June 24, 2014

Roses of Picardy

... and the roses will die with the summertime
and our paths may be far apart
but there's one rose that dies not in Picardy
'tis the rose that I keep in my heart ...

June 8, 2014

See that my grave is kept clean

... Lord, there's one kind of favor I ask of you
See that my grave is kept clean ...
Have you ever hear a coffin sound?
Then you know another poor boy's in the ground ...

June 1, 2014

28 USC 50/10. The current DOJ policy for obtaining information from news media

can be read here: Federal Register 79#39 (Thur 27 Feb 14) 10989-10994

May 26, 2014

Are you sure? I would happily repeat that, if I knew it were true, but

the hits I'm getting for Greenwald + "National States' Rights" seem to refer to his White Supremacist client

I did find some articles about GG's unsuccessful runs for city council:

April 11, 2014

IWW songs

April 10, 2014

Ku Ku

March 31, 2014

SHULER et al v SWATEK et al demonstrates just how loony the world of Roger Shuler is:

He got into repeated arguments with his next-door neighbor and finally sued over a minor property line dispute, winning $1 in damages. His neighbor countersued, claiming that Shuler had appropriated some of his belongings, and won compensation and probably lawyers' fees, in total $1525, which Shuler refused to pay. Several years later, Shuler started his blog to discuss these disputes, so the neighbor retaliated by insisting on payment of the $1525 he had won in court. Shuler took the view that all this was illegitimate and therefore required no action from him, so his home was sold for $1525. Later, Shuler went to court pro se attempting to overturn the sale and lost repeatedly. It's just nuts

The following is from the opinion in his Federal suit:

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA
SOUTHERN DIVISION
29 December 2010
SHULER et al v SWATEK et al

... In 1998, McGarity purchased the property adjacent to Plaintiffs’home .. Since then, Roger Shuler and McGarity have embroiled themselves in several disputes, ranging from litigation to actual physical altercations. After several verbal spats regarding their shared property boundary, Roger Shuler initiated a criminal trespass suit against McGarity in the spring of 2000 wherein McGarity was acquitted. Shortly thereafter, McGarity filed suit against Roger Shuler, alleging malicious prosecution and conversion, seeking damages of $25,000 .. In the 2004 trial, the jury returned a verdict against McGarity on Shuler’s trespass counterclaim, awarding Shuler $1 in damages .. The jury also found that Shuler had converted McGarity’s property and awarded McGarity $1,525 in compensatory and punitive damages. In October 2006 .. Shuler and McGarity engaged in a physical altercation .. Plaintiffs reported the incident to the .. Sheriff’s Office, but chose not to file criminal charges ... In the summer of 2007 .. Shuler started a blog .. to discuss his troubles with McGarity ... This decision allegedly prompted McGarity to try to collect on the jury award he secured on the 2004 conversion claim ... Swatek applied for a writ of execution .. to seize Plaintiffs’ cars or home for a sheriff’s sale to pay the outstanding judgment. Plaintiffs received notice of levy .. informing Plaintiffs of the impending sale of their home and property ... Plaintiffs received over twenty-five (25) phone messages .. informing them of the upcoming sale and inquiring whether they had arranged a settlement ... Plaintiffs explained that they were not attempting to work out a settlement because they believed the original 2004 judgment against them was void and, in any event, they had claimed an exemption for their property ... Sheriff Curry’s office sought guidance from Judge Harrington ... Judge Harrington apparently disagreed with Plaintiffs’ position and ordered the sale to proceed ... Plaintiffs received notice of Judge Harrington’s order .. and admit that “the court file shows that Harrington indeed signed off on the sale” ... Plaintiffs contend .. Harrington “acted outside his official capacity” ... As a result, Plaintiffs did not appeal Judge Harrington’s order or take any other action to stop the sale ... The sheriff’s sale proceeded, as ordered ... Defendants have moved to dismiss ... For the reasons stated more fully below, the court DISMISSES this case ...

February 9, 2014

It certainly squelches the "whistle-blower" defense, if Snowden was automatically

finding and downloading 550K+ documents/month during his short stint in Hawaii: it works out to an average of about 12 documents per minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, week after week after week

And how many of those documents could he have actually read?

There are 168 hours in a week, and he's gonna spend about 8 hrs/night asleep, leaving 112 hours. He also had a fulltime job, which leaves him about 70 hours, if we count (say) a fifteen minute one-way commute. Basic needs (dressing, showering and shaving and eating, &c) must chop the total down to perhaps 60 hours. He has to have clean clothes, grocery shop and cook and clean-up or grab take-out, gas the car, &c): say (generously) that leaves him about 55 hours. And there's the relationship with the girlfriend, who claims she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, so beyond snoring beside her and maybe chatting while he gets ready for work or over meals, he's got to spend some quality time with her: watching TV or going to the movies with her, attending her performances, honey-do and other relationship maintenance: say that leaves him about 45 hours/week -- or 6 hours a day

In all he's got about 550 hours to review 1.7 million documents -- which works out to reviewing an impossible 50+ documents a minute. Of course, he didn't do that: he probably did mechanized searches of his downloaded collection: but let's ignore the time spent thinking up search criteria and programming the searches. At best, he'll skim about a document a minute visually -- and nobody can keep that up for 6 hours without becoming mentally exhausted: I'd guess the long-term average can't really be much better than 30 documents an hour, which puts him below 17K documents receiving even cursory examination

The conclusion is that Snowden glanced at no more than 1% of his download

January 16, 2014

Former Swedish prosecutor Rolf Hillegren says it's time for Sweden to drop the Assange case

Dags för Sverige att avsluta fallet Assange

Five years ago, Swedish prosecutor Rolf Hillegren exhibited his heroic side by sharing with the world his opinion that most rapes aren't criminal acts but are more like mere regulatory offenses:



Fascist authoritarians, like Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, were naturally outraged: Sunde, in a fit of pique, even reported Hillegren to the ombudsman for Swedish Justice! Nevertheless, Hillegren has maintained this heroic stance in the years since. In 2011, he reiterated his concern that emphasizing "consent" in rape cases would merely increase the conviction rate:



Now everybody's hero is once again back in the news, demanding that Sweden should drop the charges against Assange. It is easy to see how this demand fits into Hillegren's general views: when deciding Sweden's extradition request in 2011, the UK magistrate at Belmarsh discussed the allegations in the warrant for Assange's arrest:



Assessing these allegations using Hillegren's 2009 theory of rape, we see that the supposed behavior does involve "a man and a woman who know each other," and that it is even a case in which "the man just goes ahead anyway," somehow neglecting to obtain consent -- which (by Hillegren's theory) is "not very nice" but perhaps "not worth two years in prison." And now, in his most recent foray into sex-crimes law, Hillegren offers this new and brilliant solution of the Assange stand-off:



Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, let's restate Hillegren's theory of sex-crimes: a man, who has sex with a woman he knows, without first obtaining consent, because the woman was thoughtlessly asleep when the man wanted sex, ought not be prosecuted, though if the woman feels injured by the occurrence then the state ought to pay her whatever damages she might have obtained from the man in a lawsuit, because the whole fuck-up is obviously the state's fault

Hillegren, unfortunately, is no longer a prosecutor in Sweden. It's unclear exactly why: perhaps he was hounded from office by a vicious conspiracy involving the US government, Karl Rove, and the Revolutionary Saudi Arabian Feminists of Sweden

January 7, 2014

In Snowden's case, we are discussing Standard Form 312,

the CLASSIFIED INFORMATION NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT

Here's a discussion of the non-disclosure obligations that are imposed on security cleared personnel, including the statutory bases