Student punished for spaghetti beliefs

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

A student has been suspended from school in America for coming to class dressed as a pirate.

But the disciplinary action has provoked controversy – because the student says that the ban violates his rights, as the pirate costume is part of his religion.

Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear 'full pirate regalia' as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism.

The school, however, say that his pirate garb was disruptive.

Pastafarians follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pictured), and believe that the world was created by the touch of his noodly appendage. Furthermore, they acknowledge pirates as being 'absolute divine beings', and stress that the worldwide decline in the number of pirates has directly led to global warming.

Pastafarianism gained wide attention when its key prophet, Bobby Henderson, wrote to the Kansas School Board during the height of the controversy over 'Intelligent Design' being taught in science classes. His letter, also published on his website, demanded equal time be given to the teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as was given to ID and evolutionary theory.

Since then, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has gained countless followers worldwide, although there are those who remain spagnostic.

The school, in North Buncombe, North Carolina, remains adamant that their decision to suspend Killian for a day has nothing to do with his religion, and quite a lot to do with his repeated refusal to heed warnings against wearing pirate outfits.

Hicks fate hangs in the balance

The fate of David Hicks hung in the balance on Tuesday night after secret talks at the Guantanamo Bay military base.

The Australian terror detainee's legal team met with US prosecutors behind closed doors and were tight-lipped about any deal ahead of Hicks's sentencing, likely to be later this week.

Hicks entered a shock guilty plea on Monday to providing material support for terrorism, in an apparent move to secure the 31-year-old Adelaide man a reduced sentence, which will be served in an Australian jail.

Prosecutors have been seeking a 20-year sentence, while Australia says the five years Hicks has already spent in US custody should be taken into account in his final sentence.

On Tuesday, as part of the Military Commissions Act process, defence and prosecutors met to establish the specifics of Hicks's guilty plea - the results of which could influence his sentence.

Prime Minister John Howard said later those facts had been agreed on, but revealed no further details.

A gag order is preventing lawyers and prosecutors talking about the deal, which could see Hicks home within weeks.

"We are being very careful to ensure that David's rights are protected until he's finally dealt with in this process," said Hicks's Adelaide-based lawyer David McLeod.

McLeod, who is at Guantanamo Bay, also warned the Australian government not to rush to judgment about Hicks following the guilty plea.

"Until the sentencing process is complete people should withhold from making judgments about David Hicks," McLeod said.

The lawyer was responding to Justice Minister David Johnston, who said the guilty plea vindicated the government's hard line on Hicks.

Despite Hicks's decision to plead guilty, the military commission will still hear the allegations against him in detail.

"You'll see over the next few days Hicks will sign up to a full admission of what he did," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Macquarie Radio.

"It's not just a question of a guilty plea but in the military commission process the judge will go through, allegation by allegation, in relation to the facts of what he was doing."

But first, a hearing will be held in the next day or two at which military judge Colonel Ralph Kohlmann must be satisfied that Hicks's guilty plea is voluntary, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

Chief prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis said Hicks would have to detail just what he did to justify his guilty plea.

A military commission panel of at least five and up to 10 military officers will then assemble to determine Hicks's sentence.

"We are shooting for by the end of the week to have them here and be able to get to the sentencing phase of the trial," said Davis.

"Hopefully, we will be wrapped up here shortly."

Military commission spokeswoman Major Beth Kubala said the defence and prosecution would be able to challenge potential members of the panel.

Candidates who may have served in Afghanistan are likely to be put under the microscope, because that is where Hicks is accused of fighting with the Taliban and training with al-Qaeda.

"Both sides will be able to question the members about any kind of actions that might tend to show any kind of bias," Kubala said.

"There only needs to be five to move forward for sentencing."

The lack of firm detail about a schedule for Hicks's sentencing has frustrated the contingent of media, human rights and legal observers.

Australian lawyer Lex Lasry QC, an observer at Guantanamo Bay, is a critic of the military commissions and said the judge's banning of two defence judges on Monday was a bad look.

"It was a very poorly organised and unattractive look for a hearing room in which criminal justice was going to be dispensed," he told ABC radio.

"The plea by Mr Hicks does nothing to allay the fears that a lot of people, including me, have about the lack of independence of this process."

McLeod also revealed why a long-haired Hicks appeared in a pale green prison outfit and thongs, drawing a warning that he should dress better next time.

"David has been in Guantanamo Bay for five years and four months and he's determined to attend the hearing in the clothing he's wearing back at the camp," McLeod explained.

Hicks has been transferred from the Camp 6 maximum security block to Camp Echo, a special detention complex with meeting rooms where he can be close to his legal team.

He has pleaded guilty to providing support to a terror organisation involved in hostilities against the United States, but denied a second part of the overall charge alleging he supported terrorist acts.

He allegedly attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and reported to an al-Qaeda commander after the September 11 attacks, but is not accused of firing a shot against US or coalition forces.

<Imagine, if you can, that you're locked away for 5 years with no charge, no hope of ever even getting any part of due process. Would you not then take any plea regardless of it's truth in order to get out? A plea here proves nothing but that he was locked away for 5 years. It can NOT be construed as proof or evidence of wrong-doing on the part of David Hicks. Furthermore, aiding those who you believe to be in the right is your duty, regardless of the means they use to carry out their objectives.>

Ugly? Stupid? A Jerk? Relax, Your Worries Are Over

You've heard of carbon offsets, right? The idea here is that you can keep your air conditioner running constantly from April through September, and your heater the rest of the year, and run a load of laundry just to wash a bow tie and a pair of Speedos, and you and your spouse can drive two separate SUVs two blocks to purchase a coal-powered water heater, and it's all ecologically copacetic because you gave some money to some company that's trying to save the world from people like you. Just a few thousand dollars can convert you from an atmosphere-despoiling narcissist to a fern-fondling flower child without you having to change your lifestyle in the least.

Clearly, there are no issues or problems with this system whatsoever, which is why I'm launching a number of corporations designed to help you improve every aspect of your life through the power of giving people money. With enough income, you can be the person you always wanted to be!

Ugly Offsets: Say, for the sake of argument, that you're a grotesque clod with the sexual appeal of a dump truck's undercarriage. I'm not saying you are, but I'm not saying you're not, either. Sure, you could get a better haircut or undergo painful, unconvincing plastic surgery, but why not just buy ugly offsets?

Send us some cash and we'll spend it on beauty college scholarships and research into moisturizing creams -- after taking our cut, of course -- thereby making you, economically speaking, so damn sexy. Just explain to the hotties at the bar that you've completely offset your ugliness and they'll throw you into the sack with such speed and vigor that you won't get your breath back until you've had three orgasms.

Stupid Offsets: Look, you already know that getting smarter costs money. It's criminal that you pay thousands of dollars to attend a university and then you have to do the work anyway. Books, training videos, ancient and wise Zen masters, any way you hack it, smarts are a real hassle.

When you get down to it, the simplest way to get smarter is to send us money, which we'll spend on scholarships and trivia quizzes. We'll send you a card with your offset IQ -- at current rates only $5,000 will bring you up to Hawking level -- and a free membership in Mensa.

Jerk Offsets: You know what's stressful? Being nice. Studies show that every time you choose not to yell at a waitress for bringing you water with ice when you asked for water without ice, it takes six months off your lifespan. If only there was some way to berate and abuse everyone around you and still be considered a nice guy ... well, you see where we're going with this.

Fork over the bills and we'll go out and perform random acts of market-driven kindness. Then the next time a pedestrian tries to cross the street right in front of your Beemer, you can yell at them, make up new sex acts for them to try out on pets and family members, throw your half-empty Starbucks cup right at their head, and then explain that you've fully offset your antisocial acts and, in the big picture, you've basically just bought them an ice cream cone and knitted them a hat.

They'll thank you, unless they've bought jerk offsets as well, in which case they don't need to thank you.

So there you go. Once I've set up these corporations, you'll be able to transmogrify yourself from an ugly, ignorant vulgarian into a stunningly attractive, worldly peach of a person. Some might say that this is all just my cynical attempt to make money off of other people's lethargy, but that's just fine. I've purchased cynicism offsets.

The Pentagon’s Power to Jail Americans Indefinitely

The presiding judge in the José Padilla case has held that the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial does not protect American citizens from being indefinitely incarcerated by the Pentagon.

Padilla had filed a motion to dismiss the case on the ground that the federal government had denied him his right to a speedy trial. Padilla has been in custody since May 2002 and his trial, which is scheduled to begin in April, is not being held until some five years later.

From May 2002 until January 2006, Padilla was held in U.S. military custody as an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror.” In January 2006, the Pentagon chose to transfer custody of Padilla to the U.S. Justice Department, which had indicted Padilla on terrorism charges in U.S. District Court. (Ever since 9/11, U.S. officials have had the option of treating people suspected of terrorism either as “enemy combatants” or as federal-court defendants.)

Last Friday, the presiding judge in the case, Marcia Cooke, denied Padilla’s motion to dismiss. The judge held that when a person, including an American citizen, is held in custody by the Pentagon as an “enemy combatant,” the time doesn’t start running with respect to his right to a speedy trial. It begins running, she held, only when he becomes part of the federal criminal-justice system.

Gee, I wonder if the judge’s reasoning applies to the rest of the Bill of Rights as well. Maybe the First Amendment doesn’t apply if it’s the Pentagon that is suppressing speech and assembly as part of its perpetual “war on terror.” Or maybe the Second Amendment prohibits only the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), not the Pentagon, from seizing guns from the American people, as it is doing as part of the “war on terror” in Iraq.

Our 18th-century American ancestors would have found Judge Cooke’s ruling to be ludicrous. If a military department of government is exempt from the restrictions of the Bill of Rights, then the entire executive branch is exempt for the obvious reason: Whenever the government wants to exempt itself from the Bill of Rights, all it has to do is employ the military to do the dirty deed. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the American people from the federal government, not a particular department of the federal government.

What Judge Cooke obviously fails to recognize is the deep antipathy to militarism and to an enormous standing military force that characterized our American ancestors. Unlike Judge Cooke, they understood the tremendous threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people that militarism and a standing army would pose.

This week, Judge Cooke is scheduled to rule on Padilla’s motion to dismiss on the basis of the government’s torture and abuse of Padilla while he was in pretrial military confinement. It will be interesting to see if Judge Cook rules that that the military is also exempt from that part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits the federal government from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments on Americans and others suspected of terrorism.

Don’t forget: José Padilla is an American citizen. Thus, this case continues to hold ominous implications for the American people, especially when Judge Cooke’s ruling is considered in conjunction with the ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the government’s “enemy-combatant” designation for Americans as part of its “war on terrorism.” That means that whatever the government has done – and continues doing to Padilla – and, for that matter, every other “enemy combatant” in its “war on terror,“ – it has the authority to do to all Americans.

Judge Cooke’s ruling is just one more confirmation of how civil liberties have soared to the top of importance in terms of federal infringements on our freedom. Perhaps this is a good time to revisit the warning issued to the American people by President Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as supreme commander of Allied forces during World War II:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

It's not always rape if a woman is drunk, says judge

A woman cannot claim rape just because she was drunk, a top judge declared yesterday.

The Appeal Court ruling freed a young man jailed for rape after he had sex with a drunken student.

It also raised deep doubts over the Government's latest attempts to toughen rape laws.

Plans include a 'sex breathalyser' law under which a woman who had consumed a certain amount of alcohol would legally no longer be able to consent to sex.

But the Deputy Lord Chief Justice, Sir Igor Judge, and two other senior judges branded the idea unrealistic.

A woman who is very drunk may still be capable of agreeing to sex, they said.

They quashed the conviction of software engineer Benjamin Bree, 25, jailed for five years in December after a drunken evening with a 19-year-old student.

The girl drank between four and six vodka Red Bulls and two pints of cider and Mr Bree was also drinking heavily.

They returned to her hall of residence at Bournemouth University, where, she told Bournemouth Crown Court last year, she was 'continually throwing up'.

She said her next memory was waking up to find Mr Bree having sex with her. She told the jury her memory was "very patchy" and I knew I didn't want this but I didn't know how to go about stopping it".

Mr Bree told the court she had given her consent and "seemed keen".

Sir Igor, sitting with Lady Justice Hallett and Mrs Justice Gloster, quashed the conviction because he said the trial judge's directions to the jury had been "vague in the extreme".

He said the case meant the court had to examine the effect of voluntary heavy alcohol consumption.

Sir Igor said sex amounts to rape if the woman is incapable of giving consent. But things are different if she is still capable of making a decision.

He said: "If, through drink, or for any other reason, the complainant has temporarily lost her capacity to choose whether to have intercourse, she is not consenting.

"Subject to questions about the defendant's state of mind, if the intercourse takes place this would be rape.

"However, where the complainant has voluntarily consumed even substantial quantities of alcohol, but nevertheless remains capable of choosing whether or not to have intercourse, and in drink agrees to do so, this would not be rape." The judge said it would not be right to lay down rules - "some kind of grid system" - that say a woman who has reached a set level of drunkenness is incapable of consent.

He added: "Experience shows that different individuals have a greater or lesser capacity to cope with alcohol.

"Provisions intended to protect women from sexual assaults might very well be conflated into a system which would provide patronising interference with the right of autonomous adults to make personal decisions for themselves."

Ministers had been expected to publish a paper setting out a new law on rape and alcohol early this year.

It has failed to appear and there has been speculation that the Government has run into deep opposition from the judiciary.

Earlier this year the Council of Circuit Judges, which represents 637 judges who sit in Crown Courts, said it should be left to juries to decide whether a woman is capable of consenting to sex.

Home Secretary John Reid and his ministers remain committed to pushing up the number of convictions for rape, which they say is far too low.

At present only one complaint in 20 ends in the conviction of a man in court.

The Home Office said yesterday: "We need to tackle the myths, particularly the view that victims are either partially or fully responsible for the assault they have experienced if they have been drinking.

"Rape is never the responsibility of the victim, whatever the circumstances."

The Home Office has been considering a study by the Association of Chief Police Officers which found that a "significant" number of rape and sexual assault victims had drunk at least the equivalent of eight pub glasses of wine.

This is equivalent to two and a half times the drink driving limit.

At these levels, said the ACPO study, a woman can be expected to show "marked intoxication levels".

But it warned that back calculations used to work out how drunk a woman may have been at the time of an alleged rape could give only approximate answers.

<It's simple, as with most big issues. If she willingly chooses to drink, she willingly chooses that her future choices may or may not be what she would chose if she were not drunk. They are still her choices. And they still stem from her original choice, to drink. If she specifically did not consent, then it can be said she was raped. If she did nothing or consented, she was not raped because she either allowed or invited the activity.>

Lesbian accuses innocent stranger of rape to win back lover

A lesbian falsely accused a complete stranger of rape in a bizarre bid to win back her former lover.

Zoe Davydaitis, picked the innocent man from a police line-up even though he had broken his back in eight places and had to wear a body brace.

Her false accusation led to Phillip Young being charged with rape, despite his protestations that his horrific injuries from an accident meant the attack was impossible. He went on to receive death threats, was assaulted and eventually attempted suicide.

But on Friday a court heard Davydaitis was a "self-centred attention seeker" as she was jailed for 18 months after admitting perverting the course of justice.

Mr Young's ordeal began in July 2004, when Davydaitis, 24, claimed to have been brutally raped on a piece of waste ground in Bedford as she walked her dog.

In a 17-page statement she gave a detailed account of her assailant and the attack.

Detectives immediately launched a major hunt for her attacker and put out his description and an appeal in local papers and posters.

At the same time Mr Young, 49, was recovering from a horrific fall. That spring he had broken his spine in eight places after falling off the roof of his third floor flat while trying to get through a skylight after locking himself out.

Surgeons inserted three metal rods into his back, held in place by 96 screws, and he had to wear a body brace and walk with crutches.

However he was arrested after a member of the public noticed his description fitted that of the rapist.

After he was questioned, Davydaitis picked him out from a picture ID parade and despite his protestations that it would have been physically impossible for him to have raped her, the Crown Prosecution Service decided he should be charged.

After Mr Young's name appeared in local newspapers, he received hate mail, stones were thrown at his windows and he was attacked in the street and suffered a broken arm. His ex-wife even stopped him seeing his two young children.

Luton Crown Court heard the truth only began to emerge months later, when a former girlfriend of Davydaitis told police she had seen her "flirting outrageously with some girls" in a pub the night after the alleged attack.

Another of her friends told police Davydaitis had admitted she had made up the allegation in the hope of getting back together with her former lover, a woman referred to in court as Kerry.

The friend said Davydaitis told her that she had been drinking and had used a hammer to strike the inside of her thighs to create the bruise marks needed to make her story convincing.

Davydaitis also later admitted to police she had made up an allegation of indecent assault against a man in 1999 after he had upset her and she wanted revenge.

The case against Mr Young was eventually only dropped after Davydaitis withdrew her complaint.

Passing sentence Judge Barbara Mensah told her: "This was a particularly nasty calculated and malicious lie which persisted over time."

She went on: "You picked Mr Young out of an identity parade and he was entirely innocent."

Judge Mensah said even after making the initial allegations she had the opportunity not to pick him out. As a result Mr Young had suffered months of "anxiety and stress".

Jailing her, Judge Mensah told Davydaitis how her victim had been branded a rapist by his own family and some of his friends, and was now paranoid about being anywhere near a woman when on his own.

Speaking outside court, Mr Young said the allegation had ruined his life overnight.

He said: "My life came to a standstill.

"First I was getting hate mail letters that started off with 'Die you rapist', and stones would be thrown at my windows day and night. I was even attacked on one occasion when a man called me a dirty rapist and pushed me over on my crutches and I broke my arm.

"In the end I didn't dare leave my flat. I stayed in for four weeks and then only went out after dark. It was awful and I got so low.

"My ex wouldn't let me see my children and things got so bad that I even tried to commit suicide.

"At first I had thought the truth will come out but the nightmare just went on and on."

He said Davydaitis had written to him to apologise - but that, to him, her apology was meaningless.

Zappa on Crossfire - 1986

Police Stupidity/Brutality caught on tape!!!

The Erosion of Rights

The erosion of civil rights across our nation over the past six years is the result of willful neglect and calculated de­sign. The Bush administration continues to use the courts and the judicial appointment process to narrow civil rights protections and repeal remedies for legal redress while allowing the traditional tools of the executive branch for civil rights enforcement to wither and die. The resulting inequality of opportunity, deteriorating civil liberties, and rising religious and racial discrimination are sad commen­taries on the priorities of the current administration.

This new report by the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights and the Center For American Progress catalogues why this is happening and how Congress can take action to remedy the situation. The 10 essays in this report encapsu­late the administration’s failure to enforce civil rights, pro­tect civil liberties and confront long-standing and emerging threats to our nation’s shining virtue: equality of opportu­nity. The authors of the report, many of them veterans of civil rights enforcement and advocacy, detail the methods employed by the administration to carry out these serious civil rights policy reversals and offer concrete solutions to slow the deterioration of our nation’s civil rights and restore our promise as the land of equal opportunity.

The first section of the report, written by five former se­nior officials in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, reveals exactly how civil rights enforcement by the executive branch has fallen in to a dangerous state of disrepair—on the eve of the division’s historic 50-year anniversary. Joseph Rich, 38-year veteran of the division until his retirement in 2005, exposes the attacks upon the professionalism of the division by political appoin­tees amid pointed lack of oversight by Congress into these transgressions.

Seth Rosenthal, a 10-year veteran of the division, then ex­amines the shift in emphasis away from classic civil rights enforcement toward action against “human trafficking,” a laudable goal, but one previously tackled by other divi­sions within the Justice Department.

Richard Ugelow, who retired from the Civil Rights Divi­sion four years ago, explains how civil rights action against discrimination in employment practices in the private sector and in local and state governments focuses today on “reverse discrimination” rather than clear patterns and practices of discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities. Similarly, Joseph Rich and two of his former Civil Rights Division colleagues, Robert Ken­gle and Mark Posner, examine how the Bush administra­tion has allowed “partisan political concerns to influence its decision-making” on enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which cuts to the core of our democratic principles and is so critical to equality in our country.

To correct these miscarriages of civil rights enforcement, the report recommends that Congress establish a Select Committee of the House and Senate for civil rights. The new Select Committee would:

• Review the implementation of federal civil rights laws.
• Conduct oversight hearings and investigations into the enforcement of civil rights laws.
• Implement any needed changes to ensure better civil rights enforcement.

In addition, the report calls for Congress to enact a key change to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002: enable people to bring civil suits in federal courts to redress violations of their civil rights. Only then can citizens count on the Justice Department and the courts to act to protect civil rights.

Fixing what ails the Civil Rights Division is an impor­tant step that must be taken, but disarray and desuetude at the Department of Justice is not the only reason the administration has failed to protect our civil rights. Elliott Mincberg and Judith Schaeffer, the former legal director and associate legal director for the People for the American Way, and Adam Shah at Media Matters for America, examine the administration’s success at appointing conservative “activist” judges to the Supreme Court and lower courts—with the express aim of legislat­ing conservative dogma from the bench.

The remedy? The president and the Senate must ensure that all judicial nominees to the federal bench have a dem­onstrated commitment to equal justice under law. With­out judges fully committed to civil rights and liberties our nation risks losing its distinctive character as a country that offers opportunity to all and protects all against the excesses of the powerful.

These same characteristics of the American way of life are in jeopardy in other legal arenas. Shaheena Ahmad Simons, formerly of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund says the struggle for immigration reform in our country is complicated by the gap between those conservatives who want draconian enforcement of U.S. deportation laws and those who want cheap immi­grant labor. The upshot, says Simons, has been no reform at all. The goal of reform should be a positive one: the enactment of a defined path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in our society.

Simon’s colleague at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, regional counsel Peter Zamora, tack­les the shortcomings of states, local agencies and the feder­al government in implementing the guarantees of the No Child Left Behind Act that English language learners will be fully included in educational opportunities. By 2025, Zamora notes, 25 percent of the U.S. school population will be English language learners. The Bush administra­tion and Congress must act now to fully enforce NCLB provisions to ensure our schools provide these students with the best opportunities to learn.

In communications policy, too, the administration’s lack of civil rights enforcement and failure to offer equal opportu­nity access to new communications technologies leaves mi­norities under-represented in the communications industry and ill-served by its services. Mark Lloyd, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and expert on com­munications policies, notes that executive branch regulatory agencies have stymied past progress on affirmative employ­ment and minority ownership in communications indus­tries. Lloyd also examines how policymakers are not seeking to bridge the so called “digital divide” by offering Internet and computer access to all Americans.

His solutions are forthright: The Federal Communica­tions Commission must enact race-conscious measures to advance equal employment opportunity and increase minority ownership in the communications industry. And the government must support the widespread provision of communications access points all across the country: in rural areas and the inner city, on Indian land and in hospi­tals, libraries and schools in every community.

Equal opportunity in housing, which is examined in the last chapter of our report, is perhaps the most important civil rights arena in that it determines access to educa­tion, jobs, and other crucial services. Yet, it poses the most formidable barriers to equality. Philip Tegeler, Executive Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, explains why equal opportunity housing programs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of the Treasury are not helping families move from higher-poverty segregated neighborhoods to less segregated areas.

Tegeler notes that all the legal and policy provisions to make these programs effective reside in the hands of ex­ecutive branch officials at these two agencies. They must only be employed to help low-income families enjoy the housing mobility that middle- and higher-income fami­lies take for granted in America. He recommends that Public Housing Authorities cooperate across jurisdic­tions and embrace new housing mobility programs, and that the Treasury department and the Internal Revenue Service actively support fair housing programs and use the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program to encour­age housing mobility.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 in many ways distracted the nation from determination to improve and enforce exist­ing civil rights laws. In this new environment the Bush ad­ministration has taken regressive steps that undermine our civil liberties, our civil rights and our expectations of equal opportunity. The detailed analysis that follows—alongside the specific recommendations to cope with the erosion of our civil rights over the past six years—provides Congress and the American people with a roadmap to help us reclaim the promise of equal opportunity for all.

Read the full report (PDF)

Unusual alliance fights .xxx creation

NEW YORK -- Online pornographers and religious groups are in a rare alliance as a key Internet oversight agency nears a decision on creating a virtual red-light district through a ".xxx" Internet address.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- ICANN -- which has already rejected similar proposals twice since 2000, planned to vote as early as next week on whether to approve the domain name for voluntary use by porn sites.

The decision ultimately could hinge on whether ".xxx" has the support of the adult-entertainment industry -- and many porn sites have been strongly opposed.

"One of the criteria is that it (must) have general support among the industry it's supposed to serve, and it does not," said Mark Kernes, a board member with the industry trade group Free Speech Coalition. "I have not met one single webmaster or adult video producer that is in favor of '.xxx,' and I've met a lot of them."

Porn sites are largely concerned that the domain name, while billed as voluntary, would make it easier for governments to later mandate its use and "essentially ghettoize sexual information on the Web," Kernes said.

ICM Registry Inc., the company behind the proposal, has vowed to fight any government efforts to compel its use and cited preregistrations of some 76,000 names as evidence of support. Kernes said many Web sites reserved names simply to prevent someone else from having it.

The Free Speech Coalition believes a domain name for kids-friendly sites would be more appropriate.

Given its voluntary nature, ".xxx" is unlikely to have much effect on parents' ability to block porn sites.

And because a domain name serves merely as an easy-to-remember moniker for a site's actual numeric Internet address, even if a government were to mandate its use, a child could simply punch in the numeric address of any blocked ".xxx" name.

Religious groups worry that ".xxx" would legitimize and expand the number of adults sites, which more than a third of U.S. Internet users visit each month, according to comScore Media Metrix. The Web site measurement firm said 4 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of all time spent Web surfing involved an adult site.

"They will keep their '.com' domains, and I have no doubt they will buy their '.xxx' as well," said Patrick Trueman, special counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian public-interest law firm. "There will be twice as much pornography on the Internet."

Trueman and other critics say ICM will be the only beneficiaries.

The startup, founded and funded by four entrepreneurs with backgrounds in domain names and British Internet companies, plans to charge $60 to register a name -- 10 times the fees for ".com." Ten dollars of it would go to a companion non-profit group that would set policies for ".xxx" use and recommend business practices for combating child pornography and promoting child safety.

ICANN tabled and effectively rejected a similar proposal in 2000 out of fear that the ".xxx" domain would force the body into content regulation.

ICM resubmitted its proposal in 2004, this time structuring it with a policy-setting organization to free ICANN of that task. But many board members worried that the language of the proposed contract was vague and could kick the task back to ICANN. The board rejected the 2004 proposal last May.

ICANN revived the proposal in January after ICM agreed to hire independent organizations to monitor porn sites' compliance with the new rules, which would be developed by a separate body called the International Foundation for Online Responsibility.

ICM revised it again a month later to clarify ICANN's enforcement abilities and to underscore the independence of the policy-making body.

Despite the vocal opposition, ICM Chairman Stuart Lawley said he preferred a quick vote, adding that the complaints come from "the same people saying the same things time and time again."

If approved, ICM would be required to help develop mechanisms for promoting child safety and preventing child pornography, and porn sites using ".xxx" would have to participate in a self-rating system, labeling sites based on such criteria as the presence of nudity and whether it is in an artistic or educational context.

ICANN indicated it would be ready to vote on it at a meeting Friday in Lisbon, Portugal.

But delays are possible if ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee raises last-minute objections when it meets next week.

Last March, the committee called for stronger language in ICANN's contract with ICM, and Lawley said those points have been addressed in the latest version of the contract.

ICM believes the domain would help the porn industry clean up its act, and Lawley said he has gone through great lengths to put its promises into writing.

"We are confident we have dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't,' " he said, "and the contract deserves ratification."

Good Samaritan law may not apply

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A woman accused of rendering a friend a paraplegic by pulling her out of a wrecked car "like a rag doll" may not be protected by California's good Samaritan law, an appellate court ruled.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal wrote in a decision Wednesday that the Good Samaritan law only protects people from liability if they are administering emergency medical care. The perceived danger of remaining in the wrecked car was not "medical," the court ruled.

Attorney Robert Hutchinson who represents plaintiff Alexandra Van Horn, said the state's Samaritan law doesn't require people to render aid. But if they do, he said, they must act reasonably.

Van Horn was in the front passenger seat of a car that slammed into a light pole at 45 mph on Nov. 1, 2004, according to the negligence lawsuit filed against Lisa Torti.

Torti was a passenger in a car that was following behind the vehicle and stopped after the crash. Torti testified she placed one arm under Van Horn's legs and the other behind her neck to lift her out of the car.
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Van Horn, who testified Torti grabbed her by the arm and pulled her from the car "like a rag doll," suffered injury to a vertebrae and a lacerated liver. Court documents said that the question of whether she was paralyzed during the crash or when she was pulled out of the car has been disputed.

Torti lawyer Jody Steinberg said he will appeal, saying the Samaritan law should protect everybody.

"There was no evidence that our client was doing anything but trying to rescue a person in need," Steinberg said. "This is a public policy issue that needs to be re-examined by the Legislature."

Amended Despite Public Opposition?

Well, as of 3/21/07, Initiative 2, passed by the voters of Missoula County has been amended because, according to County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, he had a "gut feeling" that voters were not aware of what they were voting for.

Therefore, this initiative only applies to misdemeanor marijuana charges now instead of all charges across the board.

So much for giving law enforcement the resources and ability to deal with dangerous crime huh?

So, what does this mean? Apparently the voters of Missoula County aren't intelligent enough to know what they're voting for. Thanks for babysitting us Van Valkenburg. If you weren't there to make decisions for us, how would democracy work at all!?

My National Security Letter Gag Order

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

REAL ID: Rise of the Resistance

State resistance to REAL ID is growing. The Associated Press reports from New Hampshire:

The New Hampshire Legislature took a baby step Tuesday toward rejecting what they say amounts to the creation of a national ID card.

The House Transportation Committee voted unanimously to recommend barring the state from complying with the federal REAL ID Act, which sets standards for driver’s licenses. The full House next considers the bill.

REAL ID, Passed in 2005 and due to take effect in 2008-9, turns your driver’s license into a de-facto national ID card. This is yet another step towards a totalitarian police state in America.

The Act mandates that all driver’s licenses carry the same information, no matter what state issues them. The states must also “provide electronic access to all other States to information contained in the motor vehicle database of the State.” In other words, your information will be in a national database that puts everything at the Feds’ fingertips.

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security is given the power to require “biometric” information on these licenses/ID’s in the future. This means that what appears to be a harmless-looking driver’s license could eventually contain a retina scan, fingerprints, DNA information, or radio frequency technology. We don’t know just what right now because REAL ID keeps this power open-ended. DHS will tell us…someday.

All this is supposed to help us fight terrorism, somehow, because the nineteen 9-11 hijackers had driver’s licenses. In order to be “safe” you’ll soon be required to have the proper “papers.”

Any refusal to comply by the States will mean that their residents will lose the ability to get on a plane, receive social security, and potentially, to get a bank account or a job. So, the feds are doing little more than blackmailing them into compliance and submission.

Wait a minute! That doesn’t sound legal, does it? First, a little constitutional background.

The US Constitution was written under what’s referred to as “positive grant.” This means that the Federal Government can only exercise powers that are specifically given to it by the Constitution – nothing more. This is where the Tenth Amendment comes into play – reaffirming positive grant:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Pretty simple, right? Right. If a power isn’t delegated to the U.S. government by the Constitution, then that power belongs to the States or the People. It seems that the only people who could possibly confuse this one sentence are politicians, lawyers, and federal judges.

It’s worth repeating. If a power isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution, the feds can’t do it. Period.

As New Hampshire representative Sherman Packard (R-Londonberry) said:

“We have to uphold the constitution,” he said. “We will not be blackmailed by the federal government.”

Sherman, you’ve hit the nail on the head! Obviously he’s read the Constitution. There’s not a single thing mentioned about ID’s, or licenses, or driving, or funding the states, or anything of the like. What does that mean? You’ve got it – it’s unconstitutional (against the law!) for the federal government to get involved in these things.

But, you might say, the Constitution is outdated! There were no driver’s licenses when the constitution was written – there were no cars! Right. There were no such things. But that doesn’t mean the law is “outdated” or bad.

In fact, the idea of strictly limiting the federal government is as good of an idea today as it was two centuries ago. Why? All you need to do is pay attention to what’s going on in our country right now. If you don’t keep the government in check, as many of the founders warned, governments will always grow and grow into a despotic beast.

Today, the government is larger than ever. Has that correlated with a better adherence to the law? Not at all.

Size of government notwithstanding, REAL ID is still unconstitutional. It doesn’t matter if the politicians think that it’s absolutely necessary. It doesn’t matter if they think the Constitution is outdated. None of it matters. The Law is the Law. The only legal way to approach this is through a Constitutional Amendment, and not by ignoring or violating the Constitution.

If the politicians were so confident that this program was necessary, and that We the People would approve of it, they would have presented it as a constitutional amendment. Instead, debate was light, and the bill was added to another, which passed 100-0 in the Senate.

It seems that abiding by the Constitution is pretty rare. Instead, addendums, riders, and backroom deals are the way of politics in Washington.

Think about that. Do you want to live in a society where the government has to follow the rules, or do you want to live in a society where politicians follow only the laws that they like?

Federal standards for identification are not authorized by the Constitution. It doesn’t matter whether they’re enforced through “laws” or economic “incentives” to the States. The politicians, by trying to force this on us without amending the Constitution to allow it, are showing utter contempt for states’ rights and the principles of the Tenth Amendment.

Bottom line: REAL ID violates the Constitution.

Legislators in New Hampshire (and elsewhere) should be applauded for their courageous opposition to this unconstitutional nightmare.

Long live the resistance!

Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law: 2007 National Defense Authorization Act overturns Posse Comitatus Act

"Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader--a dictator--willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to employ." -- Michael Ledeen, White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago"

"Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." -- NewsMax, November 21, 2003

In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Quietly slipped into the law at the last minute, at the request of the Bush administration, were sections changing important legal principles, dating back 200 years, which limit the U.S. government's ability to use the military to intervene in domestic affairs. These changes would allow Bush, whenever he thinks it necessary, to institute martial law--under which the military takes direct control over civilian administration.

Sec. 1042 of the Act, "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," effectively overturns what is known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act is a law, passed in 1878, that prohibits the use of the regular military within the U.S. borders. The original passage of the Posse Comitatus Act was a very reactionary move that sealed the betrayal of Black people after the Civil War and brought the period of Reconstruction to an end. It decreed that federal troops could no longer be used inside the former Confederate states to enforce the new legal rights of Black people. Black people were turned over to the armed police and Klansmen serving the southern plantation owners, and the long period of Jim Crow began.

During the 20th century, posse comitatus objectively started to play a new role within the bourgeois democratic framework: as a legal barrier to the direct influence of the powerful military establishment and the armed forces over domestic U.S. society. It served to some degree as an obstacle against military coups and presidents seizing military control over the country. (However, National Guard troops have been legally available to the ruling class for use inside the U.S., and there have been other loopholes to the prohibition of the use of armed forces domestically, as in the mobilization of Marine troops during the 1992 L.A. Rebellion.)

So the changes to posse comitatus signed into law by Bush are extremely significant and ominous. Bush has modified the main exemptions to posse comitatus that up to now have been primarily defined by the Insurrection Act of 1807. Previously the president could call out the army in the United States only in cases of insurrection or conditions where "rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." Under the new law the president can use the military in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or "other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."

The new law requires the President to notify Congress "as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of the authority." However Bush, as he has often done during his presidency, modified this requirement in his signing statement, which declared, "The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive." In other words, Bush claims that he does not even need to inform Congress that martial law has been declared!

Changing Role of Military Within the U.S.

This major change in the criteria under which martial law can be declared is a continuation of a process, begun after 9/11, to dismantle legal barriers to unrestrained executive, presidential powers.

In 2002, the government created the new Northern Command. This is the first time since the Civil War that the U.S. military has been given an operational command inside the continental United States.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that Northcom had developed battle plans for martial law in the U.S. One secret document, CONPLAN 2005, envisions 15 different scenarios where these plans could go into effect.

The U.S. has also used natural disasters like Katrina to push for an increased role for the military. According to the Washington Post, Bush advisor Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana that she should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get."

Spying by the military against U.S. persons, also supposedly prohibited, has greatly expanded in recent years. Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) was created in 2002 supposedly to evaluate threats against Department of Defense installations. However, a secret 400-page document obtained by MSNBC revealed that CIFA had spied on more than 1500 "suspicious incidents" during a ten-month period, including a meeting of Quakers to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools and an anti-war protest in Los Angeles.

James Risen has exposed in the New York Times and in his book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration that the National Security Agency, which is under the Department of Defense, has been used in a massive campaign of illegal spying of U.S. citizens, including tapping phone calls and monitoring bank and financial records and the internet. (See Revolution #35, "Spies, Lies, Thugs and Torture.")

In 2006, the Military Commissions Act was passed which, in addition to legalizing torture, allows the president and military courts to declare anyone an enemy combatant without basic civil rights like habeas corpus.

Plans for massive detention centers are already being prepared. Pacific News Service reported that in early 2006, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to build detention and processing facilities to be used "in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S. or to support the rapid development of new programs."

Would They Really Go That Far?

The Bush Regime's preparations for martial law are part of an extreme agenda. This is a regime that is setting out to create a world empire that is unchallenged and unchallengeable and has embarked on an endless war to bring this about. Along with this, they aim to restructure social relations in the U.S., doing away with many of the social and economic institutions that have characterized U.S. society since World War 2. Because of this extreme agenda, the Bush regime takes very seriously the possibility of jolts and ruptures and resistance and are preparing very extreme measures to deal with this.

On February 27, 1933, a fire broke out in the Reichstag (government) building in Germany. The next day Hitler and his Minister of the Interior Hermann Goering drafted the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and gave the central government total power. The decree was signed into law within days. After that point, opposition to Hitler became MUCH more difficult.

In the U.S. today, extreme measures much like the Reichstag Fire Decree are already being put into place--making it even more urgent that a determined struggle be waged to drive out the Bush regime and reverse this dangerous trajectory.

Human Brain a Poor Judge of Risk

The human brain is a fascinating organ, but it's an absolute mess. Because it has evolved over millions of years, there are all sorts of processes jumbled together rather than logically organized. Some of the processes are optimized for only certain kinds of situations, while others don't work as well as they could. There's some duplication of effort, and even some conflicting brain processes.

Assessing and reacting to risk is one of the most important things a living creature has to deal with, and there's a very primitive part of the brain that has that job. It's the amygdala, and it sits right above the brainstem, in what's called the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala is responsible for processing base emotions that come from sensory inputs, like anger, avoidance, defensiveness and fear. It's an old part of the brain, and seems to have originated in early fishes.

When an animal -- lizard, bird, mammal, even you -- sees, hears or feels something that's a potential danger, the amygdala is what reacts immediately. It's what causes adrenaline and other hormones to be pumped into your bloodstream, triggering the fight-or-flight response, causing increased heart rate and beat force, increased muscle tension and sweaty palms.

This kind of thing works great if you're a lizard or a lion. Fast reaction is what you're looking for; the faster you can notice threats and either run away from them or fight back, the more likely you are to live to reproduce.

But the world is actually more complicated than that. Some scary things are not really as risky as they seem, and others are better handled by staying in the scary situation to set up a more advantageous future response. This means there's an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the reflexive fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated analysis of the situation and your options for handling it.

We humans have a completely different pathway to cope with analyzing risk. It's the neocortex, a more advanced part of the brain that developed very recently, evolutionarily speaking, and only appears in mammals. It's intelligent and analytic. It can reason. It can make more nuanced trade-offs. It's also much slower.

So here's the first fundamental problem: We have two systems for reacting to risk -- a primitive intuitive system and a more advanced analytic system -- and they're operating in parallel. It's hard for the neocortex to contradict the amygdala.

In his book Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson relates an incident when he and his wife lived in an apartment where a large window blew in during a storm. He was standing right beside it at the time and heard the whistling of the wind just before the window blew. He was lucky -- a foot to the side and he would have been dead -- but the sound has never left him:

Ever since that June storm, a new fear has entered the mix for me: the sound of wind whistling through a window. I know now that our window blew in because it had been installed improperly.... I am entirely convinced that the window we have now is installed correctly, and I trust our superintendent when he says that it is designed to withstand hurricane-force winds. In the five years since that June, we have weathered dozens of storms that produced gusts comparable to the one that blew it in, and the window has performed flawlessly.

I know all these facts -- and yet when the wind kicks up, and I hear that whistling sound, I can feel my adrenaline levels rise.... Part of my brain -- the part that feels most me-like, the part that has opinions about the world and decides how to act on those opinions in a rational way -- knows that the windows are safe.... But another part of my brain wants to barricade myself in the bathroom all over again.

There's a good reason evolution has wired our brains this way. If you're a higher-order primate living in the jungle and you're attacked by a lion, it makes sense that you develop a lifelong fear of lions, or at least fear lions more than another animal you haven't personally been attacked by. From a risk/reward perspective, it's a good trade-off for the brain to make, and -- if you think about it -- it's really no different than your body developing antibodies against, say, chicken pox based on a single exposure.

In both cases, your body is saying: "This happened once, and therefore it's likely to happen again. And when it does, I'll be ready." In a world where the threats are limited -- where there are only a few diseases and predators that happen to affect the small patch of earth occupied by your particular tribe -- it works.

Unfortunately, the brain's fear system doesn't scale the same way the body's immune system does. While the body can develop antibodies for hundreds of diseases, and those antibodies can float around in the bloodstream waiting for a second attack by the same disease, it's harder for the brain to deal with a multitude of lifelong fears.

All this is about the amygdala. The second fundamental problem is that because the analytic system in the neocortex is so new, it still has a lot of rough edges evolutionarily speaking. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote a great comment that explains this:

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years -- and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

A lot of the current research into the psychology of risk are examples of these newer parts of the brain getting things wrong.

And it's not just risks. People are not computers. We don't evaluate security trade-offs mathematically, by examining the relative probabilities of different events. Instead, we have shortcuts, rules of thumb, stereotypes and biases -- generally known as "heuristics." These heuristics affect how we think about risks, how we evaluate the probability of future events, how we consider costs, and how we make trade-offs. We have ways of generating close-to-optimal answers quickly with limited cognitive capabilities. Don Norman's wonderful essay, Being Analog, provides a great background for all this.

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for some of this work, talks (.pdf) about humans having two separate cognitive systems, one that intuits and one that reasons:

The operations of System 1 are typically fast, automatic, effortless, associative, implicit (not available to introspection) and often emotionally charged; they are also governed by habit and therefore difficult to control or modify. The operations of System 2 are slower, serial, effortful, more likely to be consciously monitored and deliberately controlled; they are also relatively flexible and potentially rule governed.

When you examine the brain heuristics about risk, security and trade-offs, you can find evolutionary reasons for why they exist. And most of them are still very useful. The problem is that they can fail us, especially in the context of a modern society. Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.

And when those heuristics fail, our feeling of security diverges from the reality of security.

S.C. House: View fetal image prior to abortion

Women seeking abortions would have to see a fetal ultrasound before the procedure under a bill given key approval in the S.C. House Wednesday.

After three hours of passionate debate, the House voted 91-23 to require women to sign a statement swearing they had seen an ultrasound image of their fetus before getting an abortion.

A half-dozen other states offer ultrasound images to abortion patients, legislative staffers said. But those states do not require abortion patients view them.

Supporters of the measure hope that image will spur more women to forgo abortion. Opponents called the bill 'emotional blackmail.'

Third and final approval of the bill in the House could come as early as today, sending the bill to the Senate. There, the proposal faces stiffer opposition; individual senators hold great power to delay or derail legislation.

Abortion foes celebrated Wednesday's vote.

'It was better than I expected,' Rep. Greg Delleney, R-Chester, said after he and other lawmakers, mostly Republicans, beat back a series of amendments from Democrats.

'Many of the pro-life groups contacted people around the state, and people were praying about this. Hundreds, if not thousands, were praying for it.'

Debate was impassioned.

Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, railed against Republicans for opposing his amendment to exempt victims of rape and incest from the required ultrasound viewing.

Forcing a victim of a crime to see the results is tantamount to forcing her to relive the ordeal, Rutherford said. 'You all are doing it to her once again.'

But Delleney said the fetus is no less precious.

Rep. Bob Leach, R-Greenville, accused Rutherford of manufactured indignity. 'I'll be nominating you for actor of the year,' Leach said.

When Rutherford raised his voice in response, Speaker Pro Tem Doug Smith, R-Spartanburg, had to quiet both men and remind them to debate with civility.

Rep. Cathy Harvin, D-Clarendon, said the 111 men in the 124-member House never could understand the dueling emotions the issue raises.

'There are 111 of you in this body who will never be able to know the joy a woman experiences when she discovers she is with child,' Harvin said. 'There are 111 of you who will never know the horror, that experience, that horror of being impregnated when it's not something they desire, and then be taken and forced to observe the evidence of the crime.'

Theology, Scripture and wrenching personal stories poured from the podium through much of the debate.

Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, quoted the book of Micah to bolster her argument against the bill.

'What does the Lord require of you but to do justice?' Cobb-Hunter quoted. 'Love kindness and walk humbly with your God.'

Abortion-rights opponents used the same sentiment later Wednesday to suggest the bill is a mistake. In a news release after the bill passed, the Columbia Christians for Life said the bill 'may reduce abortions, but it will also prolong the practice of 'legalized' abortion.'

'God's requirement in the case of murder is justice, not regulation,' the release said.

Reach Gould Sheinin at (803) 771-8658.

MPs probe 'surveillance society'

An inquiry into the growing use of surveillance in society is to be held by an influential committee of MPs.

The Commons Home Affairs committee is about to announce the inquiry, leader of the Commons Jack Straw told MPs.

The Information Commissioner last year warned the UK risked "sleep-walking into a surveillance society".

It is thought the inquiry will include the impact of identity cards, the expansion of the DNA database and the large rise in the use of CCTV cameras.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said the move was welcome, adding: "Under Labour we have progressively moved towards a surveillance society with the government's obsession with ID cards and the DNA database being just two examples.

'Extremely sinister'

"What is extremely sinister however is that Labour refuses to be straight about their intentions."

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.

The UK also holds 3.6 million DNA samples - the world's biggest database.


We've got to say where do we want the lines to be drawn?
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas

But research published in November revealed other types of surveillance, from "dataveillance" - the use of information from credit cards, mobile phones and loyalty cards - to US security agencies monitoring telecommunications.

An author of the report, by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies network, said the UK was "the most surveilled country" of all the industrialised Western states.

It coincided with a publication by the human rights group Privacy International suggesting Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said concerns he had raised two years previously, had become a reality.

"We've got to say where do we want the lines to be drawn? How much do we want to have surveillance changing the nature of society in a democratic nation?," he told the BBC.

At the time a spokesman for the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) said there needed to be a balance between sharing information responsibly and respecting the citizen's rights.

He added Britain had to "rise to the challenges" of the "massive social and technological advances" of the previous few decades.

U.S. Judge Blocks 1998 Online Porn Law

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access "harmful" material.

In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech.

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.

The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web sites backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law. They argued that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutionally vague and would have had a chilling effect on speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a temporary injunction in 2004 on grounds the law was likely to be struck down and was perhaps outdated.

Technology experts said parents now have more serious concerns than Web sites with pornography. For instance, the threat of online predators has caused worries among parents whose children use social-networking sites such as News Corp.'s MySpace.

The case sparked a legal firestorm last year when Google challenged a Justice Department subpoena seeking information on what people search for online. Government lawyers had asked Google to turn over 1 million random Web addresses and a week's worth of Google search queries.

A judge sharply limited the scope of the subpoena, which Google had fought on trade secret, not privacy, grounds.

To defend the nine-year-old Child Online Protection Act, government lawyers attacked software filters as burdensome and less effective, even though they have previously defended their use in public schools and libraries.

"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.

Critics of the law argued that filters work best because they let parents set limits based on their own values and their child's age.

The law addressed material accessed by children under 17, but applied only to content hosted in the United States.

The Web sites that challenged the law said fear of prosecution might lead them to shut down or move their operations offshore, beyond the reach of the U.S. law. They also said the Justice Department could do more to enforce obscenity laws already on the books.

The 1998 law followed Congress' unsuccessful 1996 effort to ban online pornography. The Supreme Court in 1997 deemed key portions of that law unconstitutional because it was too vague and trampled on adults' rights.

The newer law narrowed the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defined indecency more specifically.

In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries to use software filters if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.

To some in Paris, sinister past is back

PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.

There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.

Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself "the best small town in Texas."

"Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said. "They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s."

There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.

There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.

The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation.

"All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated."

The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age 17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen to go public with their story.

None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a court appeal under way.

But the teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her mother had frequently accused school officials of racism.

Retaliation alleged

"Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story."

Among the write-ups Shaquanda received, according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of damage.

Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking prescription medication.

Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first.

But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent School District.

In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40 percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for excessive discipline.

An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded.

"The [department] has explained that the school district has not and does not discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said.

Not so clear

But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut, and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption."

The Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled out of the process last December before it was concluded.

And in April 2006, the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated against African-American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and 2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress.

According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, such discrimination is widespread.

"There is a philosophy of giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher, who is white.

Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated unfairly by the city's institutions.

"I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the school system, the courts or the police."

A peculiar inmate

Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and local treatment or detention.

"The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas."

Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda, who is now 15, says she has not been doing well.

Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face, then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her cell before it was too late.

She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day.

"I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said. "Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive this."

English schools win right to ban Muslim veils

LONDON - Schools have the right to ban students from wearing Muslim veils if teachers believe the garments affect safety or pupils’ learning, the British government said Tuesday.

But educators should speak with parents before introducing such a ban, the Education Ministry said in updated guidelines that also addressed keeping uniforms affordable and spelling out disciplinary measures.

“Schools should consult parents and the wider community when setting uniform policy,” Schools Minister Jim Knight said.
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“And while they should make every effort to accommodate social, religious or medical requirements of individual pupils, the needs of safety, security and effective learning in the school must always take precedence,” he said.

The ministry said head teachers always had the right to set their school’s uniform policy. Schools had already been advised to accommodate different religions, but the new rules spelled out for the first time that concerns such as safety are valid reasons for exceptions.

The guidelines did not specify what the safety concerns might be. The Sun newspaper, citing an unnamed ministry official, said there were concerns that full face veils might make it difficult to identify students and that Bunsen burners could set fire to the garment in science classes.

All British schools are encouraged to have uniforms as a way of instilling discipline and helping pupils focus in class.

EU governments walk fine line in veil debate

Britain’s highest appeals court ruled a year ago that a school acted properly in refusing to allow a student to wear a jilbab — a long, flowing gown covering her entire body except her hands and face. The school said the clothing item was not permitted under school policy.

The issue of face-covering veils has stoked debate over religious tolerance and cultural assimilation in Britain, which is home to 1.6 million Muslims.

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw provoked a stir in October when he said he requested — but did not insist — that Muslim women remove face-covering veils during one-on-one meetings. Prime Minister Tony Blair said at the time that veils were seen as a “mark of separation.”

Teacher suspended for running pro-gay editorial in school paper

A high school journalism teacher in Indiana has been suspended for two months after allowing an op-ed piece that advocated tolerance of gays to run in the school newspaper. The Associated Press reported Tuesday morning that Woodlan Junior-Senior High School teacher Amy Sorrell was placed on paid leave Monday while her job is under review.

The editorial, which ran in the January 19 issue of the Woodlan Tomahawk, was written by a sophomore student. According to the article, Megan Chase wrote about her friend coming out to her as gay.

"I can only imagine how hard it would be to come out as homosexual in today's society," she wrote. "I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you."

According to the article, after the editorial ran, principal Edwin Yoder mandated that all writings were subject to his approval. After receiving advice from the Student Press Law Center, Sorrell and the Tomahawk’s staff rejected his decision. Last week, Yoder wrote Sorrell a written warning for insubordination and failing to carry out her responsibilities as a teacher by exposing students to inappropriate material.

Ten students attended the county’s school board meeting last Tuesday to get the newspaper on the next meeting’s agenda. They were then directed to assistant superintendent Andy Melin, who claimed that the opinion piece was biased.

According to the AP, the county has had a policy since 2003 that allows principals to review student publications before going to print, but each principal chooses how to enforce the policy.

Previously, Yoder has asked Sorrell to bring him any stories that she felt would be controversial. After he reviewed a story on teen pregnancy that ran in the same issue of the Tomahawk, she said she did not think that Chase’s editorial would need the same treatment. (The Advocate)

How the MPAA killed the movie theater experience: a first-hand report

Hi Declan,

My girlfriend and I are writers here in Toronto and
I thought I'd share this, as if you needed evidence
that privacy abuses are out of hand, here's our
completely insane experience with the MPAA from
last night.

I wonder what kind of dystopian cyberpunk
future we live in when you are physically
searched before entering a movie theatre.

Last night (November 3rd), my girlfriend brought me
along to see a screening of Derailed at the Paramount
theatre in Toronto, which she had to
review for a magazine she works for. The lineup
for the screening was unusually long, as I think
they also fill seats at press screenngs with radio
call-in winners, who in hindsight, might have
accepted such poor treatment in exchange for
the ostensible privilege of paying for $30 worth
of parking and fast food at a free $13 movie.

Anyway, the line was moving slowly because they were asking
customers to raise their arms so that they could be
electronically frisked with a metal detector, and
women's purses were being searched by uniformed
security guards. Try to remember that this is
Toronto, Canada we're talking about here, not
New York, Tel Aviv or London.

People who submitted to the search (everyone from
what I could tell) had their cellphones taken from
them and checked at a table set up in front of
the theatre and they were given a ticket to reclaim
it when they left.

I was having none of this, and checked
the back of my ticket stub to ensure that there
was no mention of being required to submit to a
search listed as a condition of sale. As my girlfriend
and I made it to the front of the line, the guard
looked at me and asked me to raise my arms for the
search. I politely declined saying "No, thank
you", and proceeded to the ticket taker. I could hear
him calling "Sir! Sir!" behind me, but even though
I slowed my pace in case he was really going to do
something about it, as I had expected, I wasn't
stopped.

The ticket taker took my ticket and I waited for my
girlfriend just inside the gate, as her purse was
being subjected to a thorough going through by one
of the guards.

Since she was there for work, and her deadline was
that night, she was not ready to risk not seeing the
movie. Her 150 words won't have room for what
happened next.

Her phone was taken from her and put in a sealed
plastic bag with a claim ticket, and she
joined me where I was waiting, past the gate, and
we walked into the theatre together.

To add further insult to the debacle at the
gate, near the exits at stage right and left
were two uniformed security guards at each door,
all four with video cameras scanning the crowd
and making themselves very conspicuous.

This was not just a bit of pre-show MPAA theatre,
they stood there for the entirity of the movie, red
LED's glowing, scanning the crowd to remind
us that we were under close surviellence and our
actions were being recorded.

If you have sat in a chair in a dark room watching
disturbing scenes unfold in front of you, while four
uniformed people with video cameras stand in front
of your, silently recording your reactions, you might
be reminded of scenarios from a Clockwork Orange,
Brazil, 1984, Videodrome, and strangely,
that 90's relic: SFW.

Security guards regularly use handheld video
cameras to harrass and intimidate people,
particularly during political rallies and protests,
as the guards know that the cameras carry with
them a clear implication of future retribution
against those being recorded. The cameras are
quite literally, a threat.

( The threat is that if you do not behave as
the camera holder asks, the recording of your
actions will be used to persecute or discrace you.)

Upon leaving the theatre, my girlfriend and I
had to stop at the security desk to claim her
phone, which involved them searching through a
pile of bagged cellphones for the correct one.
We took another moment to turn the phone on
and wait for signal in the threatre to validate
that we in fact had the correct phone.

My girlfriend had said that if she hadn't already
agreed to her deadline, she would have made
a point of walking out of the screening and
giving the PR person a talking to. I did not
confront the camera wielding guards in the
theatre because she was my host she had a job
to do.

Only people who think they have done something
wrong, or deserve to be searched, submit to that
kind of authority, which is why guards get away
with it, and the rest of us continue to be
subjected to it and it becomes "normal".

Anyway, apparently this is Alliance Atlantis'
idea of how to treat an audience, then I for
one can certainly live without seeing any of
their films, and we will be skipping movies
at the Paramount theatre. I also know that
at least one reviewer will also be seeing
her movies elsewhere too.

I would also say that this is further evidence
that movie studios are losing revenue because
of the increasingly poor movie-going experience
and general low-quality of the movies they are
making, as after this, I can certainly undertstand
why someone would prefer to watch a movie on their
14 inch screen than suffer the indignity of a
multiplex.