Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Busted by Miami police for taking their picture

Thomas Hawk is following the story:

Carlos Miller is a Miami based journalist who was recently arrested after, according to Miller, he was told not to photograph the police who were investigating a “private matter” and asked to move along.

Rather than comply with the police, Miller instead continued taking photographs of them, a crime for which he asserts he was arrested.  In the end Miller spent 16 hours in a Miami Dade jail and now faces nine counts over the incident. You can read Miller’s take of what happened at this story here. The Miami Herald is also reporting on it here. [...]

I guess I’m just not buying the cop’s story here.  To me it seems like overkill to put Carlos through what he was put through.  It doesn’t all add up.  I can envision a scenario where what really happened was a photographer was taking photos of cops who didn’t want to be photographed.  They asked him not to photograph them and he continued, so they used their power to teach him a lesson.  The problem is that the cops should not be telling anyone not to photograph them.  If they want to be in a job where they won’t be photographed public service is probably not for them.  Also regardless of whether Carlos “identified” himself as a journalist or not, this is not relevant.  We are all citizen journalists and as an actual journalist Carlos holds no special rights over any of the rest of us.

I hope that this matter is investigated and that if Carlos indeed was unjustly arrested that the cops in question lose their jobs at a minimum.  I hope that his story gets the attention that it deserves and that police everywhere and photographers everywhere are better educated about our respective rights.

The above is excerpted from Hawk’s telling of the police side of the story, which includes the entire police report (with Carlos’ personal information redacted) page one.pdf, page two.pdf.

Fired for sex change

Last week James Joyner found the story of the Florida official undergoing a sex change operation “[not] particularly noteworthy in this day and age.” The juxtaposition of advertisement and photos made the story mildly amusing and earned it an Outside the Beltway post.

This week we learn that the Largo citizenry and commissioners were hardly amused:

“His brain is the same today as it was last week,” Commissioner Gay Gentry said. “He may be even able to be a better city manager. But I sense that he’s lost his standing as a leader among the employees of the city.”

Commissioners voted 5-2, with Mayor Pat Gerard and Commissioner Rodney Woods in dissent, to place Stanton on paid leave while his departure is made final. [...]

Before the vote, Stanton, 48, described the dismay of watching his reputation disintegrate in just seven days.

Until last week, he had served 14 years as the city manager, generally to good reviews. Last fall, commissioners raised his salary nearly 9 percent to $140,234 a year.

But on Feb. 21, the St. Petersburg Times reported that Stanton was undergoing hormone therapy in preparation for gender-reassignment surgery - a plan known only to a small circle of people, including his wife, medical team and a few top officials at City Hall.

Stanton and his friends had written an eight-page plan to help make his decision known in June, when he said his 13-year-old son could be out of town and shielded from the publicity.

Instead, the news came out before he told his son. Outraged residents swarmed commissioners, demanding he be ousted.

“It’s just real painful to know that seven days ago I was a good guy and now I have no integrity, I have no trust and most painful, I have no followers,” Stanton said.

Read the story. Tragic and sad. 

Gay bosses are better

It must be true, I read it in Details:

In The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders . . . and What Every Manager Needs to Know, author and USC business-school professor Kirk Snyder argues that gay bosses embody a style of personalized attention that allows high-maintenance Gen Xers and Yers to maximize their performance. “Gay executives tend to look at how each individual brings unique abilities, and they see their job as figuring out how best to take advantage of those skills,” he says.

In fact, during Snyder’s five-year study of American executives, he stumbled on some startling findings: Gay male bosses produce 35 to 60 percent higher levels of employee engagement, satisfaction, and morale than straight bosses. This is no small achievement: According to human-resources consulting firm Towers Perrin, only a measly 14 percent of the global corporate workforce are fully engaged by their jobs. And the Saratoga Institute, a group that measures the effectiveness of HR departments, found that in a study of 20,000 workers who had quit their jobs, the primary motivator for jumping ship was their supervisors’ behavior.

Why? Because we were picked on in high school and came out of the closet:

So what makes gay bosses different? It may have to do with the way they survived high school. “Gay people are constantly having to dodge and weave and assess how and where they’re going as they grow up,” says Snyder. “And that manifests itself as three huge skills: adaptability, intuitive communications, and creative problem-solving.” In other words, your boss is cool with your leaving a little early one day a week to pick up your kid from school, or happy to offer a learning experience that helps you close a crucial deal.

Gay executives note that the reflection and candidness required for coming out mean that by the time they get to the workplace, gay men are often secure in their identity and don’t feel the need to abuse people in order to boost their ego. “It makes you really honest with yourself and everyone around you,” says Chris McCarthy, a vice president at MTV Networks who came out 10 years ago. He believes the experience has allowed him to tap into the individual needs of his seven team members, including two discontented employees whom he recently helped find new positions within the company. “I think it’s really important that you give people the opportunity to have self-respect, even if that means helping them leave a job in the way they want to,” he explains.

Thanks John!

C-SPAN’s muscle means it’s time we build our own

Much as I like C-SPAN, I remember its roots.

I sold cable door to door in the early 1970s, or rather, cable sold itself. A region would come online and 6 out of 10 people would sign up, no questions asked. Cable franchising was in high gear and the public was ready for the broadcast monopoly to end. Commercial broadcasters, no dummies they, saw the cable industry as unwanted competition. They successfully used the threat that the rise of cable would mean an end to “free” TV to pressure Congress into supporting a block to further cable development through a freeze on new franchising activity.

The cable industry fought back. Among the arrows pulled from its quiver, along with the ever-popular “consumer choice” and “number of channels,” was the industry’s ability to produce programming and then show it on cable-only channels. In those days before broadcasters bought up and started multiplying cable networks (and before they were themselves, in turn, bought up) cable television had excess bandwidth. A cable-industry financed, non-profit public affairs programming network for televising sessions of the U.S. Congress was Brian Lamb’s stroke of genius.

C-SPAN launched in 1979 with an Al Gore speech. It receives no funding from any government source, has no contract with the government, and does not sell sponsorships or advertising. It strives for neutrality and a lack of bias in its public affairs programming. Still, I see it as born of - and in inherent service to - the cable industry’s congressional lobbying campaign. As cable and broadcasters fought on, cable would give in to city franchising authority pie-in-the-sky demands. Then once its monopoly was secured, successfully complain about how unreasonable those franchise provisions were.

But that’s another story. I’m telling the C-SPAN story today because of the recent Nancy Pelosi flap:

House Republicans recently complained in a press release that Nancy Pelosi was infringing on copyrights by posting video material from C-Span on The Gavel, the Speaker of the House’s web site.  Turns out that all but one of the clips was actually public domain footage, and the release was retracted.  But as a New York Times article points out, this raises further questions about C-Span’s role as a private company that purports to serve the public.

Ah, the tables have turned. C-SPAN has built up some muscle it now can flex:

“What I think a lot of people don’t understand - C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” [C-SPAN corporate vice president and general counsel Bruce] Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.”

Without use of C-Span’s material, members of Congress will have to rely on government cameras to get their message out.

Of course, it was government cameras that enabled C-SPAN to build up its muscle. If now those cameras have atrophied, it’s time to build them up again and bring them back. Cory at Boing Boing::

The U.S. Congress provides webcasts for many of their hearings.  In all cases, the hearings are streaming only, in many cases they are “live only” (no archive of the stream).  In some cases, the committees even put a “copyright, all rights reserved” notice on the hearings!

This is really dumb.  So, I’ve started ripping all congressional streams starting with the house and posting them in a nonproprietary format for download, tagging, review, and annotation at Google Video and another copy at the Internet Archive (just to prove this is a nondenominational issue .

This is a Tom Sawyer hack, a la “painting this fence is *loads* of fun!” I intend to prove to the Congressional webmasters that it is so much fun doing their web sites for them that they’ll want to do it themselves so that I go away.  Until then, look for “Carl Malamud on behalf of the U.S. Congress” for official news.

Link

Free the media!

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

A call for glass walls

My awareness of Michael Pollan began with his December 2002 New York Times Magazine cover, An Animal’s Place. This passage is one that has stuck with me since:

There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.

We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When’s the last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn’t count.) Except for our pets, real animals-animals living and dying-no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ‘’Why Look at Animals?’’ in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals-and specifically the loss of eye contact-has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.

Since reading that, I look animals in the eye. In his most recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there’s another passage that calls on us to honor the animals we eat by not looking away - from slaughterhouses (p.332):

Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operation], and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: The right, I mean, to look. No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers willing to raise and kill their animals transparently. Such farms exist; so do a handful of small processing plants willing to let customers onto the kill floor, including one-Lorentz Meats, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota-that is so confident of their treatment of animals that they have walled their abattoir in glass.

The industrialization-and brutalization-of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end-for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

Amen.

Video: A Peta primer. If you’re willing to watch. 

We have a food safety crisis on the horizon

One hundred years after Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle, it’s time someone wake us up again. When will we learn?

The federal agency that’s been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.

The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.

“We have a food safety crisis on the horizon,” said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

It’s even worse for US produced food, a nearly 75 percent drop, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency’s own statistics.

Amero sentencing postponed

The Norwich Bulletin:

The former Norwich substitute teacher convicted of exposing her seventh-grade students to Internet porn is getting extra time to bolster her defense team.

Superior Court Judge Hillary Strackbein agreed Monday, court documents show, to postpone Friday’s sentencing for Julie Amero, 40, the Windham woman convicted last month on four counts of risk of injury to a minor. Her sentencing will take place March 29 in Norwich Superior Court, where she faces 40 years in prison.

Attorney John F. Cocheo, who represented Amero at trial, requested the postponement to allow time for a new attorney and consultant to familiarize themselves with the case.

For all the others who have not gotten our attention, the plea I’ve appended to all of my Amero posts:

WE NEED A COMPUTER FORENSICS INNOCENCE PROJECT; a Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld of the computer forensics world. We need experts who believe in the presumption of innocence and are willing to spend the time it takes to dig through logs, registry entries and hard drives to find exculpatory material when present. This is hardly the first case of its kind and, unfortunately, it’s not likely be the last. Prosecutors who look for - and presume - guilt do selective searches for data supporting guilt; those accused rarely have the resources to pay computer forensics experts to counter that selective evidence.

I know you are but what am I?

Robbin Hamman:

I’ve had a go at producing three different models or types of blogs that, I think, might be useful if one wanted to try to categorise all the blogs out there. Not that I’m sure doing that would actually be useful! But for the purpose of giving an idea of the different types of blogs out there, each of them perfectly valid in their own way, I propose the following, which you can view as a slide show here:

Closed Blogs are, as the image here shows, at the centre of an audience that resembles a closed network. Blogs of this type include baby blogs and wedding planning blogs. Characteristically they have a:

* small but extremely passionate and engaged audience
* audience unlikely to grow
* audience potentially super-served - they all have a very strong personal connection, usually running both ways.

See, for example, the Aitken’s wedding blog

Blogs as Conduit of Information are blogs that act as the conduit between individual audience members and information or ideas. That is, the blog is the centre of the relationship between the information consumers and information producers. The blog itself may not be the origin of this content, but may merely pull it together in a useful way. This sort of blog is characterised by:

* potentially larger audience than closed blog model
* audience highly engaged with personality and/or topic
* audience unlikely to grow rapidly because it serves same audience without reaching out

See, for example, the H5N1 blog or SCOTUS blog.

Blog as Participant in “The Conversation” are connectors of ideas and people, but also of conversations that flow between them. Blogs of this sort have an audience potentially as big as the numbers actively engaged in the conversation. New people who get involved in the conversation, or who discover a node of it, may very well follow contextualised links, visit other sites in the chain, and become regular audience members of those sites. Bloggers who create blogs like this tend to engage with the comments on their blogs and link out heavily, using tools like RSS readers and technorati to follow the "buzz". Some also use social bookmarking or social recommendation tools to save, order and share links.

This is highly evolved blogging as both use of technology and technique which, I think, an ideal that bloggers should strive for.

I strive to be a conduit and participant.

I may even be that in some small way. But I know my blog is a globally accessible database of information that I find personally or professionally interesting, and a platform for deliberation through which I shape my views on those interests; it allows me to engage with those I admire, respect or criticize and helps me keep my sanity when I feel intellectually isolated; and it lets me develop and use my technology skills.

Via Martin Stabe.

Where have all the honeybees gone?

NYTimes:

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis. [...]

They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees’ innate ability to find their way back home.

It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.

Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Hillary @ Google

Assimilate me (reprise)

On the occasion of a San Francisco Chronicle article about the Castro district facing an identity crisis, Andrew Sullivan has recycled his End of Gay Culture shtick. Having read it all again - and still not hardly disagreeing - I’m recycling my reply. Only the links have been updated...

Andrew Sullivan is at it again. Gay culture is over. You see it, he says, in the P-town real estate bubble, ignoring that it’s of a kind with that in San Francisco, Manhattan and L.A., and that gentrification there is like gentrification everywhere.

I’ve been going to Provincetown for twenty years too. More even. I see change but can’t agree that the end is near:

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won’t create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that “gayness” alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

The gay culture he describes, the one I agree is ending, is the gay sex culture. Though he notes the paradox that “gay culture in its old form may have its most fertile ground in those states where homosexuality is still unmentionable and where openly gay men and women are more beleaguered: the red states.” I know that to be true.

He’s also right that there is no “single gay culture” today. But when he asks, “Who can rescue a uniform gay culture?” I wonder, was there ever? Not that I know of. And I was there in the 70s when:

The fact that openly gay communities were still relatively small and geographically concentrated in a handful of urban areas created a distinctive gay culture. The central institutions for gay men were baths and bars, places where men met each other in highly sexualized contexts and where sex provided the commonality. Gay resorts had their heyday--from Provincetown to Key West. The gay press grew quickly and was centered around classified personal ads or bar and bath advertising. Popular culture was suffused with stunning displays of homosexual burlesque: the music of Queen, the costumes of the Village People, the flamboyance of Elton John’s debut; the advertising of Calvin Klein; and the intoxication of disco itself, a gay creation that became emblematic of an entire heterosexual era. When this cultural explosion was acknowledged, when it explicitly penetrated the mainstream, the results, however, were highly unstable: Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco and Anita Bryant led an anti-gay crusade. But the emergence of an openly gay culture, however vulnerable, was still real.

Sullivan says that culture was “primarily about pain and tragedy.” I’d quibble with words. Not “primarily about” but infused with…

That was an era, but there was a before. Indeed, I worked on the film, Before Stonewall, that made the point that gay culture didn’t start then. There was Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis and Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde.

And there will be one tomorrow.

A pandemic choked Net

From The News is Now Public:

If a pandemic were to occur, many companies and organizations would ask their staffs to work from home. The impact of millions of additional people using the Internet from home might require individuals and companies to voluntarily restrain themselves from surfing to high-bandwidth sites, such as YouTube. If people didn’t comply, the government might step in and limit Net usage. The scenario is not far-fetched: last year at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, a group of telecom and government officials conducted a pandemic exercise based on a hypothetical breakout of bird flu in central Europe. The results weren’t pretty.

A two week supply of water and food

From the PandemicFlu.gov checklist:

Store a two week supply of water and food. During a pandemic, if you cannot get to a store, or if stores are out of supplies, it will be important for you to have extra supplies on hand. This can be useful in other types of emergencies, such as power outages and disasters....

Examples of food and non-perishables	Examples of medical, health, and emergency supplies
Ready-to-eat canned meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, beans, and soups	Prescribed medical supplies such as glucose and blood-pressure monitoring equipment
Protein or fruit bars	Soap and water, or alcohol-based (60-95%) hand wash
Dry cereal or granola	Medicines for fever, such as acetaminophen or ibuprofen
Peanut butter or nuts	Thermometer
Dried fruit	Anti-diarrheal medication
Crackers	Vitamins
Canned juices	Fluids with electrolytes
Bottled water	Cleansing agent/soap
Canned or jarred baby food and formula	Flashlight
Pet food	Batteries
Other non-perishable items	Portable radio
	Manual can opener
	Garbage bags
	Tissues, toilet paper, disposable diapers

Pandemic flu planning

I went to a session on pandemic flu preparedness tonight presented by our regional health district. The message is basically this: stock up and get prepared now because when it hits (not if it hits) all bets are off. You’re on your own.

This is from part three of NPR’s The Edge of Disaster series:

Stephen Flynn, former Coast Guard commander and author of The Edge of Disaster, says that the United States medical system is unprepared to handle a catastrophic emergency such as a flu pandemic or a major terrorist attack.

The problem, Flynn says, is that hospitals have been trying to cut costs.

“The medical community has been moving in the direction of much of our economy,” he says, “which is wringing out the extra capacity in order to essentially focus on the bottom line.”

Flynn says the United States lacks the federal leadership necessary to organize state and local efforts. Here in Georgia there are over 8 million people. We have 22,000 hospital beds. And only 16,800 nurses. There’s trouble ahead.

Flynn worries that a medical system that can barely meet day-to-day demands will be caught unprepared by an onslaught of emergency cases.

“We’re going to have incidents whether by acts of God or acts of man that are going to place a lot of people in desperate need for emergency care,” Flynn says. “And it will be life and death whether or not they receive it.”

He says that investing in a medical system that can handle a potential surge is “something that we can’t afford not to do.”

Flynn endorses alternative solutions that will enforce the medical system without tremendous expense. He says much more can be done to reach out to retired doctors and nurses who could serve as a rank of reserves for medical professionals.

There are also programs that give citizens basic training so that they can assist medical professionals in the event of an emergency.

To inspire such change, Flynn thinks the United States needs to realize that the medical system is moving in the wrong direction.

In the meantime, stock up. Visit pandemicflu.gov

YouTube v BoobTube

New TeeVee:

It’s still early in the game, to be sure, but so far it looks like YouTube can keep calling Viacom’s bluff, especially since early research shows that YouTube traffic has surged, not suffered, since Viacom demanded the takedown of 100,000 purportedly purloined video clips.

According to research from the fine folks at Hitwise, YouTube visits are up 14 percent since Viacom’s cease-and-desist order, showing that maybe it’s not just people watching Daily Show and Colbert clips after all. Who needs that Audible Magic stuff, anyway?

Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott goes on to report that during early Feburary YouTube traffic also “surged above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites,” albeit with some caveats. The figure doesn’t include web pages for things like American Idol, The Simpsons and sports - or in other words, just about everything that matters on mainstream TV.

Meanwhile, YouTube celebrities are being wooed by other video Web sites.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

A constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman?

I have to say the pastor’s got a point. What are cops doing out cruising for this kind of thing?

Authorities allege that [Rev. Lonnie W.] Latham asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.

Latham’s attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.

“Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal,” Martin said.

Both sides agree that there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a “legitimate governmental interest” in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma has filed a brief alleging that Latham’s arrest also violated his right to free speech.

Before his arrest, Latham had spoken against same-sex marriage.

He has since resigned as pastor of the South Tulsa Baptist Church and stepped down from the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, where he was one of four members from Oklahoma.

Jury still out on Genarlow

Maureen Downey in the AJC:

Two years ago today, Marie Manigault rose in a Douglas County courtroom to announce a verdict that she now regards as a terrible injustice: “We, the jury, find the defendant, Genarlow Raevion Wilson, guilty of aggravated child molestation.”

That verdict sentenced Wilson to 10 years in prison without possibility of parole; he is serving that time at the Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth and will carry the label of sex offender for life. “Genarlow needs to be home with his family,” says Manigault now. “He should have been home with his family from the beginning.”

Manigault’s statements call into question what the DA and Senate leader Eric Johnson have been saying about the jury verdict. The story ends on the question of race:

“I have been reluctant to say any racism has been involved,” says B.J. Bernstein, Wilson’s attorney. “But at a certain point you have to ask how many white kids with a 3.2 GPA, who could have been in a good college, would have gotten this much hard time?”

I have to say I’ve wondered that myself.

Amero transcripts

The Norwich Bulletin has posted the full 346 page transcript from the Julie Amero trial. The Bulleting concludes it confirms Amero’s conviction was based not on how the pornography got on the computer on Oct. 19, 2004, but on her allowing several Kelly Middle School students to see the pornography and not doing enough to prevent them from seeing it.”

I haven’t read it. Apparently this commenter has:

From the trail transcipts posted here.

The Principal Scott “Police on Speed Dial” Fain was asked what did he do after meeting with Ms Amero on Oct 21 this from the transcript here.

Q.Did you have her back in again?

A. She came back in the following day after we spoke on the phone

Q. And you discussed the matter again on that day?

A. Yes

Q. And that the day you told her she would not be coming back to your school?

A. That’s Correct.

Now for the good part. Scott “Speed Dial” Fain cares about your childrens well being their morals...so much so that this was his REAL course of action from the transcipt.

Q. MR FAIN ISN’T IT TRUE YOU WERE SENDING HER TO ANOTHER SCHOOL TO TEACH?

A. I’M SORRY?

Q. ISN’T IT TRUE YOU WERE SENDING HER TO ANOTHER SCHOOL TO TEACH?

A. MORE SPECIFICALLY WHEN DO YOU MEAN?

Q. AFTER THE 19TH

A. YES

So this is what you have. A Principal who may think that he has a teacher who is accessing porn in the classroom and his answer is to “SEND HER TO ANOTHER SCHOOL SYSTEM???????”

So what we have so far from these transcripts is testimony that :

The same websites were visited the DAY AFTER this happened and Ms Amero was no where near the computer.

Principal Fien according to his testimony visited the computer on the 20th

The principal thought that this was so HORRIBLE that he felt comfortable letting Ms Amero teach somewhere else.

Maybe someone should have asked the Principle where he was on both days?

For all the others who have not gotten our attention, the plea I’ve appended to all of my Amero posts:

WE NEED A COMPUTER FORENSICS INNOCENCE PROJECT; a Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld of the computer forensics world. We need experts who believe in the presumption of innocence and are willing to spend the time it takes to dig through logs, registry entries and hard drives to find exculpatory material when present. This is hardly the first case of its kind and, unfortunately, it’s not likely be the last. Prosecutors who look for - and presume - guilt do selective searches for data supporting guilt; those accused rarely have the resources to pay computer forensics experts to counter that selective evidence.

UPDATE: here is an improved version of the transcript, “a collaborative project driven by advocates promoting justice for Julie “

Duck confit does not a gourmet make

One of the most difficult adjustments I had to make when moving from Manhattan to Middle Georgia was the dearth of decent restaurants. A recent piece in the NYTimes had old friends calling and writing excited to have read that we have “wine tastings, live music and dishes like duck confit and cioppino” here.

To which I reply by quoting Slate:

...they’re all from Sysco, a Houston-based food wholesaler. This top food supplier serves nearly 400,000 American eating establishments, from fast-food joints like Wendy’s, to five-star eating establishments like Robert Redford’s Tree Room Restaurant, to mom-and-pop diners like the Chatterbox Drive-In, to ethnic restaurants like Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Even Gitmo dishes out food from Sysco. Should you worry that one source dominates so much of what you eat?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Please worry. Our food system is broke and most of us don’t know it yet.

Like any retailer, chefs need wholesalers that distribute goods cheaply and efficiently, and Sysco’s 400,000-plus item catalog conveniently sells everything a cook needs to run an eating establishment. A little more than half of their products are brand names like Parkay and Lucky Charms. The rest are Sysco-packaged items like 25-pound bags of rice, half-gallons of salsa, boxes of plastic gloves, beer mugs, dish-washing detergent, not to mention 1,900 different fresh and frozen chicken products. Whatever a cook orders is delivered straight to the kitchen door at bottom-barrel prices: One Sysco invoice I got my hands on has a 25-pound bag of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice selling for $20.95, or about 84 cents a pound, while a 1-pound box bought through Amazon Grocery costs $2.09.

All of that seems relatively innocuous-restaurants need to make a profit, after all. But Sysco also hawks pre-packaged food. While chefs have long relied on shortcuts like freezing and using canned goods like beans and tomatoes, it’s entirely different to pass off one of Sysco’s thousands of ready-made items-ground beef burritos, vegan tortellini, quiche Lorraine pie, tiramisu cake-as homemade.

The ingredients alone on some of the pre-made items are enough to make a restaurant-goer swear off eating out. The breaded cheese chicken breast, for instance, contains monocalcium phosphates, sorbic acid preservatives, and oleoresin in turmeric. The Serve Smart Chicken is particularly frightening. While it looks natural, it consists of parts of other chicken breasts mashed together into a single, chicken-breastlike block. As the company notes on its Web site, our “unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost. … Available in four great flavors: teriyaki, BBQ, fajita and original.” What Smart Chicken tastes like, I’d rather not know.

I’d rather not know either but I have a nagging suspicion that I’m more likely to have it here than he is there.

The company has a long history of championing frozen foods. Sysco founder John Baugh has been quoted as saying, ”frozen foods taste better than anything I could grow in my garden.” He started the company in 1969 when he saw an opening in the food services marketplace for a large, national distributor that would beat out local competitors through its sheer size. At the time, Baugh owned a small frozen-food company in Houston, and he convinced eight other regional food distributors to join forces to form a national conglomerate. Within a year of its start, Sysco posted more than $100 million in sales, and for the next 30 years, snapped up more than 150 local food distributors, becoming the largest in the nation. The company is about 50 percent larger than its next-largest competitor and five times bigger than the third-largest player; its boxes and cans are now as common in restaurant kitchens as salt and flour. A very partial listing of its better-known customers can be found here.

The timing of this company’s rise is right in line with the consolidation and monopolization that has occurred across the board in our food system: slaughter houses, farms of all kinds, poultry, pork & beef, fast-food and technologically enhanced nutritionalism.

The change we’ve seen in the last thirty years has altered our relationship to food in fundamentally profound ways from that which had existed on this planet for millennia. I am as techno-utopian as the next guy - I even think technology can help get us out of the mess it’s gotten us into - but first we’ve got to recognize that there’s a problem.

20 states consider eliminating HPV vaccine ban

I come rather late to the HPV vaccine controversy and join the fray after watching Texas Governor Rick Perry defend his position requiring “mandatory” vaccination of sixth-grade girls on Fox News Sunday this morning. Watching Perry I realized just how difficult it will be to move this nation towards Libertarian Paternalism, the idea “that private and public institutions might nudge people in directions that will make their lives go better, without eliminating freedom of choice.”

My predisposition was to support adoption of the HPV vaccine, my suspicious objection to Merck’s role in lobbying states for the provision having been allayed when Merck called off the HPV campaign. Watching Perry today it finally sunk in that this “mandatory” vaccine “requirement” has an opt-out provision. Thus, there is no mandate at all.

Rather, the default position of the state is changed to one whereby the vaccine is provided. By the logic of those who label Perry’s executive order a “mandate,” we could counter-claim that the government today has a ban in place denying the vaccine to sixth-grade girls.  And those 20 states considering bills to adopt the HPV vaccine are simply considering eliminating the ban.

They have my full support.

Note: My position does not absolve the state of its obligation to ensure safety and efficacy. I’m fine with that debate; I object to biasing its outcome with the “mandatory” label.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Cass Sunstein gets Wiki

In the WaPo today:

In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing. In just two years, YouTube has become a household word and one of the world’s most successful Web sites. Such astounding growth and success demonstrate society’s unstoppable movement toward shared production of information, as diverse groups of people in multiple fields pool their knowledge and draw from each other’s resources. READ ON

One Year Ago: the onset of my Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss

On this day last year, in a post entitled ”Uh Oh,” I wrote:

I woke up this morning with complete deafness in one ear. This is the “I’m feeling lucky” Google hit. That’s lucky?

LATER: Better hit, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, “Some patients recover completely without medical intervention.”

Of course, they do say, “It should be considered a medical emergency.” Have you ever tried to get a doctor in rural Georgia on a Saturday? 

LATER STILL: Option 1) drive an hour each way to wait 2 to 5 hours ("best guess") to see a random doctor with no particular expertise at an “Urgent Care” facility. Option 2) wait until Monday.

My doctor and Doug’s doctor’s advice, wait until Monday. Expect a smattering of future posts grumbling about health care in America…

One year later I’m still totally deaf in my right ear. I’m now completely adjusted to that reality. Some conclusions:

• - My expectations that I’d be grumbling about the American medical establishment were spot on. I’ve been through a year’s worth of tests paid for by my insurance company, many that I now believe were unnecessary. Most recently I drove four hours round trip to a research hospital in Augusta for a ten minute chat in which the doctor tried to persuade me that a titanium screw in my skull was a good idea. It’s not. He told me to come back in a year. I might.
• - My own doctor, one of the two that told me to wait until Monday (I later learned that one should, in such a situation, seek emergency care immediately), has still not seen me. I see her, on the other hand, in television commercials for some expensive franchise weight loss gimmick program. She looks much better than when last I saw her, apparently the beneficiary of another franchise money-maker, non-surgical laser face-lifts offered through her office. You can’t get an appointment for a physical, but if you need an eye job you’re in and out in a jiffy.
• - Doctors have embraced the Internet. When I would ask the doctors - GP, ENT, neurologist - if there was something they would recommend I read, to a person they answered, “Do a Google search.” Somehow that didn’t sit well with me. Then again, rereading today that very first I’m feeling lucky Google find, it was about as good as anything I’ve read since.

Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

More here. Via Larry Lessig.

New Dallas DA to review decades of convictions

Morning Edition reported yesterday that the new Dallas DA, Craig Watkins, a 39-year-old former defense lawyer who led a Democratic sweep of Dallas County offices in November to become Texas’ first black district attorney, says he’ll reopen hundreds of cases from the past 30 years to see whether DNA tests might reveal wrongful convictions:

“It’s a whole different world in the Dallas criminal justice system,” says defense attorney Gary Udashen. “It is a world where if a client of ours is innocent, we feel like there’s openness in the District Attorney’s office to hear what we have say, to look at what we have to show them, where we don’t anticipate resistance every step of the way.”

Udashen’s firm alone has had seven Dallas clients who were convicted, sent to prison, exhausted their appeals and then ultimately - with the pro bono help of Udashen and his colleagues - were found to be innocent.

Udashen says Dallas used to be like many other cities in Texas when it came to the DA’s office. If it got a conviction, it defended that conviction to the bitter end, even if strong scientific evidence was later uncovered that the convicted was wrongly convicted. [...]

In a twist of irony, Dallas has long outsourced its lab work. And instead of destroying evidence post-conviction like many law enforcement labs, the private labs preserved all the evidence. Blackburn says as a result, Dallas has a treasure trove of potentially exonerating DNA evidence.

The Houston Chronicle has more on Watkins:

By all accounts, he represents a sharp break from the law-and-order conservatives who have held the office for decades, starting with Henry Wade, who retired in 1986 after 36 years in office.

Wade prided himself on a high conviction rate and stiff sentences, but along with the office’s hard-nosed reputation came accusations of a win-at-any-cost attitude and a history of wrongful convictions that shadows it to this day.

In addition to Waller, 11 others have been exonerated since 2001 through new DNA testing, more than in any other U.S. county. Nine of those date to Wade’s administration.

“I’m not part of that failed system,” said Watkins, who twice tried for a job in the office. “I’m fresh. I have nothing to protect.”

Dallas was number 1 in crime for 8 of the past 10 years, they elected this guy. I can only hope it says that voters there saw that what they were doing was not working. Arresting and jailing people for crimes they did not do does not make for a safer public. 

Hardaway’s homophobia: “Just my belief”

I did not move away from home; I jumped out of my bedroom window (not all that high on a suburban split-level) and ran away. Years later when I decided to mend relations, I made a trip home to tell my parents, my brothers and my sister that I was gay. Each is its own story but for today I’ll share that one brother went on a rant that ended with, “You’re still my brother so I still love you but if one of my sons ever tells me he’s a faggot I’ll throw him out on the street because I hate faggots!”

I hardly recall my reaction to that; he was stuck in his stuff. He is to this day. And guess what? One of his sons is gay. When said son told his father, my brother, that he is gay, my brother answered that being gay was worse than murder, “but you’re still my son and I love you.” Huh? Talk about tough love!

I’m reminded of this by reading Scoop Jackson’s ESPN interview with “Timmy Hardaway.” In it we hear how hard this is on poor Timmy, how he apologized to his grandmother, that he was “just having fun on the radio,” that he’s “not sleeping at night because of what someone may do.” And here his friend Scoop asks what might happen if Timmy had a friend come out to him:

OK, so let’s say one of our boys, or better yet for the sake of this interview, what if I told you that I was gay. We’ve known each other all of our lives, came up together, we boys and all, and out of nowhere I spring that on you. Told you that the wife and kids were all a facade and that all of this time I’ve been gay. How would you accept that? Or would you? Would you end the friendship?

Wow. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Wow. I’d probably be or say something like, “Me and Scoop was tight until he told me this.” Our friendship may not continue to be as tight as it is but I’d let you know that you could call me, talk to me whenever, something like that. I really wouldn’t know how to react to that.

But would you be more mad at the fact that I violated a trust issue because I never told you or that I was gay?

Trust issue. I trusted you. We talked like boys for years and you had plenty of opportunity to tell me something like this. It’s always a trust issue. It wouldn’t be because you were gay or bisexual. My issue with you would be because of trust, because you never told me.

Odd, that particular interpretation of where trust lies. It is, of course, precisely because gay people can’t trust that those they know and love will still love them after they reveal a gay identity that some will choose to hide. But to the Tim Hardaways of the world, they’re the ones betrayed.

Scoop asks what caused Hardaway’s resentment towards gay people:

Lemme ask you this, because I’m really trying to get at where this is coming from, the way you came across on the radio, your choice of words, your anger. I’ve had people roll up on me and say that something must have happened to you in your life to make you feel the way that you do about gays. Now I’ve been through everything that’s gone on in your life with your family—the substance abuse, the alcoholism, you riding the CTA [Chicago public transportation] at 8 years old, surviving Altgeld Gardens, all of that. But did anything happen to you? Was there any homosexual experience that triggered any of your resentment toward gay people that happened when you were young that none of us knows about?

When we was growing up Scoop, if we saw gay people or whatever, we ran across the street. We got away from them. Our parents, our friends, our families knew that that wasn’t right. We didn’t want to be around that and they definitely didn’t want us kids around it. And it’s not that they hated gay people, they just felt they it wasn’t right. Let them do what they want to do. And that was my experience when I was growing up. Not acknowledging them. Now did something happen to me? No. But I did have a friend that something happened to him in a Catholic school, but that is another can of worms that it’s not my place to open because it’s not my life. But to answer your question, “No.” Nothing happened to me. I just don’t condone [being gay]. When I see gay people holding hands or kissing in the streets, I just don’t think that’s right.

Is there some religious factor behind your thinking or is this just your belief?

Just my belief.

The self-serving (and I suspect, false) allusion to “a friend” in Catholic school aside, he’s telling it like it is. He just believes it. He was taught it. He grew up in it. He had no idea his statements would cause a stir. He had no reason to rethink it. Now he does. And maybe he will.

Even if he doesn’t the discussion is out there. Some (my brother) will be pushed deeper into their beliefs by all the attention. Others will begin to question their assumptions. Meanwhile, we should all thank Hardaway; John Amaechi’s book will enjoy the kind of sales it could hardly have without him.