Pissed off about the FISA Amendments Act? The ACLU is looking for folks to add their names to a print ad they plan to run in the July 17 New York Times. I've added mine. You can add your here.

This is the most encouraging thing I've heard a Democrat say in ages.

But it is a great mistake to divide all human activity into two categories: those that are criminally prohibited, and those that are encouraged. In a free society, there must be a very considerable zone of activity between those two poles in which people are allowed to make their own choices as long as they are not impinging on the rights, freedom, or property of others.

He almost sounds like a libertarian.

Link

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

How Orwellian do we have to get before this bothers people?

Link

I was mindlessly surfing the web at lunch last week when I unexpectedly I found myself at a place called Dissident Voice reading a review of the graphic novel As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay in Denial. After summarizing the novel, the author of the review makes a statement I found very provocative. He said: As the World Burns is not a book for doomsday pacifists or nihilists.

This stopped me in my tracks. What exactly is a doomsday pacifist? In fact I wondered if I may in fact be a doomsday pacifist. I actually started to blog about my feelings regarding the phrase but I couldn't quite sum up my attitudes about environmental actionism in a satisfactory way.

This morning however I stumbled across this article about James Lovelock, a British environmental scientist with whom I share a lot of rather fatalistic views.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

And at that point mine and Mr. Lovelock's opinions diverge. I still have hope for renewable energy. Regardless, I thought both the phrase and the articles were pretty interesting. Am I a doomsday pacifist?

The title phrase comes from this Washington Post article and was used to describe one aspect of the current Libertarian movement. Good read.

You know I'd love an article that weaves movies and politics.

So, we can do the same types of things that the Soviets did but not be like them? We can adopt their police state tactics, spy on people like they did, hold secret courts like they did, kick down doors and haul people away like they did, throw people into secret prisons like they did, torture people like they did, refuse to answer questions like they did, ignore the laws like they did, and criticize the opposition as being disloyal like they did...and yet be nothing like them?

....

Tell me, how much evil do you have to do before you yourself become evil?

A topical link for the day: The Passion of the Pumpkin by Jesse Walker.

If anything, the Halloween-bashers play an important role. In a holiday that thumbs its nose at authority and celebrates the id, it's valuable to have some suitably spoofable superegos on hand. When someone says, "Halloween is too divisive to celebrate at school," there's a second, silent sentence lurking right below the surface. It's "Please TP my lawn."

I just read this interesting article about California's feel good Get-Tough-on-Crime policies. Note: I added the emphasis below.

California’s experiment in wholesale incarceration is one of the great policy failures of our times. Thirty years ago, California had 12 prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, after a generation of “tough-on-crime” legislation pushed through the legislature and the initiative process—from three-strikes-and-you’re-out to draconian anti-drug and anti-gang legislation—the state has close to 175,000 inmates living in 34 prisons. That means almost one in every 200 California residents is now a prisoner of the state. (And these numbers don’t even include the tens of thousands more prisoners in county jails.) The annual cost to taxpayers is about $10 billion per year, just shy of the amount the state annually puts into its vaunted public university system. If current spending trends continue, California will soon be spending more on prisons than on universities.

Who doesn't want hardened criminals behind bars? Social retribution feels good. But this is a system gone crazy. You are placing the perpetrators of crimes of unhealthy choices - drug users and their dealers - into a special program for thuggery - with all the best instructors - when you could be sending more smart kids to college. It's just nuts.

Besides my one well chronicled brush with the court system I've managed to keep out of trouble; so, I've learned most of what I know about US courtrooms by watching TV. One phase of a trial you often see portrayed is the jury instruction where the judge tells the jury they must obey the letter of the law and cannot use their own moral or ethical judgment as a basis for deciding the case. Well it turns out the judge is fibbing, and he or she knows it.

When a jury ignores this instruction and declares a defendant 'not guilty' even though the law clearly indicates they are, this is called Jury Nullification. Jury Nullification has a long and fascinating history. Back when the US was just starting out judges would even tell jurors of this power. According to this article our first chief justice John Jay told jurors: "You have a right to take upon yourselves to judge [both the facts and law]."

It's nice to know you have this is your back pocket if needed.