Madness setting in once more...

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ablacknation:

The Prison Industry: A new form of slavery in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a 90 cents - $4 a day. [X]

According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. 

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of “hired-out” miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.

During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. “Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex,”

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street.

MAJOR CORPORATIONS BENEFITTING FROM PRISON INDUSTRY COMPLEX. [X]

• McDonalds

McDonald’s uses inmates to produce frozen foods. Inmates process beef for patties. They may also process bread, milk and chicken products.

• Wendy’s. 

Wendy’s has also been identified as relying on prison labor to reduce it’s cost of operations. Inmates also process beef for patties.

• Wal-Mart 

The company uses inmates for manufacturing purposes. The company “hires” inmates to clean products of UPC bar codes so that products can be resold.

• Starbucks

The company uses inmates to cut costs as well. Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions hired Washington state prisoners to package holiday coffees.

• Victoria’s Secret

The company uses inmates to cut production costs. In South Carolina, female inmates were used to sew products. Also, inmates reportedly have been used to replace “made in” tags with “Made in USA” tags.

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by Raymond Bonner, Special to ProPublica,

SYDNEY – The United States has acknowledged that the conviction of an Australian man held for nearly six years in Guantanamo Bay was not legally valid.

The Australian, David Hicks, was one of the first people sent to Guantanamo, and he has already figured in a key U.S. court decision that expanded the rights of detainees held in the offshore prison. Initially charged with multiple crimes, including conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, attempted murder, and aiding the enemy, Hicks ultimately pleaded guilty to a single charge of providing "material support'' to terrorism.

Hicks recently appealed, arguing that the law used against him was passed after 9/11 and could not be applied retroactively. In its reply, the U.S. argued that the review court should refuse to review the case because Hicks had entered a guilty plea.  But in a crucial concession, the military commission's chief prosecutor said that if the appeal were allowed, "the Court should not confirm Hicks's material-support conviction."  

The Jan. 16 brief by Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins was obtained by ProPublica and has not yet been made public.

"Hicks will finally get justice," said Michael Mori, a Marine Corps major who was Hicks' military lawyer. Mori is now out of the military and is no longer involved in the case, but he said he has seen a copy of the prosecutor's brief, as did two lawyers currently representing Hicks.

Hicks would not have been convicted in the first place "if the case had been tried in federal court, instead of the politically motivated military commissions," said Mori, author of a book about the case, "In the Company of Cowards: Bush, Howard and Injustice at Guantanamo," which was published last September.

The latest development is a striking retreat for the American government. The Bush administration initially described Hicks as among the "worst of the worst," the label used for the men held in Guantanamo. And in 2007, when Hicks was still in Guantanamo, the American ambassador in Australia, Robert D. McCallum Jr., described the Guantanamo detainees as "ruthless fanatics who would kill Australians and Americans without blinking an eye."

Hicks' case stands out in any discussion about the use of the military commissions in the war on terror. He was a Westerner, Detainee 002 (001 was another Westerner, John Walker Lindh, from San Francisco. Lindh pleaded guilty in federal court to two-terrorism-related charges in 2002 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison) and he was on the first plane bringing prisoners to Guantanamo.

Later, Hicks was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo detainees had the right to file habeas petitions in civilian courts to challenge their detention.  And he was the first person convicted and sentenced by the military commission.

Many legal analysts have questioned whether the military process begun by the Bush administration can ever arrive at the truth.  How can a judge assess a statement extracted by torture? How reliable are the allegations in the government's indictments when prosecutors overcharged, as they did in Hicks' case? If the Bush administration had allowed suspects to be tried in federal courts, the government's charges and the suspects' claims of innocence could have been put to rigorous test.

In the case of David Hicks, opinions remain divided over whether he was a lost soul in search of adventure and meaning in his life or a committed Taliban supporter, who, with his Caucasian skin and Australian passport, was being groomed by al-Qaida to carry out terrorist attacks in the West.

A heavy drinker and drug user, Hicks was expelled from school at 14. He was only 5-feet-5-inches tall, but he played Australian Rules football, which is physically more demanding than rugby, and became a kangaroo skinner in Australia's Outback; he then went to Japan to train horses. Tired of that, he ventured to the Balkans where he joined the Kosovo Liberation Army, which at the time was fighting with NATO support against Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's leader.  When that war ended, he returned to Australia, and after trying unsuccessfully to join the Australian army, he went to Pakistan, hoping to ride the Silk Trail on horseback, he told his parents.

There, he found Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-supported organization battling India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Lashkar-e-Taiba eventually ended up on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations and executed the 2008 attack on Mumbai that killed 166 people, including six Americans. But at the time, the group was officially viewed as a collection of regional insurgents.

Lashkar sent Hicks to Afghanistan for training. American and Australian officials have said that he attended at least four al-Qaida camps. In the most exhaustive journalistic examination of the Hicks case, "Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks," Australian journalist Leigh Sales wrote that Hicks "did a seven week training course, including marksmanship, small team tactics, ambush, camouflage and intelligence gathering," and that he claimed to have met bin Laden twenty times, which was probably a boast, which he later regretted. A military prosecutor described Hicks, to Sales, as a "ne'er-do-well," "big talker," and a "kooky maverick," without the courage or intellect to carry out a major operation.

In his own memoir, "Guantanamo: My Journey," Mr. Hicks glosses over his time in Afghanistan. Sally Neighbour, an Australian journalist who has written extensively on Islam and terrorism post 9/11, asserted in her review of the book that Hicks had been less than forthcoming. She noted that he devoted only one page in the 456-page book to his al-Qaida training.

"None of this is to suggest that David Hicks deserved the 'six years of hell' he describes,'' Neighbour wrote. "He did not, which is why so many Australians campaigned for his release. At the least, Hicks owed them a frank, open and truthful account of his whole story, rather than this distorted air-brushed version of the truth.''

Hicks' ordeal began when he was captured in late 2001 by the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban group.  The Afghans turned Hicks over to the American military for a ransom of $5,000, according to his father. After being interrogated aboard the U.S.S. Peleliu, he was flown to Guantanamo, where he cooperated with interrogators.

The Australian government was content to let him stay there because whatever he was doing in Afghanistan, he had not violated any Australian laws, so he would have to be released if he were sent home.

When Hicks was first captured, Australian tabloids labeled him "Australia's own Taliban." But public opinion turned here, and support for David Hicks became the symbol, for conservatives and liberals, to express their opposition to the manner in which America was conducting the war on terror — Guantanamo, secret prisons, torture and the lack of due process under the military commissions.

Prime Minister John Howard, the leader of the country's center-right Liberal Party, and who coincidentally had been feted at a gala party at the Australian embassy in Washington two days before 9/11, was facing a tough re-election and appealed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney to bring Hicks to trial. The charges against Hicks were then reduced to the one count of material support for terrorism, and he pleaded guilty.

He was returned to Australia, served seven months in jail and then was released after a total of nearly six years behind bars. He has since married, lives in Sydney and works at odd jobs. He is currently on a job outside Sydney, beyond reliable cellphone service and thus not available for an interview, his Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, said in a telephone interview from his office in Adelaide. "We're very please to see that they agree he is innocent, and the conviction cannot stand," Mr. Kenny said.

In November 2013, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, in New York, and Joseph Margulies, a law professor who has represented several Guantanamo detainees in landmark cases, filed an appeal in Hicks' case. They argued that Hicks' guilty plea and conviction were not legally valid because material support for terrorism was not a crime under American law at the time Hicks was in Afghanistan, nor was it a war crime under international law.

Last July, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated the material support conviction of another Guantanamo detainee, Ali al-Bahlul. In light of that decision, United States v Bahlul, in November, the military review court hearing Hicks' appeal asked the government and Hicks' lawyers to specifically address the question of whether Hicks' conviction should be affirmed.

In the seven-page brief responding to that question, the commission's chief prosecutor argues first that the court should not hear Hicks' appeal because he had pleaded guilty. Hicks' lawyers argue the plea was coerced by the torture and brutal conditions under which Hicks was held at Guantanamo. They said his plea was irrelevant in any event because courts cannot accept a guilty plea to conduct that was not a crime at the time it occurred.

In his brief, the chief prosecutor acknowledges that if the court believes it has jurisdiction, it "should decline to affirm Hicks's material-support conviction'' in light of the appeals court ruling on Bahlul.

Hicks, 39, has maintained a low profile since his release. But at a human rights ceremony in Sydney last month, he heckled the country's attorney general, George Brandis.

"Hey, my name is David Hicks," he shouted as Brandis was speaking, the Guardian-Australia reported. "I was tortured for 5 1/2 years in Guantanamo Bay in the full knowledge of your party! What do you have to say?"

Related stories: Read more of ProPublica's coverage of Guantanamo Bay.

UC Irvine has invented a way to turn cooked egg whites back into their clear, uncooked state. This is achieved by adding a chemical to liquify the solid egg whites, then putting it through a machine to disentangle the clumped protein strands.

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*Insert Bitch Planet joke here.*

A little while ago I found myself on Twitter and was cheesed off (not an uncommon occurrence) to see that one of my favorite nerdy outlets had tweeted the fun science fact that Valentina Tereshkova was the “first female” in space. I mean, not only does referring to women as “females” sort of inextricably link your speech to PUAs, aspiring PUAs, gross OKCupid accounts and make you sound like a Ferengi… once you’re calling Tereshkova a “female,” the statement isn’t even true anymore! There were tons of female animals who went to space before any country sent a human woman up there. And some of them even came back!

Perhaps most famous of the animals we’ve sent into space is Laika, a small Russian dog, the first living being to complete an orbit around the Earth, and the first one to die in the pursuit of manned space flight. Laika was female, and so were all of her canine comrades in the Soviet space program. Why? Well, space constraints, and how they came into conflict with a particular habit of male dogs, as Damon Murray, creator of a book on Russian cosmonaut dogs and their relationship with the space program as well as the Russian public, explains in a fascinating Collectors Weekly article:

The problem of feeding the dogs in zero-gravity was solved by bonding nutrients with agar, a jelly-like substance. This “jelly” could then be easily consumed, minimizing waste. The most tricky obstacle for the dogs traveling into space was to find a way for them to relieve themselves in such unusual conditions. Although their suits had special receptacles for urine and feces, it was difficult to train the dogs to use them. They prefer to relieve themselves outdoors, never inside a room or a cockpit, and certainly not inside clothes. This process was unnatural for the dogs, only those who took to it more easily were selected. For orbital flights, all the dogs were exclusively female: As there was no room in the cabin to cock their legs, they were better suited to space.

Of course, as most long-time dog owners will tell you, there are male dogs out there who squat, and female dogs who cock a leg, but it’s understandable that in a program with as many variables as an orbital space craft, you’ll want to eliminate a few. Other things central to choosing a cosmonaut dog? How well they photograph in black and white, for the ease of documentation and publicity.

You can read all of Collectors Weekly’s article about Soviet space dogs here.

(top pic by Larsony on DeviantArt)

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New BAHFest day! Ever wondere about the evolutionary origins of the handshake?

A decision was made this week by “Wikipedia’s supreme court” to ban five editors who were attempting to prevent the “Gamergate Controversy” article from taking on a pro-Gamergate slant. The editors can not only no longer edit the Gamergate entry, but also any other entry having to do with “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.” It’s a move that’s disappointing for those who would like to see Gamergate’s harassment against women laid bare, as well as for those who’d like to see Wikipedia not tacitly give a harassment campaign exactly what it wants.

According to The Guardian it was Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, “the highest user-run body on the site,” that handed down the decision. The “Gamergate Controvery” article has been a sort of Gamergate battleground since the beginning, receiving the kind of push and pull that the rest of the conversation around Gamergate has — namely, whether it should be presented as being about ethics in journalism or whether that particular cause flew straight out the window the second the campaign became widely associated with its horrific threats against and general harassment of any woman who dare speak up.

Arbcom’s decision has not yet been made final, but where it stands now isn’t exactly great: The only pro-Gamergate editor accounts that have been punished were throwaways, what Wikipedia editor Mark Bernstein described as “disposal accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned.” In contrast, five editors who were working to prevent the article from taking a pro-Gamergate stance have been banned — and not just from Gamergate articles, but from any relating to gender or sexuality, “broadly construed.” As Bernstein writes:

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia.

It should be noted that this decision comes from a panel of fourteen arbitrators, eleven of whom are (you guessed it!) men. Bernstein also called the decision “a blunder that threatens to disgrace the Internet.”

This is why we can’t have nice things.

(via The Guardian) (Image via Wikipedia)

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Oh my GAWD, I wish I could show you the current TOP SECRET PROJECT.

The Olympics: an every other year experiment in curtailing the rights of its hosts while draining those hosts of as much money as possible. It's apparently gotten so bad that essentially nobody actually wants to host the olympic games. Those still relentlessly putting in bids to bring on this multi-nation quagmire of garbage probably don't care all that much that the IOC and its smaller sub-parts are money-grubbing, number-trademarking, viewer-hating megalomaniacs that quite possibly lack what we refer to as souls and may or may not be fully-manufactured Hitler-clones. But if they do care about those things, they better not say so, according to what is apparently boiler-plate legal language in Boston's agreement with the USOC.

Nobody who lives in Boston actually wants the city to win its bid for the 2024 Olympic games. And yet, in a joinder agreement between the city and the United States Olympic Committee, mayor Marty Walsh has signed a contract that forbids city employees from speaking negatively about the bid, the IOC, or the Olympic games. It's a great day for free speech in the cradle of liberty.

Boston, home of the Boston Massacre and the tea party revolt, the city from whence the USS Constitution launched, the home of both President John Adams', has decided to suspend their employees' free speech rights in favor of hosting a corporate sporting event packed with more authoritarian bullshit than your average Middle East dictatorship. Let that sink in for a moment.

Or, if you're like Boston's Mayor, Marty Walsh, just dust that crap off your shoulder cuz it's no big deal, yo.

"Mayor Walsh is not looking to limit the free speech of his employees and, as residents of Boston, he fully supports them participating in the community process. This was standard boilerplate language for the Joinder Agreement with the USOC that all applicant cities have historically signed. The Mayor looks forward to the first citywide community meeting that will be held next week."

The Mayor has also claimed that there would absolutely be no punishment for city workers who decided to express their feelings about the Olympics being a big bucket of money-sucking dogshit, but contracts are contracts, so they may not be inclined to test Walsh's honesty on that point. So I'll do it for them. The Olympics sucks. Just read it in a Boston accent.

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According to the Associated Press, the 3,300-year-old burial mask of pharaoh Tutankhamun, one of the most prized artifacts at the at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was irreversibly damaged last year during a bout of overzealous spatulating.

Museum officials confirmed to the AP via phone that the famous blue-and-gold braided beard on Tutankhamun’s mask had been removed, although the three conservators in question gave differing accounts as to whether the mask was damaged during a routine cleaning or if the beard was intentionally taken off as a precautionary measure after becoming loose:  “They agree however that orders came from above to fix it quickly and that an inappropriate adhesive was used. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.”

One conservator explained,

Unfortunately he used a very irreversible material—epoxy has a very high property for attaching and is used on metal or stone but I think it wasn’t suitable for an outstanding object like Tutankhamun’s golden mask.

Yep, one of the few things the conservators agree on is that this unknown “he” or “they” really made love to the pooch with this repair job:

The mask should have been taken to the conservation lab but they were in a rush to get it displayed quickly again and used this quick drying, irreversible material.

Another conservator, who claims to have been present at the time of repairs, said a colleague attempted to remove epoxy from the Pharaoh’s face using a spatula, leaving scratches. According to museum officials, there’s now an obvious crack in Tutankhamun’s mask between the face and beard, and “you can see a layer of transparent yellow.”

An investigation is apparently underway, although the AP could not reach the museum administration or Antiquities Ministry for comment. I guess they want to keep this…under wraps.

(via io9, image via v.williams46 on Flickr)

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Внутри Google Chrome зашита маленькая игрушка. Если у вас нет связи с интернетом – на экране появляется маленький тираннозавр рекс.
При нажатии на пробел игра начинается. Работает на компьютере и на андроиде

via

I was told a long time ago that you can really get to know people in times of crises. Adversity doesn't make a person, it reveals that person. Insert another cliche about this stuff here. The point is that when things get dire, people revert to who they are at their most basic. In America, for instance, the home of the brave and the land of the free suddenly became the home of the surveilled and the land of security theater after 9/11. France's recent experience with the plague of Islamic extremism has revealed ups, but has also revealed them to be not nearly so in favor of free speech as they like to claim when it comes to speech they don't like. That trend appears to be continuing as Paris, France claims they are going to file a lawsuit against Fox News for making laughably ridiculous claims about so-called "Muslim-only" communities in the city.

Fox News ran multiple reports describing areas of Paris (and England) that were governed by Sharia law and off-limits to non-Muslims. The network has since apologized for making "regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe—particularly with regard to England and France."

"This applies especially to discussions of so-called 'no-go zones,' areas where non-Muslims allegedly aren't allowed in, and police supposedly won't go," anchor Julie Banderas said in one on-air apology. "To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country, and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion."

Oh, Paris. So naive. A cable news organization fear-mongering their way through a horrifically inaccurate report where the facts are fiction isn't something to get upset about. As best as I can tell, that's the entire point of cable news. Truth doesn't fill a twenty-four hour news cycle, after all. Beyond that, what are they going to sue for? Inaccurate reporting that has since been corrected on-air? If that was grounds for a lawsuit, the lawsuits against cable news networks would be ongoing through eternity.

Even listening to the city's officials doesn't make this seem any less petty.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is planning to sue Fox News for its inaccurate reports on Muslim "no go zones," she told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

"When we're insulted, and when we've had an image, then I think we'll have to sue, I think we'll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed," Hidalgo told Amanpour in an interview. "The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced."

Think about this for just a moment. Filing a lawsuit against someone for the crime of insulting your honor doesn't sound like it could come from a proponent of free speech, does it? The very thing that was attacked in France is now being attacked by France, though obviously with litigious weapons instead of firearms. This isn't to suggest any moral equivalence between the two, of course, only that free speech is one of those areas where you're either for or against. Being for something with qualifications means you're not for it at all. And, fortunately for Fox News, the freedom of speech includes the freedom to be idiotically wrong.

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Updated with Judge Katherine Forrest’s ruling on the prosecution’s motion below. The trial of Ross Ulbricht hinges on proving that Ulbricht is the Dread Pirate Roberts, a shadowy, pseudonymous kingpin who ran the massive online narcotics market known as the Silk Road. But as the case enters its second week, the prosecution wants to prevent Ulbricht’s defense […]

The post Prosecutors Won’t Let a Jury See My Interview With Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts appeared first on WIRED.

The Kitchn is finally on Tumblr! If you're looking for pretty photos of food and kitchen design, lots (and lots) of GIFs, and more fun, new content from around the Internet, you should probably follow along. Here's more about what you can expect.

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Okay, geeks! Tomorrow is the last day we'll be holding open the preorder for the new kids' book in hardcopy! Please buy soon if you want it.

Every year I'm left in the lurch wondering when tea will get its due. Delicious, ubiquitous, nourishing, gently stimulating, and rich with history and lore, to say nothing of glossy tools to drop money on, tea has everything you could want in an obsession-worthy drink. Here's why I'm so into it, and why I think you should be too. Read More

Guess which movies I watched this weekend!

Not much else to add. Have a great day!

Kangaroo kangaroo kangaroo.

New comic!
Today's News:

Welp, that was it!  Good bye!

oh god am i expected to say a few words

So.  Anyway.  You guys.

I have done Shortpacked! for ten years.  I did Shortpacked! for ten years.  It's the longest project I have ever done.  Roomies! was two years, It's Walky! was five, Dumbing of Age is at about four and a half right now, but Shortpacked! is a solid decade.  And it feels weird saying goodbye to it, because I feel like I've been saying goodbye to it since 2010.  Amber got married to Mike and they left.  Ethan found Manny and left.  Leslie and Robin are married with triplets.  This was all me stealthily saying goodbye, staggered out across the years, knowing this end would eventually come, when I'd be able to pull the Soggies plug and move on.

Ten years ago, I started Shortpacked! in a panic.  I took a purposeful break after the end of It's Walky!, and months later I ran out of money.  TIME TO START A NEW STRIP!  So I grabbed some half-finished ideas from my sketchbook, and as I was recently unemployed from a toy store, I just started writing about those ideas in a toy store.  That day happened to be January 17, 2005.  I knew I wanted to start super fresh, having written Super Serious End Of The World Sci-Fi for the past while, and wanted to wallow in the absurd, as a breather.   I never knew I'd come to need Amber and Ethan in my life, or that I'd finally come to know Robin and Mike and Ultra Car in a deeper way, or that some lady named Leslie would suddenly spurt into existence and she'd be the best ever.  Also there was Faz.

I am a different, better person than when I started.  Writing Shortpacked! helped me examine my own beliefs and grow or prune them as life corrected me.  I tried to use it as a tool to teach myself understanding and respect, to put myself in the brains of others.  Sure, I'm still an asshole, but I like to think I'm a slightly better-targeted asshole these days.  Your mileage may vary.

Shortpacked! is also the end, so far as I know at the moment, of the shared "Walkyverse" between it and Roomies! and It's Walky!, altogether encompassing 17 years and some months.  That's nearly half my life, and now I'm letting it go.  Some of you have been with me since the beginning of that, and that boggles my mind.  Some of you have been with me since you turned twelve yesterday, and that makes me feel old and also maybe you should ask permission from your parents or something before reading all this.  There's swears.

In the meantime, in a week or so, I'm going to take an actual vacation.  Me and the wife (who I proposed to in this webcomic) are going on this year's JoCo cruise.  I now only have one daily webcomic to draw, and its buffer is finished out to late April of this year, so maybe for the first time in forever I'll actually be able to relax.  It's the first time in ten years I haven't drawn two webcomics simultaneously.  (And when I get back, I need to finish up those last few Joyce and Walky! pages, finally putting the Walkyverse continuity to rest.)  

But I'm not really going away.  Dumbing of Age is right over there, and it's got over four years of archives and alternate universe incarnations of many Shortpacked! characters I couldn't leave behind completely.  It incorporated a lot of the lessons learned while drawing Shortpacked! and it really couldn't have happened without it. I'll see you there, with Amber and Ethan and Malaya and Mike and many others.  

Thank you, everyone.

The only people who still feel they can clearly define who is and isn't a journalist are legislators. They're almost always wrong. Journalism isn't a career. It's an activity. Anyone can do it and, thanks to the internet, anyone can find a publishing platform and readers. But, according to many politicians, it ain't the press unless it involves one.

If you want press credentials to cover Alabama's legislative sessions, prepare to be disappointed. (via Jim Romenesko)

Raise your hand if you trust Alabama Republican legislative leaders to define "legitimate journalism" in Alabama. Well, they're doing it anyway. Tuscaloosa Rep. Chris England took to Facebook to post a list of criteria that reporters will have to meet if they're to receive press credentials & be allowed inside the press rooms at the State House.

No one's raising their hands (except maybe the legislators) but that's not going to stop the legislature from defining "journalist" to fit its narrow standards. Here's Alabama's proposed official press credential policy.

1. A media representative shall be admitted to the floors of the House or Senate or allowed press privileges if the person is a salaried staff correspondent, reporter, or photographer employed by any of the following:

a. The news department of a federally licensed television or radio station, or the news department of a network providing coverage to television and radio stations.
b. A newspaper of general circulation providing print or online editions for the dissemination of news of a general character, which has a bona fide subscription list of paying subscribers, and has been established, printed, and published at regular intervals.
c. A wire service providing news service to newspapers, television, or radio stations as referred to above.
d. Internet news services and bloggers associated with any of the previously listed categories.

2. Applicants seeking press credentials are required to submit documentation from their employer certifying that they are engaged primarily in reporting the sessions of the legislature.

The applicant must also certify that, with the exception of the Alabama Press Association and the Alabama Broadcasters Association, and the exception of receiving advertising revenue, they have no affiliation with any person, firm, corporation, association, or political party that attempts to influence legislative issues or lobby members of the Alabama Legislature.

3. Applicants unable to comply with the aforementioned certification requirement will not be issued legislative press credentials, but will still be free to cover sessions of the Alabama Legislature from the public galleries located on the sixth and eighth floors.

Any person who is discovered to have misrepresented themselves to obtain legislative press credentials will have their credentials denied or revoked.

Notice how much emphasis is placed on being paid and working for incumbent media outlets. This wording gives incumbent media preference over upstarts and quite possibly means those whose platforms aren't instantly recognizable by legislators will be deemed "non-press" and denied access.

Also notice how much information journalists will need to provide in exchange for a press pass. If you want to cover the Alabama legislature, you'll need to prove that you're a salaried employee of one of the entities on the "approved" list. Maybe something on official letterhead will be good enough for the legislature. Or maybe it's suggesting you bring a pay stub or two with you and a portfolio of your work (... and financial statements verifying your employer has subscribers, still in business, etc...). And God forbid you hold a part-time job with any "person, firm, corporation or association" that "attempts to influence legislative issues," but still attempt to "certify" that you have no connection to myriad entities listed in the "forbidden connections" section. You can kiss your credentials goodbye. And this part of the list about forbidden connections -- "or political party" -- suggests journalists are better off not registering to vote.

Beyond that, there's the weird stipulation that those receiving press credentials will need to be "engaged primarily in reporting the sessions of the legislature. (And be able to prove it.) Here's Left in Alabama's take on that:

Other than the Montgomery Advertiser, what news outlets have reporters who "primarily" report on the legislature? Staff is stretched so thin that a reporter might cover a legislative story in the morning, a car wreck over lunch, a heartwarming pet story in the afternoon, and then do a stand up about Mike Hubbard's arrest on corruption charges for the evening news broadcast. Does that count?

Now, Alabama legislators can pretend that these restrictions are in place to prevent the press gallery from becoming bathrobe blogger central, but all it's really there for is to ensure as many potential journalists as possible are locked out. It also locks out nonprofit organizations that perform journalism, as one commenter on England's Facebook page points out.

While I seriously couldn't care less about being in the press room or having "credentials", it would certainly leave the Alabama School Connection out, as I am a nonprofit news organization, online only. I will not ever have "paying subscribers". There is a huge world of nonprofit news organizations that wouldn't meet any of those criteria…

England states on his page that he's against these proposed rules. Good for him. Now, that all may change, thanks to certain members of the Alabama legislature. If it does, many journalists will be locked out, and the First Amendment will be worse off for it.

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Abusing IP law to shut down criticism isn't just for little people. Even governments do it. The County of Union, New Jersey, attempted to quiet a vocal critic by claiming her use of the county's seal violated its trademark.

[Tina] Renna produces a public access television show in Cranford, NJ, called the “Union County Citizen’s Forum.” The show displays on-air a graphic illustration depicting the Seal of the County of Union with a spotlight shining on it. The illustration symbolizes the self-proclaimed mission of the show to shine a critical light on the workings of the Union County Board of Chosen Freeholders….

The County Attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Township of Cranford warning it to stop displaying the County of Union seal, except in broadcasts of Freeholders’ meetings. According to the County, Renna’s use of the Seal infringes the County’s trademark rights under the Lanham Act.

Except the claims were bogus and the county played fast-and-loose with the facts surrounding its trademark registration. [Ruling pdf link]

On July 10, 2010, Defendant applied to trademark the Seal. See id. On October 18, 2010, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) denied Defendant’s trademark application, finding that 15 U.S.C. § 1052(b) prohibited registration of a United States municipality’s insignia. See id. at *4. Defendant did not appeal the USPTO’s decision within the six-month deadline. Therefore, the USPTO issued a Notice of Abandonment of Defendant’s trademark application on May 16, 2011. See id. at *5. On March 21, 2012, the USPTO rejected Defendant’s untimely appeal, and issued a second Notice of Abandonment of Defendant’s trademark application.

On September 17, 2010, the cease-and-desist was issued, noting the trademark (correctly) as being "pending." But a follow-up letter -- sent after Renna's legal representative informed the county that it could not actually trademark its seal (citing the law listed above) and after the county's registration had been rejected by the USPTO -- shows this local government wasn't above lying to get its way.

In response, Defendant sent McKusick a letter dated April 21, 2011. In the Second Letter, defense counsel claimed the “Seal is in fact now trademarked,” and that Plaintiff’s display of the Seal thus violated both federal and state trademark law.

Judge Michael Hammer calls out the county for its deception.

Notably, the Defendant sent the Second Letter approximately four months after the USPTO had denied its trademark application. Therefore, it implausible that the Defendant did not, or could not reasonably have been expected to know, that the Seal was not a registered trademark. At oral argument on the summary judgment motions, Defendant’s counsel could not explain that obvious contradiction.

So, what happens to lying, trademark-trolling government agencies who get caught trying to shut down critics with bogus claims? Well, they get to pay legal fees. $40,000 worth of legal fees. Awards like these are rarely handed down, but Judge Hammer notes that the county's deception and intimidation tactics makes this one of those "exceptional cases."

After considering the totality of the circumstances, the Court concludes that this case is “exceptional.” Arguably, Defendant legitimately believed that the Seal warranted the same protection as a legally protected mark. Still, there is a significant disparity in the merits of the parties’ respective litigation positions in this case. The record demonstrates that Defendant litigated this case by asserting that Plaintiff violated a registered trademark, which Defendant knew, or should have known, did not exist… Nonetheless, the Defendant, as the District Court described it, “doubled down” and continued to assert trademark violations based largely on federal and state statutes that, by their terms, did not provide trademark protection for the Seal.
[...]

Second, as the District Court noted, the Second Letter “carried the misleading implication that [the Seal was trademarked when] the opposite was the case.” Indeed, when Defendant sent the Second Letter, the USPTO had denied Defendant’s trademark application, and issued a Notice of Abandonment because Defendant did not timely appeal the USPTO’s denial.

Third, as the District Court emphasized, it is “hard to discern any purpose, other than general intimidation, for [Defendant's] citation of [a] criminal statute in an official communication to a citizen, even one represented by counsel.”

Importantly, the court (in its earlier decision in favor of Renna [pdf link]) also notes that even if the registration was valid, Renna's use of the seal was still protected.

A company may feel put upon by statements about itself that it considers inaccurate. But trademark law is not the solution to that problem; “trademark infringement protects only against mistaken purchasing decisions and not against confusion generally.” “[T]rademark rights do not entitle the owner to quash an unauthorized use of the mark by another who is communicating ideas or expressing points of view.” Were we to ignore the expressive value that some marks assume, trademark rights would grow to encroach upon the zone protected by the First Amendment. Simply put, the trademark owner does not have the right to control public discourse whenever the public imbues his mark with a meaning beyond its source-identifying function.

If a private company isn't allowed to deploy its IP rights to shut down criticism, quite obviously a government entity shouldn't be allowed to, either. Especially when doing so means attempting to shut down protected speech.

Renna is clearly using the County Seal in an expressive manner. That expression, moreover, is political expression, entitled to the highest degree of constitutional protection. Consider that the First Amendment prohibits a State from criminalizing the desecration of the United States flag as a form of political protest. Should a county, by means of an artful extension of trademark law, be permitted to quash political expression that uses its Seal? I think such an extension would be both unwarranted and Constitutionally risky.

Because of its deceptive attempt to intimidate Renna into removing a non-trademarked county seal (while citing trademark law), the county is now handing $40,000 of its constituents' money over to one of its most vocal critics. If that's not a misuse of public funds -- especially when you add in the money spent by the county to pursue the lawsuit against Renna -- and authority, then I don't know what is.

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Bowling Ball

You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. If you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the side, how long would it take to hit the bottom?

Doug Carter

It is a good thing you mentioned the weight, because of a very surprising fact:

Most bowling balls float.

It's true. Bowling balls all have about the same volume, so they all displace the same weight in seawater—12.13 lbs, or about 5.5 kg. But their weights vary substantially, from as little as 6 lbs to a max of 16. Only the balls that weigh more than 12.13 lbs will sink.

"Hang on a moment," the serious bowlers reading this are saying, "most bowling balls are at the heavy end of that range. The usual range is more like 14-16 lbs for men and 10-14 lbs for women. Maybe the average women's ball floats, but the overall average ball surely sinks."

This is definitely true for serious bowlers, but for casual bowlers, it might be better to define the "average" ball using the distribution on the rack of balls at the local bowling alley. These house balls often list the weight on them, so rather than go to a bowling alley, I just sifted through all the Flickr photos of bowling balls and tallied up all the visible weights. The average was 10½ lbs.

So at the very least, for most people, the average bowling ball they've picked up in their lives probably floats. If nothing else, this makes the popular simile "sank like a bowling ball"—which appears in a number of books—seem a little poorly chosen.[1]In defense of the authors of Volume 53 of North Dakota Quarterly, the simile they used is, "sank like a bowling ball in whipped cream," which is perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, How To Hook a Man (And a Baby) and The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies are on their own.

But Doug's bowling ball is 7 kg (15.5 lbs), making it plenty heavy enough to sink in the ocean. How fast will it fall?

Small falling spheres in viscous (goopy) liquids (like hair gel) exhibit weird behaviors and sometimes complex oscillation, but bowling balls falling through water are pretty straightforward. Their falling speed is determined by the drag equation and their weight (accounting for buoyancy). For Doug's bowling ball, that terminal velocity will be roughly 1.3 meters per second, which means it will take two hours and 20 minutes to reach the bottom. That's plenty of time to enjoy a two-hour movie.

A 13-pound bowling ball, which is much closer to neutrally buoyant in seawater, would take four and a half hours to reach the bottom. On the other hand, a bowling ball made of solid iron would reach the bottom in half an hour.

A bowling ball made of lead would reach the bottom in 23 minutes, and a bowling ball made of solid gold would make it in 17. However, a bowling ball made of solid gold would also weigh more than the average bowler.[2]At least, I think it would, but I can't think of a way to sample the weight of the average bowler without getting punched. A bowling ball made of solid osmium, the heaviest naturally-occurring element, would weigh 120 kilograms, and could sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in just 16 minutes.

But what if you got the weight wrong? What if the bowling ball you were using turned out to be 7 pounds, not 7 kilograms? Or maybe it's 10.5 pounds—the "average" bowling ball, at least according to a dubious Flickr sample.

In that case, the ball would never reach the bottom. Instead, it would drift sideways with the currents. We can track what course it would take using the Adrift.org.au ocean plastic tracking tool. The bowling ball would first drift west, past Luzon in the Philippines, then probably north along the coast of China, turning right at Japan and heading out over the Pacific.

Sometime in the summer of 2018, it would approach the coast of California. Most likely, it would follow the coast for a little while, then become swept up in the great Pacific garbage patch.

However, it's possible that it would be swept up on shore instead. If, during those three years, Doug took his boat from the Mariana islands to Los Angeles, found a nice, sheltered cove, and set up ten carefully weighted bowling pins just below the surface, then there is a tiny, tiny chance ...

... that he could succeed in bowling the single most improbable strike of all time.

Last summer, the American Federation of Musicians hit videogame composer Austin Wintory (Monaco, Journey) with a $50,000 fine for working on The Banner Saga in violation of its (nonexistent) game music contract. Thanks to the union's own stubbornness and greed, none of its members were allowed to compose music for videogames. A contract put together in 2012 without the input of AFM's members was so skewed towards the union that no videogame producers were willing to agree to it. (It wasn't until 2014 that Microsoft agreed to the terms of AFM's revamped contract. It remains the sole company to do so.)

When Wintry worked on the game without its permission, AFM got angry and threw its toys out of the crib. Its own Local 47 (Los Angeles) took issue with the union's BS and issued a resolution supporting Wintory in October. Perhaps due to this internal pressure, the AFM reduced Wintory's fine to $2,500. Now, it's threatening to expel Wintory because he hasn't paid up.

A long-running dispute between video game composer Austin Wintory and his union, the American Federation of Musicians, has come to a head this week: Variety reports that Wintory has refused to pay a $2,500 fine imposed by the AFM for his non-union work as a composer on The Banner Saga.

The union has threatened to expel him if he doesn't pay up by January 19th. Wintory is investigating his legal options to combat such a decision, and has offered to write a $2,500 check to the L.A.-based Education Through Music charity in lieu of paying the union fine.

Wintory is weighing his options. A good one would seem to be telling AFM where to stick its toys (and contracts) and ditching the union altogether. But that can have an adverse effect on finding work in other union-heavy industries, like movies and regular, old non-videogame music. These entities tend to require the hiring of union members, so the lack of an AFM card could keep Wintory from being hired should he choose to branch out.

Other AFM members have worked around the union's stupid videogame contract by recording in Nashville (Tennessee is a right-to-work state) or overseas. Wintory incensed his "representatives" by ditching Los Angeles -- an area it firmly controls -- in favor of London, which was cheaper, didn't hit the game's producer for additional "future use" fees and didn't force anyone to adhere to a one-sided contract. So, it's still out to get its pound of flesh in hopes of discouraging other members from bypassing the contract they were never given the chance to agree to.

In true AFM fashion, it is implementing another contract and letting its members know the specifics after the fact.

Meanwhile, the Recording Musicians Association (RMA), the “player conference” within the AFM that represents many studio musicians, announced over the weekend that the union had concluded negotiations with the AMPTP on a new multiyear contract for recording TV and film scores.

Details of the pact, however, were being kept under wraps Sunday. Musicians are expected to be informed of the details late Monday during meetings of the RMA and Local 47 membership.

So, who's working for who? Unions are supposed to represent their members. That's why members pay fees. AFM seems to genuinely have no concern about the well-being of its artists. (It doesn't care much for the general public either.) It fines them when they seek to do work they've been locked out of by a contract they never wanted and it keeps its negotiations with other entities secret until the ink has dried on all the signatures -- none of which belong to the members supposedly being "represented."

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