Tortured logic, tortured justice

Sometimes, I cannot comprehend how the United States of America has come to occupy the landscape that it has in the year 2009. Growing up, I learned in school about all of the wonderful things that the United States had done for the world. Out of the tyranny that the British Empire had become, our forefathers had the temerity and the moral fortitude to announce to the world that we would be building a new kind of nation-- one in which the rights of the individual would trump government power. People were inherently vested with natural rights, inalienable rights. Our First Amendment- the right to speak freely, to worship (or not) as one pleases, free press, who could ask for a better check on governmental power? Can the government force the citizenry to quarter soldiers? Not here, we've got the Constitution! Governments stopping people for no reason, or on trumped-up charges? No way, we've got the 4th Amendment! To be sure, there were some stark contradictions, but I didn't realize those until I was a little older. I mean, it's a little hard to take seriously those that would lecture on the topic of liberty while being slave-owners, but the overall idea was pretty great. We were the force for truth and justice and all that is right. We proved it, too. We fought tyranny in World War II, the most recent (winning) war. We saw the evil that was done in the name of National Socialism, Fascism, or whatever label you want to use. We saw the evil in those Nazi bastards and we would have none of it-- and rightly so. The indescribable acts of torture and dehumanization were enough to turn anyone's stomach. I read Night, as well as some other works by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and was moved to tears. I looked at the photographs of the concentration camps and saw the shivering, starving groups of people blankly staring at the camera lens. I saw the piles of bodies- massive piles of them! What kind of people could order (or commit?) these horrible, despicable acts? What kind of person could so callously cause the suffering of their fellow human beings? The Nazi experiment was a singular example of the brutality that one group could inflict on another. There is no crime so heinous that it could compare to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The scale of the suffering defies understanding-- we named it The Holocaust. [More . . . ]

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A wedding observation

I attended a wedding over the weekend. My family is Italian and I'm sure it's no surprise that we are overwhelmingly Catholic. However, because the ceremony wasn't being held in a church but rather in the reception hall I had thought that I would be spared having to sit through another Catholic mass. I was wrong. *sigh* As it turns out, it was a thankfully shortened version of the ceremony. I noticed that, even in abbreviated form, the priest managed to mention FIVE TIMES (we counted) that,"...God made us MALE and FEMALE so that we may join together in His love". It would have been just another day in a big Italian Catholic family except this time, seated right up front were two good friends of the bride and groom who also happened to be a lesbian couple. I've seen "the lesbian couple", as they are called in the family, a few times at family gatherings that were large enough to encompass all of us. They have been together for many years, at least as long as many of the other couples in the room. Longer than some. I couldn't help but cringe each time the phrase rolled around.

"Marriage was created by God for MALE and FEMALE...", "We join in holy matrimony this MAN and WOMAN...", etc.
With each repetition of the phrase it seemed that the priest was emphasizing it more and more and from our vantage point several rows back it almost seemed like he was glaring at the lesbian couple when he said it. (Probably my imagination.)

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Culture and Copyright in the 21st Century

On 24 March, 2009 Lawrence Lessig delivered the keynote speech, Getting the Network the World Needs, at the OFC Conference in San Diego, CA. This is a revision of a REMIX talk, distinguishing between parts of the 20th Century that were Read-Only and parts that were Read-Write. His brilliantly delivered thesis discusses how culture prior to the 20th century was essentially read-write, everyone consumed and created the culture interactively. During the 20th century centralization and control of media and distribution transformed our culture to a read only - where creation was almost exclusively the province of professionals and professional distribution channels (tv, movies, music). He then suggests that the 21st century brings the promise and the demand for building a read-write culture once more, and for moving far beyond the mash-up of the past decade. He also discusses the necessary legal and infrastructural changes needed to accommodate this changed reality. Warner Music has tried to serve a DCMA takedown, based on his inclusion of some music and media clips - despite the obvious and clear "fair use".

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What if there were animals that were genetically close to modern humans, but startlingly different?

What if there were animals that looked very much like modern human animals and almost identical genetically, yet they differed from us in notable ways? Would their discovery shock and horrify people? Quite likely. Wouldn't it also make many people start thinking deeply about the fact that modern humans themselves are animals? You'd hope so. Wouldn't this discovery make us intensely curious about our own origins? Remains to be seen. What follows is a true story. The evidence is overwhelming that large numbers of Neanderthals roamed Eurasia for 200,000 years. The evidence is also clear that Neanderthals differed from the modern humans in genetically small but socially and physiologically significant ways. This incredible story can be found in the October 2008 edition of National Geographic, in an article entitled "Last of the Neanderthals." This article is a must read article for anybody who wants to peer into the not-so-distant past in order to learn about his or her bipedal cousins. The article is filled with incredibly lifelike modeling of the Neanderthals. It is also filled with detailed information about Neanderthal physiology, as well as clues to Neanderthal lifestyle.

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Go Ahead…Make My Day…Again…Again…

It’s like Clint Eastwood has come to town and all the bad guys are hiding under the tables or in closets. President Obama is striking down one stupid rule after another his predecessor left behind. It’s a martial arts level kung fu pen-fest, signing (or consigning) the detritus of ignorance from the last eight years into the dustbin of… Well, he's overturned the international gag rule concerning abortion information. He’s undoing the restrictions on stem cell research. He has ordered Gitmo shut down within a year and a panel to look into what to do with the detainees. Before the vacillations of moral outrage erupt over the gag rule overturn, it should be considered how absurd and cowardly a ban on talking about something actually is. And I don’t mean from a national security perspective. Clearly, some information is sensitive in that sense and should not be publicly disseminated. But in the case of the gag rule, we’re talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, Public Knowledge. If you know what to look for, anyone can find this information and not be arrested for having it. Yet grown men and women have been constrained from talking about it in the performance of their duties as doctors and nurses. What part of “choice” do the enemies of choice not understand?

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