“It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world,” Jacque Fresco said to a sold out crowd of over 800 in New York City’s Upper West Side.

Though he may not need to convince these people, many his ardent followers, it will indeed take a restructuring of the mind for those unfamiliar with Fresco’s work to realistically accept the ideas he proposes of a new global society that has given up money and property in favor of a shared, sustainable, technology-driven community.

The caustic skepticism can already be heard, critics crying out with pointed fingers, decreeing communism, socialism, insanity! But as Fresco himself will tell you, communism is still just another system with banks and social stratification. The kind of world he imagines for the future is much different. To ease the transition, The Zeitgeist Movement provides a wealth of dizzying information detailing why a new global system is not only preferred, but necessary, and just how we can get there.

March 14th, 2010 was the second annual celebration of ZDay. Coordinated by The Zeitgeist Movement, ZDay is an educational event geared toward raising awareness of the movement. While 337 sympathetic events occurred in over 70 countries worldwide, NYC was home to the main event, a 6-hour live web cast presentation with lectures from the movement’s key figures, and 30 different countries represented in the audience.

So what exactly is The Zeitgeist Movement? Not even two years old, the movement declares itself as the activist arm of The Venus Project, an organization started in the 1970s by Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. The Venus Project distributes resources promoting Fresco’s vision of an improved society, with the main component being a resource-based economy, rather than a monetary-based one. In Fresco’s resource-based economy, the world’s resources would be considered as the equal inheritance of all the world’s peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development. It is toward this idea that The Zeitgeist Movement works to educate and inform people.

The movement’s founder, Peter Joseph, came to notoriety with his 2007 internet film sensation, Zeitgeist, and it’s 2008 successor, Zeitgeist: Addendum. While many people may find it hard to digest the idea of a world without currency, Joseph’s argument that our economic system is the source of our greatest social problems was supported with valuable evidence…

[continues at Huffington Post]

The authoritarian leader of the world’s Catholics promised to restore the purity of his church. So why is it still plagued by scandal upon scandal? Peter Popham reports.

Of all the countries Pope Benedict XVI is visiting this year – including Malta, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain – Britain, which he visits in September, is the one in the greatest moral difficulty from his perspective: a citadel of wild-eyed relativism, beset by all the ills which the Sixties incubated and which the Catholic Church here, in the Vatican’s view, has done little to combat.

Look at the evidence: we have women vicars, openly gay Cabinet ministers, the minaret of a mosque looming over Regent’s Park. Multi-culturalism has supplanted Christianity as the religion of choice; hardly anyone goes to church any more; a Christian tradition going back 1,500 years is discarded as immigrants belonging to every faith and none pour in. In our adoration of pop stars we have produced a new reign of idolatry. Benedict’s late boss, whose doctrinal conservatism was lightened by a Bohemian theatrical streak, happily sat through a Bob Dylan concert and quoted the singer’s lyrics in his subsequent sermon; on another occasion the current Pope’s predecessor went so far as to try on Bono’s shades. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict’s name before he was Pope), obliged to accompany his boss, shook his head sadly over such lapses. These “stars of the young”, he later wrote, “had a message completely different from that to which the Pope was committed. There was reason to be skeptical – which I was, and in a certain sense still am – to doubt whether it was really right to involve ‘prophets’ of this type.” Pop music, he said in 1986, was “a vehicle of anti-religion”.

[Read more at the Independent]

It’s a brave new world. Unfortunately–continuing the literary allusion–Big Brother is watching. As technology makes more information more accessible, it also threatens to expose information that is not intended to be shared. Privacy is a concept that is caught in the middle of the struggle.

Danah Boyd, a social media expert for Microsoft Research, presented a keynote speech at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin spotlighting the fate of privacy. Boyd was clear that she does not feel privacy is dead. Contrary to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claim, people do still care about privacy.

As one blog summed up her speech “Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated.”

So, where is the line, exactly? If the Google Street View cameras happen to catch you standing naked in your living room window and post it online for the world to see, does that violate your privacy? Some say yes.

However, others are quick to point out that Google is capturing its images from public roads, therefore whatever Google captures would also be viewable by anyone walking or driving down the street. The bottom line being, if you don’t want the general public to see you in all your naked glory, perhaps you shouldn’t be standing naked in the living room window.

Fair enough. What about employee monitoring? Is it OK for an employer to play Big Brother and monitor employee actions and communications? Established legal precedent suggests that the organization’s right to monitor its own hardware and network resources trump the Fourth Amendment rights of employees. Some compliance requirements actually mandate monitoring and retention of communications for businesses obligated to follow them.

The Supreme Court of the United States is hearing a case that challenges that legal precedent, though. If the established policies of the organization allow for shared personal and business use of company-issued computers or other devices, the company may inadvertently be implying an expectation of privacy and surrendering its right to monitor. The decision in this case could have wide-ranging implications for compliance, and for corporate acceptable use policies.

Schools fall under an obligation to monitor activity as well…

[continues at PC World]

A union representing Dutch nurses will launch a national campaign Friday against demands for sexual services by patients who claim it should be part of their standard care.

The union, NU’91, is calling the campaign “I Draw The Line Here,” with an advert that features a young woman covering her face with crossed hands.

The union said in a statement Thursday that the campaign follows a complaint it had received in the last week from a 24-year-old woman who said a 42-year-old disabled man asked her to provide sexual services as part of his care at home.

[Read more at Reuters]

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

[Read more for ScienceBlogs.com]

Hitting your screens this May

So we finally took the plunge — after a year of planning and debate and — and announced our new Sitting Now TV show. The show will initially be available on the site, and via online distros like iTunes, YouTube, and Vimeo, and then later will appear on a channel to be announced later in the year (confusing I know).

Anyway, check out this ‘teaser’ intro, and let us know what you think!

It’s described by the UN as the third best place to live in the world and the vagaries of economics make it more accessible than ever before to visitors and, their inevitable corollary, émigrés.

Sigga Groa Thorarinsdottir, marketing manager of UK and Ireland for the Icelandic Tourist Board, claims that the lower value of the krona has led to interest from Britons wishing to visit and settle in the previously expensive country.

According to statistics released by the board, Iceland experienced its highest ever visitor numbers in January and February this year. In January, 4,312 Britons visited the country compared with 3,865 for the same month in 2009. In February, there was a further rise of 25.6 per cent from February 2009, with an increase to 6,116 visitors. Overall in 2009 Iceland had more than 61,619 British visitors.

Thorarinsdottir said: “Despite the economic downturn, Iceland continues to be a popular destination for British holidaymakers all year round. Iceland still has an advantageous exchange rate compared with the euro, which means there has never been a better time for people to visit Iceland with UK travellers’ spending money going a lot further.”

“2009 was a challenging year for Iceland but these figures are very encouraging.”

Iceland, which has a population of only around 323,000 people, has been in a state of economic collapse since 2008. The world recession meant that Icelandic banks, which owed around six times the country’s total gross domestic product, were unable to refinance their loans. In the past year, the cost of food and house prices have risen precipitously, while the value of the krona has fallen to record lows. Many British investors, attracted by the high interest rates offered by Icelandic banks, lost money in the collapse, and on the 6th March, Icelanders voted not to repay the UK and Netherlands the £3.5 billion lost by British customers when online bank Icesave crashed.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

From Alternet:

Our nation is already deeply in debt. How can we possibly afford to invest in our infrastructure, renewable energy, health care, our schools — and create the millions of jobs that our unemployed desperately need?

We are told that we’re already living well beyond our means — that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security will bankrupt us. Forget the solar panels, the smaller classes and the new jobs — we’ve got to cut back on government programs at all levels.

Meanwhile, the super-rich are still having a ball. In his annual shareholder letter, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote, “We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.” And Forbes Magazine adds, “Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year’s wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year.”

Which brings us back to the federal budget. There are two sides to every ledger: the expenses…and the income. We need to start looking at the income side. With a fairer tax system, we could retrieve some of that money downpour that the elite has been siphoning away from us for decades.

[Read more at Alternet]

Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

The earthshaking news appeared in the medical journal Human Reproduction under the impenetrable headline: “Mitochondria in Human Offspring Derived From Ooplasmic Transplantation.”

The media put the story in heavy rotation for one day, then forgot about it. We all forgot about it.

But the fact remains that the world is now populated by dozens of children who were genetically
engineered. It still sounds like science fiction, yet it’s true.

In the first known application of germline gene therapy — in which an individual’s genes are
changed in a way that can be passed to offspring — doctors at a reproductive facility in New
Jersey announced in March 2001 that nearly 30 healthy babies had been born with DNA from
three people: dad, mom, and a second woman. Fifteen were the product of the fertility clinic, with
the other fifteen or so coming from elsewhere.

The doctors believe that one cause for failure of women to conceive is that their ova contain old
mitochondria (if you don’t remember your high school biology class, mitochondria are the part of
cells that provides energy). These sluggish eggs fail to attach to the uterine wall when fertilized.
In order to soup them up, scientists injected them with mitochondria from a younger woman.
Since mitochondria contain DNA, the kids have the genetic material of all three parties. The DNA
from the “other woman” can even be passed down along the female line.

The big problem is that no one knows what effects this will have on the children or their progeny.
In fact, this substitution of mitochondria hasn’t been studied extensively on animals, never mind
Homo sapiens. The doctors reported that the kids are healthy, but they neglected to mention something crucial. Although the fertility clinic’s technique resulted in fifteen babies, a total of seventeen fetuses had been created.

One of them had been aborted, and the other miscarried.

Why? Both of them had a rare genetic disorder, Turner syndrome, which only strikes females.
Ordinarily, just one in 2,500 females is born with this condition, in which one of the X chromosomes is incomplete or totally missing. Yet two out of these seventeen fetuses had developed it.

If we assume that nine of the fetuses were female (around 50 percent), then two of the nine
female fetuses had this rare condition. Internal documents from the fertility clinic admit that this
amazingly high rate might be due to the ooplasmic transfer.

Even before the revelation about Turner syndrome became known, many experts were appalled
that the technique had been used. A responding article in Human Reproduction said, in a dry
understatement: “Neither the safety nor efficacy of this method has been adequately
investigated.” Ruth Deech, chair of Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, told
the BBC: “There is a risk, not just to the baby, but to future generations which we really can’t
assess at the moment.”

The number of children who have been born as a result of this technique is unknown. The
original article gave the number as “nearly thirty,” but this was in early 2001. At that time, at least
two of the mutant children were already one year old.

Dr. Joseph Cummin, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Western Ontario, says that
no further information about these 30 children has appeared in the medical literature or the
media. As far as additional children born with two mommies and a daddy, Cummin says that a
report out of Norway in 2003 indicated that ooplasmic transfer has been used to correct
mitochondrial disease. He opines: “It seems likely that the transplants are going on, but very, very
quietly in a regulatory vacuum, perhaps.”

Reference: Genetically-Engineered Humans. Barritt, Jason A., et al. “Mitochondria in Human Offspring Derived From Ooplasmic Transplantation.” Human Reproduction, 16.3 (2001), pp 513-6. • Email communication from Dr. Joseph Cummins, 4 June 2003. • “First Cases of Human Germline Genetic Modification Announced.” British Medical Journal 322 (12 May 2001), p 1144. • “Genetically Modified Human Babies?” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 8 May 2001. • Hawes, S.M., C. Sapienza, and K. E. Latham. “Ooplasmic Donation in Humans: The Potential for Epigenic Modifications.” Human Reproduction 17.4 (2002), 850-2. • Hill, Amelia. “Horror at ‘Three Parent Foetus’ Gene Disorders.” Observer (London), 20 May 2001.

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Put down the cell phone, stop the status updates on Facebook, shut down Twitter, sign out of e-mail and relax…

People across the nation will tune out to reclaim time to slow life down and reconnect with friends, family, the community and themselves for 24 hours, starting at sundown, Friday, March 19. The Sabbath Manifesto’s principles were created for individual styling, but for one day we are asking you to take on the challenge of Principle Number 1: AVOID TECHNOLOGY.

With numerous states facing significant budget shortages, legislators and voters across the country this month have been giving overwhelming support to measures that would reduce the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a civil fine.

Yesterday in New Hampshire, the state House voted 214-137 to pass H.B. 1653, a bill that would reduce the penalty for possession of up to a quarter-ounce of marijuana with a civil fine of up to $200.

In Hawaii, the state Senate voted 22 to 3 on March 2 to pass SB 2450, a bill that would eliminate criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana and replace them with a civil fine of up to $300 for a first offense and $500 for a subsequent offense.

And in Vermont, 72% of voters in Montpelier approved a non-binding ordinance asking the state legislature “to pass a bill to replace criminal penalties with a civil fine for adults who possess a small amount of marijuana.”

[Read more at the Examiner]

Peep Show Window. Photo: David Shankbone (GNU)

Milton Diamond for The Scientist:

Pornography. Most people have seen it, and have a strong opinion about it. Many of those opinions are negative — some people argue that ready access to pornography disrupts social order, encouraging people to commit rape, sexual assault, and other sex-related crimes. And even if pornography doesn’t trigger a crime, they say, it contributes to the degradation of women.

It harms the women who are depicted by pornography, and harms those who do not participate but are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it. Many even adamantly believe that pornography should become illegal.

Alternatively, others argue that pornography is an expression of fantasies that can actually inhibit sexual activity, and act as a positive displacement for sexual aggression. Pornography offers a readily available means of satisfying sexual arousal (masturbation), they say, which serves as a substitute for dangerous, harmful, and illegal activities.

Some feminists even claim that pornography can empower women by loosening them from the shackles of social prudery and restrictions.

But what do the data say? Over the years, many scientists have investigated the link between pornography (considered legal under the First Amendment in the United States unless judged “obscene”) and sex crimes and attitudes towards women. And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased…

Read More: The Scientist

Constance McMillen didn’t believe her Mississippi school district would really call off her senior prom rather than allow her to show up with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo. On Thursday, a day after the Itawamba County school board did just that, the 18-year-old lesbian high school senior reluctantly returned to campus to some unfriendly looks, she said.

“Somebody said, ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year.’” McMillen said.

The district announced Wednesday it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom. The decision came after the American Civil Liberties Union demanded that officials change a policy banning same-sex prom dates because it violated students’ rights. And the ACLU said the district not letting McMillen wear a tuxedo violated her free expression rights.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford to force the school district to sponsor the prom and allow McMillen to bring whom she chooses and wear what she wants.

District officials didn’t returned numerous calls left by The Associated Press seeking comment on Thursday.

McMillen said she never expected the district to respond the way it did.

“A lot of people said that was going to happen, but I said, they had already spent too much money on the prom” to cancel it, she said. “I’m just trying to get done what I originally wanted done. Now, we’re having to fight just to have a prom.”

McMillen said she didn’t want to go back to Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton the morning after the decision, but her father told her she needed to face her classmates, teachers and school officials.

“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.”

A school board statement said it wouldn’t host the event in Fulton, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events” but never mentioned McMillen or her girlfriend, who also is a student at the school.

[Read more at Yahoo News]

So how much pot do Californians smoke?

According to a recent state board of equalization report prepared for the legislature, it’s 16 million ounces a year. That’s a little less than one-half an ounce for each resident in California, in case you’re counting every man, woman and child.

The analysis was prepared for legislation by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), that seeks to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana for use by California adults 21 and over.

Some other findings:

• California is America’s top pot producing state, with an annual yield of 8.6 million pounds of weed valued at $13.8 billion. That’s more than one-third of the cultivation across the U.S.

[Read more at the Sacramento Bee]

In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.

Around her, the other Voodoo worshippers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.

In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead – one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps – and is thus, in a way, blessed.

When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.

Instead they embrace her, even kiss her. And in that way they are blessed, too.

But for all the fervor and favor being shared in this back-alley corner of Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that was badly smashed in the quake, the practitioners of Voodoo are feeling under seige.

Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations – evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Baptists – as the cause of God’s anger in smiting their country.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

The media are trying to find political affiliations for the Pentagon shooter, but they’re missing the big picture.

Another day, another violent anti-government kamikaze act. As the feds recover from Joseph Stack flying his airplane into an IRS building in Austin on Feb. 18 — leaving one dead and 13 injured — the media and government have another dead man to worry about.

Thursday night, after having driven cross-country from California to Washington, John Patrick Bedell walked up to a screening area at the Pentagon and starting firing his two semiautomatic weapons. In less than a minute, he’d wounded two police offers and received gunshot injuries that would later kill him.

Like Stack, Bedell was well-educated and left behind comprehensive material that outlined his longtime anger at the U.S. government. But his grievances are different from Stack’s.

While the deeply tortured manifesto Stack wrote detailed his frustrations with the tax system, it also centered around his concerns that the current economic recession was caused by an economic elite that gets away with financial crimes — even financial murder — every day. “Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes,” he wrote.

[Read more at Alternet]

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.

At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.

[Read more at the Huff Post]

Pull up the wrong undersea cable, and the Internet goes dark in Berlin or Dubai. See our animated infographics of how the web works!

For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie–a congenial, 6′4″, 57-year-old Scotsman–patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.

On one recent expedition, Rennie and his crew spent 12 days bobbing in about 250 feet of water 15 miles off the coast of Cornwall in southern England looking for a broken cable linking the U.K. and Ireland. Munching fresh doughnuts (a specialty of the ship’s cook), Rennie and his team worked 12-hour shifts exploring the rocky seafloor with a six-ton, $10-million remotely operated vehicle (ROV) affectionately known as “the Beast.”

[Read more at PopSci]

When Chicago passed a ban on handgun ownership in 1982, it was part of a trend. Washington, D.C. had done it in 1976, and a few Chicago suburbs took up the cause in the following years. They all expected to reduce the number of guns and thus curtail bloodshed.

District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer told The Washington Post in 2007, “It’s a pretty common-sense idea that the more guns there are around, the more gun violence you’ll have.” Nadine Winters, a member of the Washington city council in 1976, said she assumed at the time that the policy “would spread to other places.”

But the fad never really caught fire—even before last summer, when the Supreme Court struck down the D.C. law and cast doubt on the others, including the Chicago ordinance before the court Tuesday. The Second Amendment may kill such restrictions, but in most places, it wasn’t needed to keep them from hatching in the first place.

Maybe that’s because there were so many flaws in the basic idea. Or maybe it was because strict gun control makes even less sense at the municipal level than it does on a broader scale. At any rate, the policy turned out to be a comprehensive dud.

[Read more at Reason.com]

The absolute … spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.

- Hannah Arendt [1]

Democracy in the United States is experiencing both a crisis of meaning and a legitimation crisis. As the promise of an aspiring democracy is sacrificed more and more to corporate and military interests, democratic spheres have largely been commercialized and democratic practices have been reduced to market relations, stripped of their worth and subject to the narrow logics of commodification and profit making. Empowerment has little to do with providing people with the knowledge, skills, and power to shape the forces and institutions that bear down on their lives and is now largely defined as under the rubric of being a savvy consumer. When not equated with the free market capitalism, democracy is reduced to the empty rituals of elections largely shaped by corporate money and indifferent to relations of power that make a mockery out of equality, democratic participation and collective deliberation.

The undoing of democracy as a substantive ideal is most visible in the illegal legalities perpetuated by the Bush-Cheney regime and reproduced under the presidency of Barack Obama that extend from the use of military commissions, the policy of indefinite detention, suppressing evidence of torture, maintaining secret and illegal prisons in Afghanistan to the refusal to prosecute former high-level government officials who sanctioned acts of torture and other violations of human rights. As part of the crisis of legitimation, democracy’s undoing can be seen in the anti-democratic nature of governance that has increasingly shaped domestic and foreign policy in the United States, policies that have been well documented by a number of writers extending from Noam Chomsky to Chris Hedges. What is often missed is how such anti-democratic forces work at home in ways that are less visible and when they are visible seem to become easily normalized, removed

[Read more at Truthout]

Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

Without even thinking about it, we take it as a given that the police must protect each of us. That’s their whole reason for existence, right?

While this might be true in a few jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada, it is actually the exception, not the rule. In general, court decisions and state laws have held that cops don’t have to do a damn thing to help you when you’re in danger.

In the only book devoted exclusively to the subject, Dial 911 and Die, attorney Richard W. Stevens writes:

It was the most shocking thing I learned in law school. I was studying Torts in my first year at the University of San Diego School of Law, when I came upon the case of Hartzler v. City of San Jose. In that case I discovered the secret truth: the government owes no duty to protect individual citizens from criminal attack. Not only did the California courts hold to that rule, the California legislature had enacted a statute to make sure the courts couldn’t change the rule.

But this doesn’t apply to just the wild, upside down world of California. Stevens cites laws and cases for every state — plus Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Canada — which reveal the same thing. If the police fail to protect you, even through sheer incompetence and negligence, don’t expect that you or your next of kin will be able to sue.

Even in the nation’s heartland, in bucolic Iowa, you can’t depend on 911. In 1987, two men broke into a family’s home, tied up the parents, slit the mother’s throat, raped the 16-year old daughter, and drove off with the 12-year old daughter (whom they later murdered). The emergency dispatcher couldn’t be bothered with immediately sending police to chase the kidnappers/murders/rapists while the abducted little girl was still alive. First he had to take calls about a parking violation downtown and a complaint about harassing phone calls.

When he got around to the kidnapping, he didn’t issue an all-points bulletin but instead told just one officer to come back to the police station, not even mentioning that it was an emergency. Even more blazing negligence ensued, but suffice it to say that when the remnants of the family sued the city and the police, their case was summarily dismissed before going to trial. The state appeals court upheld the decision, claiming that the authorities have no duty to protect individuals.

Similarly, people in various states have been unable to successfully sue over the following situations:

— When 911 systems have been shut down for maintenance

— When a known stalker kills someone

— When the police pull over but don’t arrest a drunk driver who runs over someone later that night

— When a cop known to be violently unstable shoots a driver he pulled over for an inadequate muffler

— When authorities know in advance of a plan to commit murder but do nothing to stop it

— When parole boards free violent psychotics, including child rapist-murderers

— When felons escape from prison and kill someone

— When houses burn down because the fire department didn’t respond promptly

— When children are beaten to death in foster homes

A minority of states do offer a tiny bit of hope. In eighteen states, citizens have successfully sued over failure to protect, but even here the grounds have been very narrow. Usually, the police and the victim must have had a prior “special relationship” (for example, the authorities must have promised protection to this specific individual in the past). And, not surprisingly, many of these states have issued contradictory court rulings, or a conflict exists between state law and the rulings of the courts.

Don’t look to Constitution for help. “In its landmark decision of DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services,” Stevens writes, “the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the Constitution does not impose a duty on the state and local governments to protect the citizens from criminal harm.”

All in all, as Stevens says, you’d be much better off owning a gun and learning how to use it. Even in those cases where you could successfully sue, this victory comes only after years (sometimes more than a decade) of wrestling with the justice system and only after you’ve been gravely injured or your loved one has been snuffed.

Reference: Stevens, Richard W. Dial 911 and Die: The Shocking Truth About the Police Protection Myth. Mazel Freedom Press, 1999.

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Flipping the bird, or sticking out the middle finger, is perhaps the oldest insulting gesture on earth. The move dates back to ancient Greece and was adopted by the Romans as digitus impudicus — the impudent finger.A zillion middle fingers later, an Oregon man is suing suburban Portland cops (.pdf) over his use of the gesture, claiming civil rights violations. Twice he flipped them off for no apparent reason while driving and was pulled over each time — resulting in what he said was a “bogus” traffic citation that was later dismissed, and a tongue lashing he still remembers.

“The guy flew into a road rage,” Robert Ekas, a retired Silicon Valley systems analyst, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Lawrence Wolf, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, said there was no law against flipping off cops. And in most instances when it leads to an arrest or conviction, the charges are dismissed. But the gesture invites police confrontation, he said.

“It’s certainly not the smartest thing one can do,” Wolf said.

[Read more at Wired]

Millions of pounds of Western aid money intended to buy food for starving Ethiopians during the country’s 1984 famine were instead used by rebels to buy weapons, an investigation has found.

At least some of that money was likely to have come from the £150 million raised by Live Aid and Band Aid. More than three million copies of Do They Know It’s Christmas sold in just five weeks in late 1984 to raise funds for the estimated eight million Ethiopians facing starvation. Up to a million died.

According to a report published on Wednesday, rebel soldiers disguised themselves as grain traders and handed over sacks of sand hidden beneath genuine food aid, in return for cash from Western donations.

The rebel army involved, headed by Ethiopia’s current prime minister, Meles Zenawi, went on to overthrow Ethiopia’s Marxist government and has run the country since.

Mr Meles has been one of Britain’s most favoured African leaders after promising democratic reforms.

The investigation by the BBC, will raise further questions over Western support for Mr Meles and his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

The University of Washington says it is looking for people who want to quit pot.

The UW School of Social Work’s Innovative Programs Research Group is looking for 70 “marijuana-dependent adults” in the Puget Sound area to participate in a clinical research trial testing approaches for people who want to stop using cannabis, reports KING5.com.

The university says research has shown that nearly 3.6 million Americans use pot on a daily basis.

Read More: Toke of the Town

What do John Edwards, Bob Barr, Rod Blagjevich, John Ensign, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, William Jefferson, William Jefferson Clinton, David Vitter, James McGreevy, Tom DeLay, Charles Rangel, Newt Gingrich, and David Paterson have in common?

Obviously, they’re all politicians who’ve been caught doing something illegal, unethical, mind-bogglingly self-destructive, or all of the above.

But what also binds them is that none of them seem to believe they really did anything wrong, in spite of vast evidence to the contrary. When they finally have no option but to appear contrite, their apologies feel stilted, scripted and anything but heartfelt.

The latest offender, New York Governor David Paterson, hasn’t even gotten around to apologizing yet. In the meantime, he’s apparently managed to convince himself that it’s okay to phone up and intimidate a woman his top aide just viciously beat up. Then there’s John Edwards. I’ve just finished reading The Politician by his aide, Andrew Young — an irresistibly salacious takedown, but one that never gets near understanding Edward’s breathtaking brazenness and utter obliviousness. Or how about the much-indicted Rod Blagjevich joining the cast of “The Apprentice?” while he awaits his own criminal trial — and continues to profess his utter innocence despite dozens of tape recordings that make it clear exactly what he did.

Read More on the Huffington Post