records, your bank records, etc. should be under your and solely your control except when you freely and voluntarily seek not an education but specific medical assessment and treatment.
I could also tell you some verified horror stories about medical and medical records errors, mix-ups, etc., some of which we only discovered by freak accidents. And wait until some "social science and social control" type wants to write a thesis comparing things about those who did and did not ever so freely give "consent" to this DNA data collection.
Oh, sure, this says it's "voluntary." Just like giving out Social Security numbers. You can read in government publications about our "voluntary" tax assessment system, which, of course, is ludicrous and the root of a lot of scams. In a day when colleges and employers get hundreds or even thousands of qualified applicants for each opening, getting entered into some data bank that keeps up with these "voluntary" responses as a "refusenik" is not a step to be taken lightly, nor is giivng away your DNA, and you shouldn't be faced with that choice in connection with anything the state or federal government, or an employer, does.
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i'd have laughed at this comment in mu foolish young college days, but anyone today who thinks being broke is the worker's fault is wrong most of the time. Likewise, a lot of those who brag about being so smart and hard-working are primarily merely lucky. This is, of course, somewhat off topic regarding investigators and sick days if the sick days are to be used when you are really sick or have a family member sick and need to take real care for them as provided under the FMLA. A retired self-employed attorney, i.e.,, small businessman, I could tell you lots of employee, and many employer, horror stories. The problem is that a prospective employee is unlikely to discover what a louse an employer company or boss is before it's too late, Many people end up at the ends of terms of elective office etc. with so many accumulated leave days, not contractually or legally tied to actual illness, that they can and practically must take accumulated leave or just quit the day after their last elected term or they end up working those days free. It helps if the contract is clear on such points. The trouble is that, except for elected politicians and other government workers, the "at will" doctrine means the employer can change the deal any time it suits them. Actually, notwithstanding federal and state law, you are very likely to get fired on one pretext or another if you, or your child, actually get sick and put in a legitimate claim for self-insured contractual medical benefits, or those under an insurance policy, or they find out you have any actual or potential disability. If you have been living in a cave and still believe the legal system works for ordinary people much of the time, or that either party or most politicians care about anyone like you, or treats their own family members, much less others, decently, you're in for an awful shock. If you're fool enough to be unfaithful to your wife, and/or fall into your own employer's or his detective's honey trap, you're equally likely to fall into one set by a competitor after your and your company's information, making you a bad risk. If your wife can't trust you, who can? And use your head!
As a retired lawyer, I know, and any junior high civics student should know, that subpoenas are issued as a matter of right and a routine, ministerial act by court clerks or, for that matter, by attorneys and Notaries Public, in both private and governmental civil as well as criminal cases. The judge normally doesn't even know about them until later if at all. Search warrants, on the other hand, are issued only on some actual or alleged showing of probable cause and may be issued either by a judge or by a mere magistrate, which is a legally trained person in the federal system but can be the town mayor, who knows no law, in state law. Very, very few applications for search or arrest warrants are turned down either in the federal or state legal systems according to the available statistical data. The government got the Supreme Court to hold, a generation ago, that bank, credit card, and other records even of your more intimate personal transactions are the institution's records, not yours, and they can obtain them without even notifying you and order the institution not to tell you. See also the paradoxically named federal Privacy Act, which mostly requires that you be notified that they can pretty much get whatever they want. The American voting public let them get by with this, instead of demanding enactment of real privacy protection, without even much of a whimper from most people. I have not found the document mentioned or other evidence indicating precisely what credit card records are being tracked by the government, for what purposes, and subject to what, if any, internal safeguards. Hopefully, even the federal government has some limitation upon its technical capacity to monitor everyone’s credit card and financial activity, and would only go to the trouble of doing this, with or without a warrant, in kidnapping, missing persons, terrorism, imminent threat to human life, major organized crime, major fugitive, and other such cases in which a court would likely find the process reasonable and thus Constitutional and lawful. But it would be safer if we had the protection of warrant requirements before they could track such records. By the way, the new AACA, “Obamacare,” health care bill requires even the smallest businesses to file IRS Form 1099 for either single or aggregate purchases of $600.00 or more, a great burden, allegedly to catch $19 Billion in alleged tax evasion. There are those who would love to see the government track every transaction. Of course, that would give them your religious, ideological, and political information, a detailed picture of your personal and business relationships, and a virtual dictatorship. It is far past time that the ACLU, if it really stands for what it claims to stand for rather than a leftist totalitarianism, some of the conservative groups that really care about conservative principles and liberty rather than just the profits of big contributors, the privacy advocates, etc., wake up, see where this is heading or could end up whether or not actually so intended, and get together and defend personal privacy, without which liberty cannot exist. If you think that only guilty people have anything to fear from government or corporate invasions of privacy, you’re wrong. I was put on a CIA list of suspected Soviet sympathizers and spies as the result of a ‘Mail cover” in which the courts hold that the government may monitor and keep dossiers and databases on who we correspond with and who writes to us, especially from outside the U. S., by old-fashioned “snail mail,” and now by Email, etc. They did this so clumsily that we learned about it right away, so any real spy would have, too, but they lied to my U. S. Senator and me about this whole sordid affair until 1983. If our much-vaunted CIA can’t tell the difference between a conservative college student doing research into the Russian-Argentine balances of trade and payments for an economics research paper, with the full knowledge and active cooperation o
For a post on SlashDot, I would have expected a citation to the original survey data, methodology, questions, maybe which university degrees and differences between them, etc., also definitions, significance, etc. Since different people would exhibit different changes in respiratory or heart rate, skin conductivity, etc., how would you get accurate, measurable, and comparable calibrations of the level of fear of death or of anything else? Most of the answers address neither the subject, the fear of death, any real analysis of why the survey might show those with university degrees fear death less, etc. A couple of responders did note, aptly, that there could be a number of factors involved including university graduates possibly facing fewer consciously immediate life-threatening situations than slum dwellers, those in war zones, etc. This one reminds me of the old psych department joke about the experiment with the male rat given a choice between food and a female rat, various adjustments in electric shocks, etc., and some student raises the question: Did anybody ever try testing the results after changing female rats? Fear of death in the abstract where the odds approximate the life insurers’ mortality tables is one thing. Too many teenagers, some of whom are in college, and some other people, in our culture, have somehow convinced themselves that death will not actually happen to them, at least for a long, long time until after they get old, and thus too many lose their lives or are severely injured young because they take foolish, useless risks, seek thrills by so doing, etc. I have known some young recent university and professional school graduates to take risks they should be smart enough and know to avoid and die, in one-car accidents, etc., as a result. Actually facing, or having good reason to believe that you are, or likely are, facing imminent death is something quite different, and I doubt that many of the survey respondents were actually in such a life-threatening situation at the time they responded. What percentage of those in each group had ever actually faced their own imminent death, not as an intellectual exercise but a stark physical reality, as children, or as graduates or at comparable ages? I have some expertise as a child and adult with very credible, serious, imminent threats of murder, etc., and some other momentarily frightening situations ranging from near drowning to violent accidents, before and after acquiring bachelor’s and an earned juris doctor in law. I don’t believe that education had that much effect upon such fears from events before and after graduation. The fear from two armed robberies in which the robbers told me that they were there and intended to kill me in any event did not really get hard to control until the next day, but these were not my first real threats or fears of imminent death, or worse. Maybe the survey should have covered college and university graduates compared to those without degrees in similar battlefield situations etc. Professionally in my law practice, and in other parts of my life, I have known and dealt with a significant number of people suffering with expertly diagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder before and after treatment,. I don’t think the specific fear of imminent death would check out as being that much more a factor than other traumatic experiences they have dealt with including seeing buddies killed, being wounded, and a lot I have known in privileged and confidential relationships who had suffered mostly incestuous child sexual abuse, or rape at older ages. I have not tested this, but in significant privileged communications with a lot of survivors of various such traumas, I have not found any particular reason to believe that education would prove to be a significant variable either in frequency of such events or resulting PTSD, etc. I have also had some limited samples of multiple contacts with child and adult patients, of varying ages, the latter with and without degrees, facing imminent death
Amen. Setting up test cases is an old and well-recognized, and permitted, practice. We studied several examples in law school, and, as long as there is a real case or controversy with real adverse parties, it's legal. I was not involved nor privy to the process, and don't even agree with a lot of their agenda, but there is very good reason to believe that the "gay" plaintiffs in Edwards v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court converted private consensual sodomy from a crime at common law into a Constitutional right, was arranged, i.e. set up, by the "gay" parties through an apparently false domestic-violence or disturbance call so that they would be caught in the act when the police thus entered the apartment lawfuly. You had to work hard at it to get vcaught for such offenses and, according to the state, tere appeared ot have been no arrests or prosecutions for this offense outside of public lewdness, which is a different crime, in many years before the arrest that set up the test case. But sometimes you have to get arrested or held in contempt to test a law or a judge's ruling. There ought to be an easier way, with less risk, but there isn't. The people trying to set up a Supreme Court test case about IRC 501(c)(3) and IRS regulations under it restricting pastors' speech about moral and politial issues and politicians have so far been frustrated because the government. apparently afraid that the law will be held unconstitutional, have so far refused to act against any of the pstors who have sent them tapes of sermons that violate the rules. Speaking of protesters wanting the authorities to over-react, we wouldn't have this current issue if the DHS and TSA hadn't over=reacted, precisely as the terrorists hoped when they sent a chump of a shoe bomber so the TSA would make everyone take off their shoes, etc.
I know an attorney whose throat was cut, nearly fatally, in a secured courtroom, by a client who had brought it from a high-security jail where body cavity searches etc. that we hopefully don’t have for flyers or visitors to the White House yet are commonly used. We’re kidding ourselves if we think the next big attack will be done just like 9/11 using Arabs or other foreign-looking engineers etc. as suicide hijackers, or that our enemies can’t get through any such mass screening that includes little old ladies and three year old kids but doesn’t do an intelligent, rather than unintelligent wide-loop, job of intelligence gathering and profiling. Back in the days of computer punch cards, our fool CIA put me on a list of suspected Soviet spies, saboteurs, and sympathizers, did it so clumsily that we found out about it right away, never checked the facts, lied to my U. S. Senator and me about this for about forty years that they maintained this list, and eventually admitted the truth and told me that they had told Nelson Rockefeller about this several years before they quit lying to my Senators and me. If they can’t tell the difference between a conservative college student writing a research paper—for which the Department of State etc., with full knowledge, had declassified bales of documents—and a Communist, it’s no wonder they made certain spectacularly fatal errors over the years. Other government agencies and officials, and keepers of medical records, have done equally illegal and utterly stupid things in dealing with me over the years using incomplete and otherwise bad computerized data. Some, including a heart attack I never had, appear to have been clerical errors, but nobody living can correct that one, while others include statements I never made to people I never met, are fake and defamatory, and the makers and keepers of those records know it. There is often no real and practical way to find out what is or has been in your records, kept by government entities, data miners and sellers with contracts with TSA and other federal and state agencies, public and private hospitals and other medical providers, etc., get a copy thereof, get a copy in a format your new doctor can read, or get errors corrected. We discovered that X-ray and other medical and billing records on at least nine people, covering two races, two sexes, over a foot differences in height and ages from about nine to about ninety, some with and some without breaks, bullets, pins, etc., had been combined into mine, only because a radiologist asked about a bullet I could write another book on credit bureau errors. The law on this subject, written by the large campaign contributors, is woefully inadequate and needs to be brought into the current and future real world with more input from people with more computer science expertise than this retired lawyer has.
Having been born with occipital lobe damage and agenesis of the corpus collossum, meaning the wiring that usually connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain was never there, which, when discovered, late in life, led two experts to believe I had become too mentally disabled to live independently much less practice law or do any gainful work, I find this fascinating. Once they realized that tests just done put my verbal abilities in the 97th percentile way past middle age and while being treated for major depression, this was congenital and long before I had been a National Merit Scholarship finalist and graduated in the upper third of my selective law school class, practiced law including trials and appeals, etc., they began to understand and explained why, despite trying hard to go into engineering, I never could do higher math--or subtract, for that matter, and I have been having "senior moments" since first grade 65 years ago. . Especially in the very young, the brain has amazing powers to rewire and preprogram itself that even the neurologists and computer experts are only beginning to think about understanding and using outside the brain. One of the questions nobody who buys into the current orthodoxy will address is how and why this level of redundancy and adaptability would and could ever have evolved and become widely distributed since the occasions for it to be beneficial would and do arise so rarely and, in a primitive world, would have left those like me at grave survival disadvantages. Furthermore, do any of those of you with better computer science backgrounds know of any computer that can, on its own, create multiple partitions, directories, and subdirectories, some with and some without cross-access to deal with overloads and other problems that would otherwise destroy data etc., as the human brain does in dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder in response to childhood trauma, and particularly those that require the brain to deal with contradictory authoritative messages? I know some experts in and some people with this condition. Some don’t believe it is real, but anyone who has seen dissociation at that level knows that it is.
If either political party or the officials and candidtes both palm off on us were honest, competent, gave a Continental about mere citizens and their children, and the fundamental, albeit unenumerated, privacy rights without which a free democratic country canot exist and function, this would have been stopped early on, or, less effectively, right now, and all lsuch collections of data would be seized in dawn raids tomorrow and destroyed. One solution might be for somebody to do a thorough data mining job on all our incumnbent and would-be elected and high appointed officials, and those at the companies involved in or helping with this, and start by publicly disclosing the whole lot about a few of the worst and announce that more would follow until we citizens get what everybody I know, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike, really want from Congresss and the companies with regard to privacy protection. Not everything that adds to the bottom line of anything that calls itself a business enterprise is either legitimately conservative or good policy. A lot of data on individuals held by government and business entities also happens to be false and defamatory. The CIA took over 30 years after we caught them to quit lyingto my Senator and me about having me on a list of Soviet spies and sympathizers, which was not only libelous and could easily have been checked but ludicrous. One solution might be to flood the system with false and scandalously defamatory data, some of which couuld be obvious and some not. Years ago, I was general counsel to a bank and discovered, for exmple, that we had amde a six-figure loan to the broke flake son of a wealthy family thecreditbureau had combined files and listed as married to hnis mother, a piece of data that got interesting when I asked him if he was still marriedf to and living with her in the process of trying to collect. I also saw the scandalous libel about the socialite daughter of the then smaller credit bureau's owner that a crook had planted todemonstrate his access while rigging his own credit report and seling that service to others. I use a lot of ad-supported services on line but am very displeased that researching things like child sexual abuse, mental illness, and substance abuse, money laundering, or whatever in my strange and eclectic law practice, etc., got me flooded with ads I don't want for things for which I'm not in the market, for years.
Too much of our First Amendment jurisprudence dealing with commercial speech, advertising, and entertainment, has departed completely from the original intent of the Framers. When the Court included commercial nude lap dancing in the same protection as core political speech in 1981, things really started to go awry. Interestingly, most of these cases benefit not the poor disenfranchised little guy who might need protection but the wealthy and influential. One has to wonder how much that has to do with the Supreme Court granting First Amendment protection to “virtual” child pornography, for example. Whatever other protection the Constitution provides, or ought or ought not to provide, for sexual activity, for example, it simply isn’t “speech” or “press,’ nor is it a modern version thereof, hardly being a modern invention or innovation, so it does not fit within the text, intent, or framework of First Amendment jurisprudence, any more than the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment do. The logical place to put most sexual liberty would be under the Fourth Amendment, but you can’t fit a right of publicity or very public activities under that. Driving on a public street and running a red light is not protected by either amendment, either, contrary to some people who know better but argue that red light cameras which capture open activity on the public roads are somehow unconstitutional. If something that wouldn’t lead you or me to do something destructive, tortuous, or criminal, even if we listened to or watched it, reasonably arguably might be likely to cause, lead, or encourage a small minority of minors or other particularly susceptible people, not readily identifiable in advance, to do so, and these are commercial and don’t really have anything to do with ideas except exploitation of base tendencies and incitement, it would be entirely proper to uphold a law regulating this conduct that 72% of the people in our democracy within a republic favor. This has no positive value. Now one real practical legal and Constitutional problem with trying to reduce the amount of such pollution by legislation was aptly summed up by the late Justice Potter Stewart in his famous comment, “I may not be able to define it [pornography, in words], but I know it when I see it.” Why, however, do we require impossible perfection in the drafting of such laws when they might affect the profits of a very profitable industry targeting minors? Of course, unless you believe that not only all members of Congress but their legal staffs are ignorant idiots, you have to ask yourself why, so often, the bills touted as solving all the world’s ills always seem to wind up having either gaping loopholes or obvious defects the courts have already ruled rendered other laws, and would render any new ones, unconstitutional, unenforceable, and void. When I was in law school, our famous Dean liked to quote Will Rogers: “Whenever Congress tells a joke, it’s a law, and whenever they pass a law, it’s a joke.”
Please provide access, in English, to all of the materials you folks are using to teach primary grade students there in India, to educators, including home-schoolers, and others here in the USA. If you have really achieved that kind of literacy rate among your entire student-age population, rather than just a select few of them, you have got onto something we need desperately, becuase our average high school graduate can barely read, can't write a simple business letter, and can't balance a checkbook much less do math or anything but play games with a computer,and an awful lot of them are altogether functionally illiterate and have also never leanred to study, work, etc. We have a few who have taught themselves more about computers than I know, but the key variable is home environment rather than anything most public schools are doing. Consider the problem of teaching a smart 12th grader, or senior, to alphabetize, compose business letters, balance a checkbook, etc., as I have had to do with many of the better ones I hired--you should see the ones we couldn't or had to fire--and you get some of the picture of teaching them to use even dedicated commercial law office software. Your piece made reference to some computer programs, etc., with which I am not familiar here. I'm an older fellow, retired lawyer. I learned to do some things in DOS, simple batch files, etc., but can't even do that in Windows, and Windows and Office often frustrate me. The only Linux expert I knew,way over my head in math--I'd have been an engineer insrtead of a lawyer but my talent is not really in math while I'm in 97th percentile in verbal ability--taught it at the local university but coulnd't make enough and had to work another job, and has since died. I would love to take some basic courses in how to get computers and programs to do what I need them to do at the local university but, among other problems, I have a life-long uncorrectable vision limitaitn and the textbooks are not only incomprehensivel to me but printed in type too small and compressed for me to use, and nobody at the university knows a solution to that problem, either.
The First Amendment, like the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, or Tenth does not grant, and was never intended to grant, any rights. They were added to guarantee fundamental, unalienable human rights, generally accepted by those supporting and those opposing the Constitution as granted by or derived from “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The same argument that the Tenth Amendment was a legal nullity because it was “merely declaratory,” could be made, and exposed as fallacious and false by making, the same argument about the First Amendment. Of course, the Constitution deals only with governmental action, but, in this case, there was pressure to stop this demonstration, applied by General Petraeus as Commander of our war effort in Afghanistan, the Secretary of Defense, the White House, and many others influenced by them, so the governmental-private distinction Some smart and thoughtful conservatives, as well as liberals, on and off the Supreme Court, realized that laws against burning the American flag as a political protest, however repugnant the act, violated the intent of the First Amendment. The opinion failed to mention that the same law would also have criminalized the burring of the flag of North Vietnam with whom we were then at war, the subject of that protest, the Nazi flag, the red flag and hammer and sickle of Communism, etc. The same problem arises with many laws intended to protect other “venerated objects,” the damaging or destruction of which causes particular hurt and anger, beyond the economic value of the object, which laws would protect cemeteries and headstones, religious symbols, Bibles and Qurans, etc. Our law does recognize many instances of intentional infliction of severe emotional distress. Intriguingly, the opinion also appeared to overlook the fact that the flag burned in that case did not belong to the flag-burner, which raised another issue altogether. A retired Texas lawyer, I’m not up on the laws of Florida or wherever Rackspace is based, but a contractual provision against a customer of a web host, an ISP, a media outlet, a publishing company, a quick print shop, or a supplier of chicken feed using the service to promote anything likely to get the web host, etc., entangled, fairly or not, in someone else’s fight, would appear to be reasonable and valid. This could, however, certainly be abused. Microsoft, Google, etc. are big enough, and virtual natural monopolies, that their refusal to deal with someone who disagreed with them or their favored candidate for President could raise some very significant issues, but that’s not the case here. Now what I would want to know, in order to judge Rackspace’s action, might include who else, pushing whatever else, they are and are not willing to serve. Al Qaeda and some other violently militant Muslim terrorists, with whom, unlike “Islam,” we really are at war because they are at war with us. Child porn distributors. People and groups who promote hate and violence. Scandal sheets that habitually invade privacy or publish libelous lies under color of the public-figure rules. I would prefer not to do business with an ISP, a hosting company, a telecommunications company, etc., that don’t guard and take action against such abuses. There were clients I wouldn’t represent in their ongoing business activities when practicing law, though I had no ethical problem representing criminals in court after they got caught or charged, about which there are rules prescribing what defense lawyers may and may not do. I happen to agree with the prevailing view, across the religious and political spectrum, that this Quran-burning protest is wrong for several reasons. I can find nothing in Christian scripture or belief that sanctions it, and it can and will be used against us not only by our real enemies but by others in the Muslim world with whom our country is trying to conduct necessary relations. It could well incite deadly violence against Americans and harm our war effort. It also appears to be a publicity stunt.
Like checking for gas leaks with a match, this theory has already exploded. Only days ago, we read of another dangerous sex offender who simply cut off his GPS ankle bracelet, left the prescribed location, and went on another violent interstate crime spree before being caught. Tampering with your GPS tether is supposed to get you arrested immediately, but, too often, it doesn't happen. Now that's for the small percentage of people locked up today who we really need to lock up, or lock up for the long times people spend in jail awaiting trial, much less being punished afterward. I've done criminal law, and been the victim of armed robberies--one led by someone already on parole from two successive life sentences for armed robbery--and other serious state and federal crimes, and there are some people who never should get out of prison but will, but we're kidding ourselves and wasting a fortune on a lot of incarceration. In my bitter personal and professioanl experirence, a huge number of the worst criminals will never be reported becuase the victims are too frustrated with the system, won't get caught, won't be investigated and prosecuted vigorously, etc. We're using jails and prisons to house a lot of mentally ill people who would not pose problems, much less danger, if properly treated--and the evidence is clear that most mentally ill people are no more dangerous than other people. As for substance abuse, which also figures in a lot of incarceration, there is something irrational, crazy, when the first thing the inmate does upon supervised release is get drunk or high again. Now when somebody comes up with a reasonably priced, effective, and accurate real-time monitor that includes not only GPS but substance abuse, which figures in an awful lot of other crime as well, that can be incorporated into all cars and also used for specific people for GPS etcl, the left would scream but we could save some lives.
The numbers here are meaningless because of variations in cost of living, whether or not you have a paid-for house, medical bills, etc., not to mention health problems of their own, their spouse’s, or their child’s that no amount of money would fix, and other unmeasured variables, but the so-called “research,’ the criteria for which are not revealed here, must have been fun. Happiness, like the economic value of artichokes or many other goods, is, subjective, or the sum of the subjective valuations of potential buyers. I don’t know how one would quantify happiness, but the subjective nature of value is elementary economics 101, or was when I majored in it. Looking back over my life, or my adult life, I don’t think my personal and largely subjective assessment my happiness or unhappiness tracked my monetary income, assets, or net worth, which have all gone up and down. I used to have a running conversation with the wealthiest man in America at that time when we officed in the same building and rode the elevators at odd hours. He often talked about things like having followed bad medical advice with respect to his brilliant first-born son with schizophrenia, and I am sure that he was nowhere near the happiest person I knew casually or otherwise, but notably unhappy. I have read survey data that indicated that the average person, across the income distribution, believed that he would be happy with thirty percent (30%) more disposable income. I’ve seen some who started out making fun of others who let their families go chasing more money and ended up doing the same thing, and ending up broke and worse.
You've obviously visited someof the same sites I have. Why are you following me around on the Web? The trick with a Do Not Track Me list is that nobody would let you visit their site and find out anything if you were on it, or clicked "no" on site. Try checking out both candidates' sites, or the pro and anti groups on issues, and getting their alerts, without being listed as a supporter. I got an Email thanking me for signing a petition for the side I oippose after doing some research on their open site though I most assuredl did not sign their petition. I'm a retired lawyer who unexpectedly found myself dealing with many survivors of certain horrific crimes, and legal research on such cases can and does get you some targeted stuff you and I really don't want. Some of it's illegal. Try to find and buy a good product, new or used, and it can be hard, though you may get some ads for some, but it's most often useless. Research a sexual issue for a client's case and you wouldn't believe some of what you get. Furthermore, when I Google the Acme Widget Corp. the US DOJ ADA, or the National Conference of Con Artists, that's what I want to see first and wish Google would quit putting them down on page four below the name I'm searching. WQhile thery;re at it, the FTC should make the federally required free site for credit reports come up instead of FreeCreditReport.com that isn't free at all and is a scam based on that law under their administration. Now Video Professor is a Scam really ought to come up before Video Professor. OK, I'll look at some ads--most ofwhich I now block--if they'll let me specify at least what I might be interested in, because they get that wrong most of the time.
I can understand the DEA and Department of Justice needing people who can speak and translate “Ebonics,” or black slave English and its latest mutating manifestations, in order to understand communications intercepted in drug and other criminal investigations. It would sometimes also be useful if undercover agents working in certain black communities were fluent in “Ebonics.” I practiced juvenile and criminal law. Trust me on this one, most of the people who actually speak “Ebonics” are either in, recent graduates from, or will soon be inmates of, juvenile and adult prisons, making those among the most logical places to find such people. Speaking this “jive” is probably the surest guarantee that someone is or will soon be involved in crime and the criminal justice system. The fun problem here is going to be finding many people who are genuinely fluent in so-called “Ebonics” who either know or can be taught enough spoken and written actual English to be able to translate this “jive,” much of which is code used for criminal purposes, into English so it can be used by anyone on the other side. One additional problem is that there are an infinite number of varieties of this and some of them are not spoken and cannot be understood by anyone outside of one isolated neighborhood or, at best, locality. Now part of this was originally invented used by slaves to resist and evade restrictions on their free speech by their masters, or, later, restrictions in prisons or the like. “Bodiesburg,” was one of the terms invented in the infamous Tucker Prison Farm in Arkansas to talk about the murders and secret burials of prisoners by the guards and administration, as in “They say he escaped; I heard he went to Bodiesburg,” or, later, “You talk about Bodiesburg, you go there.,” for example. However, very few situations like that still exist. I have represented enough speakers of one or more versions of “Ebonics” in my law practice to have learned some things about it. One is that anyone who uses this as a primary language is not trying to talk to me, his lawyer, and not going to tell me the truth, nor is he a candidate for any manner of juvenile or adult probation. Jive-speakers don’t make it through diversion or probation programs even with black probation officers, etc. Sooner or later, they all cycle through the juvenile and adult prison systems. Then they make the same stupid mistakes and get caught again. My wife was a trained public school speech therapist. Rules in the education racket specifically prohibited correcting any speech problems in English that might be traceable to black slave English, “Ebonics,” “AAVE” or whatever some academic or politician decides to call it, or, for that matter, Spanish, which, of course, had exactly the same effect as the old laws against teaching slaves to read. Simon Legree would approve, but we don’t. I had one client, who was black, with a serious mouth deformity never treated because his mother pulled him out of school after the first day, who spoke only a private “language” understood only by him and his mother. When she died, he, then 41, was lost and existed by stealing and lived like a wild animal until he bounced back and forth between the criminal and mental health systems. President Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Anderson, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, or just about any black, or Hispanic or other, person you ever heard of doing anything with their life in America may be able to shift into the vernacular of a subculture for effect but made the effort to learn and use standard English. It’s no accident, but entirely natural and predictable, that the need of federal law enforcement agencies for translators of “Ebonics” etc. is to decipher and deal with criminals.
This interests me. Having an uncorrectible life-long vision problems, and fairly large hands and fingers, I find the tiny keyboards on Blackberry and other cell phones, etc., unusable, so use my roughtly 20/50 corrected vision, touch screen, etc., but would prefer something that let me touch-type on a smaller device since they seen to be taking over. The market for disability-accessible computer hardware and software, and computer textbooks and other manuals, is larger than many seem to realize.
This poster is either a child molester, a willing aider, abettor and encourager and supporter of the making of child porn, or an ignoramus and an idiot. The Constitutional presumption would be that he is the latter. The post is also wildly off topic as the issue was how easy or hard it might be for someone to frame someone for possession of computerized child porn. It is impossible to make child porn without, among other things, a very real child labor law violation. Those who "only" buy and sell it are, among other things, just like people who knowingly buy and sell stolen tangible property, or maybe at least pirated IT. The poster's argument that distributing child porn on line is a victimless crime, and that the harm to the child victims really arises out of the conduct of their parents and the authorities, are palpably false and deceptive. Either the poster is a child abuser or he is willfully ignorant, but that statement of his and others’ is made either with knowledge of its falsity or with utter and reckless disregard thereof, so that, either way, he is a liar. How many children used in child pornography does he know? How many of them have also been subjected to indecency by contact, and how many aggravated sexual assault, as children? After his conviction and sentence for sexually assaulting and murdering several young women, and having no further motive to lie, Ted Bundy noted that pornography is where he started on this course. The same fact has been proven in the investigation of many, many other violent sex crimes against children and adults, including the very common finding of child pornography on their computers searched under warrants. In my law practice, and certain other privileged and confidential relationships, I very unexpectedly found myself representing and otherwise dealing with a large number of survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I know survivors of physical child sexual abuse who were not used in child pornography, but none of the smaller number I know or know about who were used in child pornography were not only taken improper advantage of in the context of child labor law, but also physically molested by those involved. A lot of child porn could not be made without committing felony sexual offenses. After unexpectedly finding myself deeply involved in such matters professionally, I have taken courses on child sexual abuse from nationally recognized experts who have, for example, explained the symptoms, which I have seen, of a child having been sexually abused [whether in the course of making child porn or by a socially, economically and politically prominent parent] before they were old enough to talk, much less understand the nature of these crimes. Why would anyone but a fellow pervert try to minimize the seriousness of the problems of child pornography, or to defend consumers of this evil and harmful product?
This is a very important legal issue, much broader than its narrow “gay” context, and the FTC is right! Some bankruptcy courts have permitted companies in Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcy to sell the private information their members or customers have shared with them, in reliance upon privacy policies and guarantees, free and clear of those privacy guarantees to raise money for administrative expenses and to pay creditors. This is not that new an issue, but is one calling for such attention. It is generally accepted today that purely personal and private information, the public disclosure of which would be highly offensive to a hypothetical reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities, is subject to rights of privacy which have developed at common law and by statute. The late conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote at least one of the key Supreme Court opinions establishing this point. Contrary to the impressions of some posters here, the issue and potential legal precedent here transcends the "gay teen" context in this particular bankruptcy proceeding and is very likely to affect an awful lot of us "straight" adults, not to mention teens, Consider just a few of the possibilities, e.g., a site for, for example: Survivors of childhood sexual assault including incest; Survivors of sexual assault as adults; Persons with medical conditions; Persons with mental health issues; Lawyers, doctors, hospitals, drug makers or testing labs, or pharmacies, medical records storage and retrieval firms, etc. who go bankrupt holding your personal, private, and confidential data; Personal or business financial data transfer or storage; Persons seeking lawyers or legal advice; I’ve been there. Trying to check some data on Russian – Argentine trade for an academic research paper when both currencies had multiple exchange rates and were legally non-convertible got me on a CIA list of suspected Soviet spies, long before the Internet, and our government kept me on that list and lied to my U. s. Senator and me about it for a generation before finally admitting it to me, years after they said then that they had told Nelson Rockefeller about it. . My law practice very unexpectedly came to involve representing an awful lot of survivors, and a few perpetrators, of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, mostly heterosexual incest. Some were members of the immediate and near extended families of, and molested by, prominent persons including elected and high appointed officials palmed off on us by both political parties, who, of course, never got investigated much less busted. Childhood incest survivor clients of mine, and I, have had occasions to go to, register, and post on sites we hope nobody ever connects us with. I have also represented a “gay” teen charged with the murder of a “gay” adult, among other occasions I have had to research both sides of controversial “gay” issues. The first time I addressed a committee of the Texas Legislature in support of a bill protecting the privacy of individuals undergoing psychotherapy, and my proposed amendment to ensure that this would cover group therapy sessions with or without the licensed therapist present but at his direction, not one member, practically all lawyers, realized that Texas did not yet have any settled legal protection for the privacy and confidentiality of doctor-patient communications yet. HIPAA notwithstanding, there are still an awful lot of gaps, not to mention unsettled areas, in medical and psychological, among other areas of, privacy law. I read on one computer-related site, to which I have lost the citation, that legal counsel for one of the large companies developing computerized medical records, proposed by Bush and provided for in the new PPAPA “healthcare” bill, has said that HIPAA does not protect the privacy of such stored records. Sale in bankruptcy of personal and private data obtained under a promise of privacy protection presents a very different issue than the closer one, t
How many of the big tax-and-tax, snend-and-spend, liberals, on both sides of the aisle, actually were or are lawyers? How does their percentage compare with the percentage of lawyers in any given elected legislative body, federal or state? Remember, Shakespeare's character who is often quoted for "First thing, let's kill all the lawyers," was bent on creating a dictatorship. Nobody likes taxes, and they only encourage the big spenders to spend money for the primary purpose of getting themselves re-elected, i.e., buying votes with the people's onwn money, but sooner or later the issue of giving Internet selelrs and sales a tax avantage over local stores must be aderessed somehow.
The terrorists have indeed had a great victory out of 9/11, the shoe bomber, and other such things, primarily because both of our political parties and just about all of our politicians and Homeland Security types have let them in order to be seen by other fools as doing something. Now the professionals have done some good intelligence work , headed off some attacks, and caught the perpetrators of some of the others. They didn’t do it by having a bunch of hacks make us all take off our shoes, putting a U. S. Senator and a six year old kid on the no-fly list, and the like. Hey, security absurdity, or theater, is nothing new. When I was a child, living within walking distance of the Atlantic Ocean, in downtown Washington, D.C., and in east Texas not far from the big oil field, during World War II, we had to have black plastic covers over the top half of our headlights to prevent the Germans from following them to the oil fields, but you could see the natural gas being flared off, blazing high into the sky, and above the clouds [which my Dad told us the day would come when we wished we had that gas] a hundred miles from the actual wells and just about to the coast. Lindberg navigated and flew across the Atlantic to Paris with less in the way of navigation aids than available even before radar, loran, and GPS. In my older public school days, we had asinine drills for atomic bomb blasts with instructions that wouldn’t have had any real effect. I suspect they had similar public relations gimmicks thousands of years before Homeland Security told us all to stock up on Duct Tape. It took me over twenty years before the CIA admitted to me, in writing, that they had put me on a list of suspected Soviet spies or sympathizers in college, and lied to my U. S. Senator and me about that, based on nothing but open research for a thesis is international economics and the Russians having sent me something that we already had in the college library, although any number of people from the college, the Department of State which had declassified bales of documents for that research paper, top management of American companies in Argentina, etc. could have confirmed that I was an active conservative Republican and most certainly no Communist or Communist sympathizer. Of course the funny part of this was that their Top Secret mail cover and blacklist were done in such a way that I knew about it all along and they still lied to my Senators and me about it for years, through administrations of both parties.
Right! This is just one more place where B. O. has made the same kind, and some of the same, false political promises they all make, and made the same bad move of announcing in advance exactly when we intend to give up and go home, giving the other side not only encouragement, aid and comfort but valuable intelligence information, and which, like the deadline to close Gitmo laid down before anybody thought really hard about what to do with the terrorists there, is subect to prospective and retroactive change without notice Every Presidential nominee of either party since "9/11[01]" has solemnly promised that he, and he alone, could and would capture Osama Bin Laden, thereby proving all of them, and both political parties, not only fools utterly ignorant of the history, geography, and geopolitics of that part of the world, the "graveyard of empires" since Alexander the Great's time, but bald-faced liars. Polls commissioned by organizations with political agendas are notoriously unreliable, in significant part because they know all too well what their clients want to hear and publish, and it is all too easy so shade questions over into a "push poll" the questions in which are either subtly or blatantly structured to tip the responses in the desired direction by choice of language, etc. Of course, polls on many socio-economic and political subjects start out with the fundamental problem that a huge part of the population being sampled more or less well doesn't want to let on that they really don't have a clue about the people or issues upon which they express opinions. The polling on Supreme Court appointees is a particularly gross case in point because a majority of Ivy League students or graduates, much less the general population, can’t name and tell you anything meaningful about three of the nine current Justices, doesn't know any more about the realities of "original intent," "living constitution," or any other real or made-up system of actual or purported Constitutional interpretation, can't identify the five primary rights guaranteed--which most mistakenly think are granted--by the First Amendment, much less tell you anything about recent opinions. A majority of voters who show up at the polls, much less the general public, can't name both their U. S. Senators, much less tell you anything significant about each of them, either. I've been a voter since 1959 and been "professionally" five times, all five of them asking me, the same night, while "Love Story" was on TV, what I was watching. I have never seen any design for a political polling sample that did not start out with the expert pollster's preconceived ideas of what factors were going to be outcome-determinative in that upcoming election, based, of course, on what had happened in prior elections. I have worked with the best canvassing and other data my party had in my precinct in a major metropolitan area, and, at least at that time, but probably still today, I seriously doubt that anybody, with the possible exception of Google except that their data covers only serious Internet users like me, has had the kind of detailed demographic data that just might permit a brilliant expert to put together a sample of a thousand or so likely voters that would constitute a fair sample on enough of the things that might influence the votes of swing voters, for example, especially in a year like this one with some rather unprecedented factors and developments. . I happened, years go, to have been doing something else that led to my being at the offices of a major polling organization and they got positively furious that, making conversation, I asked the receptionist a simple, basic question about the process about which I was genuinely curious. I somehow lucked into a B in statistics, but higher math is definitely not one of my talents. I’m sometimes amazed and cannot understand how the polling can be as accurate as it sometimes is. I don't have a clue how the experts cited caught on to the particular bad polling work for Daily Kos, which they would
I AM a retired lawyer. I'm also a free-enterprise conservative except where the religious, ethical, economic, and legal training and experience that made me one tell me the conservatives today have got on the wrong side of something. Burying significant health risk like this, even where you also bury the oroject but know or should know that someone else is likely to pursue that or similar ideas gets pertty close to the way the maker and seller of Thalidomide buried the information that it could and did cause terrible birth defects sevral eyars ago. This is the kind of information that should, as a matter of common decency, not to mention liability prevention, have been sent to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and to key people in the field of children's health and eye health, some of whose identities these people should have known, and post at least the basics of the situaiton on the Internet where others in the field are likely to see it, head off anyone else putting anything like this on the market without solid assurance that these issues had been eliminated. One of the problems with proprietary research is also that, becxuse it is so often not shared even when you are not going to use it to patent, make, and sell something, potentially large amounts of others' time, expertise, effort, and expense--which [like a lot of pure consumer rip-offs] count as part of Gross Domestic Product just as though it had actually resulted in adding new real value to the economy and for consumers, although they are effectively wasted, duplicative effort, not to mention the fact that, without such disclosure, somebody, herre or in China, is likely to put the same or a similar product, or another with similar dangers, on the market, causing serious personal injuries, here to children, as well as economic losses.
Right! If you believe Google, Yahoo, or either of our purchased and perverted political parties' protestations of innocence about this, which remind me of Shakespeare's "Methinks thou dost protest too much!!," I would like to talk to you about a great deal on a bridge in Brooklyn. I depend upon a lot of ad-supported Internet content, so can't complain about ads, and it is only natural that the advertisers want to target them to users more likely to buy their stuff, so acertain degree of targeting and the data collection necessary for that must be expected. It doesn't bother me if I look up new cars and get ads from Ford and Toyota instead of Purina Puppy Chow, while I get puppy food ads when I look up the specifications for a fence for a Jack Russell, computer-related ads if I go to Dell or Microsoft sites, etc., provided, and only provided, that they do not save or pass on such data ina form that can identify me. This gets a whole lot more troublesome if, in the course ofmy law practice or other research, I happen to be researching medical or mental health issues, child sexual abuse and STDs which uexpectedly came to figure in my law practice and other privileged and confidentil relationships, erectile dysfunction, or specific legal issues and strategies for an upcoming case against the government or a big company. I quit using one site geenrally regarded as reputable on sexual and other medical issues because, when I went there to check some data on sexually-related matters, I quickly started getting a lot of spam for fake viagra and the like telling me, falsely, that my wife, whose name and less common spelling thereof they guessed right, had said, in gutter language she never would have used anywhere, that I was no good in bed, etc. My wife has a separate user page on this computer and separate Email accounts, user accounts and "handles" for various sites, etc., and on her cell phone. Members of Congress and Presidential candidates of both parties have repeatedly assured us that they have already passed effective legilslation dealing with spam, phishimg, computer and ohter privacy, child sexual abuse including child porn, etc., not to mention health insurance for small businesses like mine before I retired, and that they and only they would promptly catch Osama Bin Laden and bring about prosperity and world peace when eelcted. . Both candidates promised in their 2008 campaigns to pass one law that they had bragged to me about haing passed alrady years earlier. Obama VP Joe Biden and McCain both introduced separate bills to protect children from abuse during the 2008 campaign cycle, shortly after passing the comprehensive Adam Walsh Act that was supposed to cover that subject. OK, I do want the authorities to be bel to investigagte and enforce ourlawsagianst terrorism, child sexual exploitation including but not limited to child porn, and malware distribution, and to be able to do what is necessary to deal with the use of the Ingternet to accomplish that. Nobody I know wants eihter the government or business firms ["leviathon and Leviathom, Inc., as one perceptive writer put it] to be allowed to collect or disseminate detailed profiles on individuals, even to enforce a lot of the literally innumerable laws, rules, and regulations on the books. I need to know if a prospective employee is a thief or a spy, but it is essential to freedom and democracy, and the exericse of our fundamental, unalienable, God-given rights, that we must be free to post our thoughts in our own names or anonymously, and to make a fool ofourselves now iand then which is perhaps the most essential right guaranteed by teh First Amendment and certainly the one most people are mostlikely to exercise, without exposing oursleves to unfair and ilelgal discrimination in employment, etc., inevitable when employers nad prospective employers go into our political speech, disclosures of ourrace, sex, age, religious or political affiliations or beliefs, juvenile indiscretions, and credit scores, etc. Just as with the pending financia
Amen. I'm a retired lawyer who came late to the computer revolution in the eighties and none of my computerliterate friends will teach me to hack into things, write viruses and torgans, etc. and the textbook at the local university is wirtten in type too small for me to read and copy the code, but I have watched as the law got more and more to the point that, to even get exemplary damages against a corportion orLLC, etc., , now prctically always limited to three times your "economic" damages not including many very real elements of injury, loss and damage, you pretty well have to prove that the Board of Directors voted to do it at a duly called board meeting and included this in the minutes, which, of course, never happens, and getting a criminal convictin agianst a corportion is tougher yet and the fines are rounding errors in the financial statements of big corproations like IBM. You never do find out which individuals within these large entities, corporte or government, actually decided to do and did things, so as to even begin to prosecute them, even when it is part of something that cashes not just Wall Street but the real economy and hurts a lot of people. Nobody is really likely to invest the money and manpoer to track this malware exploit to its source and take real action agianst the people and corporation culpable. Another reuslt is that anything that calls itself a business corproation can rip off a million people for several hundred dollars apiece secure in the knowledge that nobody victimized can afford to get thelegla sysetem to call them to account much less put a real dent in their wallet so as to discourage future such behavior. As for our two political parties doing anything about this, both are in bed with the private-sector crooks for money and my nationally known law school dean liked to quote Will Rogers: "Whenever Congress tells a joke, it's a law, and whenever they pass a law, it's a joke." What I can't figure out about these people who write and sprad a lto of malware that doesn't capture data, etc., is what motivates and who pays them to do it?
Some good points. However, when you say "'you' go ahead and do it [post cartoons against Mohamed]," who is "you"? I rarely visit YouTube and have no clue who created this fool cartoon site, even whether the person who did that, or those posting such cartoons, are Muslims, western Christians, atheists, people who for whatever reason want to incite hatred and riots, etc. I don't agree with them, any more than I agree with those who ridicule and attack my own Christian faith, most of whom don't know what they are talking about. Given that I understand youTube has blocked other sites and postings on it for much less offensive content, and for content opposing abortion with the general thrust of which I agree but I did not see the postings am not familiar with the specifics, it would seem to me that they could work out some arrangement to take down and block just this or other sites clearly blasphemous. Now what about Al Queda recruiting sites? I think our Supreme Court has sometimes pushed our unique First Amendment protection of expression too far, farther than the Framers who wrote it would have intended or expected, including holding that a well-known Christian activist could not sue for a cartoon depicting him having sex with his mother, the straight out allegation of which as a fact would clearly be libelous under our law, but, after seeing some cases from Europe where people were arrested or held liable for things we believe are within the zone of protected expression, I'm glad we have it. America has also become known for some things both the devout Christians and Muslims alike agree are wrong and destructive but are nevertheless legal or openly promoted, not to mention some others that are crimes but still problems here. The reality is that the U.S. welcomed Muslims before American Christians or Jews were allowed or not attacked in some Muslim-controlled countries and places. Unlike fifty or so years ago in my younger days, there is a lot more interaction between Christians and Muslims, and between countries in hwich each tend to predominate, so we had better try to understand each other and work out some bases on which we can get along peaceably despite or deep and fundamental differences. There are clearly still deep, bitter, and sometimes violent conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The Muslims conqoured much of the world by force and got to the gates of Vienna eaThefight between what we both rlier before being driven back. There were wars between Catholic and Protestant Christians just a few hundred years ago, and now the 9-member Supreme Court of the predominantly Protestant Christian U.S. has 6 Catholics, 3 Jews, and no Protestants, and nobody worries about that but they fight over some religious issues like abortion and some other basic issues when it comes time to replace a Justice. The fact is that, hardly for the first time in history, we in America were attacked, and are still facing warlike, violent attacks, by Muslims and Muslim groups, motivated by Muslim ideology and doctrine, clearly very popular within the Islamic parts of hte world [who, ironically, are also trying to take over those countries]. I'm not defending our response by attacking Iraq and Afghanistan either legally or practically, but one fact that led to these wars, with the overwhelming votes of both parties in Congress, was, as is now known, poor and insufficient intelligence knowledge because those societies were and are closed. Ours is sometimes too open to protect itself. Short of world conquest and dictatorial rule by one side or the other, which would be a disaster, it isstill true, as Jesus [who I understand Muslims recognize as a prophet] said, "they know not the way to peace." I have Muslim friends living here and somebody ought to be able to work this out based upon principles both faiths agree upon, with shared control of the TempleMount and the Dome of the Rock as there has been with other sites for centuries, but it would take someone with a lot beter knowledge and understanding of Islam and that part of theworld than me.
Right on! Never thought I'd encourage a demonstration or maybe a peaceable riot at Berkeley, but this is a looming disaster for your career and life andI'd love to be in it waving a sign. Once it's out there, it isn't yours any more but belongsto the state andthere is, as a prfactical and legal matter, nothing you can do to cotrol it or even know how it gets leaked or misused until you don't get hired and can't find out why. The courts have already held that which political, religious, etc. groups you write checks to is the bank's and not your record so you have no kick if the government wants to rummage through it. Where do you think all the thousands of student records that get actually or allegedly stolen periodically end up? ChoicePoint and Axcium most likely and they providedata to the government, employers, and two phony colelction agencies set up by the Mob that we know about. Your DNA, your medical records, your bank records, etc. should be under your and solely your control except when you freely and voluntarily seek not an education but specific medical assessment and treatment. I could also tell you some verified horror stories about medical and medical records errors, mix-ups, etc., some of which we only discovered by freak accidents. And wait until some "social science and social control" type wants to write a thesis comparing things about those who did and did not ever so freely give "consent" to this DNA data collection. Oh, sure, this says it's "voluntary." Just like giving out Social Security numbers. You can read in government publications about our "voluntary" tax assessment system, which, of course, is ludicrous and the root of a lot of scams. In a day when colleges and employers get hundreds or even thousands of qualified applicants for each opening, getting entered into some data bank that keeps up with these "voluntary" responses as a "refusenik" is not a step to be taken lightly, nor is giivng away your DNA, and you shouldn't be faced with that choice in connection with anything the state or federal government, or an employer, does.