Good Brain Hygeine

Ananova:

Council bans ‘brainstorming’

A council has banned the term “brainstorming” - and replaced it with “thought showers”.

Officials Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent feared the phrase might offend epileptics or the mentally ill.

Ironically, those who can’t brainstorm thought shower very tend to be those who don’t take real showers often enough.  That said, “thought shower” will soon have to be changed, in order not to offend the smelly hygeine-challenged among us.

Because Half the World Wants to Commit Terrorist Acts in Zimbabwe. (Get Real)

International Herald Tribune:

HARARE, Zimbabwe: President Robert Mugabe has approved a law that will give the government sweeping powers to monitor the Internet and mobile and fixed telephones in a country where the independent press has been gagged.

The official Herald newspaper said Saturday that the Interception of Communications Act would allow the government to “sift for information it deems subversive or used for organized crime.”

The law allows “certain communications to be intercepted or monitored in the course of their transmission through telecommunications or the postal service and sets up a monitoring and interception center,” it said.

This means that Zimbabwe’s computer and its telephone will be bugged. But it’s not going to be cheap: It’s estimated that the ZimPATRIOT Act will cost Zim$10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (US$22.62) per year to enforce.

Another Recommendation

Tongue Tied Blog:

This could be useful to any reader here who has a website:

Dedicated Hosting Guide has a feature article on free speech web hosting, “11 Web Hosts That Won’t Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy”. It is a list of 11 reputable web hosts that respect first amendment rights and will proudly stand behind your website, no matter any controversy or impending litigation.

Here’s another option:

Galileo Informatica.  This writer has used Galilei for ten years this January, to one extent or another, which is a relative eternity in the internet world.  While I rarely have to use dial-up internet access anymore, Galilei still hosts my personal and St. Louis CofCC-related e-mail accounts, and hosts the St. Louis CofCC Static Webpage.

Sinophobia

Scotsman.com:

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Briton who has spent years trying to convince foreigners that China is not as repressive as Western media often portray it to be has been ordered to stop publication of his politically sensitive newsletter.

China’s media censors and security officials zealously nip in the bud any threats — real or perceived — to stability.

 

Now Beijing authorities have threatened to deport newsletter editor Nick Young and ban him from visiting China for five years, Young said in an e-mail without naming what he called “credible sources” for the information.

About a dozen officials from the Beijing Public Security Bureau and the Beijing Statistical Bureau visited the office of the newsletter, China Development Brief, on Wednesday last week and accused Young of “conducting unauthorised surveys”.

Young has since been questioned by police responsible for supervising foreigners in China.

This means that the Chinese government has a special police force whose sole purpose is to monitor non-Chinese in China. Don’t try something like that here, or you’ll have the entire public and private alphabet gang whining about profiling, discrimination, nativism, and McCarthyism.

Student of the Year

So, a public school district in Vermont suspended a seventh-grade student for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt. I’m surprised they didn’t make him student of the year.

From the State That Brought You Jim McGreevey

KSDK-NBC-5:

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — The school district said Monday it regretted ordering a picture of a male student kissing his boyfriend blacked out from all copies of a high school yearbook and said it apologized to the student.

Andre Jackson, the student, said he was disappointed that the superintendent had not delivered the apology face-to-face and in public. Because of that, he said he didn’t accept it as sincere.

(snip)

Previously, Bolden had described the picture, which showed Jackson kissing boyfriend David Escobales, as “illicit.”

“If it was either heterosexual or gay, it should have been blacked out. It’s how they posed for the picture,” Bolden told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Saturday’s editions.

In the 4 1/2-by-5-inch photo, Jackson is seen turning his head back over his right shoulder and kissing Escobales, 19, of Allentown, Pa. It was blacked out after Russell Garris, the district’s assistant superintendent who oversees the city’s high schools, told Bolden he was concerned that the photo could upset parents.

What? You’re telling me that the same state that brought us James “The Gay American” McGreevey, and will probably never vote for a Republican for anything ever again, actually has parents left that disapprove of homosexuality? Looks like somebody’s going to have to spend time in some propaganda mills diversity training.

The photo was among several that appeared on a special personal tribute page in the yearbook.

Jackson, who paid $150 for the page, noted that the yearbook is filled with pictures of heterosexual couples kissing.

Oh, now I know why the school district officials backed down. Money talks, and money walks.

A R**e By Any Other Name

One St. Louis man was convicted of doing it to an 11-year old girl when he was 66 years old, eight years ago, and another St. Louis man had his sentencing for a conviction of the act postponed.

What act was this?

I can’t say anymore. A Nebraska trial-level judge has prohibited the use of the word in his courtroom.

Lincoln (Neb.) Journal-Star:

Tory Bowen says she knows what happened to her on the morning of Oct. 31, 2004.

But she won’t be able tell her story to jurors — at least not in a way that’s truthful to her, she says — because a judge’s order bars witnesses from using words like “rape” and “sexual assault” in the trial of Pamir Safi, who is accused of sexually assaulting Bowen.

“In my mind, what happened to me was rape,” said Bowen, 24. “I want the freedom to be able to point (to Safi) in court and say, ‘That man raped me.’”

Last month, Lancaster County District Judge [*****] denied a motion by prosecutors that would have prohibited Safi’s attorneys from using words like “sex” and “intercourse” when describing the encounter between Safi and Bowen.

So, in other words, the only permissible way to describe the act in his courtroom is that Safi and Bowen had a tender romantic moment that she was unsure about having.

Television Free Venezuela

How bad are things getting for free speech in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela?

The managers of the TV station he closed down have fled to corrupt-as-all-gitup Mexico and will set up shop there. Keep in mind that Mexico itself was within a 1% vote swing of having a Chavez-type elected as President last year, and if Obrador had won, I think the Venezuelan loyal opposition would be setting up shop in a country north of Mexico.

CofCC Successfully Sues Libraries For Blocking Websites

by Gordon Lee Baum

Prior to March 2006, access to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) website was blocked from the public internet terminals in the University City Public Library, the Maplewood City Library and the Valley Park Community Library, plus about seven other libraries in the St. Louis, Missouri area.  The Libraries utilized commercially available software filters to block “hate speech,” among other types of internet content.  This software filter identified certain web sites, including the CofCC, as “hate speech.”

During March 2006, First Amendment Attorney Robert Herman filed suit in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on behalf of the CofCC and against the University City Public Library, the Maplewood City Library and the Valley Park Community Library.  The other libraries, after being contacted, had dropped the block.  Following preliminary Court proceedings, the three libraries sued entered into a consent judgment with the CofCC,  agreeing  to remove the CofCC from the list of web sites blocked as “hate Speech” and allow unlimited access to the CofCC from the Libraries’ public access internet terminals.  The Libraries also agreed to pay $15,000 in costs, attorney fees and damages.

Gordon Lee Baum is the CEO of the Council of Conservative Citizens

Chavez Changes Venezuela’s Name Back to Manor Farm

If you’re going to take on a dictator and all his guns, that better be one strong back

I thought he was going to save Venezuelans from the big bad evil repressive gringo monster. Now all that remains to be seen is whether Hugo Chavez bears a greater resemblance to Napoleon or to Snowball.

Of Doggy Doo and Bacon

Placing dog waste near a Congressional office is protected political speech.  But what about putting bacon inside a Koran on the steps of a Mosque?

Yes, It Still Starts With a “C”

It’s back. It’ll now be called “Censored.”

Sometimes, “the man” doesn’t get the last laugh.

Quality and Quantity, Both

Lamplighter Blog has links to various pro- and con- opinions from around the blogosphere on the Prof. Walter Kehowski question.

Perusing the responses, most of those that were opposed to his receiving a sanction, (and this blog’s opinion was duly linked to), contained logic, reason and common sense.  Some of these such responses were from Voltaireist liberals.

By contrast, the few that thought his suspension (and potential dismissal) was a good idea wrote rambling, paranoid posts that often featured misspelled words, among which was “facist” (sic).  If you’re going to call someone a “fascist,” please spell it correctly.  The St. Louis Metro Area CofCC has first-hand experience with people opposed to “fascism” that have trouble spelling the word.

Dear Anarchists

This would be you if President Bush were as one-tenth as evil and devious and dictatorial as you put on that he is.

No “Russian Independent Media Center”

Anarchists, thank your lucky stars you live here.

Because what you do here will get you in legal trouble now (”hate speech”) if you try it in Russia.

AFP:

Terentyev wrote that police are “filth,” “the most stupid, uneducated representatives of the living (animal) world,” according to a photograph of what Kommersant said was his message.

Terentyev allegedly went on to recommend that six police in every city be “ceremonially burned daily, or better twice a day (at midday and midnight, for example).”

The ovens should be like those at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, he allegedly said.

He faces two years in a Russian prison, or perhaps a life sentence in a Cherokee Street hovel.

Don’t Fix It (Even If It’s A Little Broke)

AP:

Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government’s blessing want to scrap all that and start over. The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet “works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions,” said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”

(snip)

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

So, any reconstruction of the Internet would be centered around the whims of multinational corporations and power-mad governments. I sense Hillary Clinton’s “gatekeeper” in the mix. Bye bye web freedom.

European Islamic Union

EU bans “jihad,” “Islamic” and “fundamentalist” from its member states’ official prose and public policy documents.  Charles Martel must be rolling over in his grave.

I wonder if the EU would ban “crusade,” “radical Christian,” “right wing extremist,” “far-right,” “fascist” and “Nazi.”

Somebody On the Mother Continent Makes Sense

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s long lost twin? 

UK Telegraph:

Europe’s citizens must be on their guard against political correctness and moralising politicians, says the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

The former Portuguese premier and centre-Right politician is concerned that freedom can be the loser in European culture wars over climate change, cheap air travel, Islam and free speech.

“We should be aware of people who, sometimes for good reasons, try to establish what I call private moral codes, for this or that, be it climate change, religious behaviour or any kind of social behaviour,” he says.

He might have added, and probably did mean to add, the fact that dissenters from the racial equality politburo are criminalized.

Bong Hits For SCOTUS

Student Press Law Center via John Lott:

“All sorts of missions are undermined by legitimate and protected speech — a school’s anti-gun mission would be undermined by a student passing around copies of John R. Lott’s book,’More Guns, Less Crime;’ a school’s anti-alcohol mission would be undermined by a student e-mailing links to a medical study showing less heart disease among moderate drinkers than teetotalers; and a school’s traffic safety mission would be undermined by a student circulating copies of articles showing that traffic cameras and automatic ticketing systems for cars that run red lights increase accidents.

I don’t have an opinion on the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, so I cannot say on which side I would rule if I were a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. (I can just hear hundreds of leftists screeching in horror at that concept.) However, I don’t think that these SPLC (not Morris Dees’s) examples logically follow to the BHFJ issue.

First off, guns and alcohol are legal for many people, and the issue being debated at SCOTUS is time, place and manner of expression of political opinion, not expressing it or having it.

This is why I tend to think SCOTUS will come down in favor of the school district, because they will find that the time, place and manner of the political speech was disruptive.

Second, a school can’t have an “anti-gun” mission or an “anti-alcohol” mission in the sense that guns or alcohol should be further restricted in a legal sense than they already are. That’s a political opinion, that may, can and should be balanced with the Lott book and the medical study cited above, as long as countering opinions are done in a non-disruptive manner. It can have “anti-gun” and “anti-alcohol” missions inasmuch as guns and alcohol might have legal restrictions on possession and use of them by minors, and/or by anyone on school property.

Even through all that, if a relevant and orderly classroom discussion revolved around legalizing drugs or not doing so, or loosening firearms regulations or not, or lowering the drinking age or not, the school district wouldn’t have had a problem with any student that advocated legalizing or loosening the rules for any of these things. But I think they’re saying that the banner was untimely, out of place, disrespectful and untactful.

The Verboten J-Word

KSDK:

The message connected drug use and religion in a nonsensical phrase that was designed to provoke, and it got Joseph Frederick in a heap of trouble.

After he unfurled his 14-foot “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner on a Juneau, Alaska, street one winter morning in 2002, Frederick got a 10-day school suspension. Five years later, he has a date Monday at the Supreme Court in what is shaping up as an important test of constitutional rights.

Students don’t leave their right to free speech at the school door, the high court said in a Vietnam-era case over an anti-war protest by high school students.

But neither can students be disruptive or lewd or interfere with a school’s basic educational mission, the court also has said.

How to strike that balance is the question, particularly since the Columbine massacre and the Sept. 11 attacks have made teachers and administrators quicker to tamp down on unruly or unusual behavior.

I’m wondering if the real reason why Mr. Frederick is in trouble for this banner isn’t “Bong,” but “Jesus.” Perhaps if he would have converted to Islam, changed his name to something Arabic, and would have written “Osama” instead of “J***s” on the banner, if he wouldn’t have been suspended, and instead inducted directly into the National Honor Society.

He Is Charged With Supporting That Word We Can’t Use

The Feds allege he had something to do with t*******m

Reuters:

Defense lawyers want the word “terrorist” banned as too inflammatory in the U.S. trial of Jose Padilla and two other men charged with conspiring to aid Islamist extremists overseas.

The word conjures up visions of someone with a bomb belt blowing up himself and others in a crowded cafe, Jeanne Baker, an attorney representing co-defendant Adham Amin Hassoun, said during a hearing in the high-profile case on Friday.

“The word terrorist has nothing to do with this case,” Baker said. “The word terrorist is used to label an enemy.”

So the word “t*******m” has nothing to do with a criminal trial of a charge relating to terrorism. Using this logic, then those charged with stealing can’t have the word “stealing” used in their trials; I suppose they should be spoken of as erstwhile store patrons.

I am not providing a link to the source article, because it contains the name of a Federal judge. And considering how sensitive this case is, any anonymity that this judge could get would be well appreciated on his or her part.

We’re Pushing Matters in the Other Direction

Financial Times of London:

Internet censorship is spreading rapidly, being practised by about two dozen countries and applied to a far wider range of online information and applications, according to research by a transatlantic group of academics.

The warning comes a week after a Turkish court ordered the blocking of YouTube to silence offensive comments about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, marking the most visible attack yet on a website that has been widely adopted around the world.

A recent six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological improvements.

And most of those “transatlantic group of academics” endorse the same kind of censorship in Europe, that censors right-wing content.

Thankfully, in this country, the Council of Conservative Citizens is seeing to it that the trend goes in the other direction.

Two Stories from France

* Nicolas Sarkozy wants Jean Marie LePen on the upcoming French Presidential ballot. This is curious, because Sarkozy would get most of LePen’s votes if LePen didn’t make the ballot.

The latest print issue of American Renaissance has a front-page feature about the Front National edging away from racial realism and adopting a multiracial image. In spite of Sarkozy’s plea that he “fights LePen’s ideas,” the truth of the matter is that Sarkozy and his party are positioned slightly to the right of LePen and FN.

* On a relatively similar front, the French government is now prohibiting anyone other than professional journalists from recording or broadcasting acts of violence. Also, a new ratings system would give French websites and blogs a government seal of approval. The public premise is a good one, to prevent exhibitionist showboating. However, I think the real motive is to censor news and truths about non-white violent crime and riots.

SiteCoach Confesses to Being an Illegal Internet Content Filter

Illegal for public institutions for use.

See this post from V-Dare.

Because SiteCoach specifically states that it’s out to censor certain types of political content, then SiteCoach cannot be used in public institutions (schools, libraries). Political content is specifically (”fully”) protected speech. Also, since SiteCoach says out and out right that they censor right-wing sites, then using SiteCoach at a public library or school could also violate the Federal 14th Amendment.

As you know, the Council of Conservative Citizens has recently become very interested in public libraries’ web censorship, and will soon become interested in public schools doing the same.

Oh It Isn’t?

Headline on the neocon blog American Thinker today:

NASCAR Ain’t PC

The rest of the story, by one Earl Wright, follows suit.

Mr. Wright, talk with a NASCAR fan in the South. He might disagree with your assessment.

Of course, this is the same blog that also has this headline today:

Is Pat Buchanan Economically Illiterate?

The reason for the question is that its author questions Buchanan’s protectionist trade policies. The answer is no, he is not economically illiterate. If you look at the world in terms of pure economics, then free trade is the ne plus ultra of economic reason and literacy. But Buchanan, like a lot of sane people, and unlike economic determinists like Mr. Warshawsky here, realizes that there are other, more worthy concerns than economic prosperity.

European Union Super Snoopers

Slashdot:

An anonymous reader writes with a NYTimes piece on the early moves by European governments to implement an EU data retention directive. The governments of Germany and the Netherlands are initially proposing much more stringent programs than the EU directive requires. For example, the German proposal “would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.” The Times notes that, early days as it is, nevertheless some people involved in the issue are “concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals’ privacy rights.”

And of course, this being Slashdot, their leftist readership and responders don’t quite get it.  The reason for this madness is because European governments and the EU in general are interested in censoring conservative dialog and debate on race, sexual orientation and other matters of human particularity (”hate speech.”)

Europe being a long time defender of individuals’ privacy rights?  What a laugh.

Don’t Worry. Smoke Cigar.

AP:

A senior Cuban official has defended the country’s Internet restrictions as a response to U.S. aggression and called for controlling “the wild colt of new technologies.”

This means that Cuban authorities are worried that naughty material might be downloaded on their country’s computer.

No Criminals Allowed

European jails exist to confine those who deny the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, utter racial slurs, and download copyrighted material from file-sharing sites.  They do not exist to house real criminals.

Gang Colors

Those are the grounds under which this flag may soon be banned.

It’s already happening in Australia with their own flag.

What Do They Mean By “Rights?”

AFP:

Two US human rights groups have said they were working with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Vodafone to protect civil liberties online.

The technology giants will help craft rules-of-engagement that Internet companies can use when faced with “laws, regulations and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights,” according to the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

I wonder if this means that “hate speech” laws that exist in a lot of the world will now become moot.  Unfortunately, I don’t trust anything called “human rights” as far as I can spit, because in most instances they often diminish human rights.  And since Google and their reputation of anti-conservative censorship is involved, it just raises another red flag in my mind.