The Bickersons Go To Court (again and again)

Former Couple's Legal Fight Now in Year Seventeen. Unbelievable.

Slow Posting

Apologies for the dearth of posting lately. I have been busy with some personal business and frankly there hasn't been a ton of stuff out there that has caught my eye. I'm also trying to catch up on a backlog of material from my "to read" list.

2 Companies Close and Destroy Data Rather Than Reveal Files to Feds

The shutdown of two small e-mail providers on Thursday illustrates why it is so hard for Internet companies to challenge secret government surveillance: to protect their customers’ data from federal authorities, the two companies essentially committed suicide.

Lavabit, a Texas-based service that was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, the leaker who had worked as a National Security Agency contractor, announced the suspension of its service Thursday afternoon. In a blog post, the company’s owner, Ladar Levison, suggested — though did not say explicitly — that he had received a secret search order, and was choosing to shut the service to avoid being “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

Within hours, a fast-growing Maryland-based start-up called Silent Circle also closed its e-mail service and destroyed its e-mail servers. The company said it saw the writing on the wall — while also making it plain that it had not yet received any court orders soliciting user data.

Read the rest here.

I tip my hat to you sirs. It is remotely possible that true patriotism is not dead in corporate America.

A Bicentennial Resolution

OK, I will admit it. I am not a big fan of romance as a genre, either in film or literature. It's just not my thing. Some people really like it. Good for you. But it has been brought to my attention yet again, that this is the bicentennial of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Which even I know is the most famous work of the first truly great romantic novelist.

Oddly I have a site dedicated to her linked in the sidebar, mostly for it's great posts on late Georgian society and culture, but I have never read any of her books. Not one. But because of my love of period literature and fiction and in consideration of the anniversary, I am going to make a stab at it.

Any suggestions? Should I go for one of her other works or stick with Mr. Darcey and Miss Bennet?

Russian Orthodox Church still doubts authenticity of Russian royal family remains

Moscow, August 9, Interfax - The head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for Church and Society Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has said that the Russian Orthodox Church still has doubts regarding secular experts' conclusions that the human remains found near the city of Yekaterinburg belonged to the Russian Imperial Family members.

"In my opinion, a very wide range of competent experts, not necessarily just Orthodox experts, should be allowed to study the discovered remains," Father Vsevolod said.

It is important both to compare the DNA of some individual fragment with the DNA of the remains of other Imperial Family members, assess the wholeness of the skeletons, establish whether or not all of the found human remains have the same DNA and confirm the presence of former injuries, for example the injury that was sustained by Tsar Nicholas II during his trip to Japan when he was the heir to the Russian throne, the archpriest said.

There is also a need to compare different theories describing how the bodies were disposed of and buried, he said.

Read the rest here.

Sigh...

IRS manual detailed DEA's use of hidden intel evidence

(Reuters) - Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA's Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Read the rest here.

JP Morgan Faces Civil and Criminal Investigations

JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Wednesday that it faced a criminal and civil investigation into whether it sold shoddy mortgage securities to investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, the latest legal threat to the nation’s biggest bank.

JPMorgan acknowledged for the first time the existence of the investigation — one of several mortgage-related problems looming for the bank — in a quarterly regulatory filing. It said that the civil division of the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California, which covers a stretch of land that includes Sacramento and Yosemite, has “preliminarily concluded” that JPMorgan flouted federal laws with its sale of subprime mortgage securities from 2005 to 2007. The parallel criminal inquiry, according to one person briefed on the matter, is in a more preliminary stage.

Read the rest here.

Banks are the enemy.

Some Clarity on the War on Drugs

Colorado Lawmakers Get License Plate Protection From Traffic Cams - Parking Tickets

There are rules for the common people and rules for their "leaders," and only in rare cases do the same rules cover both. Chris Morran at the Consumerist points out how politicians (yet again) are being allowed to ignore the same laws that affect their constituents. Colorado legislators are immune from speeding tickets and parking tickets thanks to the special plates issued to lawmakers -- ones that aren't included in the DMV database.

Read the rest here.
HT: Bill (tGf)

A Spanish town gives new meaning to "lost and found"

BRUNETE, Spain — In the worldwide battle to get dog owners to clean up after their pets, enter Brunete, a middle-class suburb of Madrid fed up with dirty parks and sidewalks.

Some cities hand out steep fines. But in these tough economic times, the mayor here, Borja Gutiérrez, didn’t much like that idea. Instead, this town engaged a small army of volunteers to bag it, box it and send it back to its owners.

“It’s your dog, it’s your dog poop,” Mr. Gutiérrez said. “We are just returning it to you.”

Until now, Brunete’s claim to fame, if it had one, was that it sustained heavy damage in the Spanish Civil War. But these days, this leafy hamlet has made headlines all over Spain. Residents say that strangers take note when they say they live in Brunete.

At a recent political event, Mr. Gutiérrez said, the mayor of Madrid sought him out.

“She said, ‘Well, it is not many mayors who think sending dog poop to voters is a good idea,'” Mr. Gutiérrez said. “'How did you dare?'”

Read the rest here.

Feds Sue Bank of America for Fraud

(Reuters) - The U.S. government on Tuesday filed two civil lawsuits against Bank of America for what the Justice Department and securities regulators said was a fraud on investors involving $850 million of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed the parallel suits in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, according to the court filings.

The securities date to about January 2008, the government said, putting them just at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Bank of America responded to the lawsuits with a statement: "These were prime mortgages sold to sophisticated investors who had ample access to the underlying data, and we will demonstrate that.

Read the rest here.

Banks are the enemy.

Richard III to be buried as a Protestant

The Roman Catholic King Richard III is to be interred in a Protestant Cathedral, presumably using the rites of the Church of England. The local Catholic bishop has volunteered to participate in an ecumenical capacity.

From here.

Fixed the link.

When God Spoke Greek

Timothy Michael Law is a scholar interested in history, theology, and religion. Last month Oxford University Press published his book on the Septuagint, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible. I recently got the chance to talk with Law about his new book and the importance of the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament to contemporary churches.

Where did your interest in the Septuagint begin?

One night in 2002, I was sitting with one of my best friends from college and seminary, Kyle McDaniel, and he threw (literally!) a big blue book at me from across the room. The book was Alfred Rahlfs’ handbook edition of the Greek Septuagint. We started talking about it, and both of us were uncertain whether we wanted to pursue more Hebrew or Greek, or more early Judaism or early Christianity in our graduate work. We loved all of it. We decided that one way to marry those interests was to study the Septuagint.

Why should today’s churches care about the Septuagint?

There are several reasons I think modern Christians should care about the Septuagint.

First, when a modern reader sees Paul quoting Isaiah, and then turns to Isaiah in an English translation, she notices the citation is different. Why? The Old Testament translation of almost every modern English version of the Bible is based on the Hebrew Bible, but the New Testament authors and the early Church most often used the Septuagint. Augustine and others throughout history even argued that if the New Testament authors used the Septuagint, the Church ought to affirm its authority as well. I unpack this in several chapters in the book.

Second, the Septuagint, and not the Hebrew Bible, explicitly shaped some early Christian theology. For example, it was the Septuagint version of Isaiah, not the Hebrew Bible’s version, that shaped the most theologically profound book in the history of Christianity, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The primacy of the Septuagint continues after the first century, and one could not imagine the development of orthodoxy without it. None of this would be terribly significant if the Septuagint were merely a translation of the Hebrew; however, the Septuagint in many places contains a different message. Sometimes the translators of the Septuagint created new meanings in their translations, but there is also another reason the Septuagint is often different.

An alternative, sometimes older, form of the Hebrew text often lies behind the Greek. When the Reformers and their predecessors talked about returning to the original Hebrew (ad fontes!), and when modern Christians talk about studying the Hebrew because it is the “original text,” they are making several mistaken assumptions. The Hebrew Bible we now use is often not the oldest form of the Hebrew text, and sometimes the Septuagint provides the only access we have to that older form.

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe

Reuters: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

Read the rest here.

This country is so screwed. Seriously. We might just as well run up the Hammer and Sickle right now. They won. We are a police state.

Russia's Dangerous Alliance Between Church and State

Russia officially celebrated Paratroopers Day on Friday. For more than 1.5 million men who serve or served as paratroopers, the day is a holiday, moreover one that is totally different than every other military holiday. On this day, paratrooper veterans have carte blanche to do strange things, which include getting drunk in the morning, fighting, and ritually bathing in the city fountains. On this day in provincial cities, careful mothers tend to lock their teenage daughters inside — and for good reason. Even Wikipedia warns that "the festivities are accompanied by fights, pogroms and public disorder."

But this year Paratroopers Day had a new twist. On all the billboards and posters in Moscow, the holiday had a dual title: "Paratroopers Day — ­Elijah's Day." The Orthodox Church does, in fact, commemorate the Prophet Elijah on Aug. 2. But it's hard to understand what the ascetic hermit Elijah — aka "the first virgin of the Old Testament," who certainly never jumped out of a plane in a parachute — has in common with paratroopers who, by definition, aren't what you'd call pacifists.

Nevertheless, this isn't the first attempt of the Russian Orthodox Church to interfere in the traditions of public and military holidays. Not long ago, the authorities in Voronezh region officially prohibited celebration of the ancient Slavic holiday of Ivan Kupala. A few days ago, the church pressured the Navy to drop several traditions from Navy Day. In the past, actors played Neptune, mermaids and other creatures who, in the words of an anonymous representative of the  Navy "were not on Noah's Ark during the Flood," as Interfax reported.

Declaring Neptune a persona non grata in the Navy may be comical, but it is indicative of the recent creep of clericalism into cultural and public life in Russia. Groups of aggressive Orthodox activists and Cossacks regularly attack art exhibitions showing "blasphemous" paintings and demand that theatrical performances be banned.

Read the rest here.

MLB Suspends A-Roid + 12 Others

In the biggest surprise since this morning's sunrise Major League Baseball handed out suspensions to 13 players including Alex Rodriguez for chemical cheating. Most copped to the charges and accepted the MLB version of a plea bargain that let them off with 50 game suspensions. But A-Roid was in the cross-hairs for his attempts to entice others into cheating, attempts to obtain and destroy evidence and directly lying to MLB when questioned on the matter. No plea bargain there. He was suspended for 214 (211) games which will commence after his appeals are exhausted.

It is overwhelmingly likely he will be out for the entirety of the 2014 and whatever part of the 2015 season is left over from when he starts to serve the suspension. Some experts opine that this may effectively end his career. The Yankees however are still on the hook for whatever part of his contract is not voided by the suspension. So he stands to walk away with tens of millions of dollars.

My take is that this is a good first step and probably as much as could be hoped for given the constraints of the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Union. One really encouraging sign is that unlike in the 90's and early 2000's when most players resisted any testing and did everything in their power to obstruct inquiries into the rampant doping, the pendulum seems to have swung. Most players now see chemical cheating as dangerous to the integrity of the game itself and are loudly demanding stronger sanctions and more aggressive testing. There is almost no sympathy being expressed for those caught doping.

Players are actually pushing their union delegates to impose even more severe penalties than what MLB has asked for in the past. Among the more popular suggestions being floated by angry ballplayers is going to a two strikes and your out rule, with a first offense being a 100 game suspension. Second offenses resulting in a lifetime ban from professional baseball. And one innovative idea that might carry the most deterrent power of any I've heard of so far. The suggestion being that any player caught doping on a first offense, and proven beyond any doubt, would be liable to having his contract terminated by his club without further appeal. Given the kinds of long term contracts, frequently worth tens of millions of dollars, with a lot of pay back loaded, this could be the key to bringing an end to the era of chemical cheating.

Anyways MLB gets two and a half cheers for mostly handling this particular case right. A few too many leaks for my taste but all in all they didn't make a hash out of it. There was talk of invoking the MLB equivalent to the death penalty and slapping A-Roid with a lifetime ban. But as much as I don't care for the man that would have been overkill for what was technically a first offense. Likewise they didn't try to deny him his right to appeal. That would have looked bad and actually made the bum a sympathetic character. Besides there's really no need. By every account MLB has absolutely damning evidence against A-Roid. So let him file his appeal. It's just delaying the inevitable.

Morally of course, judgment has been rendered. He really would do well to just let the Yankees quietly pay him off and retire from baseball. There's just no point in trying to comeback in 2015. Nothing he can do will salvage his reputation and the doors to the Hall of Fame are forever closed to him.

Correction: I initially posted that A-Rod was suspended for 214 games. It was actually 211.

2 Years After 116 Police Bullets, Few Answers

MIAMI BEACH — The last 90 seconds of Raymond Herisse’s life unfold on YouTube with chilling clarity.

The car Mr. Herisse, 22, is driving rolls down a South Beach street. Shots are heard in the distance as Hialeah police officers try to stop the car. About two blocks later, the car slows to a stop, standing idle for more than minute. Eight Miami Beach police officers cluster near the driver’s side. Then they unleash a barrage of more than 100 bullets, a volley so startling that the hands of the person recording the scene from his cellphone shake.

In all, 16 bullets hit Mr. Herisse, who was killed sitting behind the wheel. Four bystanders were wounded — two men and two women, part of a large crowd gathered on May 30, 2011, for the final day of Urban Beach Week, a raucous, yearly hip-hop and rap event in South Beach.

But in the two years since Mr. Herisse’s death, his family and the four other victims, increasingly troubled by delays and the police’s handling of the investigation, are still waiting to learn why the officers opened fire on a stopped car amid a throng of onlookers.

Read the rest here.

WAPO: Five myths about libertarians

The specter of libertarianism is haunting America. Advocates of sharply reducing the government’s size, scope and spending are raising big bucks from GOP donors, trying to steal the mantle of populism, being blamed for the demise of Detroit and even getting caught in the middle of a battle for the Republican Party. Yet libertarians are among the most misunderstood forces in today’s politics. Let’s clear up some of the biggest misconceptions.

1. Libertarians are a fringe band of “hippies of the right.”

In 1971, the controversial and influential author Ayn Rand denounced right-wing anarchists as “hippies of the right,” a charge still leveled against libertarians, who push for a minimal state and maximal individual freedom.

Libertarians are often dismissed as a mutant subspecies of conservatives: pot smokers who are soft on defense and support marriage equality. But depending on their views, libertarians often match up equally well with right- and left-wingers.

The earliest example of libertarian principles in partisan politics might have come in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,when Anti-Imperialist League Democrats rejected empire and war — and believed in free trade and racial equality at a time when none of that was popular. More recently, civil libertarians such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) supported Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in his filibuster on domestic drones and government surveillance.

Read the rest here.

California: US Supreme Court Upholds Order to Release Thousands of Convicts

WASHINGTON — In a major setback for Gov. Jerry Brown, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declined to block a court order that he release 9,600 inmates from state prisons, moving California a step closer to relocating or freeing those prisoners by the end of the year.

The state can still pursue its appeal — and the administration vowed to do so. But the court's 6-3 vote was a disappointment for Brown, who had launched a political crusade against a three-judge panel that has consistently ruled that overcrowded prison conditions violate the rights of inmates.

The panel has ordered Brown to bring the number of inmates in its prisons down to 112,164 by the end of the year.

Read the rest here.