California prisoners continue hunger strikes against "cruel and inhumane conditions"

Aljazeera

Feds Reveal Widespread Housing Bias But Refuse to Stop It

ColorLines

A new report commissioned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed yesterday that prospective renters or home buyers of color are significantly less likely to be shown units compared to white home seekers.  The results of the study, conducted by the Urban Institute with a $9 million grant from HUD, are fairly unsurprising--discrimination is present everywhere and housing is no exception.

But as ProPublica's Nikole Hannah-Jones reports, HUD has no plans to do anything to stop the practices revealed in the new study. Hannah-Jones writes:

[T]he more startling thing may be what HUD intends to do with its findings. ...[T]he federal agency has no plans to use these tests to actually enforce the law and punish the offenders.

Once a decade for the last 40 years, HUD has produced a massive survey to reveal the pervasive discrimination that, year after year, exists in America's housing marketplace. But as ProPublica reported late last year, HUD as a policy refuses to invest the same kinds of time, resources and techniques in prosecuting those guilty of the very discrimination its expensive studies uncover. Instead, HUD outsources testing used to find and punish discriminatory landlords to dozens of small, poorly funded fair housing groups scattered across the country.

And Congress has shown little appetite for forcing HUD to do more meaningful enforcement. A bill that would create a national testing enforcement program at HUD is expected to soon die in committee for the third time.

The Urban Institute conducted 8,000 tests in 28 cities by sending testers of color and white testers with otherwise equal qualifications to realtors to inquire about apartments and homes. The report found that black, Asian and Latinos borrowers are less likely to be shown houses or apartments. That means folks of color have fewer options for where to live, are forced to spend more time and money looking for a home, and end up stuck in neighborhoods some may hope to leave.

As the author of the Urban Institute report said in a video that accompanies the report, "discrimination in housing contributes to the persistence of broader inequalities in housing, in home ownership, in neighborhoods, access to education, wealth building. So where we live really matters."

ProPublica's previous investigation revealed that HUD has consistently refused to act affirmatively to stop these practices despite clear legal, decades-old prohibitions against racial discrimination in housing.

Congressman Wants To Prosecute Journalists For Reporting Classified Material

ThinkProgress

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) wasn’t the only conservative member of Congress to call National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden a “traitor” for revealing confidential information about the scope of government surveillance. But King was the first to add that journalists who report on this material should also be criminally prosecuted on CNN’s “AC 360” Tuesday night:

ANDERSON COOPER: As far as reporters who helped reveal these programs, do you believe something should happen to them? Do you believe they should be punished as well?

KING: Actually, if they willingly knew that this was classified information, I think actions should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude. I know the whole issue of leaks has been gone into over the last month. But I think on something of this magnitude, there is an obligation both moral but also legal I believe against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security. As a practical matter, I guess there have been a number of reporters who have been prosecuted under it. So the answer is yes to your question.

(non-whites as mascots) NFL Commissioner: Redskins Name ‘Stands For Strength, Courage, Pride and Respect’

ThinkProgress

A top Republican messaging shop may be holding a focus group asking questions about the name of the Washington Redskins, but National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell seems to have already developed his own justification for the name. In a letter responding to members of Congress who have urged Goodell and Redskins owner Daniel Snyder to change that name, Goodell said that it remains “a unifying force that stands for strength, courage, pride and respect,” USA Today reports.

Deadspin has a full copy of the letter, addressed to Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), the co-chairs of the Congressional Native American Caucus. It is courtesy copied to eight other members of Congress who, along with Cole and McCollum, sent Goodell a letter calling for a name change in May. In the letter, Goodell cites the “overwhelming majority” of Americans who view the name positively and multiple Native American tribal leaders who have said they have no problem with it. The name is honorary and worth preserving, Goodell argues, because “the most recent detailed survey of Native Americans, conducted by the independent and highly respected Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that fewer than 10% considered the name objectionable.”

Goodell did not state the exact percentage of Native Americans that would have to find the name objectionable to qualify it as objectionable.

Meanwhile, several of Goodell’s arguments seem thin. Goodell’s letter says the team chose the name in 1933 to honor its head coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, the obvious insinuation being that Dietz was a Native American. But as Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky noted, he almost certainly wasn’t. Goodell added that the matter has been settled legally, though he didn’t mention the ongoing federal trademark case that is taking place only because a previous decision to rescind the Redskins’ trademark on grounds that it is an offensive term was overturned on a technicality.

And while Goodell states that “there is no doubt that the team understandably is proud of its heritage and the culturally rich community it serves,” he acknowledges neither the team’s extensive history of racism nor that the “culturally rich community it serves” includes a population that is just 0.6 percent Native American, according to the Census Bureau. One wonders, then, if Goodell would feel the same way if the Redskins chose to honor the racial group that makes up a majority of D.C.’s population and 28 percent of its business owners with a similar racial descriptor.

The letter wasn’t received well in Congress. McCollum called it “a statement of absurdity” and “another attempt to justify a racial slur.” Del. Eni Faleomavaega, who represents American Samoa, said Goodell’s response “completely missed the point.” Former NFL linebacker Scott Fujita tweeted Wednesday, “Whoever drafted the Commissioner’s letter to Congress about the football team in DC failed him miserably.”

No Warrant, No Problem: How the Government Can Get Your Digital Data

Propublica

"We Got Your Back": Fox Host Kilmeade Endorses Tommy Robinson, Leader Of Violent Anti-Muslim Hate Group

MediaMatters

Pat Buchanan Compares (non-whites) Immigration Reform To Appeasing Hitler*

MediaMatters

Wall Street Journal Advocates For Racist "Stop-And-Frisk" Model to Restrict Movement of Non-Whites

MediaMatters and [MORE]

A Wall Street Journal op-ed advocated for police around the country to use New York City's "stop-and-frisk" policy as a model, which has no proven evidence of reducing crime rates and has historically targeted racial minorities.

Stop-and-frisk, the controversial policy which allows police officers to stop and search individuals they consider to be suspicious, is currently under review in the case Floyd v. New York. The New York Police Department has conducted more than four million stops since 2002, and according to a New York Times editorial, a federal judge "noted that nearly 90 percent of the time the police found no criminal behavior." The suit charges the NYPD with illegally detaining these individuals "not because of suspicious behavior but because of their race."

In her Journal op-ed, Heather Mac Donald disputed these charges, claiming that stop-and-frisk policies in New York have "helped the city achieve an astonishing drop in violent crime" and should be New York's "most valued export" along with other NYPD policies to the rest of the nation. She claimed that stop-and-frisks overwhelmingly targeted blacks and Hispanics because "the preponderance of crime perpetrators, and victims, in New York are also minorities," and concluded the crime rate would increase nationwide if the policy were overturned.

But there is no evidence that stop-and-frisk has decreased crime in New York City. New York Magazine noted that while stop-and-frisks have "skyrocketed" in the past decade, non-fatal shootings in the city have remained steady. Stop-and-frisk has done little to identify illegal firearms, as a New York Times editorial noted, as "guns were seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops." And the New York Civil Liberties Union similarly explained that while total violent crime fell in New York City by 29 percent from 2001 to 2010, cities that did not have stop-and-frisk policies saw even larger violent crime declines in the same time period, by as much as "59 percent in Los Angeles, 56 percent in New Orleans, 49 percent in Dallas, and 37 percent in Baltimore."

In fact, the drop in violence in New York City is part of a trend that preceded widespread use of stop-and-frisk. As the Times reported, New York's sharpest drop in homicides came before 2002, the year stop-and-frisks started rising in New York. Forbes magazine provided the following graph, showing that "the number of murders decreased sharply between 1990 and 1998," while then remaining relatively steady during the period that stop-and-frisks increased dramatically:

Supreme Court rejects Rumsfeld torture suit appeal - two US citizens who were detained and tortured by US forces in Iraq

Jurist

The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday denied [order list, PDF] certiorari in an appeal from two US citizens who were detained and tortured by US forces in Iraq. In Vance v. Rumsfeld [docket; cert. petition, PDF], the court was asked to consider whether federal courts may entertain damages claims brought by US civilians who have been tortured by the US military, and whether Ashcroft v. Iqbal [JURIST report] imposes a heightened mental-state requirement in all constitutional tort cases against supervising government officials. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit [official website], sitting en banc, ruled [opinion] in November that the two citizens could not sue [JURIST report] former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld [official profile] for alleged torture by US soldiers. The court found that the "military authority exception" to the Administrative Procedure Act [text] bars the suit against it by prohibiting judicial review of "military authority exercised in the field in time of war or in occupied territory."

Several Bush administration officials have been sued in recent years for alleged torture and illegal detention. In June 2012 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website] announced [JURIST report] the launch of its Torture Database [materials], a collection of more than 100,000 Bush-era documents recording "rendition, detention, and interrogation policies and practices." In June 2011 the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [official website] upheld the dismissal [JURIST report] of a torture suit against Rumsfeld brought by four Afghan and five Iraqi citizens alleging they were illegally detained and tortured. Also that year the US Supreme Court ruled [opinion, PDF] in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd [Cornell LII backgrounder] that former US attorney general John Ashcroft [JURIST news archive] was immune from suit [JURIST report] by a witness detained in a terror investigation. In February 2011 the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Human Rights [advocacy websites] urged [JURIST report] the signatory states of the UN Convention Against Torture [text] to pursue criminal charges against former president George W. Bush. Other calls to investigate the criminal culpability of Bush and officials in his administration have been consistently rejected by US officials [JURIST report].

New Report Reveals Lack of Written Identification Procedures

Innocence Project

A recent National Institute of Justice report reveals a serious lack of official policies for conducting eyewitness identification procedures despite long-standing federal guidelines that urged law enforcement to implement and improve policies for how witnesses are used to identify suspects, reported USA TODAY.

 
The first national assessment of eyewitness identification standards compiled data from 619 police agencies over 15 months. Eyewitness misidentification continues to be the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions later overturned through DNA testing, contributing to nearly 75% of convictions in these cases.
 
The report, which was produced for the Justice Department’s research arm by the Police Executive Research Forum, uncovers that more than four out of five police agencies in the U.S. have no written policies with 84% lacking a written policy for conducting live suspect lineups, and slightly more than 64% without a formal standard for administering photo displays of potential suspects. Research found problems despite the size of the police agency.

Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, characterized the findings as “extremely disturbing.”

“These findings are actually worse than we thought they would be,” Scheck said, adding that at a minimum, law enforcement agencies should ensure that lineups are being administered by officers who do not know the identity of the suspect to guard against intentional or unintentional influence.

“When you don’t know who the suspect is, you are going to get a better answer,” he said. “All of the major police organizations have agreed that these best practices not only protect the wrongfully convicted, but they also protect the police.”

The guidelines that the National Institute of Justice introduced in 1999 emphasized the benefit of “blind” lineups, meaning that the officer who conducts the lineup shouldn’t be aware of the identity of the suspect, so that he or she can’t contaminate the identification procedure. Yet the new report found that nearly 70% of police agencies still use officers with knowledge of the suspects and 90% of agencies use “non-blind” administrators in live lineups.

Innocence Project client David Wiggins, who spent 23 years behind bars for a rape he didn’t commit before DNA evidence proved his innocence, is an unfortunate example of how faulty identification procedures can lead to a wrongful conviction. The 14-year-old victim identified Wiggins in a live lineup, which was not administered under blind conditions. He was the only person who had also appeared in a photo array. His attorney didn’t challenge the identification procedure, and he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Wiggins was exonerated in October after 23 years in prison. 

Read the full article. 

Jury selection is underway in the George Zimmerman trial (expect white supremacy not justice)

NPR

Jury selection is underway in the George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty to the second-degree murder in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012. Lawyers on both sides are questioning candidates for the high-profile case.

Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

LYNN NEARY, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Lynn Neary in Washington; Neal Conan is away. For the second day in a row, lawyers questioned potential jurors in the George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, last year.

Zimmerman claims that he was defending himself against Martin while serving as a neighborhood watch volunteer. But Martin supporters say the teenager was unarmed and targeted by Zimmerman because he was black. The racially charged trial has dominated national headlines and has been the subject of intense discussion social media.

Such widespread attention complicates the jury selection process, which can play a crucial role in the outcome of any trial. We want to hear from attorneys. Tell us about a time when jury selection made a difference in your case. And if you had to do it over, how would you change the way you chose a jury? Tell us your story. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. Or you can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Later in the program, we'll talk "Game of Thrones" and unhappy endings. But first the latest in the George Zimmerman trial. Jury selection started yesterday, and Corey Dade has been covering the trial. He is a contributing editor for The Root and a former NPR corr. He joins us from Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta. Welcome to the program, Corey.

COREY DADE: Hi Lynn.

NEARY: So help us put this in context. What - how much do we know, what do we know about these potential jurors?

DADE: Well, it started off, you know, the conventional wisdom was that these potential jurors would be asked a range of questions to sort of gauge their attitudes on issues that might affect the case. So their attitudes on guns, their attitudes on African-Americans, on Hispanics, whether or not they'd had experiences with crime. But so far most of the questioning has been centered on how much they actually knew about this case, and that's obviously to gauge how much they actually might have been influenced by the past 16 months of news reports and social media chatter.

So at this point they have 500 - a pool of 500 potential jurors to go through so that they can pick six.

NEARY: So can we assume from that that they're trying to find people who have not as much - know little about the case or haven't been engaging in social media and reading all the headlines?

DADE: Well, I think they want to strike a balance. Obviously the defense wants a type of juror that the prosecution does not. But I think between both sides, the ideal juror is someone who knows enough about the case but doesn't know so much to the point where they're influenced by what we've heard because there's so much information out there now that may not actually be admitted as evidence in the trial.

NEARY: And Corey, you've written a lot about how social media is playing out in this case and how it might affect the jury selection process. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

DADE: Well, social media is actually the vehicle that brought this case, the shooting, to national attention. The outcry, the national outcry about Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed, 17-year-old African-American male, being shot by Zimmerman - George Zimmerman who was 29 at the time - he went - Zimmerman went 44 days without an arrest, and that outcry through social media bubbled up to become national news.

And of course we know that that led to Zimmerman's eventual arrest. So from that moment, social media has always been involved in this. But over the last - certainly the last year, Zimmerman's attorneys have done something that's a little bit unprecedented, maybe, in legal cases. They have actively engaged in Twitter, Facebook and the Web to not only beat back sort of disinformation or myths about Zimmerman but to put out information about the evidence that they were collecting during this preparation.

This has given them an enormous platform, enormously effective platform, to shape the public's opinions about - or reshape in this case - about Zimmerman. And so the question at this point is whether or not that sort of blitz on the part of his attorneys has actually potentially influenced the opinions of these jurors.

NEARY: Well, what's interesting is that the judge has refused to put a gag order on this, right?

DADE: That's right, that's right. The prosecution has asked, four times, four separate motions with the judge, to put a gag order on both sides, and she's refused.

NEARY: And what about the prosecution? They can't use social media, is that right? Or what is their relationship to social media?

DADE: That's right, for the most part. Because they are the state, they are the government, they are prohibited from engaging in social media in the ways that the defense are. So they can not actively put out their opinions, they can't do anything to the extent that the defense can do. They can certainly go on social media and monitor traffic and pay attention to what's being said. But they can't have a voice.

NEARY: So what do both sides, both the defense and prosecution, what is it that they can glean from the conversations they might be tracking on social media?

Brooklyn is the National Epicenter of Racist Pot Arrests

AtlanticWire

Don't pretend you're terribly surprised. After all, Kings County (Brooklyn's home) is the county with the most marijuana possession arrests in the state with the most such arrests, according to the ACLU. But what might surprise you is that, if you're black, you're almost ten times more likely to be busted in Brooklyn than if you're white.

Earlier this week, the national ACLU released a study on marijuana arrests. Nationally, 45.7 percent of all drug-related arrests are for marijuana. One of the primary findings of the research was that blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites, in every state except Hawaii. Mapped by state, the ratio of black-to-white marijuana arrests looks like this. The darker the shade of the state in the interactive map below, the more likely a black person is to be arrested than a white person. No ratio is worse than Iowa, where blacks are 8.3 times more likely to be arrested.

White 911 Operator Fired After Allegedly Making Racist Comments On Facebook

Huffingpost

A 911 operator in Texas was fired Wednesday after allegedly making a series of racist remarks on her Facebook page.

In Facebook posts that only her friends could see, 911 operator April Sims, 23, apparently compared black people to "animals" and said she could "count on one hand" those she knew "who didn't have [expletive] for brains," according to local ABC affiliate WFAA-TV.

Some of the offensive comments reportedly relate to Sims' work responding to emergency calls.

“I’m a very easygoing person and I will give the shirt off my back to help others, but when call after call are black people fighting and screaming and hitting each other and they want to yell at me and treat me like [expletive] when I’m trying to help, is not cool,” Sims allegedly wrote in a post, according to The Dallas Morning News.

A statement on the Dallas Police Department's Facebook page reads: 

On June 4, 2013, a call taker for the City of Dallas advised a supervisor in the 9-1-1 Call Center that April Sims, who is also a Call Taker, had violated the Dallas Police Department’s Social Media policy. On June 5, 2013, Ms. Sims’ employment with the City of Dallas was terminated. Ms. Sims was hired by the City of Dallas in November 2012. Ms. Sims was on probation and therefore has no right to appeal her termination.

In a video broadcast on WFAA-TV, Dallas City Council member Dwaine Caraway said he was shocked and saddened. He said the incident embarrassed the police department and the city.

White Supremacist Sentenced To 10 Years For Torching Black Family’s Home

NewsOne

Five years ago, Brian James Moudry (pictured), a self-avowed White supremacist, burned down a Black family’s Chicago home. Now the man who lived only five houses away from the home of his victims has reportedly been sentenced to a maximum of 10 years behind bars for his crime, reports The Inquistr.

SEE ALSO: 911 Operator’s Racist Facebook Rant: ‘Black People Are Like Animals’

Moudry, who at one point referred to himself as “Rev. Brian ‘Warhead von Jewgrinder’ Moudry,” has reportedly been in the White Power Movement since 17. He has also admitted to being involved with the World Church of the Creator, an infamous far-right White supremacist group led by neo-Nazi Matt Hale who’s serving a 40-year prison sentence, after being convicted of asking a follower in 2002 to murder U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow. Moudry, a hate-monger, who has committed racially motivated crimes against Blacks before, has also been an avid leader of white power demonstrations in recent years.

When the unnamed family of nine moved in to Moudry’s Joliet, Ill., neighborhood, they automatically became the targets of his hatred.

On June 17, 2007, at around 4:00 a.m., Moudry, whose face, arms, and neck are covered in racist tattoos, doused the victims’ home in gasoline and then torched it because he was reportedly upset that African Americans rented a house on his block. The ex-con also confessed to planning to intimidate the owner and interfere to prevent African Americans from renting the property.

After the arson, in which luckily no one was hurt, the Mother and her eight children, who were all under age 14, moved out of the home.

Ironically, a Black attorney, Miangel Cody, represented Moudry throughout his courtroom proceedings. U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman reportedly told Moudry in no uncertain terms that he should be grateful for his Black lawyer who defended him.

In his defense, Cody said that his client suffers from schizophrenia, childhood abuse, and alcoholism, which allegedly contributed to Moudry burning down the victims’ home.

White Supremacy/ Racial Injustice in North Carolina

NYTimes

The North Carolina Legislature repealed the state’s Racial Justice Act this week, and the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, is expected to sign the bill. But the state cannot erase the detailed and irrefutable proof of ugly racial bias that led a state trial judge to resentence four death row inmates to life without parole because of this statute.

Passed in 2009, the law made North Carolina the first state in the country to give death row inmates the chance to have their sentences changed if they proved that state prosecutors significantly discriminated on the basis of race — for example, in selecting jurors. Judge Gregory Weeks tried one case on its own and three others together; in 2012, he found the bias of prosecutors intentional in all four cases.

In the first trial, he found “highly reliable” a statistical study by the Michigan State University College of Law that showed racial bias in removing blacks from juries in death penalty cases in all but 4 of the state’s 100 counties and that prosecutors were more than twice as likely to strike qualified blacks from a jury as members of other races in the 20-year period from 1990 to 2010.

In the second trial, the judge found that words and deeds of the prosecutors showed racial bias in jury selection. Prosecutors in at least one case used a cheat sheet with pretexts for striking black jurors without mentioning race. A prospective black juror with no criminal record was struck because she was said to live in a “bad area,” whereas a white juror who had been a marijuana dealer was picked in part because he was a “fine guy.”

Despite the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, there are still about 150 other cases pending under the act. It is unclear whether these cases must be allowed to go forward under the State Constitution.

The number of death sentences issued in the state declined from 33 in 1993 to 1 so far this year, and North Carolina has executed no one since 2006 — indicators that there is no need for this option to be part of the criminal justice system. The persistence of racial bias in death penalty prosecutions makes abolishing capital punishment even more urgent.

Racist Federal Judge Has Absolutely No Clue What She's Talking About

Jezebel

Sharon Stone Settles Racism Lawsuit with Filipino Nanny

DailyMail

According to the Mail Online, Hollywood actress Sharon Stone has reached a settlement in a legal dispute involving a former nanny for her children. The 55-year-old Basic Instinct star was being sued by Filipino nanny Erlinda Elemen, who was fired in February two years ago.

Elemen claimed the actress made insulting comments about her country and heritage and called her people "stupid". She also claimed Stone criticised her frequently and even stopped her from reading the Bible in her room. The Oscar nominee (Best Actress in a Leading Role for Casino (1995)) apparently also instructed her not to speak to her children - Roan Joseph Bronstein, Laird Vonne Stone and Quinn Kelly Stone - because she didn't want them "to talk" like Elemen.

Stone initially used Elemen only as a back-up nanny and she was only promoted to head nanny in 2008. That was the year she claims she moved in to Stone's residence and began travelling with her and her sons, until she was fired in 2011.

Elemen was finally fired for "stealing" overtime pay, despite working seven days a week.

"Because abuses in overtime pay are common for household employees it seems ironic that Ms. Stone initially did the right thing and paid Mrs. Elemen overtime wages and then terminated her for accepting those same wages," Solomon Gresen, Elemen's lawyer stated.

What’s Wrong With the NSA Collecting Your Phone Records?

BlackListedNews

Verizon is being forced by the government to disclose telephone records of all of its customers. Those of us who want our call records to be private are being forced to reveal them to the government. We can’t keep them private even if we want to. What is wrong with the government spying on us in this way?

Murray Rothbard has made a clear and correct libertarian case against any compulsory speech. As I understand this, our thoughts are our own. They are private. Our imaginings are our own. Our fantasies are our own. We can imagine the most heinous crimes and plan them out in our minds if we wish. We can have any sexual fantasies we wish to have. We can indulge in as many hateful, malevolent and spiteful thoughts as we wish. We can have private saintly wishes, fond hopes, mistaken views, ill-formed ideas, flashes of genius, communications with God or with the devil, atheistic thoughts, artistic ideas, or superstitions. I hardly scratch the range of what we can think. It is that vast. If it is illegitimate, in the libertarian world explained by Rothbard, to use force against a non-aggressor, then no one has a right to make us talk or to make us reveal our thoughts because our thoughts are not aggressions. That’s one argument.

Here’s a second argument. If force is allowable to be used on people’s thoughts, two kinds of results will rise in frequency. First, people will be forced to reveal thoughts that they don’t want revealed because they consider them damaging to themselves or others. People simply could not get along with one another if what people thought of each other or knew about each other were revealed or could be revealed or were made to be revealed. Society would break down. Second, people will be forced not to reveal thoughts that they want to be revealed, such as new ideas that go against conventional wisdom. Think of the suppression and persecution of Galileo. Both kinds of results cause costs to the person and society. The right to think and speak and the concomitant right to think and not speak limit these two costs.

Free speech extends to related activities. If you have a right to speak or not to speak, then you have a right to commit your thoughts to paper and keep the paper private. You have a right to communicate your thoughts to others and keep that contact private. Speech extends to joint communications with others and to the making of joint plans. It extends to using various means of communication, such as paper and electronic devices. These actions are natural extensions of free speech and the same libertarian-law reasoning applies.

You can privately conspire by yourself or with others (plan) to build the most marvelous energy-saving device, or you can privately conspire (plan) to dope a horse in a horse race. The latter cannot be a crime because you haven’t actually doped the horse. Furthermore, you can change your mind and not dope that horse. Neither one of these private plans, for good or ill, invades the rights of others. Both are exercises of one’s rights. Yes, it is no crime to plan a crime, by this reasoning. To say otherwise opens up the Pandora’s Box of controlling all speech (and associated behavior) in the name of preventing crime and of finding people guilty of thought crimes, as opposed to actual crimes. This is rank totalitarianism. The government engages in this via conspiracy laws.

Verizon is an intermediary. The government is essentially making you and me send them a record of our calls. I’ve made three arguments against this, all of them viewing this as going against free speech and as an invasion of privacy.

First, under libertarian law reasoning, making you reveal your records when you have committed no crime is an aggression and illegitimate. Second, if such aggression is permitted, it results in two serious costs, which are associated with revealing speech that people want kept private and suppressing speech that people want made widely known. Third, such aggression is part and parcel of a totalitarian mindset that, by extension, attempts to control speech as a preventive measure and find people guilty of thought crimes that have aggressed against nobody.

What the government is doing to Verizon’s customers is wrong for these reasons.

The government argues that it’s going to use the data to catch terrorists or potential terrorists who intend to violate rights of innocent people. The government is for sure invading our free speech rights against the slim possibility that terrorists will invade our lives. Which of these is a greater threat to us? Our own government’s totalitarian moves in the past 10 years or potential terrorists who are being encouraged by our own government’s activities overseas?

Can any rights ever be secured by a government that believes it is proper for it to invade some or many rights in order to secure others? Isn’t this yet another Pandora’s Box? Isn’t a government with this kind of power wide open to invading any rights it pleases?

Bread, butter, and food stamp economy

BlackListedNews.com

Is the US developing a permanent under-class of citizens economically?

Free gun give away initiative begins in Houston neighborhood

USA Today

Houston resident Cheryl Strain's inexperience with guns was apparent as she struggled to load shells into a 20-gauge shotgun.

Over the piercing blasts of gunfire in the shooting range, Strain's instructor, Dan Blackford, patiently directed her on how to use her thumb to shove a shell all the way inside the barrel and feel it click.

"Now we got a round in the chamber ready to go," Blackford said as he positioned her body on the right way to hold the shotgun. "Look down your sight, put that BB right in the middle of your target and press the trigger."

Strain's northwest Houston community of Oak Forest is the first neighborhood in the country being trained and equipped by the Armed Citizen Project, a Houston nonprofit that is giving away free shotguns to single women and residents of neighborhoods with high crime rates.

While many cities have tried gun buy-backs and other tactics in the ongoing national debate on gun control, the nonprofit and its supporters say gun giveaways to responsible owners are actually a better way to deter crime. The organization, which plans to offer training classes in Dallas, San Antonio, and Tucson, Arizona, in the next few weeks, is working to expand its giveaways to 15 cities by the end of the year, including Chicago and New York.