Shock study: Increased availability of child porn results in lower rates of child abuse

By J. DeVoy

A new study from the Czech Republic claims that the availability of child pornography has led to lower rates of child abuse.  This result allegedly is consistent with similar observations in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Sweden and the USA.  Here’s the research’s crux:

The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.

The inference to be drawn from this research is that legalizing and further increasing child pornography’s availability would decrease the incidence of child abuse.  The problem with these studies, and from which this one does not seem to be immune, is that there is no control for alternate or outside variables.  This research shows a correlation between availability of child porn – despite its illegality in most nations – and the decrease in child abuse, but ignores other explanations and ultimately cannot establish a causal relationship.

This leads the critical reader to a disturbing place: What content competes with child pornography?  For one, there’s the entire genre of “barely legal” porn – just do a search for “teen” and the market’s representation is readily apparent.  We don’t care or pass judgment on any kind of porn, so long as its made by consenting adults, but it seems far-fetched to think that its producers aren’t at least cognizant of the child porn market when they specialize in cheerleader themes, models in braces, and pigtails.  To their credit, they are providing a legal alternative and monetizing a market segment that can otherwise ruin lives if handled irresponsibly.

There is also the existence of virtual child pornography.  In 2002, the Free Speech Coalition won a decisive victory for expression over the DOJ in Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft, 535 U.S. 234 (2002).  In that case, the Supreme Court held that 18 U.S.C. §§ 2256(8)(B) and (D) were unconstitutionally overbroad, as their prohibitions on virtual child pornography and production or distribution of material pandered as child pornography – even if it is not – captured speech that was not unprotected within the scope of its earlier decisions in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) (defining the test for obscenity) or New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747 (1982) (allowing states to ban child pornography sales, as it was not protected speech).  While undoubtedly a small market – and one I have no interest in personally investigating – this allowance for computer-generated images and other “virtual” child pornography displaces the demand for actual child pornography, yet may contribute to the overall decline in child abuse crimes.

Other possible reasons for the decreased incidence of child abuse despite increased child pornography availability may be more related to features of criminal law rather than the adult marketplace or First Amendment doctrines.  First, state and federal laws may have become stricter against child offenses, inhibiting child abuse despite the availability of child pornography.  20 years ago, implementing a ubiquitous data repository for every sex offender to be mapped out like many states have done under their respective Megan’s Law provisions, as the internet was not available.  But today, those databases are active and seemingly everywhere, ruining lives while providing dubious benefits to public safety.  Depending on the relevant state’s laws, viewing child pornography may carry a lesser prison sentence than actually touching a child, and be the economically efficient choice on that basis.  Because fulfilling one’s desire is going to result in penalties and sex offender registration either way, a rational pedophile is going to choose the path that costs him the least amount of his life behind bars.  Furthermore, downloading child porn is more likely to put him into a federal prison upon conviction or reaching a plea deal – a depressing place, but far preferable to many state prisons.  Another reason for this perceived decline in child abuse is simply that reporting it has gone down.  With families more broken than ever in recent history, do parents care, and do their children even tell them if they were molested?

Ignoring these covariants and assuming the relationship between child porn availability and child abuse is causative, everyone from social scientists and policy-makers to parents is left with significant moral questions: Is it preferable to end child pornography so that the actors are not abused if it comes at the expense of the broader child population?  Or is it preferable that the actors suffer so fewer random children are victimized?  Ultimately this is a moral and ethical question that could be resolved with further research, but cannot be conclusively “answered” with any empirical truth.  Ultimately, society does not tolerate child abuse.  While the age of consent is an arbitrary line, the asymmetries of power and knowledge between adults and minors, wherever the line is drawn, makes preying on the young, the weak, the naive and inexperienced, so abhorrent.  Even if a 16-year-old is capable of forming subjective consent, the line is drawn at 18 (for production purposes) because, well, the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Should a causative or at least highly correlative relationship between child pornography and child abuse in fact exist, it would not be the first time such a finding was made.  In a study tracking rape data from 1980 to 2000, there was a .95 r^2 correlation between internet access and per capita incidence of rape; in the four states where internet access was highest, rapes per capita fell 27%; the four states with the least internet availability saw the per capita incidence of rape increase 53%.  Granted, this study as well was subject to the covariants I mentioned above, as the states with highest internet access (New York and California, among others) tend to be the most liberal and presumably disinclined to rape, but a .95 r^2 is damn high.  If not causative, it at least suggests that pornography was a meaningful substitute for sex among potential rapists.  Where pornography was not available, the incidence of rape increased, and porn’s inaccessibility very likely was a factor.  At the very least, it controverts the feminist claptrap that sex is about power — wrong, sugar: It’s about sex.  This consideration is orthogonal to the Czech Republic study, though, as it does not address child pornography and the important social, legal and political issues it entails.  Virtually nobody objects to consenting adults filming their sex acts; nobody can ignore the problems presented when children are involved with sexual content.

Increasing the tax base

This editorial calls for the elimination of the charitable giving deduction. He says that the mortgage deduction is firmly in place, given the current housing market. I disagree. It would be a great time to yank that absurd deduction – even when I owned a house, I thought it was absurd that since I was wealthy enough to own my house, I got my living expenses subsidized by the poors who lived in the apartments down the street.

While we’re discussing widening the tax base, perhaps it is time to end the deduction for cult-meeting houses, child-rape institutions, and shrines to ignorance and superstition churches.

Amazon Censoring Kindle Title List

by Charles Platt

After Amazon caved in and removed _The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure_, other titles with erotic content are now being targeted. The currently uncertain situation is summarized here.

Not wanting to do doc review called “immature” by “consultant” – follow the money and smell the bullshit

The ABA reports on Ann Israel, a “career consultant” who scolded a Yale Law graduate as “very immature” for wanting to know how to escape from document review purgatory. (source)
Here is his question:

I’m a Yale Law grad winding up a federal clerkship in a small legal market. I had a horrendous experience with document review a few summers ago, and my goal is to avoid it at all costs. Do you think I can use my credentials as leverage for avoiding this work as a condition of employment? Alternatively, if I show the partners at the firm that I am a fantastic writer, will that allow me to avoid document review? (source)

Israel’s answer:

There are plenty of attorneys in the major city offices who are not putting in enough hours and would love to be doing doc review versus the threat of being asked to look for another job. Wake up to what is happening out there in the real world! (source)

Just a little background on Ann Israel. She is apparently a time-traveler, visiting us from an age when her her website was cool. She is notoriously humorless, and Above The Law said this about her: “sometimes she seems more interested in shilling for legal recruiters than offering actual insight.” (source).

In other words, out of touch, uptight, and full of shit when being full of shit helps her make a buck.

Apparently, this “consultant” considered doc review to be “an aspect of legal work that needs to be done as part of the bigger picture of law firm life.” She wrote “there are plenty of attorneys in the major city offices who are not putting in enough hours and would love to be doing doc review versus the threat of being asked to look for another job.”

That is a slave’s answer.

That is also an answer that confirms Above The Law’s evaluation that she’s more interested in shilling than helping. More power to her. If she can convince legions of desperate wanna-be-attorneys to thank her for helping her place them in shitty, dead-end, career-dooming doc review projects, then she’ll make more money condemning them to this circle of hell from which very few will ever emerge unscathed.

But, someone has to tell you that she’s full of shit. I’ll volunteer.

First of all, do you know what doc review pays? It varies, but how does $12 an hour sound to you? Work hard, and maybe you can even pull in $30 per hour, which isn’t terrible money for a recent graduate — as opposed to this gem, minimum ass-eating wage. Yep, that’s right, the Mexican guys hanging out in front of Home Depot will take home more money at the end of a day than that. I pay my babysitter more than that. I pay the guy who trims the hedges outside my house more than that. My wife pays our pool boy more than that — and we don’t even have a pool! (which is starting to make me suspicious).

And Ann Israel thinks that he is “immature” for wanting to avoid that.

Of course, it sounds like the unnamed Yale graduate is not likely to be working for minimum wage. It sounds like he thinks that he may wind up in Biglaw, but wants to avoid being relegated to the coal mines, with the minimum wage trolls.

Far from being “immature,” his concern is far-sighted. Lets face it, if you could get a job in biglaw, making $160,000 per year for standing in a room leafing through boxes of shit, alongside legions of law-zombies who are starving to death, well … that might just be an okay deal. The “immature” law graduate would jump at the opportunity to pack away that kind of cash, even if that means that they are working in conditions that even Upton Sinclair might find appalling.

Mirriam Seddiq, or as I call her "Ms. Freakin Awesome"

You want a mature perspective on Doc Review? Mirriam Seddiq has it:

A contract lawyer is someone who is employed by a temp agency to do work for a (usually) large law firm. The work consists of document review (usually) which means the lawyers (usually licensed meaning they can practice substantive law if they choose to) sit in a cubicle and go over documents (electronic or actual paper) and determine if they are privileged or relevant. You click off boxes on a computer. You might learn some new legal concepts but nothing in depth, just enough to make sure you are accurate when you go through your 1000 documents a day. I have always called it “walmart for lawyers” because it’s not really practicing law. It’s a job. It pays the bills. I might as well be working at Walmart except at a contract job I get to wear a stupid suit and heels and feel like I’m sort of lawyering. (source)

Of course, Seddiq is talking about contract lawyers doing doc review, not associates doing doc review, but the work is the same.

Jesus, I love this woman. Lets keep reading:

It’s a con. It’s not really lawyering and that’s the problem with contract jobs. They are truly meaningless. While it is important to pay the bills and put food on the table, you cannot claim to be a lawyer if all you do or have done is document review. I’ve done it. I did it for 6 months last year when I was just getting back to work. I did it for several months in 2005 when I had just moved to Baltimore. I get it. You’ve got to pay the bills. You’ve got a family to feed. So you find a contract job that has overtime because while 28 bucks an hour isn’t great 28 bucks plus time and a half gets you through the week. So you work 50 hours, maybe 60. At first you think, I’ll do this job and look for something else, or volunteer, or take on a traffic case or two. But you don’t. You sit your ass in that cubicle and hit shift F5 and before you know it a year has passed and while you have amassed no late fees on your credit cards and no overdraft fees on your bank account, you have also amassed no new skills. You have made money at the expense of making money in the future.

Look. The shit is hard. The economy is rough. I’ve been a trial lawyer my whole big girl life. This is a skill very few people have – give me a file today I can try it tomorrow. I figured when I wanted to go back to work the whole world would be clamoring for me. I was wrong. I’d been out of the game for two years and then all I had to offer was “contract lawyer”. While it showed I was working, it also showed that after two years at home all I could now do is get myself dressed in clothes not stained in spit-up. Because there is no actual lawyering involved in document review. I repeat. You are not practicing law.

I will not say that Ann Israel’s business card has no practical use to a law graduate in a tough economy. This is a good use for it:

At least if you use it that way, you’ll find that it can help you numb the pain of graduating into this shit-ass economy.

Now, if you actually want career advice, maybe you should call Mirriam Seddiq, because she seems to be her own woman (not shilling for the coal mines), she has the courage to call them like she sees them, and she’s been there.

Seddiq suggests that you might want to take that doc review job to pay the bills. I agree. There is no nobility in starving to death. But, Seddiq recommends giving up a day of doc review work here and there to get some actual experience.

My own advice, in addition to that, is that if you are currently doing doc review, you should do whatever you can to get out of it — NOW. That means taking less money to work for a small firm. That means doing pro-bono work. That means using your writing talents to blog, if you think that will help your career. Do whatever it takes to get out of doc review as fast as you can. Even being a paralegal is better than doc review, because as a paralegal, you actually do learn a lot about the practice of law — experience that will be valuable once you’re a big grown up lawyer.

What the advice boils down to is this: Ann Israel is full of shit. She’s trying to increase her pool of candidates to fill shit-stain jobs that will eventually be outsourced to India and the Philippines anyhow (thanks to the useless fucks at the ABA). If you are a law graduate who thinks that you have anything to offer the legal profession, then don’t just listen to me. Listen to Mirriam Seddiq, a woman who has been there, and who has no profit motive in seeing you turned into a worthless, unmarketable, unskilled, inexperienced slave.

Likely Backlash Against Assange’s Self-Righteous Crusade

by Charles Platt

I’m getting an uneasy feeling when I watch Julian Assange using pretentious phrases such as “my philosophy” and “my work.” (See his latest interview, here.) It’s the same feeling I had when I saw the World Trade Center going down. A feeling that I am watching a golden opportunity for people in power to take away some of my freedoms.

Assange’s self-righteous crusade is sufficiently defiant, and is being done in such a pompous style, some kind of retaliation seems inevitable. Already the UN is on record as wanting to “harmonize” efforts to regulate the Internet, in response to Wikileaks. (See this news item.)

I am old enough to remember how publishers got rid of US laws regarding pornography. They fought a carefully executed, incremental campaign. Freedoms tend to be won this way, slowly but relentlessly, in small steps. Media whores who make grand gestures are not useful in this process. They just provide more fuel for backlash.

We enjoy freedoms online because resourceful groups such as ACLU and EFF fought and won test cases. How unfortunate it would be to see those freedoms squashed because of a prima-donna whose “philosophy” and “work” have been of negligible value so far. It’s important to remember that he is really just another content aggregator, and the material that he has revealed has not been of critical significance. Certainly not important enough to justify a battle that we are likely to lose.

Big Win for Common Sense and EFF

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed common sense this week.  In U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit ruled the government must obtain a search warrant prior to a search and seizure of our emails stored by email providers. The Sixth Circuit decision closely followed arguments of EFF in its amicus brief, holding that email shares fundamental similarities with traditional forms of communication such as postal mail and telephone calls and that it would “defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection.” The Court went on to state:

“…It follows that email requires strong protection under the Fourth Amendment; otherwise the Fourth Amendment would prove an ineffective guardian of private communication, an essential purpose it has long been recognized to serve…. [T]he police may not storm the post office and intercept a letter, and they are likewise forbidden from using the phone system to make a clandestine recording of a telephone call–unless they get a warrant, that is. It only stands to reason that, if government agents compel an ISP to surrender the contents of a subscriber’s emails, those agents have thereby conducted a Fourth Amendment search, which necessitates compliance with the warrant requirement.…”

The Department of Justice obtained emails during its criminal investigation after demanding Warshak’s email provider preserve copies of future email. The government achieved this violation of privacy by misuse of the Stored Communication Act (SCA) which allows the government to seize email already stored by the service provider.

The importance of the Sixth Circuit decision cannot be overstated. To date, this is the only federal appellate decision addressing the level of protection for email communications. Thank you to EFF, this decision was a big win for you and common sense.

Legislation banning “crush” videos signed into law

By J. DeVoy

STOMP! - just a musical production after all.

Ever the free speech patriot, president Obama signed the Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act of 2010 (ACVPA) into law earlier this month.  The bill, which labels crush videos as “obscene,” contains a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment for violating its provisions. (full text here.)

Here’s the relevant portion of the new law, 48 U.S.C. § 18:

(a) Definition- In this section the term ‘animal crush video’ means any photograph, motion-picture film, video or digital recording, or electronic image that–

(1) depicts actual conduct in which 1 or more living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians is intentionally crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled, or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury (as defined in section 1365 and including conduct that, if committed against a person and in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, would violate section 2241 or 2242); and

(2) is obscene.

The Supreme Court recently considered a similar issue in US v. Stevens, affirming the Third Circuit and ultimately striking down a 18 U.S.C. § 48 due to constitutional overbreadth. 559 U.S. ___ (2010).  That statute prohibited depictions of animal cruelty, and was enacted with a focus on the interstate market for the same crush videos the legislation enacted by Obama seeks to outlaw.  The Supreme Court ultimately decided that the sweep of 18 U.S.C. § 48 was too broad, encompassing protected speech within its scope and effectively outlawing an entire genre of expression without any judicial oversight.

Remember, also, that it was Alito’s dissent that showed his morbid fascination with crush videos.  Surprisingly, he argued that they should be their own form of unprotected speech, a la child pornography.  It looks like he may have gotten his wish.

The ACVPA apparently tries to side-step this by invoking the word “obscenity,” and criminalizing only depictions of harm to animals that is obscene.  In contrast, 18 U.S.C. § 48 did not require that the content be obscene.  This new legislation creates an interesting proposition: either it will be widely used and essentially turn prosecution of crush videos into obscenity trials under the Miller test, or, fearing that obscenity will never be provable, prosecutors will never try a case under this law.  Given Eric Holder’s tenure as Attorney General to date, I’m inclined to believe the former scenario is most likely, especially amidst increased pressure to bring obscenity prosecutions.  While I love like tolerate puppies as much as the next person, vocal members of the ASPCA and PETA – including the guy who changed his name to kentuckyfriedcruelty.com – are whiny agitators on a level previously reserved for the AARP’s bovine membership, and will try to see this law put to use immediately.

Because the law sets obscenity aside as its own provision for finding guilt, it may survive for a while.  There is a proprietary concern, however, with adding the animal abuse “plus factor” that augments the penalty for obscene speech beyond it merely being obscene.  While not a content-based restriction in the way an outright ban on animal abuse videos was in Stevens, this legislation’s content-consciousness may come into play in a hopefully inevitable constitutional challenge.

McDonald’s sued for enticing children to eat poison while their dumbass parents stand by and watch

By Randazza

The LA Times reports:

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s Corp., claiming that the company’s meals with toys unfairly entice children into eating food that can do them harm. (source)

Here’s the thing. I agree.

I agree that McDonald’s is rat dung. I agree that no human should consume that crap, unless that human is as hung over as a whore on the sixth of May in Nogales. (In which case, Mickey D’s and a vicodin is just what the doctor ordered). Short of that, any person who has too many McDonald’s molecules in their body is simply a piece of refuse.

Has “The Center for Science in the Public Interest” considered the fact that any child young enough to be enticed by the toys in happy meals is too damn young to buy their own food? Doesn’t “The Center for Science in the Public Interest” believe in evolution? Their name sounds like they would, but their actions speak otherwise.

Human beings have no natural predators. Some parents, like mine, said “fuck no” when I whined and bitched for McDonalds. Other parents can’t resist the advertising. We do need to thin the herd. Perhaps if a kid is 300 lbs and has seven kinds of diabetes and ass cancer by the time he is 7 because his parents don’t know how to say “fuck no, eat your broccoli and shut up you whining little shit,” then that means that his family is an evolutionary dud — that is how nature works.

The lead plaintiff in the suit is Monica Parham, a mother of two from Sacramento who said the company “uses toys as bait to induce her kids to clamor to go to McDonald’s,” the organization said.(source

And my two year old clamors to hold my revolver, to ride on my motorcycle, to drink beer, to put her fingers in the power outlet, to run out into traffic, and to jump off the boat dock when she can’t swim yet.

You know what my job is as a parent? I say “no.”

I don’t file a lawsuit against Smith & Wesson for making my revolver shiny and pretty. I don’t file a lawsuit against Moto Guzzi for making my motorcycles so fucking awesome. I don’t sue Hoegaarden for making great beer. I don’t sue SDG&E for putting electricity in my house. I don’t sue the city for letting cars drive down my street. And I sure as shit don’t sue hydrogen and oxygen for combining to look like some thing fun to jump into.

Instead, I do what mammals have done for a motherfucking billion years — I protect my young by using my judgment. That’s how we wound up with opposable thumbs and brains that gave us the space program — by the intelligent members of our species protecting our young, while the dumbasses stood in the way as the lava flowed down the hill or the sabertooth tigers ate our kids.

If Monica Parham doesn’t understand how to be a parent, then perhaps the right remedy is to bring back Buck v. Bell and sterilize her moronic ass, and to let her kids eat all the junk food they want so that they remove themselves from the gene pool. Because if humans had natural predators, someone as stupid as Monica Parham would have been eaten by a pterodactyl a long time ago.

‘We operate on the principle that it’s much more effective to detect the would-be terrorist than try to find his bomb.”

Israelis are neither the servile fucking pussies that Americans are, nor are they brain dead morons trying to detect the last bomb. (source)

Aside from the whole neo-apartheid thing, Israel seems like a pretty nice place to live.

Nothing can hurt a Marine – except Teh Ghey

You think you can distract ME, you MAGGOT?

General James Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps said that allowing gays to openly serve in the military would “pose a distraction” and cause more battlefield casualties. (source)

Huh?

Seriously?

Does this guy think that a gay soldier is going to be hiding behind a wall, shells exploding all around, and his buddy is going to rip off his helmet and say “I just HAVE to do something about your hair?” What bizarre stereotype is this “distraction theory” based upon?

In an interview with newspaper and wire service reporters at the Pentagon, Amos was vague when pressed to clarify how the presence of gays would distract Marines during a firefight. But he cited a recent Defense Department survey in which a large percentage of Marine combat veterans predicted that repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law would harm “unit cohesion” and their tight-knit training for war. (source)

This has been the same argument every time we try and integrate another group into the military. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry had its detractors, and look how that worked out. (You saw Glory, didn’t you?). How about the Japanese-American Fighting 442nd?

I’m not going to bash the guy. I presume that his statements are made out of slight ignorance rather than huge personal issues. His job is to keep his men safe. If he believes that this will harm them, then I applaud him for saying so. But, its the kind of applause that you render when you’re at a crappy talent show, and the slow kid gets up and sings “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”

Despite my stance that the military has nothing to do with protecting freedom, I have mad fuckin respect for the USMC. That is one bona-fide bad-ass group of men and women. And, I’m absolutely certain that there are a hell of a lot of homosexuals already in the Marine Corps — certainly more than you’d find in a random sampling of the non-military population. Now if these guys and girls can be sent to some god-forsaken desert to die for lies and bullshit, at least let them be who they really are. Marines can handle anything — including the fact that their buddy might be gay.

Introducing Vaughn Greenwalt

Faithful Satyricon Readers:

I come to you after arriving entirely overdressed (and Moto Guzzi-less) for an interview with Marc in San Diego. My name is Vaughn Greenwalt, and I am apparently the latest victim to become a Satryiconista.

My experience with the internet consists mostly of porn but I occasionally peruse Drudge Report, Politico, The Huffington Post, POPEHAT, Andrew Sullivan, S.E. Cupp, and this gem of a site.

My perspective is forged in the fires of nightly viewings of both Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly. (I usually agree with both- figure that out) I walk around looking for the perfect venue to tell people why they should be sterilized- FOUND IT!

My educational background is mediocre at best. It includes twelve years of public school education, followed by a B.S. in Political Science from University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Minuteman!), and currently working on my J.D. at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, CA. I also interned with my local representative at the Massachusetts House of Representatives in Boston.

In all honesty I’m a conservative, stay with me! I’m a conservative, not a Republican, as I still believe in traditional libertarian values and fiscal responsibility. My whole-hearted belief in libertarian values (including those silly Amendments and Bill of Rights people love to trample all over) is why I believe The Legal Satyricon is the perfect place to embark on my blogging career- I’m passionate about it.

I go into this knowing that posting my points of view will probably bar me from many future employment opportunities and I’m going to do it anyhow – no one ever got anywhere (at least not anywhere that I want to be) by being too much of a pussy to speak their mind.

I look forward to fielding your responses.  Let the games begin!

-Vaughn

If you’re in the military to “protect freedom,” please see a doctor, because you can die of asphyxiation if your head is in your ass for too long

Do you think this guy did a damn thing for "freedom?"

I remember when I was briefly in the army. We had all this rah rah hoo ha shit about how we were “protecting freedom.”

With sincere adoring apologies to the people I love who are in uniform, that’s bullshit.

If you’re in the military because you like the job security, then good. I approve. If you’re in the military because you want to blow shit up, I approve. If you’re in the military because you’re gay and you love showering with other men, then good. I approve. In fact, if you’re in the military for any reason except for the “I’m protecting freedom” bullshit, then I’m in your corner.

But if you’re in the military and you think it has a stinking ass hair to do with “freedom,” please grasp your shoulders with both hands and pull really hard, because your head is up your ass.

Proof?

When Air Force personnel on the service’s computer network try to view the Web sites of The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Spanish newspaper El País and the French newspaper Le Monde, as well as other sites that posted full confidential cables, the screen says “Access Denied: Internet usage is logged and monitored,” according to an Air Force official whose access was blocked and who shared the screen warning with The Times. Violators are warned that they face punishment if they try to view classified material from unauthorized Web sites. (source)

Military members can’t read the New York Times, among other major press outlets, because the Wikileaks cables are on there. (source) Even blind illiterate pygmy ubangis know all about the Wikileaks cables, but members of our military are not permitted to read the New York Times.

For-Profit Toilet Colleges Preying on Fear, Deception

By J. DeVoy

In short, we have institutions that:

-Get 25% of Federal education aid, yet
-Are responsible for 44% of discounts, and
-Forge records and use deceptive tactics to enroll students

And yet they’re blaming the government for obstructing the relationship between potential students, who need to be saved from themselves, and these money pits.  Hardcore libertarians, take note: This is why people think you’re foolish.  While there’s a lot wrong with higher education, at least the feds are trying to prevent wholesale theft.

“Tater disease what brung us Irish.”

H/t: D. Sterlace

Abercrombie & Fitch brings guns to bear on cybersquatters

Lets say you go to the website “abercrombieandfitchstore.com.” What would you expect to find there? Probably not what you see below.

That’s cybersquatting, and it is illegal.

Abercrombie & Fitch have had enough, and they’ve brought suit against the as yet unidentified owners of more than 150 infringing domain names. Most of them are Pay Per Click sites, and it is pretty clear that the plaintiff should prevail.

As many readers might know, when a plaintiff takes aim at a cybersquatter, there are two avenues of attack — bring suit in federal court (which is generally more expensive) or file a nice, quick, and cheap UDRP complaint. In this case, Abercrombie opted for the former, but this seems to be a tactically (and financially) sound decision. Under the UDRP, you need to pay filing fees according to how many domain names you are going after, and the complaint can only be against a single cybersquatter. In this case, there may be dozens of defendants. Even if there happened to be only a single defendant, the UDRP filing fees would likely be in the range of $20,000, given the sheer number of domain names.

Despite the fact that most of the domain names are clearly infringing, there are some puzzling additions. In addition to the clearly infringing “bercrombie.com,” and “wwwhollister.com,” the complaint says that “ant.com,” “asnf.com,” “hcos.org,” and “fierce.org” are also in violation of Abercrombie’s famous trademarks. I’m just not seeing the infringement there. While some go to pay per click pages (yuck) and others are dead links, ant.com seems to be a search engine.

Which makes you wonder, why would such great attorneys make such a seeming blunder?

I suspect that Abercrombie’s lawyers know that these non-infringing domain names are owned by the same people who own some of the clearly infringing domains. Cybersquatters usually default in these cases, leaving the plaintiff with little financial satisfaction for all of its trouble. Ant.com is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 or more. With that kind of domain at stake, someone is certain to come forward rather than risk losing that kind of online property in a default.

I have mixed feelings about that kind of tactic. On one hand, I have serious misgivings about a clearly non-infringing domain name being added into a complaint.

Abercrombie & Fitch was going about its business, selling clothes modeled by white people and beloved by Asians. Then, some unscrupulous cybersquatters started infringing on A&F’s intellectual property rights. A&F then had to hire expensive lawyers to clean up the problem. I believe that the cybersquatters should, at least, pay A&F’s attorneys fees. But, if they are hiding and simply default, then A&F will be out a serious chunk of money, while the wrongdoers run off scot free, with their pay per click fees in their pockets. If A&F is trying hold something hostage in order to smoke them out, I respect that tactical decision.

Ultimately, if the cybersquatters do default and they don’t pay the judgment, then A&F can likely foreclose on their entire domain portfolio. If the only thing of value in that portfolio is ant.com or some other non-infringing domain names, then A&F may have done well to at least lock the domain name down while the litigation is pending.

H/T: Mike Atkins

Bias alert: I am proud to say that the lawyers for A&F are friends of mine.