• Jury nullification is a perfectly legal practice for jurors who wish to vote their conscience. But talk about it and, like professor Julian P. Heicklen, you could find yourself the target of an angry, peevish prosecutor.
• Here’s an airline pilot who was forced by airport security to give up his five-inch fork — never mind that (a) any commercial captain who wants to commit an act of terrorism can just crash the fucking plane, or that (b) every day, flight attendants hand out hundreds of thousands of metal forks and knives to passengers in First and Business Class. “Security theater” doesn’t begin to sum up the TSA’s abject stupidity.
• Old news: Muslims issuing death threats against apostates. Probably-equally-old but largely unreported news: Christians issuing death threats against atheists.
• The notoriously litigious Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a foe of illegal downloading, now should probably sue itself for, um, illegal downloading.
• First the Arab world, now Asia’s ruling giant? Chinese people, fed up with Communist Party oppression and rampant corruption and cronyism, have risen up against their government and the police. Not that it will likely end well in this instance, but if the Chinese want change, it won’t come without the hazards brought on by defiance and principled insubordination. In other words, it’s brave stuff, and I hope we’ll see more of it.
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Rogier is a Dutch-born, New-England-dwelling multi-media maven (OK, a writer and photographer) whose dead-tree publishing credits include the New York Times, Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Reason. |
