revo - lution

we are legion

bloggers' rights

One of EFF's goals is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger to let you know you have rights and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected.

To that end we have created the Legal Guide for Bloggers a collection of blogger-specific FAQs addressing everything from fair use to defamation law to workplace whistle-blowing.

In addition EFF continues to battle for bloggers' rights in the courtroom:

Bloggers can be journalists (and journalists can be bloggers). We're battling for legal and institutional recognition that if you engage in journalism you're a journalist with all of the attendant rights privileges and protections. (See Apple v. Does)

Bloggers are entitled to free speech. We're working to shield you from frivolous or abusive threats and lawsuits. Internet bullies shouldn't use copyright libel or other claims to chill your legitimate speech. (See OPG v. Diebold)

Bloggers have the right to political speech. We're working with a number of other public-interest organizations to ensure that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn't gag bloggers' election-related speech. We argue that the FEC should adopt a presumption against the regulation of election-related speech by individuals on the Internet and interpret the existing media exemption to apply to online media outlets that provide news reporting and commentary regarding an election -- including blogs. (See our joint comments to the FEC).

Bloggers have the right to stay anonymous. We're continuing our battle to protect and preserve your constitutional right to anonymous speech online including providing a guide to help you with strategies for keeping your identity private when you blog. (See How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

Bloggers have freedom from liability for hosting speech the same way other web hosts do. We're working to strengthen Section 230 liability protections under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) while spreading the word that bloggers are entitled to them. (See Barrett v. Rosenthal)

(read more)

Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici

"By the power of Truth,


I, while living,


have conquered the Universe."


Ideas are bulletproof.

make mine freedom

Elmer Davis

"This nation

will remain the land of the free

only so long as it is the home of the brave."

Elmer Davis

The Tramp

Alone in the Wilderness

Richard Louis "Dick" Proenneke (May 4, 1916–April 28, 2003) was a naturalist who lived alone in the high mountains of Alaska at a place called Twin Lakes. Living in a log cabin he constructed by hand, Proenneke made valuable recordings of both meteorological and natural data.

On May 21, 1968, Proenneke arrived at his new place of retirement at Twin Lakes. Before arriving at the lakes, he made arrangements to use a cabin on the upper lake of Twin Lakes owned by a retired Navy captain, Spike Carrithers, and his wife Hope from Kodiak. This cabin was well situated on the lake and close to the site which Proenneke chose for the construction of his own cabin. Proenneke's bush pilot friend, Babe Alsworth, returned occasionally to bring food and orders that Proenneke placed through him to Sears.

Proenneke remained at Twin Lakes for the next 16 months, when he left to go home for a spell to visit relatives and secure more supplies. He returned to the lakes in the following spring and remained there for most of the next 30 years, coming to the lower 48 only occasionally to be with his family.

In 1999, at age 82, Proenneke returned to civilization and lived the remainder of his life with his brother in California. He died of a stroke April 28, 2003 at the age of 86. He left his cabin to the National Park Service and it remains today as a popular visitor attraction in the still-remote Twin Lakes region.

In 1973, Sam Keith wrote the book One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, based on Proenneke's journals and photography. After years in print and a re-edition, the book won the 1999 National Outdoor Book Award. In 2005, some of Proenneke's film, Alone in the Wilderness, began appearing on U.S. Public Television. Primarily, the film consists of shots of Proenneke performing tasks around his cabin, canoeing and walking, and views of wildlife, along with narration. (read more)

China's Peace Prize

OSLO — Imprisoned and incommunicado in China, the Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, his absence marked at the prize ceremony here by an empty chair.

For the first time since the 1935 prize, when the laureate, Carl von Ossietzky, languished in a concentration camp and Hitler forbade any sympathizers to attend the ceremony, no relative or representative of the winner was present to accept the award or the $1.5 million check it comes with. Nor was Mr. Liu able to provide a speech, even in absentia.

Guests at the ceremony in Oslo’s City Hall listened instead to a recitation of his defiant yet gentle statement to a Chinese court before his incarceration last year. “I have no enemies and no hatred,” Mr. Liu said in “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court,” read aloud by the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience.”

Through his wife, Liu Xia, Mr. Liu sent word that he wanted to dedicate the award to the “lost souls” massacred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Liu, 54, a professor, poet, essayist and campaigner for human rights, has been an irritant to the Chinese authorities since helping resolve confrontations between the police and students in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Liu was detained in December 2008, after co-writing the Charter 08 call for human rights and reform, and is currently serving an 11-year sentence for the crime of “incitement to the overthrow of the state power and socialist system and the people’s democratic dictatorship.”

He was named this year’s laureate because of his heroic and nonviolent struggles on behalf of democracy and human rights, said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding that China needed to learn that with economic power came social and political responsibility.

“We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders,” Mr. Jagland said in a speech at the ceremony. “If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favorable impact on the world.”

He added, “Many will ask whether China’s weakness — for all the strength the country is currently showing — is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.”

Mr. Jagland, a former prime minister, became chairman of the Nobel committee last year and seems unafraid to use the position to make strong political statements. Last year’s selection of President Obama as the peace laureate was interpreted by many as a thinly veiled rebuke to the politics of former President George W. Bush, and this year’s award has had broad political implications.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Jagland said that on several occasions this fall, he and the Norwegian foreign minister were specifically warned by top Chinese officials not to give the award to Mr. Liu. But even though the committee disregarded their threats, Mr. Jagland said, its choice should not be interpreted as an insult to China.

Rather, Mr. Jagland said, its reasoning should be seen as similar to that of 1964, when the prize went to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was defying the authorities to fight for civil rights in America. The prize helped nudge the United States to change, Mr. Jagland said, and he hoped that it would have the same effect on China. (read more)

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Stephen Downing began his twenty-year police career in a squad car and finished as a deputy chief of police. As Commander of the Bureau of Special Investigations at one point, the Administrative Narcotics Division was one of the divisions within his scope of authority. His vast experience in law enforcement has led him to the conclusion that the War on Drugs can never be worth the human and fiscal costs.

Founded on March 16, 2002, LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies. Those policies have failed, and continue to fail, to effectively address the problems of drug abuse, especially the problems of juvenile drug use, the problems of addiction, and the problems of crime caused by the existence of a criminal black market in drugs.

Although those who speak publicly for LEAP are people from the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, a large number of our supporting members do not have such experience. You don't have to have law enforcement experience to join us.

By continuing to fight the so-called "War on Drugs", the US government has worsened these problems of society instead of alleviating them. A system of regulation and control of these substances (by the government, replacing the current system of control by the black market) would be a less harmful, less costly, more ethical and more effective public policy.

Please consider joining us and helping us to achieve our goals: 1) to educate the public, the media and policy makers about the failure of current policies, and 2) to restore the public's respect for police, which respect has been greatly diminished by law enforcement's involvement in enforcing drug prohibition. (read more)

Mersey Beat

the greenwood

"Rise and rise again

until lambs become lions"

your choice

You have two choices in your life...

you can choose to be happy...

or you can choose to be un-happy...

which will you choose?

war on drugs ?

What's Wrong With the Drug War?

Everyone has a stake in ending the war on drugs. Whether you’re a parent concerned about protecting children from drug-related harm, a social justice advocate worried about racially disproportionate incarceration rates, an environmentalist seeking to protect the Amazon rainforest or a fiscally conservative taxpayer you have a stake in ending the drug war. U.S. federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make America "drug-free." Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health and a war on our constitutional rights.

Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called "drug-related" crime is a direct result of drug prohibition's distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are all exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. The drug war is not the promoter of family values that some would have us believe. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and delinquency. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse.

Few public policies have compromised public health and undermined our fundamental civil liberties for so long and to such a degree as the war on drugs. The United States is now the world's largest jailer, imprisoning nearly half a million people for drug offenses alone. That's more people than Western Europe, with a bigger population, incarcerates for all offenses. Roughly 1.5 million people are arrested each year for drug law violations - 40% of them just for marijuana possession. People suffering from cancer, AIDS and other debilitating illnesses are regularly denied access to their medicine or even arrested and prosecuted for using medical marijuana. We can do better. (read more)
.................................................................................

War on drugs?

Shouldn't that be...

war on drug "abuse and addiction"?

You see...

prohibition produced only one thing...

a profitable criminal underground.

Legal or illegal...

we will continue to have...

an available supply and ever present demand.

In the end...

you can't legislate morality.

Who are you ?

Shadows and dust

I knew a man who once said...

Death smiles at us all...

all a man can do is smile back.




(shadows and dust)

May day

May 1st 2009
Los Angeles, CA

An immigration rally began peacefully. The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. When police in riot gear arrived and attempted to deny people that right, some took a stand to protect their rights. Then it turned less peaceful ..giving police the authority to forcefully disperse people.

Macarthur Park, Los Angeles, May 1st 2009

A police helicopter hovers above ..a voice over the loudspeaker gives the order to ‘disperse or be arrested’. Police in riot gear charge ..unarmed citizens flee ..some are trampled and beaten ..a peaceful assembly turns into chaos ..bullets fly. This was the scene at Macarthur Park in Los Angeles May 1st 2009 ..but my mind is also receiving images from 1969 ~ People’s Park, Berkeley ..and they don’t look much different. Furthermore, I’m experiencing the same feelings of revulsion that I felt then ..and I'm not the only one ..those early images were burned into the psyche of nearly all the school-age children of my generation. It occurs to me that the ‘class of 2010 is graduating next month ..after attending all four years of high school ..during wartime. Experiencing a culture at war, at this age ..is something you never forget. It becomes part of you ..like the Vietnam War is part of me. I have a built-in mistrust of government ..ongoing problems with authority ..and an uncertain career in ‘conspiracy theory’. History repeats itself, not only when government leaders ignore it ..but also when their minds become so scripted by it ..they can’t do anything different.

People’s Park, Berkeley ~ 1969

Vacation on the Island

Bad Words

From the dictionary......

"Liberal"

[fr.L liberalis, suitable for a freeman, generous, fr. liber free]

1: of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts

2: GENEROUS, BOUNTIFUL, 3: not narrow in opinion or judgement

4: TOLERANT; also: not orthodox, 5: not conservative

also related to liberty and liberate........

maybe it's not such a bad word after all.