aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Praise for paper. Still.
I still love that line I’d quoted from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Social Life of Paper. Wraps the central point up with a bow:
It is only if paper’s usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous. The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper. Why bother filing at all?And ain’t that really the heart of the matter?
When we rely on a paper document as the final, unique destination for information, we create physical and cognitive limitations that seem crazy once you’ve spent a chunk of your life living on Google. No one disputes that.
But as an intermediary medium between thinking and a final draft, I still just love what you can do with a stack of index cards and a little spare time.
No content types. No taxonomy. No typefaces. Just you and your ideas — in a bunch of little piles that make sense to you.
Chris Bliss Diss
You’ll recall I posted this juggling video to find out what was happening with my friend Jason’s campus juggling. Turns out, I picked the wrong juggler:
If you think he’s a good juggler, you are wrong. I taped a 5 ball version because...well because my friend Penn asked me to. It is a parody and nothing more.
That’s Jason Garfield and, uh, it sounds more like a rant to me. This whole ruckus was apparently going on in May of 2006. I missed it then (a student brought me up to speed) so here’s the Chris Bliss diss video:
I’m OK that Dumbledore’s gay
Rebecca Traister is among those who wish J.K. Rowling would shut up:
I am a devoted reader and admirer of J.K. Rowling, and it honestly pains me a bit to say this, but from a literary perspective, she’s out of control here. Her abundant generosity with information is surely a response to a vast, insatiable fan base that does not have a high tolerance for never-ending suspense, ambiguity or nuance. [...]
Rowling is a brilliant lady, one of the people whose work and intentions appear nearly pristine. She created a world in which many readers happily dwelt for more than a decade. In fact, perhaps the root of my frustration with her soothsaying is my sadness that she’s running around talking about the books rather than writing us another one! I, like so many others, miss these people, and part of me can’t help but wish that if she had so much more to say about them, she’d put her thoughts in writing. But I also understand that that is one of those wishes probably better left unfulfilled. One of Rowling’s greatest authorial virtues is that she knew when to quit.
If only she would remember that now, because as she herself clearly understands, leaving us mysteries to unravel is such a critical part of the fun.
Me, I don’t mind people telling me about movies before I see them (hell, often I need them too!) so I don’t much care if an author goes on chatting about her characters.
More from the bogosphere: Andrew Sullivan runs a gay-check; Think Progress has a round up of conservative attacks (including the Newsbusters claim that the revelation vindicates Rev. Jerry Falwell); and Boing Boing points to Dumbledore pride tees (over 7,000 already sold).
Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains
Oh. So that’s what’s fueling the blogospheric vitriol:
Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.
“When we’re sleep deprived, it’s really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions,” researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience. [...]
“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, “and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes,” Walker speculated. “Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It’s a real oddity in nature.”
Monday, October 22, 2007
Report on teen sentencing around the world
In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.
Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.
Here’s the report. And an All Things Considered interview with Bryan Stevenson, executive director for the Equal Justice Initiative (significantly, out of Montgomery, AL):
Mr. STEVENSON: About 75 percent of these children had been condemned to die because the judge did not have discretion to consider their age or their background or any of the circumstances of the offense.
Mandatory sentencing laws have played a critical role in seeing these kinds of harsh sentences imposed on kids who are 13 and 14.
NORRIS: Now, someone say that there are judges who have exercised judicial discretion, who have stepped outside of these laws and these sentencing guidelines when they see fit.
Mr. STEVENSON: Well, mandatory sentencing means that for certain kinds of crimes, the judge doesn’t have that discretion. That doesn’t mean that discretion is eliminated. What mandatory sentencing has done in most systems is shift discretion from the judge to the prosecutor and to the police.
The prosecutor can always choose to not move that a child be tried as an adult or charge differently or prosecute the case differently.
Emphasis mine.
I’d really like to see the cultural dialog shift from activist judges to willful prosecutors.
Viagra & sudden hearing loss
My friends are eagerly pointing me to the news:
Men taking any of three erectile dysfunction drugs—Viagra, Levitra or Cialis—may be at increased risk for sudden hearing loss, prompting Food and Drug Administration officials to require label changes for the medications.
The FDA said manufacturers must change the labels “to display more prominently the potential risk of sudden hearing loss,” according to the agency’s Web site. [...]
Men taking any of the ED drugs and experiencing hearing loss should immediately stop taking the drug and see their physician, the FDA said.
I hear there’s talk of lawsuits. Fortunately or no, I won’t be eligible, much to Doug’s chagrin.
As to the status of my hearing loss, by now I’m as adjusted as can be. I have very tolerant friends and I’ve become proficient at faking conversation in noisy crowds.
I count my blessings; it could be so much worse!
The most activist justice on the Supreme Court is… Scalia!
In the promised LATimes OpEd, Miles and Sunstein run the numbers and find:
The Judicial Restraint Award, for the most humble exercise of judicial power, goes to Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Overall, he votes to uphold agency decisions more than four-fifths of the time. Notably, Breyer votes to uphold conservative decisions 64% of the time.
The Judicial Activism Award, for aggressive use of judicial power, goes to a most surprising winner: Justice Antonin Scalia. He upholds agency decisions only about half the time. This is an impressively low number. Under established principles, to which all members of the court subscribe, agencies are supposed to get the benefit of the doubt.
What about the partisans?
Justice Clarence Thomas is the winner of the Partisan Voting Award for the most politically skewed voting pattern. When the agency decision is conservative, Thomas votes in its favor 84% of the time. But when the agency decision is liberal, Thomas votes in its favor merely 38% of the time—a remarkable 46% swing.
Partisan voting can be found among some of the court’s more liberal members as well. Justice John Paul Stevens is the runner-up—with a 40% swing. When the agency decision is conservative, he votes in its favor 46% of the time; when it’s liberal, his validation rate soars to 86%. Stevens’ partisan voting rate is nearly the mirror image of Thomas’.
Scalia photo via Gideon.
FOLLOW-UP: My commenter is not alone in questioning the conclusions. Miles and Sunstein have posted a response to their critics here.
Obama pulls a Romney
Well, maybe not nearly that bad, but it surely don’t look like the politics of hope:
Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announced its latest effort to attract people of faith to the campaign: a gospel concert tour.
All three of the dates of the “Embrace the Change” tour are in South Carolina, where Mr. Obama is locked in battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for black voters.
Gospel acts including Mary Mary, Donnie McClurkin and Hezekiah Walker, Byron Cage and the Mighty Clouds of Joy are scheduled to appear.
Donnie McClurkin? Is that the same pray-away-the-gay preacher, gospel singer and Bush supporter who performed at the Republican National Convention?
Here’s more on McClurkin. And an excusing Andrew Sullivan. I can only imagine the outrage from Andrew if it were Hillary.
World Kiss Out Day
Coinciding with World AIDS Day, gay rapper Deadlee plans to launch the first World Kiss Out Day, which asks LGBT couples to openly show their affection.
“Many people accuse lesbian, gay, and bisexual people of ‘flaunting’ their sexuality when they talk about their partner, hold hands, or kiss one another in public,” Deadlee said in a statement Tuesday. “These are activities that heterosexual couples do all the time. Due to homophobic reactions, some lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are actually forced to hide their sexuality in public, not flaunt it.”
Last winter the NYTimes took up the topic. In A Kiss Too Far they looked at “how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not.”
I was quoted because the reporter found this old post on public displays of affection.
It looks like I’ll be doing a lot of hand-holding on December 1.
- Thanks Chelsea!
The “peace & stability industry” and the end of the nation state
Jeremy Scahill was interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal last week:
BILL MOYERS:: If you go to the CBS News website reporting on Lara Logan’s interview [link] with-- with him, what the headline says is “Blackwater chief welcomes extra oversight”. Could that have been the message? Hey, look, this was a terrible thing that happened over there. But we really want you, the State Department, government, military, to hold us more accountable.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. But I mean, there’s a very Orwellian vibe to all of this. I mean-- let’s remember here, Blackwater says they’re not a mercenary company. Erik Prince calls that a slanderous term. And they’re not even in the private military company business. They’re in the peace and stability industry. We’re in the business of peace because peace matters.
BILL MOYERS:: Peace and stability. Is this how the industry promotes itself?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, yeah. The mercenary trade association, Blackwater recent left it. But they’ve been a leading member and funder of it. It’s called the International Peace Operations Association. And their logo is a cartoon sleeping lion. I mean, it’s so incredibly Orwellian. And I think this idea that they want accountability, this has been a line they’ve been pushing for years. I mean, Erik Prince said it was excellent that the democratic legislation passed through the House that was allegedly about contract or oversight. And the reason why Blackwater endorses it is because it looks great on paper. There are gonna be laws that govern the use of private military companies. But in reality, it’s totally unenforceable. [...]
BILL MOYERS:: What does it say that this industry has become so essential, this peace and stability industry-- these mercenaries as you call them. .
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, I think we’re in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in our nation’s history. We of course see it in schools. We see it in the health care system, in prisons. And now, we’re seeing it full blown in the war machine. What I ultimately see as the real threat here is that the system of the very existence of the nation state I think is at stake here. Because you have companies now that have been funded with billions of dollars in public money using that money to then build up the infrastructure of private armies some of which could take out a small national military. And the old model used to be if a company wants to go into Nigeria for instance and exploit oil, they have to work with the juntas forces in order to do that. Now, you can just bring in your own private military force
Emphasis mine. The video is here.
In the sweep of history we’ve gone from the city-state to the church-state to the nation-state. I have long thought that up next is the corporate-state.
More on Blackwater CEO Erik Prince here.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Write shorter sentences
So says Stephen Berlin Johnson after an analysis of his Amazon text stats:
Gladwell’s sentences are fully 25% shorter than mine. I’m not sure if the average reader would notice...but a 25% drop in sentence length has to alter the reading experience dramatically. Clearly, the only things separating me from selling ten million copies of my books are those extra 6.5 words per sentence.
Fascinating.
Sex Ed II
While on the topic, let’s remember Courtney Martin who wrote last January that the way to change the toxic sexual culture is to start looking at the sex education our high-schoolers receive:
[M]any of us understand far too late that sexuality doesn’t operate by switch—on or off—but rather is a wide-ranging spectrum. That alcohol doesn’t just limit inhibitions, it also hampers communication. That articulating one’s desires and needs is essential for safe, consensual and, well, good sex. And, of course, that listening to your partner—whether they’re a partner for just a night or for a lifetime—is a matter of basic dignity and respect.
These are conversations that are conspicuously absent from all but the most progressive high schools in this country. As a result, a flood of hormonal, insecure, and unequipped 18-year-olds show up at colleges across the nation each fall with little more than a sensationalistic idea of rape, shaped by shows like Law and Order: SVU rather than by conversation with knowledgeable adults. Add almost-ubiquitous binge drinking into the mix, and you’ve got a chemistry equation that equals combustion. One study found that 75 percent of the males and 50 percent of the females involved in college campus acquaintance rapes had been drinking when the incident occurred. [...]
By giving teenagers opportunities to dialogue about sexuality and practice communicating about their desires and needs, we could prepare them for a college scene fraught with experimentation, alcohol, and difficult social negotiations. The field of emotional intelligence provides us with sound evidence that behaviors must be practiced habitually if we want them to emerge in stressful situations. In a sex ed context, this means that we could be having essential conversations in schools—about having fun while still setting limits—to prepare students for the college culture of limitless drinking. Teens could be reflecting on their own authentic boundaries, sexual and otherwise, before they are in a situation where those boundaries are in danger of being crossed. Sure, hokey role-playing activities are the last thing a bunch of too-cool-for-school teenagers want to do, but teachers could still provide them with the language that might make recognizing those boundaries easier. If that teacher is a relatable and savvy adult, all the better.
Instead, we have spent over a billion dollars on abstinence-only messages for teens, at least half of whom have already had sex before they even leave high school, and three-fourths of whom don’t believe in waiting until marriage, according a recent study in the Review of General Psychology. Most of these inadequate curricula are taught by perhaps well-intentioned but certainly not the most approachable adults in the school system. Teenagers deserve sex education from teachers who are comfortable and experienced talking about sex, not just a randomly assigned wrestling coach (the standard-bearer of sex-ed excellence at Jen and my suburban public high school in Colorado Springs).
Again, instead of arresting them, let’s educate them!
Sex Ed
Instead of arresting our kids, let’s educate them!
From Midwest Teen Sex Show:
Here’s Homosexuality-Part I.Not every teen is having sex and not every teen is abstaining. We hope the Midwest Teen Sex Show will create a space for frank discussion of all things related to teen sexuality. [...]
We’ll leave the formal education to classrooms and textbooks. The Midwest Teen Sex Show is here to provide sex information in a clear and entertaining way. We won’t pretend to be experts, but hopefully a few of our own embarrassing experiences and insights will keep you out of trouble.
Who are the activists on the Supreme Court?
Cass Sunstein previews his oped in tomorrow’s Los Angeles Times with a brainteaser:
Who are the activists on the Supreme Court? Which justices show the most partisan voting patterns? Such questions are usually answered anecdotally. Thomas Miles and I have tried to approach them more systematically, with some simple statistical methods. We have compiled and analyzed a large number of the justices’ votes over an extensive period, and we now have some answers, in the form of awards for Judicial Neutrality and Judicial Restraint—and less desirable awards for Partisan Voting and Judicial Activism.
Those answers are scheduled to appear in an oped in the Los Angeles Times this Monday. (Guesses are welcome.) A small preview: One member of the current Court has the honor of finishing second for both Judicial Neutrality and Judicial Restraint. That is, one member of the Court upholds conservative decisions (from federal agencies) and liberal decisions (ditto) at about the same rate, and thus fails to show a partisan tilt—while also showing a high level of restraint, defined for purposes of analysis as a high level of willingness to uphold the decisions of a coordinate branch of government (the executive branch, where we have a lot of data).
The member of the Court who finishes second for both neutrality and restraint is: Justice David Souter.
Stop looking for excuses NOT to see the injustice
Elle, phd calls on the progressive blogosphere to get your purportedly progressive foundation in order:
Do you know these people? Aside from the fact that they were unbelievably brave and principled?
Do you ever wonder why Rosa Parks instead of Claudette Colvin (who’d refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, AL, bus nine months before Mrs. Parks?) was the face of the Montgomery bus boycott?
Do you ever wonder why this picture of Elizabeth Eckford remaining composed in the face of Hazel Massery’s vitriol was such an important image to promote?
Do you ever wonder why sit-in participants had to be so well-dressed, so calm, so “respectable?”
Well, of course you know. The people who would be the face of the Civil Rights Movement had to be virtually blameless. They couldn’t give white bigots fodder to dismiss them or the movement. They had to tread a line between being the human face of the movement while upholding super-human reputations and faithfully remaining non-violent.
It was a lot to expect, this demand for perfection, this unspoken implication that African Americans had to be more than human, had to prove themselves worthy of fair treatment, of justice.
But I believe it was necessary then, to stave off attacks from enemies of the movement. Because a flaw, a sign of poor judgment, an episode of human error could be used to question the validity of not only the people involved, but the movement itself.
Well, skip ahead half-a-century, and AAPP makes an observation that struck a chord within me, that “white liberals and white bigots seem to agree.”
See, when faced with the question of how the hell can you be so silent in the face of injustice, of unequal treatment, of blatant racism, rather than admit you dropped the ball* or more importantly, that you just didn’t get it, you reached back and borrowed those old techniques for impugning the movement.
You can’t support the Jena Six (or issues this highlights) because there is no hero?
For people who didn’t know much about the Jena Six, suddenly you were awfully concerned about offenses for which Mychal Bell had been convicted.
Via Ampersand, who also tells us to go read “We Protest” at Afro-Netizen:
We protest because Jena is not a rural Southern town, it is a state of mind - not from the 1950s, but of the here and now in every American town, suburb and city from South to North and sea to shining sea.
SEE ALSO: my The Post-Civil Rights Fallacy.
Mac Collins, no doesn’t mean no
Don’t count Mac out of the lineup to challenge Jim Marshall:
Mac Collins, who lost a tight race to Marshall last year, has said he’s likely to make another run for the Republican nomination. But in late August, he sent the FEC a letter - called a disavowal response - specifically stating that he’s not a candidate for Congress. That letter was in response to an FEC letter to him triggered when Collins hit a certain fundraising threshold.
Don’t read too much into that little formality, the former congressman said Friday.
“They thought I was a candidate and it simply says ‘I’m not a candidate today,’ “ Collins said. “That doesn’t mean in April, when qualifying comes around, I won’t be in it.”
As for campaign funding, Collins has more than $134,000 in the bank. That’s according to an amended FEC filing that Collins filed Thursday to show a $130,000 loan to the campaign and some other cash he had on hand before the latest reporting period ended Sept. 30.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Pogue on the XO
David Pogue reviewed the XO from One Laptop Per Child a couple weeks ago and I am the last blogger in the world to have read it. Actually, I didn’t even. Instead I listened today to the last of his podcasts (too busy with TV he says 
).
[T]he bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. “Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop,” they say.
Clearly, the XO’s mission has sailed over these people’s heads like a 747.
The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough - some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.
In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges - versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.
The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more on a typical business laptop. That’s one reason it gets such great battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to recharge or power the machine.
Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO’s color screen is bright and, at 200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear and readable, it’s almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery lasts even longer.
The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops see each other, instantly, without any setup - even when there’s no Internet connection.
With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos - color-coded to differentiate them - represent other laptops in the area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the XO’s visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with the mouse or click once.)
I’m calling Consumer Affairs on Newegg
Remember I bought a 32” flat panel for under $500? That price included a $50 rebate. Look at the date (for those who don’t want to bother with the clickthrough, May 27, 2007). Here’s the status right now:
It’s going on five months now and they’re still telling me the same thing!!! I’ve about had it. I will register my complaint with the Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs and the Attorney General’s Office.
I know that there is no law… Their ought to be…
How about a time limit. 90 days? With a penalty. On 91 days I get 150%, on 120 days I get 200%. If not that, then how about that vendors must publish a promised by date?
To those of you who say these obligations are heavy-handed government intrusion that will kill the practice of rebates I answer: SO BE IT!
On sex offender registries: do they work?
The focus of the AJC opinion piece today is the injustice of saddling teens with damning label for life but the title of the 2 part series is “Registry without reason.” In it we learn:
Federal law requires states to create registries of offenders convicted of sex crimes or offenses against children. It also requires local law enforcement agencies to provide information to schools, day care centers and parents about sex offenders living in the community. In Georgia, sheriff’s offices publish the photos of newly registered offenders in their jurisdictions in their local newspapers, and the GBI maintains a registry of all offenders.
However, 22 states, including Georgia, have gone further by imposing residency or work limits on offenders on the registry. Of those, Georgia’s law is among the most extreme. [...]
Just last year, the General Assembly again tightened the restrictions. Previous law had barred sex offenders from living or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, parks, rec centers or skating rinks. The 2006 law added churches, swimming pools and school bus stops to that list.
For the first time, the new law also barred sex offenders from holding jobs within 1,000 feet of schools, child care centers or churches.
So do these registries work? In June David Giacalone put together the most impressive collection of resources I’ve found:
You can find a very good discussion of issues presented by the residency restrictions on sex offenders by Lior Strahilevitz and many commentors at PrawfsBlawg’s “Sex Offender Residency Restrictions and the Right to Live Where You Want,” Aug. 3, 2005, and Michael Cernovich reviews many of the relevant legal issues at Crime & Federalsim, in his posting Doe v. Miller: The Legal Theories. Residency restrictions have been in the news a lot recently, and have been covered well by Corey Rayburn Yung at Sex Crimes (e.g., here), and by Prof. Douglas A. Berman, at Sentencing Law and Policy weblog. Last year, Prof. Berman pointed to “A potent and important prosecutorial statement against sex offender residency restrictions” (Feb. 9, 2006). The document was released by the Iowa County Attorneys Association, an organization of county prosecutors seeking “to promote the uniform and efficient administration of the criminal justice system.” In its five-page statement ICAA explains that Iowa’s broad sex offender residency restriction “does not provide the protection that was originally intended and that the cost of enforcing the requirement and the unintended effects on families of offenders warrant replacing the restriction with more effective protective measure.” [...]
For further reading on this topic, I suggest:
1. An important amicus brief to the Ohio Supreme Court, which is quoted at length in the Sex Crimes posting “Amicus Brief in Challenge to Ohio Residency Restrictions” (June 5, 2007). Among many cogent points, the brief argues that “the Ohio statute may increase the risk of recidivism by forcing many sex offenders to move from supportive environments that reduce the offenders’ risk of re-offending. See, e.g., JOAN PETERSILIA, WHEN PRISONERS COME HOME: PAROLE AND PRISONER REENTRY (2003) (concluding that positive social support is critical to the success of released offenders.).”
2. The Sun Sentinel article “Offender fights Palm Beach County ordinance: Tough laws limit where they can live, but critics doubt their effectiveness (June 3, 2007).
3. The Newsday story, “Residency laws for sex offenders under microscope:
Restrictions aim to prevent repeat crimes, but critics say all laws do is prevent offenders from rebuilding lives,” Dec. 2, 2006.4. “More limits on sex offenders won’t help, advocate tells board,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 7, 2007, covering the consideration of residency restrictions in Wentzville, MO.
5. [update: June 14, 2007] “Patchwork of sex offender laws leads to confusion,” CapitalNews 9 [Albany, NY], June 13, 2007.
6. “Montgomery County reacting to Schenectady sex offender restrictions,” WNYT.com, June 14, 2007. [”We’ll take a look at what we have here on the books already, do an assessment in order to keep them from making a mass exodus from Schenectady County or any other county into our county,” said Tom DiMezza, chairman of the Board of Supervisors.] And, “Sex offender says he has no place left to go,” WNYT.com, June 14, 2007 (focus on Richard Matthews, a registered sex offender living in Scotia, NY).
From the Gatehouse News two day sex offender project in August, “The number of sex offense arrests has actually increased in six of the 14 states that have enacted laws telling sex offenders where to live.”
Also note, Pennsylvania has half the number of sex offenders per capita as Georgia and the lowest of any state. Pennsylvania has passed no state law.
Sex laws gone awry: teenagers punished for common acts
In the first of two parts, the AJC says it’s unjust to saddle teens with damning label for life:
Federal law requires states to create registries of offenders convicted of sex crimes or offenses against children. It also requires local law enforcement agencies to provide information to schools, day care centers and parents about sex offenders living in the community. In Georgia, sheriff’s offices publish the photos of newly registered offenders in their jurisdictions in their local newspapers, and the GBI maintains a registry of all offenders.
However, 22 states, including Georgia, have gone further by imposing residency or work limits on offenders on the registry. Of those, Georgia’s law is among the most extreme.
According to a recent count, 14,572 people are now listed on the Georgia registry. While a large number are rapists and child molesters, only 38 are classified by the state as predators, someone “who suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder or attitude that places the person at risk of perpetrating any future predatory sexually violent offenses.”
Obviously, the public has every reason and right to know the whereabouts of those offenders, 12 of whom are behind bars. Just as obviously, the sex offender registry should include those convicted of rape and child molestation, and place restrictions on their activities.
However, the registry doesn’t need to include the lowest level offenders, least of all teenagers punished for sex acts that, unfortunately, are now common among high school students. Half of teens ages 15 to 19 have had oral sex, according to a 2005 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. That does not mean that half of teens belong on a sex-offender registry.
Unfortunately, changing state law to remove people such as Whitaker and Wilson is difficult. Instead, the instinct of politicians is always to toughen such restrictions, often without thinking through questions of effectiveness or fairness.
For those who haven’t heard this here before, please read William Saletan in Slate on rethinking the age of consent. He offers the most nuanced, thoughtful and appropriate direction for an answer I’ve seen. He distinguishes between physical, cognitive and emotional maturity and tosses out a starting point that needs to be discussed and debated:
I’d draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I’d lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I’d come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I’d discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you’re 35, “she’s legal” isn’t good enough.
What I wouldn’t do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12. I know the idea of sex at that age is hard to stomach. I wish our sexual, cognitive, and emotional maturation converged in a magic moment we could call the age of consent. But they don’t.
The entire piece cries out to be read and understood.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Gutsy Gibbon early reviews
This latest release, dubbed “Gutsy Gibbon,” proves that Ubuntu Linux can compete with and, in some cases, trump Windows as an everyday desktop system when it comes to pure usability.
Gamers and hardcore media hounds may still feel left out—DVDs were a little bit tricky, and the lack of support for popular games, a long-time Linux gripe, is still evident here—but we found playing music and watching movies in the new Ubuntu to be every bit as pleasant as it is under OS X or Windows.
Gutsy Gibbon is certainly easier to install and set up than Windows Vista, and it’s very close to matching Mac OS X when it comes to making things “just work” out of the box. Wi-Fi, printing, my digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after installation—no drivers or other software required. [...]
Ubuntu and the GNOME Desktop team have put considerable effort into improving the user experience for accessing many of Linux’s under-the-hood options. A new graphical interface makes it much easier to make adjustments to monitor settings and set up a dual-monitor workstation—both of which previously required using the command line.
Beyond these key enhancements, Gutsy Gibbon incorporates some of Mac OS X’s most useful desktop traits to improve the user experience. New to this release is fast user-switching, a mimic of the same feature in OS X for switching between user accounts without logging out. Another nod to Apple is the improved Spotlight-like applet designed to search the hard drive and act as an application launcher. Printing has also been overhauled, and each print dialog now features a default virtual “PDF printer” which allows any application to output PDF files, something Mac OS X users will recognize.
If you’ve been considering making the switch from Windows or Mac, Ubuntu makes the process painless. It’s ability to seamlessly import your settings, music and data from a Windows partition erases one of the most pressing barriers for new users. And once you’re in, the learning curve is minimal. In fact, besides requiring a little futzing to get multimedia playback set up, Gutsy Gibbon is about as easy as Linux gets.
I will admit to being a Linux desktop nonbeliever. It feels a bit like yesterday’s battle fought with the wrong weapons: geekiness rather than ease of use. There’s a chance--still a slim one, but a chance nonetheless--that Ubuntu will change that.
Asay links to three reviews. Here are screenshots.
Arrested for standing still
In NYC’s Times Square no less:
[W]hen Matthew Jones of Brooklyn lingered on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in the early morning of June 12, 2004, gabbing with friends as other pedestrians tried to get by, something unusual happened: He was arrested for it.
A police officer said Mr. Jones was impeding other pedestrians and charged him with disorderly conduct.
He’s gone all the way to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which heard arguments Wednesday:
Nancy E. Little, Mr. Jones’s lawyer, said that neither the police nor the prosecutors claimed that he was doing anything other than standing on the sidewalk with friends - an activity, she said, that is not entirely without precedent in Manhattan. [...]
[O]n Wednesday, Mr. Jones’s circumstances appeared to reach a friendly audience before the Court of Appeals.
“Isn’t that lawful conduct?” wondered Judge Robert S. Smith. Later he added, “Your conduct can’t be illegal just because an officer noticed it.”
His colleague Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. questioned what other violations might attract law enforcement attention.
“All I could think of was a bunch of lawyers from the New York City Bar Association standing around trying to figure out where to have lunch,” Judge Pigott said. (The association has offices a block and a half from Times Square.)
Via Blog for Democracy.
SCHIP epilogue
It looks to me like both Barrow and Marshall voted their districts. Barrow’s sitting pretty (er, everything’s relative, we’re talking Georgia) with no challenger in sight; Marshall got in on a razor thin margin (though he ran an admired campaign) and is doing what it takes to stay. Still it seems he’s just getting by.
So, much as I might have wished he’d have voted the other way, I’d rather have a Democrat than a Republican.
And I’m guessing Marshall will sign on to whatever compromise they come up with.
LATER: Alan I. Abramowitz, the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory, parses problems with the Gallup SCHIP poll. Via DemFromCT, whose got more good SCHIP Stories: In The Aftermath.
Money corrupts. Jay Rockefeller?
From Wired’s Threat Level, Democratic Lawmaker Pushing Immunity Is Newly Flush With Telco Cash:
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans.
He has also recently benefited from some interesting political contributions.
Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).
In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.
But that changed around the same time that the companies began lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions for their alleged participation in secret, warrantless surveillance programs that targeted Americans.
The Spring ‘07 checks represent 86 percent of money donated to Rockefeller by Verizon employees since at least 2001.
AT&T executives discovered a fondness for Rockefeller just a month after Verizon execs did and over a three-month span, collectively made donations totaling $19,350.
AT&T Vice President Fred McCallum began the giving spree in May with a $500 donation. 22 other AT&T high fliers soon followed with their own checks.
Prior to that burst of generosity, the only AT&T employee donation to Rockefeller was a $300 contribution in 2001. That supporter did not identify herself as a company executive.
When asked about the contributions, an AT&T spokesman told THREAT LEVEL: “AT&T employees regularly and voluntarily participate in the political process with their own funds.” [READ ON]
Making Moonshine
Jarrard and Moss were indicted by a federal grand jury on July 24, 2007, on charges of unlawfully manufacturing, possessing, transporting, and transferring liquor ("moonshine"), and related tax evasion charges. The pair operated a still on United States government property in the Chattahoochee National Forrest area in Rabun County during 2005 and 2006.
If you can make your own wine and beer, why not hard liquor? The feds said it was because of the lead but Slate’s Michelle Tsai explains it’s really all about the money:
Because the liquor is worth more to the government than beer or wine. Uncle Sam takes an excise tax of $2.14 for each 750-milliliter bottle of 80-proof spirits, compared with 21 cents for a bottle of wine (of 14 percent alcohol or less) and 5 cents for a can of beer. No one knows exactly how much money changes hands in the moonshine trade, but it’s certainly enough for the missing taxes to make a difference: In 2000, an ATF investigation busted one Virginia store that sold enough raw materials to moonshiners to make 1.4 million gallons of liquor, worth an estimated $19.6 million in lost government revenue. In 2005, almost $5 billion of federal excise taxes on alcohol came from legally produced spirits.
Until 1978, it was illegal to home-brew any alcoholic beverage-even wine and beer. But a growing number of oenophiles and beer connoisseurs wanted to make their own, and they helped pressure Congress to decriminalize home-brews across the country. Today, federal rules say a household with two adults can brew up to 200 gallons of wine and the same amount of beer each year. (A few states have their own laws prohibiting the practice.) The 1978 law didn’t legalize moonshining, though; you still can’t brew spirits for private consumption. It is kosher, however, to own a still and process alcohol-but only if you’re using the alcohol as fuel and you have a permit from the ATF. (In some states, you can purchase a legal version of moonshine from commercial distillers.)
So what about the lead?
One study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine in September 2003 found that more than half of moonshine drinkers have enough lead in their bloodstream to exceed what the CDC calls a “level of concern.”
That sounds pretty bad to me.
