I often think it's comical – Fal, lal, la! How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la! That every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative! Fal, lal, la!
And that wonderful observation was penned over a century ago.
If no independent journalists are allowed in the country, how can one be so sure about the true illiteracy rate, infant mortality, etc.
Non-US citizens can travel to Cuba, and some US citizens can under special circumstances. Now, the Canadians and such who travel there often stay pretty close to the touristy beaches and Havana, but it is possible to visit other areas. What's keeping US contact with Cuba minimal isn't the Cuban government so much as the US government, who sees travel to Cuba as a violation of its 60-year embargo.
My mother and several of her friends were able to visit as part of a religious exchange program, and several Cubans came to the US as part of that same program, both in the 1990's. The basic story was that life got pretty difficult after the USSR collapsed (because that was Cuba's primary trading partner) but in response the government eventually loosened their laws on trading extra vegetables and medicine. At least based on what my mom saw staying with a family in the eastern part of the island, people were generally pretty well-fed, healthy, and literate, just like the UN stats say. There's still some political repression, but a lot less now then there was in 1959 (for instance, jokes about Castro were told, but he was carefully not mentioned by name).
So how do you explain this story (linked from The Daily WTF)? If you read the story, you'll know that both the exchange and the company had lots of protections built in to prevent the situation, and this story is about what happened when every single one of them had a technical problem or a person telling them to go ahead and do it.
If the collapse of the Roman empire taught us nothing else, it's that what you actually want in a serious crisis is not gold, but land you are capable of defending. Preferably with tenants to help you fight. Because that's the currency that is capable of keeping you and any supporters you may have alive.
The match is earth, demonstrating how earth begets fire.
No, the match is a mix of earth and fire. See, if you burn a match (releasing the fire), you end up with a small pile of ashes, which are obviously earth. In addition, we know that fire wants to move up, because fires on earth try to get to the heavens, plus there are some pretty big fires up there like the sun and moon. By contrast, earth very clearly wants to move down, which you see as soon as you let go of a rock.
The amazing thing about these theories which we now know to be completely wrong is how well they worked to describe the universe.
Because the questions about what a jury can and cannot know are very similar between civil and criminal law. It's pretty simple too: the jury is supposed to know what was given as evidence in the courtroom, and nothing else about the facts of the case.
In fact, since getting your name mentioned in the paper in relation to a crime can be so prejudicial (not just to a jury, but also to potential employers and the like), there's a good argument that no suspect or defendant should be named in the press until either they are convicted of a crime or the defendant specifically allows it. Many countries in fact have exactly that sort of rule, and the US has that rule for juvenile offenders as well.
All that says is that he was probably guilty of weapons charges and evading police. Nothing in what you said proved drug charges, which is what you were responsible for deciding. The key here is that your job as a juror is to decide "Did Mr Jones do XYZ?", not "Is Mr Jones a criminal?"
You have to trust that if he's guilty of evading police (for instance), another jury will convict him of that, or a plea bargain will happen to lock him up.
I was curious and found that the NYPD has arrest records online. the guy on trial had 10 or so other cases against him at the same time including weapons possession. can't remember if the cops found the weapons at the same time as the drugs, but it was a separate trial. of course i never told any of the other jurors and we ended up finding the guy not guilty even though i thought he was guilty. but based on the evidence presented at trial, he was not guilty.
I don't know exactly what the rules are in New York, but in Ohio you would be in violation of your oath as a juror, and have demonstrated exactly why this legal decision by the judge was absolutely correct.
For starters, an arrest record or other charges prove nothing about the defendant. They only prove that the police and/or prosecutor's office thought that the defendant committed some other crimes, not that he actually did commit a crime. For all you know, the real problem was that the defendant was sleeping with the prosecutor's wife. Another factor is that any other evidence you found from, say, news reports, could have been thrown out at trial due to violations of the defendant's constitutional rights.
Secondly, and more importantly, you said yourself that you thought he was guilty despite insufficient evidence presented in court to make that determination. If you had told the other jurors and convicted the defendant based on your non-evidence, you could well have sent an innocent man to jail. In addition, if there had been sufficient evidence to convict at trial, but you told the other jurors about what you found, you just gave a guilty man grounds for mistrial, which would allow him to return to the streets.
In short, there are very good reasons for the rules that you may think are stupid, oppressive, etc.
Eric Whitacre really knows his stuff, which is what makes his music fun to sing and listen. Some stuff he does really well:
- Create a sort of choral shimmer using notes that are really close to each other. That's a technique that's been really developed in the last 100 years.
- Use the lower registers of the voices. A lot of composers go with faster-higher-louder to create excitement, but Whitacre has no problem dropping the basses to their low register for something completely different.
- Choosing his words carefully, and matching them to his musical intentions.
- Making his lines fairly easy to sing, so the singers have a good chance of really nailing their parts.
And if you've skipped most of the last century's worth of orchestral and choral music, you've missed a lot of reallyinterestingstyles. The way to think about it is that there was a lot of experimentation, and some things worked and a lot of things didn't work. Interestingly, now that composers know more about what doesn't work, they've been recently doing more of what does work.
The requirement that priests remain celibate certainly both reduces the number of potential priests and also dramatically increases the chance that people who do join the priesthood will have unhealthy sexuality.
Under American law, corporations have almost all privileges of citizenship without most of the responsibilities of citizenship. And people acting on behalf of a corporation have lots of legal protections that us regular schlemiels lack. They benefit extensively from the protection of the US military (both in and outside of US territory), and of course have ready access to all the more local services such as police, the fire department, municipal water supply, and so on. Thanks to the current Supreme Court, they also have full rights of political speech.
However, about the only responsibility of citizenship that they have to any degree whatsoever is that they are required to pay taxes, and many of them manage to dodge even doing that. Interestingly, if the interests of their shareholders conflict with the interests of the US, they are legally supposed to go with the shareholder's interest. So, for instance, if it is profitable to find a legal loophole that allows some subsidiary to sell uranium to Iran, a corporation capable of doing so is generally obligated to do just that.
The craziness of this: if Carly Fiorina pretexts to find out whether her husband is cheating on her, she's likely to be in a similar boat to David Kernell. If she pretexts to find out whether there's a leak on her board, she's now acting as a corporate officer, and thus the company is liable, not Carly, unless the prosecutor or plaintiff can convince a judge to pierce the corporate veil. Same person, same act, but in the second version there's an extra layer of legal protection.
It wasn't, it just started at -1 because sopssa was repeatedly modded into oblivion in a discussion about Google. And from what I can tell from the content of the comments, unjustifiably so.
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of the White House, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here. > open mailbox Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet. > read leaflet (taken) "WELCOME TO POLITICS!
POLITICS is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No country should be without one!"
Another alternative (as anyone passingly familiar with Heinlein would know): The water and organic material is left over from the civilizations on the 5th planet that the Martians sent away because it was bad.
So you're telling me this law would have passed if the majority of illegal immigrants in Arizona were from Canada, and all the white people were suspect?
An experienced cop admitting that when he followed a car long enough he could make a legal stop because at some point everyone makes a mistake. (I presume feeling nervous that a cop has been following you the last 8 blocks also doesn't help one's situation.)
It's definitely nervewracking, I can tell you that. I've been in that very position, not because I was non-white but because my car was a bit beat up and I had longish hair at the time, and I'm pretty sure the cop had decided that I didn't belong in his small suburb.
The basic picture: I saw the cop start to pull up behind me, and I was going about 40 in a 30 mph zone (which everyone else does too: it's a rural area that has no business having a speed limit so low), so I slow down to 35. The officer continued to pull up behind me, and I slowed to the speed limit. I gave him opportunities to pass just in case he was just trying to get by me, which he didn't take. I took a somewhat less direct route out of town, following every traffic law to the letter (including things like signaling 100 ft before a turn) and making a few turns. He followed me every step of the way until I left his jurisdiction.
Now imagine having to drive like that all the time, and you'll know what a Hispanic person in Arizona needs to do to avoid getting stopped.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote the great W.S. Gilbert:
I often think it's comical – Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la!
And that wonderful observation was penned over a century ago.
Actually, no. The whole point of the program was for people of the same Christian denomination to make international connections.
But very funny.
If no independent journalists are allowed in the country, how can one be so sure about the true illiteracy rate, infant mortality, etc.
Non-US citizens can travel to Cuba, and some US citizens can under special circumstances. Now, the Canadians and such who travel there often stay pretty close to the touristy beaches and Havana, but it is possible to visit other areas. What's keeping US contact with Cuba minimal isn't the Cuban government so much as the US government, who sees travel to Cuba as a violation of its 60-year embargo.
My mother and several of her friends were able to visit as part of a religious exchange program, and several Cubans came to the US as part of that same program, both in the 1990's. The basic story was that life got pretty difficult after the USSR collapsed (because that was Cuba's primary trading partner) but in response the government eventually loosened their laws on trading extra vegetables and medicine. At least based on what my mom saw staying with a family in the eastern part of the island, people were generally pretty well-fed, healthy, and literate, just like the UN stats say. There's still some political repression, but a lot less now then there was in 1959 (for instance, jokes about Castro were told, but he was carefully not mentioned by name).
So how do you explain this story (linked from The Daily WTF)? If you read the story, you'll know that both the exchange and the company had lots of protections built in to prevent the situation, and this story is about what happened when every single one of them had a technical problem or a person telling them to go ahead and do it.
If the collapse of the Roman empire taught us nothing else, it's that what you actually want in a serious crisis is not gold, but land you are capable of defending. Preferably with tenants to help you fight. Because that's the currency that is capable of keeping you and any supporters you may have alive.
The match is earth, demonstrating how earth begets fire.
No, the match is a mix of earth and fire. See, if you burn a match (releasing the fire), you end up with a small pile of ashes, which are obviously earth. In addition, we know that fire wants to move up, because fires on earth try to get to the heavens, plus there are some pretty big fires up there like the sun and moon. By contrast, earth very clearly wants to move down, which you see as soon as you let go of a rock.
The amazing thing about these theories which we now know to be completely wrong is how well they worked to describe the universe.
The good news is that eventually the aliens can be properly sued.
Why not just put a pie in his face? It seems like that's almost par for the course, with reports like this.
this.
Because the questions about what a jury can and cannot know are very similar between civil and criminal law. It's pretty simple too: the jury is supposed to know what was given as evidence in the courtroom, and nothing else about the facts of the case.
In fact, since getting your name mentioned in the paper in relation to a crime can be so prejudicial (not just to a jury, but also to potential employers and the like), there's a good argument that no suspect or defendant should be named in the press until either they are convicted of a crime or the defendant specifically allows it. Many countries in fact have exactly that sort of rule, and the US has that rule for juvenile offenders as well.
All that says is that he was probably guilty of weapons charges and evading police. Nothing in what you said proved drug charges, which is what you were responsible for deciding. The key here is that your job as a juror is to decide "Did Mr Jones do XYZ?", not "Is Mr Jones a criminal?"
You have to trust that if he's guilty of evading police (for instance), another jury will convict him of that, or a plea bargain will happen to lock him up.
I was curious and found that the NYPD has arrest records online. the guy on trial had 10 or so other cases against him at the same time including weapons possession. can't remember if the cops found the weapons at the same time as the drugs, but it was a separate trial. of course i never told any of the other jurors and we ended up finding the guy not guilty even though i thought he was guilty. but based on the evidence presented at trial, he was not guilty.
I don't know exactly what the rules are in New York, but in Ohio you would be in violation of your oath as a juror, and have demonstrated exactly why this legal decision by the judge was absolutely correct.
For starters, an arrest record or other charges prove nothing about the defendant. They only prove that the police and/or prosecutor's office thought that the defendant committed some other crimes, not that he actually did commit a crime. For all you know, the real problem was that the defendant was sleeping with the prosecutor's wife. Another factor is that any other evidence you found from, say, news reports, could have been thrown out at trial due to violations of the defendant's constitutional rights.
Secondly, and more importantly, you said yourself that you thought he was guilty despite insufficient evidence presented in court to make that determination. If you had told the other jurors and convicted the defendant based on your non-evidence, you could well have sent an innocent man to jail. In addition, if there had been sufficient evidence to convict at trial, but you told the other jurors about what you found, you just gave a guilty man grounds for mistrial, which would allow him to return to the streets.
In short, there are very good reasons for the rules that you may think are stupid, oppressive, etc.
Either that or Communists.
Eric Whitacre really knows his stuff, which is what makes his music fun to sing and listen. Some stuff he does really well:
- Create a sort of choral shimmer using notes that are really close to each other. That's a technique that's been really developed in the last 100 years.
- Use the lower registers of the voices. A lot of composers go with faster-higher-louder to create excitement, but Whitacre has no problem dropping the basses to their low register for something completely different.
- Choosing his words carefully, and matching them to his musical intentions.
- Making his lines fairly easy to sing, so the singers have a good chance of really nailing their parts.
And if you've skipped most of the last century's worth of orchestral and choral music, you've missed a lot of really interesting styles. The way to think about it is that there was a lot of experimentation, and some things worked and a lot of things didn't work. Interestingly, now that composers know more about what doesn't work, they've been recently doing more of what does work.
The requirement that priests remain celibate certainly both reduces the number of potential priests and also dramatically increases the chance that people who do join the priesthood will have unhealthy sexuality.
Under American law, corporations have almost all privileges of citizenship without most of the responsibilities of citizenship. And people acting on behalf of a corporation have lots of legal protections that us regular schlemiels lack. They benefit extensively from the protection of the US military (both in and outside of US territory), and of course have ready access to all the more local services such as police, the fire department, municipal water supply, and so on. Thanks to the current Supreme Court, they also have full rights of political speech.
However, about the only responsibility of citizenship that they have to any degree whatsoever is that they are required to pay taxes, and many of them manage to dodge even doing that. Interestingly, if the interests of their shareholders conflict with the interests of the US, they are legally supposed to go with the shareholder's interest. So, for instance, if it is profitable to find a legal loophole that allows some subsidiary to sell uranium to Iran, a corporation capable of doing so is generally obligated to do just that.
The craziness of this: if Carly Fiorina pretexts to find out whether her husband is cheating on her, she's likely to be in a similar boat to David Kernell. If she pretexts to find out whether there's a leak on her board, she's now acting as a corporate officer, and thus the company is liable, not Carly, unless the prosecutor or plaintiff can convince a judge to pierce the corporate veil. Same person, same act, but in the second version there's an extra layer of legal protection.
And the best part: my post defending sopssa has just been modded down. And I'm guessing this one will be too.
It wasn't, it just started at -1 because sopssa was repeatedly modded into oblivion in a discussion about Google. And from what I can tell from the content of the comments, unjustifiably so.
In other words, it all started like this:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of the White House, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
> open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.
> read leaflet
(taken)
"WELCOME TO POLITICS!
POLITICS is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No country should be without one!"
Another alternative (as anyone passingly familiar with Heinlein would know): The water and organic material is left over from the civilizations on the 5th planet that the Martians sent away because it was bad.
It is. It's the plot of Spiderman 2.
It had a plot?
It's not dead - it's a zombie process. Which means, unfortunately, that "kill" doesn't work.
So you're telling me this law would have passed if the majority of illegal immigrants in Arizona were from Canada, and all the white people were suspect?
An experienced cop admitting that when he followed a car long enough he could make a legal stop because at some point everyone makes a mistake. (I presume feeling nervous that a cop has been following you the last 8 blocks also doesn't help one's situation.)
It's definitely nervewracking, I can tell you that. I've been in that very position, not because I was non-white but because my car was a bit beat up and I had longish hair at the time, and I'm pretty sure the cop had decided that I didn't belong in his small suburb.
The basic picture: I saw the cop start to pull up behind me, and I was going about 40 in a 30 mph zone (which everyone else does too: it's a rural area that has no business having a speed limit so low), so I slow down to 35. The officer continued to pull up behind me, and I slowed to the speed limit. I gave him opportunities to pass just in case he was just trying to get by me, which he didn't take. I took a somewhat less direct route out of town, following every traffic law to the letter (including things like signaling 100 ft before a turn) and making a few turns. He followed me every step of the way until I left his jurisdiction.
Now imagine having to drive like that all the time, and you'll know what a Hispanic person in Arizona needs to do to avoid getting stopped.