DEI Equals White Hatred

From a NY Times op-ed:

Unfortunately, the D.E.I. policies that followed at Anheuser-Busch were none of the above. In 2021 the company started using online dashboards that gave managers a breakdown of their employee base by demographic characteristics.

Then the company created annual performance targets linked to the company’s environmental, social and governance strategy, of which D.E.I. was one component, for thousands of employees. It was clear to me that if teams didn’t check the right boxes, managers could be punished. Promotions could be withheld. Bonuses could be lost. That year, senior executives, including me, attended weekly meetings to discuss D.E.I. initiatives. These meetings often distracted from more critical business matters, like the fact that the company risked losing employees as the Great Resignation set in. (Anheuser-Busch declined to comment for this article.)

Anheuser-Busch was hardly alone. At least 70 big companies — from Airbnb to G.E. — had set public targets for gender diversity hiring. Among the worst examples of efforts to accomplish D.E.I. goals was a diversity training course offered to Coca-Cola employees via a third-party platform that urged workers to “be less white,” which the presentation helpfully defined as being “less oppressive,” “less arrogant” and “less ignorant.” A course in Kentucky reportedly told nurses that “implicit bias kills,” that white privilege is a “covert” form of racism and that nurses may contribute to “modern-day lynchings in the workplace.”

Companies, schools, and other institutions have been anti-White for decades, with peak DEI following the death of George Floyd.

Schools Conspire to Sexually Abuse Children

The NY Times reports:

Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.

When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.

Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her?

It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.

“There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper, and in the classroom, our daughter was our son,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. ...

he asked for hormones and surgery to remove his breasts. Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety. He had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, and, to his parents, seemed not to know exactly who he was yet, because he had repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation. ...

The public school that Mrs. Bradshaw’s son attends is one of many throughout the country that allow students to socially transition — change their name, pronouns, or gender expression — without parental consent. ...

These disputes are unfolding as Republicans rally around “parental rights,” a catchall term for the decisions parents get to make about their children’s‌ upbringing. ...

Guidelines on social transitioning vary widely among school districts. Some states, such as California, New Jersey, and Maryland, expressly advise schools not to disclose information about students’ gender identity without their permission, while others offer antidiscrimination guidance that is open to interpretation. ...

One mother said her middle-schooler had secretly changed names and pronouns without her knowledge, even though she had worked as a teacher at the same school. Another mother shared how high school teachers had hidden her teenager’s social transition from her until graduation because they thought she wouldn’t be supportive enough. A mother of a 14-year-old who had spent time in an inpatient therapy facility said she had sent her school a letter from the student’s psychiatrist outlining concerns that the school had ignored. ...

Courts have ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment, parents get to make medical and mental health decisions for their children, as well as direct their education and upbringing in other ways, unless they are abusive or unfit. But lawyers for schools have countered that parental rights aren’t absolute. Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Education has said that discriminating against students based on gender identity violates federal policy, although its guidance doesn’t specifically address parental rights.

This is really sick. These school policies are extremely destructive. The courts say that parents have constitutional rights, but the Biden administration ignores them for the sake of sexually grooming children.

No, the schoolteacher is not your child's mom. She is a sexual predator.

Update: Here is an essay by Jewish journalist Jesse Singal against much of the school secrecy.

There are clearly some situations where school should be a safe haven for kids who are experimenting with different ideas or ways of expressing themselves, and where teachers should let them do so without the risk of parental interference. If a male student from a conservative religious household were, within the security of his school walls, dressing in a feminine manner, it would be quite inappropriate for a teacher to rat him out to his parents — for many of the same reasons it would be inappropriate for a student from a conservative religious household to be ratted out for reading Carl Sagan’s and Bertrand Russell’s arguments against Christianity in the school library.

So a Jew with no kids thinks that anti-parent treachery is okay as long as it undermines Christianity.

Tattoos are a Mark of the Uncivilized

Americans have freedom, and China is under the dictatorial rule of Communists. Here is the latest example.

The UK BBC TV reports:

Footballers who play for China's national team have been banned from getting tattoos - and advised to remove ones they have - under a new directive. ...

In Chinese culture a stigma has been attached to tattoos - in the past they were used to brand criminals and the tattoo still has links to organised crime groups in east Asia. Tattoos among ethnic groups were often seen as a mark of the uncivilised.

They are disapproved of by China's ruling Communist Party, but have become increasingly popular among young Chinese. ...

Last December, a women's university football match in China had to be called off after players were told they were not allowed to have dyed hair.

The match organisers, the National Youth Campus Football League, said in a statement at the time: "Athletes at all stages shall not have tattoos, dye their hair, wear weird hairstyles, or wear any accessories, otherwise they will be ineligible for the competition."

Update: A Chinese woman reports in the NY Times:

China is facing serious challenges on multiple fronts: Great power competition with the United States. Trade disputes. The future of Taiwan. But that doesn’t mean it’s too preoccupied to escalate a battle of another sort on the home front.

The Chinese government, you see, has been fighting what state news outlets have called a “masculinity crisis” for the past few years, with one top official warning that “effeminate” men in popular culture were corrupting “a generation.” The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece decreed that young men need to have “toughness and strength” and censors have blurred out male celebrities’ earrings in television and online appearances. ...

These women’s embrace of a more fluid form of masculinity is not a phenomenon the party should dismiss. Well-educated and financially independent, these women are bucking gender norms themselves by turning away from matrimony and motherhood and are proving to be resistant to the party’s push to boost marriages and births to offset the effects of an aging population.

So the NYT wants Chinese men to be gender fluid, and Chinese women to turn away from marriage and motherhood.

The government’s idea of the ideal male reads like an outdated description of 1950s gender norms: Muscular, reliable, career-oriented providers. The “masculine spirit” requires physical and mental fitness as well as “strong will power,” the Ministry of Education said earlier this year.

Yeah, they hate manly men.

Professors defend Eugenics

Philosopher Peter Singer is famous for arguing that some animals should have more rights than handicapped people, and other outrageous ideas, and now co-authors this paper:

In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. ... Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended ...

The term ‘eugenics’ (which means ‘good birth’) was coined by Francis Galton in 1883 to capture the idea that we should use insights from the new science of hered-ity to improve the welfare of future people (Levine 2017). But as Galton understood the term, eugenics involved both the study of heredity, and the use of this knowl-edge to by parents to shape their reproductive choices. It is more common now to sharply distinguish the study of genetics (a term that wasn’t coined until 1905) from eugenics. For example, in their recent book The Ethics of the New Eugenics MacKellar and Bechtel define eugenics as involving ‘strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner which is considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child, a community, or humanity in general’ (2016, p. 3). If we use this definition, many contemporary bioethicists support eugenics ...

The important conclusion is this: everyone who considers pre-natal testing justifi-able, or who thinks women should be free to weigh genetic information in the selec-tion of a spouse or a sperm donor is a eugenicist.

This is becoming a hot issue because of CRISPR, but the debate goes back 140 years. For decades, it was an obvious good that most sensible intellectuals endorsed. Then it became so unpopular that few dared to even use the term. For decades, the subject was considered unworthy of debate.

It is worthy of debate. As the paper notes, many eugenics ideas have quietly become accepted without using the term.

Population control is similarly controversial. Libertarian Jacob Sullum writes:

In a 2015 HuffPost essay titled "In Praise of China's One-Child Policy," Israeli environmentalist Alon Tal cited the famines that killed an estimated 45 million Chinese in the late 1950s and early '60s as evidence that strict population control was necessary. ...

The assumption that coercion was necessary to reduce China's birth rate is contradicted by trends in other developing countries that never adopted such a policy.

The Libertarian view seems to be that people have a right to make a billion excess starving babies if they want to. The better strategy is to make all the women fat and lazy, so then they would not want kids.

China is a horrible Communist country, but at least they make long-term planning for the good of their nation.

Libertarian open borders

Libertarians often argue for open borders. They usually claim to be following abstract general principles, and ignore the fact that they are letting in people who will destroy all those abstract principles. Here is an example:

He thinks that as a matter of fact, banning certain immigrants would help prevent an illiberal culture from forming. He might respond that, given the facts, we don’t need to censor people, indoctrinate them, or ban certain religions. He might be right. But we can still ask him, “Would you in principle be willing to do those things, if the facts were different? If, e.g., allowing people to convert to Islam turned out to be just as dangerous as you think allowing immigrants from Afghanistan, would you favor banning Islam, in order to maintain a liberal culture committed to the rule of law?” We doubt he’d say yes.

Yes, we can have free speech, freedom of religion, and democracy as long as we do not let in too many people who are opposed to those principles.

Islam is not just a religion. It is a belief system that is opposed to those libertarian principles.

If half the population wants basic freedoms, and the other half are opposed, then that is a recipe for war. Yes, it is sometimes to fight for freedom. I have no problem saying that. The strange ones are the Libertarians and cuckservatives who promote policies that will ultimately destroy what they stand for.

Feds refuse to look at terrorist Facebook pages

I posted below about academic leftists pretending to take a great and good moral stance by opposing govt surveillance. Now we have a good example of how such stances are killing people. ABC News reports:

Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end the secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, according to a former senior department official.

“During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process,” John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.

I am all in favor of privacy and civil liberties, but we have jihadi Ialamic terrorists applying for visas to come to the USA, and declaring their allegiance to ISIS on their Facebook pages, and our immigration officials are not allowed to check it out!

This is really sick. People are saying that it is against common sense, but that understates the problem. We have shitlibs, cuckservatives, and leftist elites who are doing everything to destroy this country. I hate to think what electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 could do.

Rights, emojis, drugs, dating market

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist (and now retired professor) Jerry Coyne writes in one of his anti-religion diatribes:

In general I don’t like discussions of “rights,” as their assertion is often a way to shut down discussion. Let’s instead talk of consequences: the consequences for society’s well being ...

This sums up a strand of leftist SJW thinking. Sacrifice rights for supposedly better social consequences.

Apple phone now force this:

Apple investigated by Russia for 'homosexual propaganda' over its emojis featuring same-sex couples

Here are the gay emojis. Heteros just get the middle finger.

I posted a defense of logicism against attacks from anti-truth leftist philosophers.

Here is the latest psychiatric drug:

By the time Feifel began hearing about ketamine, he had become frustrated with existing depression drugs. Too often, he says, they just weren't helping his patients.

A major study on antidepressant medication published in 2008 seemed to confirm his suspicions. It found that current antidepressants really aren't much better than a placebo.

Funny how each new drug comes with and admission that all the others don't work.

I looked for Media Matters to comment on the revelation that it was founded and funded by Bill and Hillary Clinton, but instead I found it babbling about Martian climate change. It is funny how the

Martian water announcement was timed to promote a Hollywood movie. This was planned two months ago, but too late to work Martian water into the plot. The whole purpose is to convince people that climate change wiped out life on Mars, so we better not let it happen on Earth. And to increase funding for NASA.

A new book says:

There simply aren't enough college-educated men to go around. For every four college-educated women in my generation, there are three college-educated men. The result? What Birger calls a "musical chairs" of the heart: As the men pair off with partners, unpartnered straight women are left with fewer and fewer options—and millions of them are eventually left with no options at all.

The book is Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game, by Jon Birger, and his blog has reviews.

I do not doubt his facts, or even his advice, but I am sure he is only telling part of the story.

For one thing, while more girls attend and finish college than boys, they are not more educated. The girls concentrate in worthless subjects that give them warped views of the world.

For another, there has been a long list of legal and social changes that have combined to kill the nuclear family, as documented in this book. Many of this changes serve leftist and feminist goals, and make is very much more difficult for a woman to have a traditional family.

It is not true that there is an excess of available women anywhere. The online dating sites all have more men than women. The book says that some areas are better than others for women, but they can advertise in those better areas, if they want. Very few do.

The first comment after one review says:

How about "you wrecked marriage by making it too dangerous for men to marry?"

Roosh V

One of the reasons that Poland is on the decline is because young Polish women are buying into Western pro-sterility ideas, choosing to spend the bulk of their good years searching for stable office work and reality show excitement instead of trying to secure a good man to start a family with. This fact is confirmed by the increased percentage of girls I’m meeting who are on birth control even though they are not in a serious relationship. The current social justice Pope has so far not objected to their newfound lifestyle.

Birger gives this example:

She was in her late 30s, he was in his mid 40s. She really wants to have kids, get married, the whole [thing]. And she's amazing in every way."

That may all be true, but it is unlikely that family was a priority for her when she was in her 20s or even early 30s. She may be amazing, but a large portion of such women have serious negatives, such as obesity, mental illness, or attitudes unsuited for marriage.

As a recent example of legal anti-male family law nuttiness, the Kansas courts have denied parental rights to a sperm donor who wanted to be a dad. But when one did not want to be a dad, he was ordered to pay child support.

Wonder why the Germans are accepting so many Moslem migrants? The people have been intimidated:

Germans who make racist anti-migrant posts could have their children snatched by the state and be fired from their jobs, according to the German Lawyers’ Association.

In an article entitled Racism and parenting: Threatening loss of custody?, lawyer Eva Becker, Chair of the Working Group on Family Law in the German Bar Association, outlines the conditions under which “xenophobic” Facebook posts could lead to parents being targeted.

The NY Times blames Austrian resistance on insufficient ne-Nazifiction:

The Freedom Party’s strident anti-Islam message seems to have struck a chord in a city whose palaces speak of the bygone glory of a multiethnic European empire, and whose public spaces now attest to increasing diversity and a Muslim population of some 12 percent.

“We don’t want an Islamization of Europe,” the party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, told Austria’s public broadcaster as he began his campaign to be Vienna’s mayor. “We don’t want our Christian-Western culture to perish.”

In Germany, such sentiments exist on the fringe of politics. In Austria, which never underwent denazification programs after 1945, the Freedom Party has morphed from its roots in groups of former Nazis to a xenophobic message that it blends with concern for the little guy.

There are some similarities between the current migrant influx into Europe and the barbarian invasions that helped bring down the Roman Empire.

Books about the FBI

There are a couple of new books about the FBI, and here is what I learned. J. Edgar Hoover's secret surveillance programs were explicitly ordered or approved by the President, including FDR and Kennedy. Hoover was a homosexual or cross-dresser. The FBI spied on M. L. King because because his top Jewish advisor was a Communist. Hoover cut off Sen. Joe McCarthy from info because Pres. Eisenhower regarded McCarthy as a political threat. The Watergate scandal was largely the result of the deputy FBI director vindictively sabotaging Pres. Nixon by illegal leaking slanted info from investigations.

Commies and commie sympathizers have always hated Hoover's FBI. If he really had presidential authorization for all of his investigations, then any blame should be on FDR, Kennedy, and the other presidents, not Hoover.

Bogus sex allegations

I commented before that case against Assange is based on denying him his right not to incriminate himself, a right that Americans have.

Assange just lost his British extradition appeal, with this ruling:

Although it is clear a decision has not been taken to charge him, that is because, under Swedish procedure, that decision is taken at a late stage with the trial following quickly thereafter. In England and Wales, a decision to charge is taken at a very early stage; there can be no doubt that if what Mr Assange had done had been done in England and Wales, he would have been charged and thus criminal proceedings would have been commenced. If the commencement of criminal proceedings were to be viewed in this way, it would be to look at Swedish procedure through the narrowest of eyes. On this basis, criminal proceedings have commenced against Mr Assange.

That's it? Sweden wants to interrogate him, but not inform him of the charges against him? And Britain happily extradites him just because Sweden customarily denies suspects the rights that they would have in Britain.

The Assange extradition is based on (1) allegations that might not be crimes outside of Sweden, (2) Sweden's habit of prosecuting men without informing them of the charges against them, and (3) denying what we call the 5A right against self-incrimination. That and Sweden being a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.

On the subject of sex allegations, Jon Stewart is on the attack against Herman Cain with a big rant on what is or is not an allegation. He is a moron. An allegation is an assertion offered without proof. Usually it is an assertion of some sort of wrongdoing. Depending on the context, there may or may not be an implication that a proof is forthcoming. An assertion is a factual assertion. Stewart says that the Cain sexual harassment story is fact, not an allegation, but Cain's unsupported belief about racism is an allegation.

Police Arrest Man With Headless Duck

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- An 18-year-old man was charged with animal cruelty and resisting an officer after witnesses reported the suspect had a headless duck in one hand and a knife in the other. ...

According to the report, witnesses said Main was attempting to show off when he captured and killed a duck, saying he planned on cooking it.

Officers said there was a barbeque grill with a fresh fire blazing on the patio when they arrived. They also said a half-empty bottle of spiced rum was on the patio, and "it was apparent from the suspect's breath and demeanor that he had been consuming alcohol."

So why is this a crime? If this were done by a restaurant, a farmer, or a hunter, no one would question it. Duck is good food, and cutting off its head is as good as what the slaughterhouses do.

I can see where it might be crime to kill someone's pet, or to hunt out of season, but this is not animal cruelty. But this seems to be a trend. I've heard a bunch of stories like this, where someone was arrested for animal cruelty, but where there is no real cruelty. Just someone who disapproved of someone else's treatment of an animal. It makes the law very vague, because there is hardly anything that you can do with an animal that will not cause someone to disapprove.

Violating 5A rights

The NY Times reports:

In his current circumstance, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is more hunted than hunter, fighting extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual misconduct while struggling to maintain the influence of WikiLeaks even as he remains here at Ellingham Hall, ... In December, Mr. Assange was unable to meet the terms of bail because he had no permanent address — he is an itinerant who leads a stateless organization that operates in an online world without borders. Mr. Smith, after consulting his wife, Pranvera Shema, decided they would provide Mr. Assange with an address, a roof over his head and a place to manage his legal case. ... He wears an electronic bracelet, reports to the local police every day and, to the extent he can, continues to push the WikiLeaks agenda. ...

But if Mr. Assange is in compliance with the conditions of his bail, he remains at the margins of the law. Federal authorities in the United States and Australia continue to investigate whether the release of classified information by WikiLeaks constitutes criminal behavior that has endangered various operatives. And Swedish prosecutors are seeking his extradition for questioning — he has yet to be charged — on accusations of sexual misconduct with two women.

So Assange has been held by the UK police for almost a year, and he has not been charged with any crime. In the USA, it is unconstitutional to hold a suspect for even one day under such circumstances. He is only being held for questioning aimed at forcing him to incriminate himself, and in the USA he would have a constitutional fifth amendment right not to do that.

I do not even agree with saying that Assange is fighting "accusations of sexual misconduct", if he has not been charged. He is not even fighting interrogation, since he has agreed to be questioned in London. He is only fighting a very peculiar and oppressive form of Swedish entrapment.

I have read a bunch of articles about Assange, but none has explained this simple fact that Assange is being subjected to what we Americans agree is a fundamental violation of his civil rights. Whether he is a good guy or a bad guy, we should all criticize the UK govt for holding him.

England has no right to self-defense

A UK newspaper reports:

A wealthy family man was arrested on suspicion of murder yesterday after allegedly stabbing a burglar to death with his own knife.

Businessman Vincent Cooke, 39, was relaxing when he heard a knock at the front door of his detached home.

When he answered he was confronted by two men, at least one armed with a knife, who threatened him and tried to force their way into the £350,000 house in the Cheshire stockbroker belt. ...

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke promised that householders who used ‘whatever force necessary’ on intruders in their homes would not be committing a criminal offence.

Promised? It should be written into their constitution, if they had one.

I realize that the UK is more of a parliamentary democracy than a monarchy, but it sounds as if they still have a monarchy mentality. Self-defense is something that they can only do with the king's permission. And they cannot even own guns.

Getting spam from Google

I like Google products, but the company is frustrating to deal with. Google mail does an excellent job of filtering spam, but it tags as spam the messages I get from Google itself. I just got an email from "The Google Books Team", confirming a financial transaction, and Google mail not only marked it as spam but also put it behind a giant red anti-phishing warning:

Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information.

The only link in the email was to the Google Books Partner program.

I have also gotten email from the Google Blogger team, and had it marked as spam.

Currently Google has lawsuits about whether it should be allowed to represent the interests of authors of orphan works. However it is very difficult to get the company to do what I want with my books even when I am filling out their own web forms and explicitly granting permission, and communicating with their own email service. There should be a way to copy orphan works, but Google control is not the answer.

Recording the cops

After Rodney King, you would think that it would be obvious that it is legal to record cops doing their dirty work. Bit it still gets litigated:

It's refreshing, therefore, to read that a Federal Appeals Court has found unconstitutional the arrest of a Massachusetts lawyer who used his phone to video-record an arrest on the Boston Common.

The court even ruled that the lawyer could sue the cops for damages for interfering with his rights.

But a Chicago woman is still being prosecuted for similar recording.

Google book deal killed

The NY Times reports:

Google’s ambition to create the world’s largest digital library and bookstore has run into the reality of a 300-year-old legal concept: copyright.

The company’s plan to digitize every book ever published and make them widely available was derailed on Tuesday when a federal judge in New York rejected a sweeping $125 million legal settlement the company had worked out with groups representing authors and publishers.

Judge Denny Chin said the legal settlement with publishers and authors would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly.”

It was always clear that an opt-in settlement would be legal. The class action lawsuit against Google was based on the premise of protecting the interests of those who do not want to opt-in. The phony settlement was an opt-out deal. Such a settlement cannot possibly be in the interests of the class. The judge was right to kill this deal.

Google is right that copyright is broken in that orphan works get effectively buried for a century. But Congress needs to fix it, and not some sleazy Google deal with some crooked lawyers.

These should be rights, not crimes

In California and some other states, there are procedures for kids to attend public schools outside their home school districts. It is called public school choice, and it ought to be a constitutional right. Apparently it is a crime in Ohio:

An Akron woman was sentenced to 10 days in the Summit County Jail, placed on three years of probation and ordered to perform community service after being convicted of falsifying residency records so that her two children could attend Copley-Fairlawn schools. ...

After seven hours of deliberations, a jury convicted her late Saturday of two counts of tampering with records.

While her two girls were registered as living with her father in Copley Township within the Copley school district, prosecutors maintained that they actually were living with Williams-Bolar on Hartford Avenue in Akron, in subsidized housing provided by the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority. ...

On the tampering conviction, Cosgrove gave Williams-Bolar the maximum prison sentence — five years — for each of the two charges, with the sentences to run concurrently.

I doubt that the jury was told that the mom could get ten years in prison for sending her kids to a better school.

Maybe the mom should be prosecuted for having two kids she cannot support, cutting their dad out of their lives, and living off welfare, but school choice should be a right, not a crime.

In nearly all states it is legal to record govt agents who are threatening your liberty. This ought to be a constitutional right also. But apparently it is a crime with a 5-year prison term in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland:

Ms. Moore, whose trial is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Cook County Criminal Court, is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer. Mr. Drew was charged with using a digital recorder to capture his Dec. 2, 2009, arrest for selling art without a permit on North State Street in the Loop. Mr. Drew said his trial date was April 4.

Both cases illustrate the increasingly busy and confusing intersection of technology and the law, public space and private.

No, this is not confusing. There are probably 100M Americans who have these devices and who see nothing wrong with recording cops.

Crime to report on the cops

The Wash. Post reports:

In early March, Anthony Graber, a 25-year-old staff sergeant for the Maryland Air National Guard, was humming a tune while riding his two-year-old Honda motorcycle down Interstate 95, not far from his home north of Baltimore. On top of his helmet was a camera he often used to record his journeys. The camera was rolling when an unmarked gray sedan cut him off as he stopped behind several other cars along Exit 80. ...

A week later, on March 10, Graber posted his video of the encounter on YouTube. What followed wasn't a furor over the police officer's behavior but over Graber's use of a camera to capture the entire episode.

On April 8, Graber was awakened by six officers raiding his parents' home in Abingdon, Md., where he lived with his wife and two young children. He learned later that prosecutors had obtained a grand jury indictment alleging he had violated state wiretap laws by recording the trooper without his consent.

Here is the Maryland wiretap law:

§ 10-402.
(a) Except as otherwise specifically provided in this subtitle it is unlawful for any person to:

(1) Wilfully intercept, endeavor to intercept, or procure any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication;

(2) Wilfully disclose, or endeavor to disclose, to any other person the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire, oral, or electronic communication in violation of this subtitle; or ...

The law is critisized here and elsewhere.

It should be obvious that this is a wiretap law, and someone wearing a video camera on his head is not doing an "intercept". He is also not "wilfully" violating the law.

It also should be unambiguously legal to videorecord a cop making an arrest or issuing a citation in a public. Posting the recording on YouTube ought to be a free speech right. Many cops now have their own videorecorder to document their actions, including all Maryland state troopers. This motorcyclist has a legitimate complaint against Maryland police procedure, and the only way that he can make his point is to post the video.

More evidence that copyright is broken

From an unofficial Google watcher:

The truth is difficult to find if those that know it have a lot to lose when it's revealed. Three years after Viacom sued YouTube for 1 billion dollars, some pieces of truth are revealed:

"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. " ...

"... The team told senior Google execs that YouTube was a "rogue enabler" of content theft, that its content is all free, and much of it is highly sought after pirated clips and that YouTube's business model is completely sustained by pirated content. " ...

Google will probably have to pay millions of dollars, because YouTube would have never taken off without that pirated content. And yet hardly anyone sees anything wrong with it.

Swiss voters reject animal lawyers

AP reports:

GENEVA – The result was emphatic: Swiss voters don't think abused animals need to have their own lawyers. ...

Official results showed that 70.5 percent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal to extend nationwide a system that has been in place in Zurich since 1992. Some 29.5 percent of voters backed the proposal, with turnout at just over 45 percent.

According to the country's only animal lawyer, Antoine F. Goetschel, public prosecutors are often unsure about animal rights and shy away from pursuing cases ...

Most of his clients are dogs, cows and cats, Goetschel told The Associated Press in a recent interview. Many cases involve the serious abuse of animals, such as deliberate wounding, rape and neglect.

But in one high-profile case last month, Goetschel represented a dead pike after an animal protection group accused the angler who caught it of cruelty for taking 10 minutes to haul the fish in.

The angler was found not guilty.

This article is not a joke. A Swiss lawyer represented a dead pike fish. 30% of the Swiss voted for this nutty law.

I am waiting for Switzerland to get its second animal lawyer. Then they can sue each other when one rabbit rapes another.

Crime to find a coin

Apparently it is a crime in the UK to find a coin:

A woman who found a 700-year-old coin in her garden as a child has become the first person to be convicted of failing to hand in suspected treasure.

Kate Harding, 23, was prosecuted under the Treasure Act after she ignored orders to report the rare find to a coroner.

The article is a little misleading because the prosecution was based on the object being not really a coin, but some sort of coin-like metal token of unknown purpose. But still, why should it be a crime to find a piece of metal in your yard? And why tell the coroner? I thought that a coroner was an official who keeps track of dead bodies.