Thursday, May 27, 2010
Victory: Charges Against Student Accused of ‘Disorderly Conduct’ for E-Mail
CLEMSON, South Carolina, May 26, 2010—Clemson University has withdrawn “disorderly conduct,” “harassment,” and two other charges against a student who e-mailed an administrator using “language and tone” that another administrator found “unacceptable.” After undergraduate William Kirwan was charged with a variety of offenses in violation of his First Amendment rights, he turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.
“Public university administrators cannot punish students simply because they disapprove of their ‘language and tone,’” said FIRE Vice President Robert Shibley. “We commend Clemson’s leadership for putting an end to this violation as soon as FIRE brought it to their attention.”
Read The Rest At Orwell's Dreams
Reinventing Memorial Day: Beyond the Mattress Blowout Sale
Why has Memorial Day, like so many of our national holidays, been reduced to appliance sales, fast food specials, and vacation deals?
With the recent near-collapse of our economy, the ways in which we understand and celebrate national holidays seem particularly challenged. This erosion of meaning is just one of many examples of the growing gap between the promise of America–freedom and opportunity through sacrifice and unity–and how people experience Brand America. Like any brand, America will have to close this gap to thrive in the future.
Remembering Memorial Day is not about believing in war. It’s an opportunity to reconnect the American Experience with its core promise, and reinvigorate the nation’s signs, symbols, myths, and metaphors with authenticity and relevance. The following is the first in a series of thoughts exploring how design thinking might help do this.
Read The Rest AT: Orwell's Dreams
U.S. Committed to Border Defense: For South Korea
The border between North and South Korea is about 160 Miles long. It is also heavily defended by about 28,600 American troops, walls, guns, searchlights, etc.
“The Mexico – United States border … runs from San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Baja California, in the west to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, Texas, in the east, and traverses a variety of terrains, ranging from major urban areas to inhospitable deserts. From the Gulf of Mexico it follows the course of the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte) to the border crossing at El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; westward from that binational conurbation it crosses vast tracts of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Desert, the Colorado River Delta, westward to the binational conurbation of San Diego and Tijuana before reaching the Pacific Ocean.
The border’s total length is 3,169 km (1,969 miles), according to figures given by the International Boundary and Water Commission.[1] It is the most frequently crossed international border in the world, with about 250 million people crossings every year. (Source)
North Korea has about 238 United States soldiers per mile along its border, plus the South Korean army.
“Currently, the U.S. Border Patrol employs over 20,200 agents (as of the end of fiscal year 2009), who are specifically responsible for patrolling the 6,000 miles of Mexican and Canadian international land borders and 2,000 miles of coastal waters surrounding the Florida Peninsula and the island of Puerto Rico. Agents are assigned primarily to the Mexico–United States border, where they are assigned to control drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Patrols on horseback have made a comeback since smugglers have been pushed into the more remote mountainous regions, which are hard to cover with modern tracking strategies.” (Source)
For those of you keeping score at home, that is about 2.5 INS Agents (soldiers) per mile. South Korea has 238 American soldiers per mile to defend its borders. We get 2.5 American soldiers per mile to defend ours. But wait, there’s more! Obama has just committed an additional 1200 National Guard troops to border protection. This raises the number to 2.65 soldiers per mile. If only Arizona had the the same lobbyists as South Korea!
Read The Rest At Orwell's Dreams
Violent crime declines as American gun ownership rises
For the third consecutive year, violent crime has declined in the United States during the same period when gun and ammunition purchases have increased dramatically, something that should not be happening, if one were to believe the gun prohibition lobby. The FBI on Monday released preliminary uniform crime data showing that the four major violent crime categories are all slipping. Overall, 2009 experienced a 7.2 percent drop in murders, an 8.1 percent decrease in robbery, a 4.2 percent decline in aggravated assault and 3.1 percent reduction in forcible rape. Yet, according to data from the FBI’s National Instant Check System and – from all places – the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, gun and ammunition sales are up dramatically. NICS background checks are up this year, and the excise tax apportionments to the states from the sale of firearms and ammunition have climbed from $336,474,545 in Fiscal Year 2009 to a whopping $472,719,710 for FY 2010. Do any kind of math you like, that still translates to more than $136 million in additional excise tax revenues over 2009, which further translates to a lot more guns and ammunition, and hunting/shooting-related gear changing hands at the retail counter.
Read The Rest At Orwell's Dreams
Yet More Reasons (As If We Needed Any) to Abolish the TSA
What would enrage you enough to “kick a wall, throw a suitcase or make a pithy comment to a screener” at an airport? How about the screener’s electronically denuding and then leering at your wife? What if the gizmo whereby he stripped also her exposed both her and the month-old child she didn’t yet realize she was carrying to carcinogenic rays? Fast-forward a few years: now, as your toddler struggles with a congenital deformity, you learn your wife’s virtual strip-search at the airport may have been responsible. How many walls, suitcases and screeners will escape your wrath then?
Beware: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), keeper of blacklists to which it secretly adds folks it has never charged with any crime, let alone tried in a court of law, and from which its victims have little recourse, maintains yet another list, this time of “people who make its screeners feel threatened… A TSA report says the database can include names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers of people involved in airport incidents, including aggressors, victims and witnesses.”
Read The Rest At Orwell's Dreams
National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily Recap For 05-26-10
Here are the 29 police misconduct reports recorded in our National Police Misconduct News Feed yesterday, Wednesday the 26th of May, 2010:
- The once-police chief of Jacksonville North Carolina has been sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of 1st degree murder in the 1972 shooting death of a US Marine sergeant. The chief, George Hayden, killed William Miller with two shots to the back of the head with an M-16 after Miller’s then wife lured him into an ambush so that she and Hayden wouldn’t lose custody of Miller’s daughter when they got married just a few months later due to a fraud case Miller was building against Hayden at the time.
- The state of New Jersey and two New Jersey transit cops will have to split up paying a $760,000 judgment that was awarded to the woman who was raped by the two officers. The pair were convicted of official misconduct and sentenced to 3 years in prison for talking the woman into following them after she had asked for help and then forcing her to have sex in the weeds under an overpass under threat of arrest.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
