06.26.09
Posted in The News, International Issues at 12:54 pm by Stephen
L.A. Times
Reporting from Mexico City — Could Mexican cities become Latin Amsterdams, flooded by drug users seeking penalty-free tokes and toots?
That is the fear, if somewhat overstated, of some Mexican officials, especially in northern border states that serve as a mecca for underage drinkers from the United States.
The anxiety stems from the Mexican legislature’s quiet vote to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs, an effort that in the past proved controversial.
There’s been less protest this time, in part because there hasn’t been much publicity.
Some critics have suggested that easing the punishment for drug possession sends the wrong message while President Felipe Calderon is waging a bloody war against major narcotics traffickers. The battle between law enforcement authorities and drug suspects has claimed more than 11,000 lives since he took office in late 2006.
But it was Calderon who proposed the decriminalization legislation.
His reasoning: It makes sense to distinguish between small-time users and big-time dealers, while re-targeting major crime-fighting resources away from the consumers and toward the dealers and their drug lord bosses.
“The important thing is . . . that consumers are not treated as criminals,” said Rafael Ruiz Mena, secretary general of the National Institute of Penal Sciences. “It is a public health problem, not a penal problem.”
The legislation was approved at the height of a swine flu outbreak that dominated the public’s, and the world’s, attention. Meeting at times behind closed doors, the lower and upper houses of Congress passed the bill in the last days of April. It now awaits Calderon’s signature.
The bill says users caught with small amounts — 5 grams of marijuana, 500 milligrams of cocaine — clearly intended for “personal and immediate use” will not be criminally prosecuted. They will be told of available clinics, and encouraged to enter a rehabilitation program.
Up to 40 milligrams of methamphetamine, a synthetic and especially harmful drug, is permitted under the legislation, as is up to 50 milligrams of heroin.
In May 2006, then-President Vicente Fox, of the same right-wing party as Calderon, vetoed a similar bill that he initially had supported. He backed down only under pressure from the Bush administration, which complained that decriminalization for even small amounts could increase use.
But with about two weeks to go before crucial mid-term elections in which his party is struggling to maintain control of Congress, Calderon cannot afford to be seen as bowing to the United States, analysts say.
Already under intense criticism for the drug-related violence, Calderon needs to maintain good relations with his nation’s Congress, where much of the opposition voted in favor of the decriminalization bill.
And so, political observers say, he probably will sign it into law. Calderon’s office declined to comment for this article.
So far, the U.S. government has not publicly objected to the legislation. Michele Leonhart, acting director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, however, said in April that legalization “would be a failed law enforcement strategy for both the U.S. and Mexico.”
Mexican officials emphasize that they are not talking about legalization, but decriminalization. Courts now decide on a case-by-case basis whether and how to punish first-time drug-use offenders. There has been no standard criteria.
Calderon originally wanted the bill to allow users caught with amounts within the limits to avoid jail time only if they agreed to rehabilitation. But the bill was changed to say only that treatment would be encouraged.
Then Calderon sought a provision in which a third-time offender would be obliged to seek treatment. That measure was removed, Ruiz Mena said, after debate over whether mandatory rehabilitation is ever effective.
Mexico is woefully under-equipped to handle a rising drug-abuse problem.
For decades the country was a transit point for cocaine, marijuana and other drugs headed to the U.S. But recently, domestic consumption has risen. A 2007 study by the government found the number of addicts in Mexico to have doubled in the previous five years.
Drug abuse has grown worse in part because some of the cartels pay their people with cocaine or other drugs.
Clinics and other institutions that specialize in treatment and prevention have not kept up with the trend. The government is building 310 centers to improve care, but experts say that is not enough.
The decriminalization legislation has been criticized by religious leaders and several officials in the northern border states, who fear that “drug tourists” will begin flocking to towns and cities already besieged by violence.
“Allowing the carrying of certain amounts of drugs will create more consumers,” Oscar Villalobos Chavez, social development secretary for Chihuahua state, which borders Texas, told local reporters.
An editorial in the official magazine of the Roman Catholic Church criticized legislators for relaxing the law “when faced with the highly contagious and lethal sickness that drug addiction represents.”
Mary Ellen Hernandez, director of the Rio Grande Safe Communities Coalition in El Paso, across the border from blood-soaked Ciudad Juarez, said she worried that decriminalization would lure Americans into a drug world they aren’t prepared for and increase violence on both sides of the border.
“Already, the drugs that don’t come over into the U.S. are being handed out by dealers to younger and younger children [in Mexico], 8, 9, 10-year-olds, hooking them,” said Hernandez, whose agency specializes in drug prevention. “And then [the youths] steal to feed the habit.”
The legislation “is very disturbing and I think it will make things worse,” she said.
Except for the relatively few voices, however, there has been minimal protest over the law, and some praise.
Luciano Pascoe, vice president of the small left-wing Social Democratic Party, said the law was a positive “first step” that helped “shatter the stigma that consumers are criminals.”
His party is running in next month’s elections on a platform that includes legalization of all drugs as a way to make trafficking less lucrative.
It is not known whether that position has anything to do with four of his candidates being attacked in recent weeks. None was seriously injured.
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06.24.09
Posted in Politics, The News, Life In General, Government, Editor's Picks, Education Issues at 2:08 pm by Stephen
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/bryan10.html
Anyone who attended those giant child-processing centers the state insists on calling “schools” will recognize the scene:
You walk into the million-dollar cinderblock gymnasium, immediately dwarfed by the size and sound of the crowd. The school’s thousands of students have been herded together to cheer the glory that is “their” team as it prepares for “the big game.” Teachers and students dress in school colors, wave the school pennant, and join in the school fight song.
All this is a Very Big Deal, and woe unto he who questions any of it. There may be a speech from the principal, or from that annoying kid who successfully rode a wave of apathy into the student council presidency. The cheerleaders dance and praise the team. The team members themselves run out to thunderous applause, the crowd cheering for whatever it is they presumably accomplish for the school community – and never mind that the biggest jerks in the school are invariably found within their ranks.
Here and there you may notice small, dark clumps of the disaffected, those dour punk/goth/whatever kids who don’t seem impressed by any of this. They will be treated harshly by teachers for being negative, antisocial, or – heaven forbid! – lacking in proper “school spirit.” There is something wrong with them, most would agree, or they just want attention. And these malcontents are all freshmen or sophomores. Upperclassmen of their ilk have long since learned that such rallies are the perfect time to sneak behind the school for a cigarette or a few bong rips.
Of special significance is the rally against the major rival school down the road, the archenemy who must be denounced, ridiculed, and defeated. No one can tell you why that particular school is the big rival. “Because they’re the Broncos (or whatever the rival mascot might be)” is a typical, circular answer. Some don’t even bother moving in a circle: “They just are,” such people say, probably convinced, after a lifetime of learning to accept such answers from teachers, that this would appropriately resolve the question.
In my experience, one revealing answer came from my high school Latin teacher: “You must support the home team. Support the home team. Support the home team.” (Also, teaching Latin by rote had apparently programmed her to repeat all statements three times. Not kidding.) She didn’t follow up with any explanation of the virtues and benefits to accrue from home-team-supporting behavior. It was just crazy to think that, although the state forced us into this ridiculous institution, with its ridiculous rules and overlords, we would ever consider the school to be anything but our “home.” We were certainly intended to identify it as such. The football team was there to defend our honor (against what, nobody knows).
Having read some Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Jefferson, I concluded that the entire culture and organization of public schools must be a mistake. There were so many authoritarian attributes, I thought, they weren’t teaching kids to be responsible citizens of a republic, but subjects of a police state. Serious reforms were clearly needed. (Years later, having studied John Taylor Gatto and Austrian economics, I realized that a) the state raises kids this way deliberately, not by mistake, and b) a free market in education would quickly find and disseminate the best methods for teaching children.)
The whole weird culture of government school still puzzled me when I graduated in 1996. A little more than five years later, starting on 9/11/2001, I began to discover what all the weird ritualism and pressure to conform had really accomplished for the state.
Flags went up everywhere – you had flag bumper stickers, flag lapel pins, flag t-shirts, flags draping homes and buildings, flag-colored bunting. Across the South, people even traded their defiant Confederate flags for Old Glory – swapping out their scrimmage jerseys for the team colors. The Pledge of Allegiance took on a new, more sacred quality, as did the drinking game that is our national anthem (from the article: “If you could sing a stanza of the notoriously difficult melody and stay on key, you were sober enough for another round”).
President Bush, until then known for his questionable election, the Enron scandal, and taking long vacations, suddenly became the great leader, warrior, and protector. (Yes, the same guy who completely didn’t protect anyone from the attacks was now going to keep us safe – but let’s not digress into reason). We had Britney Spears and Ann Coulter to cheerlead the Prez. Men and women in any sort of government-issued uniform became hallowed saints. Our wise and noble leaders, all in their matching lapel pins, sat down at their desks and led the charge to war – war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, and a hoped-for war in Iran, if they could squeeze it in.
Sure, here and there were clumps of the disaffected, those left-wingers and libertarians who didn’t support the Patriot Act, the Iraq invasion, or the general sense that our politicians and thinktankers would kill anyone who stood between them and the oil supplies of the Middle East and Central Asia. But these were not serious people, not people who had TV talk shows and columns in the New York Times. Not people who held high office. Thanks to public education, we all knew that these were just that predictable handful of fringe weirdos, who are probably even now sneaking out back for a cigarette or a few bong rips. The serious, sober-minded folks were out buying little flags to pin on themselves.
Question the war in those days, and many people would just give you a puzzled look, as if asking why they hated the Broncos. “Because they’re our enemies!” According to whom? Had Iraq attacked us? “What are you, on their side? You’re either with us or against us!” And the countless innocents who would die from the invasion? Probably fans of the other team, the jerks.
Even if you didn’t support the war, you should of course “Support the Troops,” preferably with a yellow magnet on your car (don’t use a sticker, it could scuff the paint). Naturally, they’re fighting for us, and it’s important to support the home team, don’t you know, even if the game itself seems pointless to you. And support them only by keeping them at war, no matter what, for years and years and years, because quitters don’t win the championship ring. We need to bring home the gold. For our country, our honor, etc.
And when it comes to politics, the same logic applies. You can choose “your” team – there are two big ones – and then cheer for them, wear their t-shirts, wish harm upon the opposing team, and feel as if something’s been accomplished when someone from your team wins a major office. Between the shouting matches at bars and the flaming blog posts, you’ll barely notice how truly powerless you are.
Gatto’s work reveals many ways government schools are designed to break human beings into mindless, obedient machines. There’s the common teacher tactic of insulting and humiliating the kid who acts differently, or asks too many questions. There’s the charming custom of begging for permission to carry out basic bodily functions, which many a teacher gleefully denies – and you must have that hall pass so you can show your papers to the hall monitors, proving you have a right to pee.
Possibly most effective is the practice of age-ranked classes. Every child naturally looks to older children and adults as role models. The school denies us this, forcing kids to look to other kids their own age as role models. Everybody strives to be like everybody else, the source of the common teenage lament that “Everybody else dresses this way!” or “Everybody else is going to the party!” After more than a decade of this, we become adults desperate to prove to everyone else that we are just like everyone else. Much character development is also lost in the other direction – older kids never learn the responsibility of looking out for younger kids, the understanding of subject matter that comes from helping to tutor them, or the fulfillment that comes from helping someone smaller and weaker than yourself.
All of this is useful for training obedient subjects who constantly adjust themselves to whatever they are told. When it comes to the martial virtues, however, there’s nothing quite like a properly managed team-sports program. Kids can learn loyalty, teamwork, obedience, aggressiveness, and an animosity toward the “enemy” that can be snapped on at will. Some of these may sound virtuous by themselves – but what about the German soldier who remains steadfastly loyal to Hitler, or engages in teamwork by helping operate a concentration camp? Those soldiers were several generations into the Prussian school system on which the American system is based.
Clearly, the individual needs an inner core of principles that he values more highly than the approval of the team, the coaches, and the rest of the school community. Such fierce individualism is at the heart of what it means to be American, and what it means to be human, and it is something government schools will never teach.
June 23, 2009
J. L. Bryan [send him mail] lives in Atlanta. His novel Dominion is free at his website.
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Posted in Politics, The News, Business News, Medical Issues at 12:37 pm by Stephen
Liberty For All
Doctors told Steve Kubby that he had only six months to live. That was more than thirty years ago! What has Mr. Kubby done with the extra time physicians told him he didn’t have? Well, besides becoming an icon in the medical marijuana movement and running for the LP presidential nomination in 2008, he is taking libertarians, and the liberty movement, out of the trenches. He is taking our message from the front lines of Main Street to the bottom line of Wall Street. His new company, Cannabis Science Inc. (NASD OTCBB: CBIS), brings an opportunity to the libertarian community which has rarely, if ever, been offered before.Make no mistake, Steve Kubby is no fool. He knows that starting a new company is a risky venture, but when you live day-to-day with life-threatening adrenal cancer and the authorities breathing down your neck because the medicine you use is not sanctioned by the government, just getting up in the morning is less than certain. When asked recently about the risk of starting a new company in tough economic times Kubby, who has had success in other entrepreneurial endeavors, said:
“There are always those who scoff at new ideas and ventures. Such doubters will tell you, and anyone else who will listen, that Cannabis Science, Inc., our new cannabinoid pharmaceutical company, is too risky and our stock too volatile. Yes, our venture is a risk and investors could lose everything, but where is there a ’safe’ investment these days?”
According to the company’s website, “Recent advances in science have opened the door to develop, produce, and commercialize, a variety of effective whole plant cannabinoid based pharmaceutical products with a wide variety of important applications.”
Cannabis-derived pharmaceuticals have been hailed as “the next blockbuster” drug. Both scientific research and human experience indicate that mimicking the body’s own cannabis-like substances could play a major role in fighting a large number of diseases including multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, fibromyalgia, arthritis, neuropathic pain, inflammatory bowel disease, depression, epilepsy, migraine, asthma, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, and osteoporosis. These possibilities are in addition to traditional uses of cannabis-based medicines for glaucoma, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and correction of weight loss experienced by cancer and AIDS patients.
Mr. Kubby and his team of scientists are developing more effective ways to produce and commercialize the production of whole plant cannabinoid-based pharmaceutical products. Even today, new uses for cannabis are being found, such as the recent discovery that topical cannabis preparations can be effective against MRSA (MethIcillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), the deadly antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating disease. Other topical applications, which are largely non-psychoactive, would target localized pain, such as arthritis, and burns, but also neuropathic pain, for which there are few effective treatments.
Would the FDA consider approving cannabis-based drugs? The good news is that they already have. Synthetic THC, marketed as Marinol®, is already approved for chemotherapy-induced nausea and AIDs wasting syndrome. Cannabis Science will develop whole plant extracts, rather than single synthetic components of cannabis, that won’t necessitate smoking.
Clearly, the FDA favors that approach. Three years ago, the FDA gave the British company, GW Pharmaceuticals, permission to put their cannabis extract into human trials in the U.S. for cancer pain. The door for FDA-approved cannabis products has been opened and Steve Kubby intends for Cannabis Science to be in the forefront of this emerging niche. In an article published earlier today Steve encouraged others to join him in this exciting venture that has the potential of saving countless lives. He explains, “Acquiring a publicly-traded company, and selling our stock today, is a significant accomplishment, not just for us, but for all who believe in this important cause.
However, our effort is much more than that. We are a group of veteran activists, who are taking our cherished principles and ideals from Main Street to Wall Street. We are betting our lives and our fortunes on economic and social principles that will allow us to demonstrate to the business world that free markets and medical freedom are the wave of the future.”
So, why should we care about Cannabis Science Inc. (NASD OTCBB: CBIS)? Is it worth the risk? Kubby and his team of proven professionals certainly think so. According to a 2001 article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal the market is certainly there. It revealed that, based on self-identified needs, an estimated 2% (or 400,000) Canadian adults were already using cannabis for medical purposes. That number would extrapolate into roughly 4 million in the US, where medical marijuana, legally accessible by about 25% of the population, is already estimated to be a $1 billion industry. Consequently, it would not be unreasonable to think that the global medical cannabis market will potentially reach several billion dollars.
Steve Kubby is confident and optimistic. When I asked him about the potential success of his new company he replied, “Will we succeed? Yes, but only if people such as yourself become involved, support our efforts and become personally invested in our future together. Together, we CAN create the kind of world we dream about.”
R. Lee Wrights is a writer and political activist living in North Carolina. He is the co-founder and editor of the free speech online magazine Liberty For All. He also serves as Director of Communications for Cannabis Science Inc. Contact Lee at rleewrights@gmail.com.
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06.13.09
Posted in The News, Judicial/Crime, State Issues at 11:39 am by Stephen
I came across a news article from Fox News today about a woman that died from heat exhaustion in an outdoor holding cell in Phoenix, Arizona. After undergoing an evaluation, a 48 year old female inmate was put into an outdoor holding cell in 108 degree heat, with no shade for four hours while she awaited transfer to an observation ward. Inmates are only supposed to be held in the outdoor cells for no longer than two hours, with guards checking on them every 30 minutes. However it is not clear if the guards checked on her at all, who were 20 yards away in a control room. It is also not clear how much water was given to the inmate during her time spent in the cell.
So far two guards and a deputy warden have been suspended during the investigation of the incident. Officials are looking into changing their policy and have sworn that an incident like this will never happen again. One has to wonder why this happened at all to begin with. Someone is responsible for this woman’s death, and should be held responsible, as this inhumane treatment of inmates is unacceptable, and is flat out barbaric. I would hope that whoever is responsible for this incident, both guards and supervisors, are prosecuted to the full extent of the law for the death of this woman.
On a side note, one also has to wonder about the level of sincerity shown by the media company reporting on this incident, Fox News. Their article describes the situation as “Prostitute dies after being held in scorching outdoor prison cell”. I have to wonder to myself why this woman is treated as 2nd tier and referred to as just a prostitute, instead of a female inmate. It almost seems to me to seek to justify that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the woman that died, was just a prostitute with mental problems, rather than a human being.
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06.11.09
Posted in The News, Judicial/Crime at 3:29 pm by Stephen
Four years after his conviction was quashed, six years after he was released from prison on licence and a full 31 years since he was first arrested for a brutal crime which it is now abundantly clear he did not commit, Paul Blackburn has barely even begun to impose some sort of order on his life.
“It’s only been a few months now since I’ve had my own house. Before that I just flitted from place to place to place,” says Blackburn, now a lean, crop-haired 45-year-old with greying stubble. “I’ve lived on sofas on floors, lived on the streets, lived in tents. Anything, anywhere, just not to stand still.
“I couldn’t stand still. I was too afraid. Too afraid of what might happen if I stood still as I thought I would end up killing myself. That was the biggest worry when I got out of prison, that there would be nobody left to fight, and I’d just commit suicide, that it was the fight which was keeping me going.
“I still have nightmares. I wake up and there’s a person-sized pool of sweat on the bedsheets.”
Blackburn was just 15 when, in 1978, he was jailed for life for the attempted murder and sexual assault of a younger boy. That he served a quarter of a century in jail – or rather being shuttled between 18 different jails – was due to his refusal to acknowledge any guilt. He similarly declined the protection commonly given to sexual offenders, and so endured regular beatings.
In March 2003, two years before the appeal court formally reversed his conviction, in the process labelling the two Cheshire police officers who led the case as perjurers, Blackburn was permitted to leave prison. He was offered almost no support on how to re-enter a complex, baffling world he had last experienced as a teenager.
“I’d been locked up since I was 15 years old. I’m now getting out at the age of 40. Never mind the movie, I was a 40-year-old virgin. It was scary shit for me. And there was nobody there to help me. My probation officer was decent in her way but she was embarrassed to speak to me about some things.”
Self-educated, charismatic and fiercely articulate, Blackburn has forged something of a post-prison role addressing academics and professional conferences about his experiences, and what can be learned from them.
But any initial impression of composed self-assuredness is deeply misleading. Beset since he left jail by intermittent drug and alcohol abuse, an inability to form lasting relationships and what he calls “a serious, serious problem” of contemplating suicide, Blackburn’s ordeal moulded him into a mass of contradictions.
Inured by years of prison confrontation against any concern for his physical safety – “I can be in whatever nasty area of London at 4am surrounded by drug addicts, crackheads and robbers, it holds no fear for me. I’ve just been living with them all for 25 years” – he finds visiting supermarkets utterly terrifying. “It was a big Asda, I turned round and walked out again. It’s all just too much for me. Too much information, too much choice, too much going on.”
Similarly, while he is easy company, utterly open in discussing the emotional, even sexual, impact of his time in jail with someone he has met only a couple of hours before, Blackburn remains fundamentally a loner, whose friends and girlfriends are wearily used to waking up to find he has departed and is now hundreds of miles away, having driven restlessly through the night.
“For 25 years I pretty much lived totally within my own head,” he says. “My emotions have been cut off completely pretty much my whole life. To open up to another person and be open – I didn’t know how to do it.”
This mental disquiet is not helped by the fact that, notwithstanding the appeal court ruling in May 2005, there has been almost no official acknowledgement of the injustice he suffered. He still awaits any significant sum in compensation, while neither the Home Office, which as late as 1996 refused him leave to appeal, nor Cheshire police have expressed regret.
“There has never been anything official, and there never, ever will be,” Blackburn says. “So far we’ve had one letter back from the [Cheshire police] which basically says: ‘Tough shit, fuck off. We’re admitting nothing and we never will.’”
Such conduct is particularly galling given that the evidence which sent Blackburn to jail for his entire adolescence and young adulthood appears, in retrospect, so pitifully thin.
What has never been in dispute is that a terrible crime took place on 25 June 1978. A nine-year-old boy, fishing on waste ground by a canal in Warrington, Cheshire, was snatched by a knife-wielding teenager and led to a disused sewage works. There, he was sexually assaulted, beaten, stabbed and left for dead under a wooden board weighed down with bricks. He was found 28 hours later only after neighbours carrying out a last, frantic search heard muffled cries.
Police were under enormous pressure to find the culprit, and their attention was drawn to Blackburn for two reasons. Firstly, as he freely admits, he was a “screwed-up young kid” from a violent, neglectful background, who was attending a reform school in nearby Newton-le-Willows after convictions for burglary and arson. Also, on the weekend in question Blackburn was on home leave, staying only a few hundred metres from where the attack took place.
But aside from a few circumstantial details – for example two haircuts in quick succession which, prosecutors argued, were intended to disguise a resemblance to newspaper descriptions of the assailant – the entire case against Blackburn rested on a confession he hand-wrote on 21 July, after more than four hours of interrogation by two Cheshire detectives.
“It was real good cop, bad cop stuff. All very obvious, but when you’re a kid it’s terrifying,” Blackburn says. This was the fourth time he had been questioned over the case. The only other person in the room was a warden from the reform school. No lawyer was present, and Blackburn was never told he was entitled to one.
After finally breaking down under and “saying things I knew that they’d want to hear”, Blackburn wrote a statement which was, he says, effectively dictated to him by the detectives. “They even helped me spell the words I didn’t know. My writing was quite basic at the time.”
It later emerged that earlier in the investigation, Blackburn’s older brother and two other initial suspects had provided police with confessions, all of which were, like his, swiftly retracted.
At his trial the officers insisted the confession was freely offered and in Blackburn’s own words. The police “did not tell the truth”, the three appeal judges concluded starkly in 2005, noting expert testimony which questioned how a poorly educated 15-year-old could have drafted a document littered with technical terms, all of them spelled correctly.
Glyn Maddocks, the solicitor who guided Blackburn’s appeal, says he had never previously seen a more “absolutely black and white case”, and is aghast no retrospective action was taken against the Cheshire detectives.
“They lied in court, and they should therefore have been prosecuted. If they did it in that case, did they do it in other cases?” he says.
Blackburn could have been released from jail more than a decade earlier, Maddocks adds, when DNA testing came into use. However, almost all the physical evidence from the police investigation had been lost and there was insufficient DNA remaining for a proper comparison.
If there is one remotely hopeful message to be taken from the case, it is simply the fact that Blackburn is, however chaotically at times, still here, despite years of “prison officers telling me I was going to die in jail, and me believing them”.
His demise, he recalls, could have come either at his own hand or through the actions of a fellow prisoner. “The day I walked into prison I become something different. You’re not even a normal prisoner. I’m in prison for the attempted murder and sexual assault of a young child. I’m a nonce. You’re a beast and an animal, and you’re treated as such.”
Abandoned by his family, Blackburn says he was “completely and utterly lost within the prison system for nigh on 15 years”, with a great deal of this time spent causing as much disruption as possible.
His eventual survival came from a combination of two factors: first, a creeping realisation that “no matter what happened, no matter what they said and no matter what they did, they’d already lost … Because I didn’t do it.”
He additionally credits the assistance of older, more educated prisoners, who both believed in his innocence and led him towards books.
“I suppose in the end, words were my salvation, because I found I could actually speak, I could actually write, I could actually put my thoughts down on paper. And I did: I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
“Just fighting the prison system tooth and nail, nose to nose, is fine, it’s great, but they can deal with that all day long. What they can’t deal with is people fucking thinking. People who can organise. That scares the fucking life out of them.
“And that’s essentially what I ended up doing. I started thinking and learning for myself, finding out that I wasn’t this fucked-up little scumbag that they thought I was. I was actually quite a nice guy. And I wasn’t that stupid either. I found out I could think for myself, I could do things for myself. Essentially, I did start doing that. I started fighting them on their own level.”
Despite having lived in the same part of Cornwall for much of his post-prison life, Blackburn has only just acquired his first possession too big to be stuffed into one of the three rucksacks he keeps ready for a quick move. This new exception, a television set, feels like “a millstone around my neck”, he complains.
There is also Bonnie, a young collie pup chewing contentedly on a toy at his feet. “I’ve never been responsible for anything in my life,” Blackburn says, almost proudly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/09/paul-blackburn-wrongly-convicted
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06.09.09
Posted in The News, Judicial/Crime, Education Issues, Religion at 2:45 pm by Stephen
Life grows more interesting by the day for officials of the West Bend (Wis.) Community Memorial Library. After four months of grappling with an evolving challenge to young-adult materials deemed sexually explicit by area residents Ginny and Jim Maziarka, library trustees voted 9–0 June 2 to maintain the young-adult collection as is “without removing, relocating, labeling, or otherwise restricting access” to any titles. However, board members were made cognizant that same evening that another material challenge waited in the wings.
Milwaukee-area citizen Robert C. Braun of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU) distributed at the meeting copies of a claim for damages he and three other plaintiffs filed April 28 with the city; the complainants seek the right to publicly burn or destroy by another means the library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. The claim also demands $120,000 in compensatory damages ($30,000 per plaintiff) for being exposed to the book in a library display, and the resignation of West Bend Mayor Kristine Deiss for “allow[ing] this book to be viewed by the public.”
The unanimous vote rejecting the Maziarkas’ challenge came after trustees heard several dozen comments for and against restricting the materials, as well as being presented with opposing petitions: 700 signatures on the petition circulated by West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries, a group formed by the Maziarkas, and more than 1,000 on an anti-restriction petition from the newly formed West Bend Parents for Free Speech. Ironically, four of the trustees were denied reappointment in April as a rebuke from city council members for adhering to the library’s reconsideration process instead of complying immediately with the Maziarkas’ changing reconsideration requests. The trustees are serving until their successors are appointed.
Accusing the board of submitting to the will of the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginny Maziarka declared, “We vehemently reject their standards and their principles,” and characterized the debate as “a propaganda battle to maintain access to inappropriate material.” She cautioned that her group would let people know that the library was not a safe place unless it segregated and labeled YA titles with explicit content. However, after the meeting board President Barbara Deter emphasized that it was the couple’s “freedom of speech” to challenge any individual library holding, according to the June 3 Greater Milwaukee Today.
For the immediate future, West Bend officials will be dealing with the CCLU’s legal claim. Describing the YA novel by celebrated author Francesca Lia Block as “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian,” the complaint by Braun, Joseph Kogelmann, Rev. Cleveland Eden, and Robert Brough explains that “the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” specifically because Baby Be-Bop contains the “n” word and derogatory sexual and political epithets that can incite violence and “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”
The complaint points out that library Director Michael Tyree has “publicly stated that it is not up to the library to tell the community what is appropriate.” Citing “Wisconsin’s sexual morality law,” the plaintiffs also request West Bend City Attorney Mary Schanning to impanel a grand jury to examine whether the book should be declared obscene and making it available a hate crime.
—Beverly Goldberg, American Libraries Online
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06.08.09
Posted in The News, Government, International Issues at 9:58 am by Stephen
(CNN) — We spend nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. We spend more on health care than anybody else in the world. And we have a bigger national debt than anybody else in the world.
Some experts are warning that if we keep spending like drunken sailors, we may lose our AAA credit rating, costing taxpayers billions more in higher interest payments.
The press widely reported that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner went to China partly to convince the Communist government that we will bring our spending habits under control and that their investments are safe with us.
Meanwhile, in Congress, the Senate is busy readying a health care plan that will add more than a trillion dollars to a debt we can’t afford. The big debate seems to be whether Sen. Max Baucus adds his public option plan in committee or in conference.
Can we continue to spend like this? No, we can’t.
We can’t continue to spend more on defense, health care and retirement programs than any other country while borrowing money from the rest of the world in order to finance it. Something has got to give.
The fastest-growing part of our budget comes from Medicare and Social Security. Because baby boomers are starting to retire, it is becoming harder and harder politically to reform these programs, but more necessary fiscally. But retirees don’t have to worry about any changes to these budget-busting programs. Neither the Obama administration nor the Democrats have any intention of touching either program.
It troubles me that the president doesn’t seem to acknowledge how his health care plans will make our fiscal problems even worse. He wants a public “option” health insurance program that will cost billions in money we don’t have. The president has said that such an option would actually save money, through greater efficiencies, better preventive health care and fewer medical errors.
But as Maya MacGuineas pointed out in The Washington Post the other day, “Expanding insurance to cover the 46 million Americans who are uninsured would probably cost more than $100 billion a year — more than the federal government spends on education, training, employment and social services combined. It is an immense undertaking at a time when the budget is under terrible strain.”
A terrible strain, indeed.
So, where would this money come from?
According to the Obama administration, it would come partly from higher taxes on the rich. And believe me, that is one place where the Democratic-dominated Congress will look. But a trillion dollars over 10 years will not only soak the rich, it will suck the life out of the economy. And as we saw in California just last month, raising taxes is not something that a smart politician wants to do in a slowing, sagging, collapsing economy.
If Congress decides not to raise taxes to cover the price tag, it has three other choices. It can just put it on the tab, and have the next couple of generations pay for it. It seems unlikely that the Chinese or the bond rating agencies would like that very much, though.
Or it can cut spending on entitlements, like Medicare and Social Security. After all, that is where the money is. But while the president talks a good game about entitlement reform, I guarantee that any real plan he comes up with would be dead on arrival in Congress.
Or it can cut defense. The president did campaign on the idea that he can help pay for his agenda by ending the war in Iraq. Nice idea, but as we have found out already, talking about getting out of Iraq is a lot easier than actually getting out of Iraq.
While Defense Secretary Robert Gates is busy with a reform plan that will cut procurement costs, slash spending on missile defense research (just as the North Koreans launch another missile), and gut other weapons systems, it is unclear how much this will save, and most of those savings are earmarked for spending on veterans’ health care.
None of these are good choices. But the first choice should be to stop spending on new programs that we simply can’t afford.
In 40 years, when we wonder why we lost our huge defense advantage to the Chinese or the Indians (or the Brazilians for that matter), when we wonder why we can’t get any more loans from the Germans or the Japanese, and when we wonder why 80 percent of our budget is dedicated to health care and retirement spending, we can look back on these days and thank those big-hearted, compassionate spenders who said “yes, we can,” when they should have said, “no, we really can’t.”
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06.07.09
Posted in The News, Judicial/Crime at 10:29 am by Stephen
(CNN) — Surveillance video shows a Passaic, New Jersey, police officer beating a 49-year-old man standing idly on a street corner.
Surveillance tape from Lawrence’s Grill and Bar in Passaic on May 29 shows a police car pull up to Ronnie Holloway, who is standing still on the curb outside the restaurant. After a few moments Holloway zips up his sweatshirt — because the female officer in the car instructed him to do so, Holloway said.
At that point, the other officer in the vehicle, Joseph R. Rios III, exits the car, grabs Holloway and slams him onto the hood of the police car. He then pummels Holloway with his fist and baton.
Holloway said he had exchanged no words with the officer before he pounced on him.
After the incident, police locked Holloway in a holding cell for the night and did not provide treatment for his injuries, according to Holloway’s attorney, Nancy Lucianna. Those injuries included a torn cornea and extensive bruising to the left side of his body, she said.
Holloway is schizophrenic, according to his mother, Betty, with whom he has lived for more than 20 years. But Holloway’s attorney says that is not the full extent of his mental disabilities and that her client was “mentally challenged on multiple levels.”
At the time of the incident, Holloway told CNN, he was in the midst of a walk around the neighborhood. His attorney described such walks as his chief pastime. 
Watch the surveillance tape »
The Passaic Police have filed three charges against Holloway: resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and wandering for the purpose of obtaining controlled dangerous substances.
Holloway’s attorney maintains her client is innocent of all charges and adds that “nothing that Ronnie Holloway was doing would warrant” the pounding he received.
Betty Holloway said she cannot bear to watch the tape of her son’s beating.
“I haven’t looked at the tape because I don’t want to see it,” she said. “I don’t want to see that man beating on him like that.” Holloway said the experience has left him with a range of scars spanning the literal and the figurative. “To think about it hurts. And the physical part, yes, he was really whooping me.”
The Passaic Police Department and Rios did not respond to calls for comment.
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06.05.09
Posted in The News, Life In General, Business News, Religion at 2:13 pm by Stephen
I felt the need to repost this article that was sent to me by a friend.
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What is more Christian than discrimination? I wonder. It seems like every day I hear about someone being fired from their jobs, or losing a big promotion simply because their bosses discover that they do not believe in God. I don’t normally give my belief (or lack thereof) a second thought, but that’s because I am lucky enough to live in a city where my religious beliefs have never be a contentious issue. Not everyone, unfortunately, is as lucky as I am.
Amanda Donaldson did not benefit from the kind of tolerance that I am acclimatized to. She recently got fired by her Christian boss specifically because she is an atheist. After Dr. Scott Dawson read her husbands atheist blog, he confronted her about the fact that she had been identified as not believing in a God. Even though she expressed clearly the fact that her beliefs were private and not related in any way to her job performance, Dr. Dawson became upset that his worker did not believe in his bearded sky god. As a consequence, he gave her the old pink slip, meaning that she lost her medical insurance. This is especially worrisome because Amanda is currently fighting aggressive breast cancer.
Let’s recap here: a Christian boss fired his atheist employee for no other reason that his simple bigotry and intolerance of other world views, and did this knowing full well that she was sick and in need of medical treatment. Yep, that’s some of that good old fashion Christian love for you!
Unfortunately, there isn’t much Amanda can do about this. At this point the best thing everyone can do is either by helping contribute to the cost of her treatment, or help find her another job. There’s no real legal precedent that would allow her to fight this injustice. They’ve already collected over 1k in donations, so if you’re feeling generous, than I suggest giving what you can (no matter how small, it will help!).
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06.03.09
Posted in Life In General, Editor's Picks at 3:25 pm by Stephen
This is an essay that I wrote for a scholarship I am attempting to win. The subject was, Describe a perfect world. Read the rest of this entry »
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