Thursday, October 27, 2011

Bush II's Iraq War

I came across this article in a back copy of Extra: the Magazine of FAIR from Feb 2008 in which they report of the cost in Iraqi lives lost by our war there. They base their estimate of civilian dead on a John Hopkins School of Public Health study that was published in Lancet-a British medical journal on 10/21/06. That study estimates that as of July 2006, "665,000 Iraqis had been killed". "An extrapolation of the John Hopkins estimate of violent deaths done by Just Foreign Policy on 9/18/07 currently stands at over 1.1 million". Another study by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business from 9/07 also estimates that "over a million Iraqis have now been killed". This source claims that other US media are ignoring these study and the AP has reported that Americans think the death toll is "less than 10,000. A headline for this article was "the US press buries the evidence". (I have no way of knowing if the John Hopkins report is accurate, nor do I have any of knowing if the AP estimate is accurate).
(Source: "A Million Iraqi Dead?" by Patrick McElwee. Extra: The Magazine of FAIR. February 2008).

Andrew Jackson and Cahokia

I thought this quote from National Geographic was interesting. "Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830....was premised on the idea that Indians were nomadic savages who couldn't make good use of land anyway". Thus the knowledge that Indian civilizations developed the Cahokia Mound building society in the region of the south east of the US would have dispelled Jackson's theory. Cahokia is the center of what anthropologists call the Mississippian Culture that were a "collection of agricultural communities in the American Midwest and Southeast that started around A.D. 1000 and peaked around the 13th century".
(Source: "America's Lost City" by Glenn Hodges. National Geographic January 2011.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

US Supreme Court

The court will decide-this year I suspect-whether the government/police can attach a GPS tracking devise on a suspects car without a warrant. This is the U.S. v. Jones 2011 case. The court ruled in 1983 that the police did not need a warrant to "attach a 'bird dog' to a suspects vehicle" (I don't know what a "bird dog" is. More research will be needed). That case was U.S. v. Knotts. In 2001 the court ruled on the issue of the police use of "thermal imaging technology" in Kyllo v. U.S. I will need to do more research, but I believe the court ruled that search to be an unreasonable search, thus unconstitutional.
(Source: Internet search on FindLaw.com on this date)

Update. The SC will hear the GPS case this November; the Virginian Pilot newspaper from Virginia Beach, VA states their belief that the search in this case was illegal. In the Jones case the police believed Jones was a drug dealer, they sought and were issued a search warrant that allowed them to place the GPS on his private vehicle, but they failed to act on the warrant within the 10 days the warrant specified making the warrant "invalid". It appears from this source that the issue is the warrantless nature of the search and not the GPS device itself. The police may have been correct in their actions if they had gotten a valid warrant-at least according to this newspaper.
(Source: "GPS and the Constitution" editorial in The Virginian Pilot on 9/28/11).

Student Speech Rights

Two cases out of Pennsylvania create first amendment rights for students when using cyberspace. In J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District an 8th grade student "created a fake profile" of her principal and posted it on MySpace. She used her parents computer. She accused the principal of having sex in his office, hitting on students and parents of being a "sex addict". She used obscene language and put down GLBT persons. She also ridiculed his wife and son. When confronted the student wrote an apology to the principal and his family but was suspended for 10 days afterwards. At that point she and her parents sued saying her right to free speech was violated. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the students favor by a vote of 8 to 6. In the second case-Layshock v. Hermitage School District-a senior posted a "parody profile" of his principal on MySpace that accused the principal of being a drunk, smoking pot, using illegal drugs and shoplifting. He used "vulgar language" and made anti gay comments. He used his grandmother's computer. When confronted he apologized and his parents "grounded him and took away his computer access". The school suspended him and transferred him to an "alternative" high school. He sued and also won by a vote of 14 to 0. The court-Third Circuit Court of Appeals-argued that the actions of the students in these cases did not "cause a substantial disruption of the school" and they were punished for off-school grounds actions. If the cyberspace messages urged a student walk out of threatened "harm to employees or fellow students" then the students actions could have been punished. The issue might go to the Supreme Court.
(Source: "Mauled on MySpace" by Michael D. Simpson of the NEA Office of General Counsel. NEA Today from Summer 2011).

Friday, October 14, 2011

US Race Relations

Ralph Bunche was the US representative to the United Nations, a Noble Prize recipient and a black man. While at the UN in the late 1940's he had to meet "...foreign diplomats in the non-air conditioned basement cafeteria of the South Interior building, because other restaurants would not admit him". (Another example of the reality of a racially segregated society that existed during my life time).
(Source: "Memories form the front lines of the segregation battle in the District" by John Kelly of The Washington Post from 10/11/11).

Julius Rosenwald was the CEO of Sears Roebuck & Co in the early decades of the 20th century. He funded the construction of "more than 5300 schools in 15 states between 1913 and 1932" that were meant for African-American students. He worked with Booker T. Washington. Today in North Carolina 22 of these "Rosenwald Schools" are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and another 41 are up for consideration. Rosenwald's fund was combined with "county money and contributions from local black families" and in North Carolina 787 schools were built; the most of any state. I visited one of those schools in Coinjock, NC that is hoping for money to restore it. That school was in operation until 1950. (As we know, this was the time of "separate but equal" facilities-schools-for black and white citizens. The school in Coinjock does not compare with the elementary schools I attended in Cresskill, which is still in operation).
(Source: "Historic N.C. school gets second chance at life, new use" by Jeff Hampton of The Virginian Pilot on 10/11/11).