Archive for May, 2009
U.S. Supreme Court Hands Medical Marijuana Major Victory
Ryan Grim | HuffPost: The U.S. Supreme Court handed medical marijuana patients and advocates a resounding victory on Monday, refusing to hear a case brought by San Diego County, which has long chafed at implementing statewide medical marijuana laws.
The state of California, in an effort to systematize the 1996 voter-approved initiative, required localities to implement identification card programs for patients with doctor approval in 2004. Such ID cards are required to enter medical marijuana shops in California and can be shown to police officers who find patients in possession of marijuana.
San Diego County, however, argued that the federal ban on marijuana trumps the state law, meaning they are not required to follow the state law. The county filed suit in 2006. Both the San Diego Superior Court and the Fourth District Court of Appeals rejected the argument, which was followed by the California Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case…
The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible
The Bush administration’s Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.
Top row from left: Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales. Second row: David Addington, William “Jim” Haynes, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, George Tenet
Marcy Wheeler, Salon: On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, “It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”
Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to “preauthorize” torture…
Harvard Law Professor Tells Judge That P2P Filesharing is ‘Fair Use’
Nate Anderson, arstechnica: Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can’t be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders.
These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum. In court filings, Nesson spelled out his defense strategy, which doesn’t appear to involve claims that his client “didn’t do it.” Instead, Nesson argues that it doesn’t matter if Tenenbaum copied music; such noncommercial uses are presumptively “fair” and anyone seeking to squeeze file-swappers for statutory damages is entitled to precisely zero dollars.
The strategy certainly doesn’t lack for boldness. In making the case that statutory damages only apply to commercial infringers, Nesson says that his reading of the law is “constitutionally compelled.” His most interesting argument is that the law offers rightsholders the chance to seek either statutory…
Ventura on ‘The View’: If Waterboarding Is Fine, Why Don’t Cops Do It?
RAW Story: Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, making a guest appearance on ABC’s The View, gave co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck a lesson or two about the torture technique known as waterboarding.
Ventura, who underwent a barrage of torture techniques at the military Survival, Evade, Resist and Escape (SERE) school, confirmed for Hasselbeck that waterboarding is torture and not just an “enhanced interrogation technique.”
“If waterboarding is okay, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects to learn what they know?” he asked to a chorus of applause. “That’s an interesting question,” Hasselbeck said. “I understand that question.”
“If waterboarding is okay, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and [Terry] Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? What’s your answer to that?” he asked. “We only seem to waterboard Muslims.”
“That’s an extremist statement,” said Hasselbeck.
“Aha!” cheered Ventura. “Have we waterboarded anybody else? Name me someone else…
New ‘Yes Men’ Film Receiving Under-the-Radar Oscar Run
S.T. VanAirsdale, Movieline: Despite critical raves and cult word of mouth, the 2004 prankumentary The Yes Men stumbled to a disappointing $250,000 theatrical gross before shuffling off to DVD eternity. The duo’s eco-centric follow-up, The Yes Men Fix the World, left this year’s Sundance Film Festival with similar acclaim but no theatrical distribution deal. But for those eager to have a look sooner than later, HBO’s Oscar ambitions might be your gain this weekend in Los Angeles and New York.
Fix, which features notorious jokers Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum crusading against corporate greed and malfeasance, is getting one of those relatively common (if ethically suspect) one-week qualifying runs this week. HBO will premiere it in July. Again, this is kind of par for the course with such wack Oscar-qualifying rules on the books, but for anyone who either can’t wait for the broadcast or simply wants to see the film…
SETI Picks Up Regular Laser Pulse Emanating From Space
Annalee Newitz writes on io9.com:
Astrophysicist Ragbir Bhathal works with SETI to scan the skies for possible communications from extraterrestrial intelligences. Unlike most SETI facilities, which look for radio signals, Bhathal’s looks for laser pulses. And now he’s found one.
Several years ago Bhathal, a researcher at the University of Western Sydney, suggested that a likely form of extraterrestrial communication would be laser bursts. He set up a facility at his lab which sweeps a nearby volume of space, within about 100 light years, for laser bursts that come in a regular pattern. Any kind of communication would likely be distinguished from background noise by coming in repeated or non-random patterns.
And a few months ago, Bhathal found the kind of regular pattern he’s been looking for. He’s been analyzing it and seeking a repeat pattern in the same area of space ever since. Though he’s cautious about claiming it as a genuine…
Life Inc. — The Movie
In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from a convenient legal fiction to the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.
Bilderberg Fears Losing Control In Chaos-Plagued World
One of Bilderberg’s main topics of conversation at this year’s meeting was whether to oversee a long period of economic stagnation or to quickly sink the economy with a rapid depression.
Estulin called the “bank stress tests” recently conducted as being “little more than a shameless hoax based on the irrational assumption that the economy wont get as bad as it already is.”
Bilderberg are also intent in pushing through the Lisbon Treaty despite it being rejected by countries in Europe who allowed their population to vote on the issue, and are prepared to manufacture demonization campaigns against anti-EU pressure groups, namely the Libertas organization fronted by Declan Ganley.
One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns according to Estulin is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos in order to implement their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario…
Palling Around with Terrorists – Disinformation World News
Disinformation World News – Episode 7: Palling Around with Terrorists
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Swine flu conspiracy theories, disinformation World Tour updates, and an interview with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, this week on Disinformation World News.
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The Reality Party — Honesty in Politics
Finally! An honest and truthful politician who tells it like is!
Rumsfeld Used Scripture to Push Iraq War
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent President George Bush top secret wartime memos with cover sheets that mixed Scripture and battle photos to cast the Iraq invasion as a holy Christian crusade.
Rumsfeld, not a man who wore religion on his sleeve, appeared to be trying to manipulate — or curry favor with — the Bible-quoting Bush, according to an explosive story in GQ.
Some Pentagon analysts worried that if the memo covers leaked, they would inflame the Islamic world, undercut Washington’s Arab allies and bolster those who claimed America was out to Christianize the Muslim world.
One official was so disturbed he kept the report covers and recently gave them to GQ writer Robert Draper, a leading chronicler of the Bush administration.
“Commit to the LORD, whatever you do, and your plans will succeed — Proverbs 16:3,” appeared on a April 1, 2003 report over a photo of a U.S. soldier near a highway…
Rumsfeld’s Biblical War Briefings
The magazine GQ has managed to dig up the covers from Donald Rumsfeld’s top-secret daily intelligence briefing reports, which were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House to be read by Bush and company.
These uber-classified reports from the first weeks of the Iraq War are adorned with photos of fighter jets, praying soldiers, and convoys rolling through the sand, juxtaposed with heavy bible quotes, such as “Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, The Nation that keeps faith. (Isaiah 26:2)” above a photo of U.S. tanks driving into an Iraqi city’s gateway. The use of biblical prophesies as captioning of pictures of the U.S. military’s operations seems to suggest that Rumsfeld or the White House believed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a fulfillment of biblical predictions.
Early Humanity Feasted On Neanderthal Flesh
Scientists have long wondered what happened to the Neanderthals, the early people who evolved in Europe 300,000 years ago, made complex stone tools and survived several ice ages, before disappearing 30,000 years ago, just as modern human beings arrived in Europe from Africa. According to new fossil evidence, the answer is: we ate them!
Researchers in France have found a prehistoric Neanderthal jawbone with indications that the flesh and tongue were stripped out in a manner similar to early homo sapiens’ butchering of deer carcasses. This suggests that humans killed Neanderthals, dragged their corpses back to the caves, and feasted on their flesh before turning their teeth and skulls into jewelry and trophies. “For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place,” says Fernando Rozzi, of Paris’s Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique.
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Amy Goodman Interviews Michael Pollan: “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
Amy Goodman: Let’s start with the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected to industrialized agriculture?
Michael Pollan: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation, where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact. And this was in Mexico.
And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later…
Bilderberg Fears Losing Control In Chaos-Plagued World
Investigative journalist Daniel Estulin, whose information from inside Bilderberg has routinely proven accurate, states that the global elite’s plan to completely destroy the economy and ultimately lower global population by two thirds has stoked fears even within Bilderberg itself that the fallout from such chaos could ultimately result in the globalists losing their control over the world.
In a telephone interview, Estulin re-iterated his original points about Bilderberg’s 2009 agenda, which were released in a pre-meeting booklet to members. These include the notion that investors, whipped up into a false state of euphoria by the belief that the economy is recovering, are being suckered into ploughing their money back into the system as a set up for “massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead” as the stock market reverses its uptrend and plummets to new lows.
One of Bilderberg’s main topics of conversation at this year’s meeting was whether…
Biden Reveals Location of Secret VP Bunker
Vice President Joe Biden, well-known for his verbal gaffes, may have finally outdone himself, divulging potentially classified information meant to save the life of a sitting vice president.
According to a report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president.
The bunker is believed to be the secure, undisclosed location former Vice President Dick Cheney remained under protection in secret after the 9/11 attacks.
Eleanor Clift, Newsweek magazine’s Washington contributing editor, said Biden revealed the location while filling in for President Obama at the dinner, who, along with Grover Cleveland, is the only president to skip the gathering.
According to Clift’s report on the Newsweek blog, Biden “said a…
Did AI Cause The Financial Crisis?
“One of the many interesting aspects of the current global financial crisis is the role that artificial intelligence and advanced computer software has played in it.”
Ben Goertzel, the CEO of both Novamente and Biomind — both AI companies — points to the “narrow AI” software that recognizes subtle nonlinear patterns in financial data, and asks what’s learned from its performance leading up to the global financial crisis.
“The root of the problem really came down to the ways people chose to use this software to serve their own ends,” he argues. “On the other hand, it’s hard to say exactly how long it will take for AI to achieve the needed understanding of context, to avoid this sort of ‘minor glitch.’”
Did AI cause the financial crisis?
“One of the many interesting aspects of the current global financial crisis is the role that artificial intelligence and advanced computer software has played in it.”
Philip K. Dick’s ‘Tears’ To Flow Into Theaters
Graeme McMillan, io9.com: Ready for a new movie based on a classic Philip K. Dick novel, from the people who are bringing you Terminator Salvation? Halcyon Pictures have announced plans to film Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
Dick’s 1974 novel, about a man who wakes up one day to discover that he doesn’t exist, isn’t the most obvious choice to adapt into a major motion picture; it’s not the book’s dystopian future America or existential themes that might scare away audiences as much as the drug use, that’s so important to the plot, and the incestuous central couple that would likely scare away studios.
Here’s hoping that Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson, founders of Halcyon and producers of Terminator Salvation will stay true to the book’s spirit … or that Dick’s daughters, Isa Dick Hackett and Laura Leslie, who’re developing the movie, will keep them honest.
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