The Wall Street Journal had a run-in with Singapore which was very amusing to those who think that the WSJ editorial page was written by pompous right-wing assholes.
The WSJ editorial page had long praised Singapore as a model free-market state, which showed that you didn't need socialism to get a developed economy.
Then they printed an op-ed essay in one of their editions by an opposition politician. Lee's government used to deal with its legislative opponents by suing them for libel. The Singapore courts always ruled that they had committed libel, and awarded Lee huge damages which drove the opposition politician into bankruptcy. Under Singapore law, you can't serve in the legislature if you're bankrupt. So they had to leave the legislature. Cute, huh?
So Lee sued the WSJ, which had an Asian edition with a large circulation in Singapore, for libel. Lee won. The WSJ had to pay damages, and even worse, they weren't allowed to sell their newspaper in Singapore until they published a groveling apology.
What a dilemma! Stick to your principles of free speech, and lose millions of dollars of sales in one of the fastest-growing asian markets? Or cave in, abandon your principles, and throw the political dissidents to the wolves?
The WSJ printed an editorial trying to educate Lee and the Singaporian people (and businessmen) of the virtues of American-style free speech. The Singaporian people didn't pay much attention. After all, this was a matter of money (and power).
So finally the WSJ caved in, paid up, and printed a groveling, Soviet-style recantation.
I was in Singapore about a year later. You can find the New York Times everywhere. I asked for a copy of the WSJ. Everybody was "sold out". I finally found a copy in a bookstore on the fifth floor of a monster shopping mall at the end of an out-of-the way corner.
The Singaporean people were very nice. All the teenagers walk around with science textbooks. The restaurants have signs that say, "No studying." They're neat and well-dressed like Moonies, only smarter.
Lee was interviewed on Terry Gross and he defended his human rights violations. He said when he came in, they were living in poverty. They didn't have toilets. Now it's a modern developed state with an economy like Western Europe. I guess people are entitled to choose a dictator. I guess the Cuban people are entitled to say the same thing about Fidel Castro.
That's the elastic clause. But no one could have looked at the 9th and 10th Amendments in 1791 and concluded that they implied a right to abortion.
They say that there are other unenumerated rights, but they don't say what those unenumerated rights are.
It seems clear to me that the right to an abortion is so necessary to the running of a modern, liveable society. It seems so obvious that it's not necessary to explicitly say it.
It's like saying, "Where in the text of the Constitution does it say that you have a right to breathe free air?" It doesn't say that because it's obvious.
However, to other people it seems just as obvious that abortion is a crime.
On one level, there's no logic to it. You have people on both sides saying, "It just seems logical to me," and hiring lawyers to make logical arguments.
In New York City I've seen people order a "delivery" of marijuana to their homes. A hippie shows up, comes into their home, closes the door behind him, and makes the sale, just like delivering a pizza. They can order cocaine and heroin the same way.
Mayor Giuliani promised to get the drug dealers off the streets. He did. They used to sell drugs in the parks. No longer. People who sold drugs in public were quickly arrested.
I don't even know of any dark alleys in Manhattan. Houses are built right next to each other. I think that when TV police shows have drug deals in dark alleys, they shoot them in a studio.
The point I was making was that the Supreme Court created a right to privacy in the bedroom, and then derived the right to an abortion (up to viability, but not after) from that right to privacy.
I don't understand how they derived the right to an abortion from the right to privacy. I don't think it's logical. I think it was a political decision. (Even the Republicans, including Richard Nixon, supported the right to abortion around that time.) But that's the Supreme Court's decision, and that's now the law.
Even lawyers can't depend on logic to predict court and ultimately Supreme Court decisions. Much less can non-lawyers use logic to figure out what the law is.
Hidden cameras in every motel room and nobody complains? Hard for me to believe.
A woman stays at your motel and gets undressed to take a bath, and she doesn't care about the hidden cameras? Not the women I know.
I've seen cases of people who were convicted of crimes for installing hidden cameras in their bathrooms to photograph women. In one case the guy was photographing an au pair. He served jail time. It must be illegal.
That Wikipedia entry looks like it was original research by a non-lawyer based on a bunch of Google searches and books written for non-lawyers.
For one thing, legal expectations of privacy vary from state to state.
There are public places with no right to privacy, and so many exceptions that you can't make general statements. The right to privacy is like swiss cheese.
Photographers know this very well. They can take photos in a public place and publish them under some circumstances, but not under other circumstances.
One photographer took a photo of a black man dressed in a business suit with a briefcase walking through Grand Central Station. The New York Times magazine published it on the cover to illustrate a story on "The Black Middle Class." He sued and won, complaining that it subjected him to ridicule and invaded his right to privacy and right to control his own image.
Another photographer set up an automatic camera on 42nd St., took photos of people walking by, blew them up as large-format portraits, exhibited them in an art gallery and included them in a published gallery catalog. A subject sued him, charging that his right to privacy was violated. The judge ruled that he was in a public place, and should have been prepared to be photographed. If they used his photo on an advertisement or a peanut butter jar, the courts might have come to a different conclusion.
Another example of the right to privacy is the right to have an abortion. Now, I feel pretty strongly that a woman should have an absolute right to decide whether or not she has an abortion. But I read Roe v. Wade several times and, while I'm glad of the outcome, I don't see where the right to privacy comes from or how they applied it to that case. They seemed to have pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Yes, people have sex in private, and use contraceptives in private. But people also use heroin in private. People buy and sell heroin in private. Why doesn't the same right to privacy extend to selling heroin?
There are different definitions of "private" and "public" for different purposes under various laws.
For example, under the civil rights laws of the 1960s and 1970s, places of public accommodation were forbidden from discriminating on the basis of race. That would include hotels, Woolworth lunch counters, public and private schools, places of employment, etc. Some of these restrictions were limited to places involved in interstate commerce.
"Public" doesn't mean "government". A courtroom is a public place. The judge's chambers are private. Zucotti Park was privately owned, but open to the public.
In Italy, it's bad form to take someone's picture without permission, and they often don't give permission. Like every other country, some Italians are kind of tough.
Japanese tourists take pictures everywhere they go.
This is the kind of thing that chemistry books in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged kids to do.
One of the 19th century classics was Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle, which showed you how to make a paint can blow its top with lycopodium powder. (Still a great book for kids, now open source.) My chemistry teacher used that one in class. There was one British popular science lecturer who said that an indoor explosion is a good way to get peoples' attention.
The big difference is that back then, making bombs and rockets helped us fight our enemy, the communists. Now, making bombs and rockets is the kind of thing our enemies, the muslim terrorists, do.
You gotta admit, we beat the Russians to the moon. OK, they beat us into space. But putting a man on the moon is what really counts.
I had a couple of friends who wrote for Reason, and they even gave me a free subscription, so I read it for a few years. We had a few discussions about gun control, so I heard the basic arguments, which left me unconvinced.
I think the Nature article quoted a researcher who said that there is not now enough evidence to demonstrate whether gun control would save lives, and that may be true.
I don't think it contributes to a rational resolution to have politicians decide which scientists are biased and cut off their funding, as they did in this case (and as they did for research on marijuana, another product that Reason is sympathetic to).
Even worse, I don't think it contributes to a rational resolution to have politicians pass laws that mandate that data not even be collected, when somebody uses the data to come to conclusions that you don't like. There were studies that concluded that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than use them in any reported self-defense. I'd like to see somebody try to refute that conclusion, but now they never will. Now the names of people who buy guns are no longer available to researchers or even collected. So we're having a data-free debate.
I am skeptical of the claim that all peer-reviewed academic journals are biased against guns. Back in the days when the federal government was funding those studies, I would always see letters in JAMA etc. from pro-gun people, including doctors. Even today, many researchers, including doctors, say that they did or still do own and use guns.
I used to use the library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and they had shelf after shelf of criminology journals. If some academic researcher did discover the truth, I'm sure he could find someplace to publish it, and they can fight out their arguments in that literature.
I enjoy reading law journals as much as the next guy, but I am no longer spending time going through the firearms debate. I know there isn't going to be any new data. Besides I just got the latest NEJM on my desk and I have to read it. So this will have to serve as my courteous reply.
Lead investigator Dr William Jacobs, professor of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, said: "We have only been able to demonstrate this in a test tube, and we don't know if it will work in humans and in animals.
None of the firearms researchers was ever accused of falsifying evidence -- merely of coming to conclusions that the NRA and their supporters disagreed with.
Perhaps you're thinking of John Lott, who didn't back up his hard drive, and lost his paper documentation, and couldn't remember the names of any researchers, and who created an online meat puppet named Mary Rosh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott#Controversy
They were publishing plenty of peer-reviewed articles about their research in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Public Health, etc., until the NRA lobbyists forbid government agencies from funding their research.
If you don't believe in peer-reviewed research, then you have a bizarre idea of facts and reality.
It's a lot easier to take away guns from irrational people than it is to get them to control their impulses. When you figure out how to get irrational people to control their impulses, let me know.
I don't know where you get the idea that gun banners don't care about addressing the base cause of violent crime. The people who led the effort were doctors who got tired of having people dying from gun wounds in the emergency room. They were happy to reduce violence any way they could do it. The easiest way was to start by taking away the guns.
They're the same people who are trying to reduce poverty, increase education, etc. but that's a long, indirect path.
Slashdot Mirror
Find some interesting guys in your neighborhood who are doing interesting things.
Try the local businesses, colleges, IEEE chapter, etc.
That's a "speaker" who comes in to describe his work, but then you spend an hour just hanging out with him or her.
The Wall Street Journal had a run-in with Singapore which was very amusing to those who think that the WSJ editorial page was written by pompous right-wing assholes.
The WSJ editorial page had long praised Singapore as a model free-market state, which showed that you didn't need socialism to get a developed economy.
Then they printed an op-ed essay in one of their editions by an opposition politician. Lee's government used to deal with its legislative opponents by suing them for libel. The Singapore courts always ruled that they had committed libel, and awarded Lee huge damages which drove the opposition politician into bankruptcy. Under Singapore law, you can't serve in the legislature if you're bankrupt. So they had to leave the legislature. Cute, huh?
So Lee sued the WSJ, which had an Asian edition with a large circulation in Singapore, for libel. Lee won. The WSJ had to pay damages, and even worse, they weren't allowed to sell their newspaper in Singapore until they published a groveling apology.
What a dilemma! Stick to your principles of free speech, and lose millions of dollars of sales in one of the fastest-growing asian markets? Or cave in, abandon your principles, and throw the political dissidents to the wolves?
The WSJ printed an editorial trying to educate Lee and the Singaporian people (and businessmen) of the virtues of American-style free speech. The Singaporian people didn't pay much attention. After all, this was a matter of money (and power).
So finally the WSJ caved in, paid up, and printed a groveling, Soviet-style recantation.
I was in Singapore about a year later. You can find the New York Times everywhere. I asked for a copy of the WSJ. Everybody was "sold out". I finally found a copy in a bookstore on the fifth floor of a monster shopping mall at the end of an out-of-the way corner.
The Singaporean people were very nice. All the teenagers walk around with science textbooks. The restaurants have signs that say, "No studying." They're neat and well-dressed like Moonies, only smarter.
Lee was interviewed on Terry Gross and he defended his human rights violations. He said when he came in, they were living in poverty. They didn't have toilets. Now it's a modern developed state with an economy like Western Europe. I guess people are entitled to choose a dictator. I guess the Cuban people are entitled to say the same thing about Fidel Castro.
Go to the Nobel Prize web site and read the autobiographies.
You get a chance to do study engineering because of your proficiency in baseball.
Is there anything more stupid?
Getting a chance to study engineering in order to build nuclear-armed ICBMs to blow up the world.
(I get your point. But you asked.)
That's the elastic clause. But no one could have looked at the 9th and 10th Amendments in 1791 and concluded that they implied a right to abortion.
They say that there are other unenumerated rights, but they don't say what those unenumerated rights are.
It seems clear to me that the right to an abortion is so necessary to the running of a modern, liveable society. It seems so obvious that it's not necessary to explicitly say it.
It's like saying, "Where in the text of the Constitution does it say that you have a right to breathe free air?" It doesn't say that because it's obvious.
However, to other people it seems just as obvious that abortion is a crime.
On one level, there's no logic to it. You have people on both sides saying, "It just seems logical to me," and hiring lawyers to make logical arguments.
a quick google search did it.
http://books.google.com/books?id=EYAnJEMZGn8C&pg=PA116&lpg=PA116&dq=photograph+new+york+times+magazine+black+middle+class+sued&source=bl&ots=XNi0u7VRJ1&sig=ODCfecF6uiGCBIH4fzZ97SgTbk0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jaikUaGPO5TH0gGY2YEw&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=photograph%20new%20york%20times%20magazine%20black%20middle%20class%20sued&f=false
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/arts/17iht-lorca.html?pagewanted=all
In New York City I've seen people order a "delivery" of marijuana to their homes. A hippie shows up, comes into their home, closes the door behind him, and makes the sale, just like delivering a pizza. They can order cocaine and heroin the same way.
Mayor Giuliani promised to get the drug dealers off the streets. He did. They used to sell drugs in the parks. No longer. People who sold drugs in public were quickly arrested.
I don't even know of any dark alleys in Manhattan. Houses are built right next to each other. I think that when TV police shows have drug deals in dark alleys, they shoot them in a studio.
The point I was making was that the Supreme Court created a right to privacy in the bedroom, and then derived the right to an abortion (up to viability, but not after) from that right to privacy.
I don't understand how they derived the right to an abortion from the right to privacy. I don't think it's logical. I think it was a political decision. (Even the Republicans, including Richard Nixon, supported the right to abortion around that time.) But that's the Supreme Court's decision, and that's now the law.
Even lawyers can't depend on logic to predict court and ultimately Supreme Court decisions. Much less can non-lawyers use logic to figure out what the law is.
The movie Milk, about Harvey Milk, starts off with a camera filming somebody in a gay bar circa 1960. The guy in the bar throws a drink at the camera.
Mod parent up. Street View is a very good example.
Hidden cameras in every motel room and nobody complains? Hard for me to believe.
A woman stays at your motel and gets undressed to take a bath, and she doesn't care about the hidden cameras? Not the women I know.
I've seen cases of people who were convicted of crimes for installing hidden cameras in their bathrooms to photograph women. In one case the guy was photographing an au pair. He served jail time. It must be illegal.
That Wikipedia entry looks like it was original research by a non-lawyer based on a bunch of Google searches and books written for non-lawyers.
For one thing, legal expectations of privacy vary from state to state.
There are public places with no right to privacy, and so many exceptions that you can't make general statements. The right to privacy is like swiss cheese.
Photographers know this very well. They can take photos in a public place and publish them under some circumstances, but not under other circumstances.
One photographer took a photo of a black man dressed in a business suit with a briefcase walking through Grand Central Station. The New York Times magazine published it on the cover to illustrate a story on "The Black Middle Class." He sued and won, complaining that it subjected him to ridicule and invaded his right to privacy and right to control his own image.
Another photographer set up an automatic camera on 42nd St., took photos of people walking by, blew them up as large-format portraits, exhibited them in an art gallery and included them in a published gallery catalog. A subject sued him, charging that his right to privacy was violated. The judge ruled that he was in a public place, and should have been prepared to be photographed. If they used his photo on an advertisement or a peanut butter jar, the courts might have come to a different conclusion.
Another example of the right to privacy is the right to have an abortion. Now, I feel pretty strongly that a woman should have an absolute right to decide whether or not she has an abortion. But I read Roe v. Wade several times and, while I'm glad of the outcome, I don't see where the right to privacy comes from or how they applied it to that case. They seemed to have pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Yes, people have sex in private, and use contraceptives in private. But people also use heroin in private. People buy and sell heroin in private. Why doesn't the same right to privacy extend to selling heroin?
There are different definitions of "private" and "public" for different purposes under various laws.
For example, under the civil rights laws of the 1960s and 1970s, places of public accommodation were forbidden from discriminating on the basis of race. That would include hotels, Woolworth lunch counters, public and private schools, places of employment, etc. Some of these restrictions were limited to places involved in interstate commerce.
"Public" doesn't mean "government". A courtroom is a public place. The judge's chambers are private. Zucotti Park was privately owned, but open to the public.
In Italy, it's bad form to take someone's picture without permission, and they often don't give permission. Like every other country, some Italians are kind of tough.
Japanese tourists take pictures everywhere they go.
Japanese tourists go to Italy.
Result ....
What kind of war does Spain anticipate fighting in which a submarine would play a useful role?
No, as I said above, my problem -- and the problem of doctors -- is the injury, particularly the deaths, not the violence.
Would you rather be beaten up or killed?
The experience of doctors who treat injured people is that guns are more likely to kill than stabbing or beating.
That makes sense. Guns are designed to kill. If they weren't more efficient at killing, people wouldn't use them.
The ER doctors and surgeons tell me that removing the gun significantly reduces the injury and likelihood of death.
The rocket pioneers were always one step ahead of the cops.
I know I was.
This is the kind of thing that chemistry books in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged kids to do.
One of the 19th century classics was Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle, which showed you how to make a paint can blow its top with lycopodium powder. (Still a great book for kids, now open source.) My chemistry teacher used that one in class. There was one British popular science lecturer who said that an indoor explosion is a good way to get peoples' attention.
The big difference is that back then, making bombs and rockets helped us fight our enemy, the communists. Now, making bombs and rockets is the kind of thing our enemies, the muslim terrorists, do.
You gotta admit, we beat the Russians to the moon. OK, they beat us into space. But putting a man on the moon is what really counts.
If you consider getting shot to be violence, then taking away guns reduces violence.
I had a couple of friends who wrote for Reason, and they even gave me a free subscription, so I read it for a few years. We had a few discussions about gun control, so I heard the basic arguments, which left me unconvinced.
I think the Nature article quoted a researcher who said that there is not now enough evidence to demonstrate whether gun control would save lives, and that may be true.
I don't think it contributes to a rational resolution to have politicians decide which scientists are biased and cut off their funding, as they did in this case (and as they did for research on marijuana, another product that Reason is sympathetic to).
Even worse, I don't think it contributes to a rational resolution to have politicians pass laws that mandate that data not even be collected, when somebody uses the data to come to conclusions that you don't like. There were studies that concluded that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than use them in any reported self-defense. I'd like to see somebody try to refute that conclusion, but now they never will. Now the names of people who buy guns are no longer available to researchers or even collected. So we're having a data-free debate.
I am skeptical of the claim that all peer-reviewed academic journals are biased against guns. Back in the days when the federal government was funding those studies, I would always see letters in JAMA etc. from pro-gun people, including doctors. Even today, many researchers, including doctors, say that they did or still do own and use guns.
I used to use the library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and they had shelf after shelf of criminology journals. If some academic researcher did discover the truth, I'm sure he could find someplace to publish it, and they can fight out their arguments in that literature.
I enjoy reading law journals as much as the next guy, but I am no longer spending time going through the firearms debate. I know there isn't going to be any new data. Besides I just got the latest NEJM on my desk and I have to read it. So this will have to serve as my courteous reply.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22614522
Lead investigator Dr William Jacobs, professor of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, said: "We have only been able to demonstrate this in a test tube, and we don't know if it will work in humans and in animals.
Not true. One of the leading researchers who publishes in peer-reviewed journals has repeatedly criticized studies supporting gun control when they went against the evidence.
http://www.nature.com/news/firearms-research-the-gun-fighter-1.12864
None of the firearms researchers was ever accused of falsifying evidence -- merely of coming to conclusions that the NRA and their supporters disagreed with.
Perhaps you're thinking of John Lott, who didn't back up his hard drive, and lost his paper documentation, and couldn't remember the names of any researchers, and who created an online meat puppet named Mary Rosh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott#Controversy
They were publishing plenty of peer-reviewed articles about their research in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Public Health, etc., until the NRA lobbyists forbid government agencies from funding their research.
If you don't believe in peer-reviewed research, then you have a bizarre idea of facts and reality.
It's a lot easier to take away guns from irrational people than it is to get them to control their impulses. When you figure out how to get irrational people to control their impulses, let me know.
I don't know where you get the idea that gun banners don't care about addressing the base cause of violent crime. The people who led the effort were doctors who got tired of having people dying from gun wounds in the emergency room. They were happy to reduce violence any way they could do it. The easiest way was to start by taking away the guns.
They're the same people who are trying to reduce poverty, increase education, etc. but that's a long, indirect path.