It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t entitle religious people to imagine that all their crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

The State will be hard-pressed to show Zimmerman had the “ill will, spite, malice or hatred” needed to prove a “depraved mind.”

Success brings out the best in all but gloating bastards;  magnanimity, generosity, ease, confidence, joy, relaxation, energy, festivity, and a positive outlook. In contrast, failure naturally elicits bitterness, resentment, dolour, enervation, listlessness...

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes

Read more at http://shortformblog.com/post/48213064835/scalia-voting-rights-act#LTRcohDhb1RpkAyp.99 

“Look, Trayvon Martin was a victim who shouldn’t have died and in my view there’s a lot of moral responsibility on the shoulders of Zimmerman. 

“The question is, is it a criminal responsibility? And if it is a criminal responsibility, of what degree? It’s certainly not the kind of murder charge that he’s now facing.’’

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/US/dershowitz-zimmerman-martin-defense/2013/02/26/id/492168#ixzz2XXuXAMoT 

Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

HIROSHIMA 


The medical corps was expecting around 400,000 to 500,000 total casualties, about one-fourth of them dead. In fact, it was the position of the Japanese military that they would inflict such heavy casualties on any invasion force that the Allies would agree to precisely the surrender on terms the Allied governments wished to avoid, and there was substantial evidence of war weariness among the U.S. and British populations.

The failures here have to do with inviting persons into your country who are openly hostile to the prevailing customs and traditions of the host country or, more frequently the case, are slow to relinquish the ways of their homeland. 

Optimal immigration policy would be identical to hiring policy at any firm. How much can the candidate contribute and how good a fit are they into the company culture. The existing US immigration policy would be like a company basing hiring decisions based on how badly the candidate needed the job.

• "Just as buildings in California have a greater need to be earthquake­ proofed, places where there is greater racial polarization in voting have a greater need for prophylactic measures to prevent purposeful race discrimination."


• "Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court's opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story. See supra, at 18–19. Without even identifying a standard of review, the Court dismissively brushes off arguments based on "data from the record," and declines to enter the "debat[e about] what [the] record shows"…One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation's signal piece of civil-rights legislation."


• "Given a record replete with examples of denial or abridgment of a paramount federal right, the Court should have left the matter where it belongs: in Congress’ bailiwick."

Ginsburg's dissent also rattled off these eight examples of race-based voter discrimination in recent history:

• "In 1995, Mississippi sought to reenact a dual voter registration system, 'which was initially enacted in 1892 to disenfranchise Black voters,' and for that reason was struck down by a federal court in 1987."


• "Following the 2000 Census, the City of Albany, Georgia, proposed a redistricting plan that DOJ found to be 'designed with the purpose to limit and retrogress the increased black voting strength…in the city as a whole.'"


• "In 2001, the mayor and all-white five-member Board of Aldermen of Kilmichael, Mississippi, abruptly canceled the town's election after 'an unprecedented number' of AfricanAmerican candidates announced they were running for office. DOJ required an election, and the town elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen."


• "In 2006, the court found that Texas' attempt to redraw a congressional district to reduce the strength of Latino voters bore 'the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation,' and ordered the district redrawn in compliance with the VRA…In response, Texas sought to undermine this Court's order by curtailing early voting in the district, but was blocked by an action to enforce the §5 pre-clearance requirement."


• "In 2003, after African-Americans won a majority of the seats on the school board for the first time in history, Charleston County, South Carolina, proposed an at-large voting mechanism for the board. The proposal, made without consulting any of the African-American members of the school board, was found to be an 'exact replica' of an earlier voting scheme that, a federal court had determined, violated the VRA…DOJ invoked §5 to block the proposal."


• "In 1993, the City of Millen, Georgia, proposed to delay the election in a majority-black district by two years, leaving that district without representation on the city council while the neighboring majority white district would have three representatives…DOJ blocked the proposal. The county then sought to move a polling place from a predominantly black neighborhood in the city to an inaccessible location in a predominantly white neighborhood outside city limits."


• "In 2004, Waller County, Texas, threatened to prosecute two black students after they announced their intention to run for office. The county then attempted to reduce the avail ability of early voting in that election at polling places near a historically black university."


• "In 1990, Dallas County, Alabama, whose county seat is the City of Selma, sought to purge its voter rolls of many black voters. DOJ rejected the purge as discriminatory, noting that it would have disqualified many citizens from voting 'simply because they failed to pick up or return a voter update form, when there was no valid requirement that they do so.'"

Noam Chomsky:

The advertising industry is a huge industry, and anyone with their eyes open can see what it's for. First of all, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars. They have to have product differentiation, and you got to turn to deluding people into thinking you should buy this rather than that. Or just getting them to consume - if you can get them to consume, they're trapped, you know.

It starts with the infant, but now there's a huge part of the advertising industry which is designed to capture children. And it's destroying childhood. Anyone who has any experience with children can see this. It's literally destroying childhood. Kids don't know how to play. They can't go out and, you know, like when you were a kid or when I was a kid, you have a Saturday afternoon free. You go out to a field and you're finding a bunch of other kids and play ball or something. You can't do anything like that. It's got to be organized by adults, or else you're at home with your gadgets, your video games.

But the idea of going out just to play with all the creative challenge, those insights: that's gone. And it's done consciously to trap children from infancy and then to turn them into consumer addicts. And that means you're out for yourself. You got the Ayn Rand kind of sociopathic behavior, which comes straight out of the consumer culture. Consumer culture means going out for myself; I don't give a damn about anyone else. I think it's really destroying society in a lot of ways. And education is part of it.

Zimmerman followed Trayvon, confronted him, and was punched in the nose, knocked flat on his back and jumped on, getting his head pounded, when he pulled his gun and fired. That Trayvon's body was found face down, not face up, would tend to support this. 

    

But, to Florida Congresswoman Federica Wilson, "this sweet young boy ... was hunted down like a dog, shot on the street, and his killer is still at large."

A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.^[1]

The typical SLAPP plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. A SLAPP may also intimidate others from participating in the debate. A SLAPP is often preceded by a legal threat. The difficulty is that plaintiffs do not present themselves to the Court admitting that their intent is to censor, intimidate or silence their critics. Hence, the difficulty in drafting SLAPP legislation, and in applying it, is to craft an approach which affords an early termination to invalid abusive suits, without denying a legitimate day in court to valid good faith claims.

SLAPPs take various forms. The most common used to be a civil suit for defamation, which in the English common law tradition was atort. The common law of libel dates to the early 17th century and (unusual in English law) is reverse onus, meaning, once someone alleges a statement is libelous, the burden was on the defendant to prove that it is not. The Defamation Act 2013 removed most of the uses of defamation as a SLAPP in the United Kingdom by requiring the proof of special damage. Various abusive uses of this law including political libel (criticism of the political actions or views of others) have ceased to exist in most places, but persist in some jurisdictions (notably British Columbia and Ontario) where political views can be held as defamatory. A common feature of SLAPP suits is forum shopping, wherein plaintiffs find courts that are more favourable towards the claims to be brought than the court in which the defendant (or sometimes plaintiffs) live.

Nothing more to say:

There is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ... without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

---- Thomas Jefferson

This little snapshot story simply puts an end to whatever Chomsky was saying. We were ready to commit troops to force Japan's surrender.  It's not rocket science.  Right or wrong, a costly invasion was ready to go. 

The news from Afghanistan is hardly the first time the United States has scrapped military hardware on an industrial level. After World War II, a similar (and far more aggressive) scrapping took place. My own grandfather was in the Merchant Marine in August 1945, bound for the Philippines with a ship full of M4 Sherman tanks destined for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. When the ship learned of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the unconditional surrender, they were ordered to dump the tanks into the ocean and head home. Because it was cheaper than transporting them to the Philippines.

All that's left is Nagasaki. Probably a horrible miscalculation. Admit it if that's the case. we should have waited 24 hours.  No excuse. Too bad. Shit happens.  Human beings are pretty fucked up. Or am I missing something?  24 hours. 

One of Samsung’s biggest additions to their ES8000 Smart TV this year is gesture control. Gesture control is activated by waving your hand in front of the television, then moving your hand to control the on-screen cursor. Selecting menu items and adjusting volume and other settings is handled by opening and closing your fist. Keeping your fist clenched will continually adjust the volume until you open your hand again. Web browser navigation can also be done by using your hand. Moving the cursor to the top or the bottom of the screen scrolls, while turning your hand in a counter-clockwise motion activates page back.

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ." - Pope Leo X

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ." - Pope Leo X

1. Joel: A very powerful quote by Barry Goldwater.

   There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.

   37 minutes ago

In particular, we’re stuck with the political inequalities built into the U.S. Senate, which have grown more grotesque with time. In 1789, the population ratio between the most and least populous state was 11 to one. Now it’s 66 to one. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton absolutely hated the idea that each state should be entitled to the same number of senators regardless of size. Hamilton was withering on the topic. “As states are a collection of individual men,” he harangued his fellow-delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or of the artificial beings resulting from the composition? Nothing could be more preposterous or absurd than to sacrifice the former to the latter.” In the end, he and Madison accepted the deal only because without it the pipsqueak states like Rhode Island would have bolted. It gets worse. In the Constitution’s Article V, the one outlining the process for amendments, only one type of amendment is absolutely forbidden: “[N]o State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who cares

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who's there

Feeling unknown

And you're all alone

Flesh and bone

By the telephone

Lift up the receiver

I'll make you a believer

Take second best

Put me to the test

Things on your chest

You need to confess

I will deliver

You know I'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith

Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who cares

Your own personal Jesus

Someone to hear your prayers

Someone who's there

Feeling unknown

And you're all alone

Flesh and bone

By the telephone

Lift up the receiver

I'll make you a believer

I will deliver

You know I'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus

Reach out and touch faith

PLAYBOY: Assume there is a god and you were given the chance to ask him one question. What would it be?

DAWKINS: I’d ask, “Why did you go to such lengths to hide yourself?”

PLAYBOY: Do you have any deeply religious friends?

DAWKINS: No. It’s not that I shun them; it’s that the circles I move in tend to be educated, intelligent circles, and there aren’t any religious people among them that I know of. I’m friendly with some bishops and vicars who kind of believe in something and enjoy the music and the stained glass.

PLAYBOY: Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking reference God in their writings. Are they using the word in the sense of an intelligent designer?

DAWKINS: Certainly not. They use god in a poetic, metaphorical sense. Einstein in particular loved using the word to convey an idea of mystery, which I think all decent scientists do. But nowadays we’ve learned better than to use the word god because it will be willfully misunderstood, as Einstein was. And poor Einstein got quite cross about it. “I do not believe in a personal god,” he said over and over again. In a way he was asking for it. Hawking uses it in a similar way in A Brief History of Time. In his famous last line he says that if we understood the universe, “then we would know the mind of God.” Once again he is using god in the Einsteinian, not the religious sense.

PLAYBOY: You’ve made the point that if Jesus existed and went to his death as described in the Bible, it was, as you put it, “barking mad.”
DAWKINS: There’s no evidence Jesus himself was barking mad, but the doctrine invented later by Paul that Jesus died for our sins surely is. It’s a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe—capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process—that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death. And what a terrible lesson to say we’re born in sin because of the original sin of Adam, a man even the Catholic Church now says never existed.

PLAYBOY: We hear constantly that America is a Christian nation and that the founding fathers were all Christians.
DAWKINS: They were deists. They didn’t believe in a personal god, or one who interferes in human affairs. And they were adamant that they did not want to found the United States as a Christian nation.

PLAYBOY: But you hear quite often that if you let atheists run things you end up with Hitler and Stalin.
DAWKINS: Hitler wasn’t an atheist; he was a Roman Catholic. But I don’t care what he was. There is no logical connection between atheism and doing bad things, nor good things for that matter. It’s a philosophical belief about the absence of a creative intelligence in the world. Anybody who thinks you need religion in order to be good is being good for the wrong reason. I’d rather be good for moral reasons. Morals were here before religion, and morals change rather rapidly in spite of religion. Even people who rely on the Bible use nonbiblical criteria. If your criteria are scriptural, you have no basis for choosing the verse that says turn the other cheek rather than the verse that says stone people to death. So you pick and choose without guidance from the Bible.
PLAYBOY: You’ve said that science is losing the war with religion.
DAWKINS: Did I say we were losing? I was just having an off day.
PLAYBOY: You are surprised science is still being challenged.
DAWKINS: I am surprised, but I’m not sure it’s a losing battle. If you take the long view of centuries, there’s an upward trend. Religious people like to point out that Isaac Newton was religious. Well, of course he was—he lived before Darwin. It would have been difficult to be an atheist before Darwin.
PLAYBOY: You might have been the guy who didn’t believe in Zeus.
DAWKINS: I would have been skeptical of the details of Zeus hurling thunderbolts, but I probably would have believed in some supernatural being. When you look around at the living world and see the complexity of a cell and the elegance of a tree—“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree. / Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree”—I would have been moved by that. Darwin changed all that. He provided a simple, explicable, workable story about how you can get the complexity not just of a tree but of a human by physics working through the rather special process of evolution by natural selection. If only Newton had been alive to be told about that.
PLAYBOY: The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould viewed science and religion as——
DAWKINS: Non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA.
PLAYBOY: Completely separate.
DAWKINS: That’s pure politics. Gould was trying to win battles in the creation-evolution debate by saying to religious people, “You don’t have to worry. Evolution is religion-friendly.” And the only way he could think to do that was to say they occupy separate domains. But he overgenerously handed the domains of morals and fundamental questions to religion, which is the last thing you should do. Science cannot at present—maybe never—answer the deep questions about existence and the origins of the fundamental laws of nature. But what on earth makes you think religion can? If science can’t provide an answer, nothing can.
PLAYBOY: Some scientists say that you should stop talking about atheism because it muddies the waters in the debate over evolution.
DAWKINS: If what you’re trying to do is win the tactical battle in U.S. schools, you’re better off lying and saying evolution is religion-friendly. I don’t wish to condemn people who lie for tactical reasons, but I don’t want to do that. For me, this is only a skirmish in the larger war against irrationality.
PLAYBOY: You’ve said that if science and religion are truly NOMA, Christians must give up their belief in miracles.
DAWKINS: Absolutely. Miracles are a naked encroachment on science’s turf. If you ask people in the pew or on the prayer mat why they believe in God, it will always involve miracles, including the miracle of creation. If you don’t allow religion to have that, you’ve removed the reason just about everybody who is religious is religious.
PLAYBOY: Do you get discouraged by the continuing attacks on reason?
DAWKINS: No. I go on the internet quite a lot and read what young people are saying. I see a great upsurge of good sense, rationality, irreverence. America is split into halves. There’s the Sarah Palin know-nothing idiots on the one hand, and then there’s a huge number of intellectual, intelligent, educated people on the other. I find it hard to believe that the Stone Age types are going to win in the end. An awful lot of people who call themselves religious simply don’t know there’s any alternative. If you probe what they believe, it turns out to be pretty much the same—we all have a sense of wonder and reverence at the majesty of the universe.

According to Einstein, volition or free will, initiative and effort had NOTHING to do with his rise to great fame and fortune. It was DNA and the usual effort and hard work that just being a healthy person entails.  

Here's the Protestant Calvinist version of free will.  There isn't any. If god chooses you for earthly riches and admiration and success and happiness,  you are elected .  You don't earn it, you don't deserve it.    it's called election.  

Life is unfair.  

One of the most common objections to my position on free will is that accepting it could have terrible consequences, psychologically or socially. This is a strange rejoinder, analogous to what many religious people allege against atheism: Without a belief in God, human beings will cease to be good to one another. Both responses abandon any pretense of caring about what is true and merely change the subject. But that does not mean we should never worry about the practical effects of holding specific beliefs.

I can well imagine that some people might use the nonexistence of free will as a pretext for doing whatever they want, assuming that it’s pointless to resist temptation or that there’s no difference between good and evil. This is a misunderstanding of the situation, but, I admit, a possible one. There is also the question of how we should raise children in light of what science tells us about the nature of the human mind. It seems doubtful that a lecture on the illusoriness of free will should be part of an elementary school curriculum.

While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the 'red [Republican] states' are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don't. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in 'blue' [Democrat] states, and 38 percent are in 'red' [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.*

Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time.

---- Aldous Huxley

There is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ... without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

---- Thomas Jefferson

The Fallon walkovers, as trivial as they may seem, have been the culmination of everything I’ve cared about my whole life: making strange musical connections, reveling in the way that something obscure can illuminate something obvious.

One of the best things about the Jimmy Fallon show — maybe the best thing — is that it’s a test of ingenuity every single day. It sent me back to the days of working with Dave Chappelle. But that show was brilliant guerrilla comedy; it happened on the fly and then some. The Fallon show is a day job in the best sense. We’re in by noon and gone by seven, and in between we make a show. It’s highly structured, and as a result, the opportunities we have for creativity are really distilled: not reduced at all, but disciplined, forced into existing forms and packages. “Freestylin’ with the Roots” is one of the highlights for us. One of the others is the walkover.

The walkover, or walk-on, for those who don’t speak backstage, is the song that the band plays as a guest comes out from behind the curtain and walks over to the host’s desk. Once upon a time, maybe, it was straightforward, a little musical cue or song associated with the artist. But then came Paul Shaffer’s work on “Letterman,” and the walkover became its own little art form — an obscure musical reference that the audience (and sometimes even the guest) had to decode.

From the beginning, I wanted the Fallon walk-ons to be classics of the genre, the talk-show equivalent of video game Easter eggs. When we had Salma Hayek on the show, rather than play “Mexican Radio” or even “Salmon Falls,” we did some Internet research and unearthed the theme song from the first Mexican soap opera she ever starred on, “Theresa.” She knew it faintly at first, or at least knew it was something she should know, and her eyes went wide when she figured out what it was. When Edward Norton was on, promoting “The Bourne Legacy,” we played Patrick Hernandez’s 1979 disco hit “Born to be Alive.” And we thought we had a great left-field pick when we played the Dave Matthews Band’s “The Space Between” for football player Michael Strahan, but somehow he knew it immediately. Howard Stern once came up to me during a bathroom break, confused, to ask me why we played this disco song by Bell and James for his wife, Beth Ostrovsky. “She’s from Pittsburgh, right?” I asked. He nodded. I explained that everyone from Pittsburgh gets that treatment — it’s a band in-joke that refers back to the late-’70s basketball comedy “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.” I’m not sure he was satisfied by the answer. The Fallon walkovers, as trivial as they may seem, have been the culmination of everything I’ve cared about my whole life: making strange musical connections, reveling in the way that something obscure can illuminate something obvious.

Because the songs we select are a kind of code, some of the guys in the band use them to slyly flirt with female guests. I let Kirk talk me into playing The Lonely Island’s “Lazy Sunday” for Christina Ricci because he had heard she has a “Chronicle of Narnia” tattoo on her back. I did it but got no reaction at all. I put him on six-month probation for that suggestion; he was forbidden to send any more secret messages to anyone. And I can remember one case where I totally fumbled the ball. We had a famous actress on — I won’t say who, to protect both myself and her — and I thought she had been in a particular movie, and I built the walk-on around that title. After the show, her publicist came up to me. “Hey,” she said, “what was the walkover song? I’m not sure I understood the reference.” I had confused her with someone else. I was so embarrassed.

Sam Leith considers the components of a good speech:

It must be forceful in argument, memorable in style, resonant in its references. It must also, before anything else, connect its speaker to its audience. This is what Aristotle, the first Western authority on rhetoric, called ethos—the basic movement in any effective speech that transforms the “me” of the speaker and the “you” of the audience into “we”: “Friends, Romans, countrymen…”

Ethos is established by, quite literally, speaking the audience’s language: shared jokes, common reference points, recognisable situations. As the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke has said: “You persuade a man only in so far as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.” You can then take the shared language—and with it your audience—wherever you want it to go.

How often have you been there?

Often enough to know

What did you see when you were there?

Nothing that doesn't show

Alex Tabarrok maintains that everyone should be worried about excessive government surveillance because “no one is innocent”:  

Alex Tobarrok is wrong.  Of anyone wants to frame me there's no defense. 

Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Harvey Silverglate argues that a typical American commits three felonies a day. I think that number is too high but it is easy to violate the law without intent or knowledge. …

If someone tracked you for a year are you confident that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law. Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.

Obama hits a wall in Berlin

By George F. Will, Published: June 20

The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality?
Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project — ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government — more repulsive. Then came Wednesday’s pratfall in Berlin.
There he vowed energetic measures against global warming (“the global threat of our time”). The 16-year pause of this warming was not predicted by, and is not explained by, the climate models for which, in his strange understanding of respect for science, he has forsworn skepticism.
Regarding another threat, he spoke an almost meaningless sentence that is an exquisite example of why his rhetoric cannot withstand close reading: “We may strike blows against terrorist networks, but if we ignore the instability and intolerance that fuels extremism, our own freedom will eventually be endangered.” So, “instability and intolerance” are to blame for terrorism? Instability where? Intolerance of what by whom “fuels” terrorists? Terrorism is a tactic of destabilization. Intolerance is, for terrorists, a virtue.
It is axiomatic: Arms control is impossible until it is unimportant. This is because arms control is an arena of competition in which nations negotiate only those limits that advance their interests. Nevertheless, Obama trotted out another golden oldie in Berlin when he vowed to resuscitate the cadaver of nuclear arms control with Russia. As though Russia’s arsenal is a pressing problem. And as though there is reason to think President Vladimir Putin, who calls the Soviet Union’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” is interested in reducing the arsenal that is the basis of his otherwise Third World country’s claim to great-power status.
Shifting his strange focus from Russia’s nuclear weapons, Obama said “we can . . . reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking.” Were Obama given to saying such stuff off the cuff, this would be a good reason for handcuffing him to a teleprompter. But, amazingly, such stuff is put on his teleprompter and, even more amazing, he reads it aloud.
Neither the people who wrote those words nor he who spoke them can be taken seriously. North Korea and Iran may be seeking nuclear weapons? North Korea may have such weapons. Evidently Obama still entertains doubts that Iran is seeking them.
In Northern Ireland before going to Berlin, Obama sat next to Putin, whose demeanor and body language when he is in Obama’s presence radiate disdain. There Obama said: “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Differing perspectives?
Obama wants to reduce the violence by coaxing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is winning the war, to attend a conference at which he negotiates the surrender of his power. Putin wants to reduce the violence by helping — with lavish materiel assistance and by preventing diplomacy that interferes — Assad complete the destruction of his enemies.
Napoleon said: “If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.” Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be explained by two words: “Too late.” Regarding Syria, Obama is tentative and, if he insists on the folly of intervening, tardy. He is giving Putin a golden opportunity to humiliate the nation responsible for the “catastrophe.” In a contest between a dilettante and a dictator, bet on the latter.
Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”? With German Chancellor Angela Merkel sitting nearby, Obama began his Berlin speech: “As I’ve said, Angela and I don’t exactly look like previous German and American leaders.” He has indeed said that, too, before, at least about himself. It was mildly amusing in Berlin in 2008, but hardly a Noel Coward-like witticism worth recycling.
His look is just not that interesting. And after being pointless in Berlin, neither is he, other than for the surrealism of his second term.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
Read more about this issue: Charles Krauthammer: Obama’s fall Charles Krauthammer: The selective modesty of Barack Obama The Post’s View: Obama’s starry-eyed view of Putin The Post’s View: Obama’s too-rosy view of postwar Iraq

My opinion, he was just a lunatic mass murder for years, just waiting to be set free and maim and kill.  There are always a few of these psychos around, keeping it hidden, either sad or happy, and captain of the wrestling team, both brothers in pugilistic sports, that's kind of a tell,but there are no tells, no way of knowing which regular guy or sad sack has horrendous demons straining to break free.  I always thought the Hannibal lector version of what makes these fiends tick is pretty much the simple truth.  

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Let's face it. The thought of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia presiding over us for the next decade -- if not longer -- and doing their "right" best to reverse course and halt our progress as we try to move forward as a nation, should send shivers up any reasonably intelligent person's spine.

Granted, Chief Justice, John Roberts (a conservative), recently sided with the liberals on immigration, and, most importantly, health care. But, with all the talk surrounding the possible motivation behind Roberts' decision -- the least popular option being he believed it was best for the American people -- it doesn't exactly breed confidence in the judiciary.

Looking at the big picture, whether or not Roberts is for or against health care is practically irrelevant. The fact that the presumption exists he voted with the liberals to "preserve the integrity of the Court," and not because he felt it was the right thing to do for the American people, is a pretty scary thought.

We have a chamber full of "lifetime appointees" who've sided along party lines for so long, and in so many recent crucial decisions (Bush v. Gore, Citizen's United, Montana's campaign laws, etc.), they're actually in danger of turning the once-respected court into nothing more than a bunch of "Court Jesters." Presently, there's such fierce dissenting and infighting amongst the judges themselves, would anyone be surprised if they all were summoned before Judge Judy?

"Justice Scalia, you put gum on the seat of Justice Sotomayor. You owe her $685.14 for a new robe."

On the liberal side, the fact that Justice Ginsberg hasn't retired during Obama's current term makes things even more precarious. If Romney wins, and, five days later, Ginsberg decides she's had enough, that means a 6-3 conservative majority on abortion, gay marriage, etc. And, we didn't think things could get any worse.

The current approval rating of the Supreme Court is a measly 33 percent, up a bit from itsall-time low of 28 percent just three months ago. In business, nothing screams A CHANGE IS NEEDED! like a low approval rating. If the Supreme Court were a publicly traded company, its largest shareholders would be leaping out windows as we speak.

Maybe that's the answer? Make Congress bet on the Court like Fantasy Baseball. The more money they lose, the more amenable they'll be to booting a few.

To put the whole "lifetime appointment" thing in perspective, try and remember, the folks whose idea it was to appoint Supreme Court justices for life had wooden teeth. This decision, made over 225 years ago when monarchies were the main form of government, was, for the most part, due to the fear that politics would play too much of a role if the judges had to worry about losing their jobs under the king. I wonder what they'd say today. Perhaps a slight revamp, Your Majesty?

Another, even more intriguing, but most-likely-doomed-to-failure, option is to do what Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at G.W. suggests -- and that is follow the lead of our more advanced, overseas neighbors and appoint several dozen justices to the court.

Professor Turley points out Germany has 16 justices, Japan 15, Israel 15, and France uses 124 judges who are rotated. Either of these systems would be better than what we have now, and would, no doubt, dramatically cut down on the politics and power of our current system.

Turley also adds, there's nothing magic about the number nine. Our founding fathers didn't specify any number of justices, thus, if we, as a people, can threaten enough of our representatives with unemployment, they may be open to revisiting this way-too-out-of-date Constitutional provision. If they need a nostalgic opinion, simply present to them the words of Ben Franklin or George Mason, the orchestrator of the Bill of Rights: "Nothing is so essential to the preservation of a Republican government as a periodic rotation." (InsertButthead laugh here.)

Whether you're for or against term limits, believe in increasing -- or decreasing -- the number of justices, or just feel we should leave everything alone, you have to agree; in today's incredibly fast-paced, technologically-driven society, it's a bit unnerving having nine, stuffy, old lawyers -- some of whom probably still have a subscription to T.V. Guide -- acting as the final word on future policy.