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aaronsmithtumbler · 5 years ago

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Completed Chapter 14 Rewrite

I was awake and something was horribly wrong.

I was in a jail cell, but that wasn't what was horribly wrong. That was just a sort of encrustation of legible wrongness on top of a deeper wrongness still unplumbed, like a tiny black spot that reveals a man dying of melanoma. The wrongness was deeper and more spiritual. It surrounded and confounded me.

Hasidic legend describes a time Rabbis Zusya and Elimelech were thrown in jail. There was a disgusting bucket full of waste, and the whole cell stank. Rabbi Elimelech started crying. Rabbi Zusya asked what was wrong. Rabbi Elimelech explained that Jewish law prohibits prayer in a disgusting place, and so he could not follow the commandment to pray every morning. Rabbi Zusya pointed out that he was still following the commandment not to pray in a disgusting place, so overall he was coming out even in number-of-commandments-followed. In fact he was getting to follow a new commandment he had never followed before, and surely this brought him even closer to God. Rabbi Elimelech was delighted, and began singing and dancing in joy. Rabbi Zusya joined in, and soon all the prisoners were singing and dancing. The warden came and asked what was going on, and the inmates weren't totally sure except that the rabbis seemed very happy about the bucket of disgusting waste. The spiteful warden said that fine, then they couldn't have the wastebucket, and took it away.

"There!" Zusya told Elimelech. "Now you can pray!"

There was something terribly wrong, worse than the stench the rabbis dealt with. I didn't feel like it was inappropriate to pray; I felt like prayer <i>wouldn't work</i>, like God was somehow very far away and beyond my reach and neither praying or not-praying would bring me closer to Him. I felt hopeless, not because I was without hope, but because something was actively pumping hopelessness into me.

I was dressed in my normal clothes, but I was wearing a ball gag. A reasonable precaution; otherwise I would have spoken the Vanishing Name and been out of there. I lay on a bare cot. My cell had no bars. It had a door, locked, with a small window in it. I went to the window, looked out, saw a hallway. Turned the knob, not expecting anything, didn't get anything, lay back down.

[Ana, are you there? Where are you?]

There was nothing. Either Ana was far away, or distracted, or asleep, or – I couldn’t make myself think “dead”. I would have felt it if she died. That, I told myself, is definitely how kabbalistic marriages work.

So I knocked on the door to my cell. A few seconds later, the doorknob turned and an armed guard looked me over.

"Mr. Smith-Teller," said one of them. I winced internally. I mean, I suppose if they didn’t know my name now it wouldn’t have taken them too much longer to find it out, but it still hurt. Kabbalists are notoriously fussy about who knows their true name, it's a sort of placebomantic disadvantage, a vague way of letting someone else have power over you. "We're sorry about the gag, but we're sure you understand."

I made some hand motions. I was trying to convey something like "WHY IS EVERYTHING HORRIBLY WRONG?", but I was used to dealing with Ana, where I have telepathy to help me. In this case, I had nothing but context. Luckily, it seemed like context was enough.

"Director Bentham wants to speak to you," he finally said. "His presence...makes people uncomfortable."

Even if you're nowhere near him? Uncomfortable like you're surrounded by an impenetrable field of hopelessness? The moment this gag was off, I was going to have so many questions.

The guard cuffed me and escorted me down the corridor. I didn't know where I was, but it seemed big. Hard to hide. I knew UNSONG arrested people, I knew that they put you in prison for a long time if you used Names without a license, but I’d always heard they used the normal federal prisons. The idea of a secret UNSONG black site somewhere sounded like it was out of Valerie’s paranoid anti-government screeds. If no one had ever revealed the existence of this place before, that meant either that they were very good with the Amnestic Name, or else no one had ever gotten out of here before. I tried to remember exactly how effective the Amnestic Name was and ironically came up blank. And what about the Confounding Name? I couldn’t remember.

The facility wasn’t small, either. We walked through poorly-lit corridor after poorly-lit corridor. I tried to look for other prisoners, references to the location, even doors with signs on them, but all I spotted were a couple of locked rooms with the UNSONG seal on the front. An aleph superimposed on the United Nations globe, and around it, the name “United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God” and the motto “I TEGO ARCANA DEI”. Begone, I hide the secrets of God. There were deep kabbalistic depths in that phrase, but I didn’t have the energy to think about them, because something was horribly wrong.

We came to a room. A conference room, it looked like. The guard motioned me to sit down, then cuffed me to the chair. The sense that something was horribly wrong got stronger. The guard could feel it too. I could tell. The dissonance reached a crescendo, like some sort of reverse symphony.

The door swung open.

How can I describe Asher Bentham?

He was both very beautiful and very ugly. Every detail of his face was perfectly sculpted and the gestalt still looked hideous. His voice had a bizarre effect like a thirty-foot-tall ogre trying to speak reassuringly without realizing that this conflicted with his choice to be a thirty-foot-tall ogre. I am a master of several languages, renowned for my skill with words. The only one I can cough up to accurately describe Asher Bentham is "bad". The most reassuring thought I could muster was that my hands were cuffed to the chair so there was no way for him to offer me a handshake and I wasn't going to have to touch him.

When the President, Secretary-General, and Comet King had come together to found UNSONG, leadership of the fledgling bureaucracy had gone to a elderly Brazilian politician with a hands-off approach. He’d gone after the biggest gangs and most blatant serial abusers of Names, talking about “decapitation strikes” against networks of large-scale pirates. The policy was very popular – everyone agreed that having the Mafia in on the Name business was a bad idea – and very worthless, because most unauthorized Name use was by ordinary non-Mafia people who talked to each other online.

He had died in 2002; Bentham had succeeded him. After the fall of the Presidency, Bentham had somehow manipulated the warring states' committments to abide by UNSONG regulations into a de facto replacement of the executive branch of the Untied States. A thousand conspiracy theories about the United Nations taking over the US had been suddenly vindicated.

Since the sky cracked, we have lived in a world of inhuman powers. The Lady of Los Angeles is a Watcher. The Comet King was the Messiah. The Other King is a necromancer. Various angels and demons have intruded into our history, left their mark, and returned beyond the veil. Now I had learned that the arch-manipulative head of UNSONG was something other than human. I was less surprised by the revelation than dumbfounded at the sheer magnitude of the non-humanity confronting me.

"Mr. Smith-Teller," he said. Fuck people knowing my true name, fuck it so much. Any hope that they were just annoyed at Valerie’s secret meetings was gone. This was the Director-General. The head of UNSONG. If he was involved, they thought this was the most important thing happening in the world at this moment. Which of course it was. They knew all about the Vital Name and everything it could do, and it had gone straight to the top. Okay. So I was really, really doomed.

“I’m sorry you’re in this situation.” He really did sound sorry. I changed my assessment of Bentham from "trying to intimidate me" to "trying as hard as he could not to intimidate me, and it just wasn't enough", and shuddered. “I understand you are associated with Singer groups who have a dim view of UNSONG. You’re probably laboring under the misapprehension that I am here to hurt you. As difficult as this may be to believe, we’re on the same side. I’m going to take your gag out. If you start speaking a Name, I’m afraid we’ll have you unconscious before you finish the second syllable, and the gag will go back in. I’m sure you can imagine the reasons we have these precautions. Nod if you understand.”

I nodded.

His face, I decided, was actually quite beautiful, except for the eyes. The eyes looked like they came from one of those weird nightjar birds whose eyes are in the wrong place and don’t even look real.

"As you can tell," he said, "we're taking this situation very seriously. The Keller-Stern Act of 1988 states that anyone who discovers a Divine Name of potential military value is legally obligated to report it to UNSONG in exchange for fair monetary compensation. Most people aren’t aware of the Act, and we have no interest in punishing them for refusing to follow a law they never heard of. But now you know. So, Mr. Smith-Teller, and please tell me the truth, do you know any Names that might be covered under the law?"

Jewish law permits lying for the greater good. According to the Talmud, even Heaven is not always truthful. Rabbi Gamliel kept his classes small. Later Rabbi Elazar took over the academy and expanded classes; hundreds of new students flooded in. Rabbi Gamliel felt guilty that he had kept out so many bright scholars, but God sent him a vision of beautiful barrels full of ashes, indicating that the new students were no good anyway. The Talmud explains that the new students were actually fine; God was just trying to cheer up Rabbi Gamliel. I had no moral qualms about lying to Asher Bentham. I just wasn't sure it was possible.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know any such Name.”

And it was the honest truth. Because I had forgotten the Name. Because I was a moron. I could have told him more, but he terrified me, and the truth – that I’d known the Vital Name and forgotten it – would be neither believable nor welcome. And part of me was desperately hoping that if I said nothing, he would go away, the wrongness would end, and I would just be in a perfectly normal government black site and everything would be fine.

“Did you speak a Name that allowed you to find the location of the Moon?”

“I did,” I said.

“How did you learn that Name?”

Every fiber of my body tensed at her oppressive closeness. It was a fair question. I had no way out this time. Either tell her what had happened, or lie like a rug and see exactly what those nightjar eyes could do.

I ran through a host of scenarios. I tell the Director-General that I knew the Name and forgot it. He doesn’t believe me and tries to torture it out of me. He doesn’t believe me and tries to torture the Name out of Ana. He does believe me and tries to dissect my brain to get it. He goes to an error correction specialist, fixes the Name, and takes over the world, and I’m still alive to see it.

I am not a hero. I’ve been in one fight, but only because I was drunk, and I ended up with two black eyes. The only thing I’ve ever been good at is studying things and comparing them and trying to understand them.

But the sages of old weren’t typical heroes either, and they were constantly breaking out of prison by one miracle or another. Rabbi Meir convinced a Roman prison guard to free his friend by reassuring him that if anyone tried to punish his disobedience, he could say “God of Meir, help me!” and God would keep him from harm; when his commander tried to hang him for his role in the escape, the guard cried “God of Meir, help me!”, the rope broke, and he managed to run away to safety. When a whole Roman legion arrived to arrest the great translator Onkelos, he preached to them in Latin about the symbolism of the mezuzah, and the whole legion converted to Judaism on the spot. And when the Romans arrested Rabbi Eleazar ben Perata on five charges, God helped him craft a plausible alibi for each; when the plausible alibis didn’t work, the prophet Elijah appeared at the end of the trial, lifted up the prosecutor, and threw him out of the courtroom so hard that he landed five hundred miles away. I think I mentioned that the Talmud is kind of crazy.

So miraculously breaking out of prison is the sort of thing kabbalists are expected to be able to do, and I daydream a lot, and a long time ago I had come up with a fantasy about the sort of thing I would do if I were ever trapped in a prison, and this was by far the stupidest thing I had ever done, but something was terribly wrong and I needed to get out of here.

"I was on drugs and I had a prophetic vision," I said.

Ever since the sky cracked, drugs had gotten really weird. The ones whose names were also Hebrew words were the weirdest. MDA and its cousin MDMA gave mystical knowledge, probably because mem-dalet-ayin was madda, "knowledge", (see 2 Chronicles 1:10). The effects of LSD were more blatantly divine, since lamed-shin-dalet was leshadi, "strength" (see Psalms 32:4), and the pronounced consonants in El Shaddai ("God Almighty") to boot. The ones without three letter names were less predictable, with peyote being a demonic conduit and the rest having variable effects. I decided to go with LSD as the most likely source of divine revelation.

"Drugs always attracted me," I said. I thought for a second, and continued. "So I got some LSD from a friend and tried it out. That was a bad idea, I admit."

I suspected Asher knew I was lying. I was banking on him waiting to see exactly what lie I was going to tell, hoping that I would slip up somewhere in my story. If he would just let me keep going for twenty-seven more sentences, I was in the clear.

"Zelda was the name of the friend who sold it to me," I said, awkwardly, because I couldn't think of any other way to start a sentence with Z. "My hope was we would do it together, but she bailed out at the last second."

That was DST and ZM. Twenty-five consonants to go. I was afraid, which was good, because it let me pretend that my fear was making it hard to talk, whereas in fact I was working out how to start my sentences with the right letter.

"Regular LSD is supposed to just give you a taste of divinity. She gave me something else, I'm not sure. She didn't tell me, but it must be true. No way to know now."

DASAT-ZAM-RUSH-SHAN.

"So I had taken the drug, when I started feeling weird. Very weird. Regular LSD doesn't do that. LSD is supposed to be gentle. Some kind of angelic entity was standing in front of me. Questionably angelic. Not human. Deep-voiced. Like you would expect an angel to be."

Asher Bentham must have thought I was the least fluent, worst storyteller in the country. I couldn't read his face at all. Was he confused? Was he suspicious. No time to think about that. I'd gotten DASAT-ZAM-RUSH-SHAN-SEVER-LAS-KYON-DAL. Next letter was aleph.

"All of the things you hear about angels, the beautiful wings and the golden eyes. They don't prepare you. Not a bit. To see something like that. Right away I knew it had a message for me. You couldn't imagine what it was like."

DASAT-ZAM-RUSH-SHAN-SEVER-LAS-KYON-DAL-ATHEN-TRY. All I needed was KOPHU-LI-MAR-TAG. How was I going to bring a K in?

"Kind of quietly, it spoke to me. Phenomenal voice. 'Listen', it told me. Revealed secret names. To grant me power over the heavens and earth."

Bentham was getting impatient. "What names?" he asked. "The one you used to find the moon?"

I didn't know how to answer, but it didn't matter. He thought I had been telling him a story, but I hadn't been. I'd been forging a notarikon. The same way the kabbalists had expanded AGLA into "atah gibor le'olam A-----". Any notarikon for a divine Name is itself equivalent to that Name. A sentence-by-sentence notarikon was completely valid. There was even one in Proverbs 31:10-31, for the Hebrew alphabet as a whole. But nobody had taken the obvious next step and used it to speak a Name covertly. Well, I was going to do it. I only had one letter left: a gimel.

I realized that God had delivered Asher into my hands. The rest had been my artifice; this part was pure divine inspiration.

"Goodbye, Asher Bentham," I said, and finished the notarikon.

Don’t use the Vanishing Name, I had said during choir practice, unless you are in a situation where it is absolutely vital to your well-being and continued survival that you be accosted by a different band of hooligans than the ones who are currently accosting you. Right now, being accosted by a different band of hooligans was my heart’s fondest and most desperate desire.

As Director-General Asher Bentham strained to make sense of my poorly-narrated story, I disappeared from right in front of his face.

#editing unsong

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alexsmitposts · 5 years ago

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Of Lesser Men Imagine yourself in school. You are 8 years old and it is recess time. You look for your friends, for the boys it is baseball or football, and the natural leaders set up teams and it begins. This is humanity, from its roots as hunter-gatherers so many hundreds of thousands of years ago, this is the natural order of things. Then, some would not survive. Guile and weakness was seldom rewarded. With the onset of “civilization” that changed. Where, at one time, the natural leaders became royalty or nobility, the need to pass on power though lineage went awry and these bloodlines through inbreeding and degeneration became the Deep State, physical weaklings, moral reprobates, tasked with selecting more of the same and moving them into positions of authority. The goal has been division, entropy, suffering, and managing the expectations of those of promise, pushing them into piracy, banditry or killing them in wars. Thus, when we find ourselves, even the strongest of us, the best of the best as it were, subject to rule by our lessers, “under the thumb” of those who, as children, we shunned as cowardly or vile, why do we recoil in surprise? What was left runs Washington, London and Paris, other capitols as well, the “lesser men,” damaged, confused, inferior, pushed up the ladder, the chosen people, a class of “Untermensch.” America’s ruling elite, when examined, for the most part resemble a form of reverse Darwinism. We are going to be calling the comic tragedy of the Muller investigation what it really is, “MuellerGate.” Any possibility that there was ever an investigation of anything intended is gone but the real reasons might well startle all but the most paranoid or well-informed watchers. What began as RussiaGate is playing out as not just fakery, but a complex and well-crafted intelligence operation intended to destabilize both the United State and Russia with full complicity of the press, those who control the press from the inside. It was always not only a wrong assumption by insane as well to assume that somehow, the controlled corporate media, would declare war on a presidency that has been so friendly to the oil industry, Wall Street, big polluters and the big pharma “poisoners.” The only other force handling this much cash is the CIA/Deep State worldwide heroin ring run out of Afghanistan and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, with the help of well known and powerful American families, names very much like Romney, Bush and Walton, according to an FBI whistleblower who came forward in 2012. When Mueller investigators interrogated me in 2018, I brought the debriefing recordings with me and offered to play them. It nearly cleared the room. Here is what is playing out as of mid-April, 2019: Democrats who control congress are planning to subpoena the entire Mueller Report and to question both Mueller and Barr. Legal experts are saying that only a preliminary impeachment process provides needed statutory authority for this effort. The public, perhaps a majority approaching 60%, is hanging on this drama, waiting to “get Donald Trump” as though he were a masked villain in a fake professional wrestling match, which of course he is. What has been purposefully forgotten is that both Mueller and Barr are “lesser men.” Both, according to sources, were CIA recruits early in life. During Vietnam, the CIA began profiling a new generation to carry them past their roots. The CIA’s roots are Nazi Germany’s Abwehr. Their profile included intellectual ability combined with a bevy of negative traits including social psychopathy, feelings of inferiority and intense guilt, and a powerful need for approval and affirmation from authority figures. Two of my good friends, one a senior Army intelligence officer and the other a high-ranking FBI official, both “the best of the best” tried to get into the CIA and were turned away. They weren’t crazy enough. According to sources, both Barr and Mueller were “crazy enough” and for 4 decades or more, have been close personal friends while operating in and out of the corridors of power on behalf of what is now termed the Deep State. Similarly, Mueller and Comey as FBI directors were close friends. Remember, it was Comey that only days before the 2016 election put out highly derogatory and utterly unnecessary statements about the Clinton email case. That case, of course, was a fabrication of a GOP congress that spent endless millions concerned about “classified emails” that, thus far, were utterly without substance. Moreover, anything from the State Department that a Secretary of State wants to make pubic or declassify, has the full authority to do as the President does the same for the White House. Trump does this continually. Before that it was the phony Benghazi investigation and before that, Hillary Clinton was accused of personally murdering Vince Foster. Let us not forget the Clinton impeachment and the role of Kenneth Starr as prosecutor. Starr was a longtime acolyte of Richard Mellon Scaife, a typical James Bond bad guy, scion of one of the biggest Deep State banking families who simply bought Starr and spent millions hiring thugs of various kinds to smear the Clintons. Starr had been promised a seat on the US Supreme Court if he got Clinton. He failed but his “man,” Brett Kavanaugh, now holds a seat on the high court as a surrogate, we are told, for failed and disgraced Ken Starr. A key to understanding the dynamic is knowing that everything the public sees or is allowed to see is scripted. Comey went after Clinton not to damage or influence the election but to create the appearance of doing so while, as had happened in 2000 and 2004, Deep State operatives working with local election officials, literally thousands of them, simply hacked the election count. This has been investigated, studied and written of so many times and is forgotten and shelved. Everyone is complicit. Past that, every candidate is always from the same pool, either hopelessly insane like Trump or Bush 43 or deeply flawed or crippled like Bill Clinton or Barak Obama. When someone different sneaks in like Jimmie Carter, the answer is simple. The Federal Reserve cuts off the money supply, collapsing the economy and the CIA stages a coup in Iran in order to move Reagan in. Part of America’s suppressed history is the truth about Reagan, BCCI, Iran Contra and the collapse of America’s industrial economy, all done while America’s middle class disappeared. This was no accident. MuellerGate is a critical component of a “lesser man” ploy. Mueller and Barr, we assume, are in continual contact as they are constant companions, lifelong companions, who have planned and executed Deep State operations over and over during their careers. Barr exists to fabricate childishly absurd legal opinions. Read one of them. His early letter on the RussiaGate investigation, castigating his best friend Robert Mueller as dangerously incompetent, is classic deception and cover. Then, lo and behold, Mueller finishes an investigation that takes forever. The nation focuses on little else while everything that can be broken or stolen in the nation is broken and stolen. There are 3 White Houses, one in New York at Trump Tower, now a Secret Service protected home for the headquarters of the Kosher Nostra while at Mar-a-Lago, Chinese billionaires are buying America on the cheap. The White House in Washington is now “Tel Aviv on the Potomac.” Making it all work is the three-act play staged by the worst actors in the world, villain Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi of the fake left, and a cast of thousands. It was evident what was going to happen from the get go with the public sucked in the Mueller drama, taking it all seriously, while the GOP’s control of the Senate and the generalized agreement that a sitting president cannot be indicted. In fact, there is no such provision in the constitution whatsoever. The legal concept is the creation of now sitting Federal District Judge Raymond Moss, written in 2000 at the behest of then Attorney General Janet Reno. Was Reno expecting Bill Clinton to start murdering White House visitors on live television? That is, perhaps, the only rationale for a legal opinion that has entrained itself as a keystone of Deep State security. This is from Lawrence Tribe, perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the constitution: “In a recent opinion piece, I argued that the text and structure of the Constitution, a serious commitment to the rule of law, and plain good sense combine to preclude a rigid policy of “delaying any indictment of a president for crimes committed in winning the presidency.” My op-ed argued against the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos opining that the Constitution prevents the indictment of a sitting president. Nearly everyone concedes that any such policy would have to permit exceptions. The familiar hypothetical of a president who shoots and kills someone in plain view clinches the point. Surely, there must be an exception for that kind of case: Having to wait until the House of Representatives impeaches the alleged murderer and the Senate removes him from office before prosecuting and sentencing him would be crazy. Nobody seriously advocates applying the OLC mantra of “no indictment of a sitting president” to that kind of case. The same is true for any number of other cases that come readily to mind. Among those, in my view, must be the not-so-hypothetical case of a president who turns out to have committed serious crimes as a private citizen in order to win the presidency. Whether the president committed such crimes in collusion with a shady group of private collaborators or did so in conspiracy with one or more foreign adversaries, it should not be necessary for the House to decide that such pre-inaugural felonies were impeachable offenses and for the Senate to convict and remove the officeholder before putting him in the dock as an alleged felon and meting out justice.” Conclusion Are people like May or Macron or Trump little more than circus clowns? Is everything scripted, where the chance of peace breaking out, of justice and righteousness infecting the absurd global processes inoculated against? Are the current moves around the world to criminalize expression of these very thoughts an indication of how blatant and egregious the lesser men have become?

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news-ase · 4 years ago

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ruminativerabbi · 7 years ago

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Blasphemy

Readers of these letters will know already that one of the areas that I find the most interesting—and also the most challenging— to write about is the precise way my commitment to the values that underlie our American republic meshes (or doesn’t mesh) with my equally strong commitment to the Torah-based values that inhere in traditional Jewish life.

That was the reason I chose to write a few weeks ago about the Supreme Court’s decision to consider the case of the Colorado baker who declined to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, and why I continue to find that case so interesting. On the one hand, as someone unambiguously committed the notion that the civil rights of gay people deserve to be protected by law no less forcefully or fully than the civil rights of any other group within our American society, I can easily identify with the couple who felt discriminated against by the baker’s refusal to serve them. On the other hand, I also feel—and just as strongly—that it can never be a good thing—not for members of religious minorities but also not for the nation itself—for the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to be attenuated by restrictive legislation or undermined by the courts. I wrote then how struck I was by the many articles and essays I read on both sides of the issue that appeared to consider the matter as unambiguously simple and clear-cut, whereas to me it seemed and seems thorny and complex.

I do not wish to write again about that specific case today, but rather to address a very interesting issue that I see growing out of it: the question of whether the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution should rationally be taken to include speech itself. The baker, after all, is not arguing that anyone has restricted his right to practice his faith at home or in church in whatever manner he wishes, but rather that custom-baking a cake for a gay wedding reception would imply that he personally supports the notion of same-sex marriage and should for that reason only be something he has the constitutional right to decline to do. Leaving aside the question of whether non-verbal activity like baking a cake—even a super-fancy one—should be considered speech at all, I would like instead to consider the question of whether speech itself is can be reasonably qualified as enough of a religious act to be protected by the First Amendment.

Our Jewish tradition certainly thinks so, making blasphemy into the kind of capital crime so potentially injurious to the public weal that the entire people is called upon to participate together in the blasphemer’s execution. Nor does Scripture allow for the possibility that this is meant as some sort of kashrut-style prohibition meant to apply solely to Israelites: “as well the stranger as he that is born in the land,” the Torah solemnly announces, “when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall be put to death.” So that’s clear enough, but what is being prohibited exactly? Our ancient sources go back on forth regarding the details, but those discussions mostly center around the question of what specifically someone would have to do actually to merit execution as a blasphemer—whether such a person has to curse God using the most sacred of divine names, whether it counts if someone curses another individual using that name of God as part of the imprecation, whether speaking in a vulgar way about God is enough to warrant indictment, whether insulting God’s Torah counts, whether the crime even can be committed by someone who does not speak Hebrew, etc. But the notion that speaking aloud in a way that disrespects the name of God is sinful and wrong is a cornerstone of our Torah’s approach to the morality of speech itself.

And that brings me to a remarkable booklet entitled Respecting Rights? Measuring the World’s Blasphemy Laws, published just this last July by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the federal commission with the mandate specifically to report on violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and to the Congress. It is, to say the least, an eye-opening read. (Click here to the see the full report online and here to see an abbreviated version.)

To my slight amazement, it turns out that a full third of the world’s nations, 71 countries in all, have laws that make blasphemy illegal. How this is specifically defined varies, but the basic principle is that there are 71 countries in which you can face serious punishment if you are convicted of having spoken out in a way deemed insulting to God or, in some cases, to religion itself.

Some of the countries on the list were no surprise at all, countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, and Syria. But others were amazing to me, particularly Western-style democracies like Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, and Spain. Israel is on the list. And, most unexpected of all (to me personally, at any rate), so is Canada.

The laws themselves vary widely. But the punishments are severe in almost every case: of the 71 nations that have laws prohibiting blasphemy, 59 punish individuals convicted of the crime with imprisonment. In two other nations, Iran and Pakistan, convicted blasphemers risk execution. Two more, Russia and Kazakhstan, punish convicted blasphemers with compulsory or corrective labor. One country, Sudan, punishes the blasphemer with the kind of corporal punishment administered with a whip. Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland levy fines against anyone convicted of blasphemy. Three countries, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Saudi Arabia, do not have specific punishments enshrined in law and rather ominously leave the decision in the hands of the presiding judge.

I read it, but I couldn’t believe it. Canada really imprisons blasphemers? In what century? And yet…there it is, in the Criminal Code of Canada, article 296: “Everyone who publishes a blasphemous libel is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.” Yes, the is a huge “but” that is also enshrined in Canadian law to the effect that no one may be convicted of an offense under this section of the code merely for expressing “in good faith and in decent language…an opinion on a religious subject.” So that softens the blow considerably: to qualify for your up-to-two years in prison, you have either to express your blasphemy hypocritically or to couch it in foul language. I was unable to discover how many Canadians, if any at all, have been convicted lately of blasphemy, but I suspect the number is quite low. In fairness, I should also note there is a bill before the House of Commons right now that would repeal the law in its entirety. But the fact that the law exists at all is what amazed me. And continues to amaze me!

What nations mean by blasphemy also varies. The law in Brazil refers to someone “publicly vilifying an act or object of religious worship.” The law in Bangladesh is much broader and makes indictable the individual who merely speaks in such a way that “hurts the religious sentiments” of another person. Finland takes a more biblical approach, specifically directing the law against any who “publicly blasphemes against God.” Article 173 of the Israeli Penal Code is somewhere in the middle and threatens with one single year’s imprisonment anyone who “publishes a publication that is liable to crudely offend the religious faith or sentiment of others” or who “voices in a public place and in the hearing of another person any word or sound that is liable to crudely offend the religious faith or sentiment of others.” In Indonesia, anyone who expresses “feelings of hostility, hatred, or contempt” towards any religion at all with the intention of discouraging someone from adhering to that faith or who speaks “disgracefully” about any religion is liable to up to five years in prison. You get the idea.

In America, of course, we have no such laws. The American approach was probably best summed up by Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, who wrote in 1952 that, “from the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures.” So that’s clear enough.

But what about me? I live within a tradition that takes blasphemy seriously and considers it the kind of offense that should apply to all, as a kind of universal wrong that society would do well to outlaw. But the American in me is with Justice Clark and finds the thought of punishing Americans for speaking out hostilely towards any religion—or towards religion itself or towards God—not something merely to be condemned a tasteless, but something wholly inconsonant with our democratic ideals as enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

So I get the baker’s argument that he does not wish to be forced by the courts to “say” something he finds spiritually repugnant. I wouldn’t wish to be either. Yet, for all the reasons I detailed in my previous letter, I think the Supreme Court should nevertheless uphold the lower court’s rulings and require that he not discriminate against gay couples merely because he doesn’t approve of same-sex unions. I suppose I can live with a little inconsistency when it comes to squaring my rootedness in Torah values and my devotion to the principles that underlie our American democracy. Just you’d think I’d be better at it by now!

#blasphemy

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savvyherb · 5 years ago

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At School, ‘Everyone Vapes,’ and Adults Are in Crisis Mode

CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. — In Alabama, a school removed the doors from bathroom stalls to stop students from sneaking inside to vape. In Colorado, a school decided to forfeit a volleyball game after finding “widespread vaping” and other infractions by the team. And in Pennsylvania, at a school where administrators have tried installing sensors to detect vaping in bathrooms and locker rooms, students caught with vape devices face a $50 fine and a three-day suspension.

At least 530 people have been sickened by mysterious lung illnesses related to using e-cigarettes with nicotine or vaping THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and at least eight have died. That has sent high schools, the epicenters of youth vaping, racing to give teenagers a new, urgent message: Vaping can be deadly.

Federal health officials have yet to pinpoint an exact cause of the recent illnesses, but the alarming pattern has put principals and teachers into crisis mode. They are holding assemblies to warn students about the dangers. They are getting creative with rules to make it harder for students to secretly vape in school bathrooms, hallways and even classrooms. They are trying to train parents and teachers on the wide array of vape devices, which look like pens or flash drives and which many adults do not even recognize.

During an assembly at one suburban Chicago high school this week, hundreds of students, many dressed in school colors of orange and black in honor of homecoming, saw an X-ray image of a young man’s lungs, cloudy and damaged, on an auditorium screen.

He had recently been hospitalized after vaping and placed in a medically induced coma for a week, a substance-abuse consultant told the students from a stage.

“His lungs are now that of a 70-year-old. He’s in his 20s,” the consultant, Ashleigh Nowakowski, said. “Can you imagine how that’s going to affect the rest of his life? He can’t run. He can’t play sports.”

The students watched solemnly. A few squirmed in their seats.

Is It Safe?

A guide to vaping and its risks.

Administrators at American high schools have long tried to warn students about the risks of vaping, which gained popularity several years ago as an alternative to cigarettes and works by heating liquid and turning it into vapor to be inhaled. But the outbreak of illnesses has brought new levels of urgency and attention to the issue. Students who had brushed off the warnings in the past, saying that vaping was relatively harmless, could no longer do so.

After the assembly, at Crystal Lake Central High School, 45 miles northwest of Chicago, some students said they were skeptical that vaping was as dangerous as the presentation suggested.

The students told of a high school ecosystem where vaping devices are easily obtained, and refill cartridges with THC oil, known as carts, are sold for $20 apiece. It is not uncommon, these students said, for seniors to sell vape pens to freshmen, eager to take up vaping.

Opportunities to vape discreetly are everywhere, they said — in an empty hallway, a bathroom stall or the back row of a classroom where a teacher cannot possibly monitor every student’s move. Older students said they tended to leave campus for lunch, vaping in their cars along the way.

“It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t do it,” said Alexis Padilla, 16, a junior. “You can’t go on social media without someone’s videos of them doing it.”

Image

Alexis Padilla, 16, Nyanah Bey, 17, and Sophia Scarfe, 17, talked about student vaping after a drug education program in Crystal Lake, Ill.CreditAlyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Last week, the Trump administration said it planned to ban most flavored e-cigarettes and nicotine pods, an attempt to curtail use among teenagers. States tend to regulate e-cigarettes like other nicotine products, and laws vary. At least a dozen states have passed laws restricting sales of e-cigarettes to young people; in Illinois, Arkansas and other states, the legal age for purchasing nicotine products, including e-cigarettes, is 21. In Texas, minors can be fined for possessing e-cigarettes.

But many teenagers sidestep the age restrictions by buying e-cigarettes online or from friends.

In one group of the Crystal Lake students — girls carrying patterned backpacks and wearing tattered Chuck Taylors — three said they personally knew people who had become seriously ill after vaping.

One friend who had vaped nicotine for two years using a Juul, the dominant seller in the market, was hospitalized with a respiratory lung defect, but has recovered, one student said. Another girl who vaped regularly suddenly could not breathe one day, the students said, and she now has to use an inhaler every four hours.

Sophia Scarfe, a 17-year-old senior, said her parents routinely sent her news articles about the dangers of vaping. Many students have moved beyond vaping nicotine, she said, routinely using THC oils instead. “Vaping anything else other than nicotine is way more common,” she said.

Alcohol is still widely consumed among teenagers, they said. But “vaping is the big thing,” said Nyanan Bey, 17, a senior.

One student openly laughed when she heard a widely cited statistic from the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey that estimated that one in four youths between the ages of 12 and 17 have tried vaping nicotine or THC at least once.

“Yeah, that’s too low,” she said. “Literally everyone vapes.”

Health officials suspect that vaping-related illnesses and deaths are underreported, and that doctors have only recently begun to connect vaping to mysterious lung ailments.

And educators said they were beginning to grapple with the reality that a new generation of American teenagers, one that would be loath to pick up cigarettes, is now addicted to nicotine through vaping.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the students at Crystal Lake Central, a school of 1,500 students, said Steve Greiner, student services coordinator.

“The kids in our school are like any other school,” he said. “People are really starting to realize, ‘Holy cow, this was seen as the answer to our prayers to get people off cigarettes.’ Now it’s turned into this.”

Administrators there have stationed teachers in the hallways between classes to deter vaping. Some have worried that Crystal Lake is only 30 miles from a town in Wisconsin where the police this month said they uncovered an illegal vape-pen factory that was producing 3,000 cartridges of THC-laced oil a day, with a distribution network that is believed to have been extensive.

At a separate informational session for teachers in the auditorium after school on Wednesday, another substance-abuse consultant guided teachers through the world of teenage vaping. The numbers “710” — which spell “oil” upside down — are a code for vaping, the consultant explained. Vaping devices might be found in unlikely, out-of-view places — inside the cord of a hoodie or dangling from a key chain. “Girls sew them into their jeans, next to the zipper,” Dave Shutters, the dean of students, added.

Image

Teachers and staff at Crystal Lake Central High School listened as consultants described ways students hide drug use, including the use of nicotine and cannabis in vape pens.CreditAlyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Image

Teachers, including Audrey Mazzuca, a science and math teacher, were guided on what to look for.CreditAlyssa Schukar for The New York Times

In Crystal Lake, the typical response to a student caught vaping is counseling and other efforts to provide information about the dangers. Some schools have tried vaping support groups.

At Nerinx Hall, an all-girls Catholic school in the St. Louis area, students are planning a peer-driven “amnesty week,” where they hope to make an “emotional appeal” to one another and offer a chance to dump vaping equipment at a secure drop-off location, said Meta Stephens, the senior class treasurer.

“We really want it to be no pressure: You will not get in trouble for this,” said Ms. Stephens, 17, who is helping plan the event this fall. “We really just want to help you stop if you want to.”

Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting from New York.

Vaping and Illness

The latest on the outbreak.

Vaping Illnesses Increase to 530 Probable Cases, C.D.C. Says

Sept. 19, 2019

Vaping Bad: Were 2 Wisconsin Brothers the Walter Whites of THC Oils?

Sept. 15, 2019

1 in 4 Youths Has Vaped. Will State Bans Do Anything?

Sept. 17, 2019

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ladystylestores · 4 years ago

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A New Surge in Virus Deaths

Want to get The Morning by email? Here’s the sign-up.

Good morning. The mayor of Seoul has been found dead. Joe Biden lays out his economic recovery plan. And virus deaths have been rising again.

The number of Americans dying from the coronavirus has started rising again.

More than 800 have died in each of the last three days — a three-day total that’s about 60 percent higher than during the same three days last week.

(The chart above doesn’t yet include yesterday’s number, which would add a third large gray bar on the right side.)

The spike reverses what had been the one positive virus trend in the U.S.: Deaths had been declining since mid-April, even as the number of confirmed new cases held fairly steady in the late spring and then surged over the past several weeks.

How? Older Americans have been especially cautious, which has led to declines in the average age of new patients; younger patients die from it less often. And doctors and nurses have become better at diagnosing the virus earlier and treating it effectively.

President Trump and his aides have repeatedly highlighted the decline in deaths and said it showed that the virus was in retreat. But many epidemiologists have disagreed, saying that the surge of new cases since mid-June was so large that it would eventually lead to more deaths. (In a typical fatal case, a patient dies three to five weeks after getting infected.)

It’s too soon to say for sure, but the last few days suggest that the experts’ prediction is starting to come true.

Deaths have begun to rise across many of the same Sun Belt states where the numbers of cases are increasing. California and Texas reported a daily high in deaths earlier this week. Florida and Tennessee did so yesterday.

“Several months ago, I warned of a potential tsunami if we did not take this more seriously,” Richard Cortez, an official in Hidalgo County, in southern Texas, said. “The tsunami is here.” Nationally, the number of new cases hit another record yesterday. (The Times is tracking the latest virus news here.)

Among the victims: Richard di Liberto, the son of an immigrant bricklayer and the chief of photography at the Frick Collection in New York. The Times has a running series on people who have died from the virus, “Those We’ve Lost.”

FOUR MORE BIG STORIES

1. Court backs subpoena on Trump’s finances

The Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors in New York will be able to inspect Trump’s financial records, with both justices named by Trump — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — joining the seven-member majority. In a separate decision, the court ruled that Congress cannot see the records, at least for now.

What are prosecutors looking for? Susanne Craig, who has reported on Trump’s taxes for years, says investigators are trying to figure out whether Trump violated campaign finance laws when paying hush money to two women, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels. “This could go on for months,” Susanne told us. It is “unlikely that we will see the president’s taxes as a result.”

Thursday’s other decision: The court also ruled that much of eastern Oklahoma falls within an Indian reservation, which weakens the state’s jurisdiction over Native Americans in criminal matters. Gorsuch, a Westerner who has sided with tribes in previous cases, joined the four liberal justices in the 5-to-4 decision.

2. Deadly rains in Japan

Record-breaking rains this week in the south of Japan have killed 62 people in floods and landslides. The extreme weather is highlighting the vulnerability of nursing homes: Floodwaters killed 14 seniors in one nursing home.

The disaster represents a “collision of two powerful forces shaping the country’s present and future: demographic change and global warming,” The Times’s correspondents in Tokyo write. Torrential rains in Japan have intensified in recent years because of climate change, and the country has the world’s highest proportion of elderly people.

3. Seoul mayor is found dead

The mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, has been found dead. He had disappeared a day after a secretary in his office told the police that he had sexually harassed her since 2017. The story has been shocking to Koreans because he had been a rare champion of women’s rights among the country’s politicians.

4. Biden rolls out economic plan

For decades, advocates of freer trade have been saying that the middle class would benefit from an open global economy. But as the U.S. has liberalized trade and welcomed China into the international marketplace, the incomes and wealth of most Americans have grown painfully slowly. (This chart offers a glimpse.)

We’re now experiencing the political backlash, as Joe Biden’s first detailed economic proposal makes clear. In a speech at a Pennsylvania factory, Biden moved away from the Democratic Party’s recent emphasis on open trade and called for the federal government to spend $700 billion on American-made goods in technology, clean energy and other sectors. He called it an investment “not seen since the Great Depression and World War II.”

The political angle: “They are essentially trying to steal the Trump program of 2016 and steal that playbook,” Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, lamented, as The Washington Post reported. “For some reason, the White House and the campaign have been caught flat-footed.” And The Times reports on Trump’s struggle to define Biden politically.

The Biden economy: In a column for this weekend’s Sunday Review, I imagine what a post-coronavirus economy will look like — under both a Trump second term and a Biden presidency.

Here’s what else is happening

An explosion rocked western Tehran early today, state media reported, the third major recent nighttime explosion in Iran. The location this time wasn’t clear; the first two occurred at key military and nuclear bases.

About one million international students are in limbo after a recent directive by the Trump administration that would strip students of their visas if their classes moved online-only. Here’s what they have to say about it.

Lives Lived: She nurtured a generation of fashion designers as the publicity director of Saks Fifth Avenue, and she was the best friend of the actress Claudette Colbert. But she never lost her Southern accent or manners. Helen O’Hagan has died at 89.

IDEAS OF THE DAY: V.P. edition

In previous newsletters, we’ve written about Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren as vice-presidential possibilities for Biden. Today, I want to tell you about a few other candidates — and who’s making the case for them:

Molly Jong-Fast, writing in Vogue, advocates for Val Demings, a Florida congresswoman and former Orlando police chief: “Demings may be one of those once-in-a-lifetime politicians, a gifted orator, a woman who is completely self-made, a racial pioneer.”

Two different Georges — Will, of The Washington Post, and Skelton, of The Los Angeles Times — have made the case for Karen Bass, a Los Angeles congresswoman. In 1990, Will points out, Bass started a community group “to devise nonpolice measures for addressing crime.” Skelton writes: “Everyone likes her. She’s comfortable to be around and is able to deal with Republicans.”

Steve Chapman, a columnist at The Chicago Tribune, argues for Susan Rice, who was national security adviser and U.N. ambassador in the Obama administration. “She’s not only better equipped in foreign and defense affairs than the other vice presidential prospects,” he writes, “she’s better equipped than any president since Richard Nixon.”

More on the veepstakes: Duckworth has written an Op-Ed for The Times, responding to the attacks on her by Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host. She calls them an effort to distract the country from Trump’s performance as president.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, GUMBO

Bringing gumbo to rural Minnesota

Krewe is a restaurant in the small Central Minnesota city of St. Joseph. It’s the brainchild of Mateo Mackbee and Erin Lucas, a couple who moved from Minneapolis two years ago to overcome career obstacles in bigger cities and to spread awareness of racial inequities.

St. Joseph is more than 90 percent white, and locals say the restaurant is the city’s first Black-owned business. Read the story of how the two chefs are using their food to promote diversity.

(And while it’s a departure from the traditional New Orleans gumbo served at Krewe, this recipe for black-eyed pea and pork gumbo is also delicious.)

Watch something … kid-friendly

Our weekly suggestion from Gilbert Cruz, The Times’s Culture editor:

Since I am home with my child all day every day for the foreseeable future, I need a few things that the whole family can watch together and enjoy without fear of bad language or violence or anything approaching “serious.”

The Netflix series “Nailed It!” is one of those shows. A reality competition series in which amateur bakers make and decorate devilishly intricate desserts, “Nailed It!” is named after the exclamation said bakers have to make when they unveil their inevitably cursed looking creations.

It’s that moment that elicits the most laughter from my family. These cakes often seem like they are genuinely in pain, and the faces made by the comedian Nicole Byer (who co-hosts alongside the pastry chef Jacques Torres) are eminently GIF-able. It’s a cooking show you can binge without ever feeling hungry afterward.

Carl Reiner, by Steve Martin

The actor Steve Martin has written a tribute to his late friend Carl Reiner, the comedy director whom he met while making “The Jerk” in 1979. The pair would go on to have near daily lunches for a period of five or six years.

Among Reiner’s life-lessons? “He taught me about modesty,” writes Martin. “I called him late one evening to discuss the next day’s shooting. I asked, ‘Am I interrupting you?’ He said, ‘No, I’m just lying here going through a litany of my failures.’”

Diversions

In this week’s Modern Love, a professor discusses the lessons she’s learned from her son and his passion for bags of all kinds.

Games

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Prince married to Meghan Markle (five letters).

Or try this week’s news quiz.

You can find all of our puzzles here.

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years ago

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You may not have noticed, what with America’s COVID-19 deaths passing the 100,000 mark and cities in an uproar coast-to-coast over police tactics against black residents, but President Trump last week staged a completely fictional attack on Twitter and other online services. The fiction was embodied in an executive order Trump signed on May 28, purportedly aimed at “preventing online censorship.” The order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which dramatically changed the environment for online services hosting user-provided content. Section 230, which has been consistently misunderstood by its critics across the political spectrum, allows online services to host potentially objectionable, even defamatory user-posted content without becoming liable to legal action themselves, while also giving them the discretion to moderate that content as they wish. We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation…. You’re always going to cheese off somebody. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University “The section’s most fundamental concept is that we want internet companies to manage user content, and not be liable for whatever they miss,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in the law at Santa Clara University Law School. “The fear was that if they were liable for whatever they missed, they wouldn’t even try.” The tech community has long treated Section 230 as “the most important law on the Internet.” As my colleague Sam Dean reports, the title of a book on the section by Jeff Kosseff, a cyberlaw expert at the U.S. Naval Academy, labels its text “the twenty-six words that created the internet.” But the law also has come under concerted attack by plaintiffs who keep looking for loopholes and judges who open them, all aimed at scrubbing distasteful material from the Web. Trump’s executive order is a typical attack on Section 230, launched by someone acting out a personal grievance. It’s so sloppily drafted that it would accomplish nothing resembling the prevention of “online censorship,” would be almost certainly unconstitutional if it did, and was basically a reflexive reaction to one offense: Twitter’s unprecedented designation of Trump tweets as the embodiment of lies requiring corrections. Twitter tagged the May 27 tweets, which asserted that mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” with a note directing users to fact-checked information refuting the assertion. Trump issued his executive order the very next day. Twitter went even further a day later, when it placed a blocking message over a Trump tweet implying that participants in protests over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who apparently died in the custody of Minneapolis police, should be shot if they were looting. The message required users to click separately to view the tweet. The executive order bears all the hallmarks of a Trump tantrum, including the lack of a mechanism to turn it into action. It begins with a Frank Costanza-like litany of personal grievances. “Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” the order reads, specifically calling out Twitter: “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias… Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.” (Trump means any politician other than himself.) We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process. — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020 The order calls on the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” the scope of 230’s immunity from liability, even though that latitude is quite clear in the language of the law. The text makes it clear that the immunity is very broad indeed. It allows online services to restrict access to content that they consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” The catchall language of “otherwise objectionable,” Goldman says, “makes you wonder exactly what wouldn’t have been included in Congress’s expectations, since they gave such a broad-based mandate to services.” The 230 exemption has been relied on by countless services that allow users to post statements or other content on their sites — newspapers hosting reader comments, merchants posting consumer reviews, expert and amateur forums of every description. Nevertheless, efforts to place limits of the 230 exemption are legion. In one closely followed California case, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer persuaded a state judge to order the consumer review site Yelp to remove an ex-client’s criticism of her performance after the lawyer won a defamation lawsuit against the client. Yelp refused, noting that it hadn’t been named as a defendant in the defamation lawsuit and arguing that it was immune from liability for the client’s posts under Section 230. The California Supreme Court found in Yelp’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the issue, ending the case against Yelp. (The defamation judgment against the client remained in effect.) Congress tried to carve out an exception to Section 230 protection aimed at online sites that purportedly facilitated sex trafficking. The so-called Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump in 2018, made online services liable for ads ostensibly promoting prostitution, consensual or otherwise. But FOSTA has failed to achieve its goals. Law enforcement officials have said it has made it harder for them to root out sex trafficking, because it drove perpetrators further underground, and interfered with posts aimed at warning consensual sex workers away from dangerous situations or clients. This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today. https://t.co/sl4wupRfNH — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 29, 2020 In Congress, attacks on Section 230 or services that rely on its terms are bipartisan. For years, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been asserting that under Section 230, online services that remove conservative-leaning contents lose their status as “neutral public forums” and therefore their immunity. Those services “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken,” Cruz wrote in 2018. (His target then was Facebook, which he complained had been “censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.”) Cruz’s take was wrong and in any event unenforceable, since any content moderation whatsoever entails picking and choosing what to allow online. Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows he’s wrong, and just as reasonable to conclude that he’s merely preaching to an ideologically conservative choir . But an attack on 230 has also come from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who in 2018 proposed a sheaf of regulations on social media aimed at stemming the tide of disinformation, including faked photos and videos, posted online. Warner advocated making online services liable for defamation and other civil torts if they posted “deep fake” or other manipulated audio or visual content. But he acknowledged in his position paper that distinguishing between “true disinformation and legitimate satire.” He also recognized that “reforms to Section 230 are bound to elicit vigorous opposition, including from digital liberties groups and online technology providers.” The best approach to Section 230 is to leave it alone, but manage our expectations of what it can achieve. For the most part, legitimate online services find it in their best interest to combat material widely judged to be socially unacceptable —hate speech, racism and sexism, and trolling. But the debate on the margins is always going to be contentious. “We’re never going to be happy with internet companies’ content moderation efforts,” says Goldman. “You can’t ask whether one company’s doing it right and another’s doing it wrong. They’re all ‘doing it wrong,’ because none of them are doing it the way I personally want them to do it. Your standards may differ from mine, at which point there’s no pleasing everybody.” Online services will always be vulnerable to attacks like Cruz’s or, indeed, Trump’s. The goal of his executive order was to pump up the image of online services into behemoths that have taken over the public debate space for their own purposes, assuming “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences,” as he put it in remarks during the executive order signing ceremony. In his mind, that made them legitimate targets for regulation. Trump’s audience, of course, wasn’t ordinary citizens who feel their access to information or right to post their content online was being trampled, but his political base, which imagines that its megaphone is being taken away. The biggest joke during the signing ceremony was Trump’s assertion that “if [Twitter] were able to be legally shut down, I would do it. I think I’d be hurting it very badly if we didn’t use it anymore.” As the prominent internet rights lawyer Mike Godwin observed in response, “Seriously? Who on earth believes that Donald J. Trump could make himself live another week in the White House — much less serve another term — without his daily dose of Twitter psychodrama?” In truth, Trump was just trying to work the referees — hoping that his rhetoric alone will discourage Twitter from further interfering with his tweets. That seems to be working with Facebook, which thus far has announced a hands-off policy on political posting, no matter how noxious or mendacious. Even Facebook executives, as it happens, have been discontented by the hands-off policy adopted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Arguments that private companies such as Twitter or Facebook are infringing on constitutional free speech rights are misguided, since constitutional protections for free speech apply to official government infringements, not those of private actors. In the private sphere, the diversity of approaches to content moderation may be society’s safety valve. “We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation, that if internet companies just invested enough time and money, they’d come up with something that would make everyone happy,” Goldman told me. “That outcome does not exist. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.” window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '119932621434123', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://ift.tt/1sGOfhN"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); The post Hiltzik: Trump’s fake attack on Twitter appeared first on Sansaar Times.

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lovehardenemycollector · 5 years ago

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Undocumented workers who rebuilt the city after Hurricane Katrina remain unrecognized and have seen their home become hostileThe sight of the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel is impossible to escape on the busy Canal Street corridor downtown. Slabs of broken gray concrete form a frozen landslide 18 stories above the ground, and the arm of a massive crane stands almost upright after a botched removal effort left it embedded in the sidewalk below.Nearly three months after the deadly collapse, the bodies of two victims – José Ponce Arreola, from Mexico, and Quinnyon Wimberly, from New Orleans – still remain inside the wreckage. After Delmer Joel Ramírez Palma was deported just days after Thanksgiving, the Hard Rock ruins serve as a stunning visual reminder of the precarious situation of undocumented workers who hold a unique place in the history of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Having helped rebuild New Orleans and much of the surrounding region after the hurricane, they now face being hounded out of the place many of them call home.Ramírez Palma, an undocumented construction worker at the Hard Rock, had tried to warn supervisors of construction safety concerns but was ordered to ignore the issues, according to his lawyers and family. Two days after being seriously injured in the collapse, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and subsequently deported to Honduras, against the protests of immigration advocates and the head of a state labor agency. He had lived in New Orleans for 18 years.For many New Orleanians, the treatment of Ramírez Palma was both a stinging rebuff to the contributions of undocumented immigrants in New Orleans over the years, and yet another example in a long history of Latinx worker abuse in the city.“It’s just unconscionable. It’s unreal how evil sometimes their policies are,” Salvador Longoria, executive director of Puentes New Orleans, said of Ice’s decision to deport the Honduran father of three.Longoria co-founded Puentes, a local Latinx advocacy not-for-profit, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to help support and assimilate the thousands of workers who came to New Orleans to rebuild the city after it was flooded by a massive levee failure.In the New Orleans area, undocumented families have had to change the way they live in Ice’s shadow, Longoria said.He knows of families that limit their outings to work and the grocery store, and of children who have memorized a plan of action, including who to call to post bail, in case their parents do not return home after work.“They’re dealing with real dystopian scenarios,” said Longoria. “After the raids and after the detention of so many other people, that’s what they’re living with every day and it really is a constant fear and tension about what could happen,” he said.Within the last six months his organization received an uptick in requests for “Know Your Rights” training from undocumented communities in neighborhoods across New Orleans to help protect themselves in case of an encounter with Ice.> Latinx workers, many undocumented, were a pivotal force in the city’s post-Katrina recovery.Latinx workers, many undocumented, were a pivotal force in the city’s post-Katrina recovery. A 2006 academic study found about half of the reconstruction workforce was Latinx, and about half of that group was undocumented. The majority of Latinx workers relocated to New Orleans from other areas of the United States.“So many of the people that were gutting the moldy buildings, and tearing walls down and doing the dirty work that has to be done in mold-infested houses were Latino workers,” said Longoria. “[They] without a doubt, reconstructed and rebuilt New Orleans.”In an effort to speed up construction after the storm, the federal government suspended enforcement of employee eligibility checks by employers and certain workplace protection measures.The result was widespread worker exploitation.“There was wage theft, there was underpayment of wages, there was abuse of the employees,” said Longoria.Reports from 2015 found day laborers were still waiting to get paid for post-Katrina work a decade after the storm.Many leading advocacy groups in the city – like the Congress of Day Laborers, an immigrant-led activism group affiliated with the New Orleans Center for Racial Justice – were created as a response to the rampant abuse of Latinx workers in the wake of the storm.Post-Katrina, the Latinx community developed a strong and growing presence in New Orleans. Since 2010, the Hispanic population has grown by 24%, outpacing 7% total growth in the metro area, according to the latest statistics from the New Orleans Data Center. Most of the area’s 114,000 Latinxs reside in the suburban areas of Jefferson Parish, outside New Orleans, and Hondurans represent about a third of the Latinx population in the area.While Ice maintained a steady rate of deportations under President Obama, the current administration’s increasingly aggressive crackdown on immigration and asylum seekers has cast a new level of fear among Latinxs in New Orleans, like so many other cities and towns across the US.Louisiana has also recently emerged as a new hub of migrant detention. Over the past year, Ice has expanded its network of detention centers across the state with eight new facilities, all former state prisons and local jails.As of today, 7,513 people, or 17% of the 44,538 national detainees, are being held in Ice custody in Louisiana, according to an agency official.While Louisiana’s converted jails are also housing detainees from out of state, the sharp rise in detention capacity and remote locations of the new facilities has alarmed local undocumented workers and immigration advocates.Bruce Hamilton, staff attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana, said he drives up to five hours to reach clients detained in Ice facilities across the state.Remote detention centers add yet another layer of difficulty to an already complicated immigration system and has a tangible impact on the outcomes of asylum cases, lawyers and advocates say.“[Asylum-seekers] are very much cut off from the resources that could help you with asylum,” said Hamilton. “You don’t have access to your papers, if they’re in the care and custody of your family. You don’t have access necessarily to an attorney. And you may have very limited access to the internet or to a law library.”> Asylum-seekers are very much cut off from the resources that could help you with asylum.> > Bruce HamiltonA spate of controversial cases in Louisiana this year – including the detention and deportation of Yoel Alono Leal, a Cuban man with cancer, and the suicide of another Cuban, Roylan Hernández-Díaz, while in a private Ice detention facility – have prompted popular outcry against Ice policies.The ACLU is pushing Ice to stop the use of solitary confinement in detention centers and grant bonds and parole for asylum seekers on humanitarian grounds. Granting of parole requests has dropped precipitously among certain Ice field offices, from more than 90% in 2011-2013 to 4% in February-September 2017, according to an ACLU lawsuit.Ice officials did not respond to a question on parole denials but said in an email statement: “Bond decisions are based on an alien’s flight risk, and the potential threat to public safety. Each case is reviewed individually, taking into account factors like immigration history, criminal history and community ties.”While New Orleans keeps a sanctuary city policy that prevents local police from aiding Ice, in suburban municipalities – where the Latinx population is concentrated – offer no such protections for the undocumented.Still, New Orleans, which exists in the mainstream imagination along a black/white racial binary, isn’t immune to anti-Latino sentiment, says Longoria.His family emigrated to New Orleans from Cuba when he was four years old, and he noted that even while most New Orleanians are accepting of the Latinx community, he still perceives a gradual shift in racial anxieties.“I grew up here and I never felt a tension about my Latino identity and my assimilation in the city. But, as the years have gone on, when certain people see the number of Latinos increasing … they feel that for some reason or another their way of life is threatened.”Longoria still takes the long view: “I hope that most New Orleanians realize that, you know, Latinos have actually been here since the city was founded,” he said. “And it’s just a new phase of that history that has always existed in New Orleans.”

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newsfundastuff · 5 years ago

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ionecoffman · 6 years ago

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An Elephant’s Personhood on Trial

Forty-seven years ago, the Asian elephant now known as Happy was one of seven calves captured—probably in Thailand, but details are hazy—and sent to the United States. She spent five years at a safari park in Florida, time that in the wild would have been spent by her mother’s side. Then she was moved to the Bronx Zoo in New York City. There Happy remains today, and since the death of an elephant companion in 2006, she has lived alone, her days alternating between a 1.15-acre yard and an indoor stall.

For a member of a species renowned for both intelligence and sociality, the setting is far from natural. In the wild, Happy would share a many-square-mile home range with a lifelong extended family, their bonds so close-knit that witnessing death produces symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. It would seem that Happy, despite the devotions of the people who care for her, is not living her best life.

In considering Happy’s circumstances and what might be done to improve them, should something more than animal-welfare laws and zoo regulations—which the Bronx Zoo has not violated, but arguably are inadequate—be invoked? Should Happy be considered, in legal terms, a person? Which is to say, an entity capable of possessing at least some rights historically reserved for humans alone—beginning with a right to be free?

Making that case is an advocacy group called the Nonhuman Rights Project. Since 2013, the group has filed lawsuits on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in New York and, in neighboring Connecticut, three elephants used in a traveling circus. They’ve lost those cases, but they have convinced judges to take them seriously, and in October petitioned a New York state court to order Happy’s release. She wouldn’t be returned to the wild, but transferred to a sanctuary in California with more space and the company of other elephants. The hearing took place earlier this month, and while no decision was reached—the case will likely be moved to a court within the Bronx Zoo’s jurisdiction—it was still a unique moment to reflect on the status of animals and the law.

Until recently, the idea of elephant personhood would have struck legal observers as a joke. Just a few decades ago, most states still treated animal cruelty as a misdemeanor, like public intoxication or driving without insurance. But an increasing number of Americans take animal well-being seriously: A 2015 Gallup poll found that a majority “are very or somewhat concerned” about animal mistreatment. The legal system has changed in turn. Every state now considers animal cruelty a felony, and laws like California’s recently passed Proposition 12, which improves living standards for farm animals, are becoming commonplace.

Still, these laws have blind spots and inconsistencies. The federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act omits poultry. State laws are an inconsistently enforced patchwork, and practices that many people consider cruel—such as gestation crates for pigs—remain legal in many places. Even the most-beloved animals don’t always receive much consideration. “In the vast majority of jurisdictions, if someone beats your dog to death in front of you, all you can sue them for is the cost of buying another dog,” says Chris Green, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program.

Animal-welfare laws also depend on government intervention. Citizens can’t file suit on behalf of animals they don’t own. Animal-welfare laws fall short of actual rights—and centuries of legal custom have reserved rights for humans. “A thick and impenetrable legal wall has separated all human from all nonhuman animals,” writes Steve Wise, the Nonhuman Rights Project’s founder and lead attorney, in his book Rattling the Cage.

[Read: Do we need zoos?]

To help Happy breach it, Wise invokes both scientific research and legal principle. Elephants, attest scientists who filed affidavits in Happy’s case, are highly self-aware, emotional, make choices, and have a rich sense of both past and future. (Happy, in fact, was the star of a landmark 2006 Science study describing how elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors, which is considered a measure of especially human-like awareness.) “Elephants share many key traits of autonomy with humans,” write evolutionary biologists Lucy Bates and Richard Byrne in their affidavit. Wise argues that respect for autonomy underlies our own legal right to physical liberty. Extending that to elephants is simply a matter of equality.

Happy the elephant in the Bronx Zoo’s Asia display (Bebeto Matthews / AP)

In a news release issued after this month’s hearing, the Wildlife Conservation Society—the Bronx Zoo’s owner—describes the lawsuit as “an academic exercise” that, in the words of the zoo’s director, Jim Breheny, is intended to “promote their radical philosophical view of ‘personhood.’” Happy’s present conditions, they say, are perfectly suitable and meet established welfare standards, and moving her could be traumatic. (That issue won’t be adjudicated in this article; for more information, see court documents filed by Patrick Thomas, the Bronx Zoo’s associate director, and Joyce Poole, one of the biologists supporting the lawsuit.)

More to the philosophical point, the Wildlife Conservation Society cites rulings against similar Nonhuman Rights Project lawsuits filed on behalf of captive chimpanzees. According to those decisions, rights belong only to those who can also accept moral responsibility and social duties—which even the smartest animals can’t.

The rulings have been criticized, though, both by scientists who insisted that chimps do in fact have responsibilities within their own societies, and by some legal theorists who don’t necessarily support chimp rights, but fear a rationale that could threaten many human beings. The rights of an infant or an elderly grandmother with severe dementia are hardly contingent on the duties they fulfill.

[Read: Is the future of zoos no zoos at all?]

This past May, in rejecting a Nonhuman Rights Project request to appeal these decisions, the New York judge Eugene Fahey wrote that he only did so on procedural grounds. “Does an intelligent nonhuman animal who thinks and plans and appreciates life as human beings do have the right to the protection of the law against arbitrary cruelties and enforced detention?” he wrote. “This is not merely a definitional question, but a deep dilemma of ethics and policy that deserves our attention.”

Fahey’s opinion—intended, as legal opinions are, as a resource for future deliberation—seems to leave New York courthouse doors open for Happy. Whether they’re wide enough remains to be seen. There are certainly other arguments against elephant personhood. Richard Cupp, an animal-law professor at the Pepperdine School of Law, worries that extending rights to animals could ultimately erode our own. “Courts and society might, with this new paradigm, be tempted not only to look at more intelligent animals as being like humans,” he said in a debate with Wise, “but start to think of less-intelligent humans a little more like animals.”

Cupp also fears opening a “floodgate of litigation” as animal advocates work their way through the animal kingdom, moving from elephants and chimpanzees to common creatures—a worry echoed by Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, who spoke to Harvard Magazine about his concern that people might claim personhood for farm animals. “We kill millions of animals a day for food,” said Epstein. “If they have the right to bodily liberty, it’s basically a holocaust.” Rather than rights, Epstein suggests more animal-welfare protections.

There are rejoinders to both points: Expanding rights to women, racial minorities, and children didn’t erode the rights of property-holding white men, and implications for other species are immaterial to the question of elephant or chimpanzee rights. Other lawsuits involving other species and other rights would certainly follow—but those deserve to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, rather than forestalled en masse because it’s uncomfortable to consider what they imply for animals we eat.

[Read: Why are baby animals dying at the National Zoo?]

Regardless of how Happy’s case is decided, though, the legal landscape for animals is changing. Outside the U.S., an Argentine court granted freedom to an orangutan at the Buenos Aires Zoo; courts in the Indian state of Uttarakhand ruled that animals both wild and domestic are not property but “legal entities” on whose behalf humans must act as guardians. The European Union, New Zealand, and Quebec explicitly recognize animals as sentient, though the actual impacts of sentience laws have been limited. Legal rights for animals are no longer a fringe idea.

Inside the U.S., judges in Alaska and Illinois have started to consider the well-being of pets, rather than mere ownership claims, in divorce-custody proceedings. Though an Oregon court rejected a high-profile lawsuit that would have allowed a horse’s advocates to sue for damages caused by criminal neglect, another court in that state ruled that animals could legally be considered victims of crimes—an implicit recognition that they’re more than just property.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund, which filed the aforementioned Oregon horse case, has also pushed for animals to be covered by Freedom of Information Act laws that, by the law’s letter, apply to individuals—not individual humans. Meanwhile, Friends of Animals, another advocacy organization, has collaborated with the legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum to develop what they call a “right to ethical consideration”: In their eyes, the Nonhuman Rights Project’s focus on autonomy sets too high a cognitive bar; rights might instead be based on simpler capacities, like emotions and imagination.

Ethicists have even suggested property rights for wild animals threatened by development, labor rights for working animals, and the use of citizenship theory as a framework for thinking about animal rights. Domestic animals might be treated as full-blown citizens; wild animals are likened to members of other nations. Even if such ideas seem impractical, they’re valuable prompts to moral imagination. What would fair labor law look like for a chicken?

“For the most part, there’s been an invisibility to anything but humans throughout the legal system,” says Irus Braverman, a law professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “We have to bring the animals back in.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

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go-redgirl · 6 years ago

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Trump is Proving to Be One Tough Hombre at the Border Townhall.com ^ | December 22, 2018 | Nicholas Waddy

After some indecision, President Trump has decided to roll the dice and embrace a government shutdown in order to put pressure on Congressional Democrats to fund a “Great Wall” on the border with Mexico. Bravo, President Trump!

Conservatives and patriots have watched with consternation over the past two years, as Trump has repeatedly given way on the issue of wall funding. The time has now come for Republicans to put up or shut up. As Trump observed himself, upholding the sovereignty of our nation, and protecting the safety of the American people, is the first responsibility of any elected official. Thus, adequately fortifying our porous border with Mexico ought to be a no-brainer for any congressman. Since, unfortunately, quite a few congressmen failed to realize this, their hands must be forced. So be it. It is high time that an American president showed the mettle to take this battle on.

The media's reaction to a shutdown is predictable: they will spin it as a calamity caused, as per Chuck Schumer's latest trademark sound bite, by a Trumpian “temper tantrum.” Walls are dumb, the press will say, and Trump is wasting everyone's time, since the Democrats will never vote for a wall. The obvious rejoinder is...Trump clearly believes in the necessity of a wall, as do many of his core supporters. We shall see whether a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, of partially disabled government is enough to bring Democrats to the negotiating table, but they will crack, sooner or later. If in the end that means meeting President Trump halfway and voting for slightly less than $5 billion for the wall, that would be vastly better than nothing.

Those who believe in border security should be thrilled that President Trump is finally going to the mat for a wall. The good news doesn't stop there, however. This week the U.S. also agreed with Mexico that, in future, those traveling through Mexico to apply for asylum in the U.S. will stay in Mexico while their claims are being processed.

This is a huge win for the Trump administration. What it means is that Mexico will bear the burden of housing and caring for these migrants (no doubt subsidized by the U.S.), but more importantly these opportunistic gate-crashers will be denied, both in the short-term and in the long-term, what they most want: entry into the United States. After all, going forward, how many poor Central Americans will make the trek to the U.S. border if they know that at the end of it they face a long spell in a Mexican detention camp, followed by a likely refusal of their asylum application by U.S. authorities? Very few indeed.

Imagine just for a second, though, that Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016 instead, and she had welcomed every self-described “refugee” at the border with open arms, continuing President Obama's policy of “catch-and-release,” which gave these mostly phony asylum-seekers immediate gratification: the ability to work and live in the U.S. Trump's new agreement with Mexico constitutes a strong deterrent to illegal immigration and to fraudulent requests for asylum. The Democratic “plan” for the border, though, would have encouraged greater and greater flows of migrants/refugees, and thus by now America's cities would be overflowing.

We can't, of course, rule out the possibility that Mexico will balk, or that some grandstanding federal judge will try to block President Trump's brilliant new deal with Mexico with a national (or international) injunction, but on the face of it Trump has, at a stroke, torpedoed the raison d'être of the “caravan” system. The end of the road for most migrants will now be in Tijuana, instead of Los Angeles. The American people can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Despite all these positive signs about President Trump's seriousness about defending our border and our sovereignty against the tide of illegal immigration, there is still more to be done. A wall will not, by itself, prevent all illegal crossings, nor will it stop people from coming to the U.S. as tourists or as students and then choosing to stay here. What will put an end to these forms of illegal immigration is strong sanctions on U.S. employers who hire undocumented workers.

The Trump administration has so far not moved as aggressively as it should in this regard. Millions of U.S. businesses continue to scoff at our labor and immigration laws. There still exists no better way to disincentivize illegal immigration than by depriving illegal aliens of work opportunities. Despite the carping this will engender from corporate America, it is in the long run the only way that illegal immigration can be defeated.

Secondly, our country has, as I have noted before, strong laws prohibiting the harboring of illegal aliens, and which make it a felony to aid or encourage illegal immigration. Democratic politicians and various “pro-immigrant” advocacy groups are violating these laws with impunity and have been doing so for years. Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice followed standard operating procedure in such cases – that is, it assumed that Democrats and liberals are above the law.

There is no reason why the Whitaker or Barr Justice Department should act with similar fecklessness. On the contrary, it is high time that illegal immigration's enablers and apologists should face the music.

With President Trump's help and guidance, the United States is about to turn the corner on the issue of illegal immigration. We are about to control our border with Mexico for the first time in decades.

Let's not stop there, however. Let's control the homeland as well, by making it a place where employers, politicians, and activists alike respect our immigration laws, and where crime does not pay.

TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; Front Page News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections KEYWORDS: aliens; border; trump; winning

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benrleeusa · 7 years ago

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[Ilya Somin] The "Protect and Serve Act" is both Unnecessary and an Assault on Federalism

Both the House and the Senate are now considering versions of the "Protect and Serve Act," which would make it a federal crime to assault a police officer. The proposed legislation is both unnecessary and an attack on constitutional federalism. Monique Judge of the Root has a helpful description of the two versions of the bill, one of which is modeled on federal hate crimes laws criminalizing violence motivated by hostility to various minority groups:

The House version (pdf) of the bill makes it a crime to knowingly cause or attempt to cause "serious bodily injury to a law enforcement officer." The crime is punishable by 10 years in prison. If the crime results in the death of a law enforcement officer, or the crime involves kidnapping or the attempt to kidnap or kill a law enforcement officer, then the sentence can be up to life in prison.

The Senate version was introduced by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.). Using language that mirrors the language used in hate crime laws aimed at protecting marginalized groups, the bill would make it a federal hate crime "to knowingly cause bodily injury to any person, or attempt to do so, because of the actual or perceived status of the person as a law enforcement officer."

Both versions are an unconstitutional attack on federalism. In United States v. Morrison (2000), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not give the federal government a general "police power" authorizing it to punish violent crime throughout the nation. As the Court put it, "we can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims." Morrison struck down a provision of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that would have given victims of gender-motivated violence the right to sue their assailants in federal court. The same logic that doomed that law also applies to both the House and Senate version of the Protect and Serve Act. Both seek to use federal law to criminalize local violent crime, even if in this case directed at police officers rather than victims of gender bias.

Even aside from precedent, anyone who cares about enforcing constitutional limits on federal power has good reason to oppose the Protect and Serve Act. The most plausible source of constitutional authority for the act is Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce, under the Commerce Clause. It could be argued that Congress can criminalize violence against police officers, because such violence has an effect on interstate commerce, especially in the aggregate. But if such minor and indirect effects are enough to authorize making something a federal crime, the same logic can justify federal regulation of almost any activity. Virtually any significant activity of any kind has some substantial impact on interstate commerce. In Morrison, the Supreme Court rejected the federal government's Commerce Clause argument because it "would allow Congress to regulate any crime as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact of that crime has substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption. Indeed, if Congress may regulate gender-motivated violence, it would be able to regulate murder or any other type of violence since gender-motivated violence, as a subset of all violent crime, is certain to have lesser economic impacts than the larger class of which it is a part."

Morrison was partly undermined by the Court's terrible 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich. But even Raich did not reverse Morrison's holding with respect to federal power over local violence.

The Senate version of the Protect and Serve Act could also be potentially be justified on the same types of theories as those put forward to defend federal hate crimes laws. I addressed this issue in my critique of the 2016 Blue Lives Matter Act, an earlier proposal similar to the current Senate bill:

Lower courts have upheld some parts of current federal hate crime laws targeting violence on the basis of race, gender, religion, and similar classifications under an expansive interpretation of Congress' powers under the Thirteenth Amendment, which is often understood to target a wide range of "badges and incidents" of slavery, as well as actual slavery itself. In my view, this rationale for current federal hate crimes laws is extremely dubious. But even if it is sound, it clearly does not apply to the Blue Lives Matter Act [and the Protect and Serve Act]. Even a very expansive view of congressional power under the Thirteenth Amendment cannot cover this case. No one can seriously argue that violence against police is a badge or incident of slavery, or that law enforcement officers are a historically oppressed minority group.

For more on the Thirteenth Amendment issues raised by this kind of legislation, see this analysis of the Blue Lives Matter Act written by my wife Alison Somin, who is a special assistant/counsel at the US Commission on Civil Rights.

In addition to being unconstitutional, the Protect and Serve Act is also unnecessary. As Radley Balko explains, violence against police officers remains at historically low levels, and there is no reason to think that state and local authorities do not take such crime seriously. Police have obvious incentives to aggressively investigate crimes targeting their fellow officers. The same goes for prosecutors, who need to maintain good relations with the police in order to do their own jobs effectively. If anything, we have far more reason to fear that police and prosecutors will fail to properly address crimes committed by police than crimes committed against them.

Some states already have laws imposing additional penalties for crimes targeting on-duty police. Even in those that do not, there is every reason to expect that crimes against police will be aggressively investigated and prosecuted. As Balko notes, police are far from being a helpless minority group that requires federal intervention to save them from the indifference or hostility of state and local governments:

The conventional thinking on hate crimes is that, when someone kills or assaults or commits a property crime like vandalism in such a way that targets the victim because they are a member of a vulnerable community, all members of that community are affected. The problem with adding police officers (or the military — another group some Republicans have tried to add) is that they are about as far removed from a vulnerable group as one can imagine. They carry guns and other weapons. They have the power to detain, arrest, and kill. And they literally have the entire government at their backs. That's who they represent.

Balko also points out some ways in which the House version of the Protect and Serve Act could be abused by law enforcement:

What harm could come of this bill? An assault on a police officer charge is often used a cudgel — it's a way of dissuading legitimate victims of police brutality from filing complaints. If such an assault charge could soon come with an additional federal charge punishable by up to 10 years in prison, that cudgel grows by about 10 sizes. It gets awfully persuasive.

Or think about a demonstration where police push into a protest line, resulting in pushing and shoving. It would now get pretty easy to start handing out assault charges against the protesters. A politically ambitious U.S. attorney who wants to, say, shut down Black Lives Matter could get a lot of mileage out of this bill.

To a greater extent than the Blue Lives Matter Act (sponsored by Republican Rep. Ken Buck), the Protect and Serve Act enjoys substantial bipartisan support. Both Democrats and Republicans see it as a way of burnishing their pro-police credentials ahead of the 2018 election. For the Trump-era GOP, this is another example of their egregious "fair weather federalism," which seems to crop up repeatedly on issues relating to immigration and criminal law. It isn't a good look for the bills' Democratic supporters either, at a time when their party is using constitutional federalism to battle Trump on a variety of issues. Both sides of the political spectrum would do well to curb their appetite for federal overreach.

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njawaidofficial · 7 years ago

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Artificial Intelligence Ushers in the Era of Music Moneyball (Guest Column)

http://styleveryday.com/2017/09/12/artificial-intelligence-ushers-in-the-era-of-music-moneyball-guest-column/

Artificial Intelligence Ushers in the Era of Music Moneyball (Guest Column)

Monkeys cannot create copyrightable works. This is an actual rule. Seriously.

In 2011, British photographer David Slater was photographing a troop of macaques when Naruto, a six-year-old, smiled into Slater’s lens, pressed the shutter button, and captured this toothy selfie:

After going viral and popping social media metrics rivaling Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar-selfie, the photo was posted on Wikipedia. Slater fired off a cease-and-desist letter, but Wikipedia refused to take down the photo because a monkey, not a human, created it. PETA jumped into the fray and sued Slater to establish Naruto’s ownership of his selfie. After entertaining some giggle-inducing, “monkey-see, monkey-do” briefs, a federal court held that Congress did not intend to extend copyright protection to works created by animals. A recent settlement – in which Slater will donate a portion of future royalties to conservation charities – mooted the Ninth Circuit appeal. Nonetheless, this seemingly frivolous lawsuit has significant consequences.

Following the “Monkey Selfie” decision, the United States Copyright Office compendium amended its eligibility requirements. “Photograph[s] taken by a monkey” were excluded. The Copyright Office also declared that “Works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author” were ineligible. Copyright requires a human touch.

This means musical works purely created by artificial intelligence (“AI”) are not protected by copyright law. Sounds like far-fetched sci-fi? Not to the music industry. Algorithmic music is not new: it is fifty years in the making. AI has been steadily infiltrating the music industry’s core creative processes and now teaches computers how to create without human intervention. One tech pundit recently predicted that AI’s progress would lead to the music industry’s next “Napster moment.” To assess this possibility, consider some of the AI forces already animating today’s music.

Amper Music, a “composer in a computer,” enables collaborations between artists and computers. It recently released the single, “Break Free,” a duet with Internet personality/singer, Taryn Southern on the single, “Break Free.” Amper developed the harmony, chords and sequences based on Southern’s suggested inputs, which human producers then fine-tuned.

AI is not just assisting the creative process. It is independently creating music. Jukedeck uses neural network AI technology to produce customized, royalty-free tracks. A user selects variables such as mood (energetic, melancholic), style (modern, classical, piano, synthesizers), tempo (beats per minute) and length. The selections enter Jukedeck’s MAKE cloud which then precipitates a tailored track in mere seconds. Even when identical parameters are selected again and again, Jukebox’s AI rains unique, complete musical works each time. The user can then preview the song, accept it, modify the selection, or request a new creation. Because there may or may not be some “creative input or intervention from a human author” after Jukedeck’s AI generates the music, only a case-by-case analysis could discern whether any given song generated by Jukedeck qualifies for copyright protection. At some point along the continuum from merely aiding to independently creating music, Jukedeck produces works that may be as uncopyrightable as Naruto’s Monkey Selfie.

Optimists view Jukedeck as a benefit to the music industry. Jukedeck summons science to reduce the cost of creating musical content. And because its core audience is YouTubers desiring personalized soundtracks for their videos, Jukedeck dissuades the kind of infringement endemic to YouTube.

Pessimists view Jukedeck as a harbinger of catastrophe. To back the 400-plus hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, Jukedeck asks only for a one-time charge (as low as $0.99 for individuals/$21.99 for large companies). These nominal fees eliminate the need for licenses, and have the potential to render stock music libraries and human musicians obsolete.

Realists sniff at Jukedeck, Amper and similar AI creations, rightly characterizing the current offerings as customized, affordable 21st century elevator music. But, can AI be taught to produce revenue-generating hits? Though even the most fervent AI supporters concede that the technology is a long way from producing a perennial hit like Toto’s “Africa” or a concept record like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” current software suggests that the era for realizing such potentialities has arrived.

Australian start-up Popgun (co-founded by Twitter music executive, Stephen Phillips) utilizes deep-learning AI, which is capable of yielding exponentially more nuanced compositions than the background sounds traditionally produced by machine-learning AI. Popgun’s first project is Alice, an AI that plays piano with humans. Alice was inspired by Google’s AlphaGo project which famously taught a computer in 16 months how to best the world’s top-ranked player in Go (an ancient Chinese-board game more complex than chess).

Alice just started playing the piano in April 2017. It learns like a child, listening to thousands of songs and observing how experienced pianists play. After only a few months, Alice can already listen to human keystrokes and reply with suggested notes, resulting in collaborations and duets between AI and humans. Imagine what Alice will learn if it able to ingest every known sonic footprint, or spend one-on-one time with Kayne or Pharrell. Skeptical of Alice’s potential? Recall the scoffing that bubbled and then popped after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess grandmaster in history. This stunning AI victory happened over twenty years ago. AI is significantly better today. At this rate, it is only a matter of time before Alice can out Brittany, Brittany, and a race for artists’ AI rights ensues.

Still incredulous? Follow the money. There’s an AI-driven gold rush. Google Brain introduced Magenta with the stated objective of determining whether computers can produce compelling artistic music. Sony and Warner have invested in Techstars Music, an AI music incubator. Sony’s separate Computer Science Laboratory unveiled the Flow Machine project to analyze thousands of differing scores (from ABBA to Zappa) and educate the computer to compose its own catchy pop tunes. Moodagent, IBM Watson and Gaana are also processing voluminous catalogues into big data to ascertain the science behind the music and musical preferences. AI is seeing beyond traditional genre divides, and plotting the dots between artist and audience. Spotify uses AI to create “Discover Weekly” playlists that are replacing the industry’s “golden ears” with more accurate, personalized recommendations. Increasingly ubiquitous smart voice assistants, Alexa and Siri, are already delivering a frictionless music experience.

Musical Moneyball has arrived, and just in the nick of time. Declining revenues, decreased marketing spends, and smaller A/R budgets necessitate minimizing risk, smarter resource allocation, and a higher hit rate in introducing new artists. AI’s continued evolution will aid album promotion (targeted chatbots), brand building (focused user engagement), and concert ticket sales (postal code analytics, “verified fan initiatives” and fan devotion metrics).

Fully realized AI will arrive with what futurists have dubbed the “singularity,” the moment when AI learning tumbles into a runaway reaction of self-improvement cycles that yields a superintelligence surpassing all human intelligence. Here, one imagines individuals empowered to compose her life’s soundtrack with supersmart phones and wearable technology, to create and play real-time musical scores drawn in accord with the listener’s external environment or internal biorhythms, or both. One company, AI Music, is already working on “shape changing” existing songs to match the listening context (such as the user’s walking pace) and remixing them on the fly to achieve harmonious states of being.

AI is the future of the music industry. While it may be awhile before AI-generated music tops the charts, AI is already curating music, breaking artists, changing consumption, and influencing listenership. It is not too early to check your contracts and negotiate AI rights. And do not be afraid to let computers make your music. Just be sure to secure your rights by imparting some human “creative input or intervention” to such digital ditties to avoid simian-like exclusion.

James Sammataro is the national head of Stroock’s entertainment litigation group. He represents celebrities, media companies and professional sports teams on a wide range of matters including copyrights, trademarks, defamation, First Amendment issues and profit participation disputes.

#Artificial #Column #Era #Guest #Intelligence #Moneyball #Music #Ushers

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years ago

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Hiltzik: Trump’s fake attack on Twitter

The fiction was embodied in an executive order Trump signed on May 28, purportedly aimed at “preventing online censorship.” The order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which dramatically changed the environment for online services hosting user-provided content.

Section 230, which has been consistently misunderstood by its critics across the political spectrum, allows online services to host potentially objectionable, even defamatory user-posted content without becoming liable to legal action themselves, while also giving them the discretion to moderate that content as they wish.

We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation…. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.

Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University

“The section’s most fundamental concept is that we want internet companies to manage user content, and not be liable for whatever they miss,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in the law at Santa Clara University Law School. “The fear was that if they were liable for whatever they missed, they wouldn’t even try.”

The tech community has long treated Section 230 as “the most important law on the Internet.” As my colleague Sam Dean reports, the title of a book on the section by Jeff Kosseff, a cyberlaw expert at the U.S. Naval Academy, labels its text “the twenty-six words that created the internet.”

But the law also has come under concerted attack by plaintiffs who keep looking for loopholes and judges who open them, all aimed at scrubbing distasteful material from the Web.

Trump’s executive order is a typical attack on Section 230, launched by someone acting out a personal grievance.

It’s so sloppily drafted that it would accomplish nothing resembling the prevention of “online censorship,” would be almost certainly unconstitutional if it did, and was basically a reflexive reaction to one offense: Twitter’s unprecedented designation of Trump tweets as the embodiment of lies requiring corrections.

Twitter tagged the May 27 tweets, which asserted that mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” with a note directing users to fact-checked information refuting the assertion.

Trump issued his executive order the very next day.

Twitter went even further a day later, when it placed a blocking message over a Trump tweet implying that participants in protests over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who apparently died in the custody of Minneapolis police, should be shot if they were looting. The message required users to click separately to view the tweet.

The executive order bears all the hallmarks of a Trump tantrum, including the lack of a mechanism to turn it into action. It begins with a Frank Costanza-like litany of personal grievances.

“Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” the order reads, specifically calling out Twitter: “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias… Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.” (Trump means any politician other than himself.)

We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020

The order calls on the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” the scope of 230’s immunity from liability, even though that latitude is quite clear in the language of the law.

The text makes it clear that the immunity is very broad indeed. It allows online services to restrict access to content that they consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.”

The catchall language of “otherwise objectionable,” Goldman says, “makes you wonder exactly what wouldn’t have been included in Congress’s expectations, since they gave such a broad-based mandate to services.”

The 230 exemption has been relied on by countless services that allow users to post statements or other content on their sites — newspapers hosting reader comments, merchants posting consumer reviews, expert and amateur forums of every description.

Nevertheless, efforts to place limits of the 230 exemption are legion. In one closely followed California case, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer persuaded a state judge to order the consumer review site Yelp to remove an ex-client’s criticism of her performance after the lawyer won a defamation lawsuit against the client.

Yelp refused, noting that it hadn’t been named as a defendant in the defamation lawsuit and arguing that it was immune from liability for the client’s posts under Section 230. The California Supreme Court found in Yelp’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the issue, ending the case against Yelp. (The defamation judgment against the client remained in effect.)

Congress tried to carve out an exception to Section 230 protection aimed at online sites that purportedly facilitated sex trafficking. The so-called Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump in 2018, made online services liable for ads ostensibly promoting prostitution, consensual or otherwise.

But FOSTA has failed to achieve its goals. Law enforcement officials have said it has made it harder for them to root out sex trafficking, because it drove perpetrators further underground, and interfered with posts aimed at warning consensual sex workers away from dangerous situations or clients.

This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today. https://t.co/sl4wupRfNH

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 29, 2020

In Congress, attacks on Section 230 or services that rely on its terms are bipartisan. For years, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been asserting that under Section 230, online services that remove conservative-leaning contents lose their status as “neutral public forums” and therefore their immunity.

Those services “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken,” Cruz wrote in 2018. (His target then was Facebook, which he complained had been “censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.”)

Cruz’s take was wrong and in any event unenforceable, since any content moderation whatsoever entails picking and choosing what to allow online. Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows he’s wrong, and just as reasonable to conclude that he’s merely preaching to an ideologically conservative choir .

But an attack on 230 has also come from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who in 2018 proposed a sheaf of regulations on social media aimed at stemming the tide of disinformation, including faked photos and videos, posted online.

Warner advocated making online services liable for defamation and other civil torts if they posted “deep fake” or other manipulated audio or visual content. But he acknowledged in his position paper that distinguishing between “true disinformation and legitimate satire.”

He also recognized that “reforms to Section 230 are bound to elicit vigorous opposition, including from digital liberties groups and online technology providers.”

The best approach to Section 230 is to leave it alone, but manage our expectations of what it can achieve. For the most part, legitimate online services find it in their best interest to combat material widely judged to be socially unacceptable —hate speech, racism and sexism, and trolling. But the debate on the margins is always going to be contentious.

“We’re never going to be happy with internet companies’ content moderation efforts,” says Goldman. “You can’t ask whether one company’s doing it right and another’s doing it wrong. They’re all ‘doing it wrong,’ because none of them are doing it the way I personally want them to do it. Your standards may differ from mine, at which point there’s no pleasing everybody.”

Online services will always be vulnerable to attacks like Cruz’s or, indeed, Trump’s.

The goal of his executive order was to pump up the image of online services into behemoths that have taken over the public debate space for their own purposes, assuming “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences,” as he put it in remarks during the executive order signing ceremony. In his mind, that made them legitimate targets for regulation.

Trump’s audience, of course, wasn’t ordinary citizens who feel their access to information or right to post their content online was being trampled, but his political base, which imagines that its megaphone is being taken away. The biggest joke during the signing ceremony was Trump’s assertion that “if [Twitter] were able to be legally shut down, I would do it. I think I’d be hurting it very badly if we didn’t use it anymore.”

As the prominent internet rights lawyer Mike Godwin observed in response, “Seriously? Who on earth believes that Donald J. Trump could make himself live another week in the White House — much less serve another term — without his daily dose of Twitter psychodrama?”

In truth, Trump was just trying to work the referees — hoping that his rhetoric alone will discourage Twitter from further interfering with his tweets.

That seems to be working with Facebook, which thus far has announced a hands-off policy on political posting, no matter how noxious or mendacious. Even Facebook executives, as it happens, have been discontented by the hands-off policy adopted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Arguments that private companies such as Twitter or Facebook are infringing on constitutional free speech rights are misguided, since constitutional protections for free speech apply to official government infringements, not those of private actors.

In the private sphere, the diversity of approaches to content moderation may be society’s safety valve. “We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation, that if internet companies just invested enough time and money, they’d come up with something that would make everyone happy,” Goldman told me. “That outcome does not exist. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.”

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