We have been following the outrageously abusive fines being imposed on citizens for downloading and sharing songs — obscenely large fines allowed by Congress under laws written by lobbyists for the music and movie industries. Law firms have been targeting even people who try to inform citizens of their rights. Now, in one of the most abusive cases involving a former Boston university student, the Supreme Court has refused to review a $675,000 fine against Joel Tenenbaum, 28, for downloading and sharing 30 songs. Despite the general condemnation of these actions, Congress is cowed by pressure from the industry lobby. The most abusive litigation is directed by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Month: May 2012
NYPD Sergeant Lesly Charles is the center of a controversy this morning after the release of a video showing him in a tirade where he speaks of the giant size of his penis and says that committing crimes is okay with him. He was just upset that someone double parked their car.
Thomas Parkin, 52, of Brooklyn was sentenced to 13 years and 8 months in prison for a bizarre crime where he dressed up like his dead mother in a red cardigan and lipstick. Breathing through an oxygen tank, he claimed to be Irene Pruskin who died in 2003 at 77. This would seem to take the Oedipus complex to a whole new level.
It appears that there is nothing quite so inspiring for a Sunday morning like a good old-fashioned homicidal homophobic homily. Pastor Charles L. Worley has propelled himself into the national limelight with a hate-filled sermon that lays his faith-based fantasy for homosexuals — concentration camps with electric fences where they would be left to die off. In what could be viewed as a violation of the tax-exempt status of the church, he rails against President Barack Obama and says that it would be impossible to vote for him.
Continue reading “American Taliban: Pastor Worley and How To Solve The “Homosexual Problem””
We have another video raising questions over the rules relating to free speech for students in high school. This video (below) was taken in North Rowan High School in North Carolina where a teacher screams at a student that he can be arrested for disrespecting President Obama. The teacher went ballistic after a student responded to the account of Mitt Romney bullying a student as a teen by noting that President Obama admitted that he had bullied a student in his youth. [Update: the teacher has been suspended pending investigation].
Richard Celler of Morgan & Morgan has a rather unique approach to depositions. Celler was removed from a case by U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga after scheduling depositions at a Dunkin’ Donut shop, appearing in shorts and teeshirts, drawing pictures of male genitalia to mock opposing counsel, and playing video games like Angry Birds during depositions. This case in Miami shows another recent case of a lawyer in Texas who was charged with sanctionable conduct for a bizarre series of emails to opposing counsel concerning the scheduling of depositions. I thought I had been in some heated depositions in my career, but I now feel like a mere piker practicioner.
Spencer Freeman Smith, 32, a partner at the San Francisco firm of Smith Patten was arrested this week on suspicion of felony hit-and-run and manslaughter in connection with the death and hit-and-run of Bo Hu, 57, of China, who was bicycling along a road when he was hit by a Mercedes-Benz. Police traced pieces of Smith’s brand new 2012 Mercedes-Benz CLS550 to his home.
I have posted some of the best pranks from around the world with the leading contender being the faux protest prank. However, this prank by a Japanese crew is a clear contender.
The Word
by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
Originally, I drafted this article with a preface about the story Michael Hastings recently broke on BuzzFeed about an amendment to the latest defense authorization bill that would “legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences.” However, as I worked on it this morning, our very own poet laureate and research librarian extraordinaire Elaine Magliaro cut me off at the pass with her own excellent article on the subject. So instead of repeating the points she makes which illustrate why understanding propaganda is important, I will refer you to her post “How about Some Government Propaganda for the People Paid for by the People Being Propagandized?”
Now that the kid gloves have come off regarding the governmental efforts to control your mind by controlling both your information and how you receive it, let’s discuss the nature of propaganda. Now more than ever, it is important to know the basics of how propaganda works. Since words are the basic building block of the English language, we’ll start with asking what is propaganda, look at some general history of the practice, consider the importance of meaning of words, the ideas of connotation and denotation, and the process of selecting “value loaded” words.
Continue reading “Propaganda 101: What You Need to Know and Why or . . .”
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
As a die-hard White Sox fan (sorry Professor Turley!), it was nice to see the White Sox beat the Cubs in the first two games of the 3 game series at Wrigley Field. Now, I am not writing this article to rub Cub fan’s noses in it, but rather to discuss one of the Cub’s owners Super Pac political activities and the Cubs ownership that is looking for corporate welfare to help renovate venerable Wrigley Field. I understand that many ball parks are subsidized by the voters, including beautiful Cellular Field on the South Side of Chicago. However, there is a big difference in what the Cubs organization wants to do and how they are going about it. Continue reading “The Clout of the Chicago Cubs”
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Investigative journalist Michael Hastings recently broke a story on BuzzFeed about an amendment that is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill. The amendment would “legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences.” Hasting reported that the amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon. He says the “tweak” to the bill would “neutralize” two other acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—which were passed in order “to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.” Rep. Mark Thornberry (R, Texas) and Rep. Adam Smith (D, Washington) are co-sponsors of the bipartisan amendment.
Hastings says that “the new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public.” One Pentagon official who is concerned about the amendment told Hastings, “It removes the protection for Americans. It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.” The official added that there are “senior public affairs” officers in the Department of Defense who would like to “get rid” of the Smith-Mundt Act “and other restrictions because it prevents information activities designed to prop up unpopular policies—like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Desmond Hatchett is petitioning the court for entry of an order reducing his child support. In tough economic times that is not uncommon. What is uncommon is that Hatchett has fathered 30 children by 11 different women. The children range in age from toddlers to 14-years-old. Hatchett earns minimum wage and half of his check is apportioned among the children. That means some mothers receive as little as $1.49 per month for one child. The prolific father has previously appeared in court in 2009 to answer charges of failing to pay any support. Then he had 21 children and promised to stop procreating. Hatchett explains the current situation this way, ” [W]ell you know what we mean, I had four kids in the same year. Twice.”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Is there massive voter fraud or is this claim simply a cover for voter disenfranchisement? Those who claim that the voter fraud meme is itself a fraud, have been given a prime piece of evidence in the form of the latest James O’Keefe video. O’Keefe’s video intended to show two examples of non-citizens, and one example of a dead person, who are registered as voters in North Carolina. The video was immediately praised by Michelle Malkin, Breitbart.com, and The Daily Caller.
Continue reading “James O’Keefe – Voter Disenfranchisement’s Best Friend”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) : “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
Since the beginning of its existence on this planet untold millennia past, life has been a dangerous proposition for all creatures. The big fish eating the little fish has been the model for most interactions between living entities. All living entities have been either predator and/or prey. Evolution needed to develop in each entity methods of recognizing danger and thus trying to ensure that it will be able to replicate itself through procreation. Each species of course has different means of recognizing danger in its environment and various diverse senses for doing so. The importance of these senses varies by species and sometimes varies infra-species. Its own hierarchy of life preserving senses and activities can change in a species as it evolves to meet each new environmental challenge.
As humanity evolved there is no doubt that there were variations in the relative importance of our five senses at different times in our evolutionary history. What many humans believe is our most important attribute is of course the collective of our senses known as intelligence and the ability to reason. We are the singular species of this planet that has developed incredibly complex means of communication leaving us as the seeming masters of our world. Nevertheless, most of what we know of reality is our personal constructs of information that our senses have perceived and then compressed into a usable conception of our world, which despite the breadth of any one individual’s intelligence, is merely an approximation of the whole. However, to continue existence each human must make certain choices based on their personal perception of their environment. Sometimes these choices are successful ad sometimes they are disastrous. Since the arc of human existence has presented an ever-widening range of information, we have learned to edit and approximate much in own personal constructs. An example of this is that behavioral science has determined that we develop pictures in our mind of particular individuals and in our subsequent encounters rely mainly on those original pictures. Anyone who has raised a child knows that it is hard to see them as they grow, as anything more than the infant they were. While it’s true our picture of the child changes with growth, the lasting overlay of impression is usually quite dated. This is at least my conception of human perception.
With this concept in mind let me bring this post to the America of today, illustrated as a microcosm of the difficulty humans have in living with each other. Our politics have become perhaps more polarized and deadlocked than at any point in our history. Many people respond to each new issue that crosses public consciousness based on their personal sense of correctness, informed by a long developed political belief system that structures the nature of their response. The deeper ingrained this belief that there is only one path to political truth, the more mechanical the response becomes, and the less capable becomes the individual’s ability to react to the information from its environment to save itself. Those species unable to evolve to meet each new challenge to their existence became extinct. As humans our evolution has become more than just meeting actual physical challenges, we have evolved to the point that we represent the greatest danger to ourselves. Human existence is now dependent upon collectively being able to comprehend the dangers we face. How can we understand these dangers if our only method of understanding them is filtered through an ideological certainty that categorizes them based rote methodology? This is my attempt to try to make sense of why our political scene today seems so irrationally skewed by the inability to collectively recognize and adapt to dangers. Continue reading “The Lure of Certainty is Fear of Uncertainty”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor at Florida A&M University, has written a short Kindle book entitled For Better or Worse Reasoning: A Philosophical Look at Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage. In this book, LaBossiere reviews the “arguments” against same-sex marriage and points out the fallacious reasoning behind them. I would like to highlight a couple of the fallacious arguments, but for a complete treatment I suggest you download his book which is only $0.99.