Monthly Archives: March 2001

When Is A Robbery Not A Robbery? When The Court of Appeals Is Insane

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This one’s unbelievable. In May 1999 a man walks into a convenience store in Iowa at 4:30 a.m. wearing a paper bag over his head, athletic socks on his hands, and tells the cashier “Trick or treat” and then tells her to give him the money. She gives him the cash. He orders her to life on the floor. She does, and he flees the scene only to be arrested later.

James Edward Hearn was convicted of second degree robbery by a jury. An appeals court, however, cleared his conviction on the grounds that what he did in the convience store didn’t meet the legal test of second degree robbery. In Iowa part of the definition of second degree robbery is that the person being robbed has to have a reasonable fear of “immediate serious injury.”

Having worked many overnight shifts at convenience stores during one summer while I was in college, if someone had come in with a bag on his head and socks on his hands at 4:30 a.m. and asks me to give him the money, I’d have been very tempted to take my chances and just shoot him.

Hopefully the Iowa State Supreme Court will do the sensible thing and overturn the appeals court.

Religious Art in Public Schools

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The issue of what is and is not permissible religious expression in public schools in the United States tends, unfortunately, to gravitate to the extremes. On the one hand are public schools, typically in the South, who want to prominently display religious texts such as the Ten Commandments in schools. On the other hand are public schools, typically in more Northern urban areas, who try to suppress even the most incidental religious expression of students.

The Associated Press reports about a Syracuse, New York school that wasn’t too pleased with a drawing produced by a kindergartner. The student was supposed to make a poster about the environment to be posted as part of a student display. The student ended up initially drawing a picture of Jesus praying with the message that “Prayer changes things.”

The school said that poster hadn’t fulfilled the assignment, so the boy drew a second poster which,

…included a church and showed two children picking up garbage from the lawn and putting it in trash cans, a man and a woman dropping trash into a recycling bin and a picture of a globe with cutout children holding hands circling it.

Off to one side was a man in a flowing robe kneeling down with both hands outstretched to the clouds above. He was not identified as Jesus.

The school displayed that poster, but only after folding it in half so the Jesus-looking character was not visible. The student’s parents are suing, and if the teachers and administrators altered the sign specifically to hide the Jesus figure because of its religious implications, they were pretty clearly acting unconstitutionally.

Anyway, I find it odd that adults who children look up to engage in this sort of behavior. As some of you know, I’m an atheist and my wife is a Wiccan, and we take our daughter to a day care center that is on the campus of the university we work at — the day care is owned by the university and is therefore a public institution.

Over the summer they had the children create various posters and they hung them on the wall so that any visitor would see them coming in. One child, probably from a Christian family, had created a poster that exhorted the reader to reject Satan, accompanied by relatively technically accomplished depictions of both Satan and the benefits to be had by not following him.

If one of the teachers had drawn such an overtly religious poster, that would have concerned both of us given their position of authority, but the child’s poster was not a concern. On the one hand we’d prefer not to have our daughter indoctrinated by staff members, but on the other hand shielding her completely from any religious views that students have would be equally absurd.

Morons Who Served In Congress

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About twice a day it seems I get the same boring spam/scam about how I could make thousands of dollars by helping Nigerians transfer money out of that country. This is a long-running scam that predates the Internet and has fooled victims literally around the world — including a U.S. Congressmen.

Former Congressmen Edward Mezvinsky was recently indicted for bilking people out of more than $10 million, partly in an attempt to cover losses he incurred after falling for the Nigerian money transfer scam. Mezvinsky was also involved in some other scams, including Ponzi schemes. The amusing part (except, I guess, for those out the $10 million), is that while Mezvinksy was busy scamming other people with Ponzi schemes, he himself fell for the Nigerian money scam.

But, of course, this is America and so Mezvinksy’s lawyers have a ready defense for him — he was legally insane, they claim, at the time he committed his illegal acts. In fact Mezvinsky recently sued pharmaceutical company Roche AG claiming that its anti-malarial drug, Lariam, was really responsible for all of Mezvinsky’s problems. According to his lawsuit, “As a result of the psychiatric syndrome caused by his long-term use of Lariam, he invested rashly in bad investments . . .[and] depleted his own financial resources, his wife’s financial resources, as well as his wife’s inheritance.”

That IBM-Holocaust Book

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ArsTechnica recently linked to one of the better (though short) reviews of Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. Reviewing the book for The New York Times‘s, Gabriel Schoenfeld wwrites of the book,

The key question, in any case, is not whether I.B.M. sold Germany its equipment but whether, as alleged, it made the Final Solution part of its ”mission” and whether its relationship with Germany in any way ”energized” or significantly ”enhanced” Hitler’s efforts to destroy world Jewry. On the first point, Black never even attempts to substantiate his accusation — a scandalous omission considering the gravity of the charge. As for the second, his shaky evidence leads him to oscillate between two completely irreconcilable positions.

On the one hand, Black argues that I.B.M., through its German subsidiary, ”designed, executed and supplied the indispensable technological assistance Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before — the automation of human destruction.” On the other hand, he maladroitly hedges, noting that even if Germany had completely lacked I.B.M.’s efficiency-enhancing tools, ”the Holocaust would have proceeded — and often did proceed — with simple bullets, death marches and massacres based on pen and paper persecution.” But if that is so, in what sense were the punch cards and the tabulating machines ”indispensable”?

Intolerance Run Rampant

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This is really unbelievable. Apparently the Pennsylvania State University’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had its constitution and mission statement censured by the PSU student government. According to the student government, the YAF constitution and mission statement were discriminatory.

How were they discriminatory? Both referred to upholding “God-given free will, whence derives the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.” According to the student government, that wording reflected a “devotion to god” which was discriminatory. As a result, YAF was told to either change the wording or it would not longer be allowed as a student group.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education worked with the YAF and a university committee overruled the student government (for more information see FIRE’s press release about the incident).

Unfortunately, there seems to be a growing ambivalence to and even ignorance of the fundamental role that protection of free speech plays in civil society. The Christian Science Monitor reported some depressing news today on that front. It reports that in a recent study, 75 percent of teachers knew the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech, but less than 25 percent of teachers could name the other rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

And, of course, administrators outright rejected the notion that high school students could be trusted with free speech. Less than a third said that students at public high schools should be allowed to report on controversial issues for their student newspapers without explicit permission from the administration.

NAACP Should Shut Up

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Near the end of the 2000 political season, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ran a controversial advertisement implying that George W. Bush was responsible for the murder of James Byrd. The ads features Byrd’s daughter, Renee Mullins, doing a voice over saying that after seeing Bush oppose hate crime laws, “It was like my father was killed all over again.”

Conservatives were outraged by the ad, they need not worry much longer, because ultra-liberal Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone (Minnesota) has a solution — he wants to make that ad illegal.

The NAACP, like many such organizations, is incorporated as a nonprofit under IRS rules that forbid it from doing partisan political advocacy; if the NAACP itself had aired the ad, its tax exempt status could be jeopardized. To get around this limitation the NAACP exploited a “loophole” and created The NAACP Voter Fund. The Voter Fund is incorporated as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. A 501(c)(4) nonprofit is defined by the IRS as a nonprofit that is devoted to some sort of social welfare issue. Such organizations can’t endorse candidates without risking their tax exempt status, but they can run the sort of issue ads that the NAACP ran directed at Bush.

For Wellstone and other extremist supporters of campaign finance reform, allowing the NAACP to take out such ads is an intolerable loophole in the law. As such Wellstone recently introduced an amendment to the campaign finance reform bill currently under consideration by the Senate which would forbid 501(c)(4) organizations from taking out any sort of ads within 60 days of a primary election.

Several opponents of any campaign finance reform, namely Republican Mitch McConnell, have actually signed on as supporters of Wellstone’s bill. Why? Because it is clearly an unconstitutional restriction of free speech, and there’s a good chance opponents of campaign finance reform will succeed in crafting any resulting bill in such a way that the Supreme Court will have to strike down the entire law rather than pick and choose to strike down just Wellstone’s amendment.

Wellstone, for his part, offers only the most pathetic of defenses in favor of his amendment. Despite the clear language from the Supreme Court on this matter, Wellstone thinks his amendment would survive legal challenge. And what about those NAACP ads? Don’t worry, Wellstone says, the Federal Elections Commission will be able to tell the good ads from the bad ads,

A comprehensive study conducted by the Brennan Center of ads run during the 1998 election found that only 2 genuine issue ads — out of the hundreds run — would have been inappropriately defined as a sham issue ad. Finally, in the event of constitutional problems, the Wellstone amendment is fully severable.

Hmmm. A sham issue ad, of course, is where the nonprofit claims to be just promoting an issue but, in fact, is really endorsing a candidate. Was the NAACP ad a sham issue ad? I would hazard a guess that it probably was. Moreover regardless of whether you think it was or not, the additional reporting costs and lawyers fees necessary to defend every advertisement would put everything back to square one — groups with large financial resources would still be in the game while the genuine grassroots efforts would get pushed out of the process entirely (Jesse Helmes once cleverly used the FEC to go after an ACT UP chapter that made the mistake of attacking him in a radio interview — few genuinely small groups can afford the risk of a protracted dispute with the FEC).

On Wellstone’s Senate web site there is some delightful Orwellian language with his office saying that these provisions are only fair,

Wellstone points out that limiting the issue ad ban just to corporations and labor will invite a shift in spending to non-profit groups in future elections, suggesting that in future years — even if this bill should pass — Congress will be forced to revisit sham issue ad regulation to close yet another loophole in federal election law.

Liberals used to trumpet this saying that the best response to speech with which they disagreed was simply more speech. Wellstone and others seem to have reversed this and decided that the less speech the better. It’s more than a bit weird to see a Democrat supporting efforts to outright ban political advertisements by labor unions. I guess they think that’s a small price to pay for an outright ban on corporate ads, but it seems like one immense Faustian bargain.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will still manage to save the soul of the country by invoking the ultimate loophole to this whole process, the First Amendment.

Source:

Wellstone Pushes to Close Sham Issue Ad Loophole In McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill. Paul Wellstone, Press Release, March 26, 2001

Planting Shrubs in Kalamazoo

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Later today the President is going to give a speech about 100 yards from my office here in Kalamazoo, the main effect of which is I won’t get to work out because they’ve decided to have him speak from the Recreation Center here.

The security here is amazing — they shut down most of the Recreation Center four days ago, and the Secret Service has been everywhere.

I wonder if Bush will give the same paramount consideration to safety of civilians the next time he decides to bomb Iraq?

Anyway, on a related topic, although I try not to be an elitist sometimes I have the feeling that I am the last conscious person left in Michigan. The hot topic with my liberal friends lately has been Bush’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed standards on arsenic.

For those not following that debate, an independent report a few years ago concluded that the current standard, 50 parts per billion, is probably too high, but they didn’t offer any guidance on what would be an acceptable standard because there isn’t a lot of conclusive research on such low levels, except in animal models.

So the EPA went ahead and put forth a 5 parts per billion standard which Bush killed. My liberal friends have been going on about how this is just for the evil corporations who want to dump arsenic in our water. Amazingly, not a single person who has brought this up to me as an example of a good regulation killed by corporate greed was aware that the major problem with the standard was that arsenic occurs naturally in large quantities in many Western states and the cost of complying with the new standard would have been extremely expensive — far in excess of even the most optimistic estimates of benefits.

If you look at a state like New Mexico, for example, it is not inconceivable that it could cost literally billions of dollars to bring their water treatment systems in compliance with a 5 parts per billion standard. Promulgating such expensive regulations without a clearer idea of the benefits is the worst sort of government intervention.

And Now, For Something Really Amazing…

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Okay, here’s something really amazing I can do with Conversant that was basically impossible with a static system. At Overpopulation.Com I have a list of all the countries of the world. The minor amazing part is that web page is one short macro that automatically pulls all of the country names from the underlying directories (since countries don’t change that often, this one is cached to maximize performance).

Anyway, I’m only about 1/3rd of the way through the nations of the world but you can get a flavor of the power of this system by visiting the page about Ethiopia. This page is also generated dynamically and at the moment simply provides links to every article on the site that mentions Ethiopia. It is relatively easy, by the way, to insert static content such as a description of Ethiopia, statistics and a map which I will go through and do in a few weeks.

Linking the content together this way throughout the site is something I’ve always wanted to do, but when you’ve got 230+ countries it becomes almost impossible. With Conversant it happens automatically after a process that probably takes 3 minutes per country to set up.

U.S. Steps Up Chemical Warfare Against Colombia

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Environmental News Network reports that the Colombian government has begun fulfilling one of its obligations under a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package approved last summer and stepped up its aerial spraying of herbicides in southern Colombia.

The Colombian army estimates that about 75,000 acres of coca plants have been eradicated through intensive spraying of Roundup Ultra. ENN reports that the herbicide is being sprayed indiscriminately and so also wipes out non-narcotics crops as well including corn and yucca plantings.

Four Colombian governors recently traveled to the United States to demand an end to the program, with Guillermo Jaramillo Martinez, governor of Tolima, stating the obvious that, “The farmers are the weakest in the narcotics traffic chain. They are cultivating illegal crops because they have no other alternative.”

And, of course, even if the eradication program is effective it will still have a perverse effect on Colombian agriculture. Any resulting decline in cocaine supply to the United States would simply cause an increase in prices which would provide ever more incentive for farmers to find ways to grow coca in spite of the spraying (not to mention fueling more violent drug-related crime in the United States that usually accompanies increases in drug prices).

That economic theory of drug demand and supply is confirmed by the fact that since the eradication efforts began seriously in the early 1990s, the amount of land cultivated for coca has tripled.

Like an addict who thinks that just one more hit will make everything better, however, the U.S. government can’t seem to get enough of its attempts to use chemicals to make its domestic drug abuse problem go away.

Source:

War on drugs takes toll on environment. Margot Higgins, Environmental News Network, March 21, 2001.