Later On

Marci Hamilton, a FindLaw columnist, is the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008). A review of Justice Denied appeared on this site on June 25, 2008. Her previous book is God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005), now available in paperback. She writes:

Yesterday, March 18, the New York Assembly Rules Committee passed the Child Victims Act (Assembly Bill A02596/Senate Bill S02568), which will extend the criminal and civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse by five years. It will also open a one-year window of opportunity for child sex abuse victims to go to court even if their statute of limitations already had expired. The next stop is the full Assembly and then on to the Senate.

The Child Victims Act was first introduced by Assemblywoman Marge Markey, who has doggedly stood by the bill. For three years, she shepherded it through the Assembly, only to be blocked by Sen. Joseph Bruno, now under federal indictment. Now that Democrats are a majority in the Senate and many support this bill, there is real hope that victims have a shot at justice in New York this time around.

The Urgent Need for States to Extend their Statutes of Limitations and Create "Windows" During Which Past Victims Can Sue

As I have discussed in previous columns such as this one and my book Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children, we do not know the identity of the vast majority of child sex predators, because we have crafted a legal system that prefers the adult perpetrators over the child victims. Hundreds of studies have shown that child sex abuse victims face enormous barriers to pursuing their perpetrators and those who aided the perpetrators. The same mismatch in power that permitted the abuse to happen in the first place severely undermines the ability of victims to pursue those who sexually abused them, not to mention those in positions of power in organizations that also permitted them to be abused. In the nature of things, adults are in an extremely powerful position vis-à-vis children, but when an adult can also exploit a position of trust as a parent, teacher, rabbi, priest, or Boy Scout leader, the scale tips so strikingly that the victim can be seriously disabled and disempowered for life.

Until relatively recently, most states had statutes of limitations that closed the courthouse doors before the victim was psychologically capable of coming forward. The result has been that perpetrators have continued to teach, advise, and guide our children in churches, synagogues, schools, and extracurricular activities – and to do so under legal cover. The fix is obvious: Eliminate, or at least lengthen, the statutes of limitations.

The New York bill has taken a moderate route. On one hand, …

Continue reading. 

From the NY Times:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday outlined a shift in the enforcement of federal drug laws, saying the administration would effectively end the Bush administration’s frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana.

Speaking with reporters, Mr. Holder provided few specifics but said the Justice Department’s enforcement policy would now be restricted to traffickers who falsely masqueraded as medical dispensaries and “use medical marijuana laws as a shield.”

In the Bush administration, federal agents raided medical marijuana distributors that violated federal statutes even if the dispensaries appeared to be complying with state laws. The raids produced a flood of complaints, particularly in California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize marijuana sales to people with doctors’ prescriptions.

Graham Boyd, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union drug law project, said Mr. Holder’s remarks created a reasonable balance between conflicting state and federal laws and “seem to finally end the policy war over medical marijuana.” He said officials in California and the 12 other states that have authorized the use of medical marijuana had hesitated to adopt regulations to carry out their laws because of uncertainty created by the Bush administration.

Mr. Holder said the new approach was consistent with statements made by President Obama in the campaign and was based on an assessment of how to allocate scarce enforcement resources. He said dispensaries operating in accord with California law would not be a priority for the administration.

Mr. Holder’s comments appeared to be an effort to clarify the policy after some news reports last month interpreted his answer to a reporter’s question to be a flat assertion that all raids on marijuana growers would cease. Department officials said Mr. Holder had not intended to assert any policy change last month but was decidedly doing so on Wednesday…

Continue reading.

My all-time favorite assault rifle is the H&K G11. It also uses a bullpup design, but the big change is in the ammo, along with the feeding mechanism. More info here and here.

I’ve always liked the bullpup design for assault rifles (see the Steyr AUG in the video below), and now the idea been adapted for pistols. Take a look at the Boberg XR9.

This sounds good and also easy:

Marinated Olives

It doesn’t take much to convert good olives to great ones — just a bit of olive oil, some crushed cloves of garlic, several sprigs of rosemary and, more for color then anything else, a few slivers of lemon peel. Perfect for entertaining.

Yield 4 servings
Time 5 minutes, plus marinating time

An assortment of olives is what you’re looking for here — oil cured, dark green, light green, brown and black.

• 2 cups assorted olives
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary leaves
• 1/2 lemon, cut in half and segmented like a grapefruit

Toss all ingredients together in a bowl. Marinate for an hour or longer at room temperature. Refrigerate overnight if not using immediately. (Remove from the refrigerator an hour or two before serving.)

From New Scientist:

The Age of Stupid

• 14 March 2009 by Catherine Brahic

The Age of Stupid directed by Franny Armstrong. UK cinema release 20 March/US release September

No one likes being preached to, which doesn’t bode well for any film on climate change. The latest offering is the part sci-fi movie, part-documentary The Age of Stupid. Set in 2055 on a flooded, damaged, inhospitable Earth, a lone man, played by Pete Postlethwaite, guards a historical archive and bemoans that earlier generations did not prevent climate change.

It is worthy, though not riveting, cinema, but it has a very clever feature: much of the film is a patchwork of real news clips of remarkable single weather events from the early 2000s. Isolated events cannot be wholly blamed on global warming but, together, the staggering accumulation of severe hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and more is probably the result of climate change. By displaying these events side by side, the film compellingly shows that climate change is real, providing 20/20 hindsight while there is still time to act.

It’s not because they force us out of bed, Megs, just so you know. From New Scientist:

• Made for Each Other: The biology of the human-animal bond by Meg Daley Olmert
• Published by: Da Capo Press
• Price: $26

WHY and how do we bond with other beings? The rapidly growing field of anthrozoology, the study of human-animal relationships, is attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines who want to answer this question.

To this end, Meg Daley Olmert has written a fascinating, wide-ranging and easy read about the biology of the human-animal bond. It comes with a strong endorsement from renowned scientist E.O. Wilson, who coined the term "biophilia" to highlight our innate attraction to the natural world. Olmert’s goal is to show that "our curiosity about other living things… is biological, is genetic, and can stand up to scientific scrutiny".

In Made for Each Other, Olmert weaves together the latest science – from archaeology and psychology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience – with engaging stories to make a strong case that we need animals in our lives and that there are deep-rooted reasons for why this is so. And it all comes down to one important chemical: …

Continue reading.

Good post from the Archdruid:

The relation of technology to time is a theme that’s come up more than once in these essays, and for good reason. On the one hand, many of the challenges we face as industrial civilization lurches down the long curve of its decline and fall come from the mismatch between the short timeframe that governs so many of our collective decisions and the long reach the consequences of those decisions so often have.

On the other, a crucial aspect of our predicament just now – though it’s not often recognized as such – is the fact that most of our modern technologies are very poorly adapted to the long term. Most of the technologies used by today’s industrial societies depend directly or indirectly on nonrenewable resources that, in the broad scheme of things, simply won’t be around all that much longer. Those technologies that can’t be reworked to use entirely renewable inputs, or that stop being economical once the costs of renewables has to be factored in, will go away in the decades and centuries to come, with profound impacts on human life.

In that light, it’s comforting to realize that our species has managed to come up with a certain number of extremely durable technologies. Agriculture, despite the assertions of its modern neoprimitivist critics, is at least capable of being one of those. The rice paddies of eastern Asia, the wheat fields of Syria and the olive orchards and vineyards of Greece and Italy, to name only a few examples, have proven sustainable over many millennia, and will likely still be viable long after today’s idiotically unsustainable petrochemical agriculture has become a footnote in history books written in languages that haven’t evolved yet.

There are other examples. One in particular, though, plays an important role in my own hopes for the future, not least because I work with it every day: …

Continue reading.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Sony Electronics Inc. is pairing with Google Inc. to battle Amazon.com Inc. in the growing digital books market.

In a strike against Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader, Sony and Google plan to launch a partnership Thursday that will give users of the Sony Reader device access to more than half-a-million public domain books from Google’s ambitious book digitization project. The books will be offered to Sony Reader users free via the online Sony eBook store. The companies wouldn’t reveal financial terms of the deal.

"We aren’t set on just having books purchased from our store," said Steve Haber, Sony Electronics’ …

Take a look. From the site:

Science.gov searches over 38 databases and 1,950 selected websites, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information, including research and development results.

Also:

Agriculture & Food

Food Safety, Gardening, Pesticides, Veterinary Science …

 

Applied Science & Technologies

Biotechnology, Electronics, Engineering, Transport …

 

Astronomy & Space

Exploration, Planets, Space Technologies …

 

Biology & Nature

Animals & Plants, Ecology, Genetics, Pest Control …

 

Computers & Communication

Networks, Hardware, Software …

 

Earth & Ocean Sciences

Land, Maps, Natural Disasters, Oceans, Weather …

 

Energy & Energy Conservation

Energy Use, Fossil Fuel, Solar, Wind …

 

Environment & Environmental Quality

Air/Water/Noise Quality, Cleanup, Climate Change …

 

Health & Medicine

Disease, Health Care, Nutrition, Mental Health …

 

Math, Physics, & Chemistry

Astrophysics, Chemicals, Mathematical Modeling …

 

Natural Resources & Conservation

Ecosystems, Energy Resources, Forest Science, Mining …

 

Science Education

Homework Help, Teaching Aids, Science Internships …

15 free downloads to bring a spring back into its step.

Interesting article, which begins:

Everyone thinks that people in Paris are impossibly rude. The longer I spend in the city, the more I realise that this is untrue. In fact, they are impossibly polite.

Understanding this is the secret to an effortless life in the French capital. Mastering lift etiquette is a good case in point. I arrived in Paris a few years ago from London, where even colleagues would rather stare blankly at the closed doors than venture a greeting. In Paris, by contrast, there is a tightly observed ritual. When the lift doors part, you step in and say “Bonjour”. Everybody says “Bonjour” back. Whenever anyone steps out, you wish them a “Bonne journée”. They do the same. And that’s not all. If later in the day you bump into anyone again, you start all over again with (I’m not making this up) “Re-bonjour”.

At first, I found this exasperating. You approach a pair of shop assistants in the wonderfully chaotic DIY basement at BHV, the department store next to the Hôtel de Ville, who appear to have been trained not to interrupt their conversation as you draw near. In fact, they have perfected the art of not even catching your eye, while you wait in disbelief in front of them. I didn’t realise it then, but a “Bonjour Madame” would have brought their conversation to an instant halt, and located those 5cm masonry nails in moments. (If in doubt, it’s best to stick to Madame, not Mademoiselle, unless the shop assistant looks about 17; the French tend to use Madame as a term of respect for an older woman, not a factual reference to marital status.) …

Continue reading.

From the CAP:

During the presidential campaign, Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren had perhaps the best access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) of any journalist. In September, she hosted a one-hour "documentary" on the GOP vice presidential candidate, titled "Governor Sarah Palin — An American Woman." She also scored an exclusive interview with Todd Palin, in which she grilled him "on everything from the story behind the name ‘First Dude’ to how he feels about the name ‘First Dude.’" Palin even chose Van Susteren for her first post-election national television interview. Since then, Van Susteren has consistently covered Palin, keeping an eye out for any potential slights of the governor and gushing over her popularity. On Monday, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza revealed one of the reasons that Van Susteren may have so much interest in and access to Palin: it turns out that her husband, John Coale, is one of "the figures charged with guiding Palin’s political image in Washington." In an interview with Cillizza, Coale "acknowledged that he suggested" Palin "start a leadership PAC and helped her navigate through some of the questions surrounding her family that lingered after the campaign." "Others familiar with Palin’s political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on — essentially helping run Sarah PAC," reported Cillizza. According to a Nexis search, starting on the day that Sarah PAC was announced, Van Susteren has never disclosed her husband’s behind-the-scenes role on air. Ironically, just last week, Van Susteren decried people thinking she’s "so close to the Palin family." "The only way that I’ve met them is by interviewing them," she said, never mentioning her husband’s relationship to Palin.

CAP in an email:

Six years to the day  have passed since President Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, a preventative war of choice based on "intelligence fixed around the policy." The purpose, according to Bush, was "to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger." Yet of course, there were no weapons to disarm and no "grave danger" to defend against. The war has spawned more terrorists and created deeply rooted resentment of the United States. Even including the billions of dollars Congress has authorized to bail out the nation’s troubled financial institutions, this unnecessary war will most likely turn out to be "the largest spending bill in history," as Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) called it. Billions have been lost in waste, fraud, and abuse. Private contractors who have raked in billions from the war have established solid records of endangering the lives of Americans and Iraqis in the country. More importantly, al Qaeda — the main threat to the U.S. when the war was launched — "has organized to pre-9/11 strength" because Bush turned his back on Afghanistan, a war in which the U.S. and its allies are not currently winning. However, the war in Iraq may be starting to draw to a close. Late last year, the Bush administration negotiated a security agreement — or "withdrawal accord" — with the Iraqi government, mandating that all U.S. troops exit the country by 2011. Last month, President Obama announced his own plan to speed up that process, ordering two-thirds of U.S. forces to redeploy by Aug. 31, 2010. The Progress Report has rounded up the significant developments surrounding the Iraq war over the last year — some good, some bad, and others ugly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, writes in The Washington Note about “the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan” during the early days of U.S. operations there. “Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”

Having too few adequately trained troops and civilians, combined with pressure from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to “just get the bastards to the interrogators” meant lots of hasty abductions of the wrong people, many of whom were sent to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Moreover, Wilkerson writes, “several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”

Needless to say, the Bush administration didn’t do anything about it. Read Wilkerson’s full post here.

The Wife, who got a speeding ticket this morning on her commute, will doubtless find this of interest. Via James Fallows:

I’m making this recipe, from the Kitchn [sic].

UPDATE: I did make it (very tasty) and I’ve indicated in the recipe below the necessary changes for next time.

Rigatoni with Shredded Pork in Mustard Cream Sauce
adapted from this recipe in Food & Wine

serves four as a main dish

1 pound rigatoni
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small to medium yellow onion, sliced
1 cup chicken broth
2 cups cooked, shredded pork shoulder*
3/4 1 cup heavy cream
1/4 1/3 cup whole grain Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
salt and pepper

Bring a large stock pot of water to boil and salt generously. Add the pasta and cook until al dente. Drain.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a large skillet or sauce pan over medium high heat. Add the onions, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the onions are soft and beginning to brown, about 10 minutes.

Add the chicken broth and simmer for about 3 minutes, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the pork and cook until heated through. Add the cream, mustard, and thyme, and stir to combine. Pour in the drained pasta and toss until everything is coated in the sauce. Season with salt and pepper and serve immediately.

• If you want to make this recipe without leftover pork shoulder, you can use a pound of sweet Italian sausage. Brown and crumble it in the pan with the onions, then proceed with the rest of the recipe.

Click here to see beautiful photos of the dish.

A sobering article in the Washington Monthly by the economist James K. Galbraith begins:

Barack Obama’s presidency began in hope and goodwill, but its test will be its success or failure on the economics. Did the president and his team correctly diagnose the problem? Did they act with sufficient imagination and force? And did they prevail against the political obstacles—and not only that, but also against the procedures and the habits of thought to which official Washington is addicted?

The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind that program, and there may not be one, until the first report of the new Council of Economic Advisers appears next year. We therefore resort to what we know about the economists: the chair of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers; the CEA chair, Christina Romer; the budget director, Peter Orszag; and their titular head, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. This is plainly a capable, close-knit group, acting with energy and commitment. Deficiencies of their program cannot, therefore, be blamed on incompetence. Rather, if deficiencies exist, they probably result from their shared background and creed—in short, from the limitations of their ideas.

The deepest belief of the modern economist is that the economy is a self-stabilizing system. This means that, even if nothing is done, normal rates of employment and production will someday return. Practically all modern economists believe this, often without thinking much about it. (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it reflexively in a major speech in London in January: "The global economy will recover." He did not say how he knew.) The difference between conservatives and liberals is over whether policy can usefully speed things up. Conservatives say no, liberals say yes, and on this point Obama’s economists lean left. Hence the priority they gave, in their first days, to the stimulus package.

But did they get the scale right? Was the plan big enough? Policies are based on models; in a slump, plans for spending depend on a forecast of how deep and long the slump would otherwise be. The program will only be correctly sized if the forecast is accurate. And the forecast depends on the underlying belief. If recovery is not built into the genes of the system, then the forecast will be too optimistic, and the stimulus based on it will be too small.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hardly a surprise, but the Vatican has leapt to the defense of the Pope:

The Vatican on Wednesday defended Pope Benedict’s opposition to the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS as activists, doctors and politicians criticized it as unrealistic, unscientific and dangerous.

Benedict, arriving in Africa, said on Tuesday that condoms "increase the problem" of AIDS. The comment, made to reporters aboard his plane, caused a worldwide firestorm of criticism.

"My reaction is that this represents a major step backwards in terms of global health education, is entirely counter-productive, and is likely to lead to increases in HIV infection in Africa and elsewhere," said Prof Quentin Sattentau, Professor of Immunology at Britain’s Oxford University.

"There is a large body of published evidence demonstrating that condom use reduces the risk of acquiring HIV infection, but does not lead to increased sexual activity," he said.

The Church teaches that fidelity within heterosexual marriage and abstinence are the best ways to stop AIDS.

Asked about the criticism, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope was "maintaining the position of his predecessors."

The Vatican also says condoms can also lead to risky behavior but many contest that view.

Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, said there is no scientific evidence showing that condom use spurs people to take more sexual risks.

"The guidance we give is that condoms are highly (effective) to prevent the transmission of HIV if they are used correctly and consistently," he said in a telephone interview…

Continue reading. The church will never be happy with science, I fear.

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post, which begins:

Another Federal district court has given another church that uses the DMT-bearing brew called ayahuasca has won another battle in Federal district court.

This time the case is in Oregon and involves a branch of the Santo Daime, one of the two large religious organizations with Brazilian government permission to use the "tea." The previous case was in New Mexico, and involved a branch of the UdV, the other major Brazilian church that uses ayahuasca.*

In the Oregon case, Judge Owen Panner has issued a permanent injunction, and a very clearly-reasoned opinion to go with it. (It’s as good a statement of the facts as I’ve seen.) That doesn’t quite end matters; the church and the DEA still have to work out a regulatory process to prevent diversion, and the Justice Department could still choose to appeal.

In the New Mexico case, the government appealed the preliminary injunction all the way up to the Supreme Court, which affirmed 8-0. But so far the government has insisted on its right to have a full-dress trial on a permanent injunction, even after the three-week hearing on the preliminary injunction and three rounds of appellate briefs and arguments (a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit, an en banc, and then the Supreme Court).

In both cases, the government’s arguments amounted to "OOOOGA BUGGA! DRUGS!!!!" Neither court was having any, thanks. Without evidence of either physical or psychological harm or of diversion to non-religious use, the judges refused to suppress religious exercise on the basis of merely speculative harm. These were not Constitutional cases under the Free Exercise clause, but statutory-interpretation cases under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In the New Mexico case, but apparently not in the Oregon case, the Justice Department argued that the government was bound by treaty obligations to ban any non-medical use of DMT, the one hallucinogen we know of that is produced within the brain itself.

Now the new leadership at DoJ faces a question…

Continue reading.