Bloodstar
Liberals and Libertarians on Everything and Nothing
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BloodstarLiberals and Libertarians on Everything and Nothing |
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Walt Disney Co. agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment Inc. for about $4 billion in cash and stock, adding comic-book characters Iron Man and Spider-Man to Disney’s lineup of princesses and live-action stars.
Spiderman v Cruella? Venom v the Little Mermaid? The crossover potential is limitless! /sarcasm
and another piece of my childhood dies a horrible Disney death.
This one is important for everyone but no one probably even knows The judge tossed out the conviction against Lori Drew (warning PDF Document) Why did they do it? well Orin Kerr fills us in:
The reasoning of the opinion is that whatever unauthorized access means, it cannot mean mere violation of Terms of Service without more. Such a reading of the statute would render the statute unconstitutionally void for vagueness because it would give the government almost unlimited power to prosecute any Internet user and wouldn’t give citizens sufficient notice as to what of their Internet conduct was criminal.
Effectively, in the effort to convict Lori Drew of *something*, the prosecution attempted a very nasty and bad interpretation of a law which would have criminalized everyone who uses the internet. If the prosecution appeals, that’ll give some indication of their desire to make sure we’re all criminals.
From Calculated Risk:
I’ll try to explain this graph. What it shows is the correlations between the percentage of bankruptcies per 1000 people, versus the percentage of home loans either delinquent or in foreclosure.
And the states with the highest rate of delinquent home loans?
State Populate Bankrupcies Loans delinquent.
FL 18,328,340 2.5K 1.39 22.8%
NV 2,600,167 8,151 3.13 21.3%
AZ 6,500,180 9,069 1.40 16.3%
MI 10,003,422 1.8K 1.83 15.8%
RI 1,050,788 1,345 1.28 15.8%
MS 2,938,618 3,613 1.23 15.7%
IN 6,376,792 1.3K 2.06 15.5%
CA 36,756,666 5.4K 1.46 15.2%
GA 9,685,744 1.8K 1.90 14.3%
OH 11,485,910 1.9K 1.65 14.3%
Source: NASA
Source: icanhascheezburger
On the Flow
Several hours peace and calm
forget the pain; regain my mind.
Laying on the warm soft bed
Til you decide to come inside.
Leather whips and chains that bind
won’t make me quake; won’t make me cry,
it’s when you speak in tones of hate
it’s then my insides start to shake.
Pull the trigger like a gun.
The feeling grows and starts to run
through my veins so thick and black
no stopping now, no going back.
I despise what I become
when you start to have your fun.
Love and hate soon intertwine
Then I tell you all
I’m fine
In an interesting hypothesis, why is depression considered a disease or disorder or some sort of Brain Malfunction and not an evolutionary adaptation which it appears to be?
One reason to suspect that depression is an adaptation, not a malfunction, comes from research into a molecule in the brain known as the 5HT1A receptor. The 5HT1A receptor binds to serotonin, another brain molecule that is highly implicated in depression and is the target of most current antidepressant medications. Rodents lacking this receptor show fewer depressive symptoms in response to stress, which suggests that it is somehow involved in promoting depression. (Pharmaceutical companies, in fact, are designing the next generation of antidepressant medications to target this receptor.) When scientists have compared the composition of the functional part rat 5HT1A receptor to that of humans, it is 99 percent similar, which suggests that it is so important that natural selection has preserved it. The ability to “turn on” depression would seem to be important, then, not an accident.
For those who have suffered through (or are still suffering from) depression, the costs can be tremendous, but the benefits are also interesting:
[Read more →]
Let’s work on immigration reform:
U.S. Border Patrol manpower has been doubled since 2005 — to 20,000, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.
The Department of Homeland Security has spent billions of dollars creating physical and high-tech “virtual” barriers along the border with Mexico, and the DHS last year deported 350,000 illegals caught in the U.S., a 20 percent increase over 2007.
And the Bush and Obama administrations have toughened enforcement of laws against the hiring of illegal immigrants, staging large-scale raids on various businesses to make the point.
Let’s get to work people. You’re not going to hand wave people who are here away. So do something to make them productive member of society instead of simply sticking your fingers in your ears and saying ‘la la la they should just go away.’
I haven’t had a chance to read the entire opinion, but those of you in a legal profession are encouraged to do so (you can find the decision here *warning PDF Document*). Effectively, from what I can tell, the courts are declaring that you cannot do any plain view searches of computers.
They created a set of prophylactic rules that has the effect of banning plain view through ex ante restrictions. The Ninth Circuit took a truly remarkable step: It ordered the government to behave exactly as it would behave if the plain view exception did not exist. The court wrote out a list of ways that the government would act if there were no plain view exception, and then ordered the government to follow those rules as a condition of getting the warrant in the first place. The plain view exception is gutted by ensuring the government will never be in a position to try to offer the evidence to a court in the first place.
You can see this in the new rules that the en banc court handed down. The rules are complicated, but the theme is that the government can never get to a position in which they will discover evidence in plain view. First, the government has to promise that it won’t use any evidence in plain view. Then, the forensic search either will be undertaken by a third party who won’t share the evidence with the government or else a government forensic agent who can’t share the evidence with investigators. All evidence has to be returned, or in the case of contraband, destroyed. These rules will revolutionize the computer forensic industry, and cause a tremendous amount of disarray for computer crime investigators. But one thing they won’t do is let the government come across evidence in plain view anymore when the government executes a computer warrant.
Fascinating, In other words, the police won’t be able to do the searches directly, and must tell the third party what they’re looking for. and will only be allowed access to *that* specific information.
Will this get appealed, you bet. Maybe not for this case, but for a case where the outrage that someone may ‘get away with something’ could help push the Supreme Court into ruling in favor of the Government.
My tentative sense of this case is that Supreme Court review is likely. Indeed, I would think that is the point of the exercise. A decision this far out of the usual bounds is basically asking for Supreme Court review; parts of the opinion seem to be written more as food for thought for the Justices than as a traditional judicial decision.
Thoughts?
As of Today, we’ve had 47 straight days without sunspots, and so far this year, more than 79% of the days have been without sunspots. to put how quiet this is in perspective, 190 days is the 8th quietest year since 1900 and we still have over 4 months to go to accumulate more days. The record since 1900 is 311 days of sunspotless activity. It’s possible, but unlikely, that we can reach that record, but the second quietest year (last year) of 266 days is certainly well within reach.
In addition to the lack of sunspots, the sunspots we are having are reduced in magnetic strength, from just over 3000 Gauss in 1995 to a fairly steady decline down to 2100 Gauss this year. While no one is sure what the implications are, it’s possible that the drop in field strength could lead to another great solar minima similar to what was seen during the Maunder Minimum.
Dick Cheney has now accused the Obama Administration of politicizing the Justice Department…after his Administration criminalized the Justice Department.
around 22N 62W is a system starting to get going. While not classified, there certainly is enough warm water and atmospheric conditions are favorable for the system to grow and build. The fun part is the track of the system. There is an old front stalled out across Florida stretching up the Atlantic Seaboard to the Carolinas. Generally this would force the system to steer NW then N and NE away from land. However as the front decays, the system may have an opportunity to shift back to a more Westerly track. That is until the next cold front come slipping down and steering currents push the storm away.
Now the questions are, will the storm recurve away now? will it recurve a bit, then head towards the coast only to be picked up again, or will it somehow manage to slip between the systems and strike the US coast. There is a low confidence on any of these ideas right now. The storm still hasn’t fully developed, and *where* the system develops has as great an impact on the path ultimately takes.
It may seem odd that 50 – 100 miles can make a huge difference but weather is a Chaotic system and until the center actually forms, it’s difficult to determine what’s going to happen.
And of course, there’s always a chance nothing will develop.
And this is what we do to people that in many cases had not committed a crime or were involved in activities against the United States, In otherwords, this is what we did to innocent people:
(1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees’ faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it “poignant”); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one’s bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) “hard takedowns” (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them).
Greenwald has more detailed information. But one thing that also struck me, is the idea that somehow the operatives doing this thought that they were just following orders is a meme going around, when in fact according to the CIA IG report, there were repeated concerns about being prosecuted later or being tried for War Crimes at some point down the road. We beat people to death, We drowned people, and they died, because they wouldn’t give up information. Information they didn’t have, because they didn’t know anything.
That so much of America doesn’t care, is an indication of how deep the cancer has spread. We must become better than this. and we must find a way to become better than this.
I find it fascinating that the price of homes was reported as rising from the start of the year by some news agencies (IE the radio as I was driving to work), but the year over year price is still going down:
U.S. home prices fell 6.1 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier as a record number of foreclosures eroded the value of real estate.
The rate of decline slowed from the first quarter’s 7.1 percent drop, according to a report today from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Measured monthly, prices rose 0.5 percent in June after a 0.6 percent monthly gain in May, the Washington-based agency said.
Prices fell in June in four of nine U.S. regions covered by the report as banks seized real estate from delinquent borrowers. About 4.3 percent of U.S. homes, or one in 25 properties, were in foreclosure in the second quarter, according to an Aug. 20 report from the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. That’s the most in three decades of data.
Of course, what people aren’t mentioning about home prices going up this quarter is how much effect speculators are having along with people using the homebuyer tax rebate. The stimulated demand is helping but as more people slip underwater, the glut is going to continue, and get worse.