The case, which was taken in June of 2011 after the Supreme Court granted the writ of certiorari that was put forth for the case, brought light upon the situation in which government law enforcement agencies track individuals using GPS devices. Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner in the District of Columbia, was arrested and charged by police for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The District’s Metropolitan Police department had conducted surveillance on Jones for an extended amount of time. In particular, Jones’ movements were tracked using a GPS transmitter. The device had been placed on the car Jones was using long after the warrant to place to object had expired.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that such a placement of a GPS device did indeed constitute a search of personal property and, as such, required a search warrant. However, while all the justices did rule unanimously, three separate concurrences were written. The majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia, consisted of the jurisprudentially conservative view that the GPS device did not meet the two-pronged reasonable expectation of privacy test that was originally established by Justice Harlan’s concurrence for the case of Katz v. United States. Scalia was joined by Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Sotomayor, and Chief Justice Roberts.

In a concurrence that took aim at the stance of Scalia and the majority, Justice Alito noted that rapidly changing technological trends look to quickly make the traditional response of Scalia and his cohorts into an antiquated relic of the past. With his pointed concurrence, Alito was suggesting that the days of using such a narrow distinction were mostly over, as the immediate future of public surveillance may be able to be characterized by real-time video that is accessed remotely. In this concurrence, Justice Alito was joined by joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kagan.

Justice Sotomayor also crafted her own separate concurrence in which she took the unusual step of exploring the entire issue of privacy in the modern age, presenting a laundry list of complaints that privacy advocates often have and then urging that these issues soon be settled via the courts.

As for Antoine Jones, his case has been remanded and will again be heard within the District of Columbia’s District Court.

Although Joba had his second consecutive year with an ERA of 4+ in 2010, the 25 year-old hurler pitched a clean inning today in the Bronx. The 8^th inning saw the Yankee debut of Rafael Soriano, last year’s AL saves leader with the Rays. He too, made quick work of the Tigers and handed the ball to the greatest reliever of all-time. No surprise, Mariano Rivera ended the game easily, although he did showoff his new fashion with high socks, a la Alex Rodriguez.

Joe Girardi’s decision to start Russell Martin paid off, as the new catcher compiled a single and two runs scored. However, young stud Jesus Montero should not be forgotten in this equation, as although he was sent to Triple-A, Montero is regarded as the future catcher of the Yankees.

So for Opening Day, the Bombers’ pitching looked formidable and its hitting seemed acceptable, after all, Earl Weaver’s philosophy of, “Pitching, hitting and the three-run homer”, seemed to work today.

What I notice more on Aljazeera is a local coverage of the Egyptian people and their struggle for freedom. American coverage has predictably been US-centric, and asking how the outcomes could affect US relations in the Middle East, and how this could affect Israel, our main ally in the region.

Image by Muhammad ?????? via Flickr

While this may be pragmatic, it diminishes the struggle that the Egyptian people have expressed on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez.  Media pundits have been discussing that the stance of the Obama administration of not

supporting Mubarak, an ally of more than 30 years, and thus have shown support of the protesters.

Israel fears losing an ally in Mubarak and fear the void that his expulsion would leave behind. Yes, it is not known who will lead Egypt next, but that is the cost of democracy. If we truly stand for the principle rather than democr

acy being meaningless rhetoric to spout out when one needs to justify foreign policy choices, than we should support the revolution and not fear it.

The despicable hypocrisy in American foreign policy in supporting democracy whilst propping up friendly d

ictators has to cease! I applaud the Obama administration for treading the fine line between pragmatism and silent support of the Egyptian people. There is cleverness in not supporting the revolution out loud, as some would interpret it as US involvement. I, however, deplore the pundits for trivializing a democratic revolution. How can we promote

democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan and stand against them in the rest of the world?

People have taken inspiration throughout the Middle East after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Protests have broken out in Morocco and Yemen. The King Abdullah II of Jordan has dissolved his parliament and ordered to implement changes (though this may only be superficial). Even China has blocked searches of Egypt in fear of a revolution.

While I was thinking about the struggles of the Egyptian people and eagerly anticipating their success, in contrast to the pundits at MSNBC and Fox News, the remembered the powerful words of Bob Dylan, “there’s a battle outside and it’s raging. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, for the times they are a-changing.”

The revolution is happening now, to oppose it now would be futile and irresponsible.

We all know about Pan Am Flight 103 being blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. We also know 270 people were killed on that innocent Wednesday morning. What I don’t know is how in the world can Scottish authorities release the mastermind behind the tragedy. 

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of murdering those 270 people almost a decade ago. The trial was presided over by Scottish officials in an international tribunal located in the Netherlands. Obviously this was done to appeal to the human rights/ amnesty international crowd. 

Flash forward to 2009. Megrahi is set free on humanitarian grounds. According to the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill, compassion is key when dealing with mass murderers. You see, Megrahi has terminal cancer, and his lawyers think it acceptable he be allowed to return to Libya, the nation run by terrorist sympathizer Muammar al-Gaddafi. Did those terrorists show any sympathy? Did his victims get to see their families for a final time? Megrahi should be rotting in a cell, instead of galavanting around and making a mockery of justice.

Not to mention, Gaddafi formally admitted to and apologized for the Lockerbie bombings only a few years ago. Ah, don’t we like it when the terrorists are so straightforward with their admissions?

Oh yeah. President Obama shook hands with “Colonel” Gaddafi at the G8 summit. What’s next, dinner with Chavez, tea with Mahmoud, or Madden with Kim Jong Il?

Let’s think deep, real deep. The planet as we know it is merely a temporal breeding ground for our species, and our ideals. I doubt the world will end in 2012 as many theorists postulate, but in the long run, Earth will not be able to survive. The scientific community supposes the Sun will explode in five billion years, furtheremore, an asteroid could hit our planet at an given moment. Then, life as we know it will end. That is not what I want. Humanity must find a way to expand its reach across the Universe and promote peaceful democratic ideals. The gist of it is this, when Earth becomes ruined via some gargantuan phenomena, I do not want humanity to perish alongside it. Either in 2012 or 1,000,000,000,000 AD, life must go on. It would be a tragedy to consider humanity a species that must stay with Earth.

Everything we now know must be preserved and passed on to further generations, be it literature, history and to spice it up a bit, Earth’s creatures. Earth is the root of humanity, but we must expand ourselves and blossom into benevolent, charitable beings.

I think I may start to write little snippets every now and then expanding on this entry.

Here’s the link:

http://blog.indecisionforever.com/2009/04/29/jon-stewarts-extended-interview-with-cliff-may/

Great stuff, seriously! Even May says himself, “Literally, this is the best conversation I have had on this subject anywhere.”

Water boarding is the new fad when it comes to interrogating suspected terrorists nowadays, but to hold such of view of this ancient practice is to be just plain ignorant.  Contrary to public belief, water boarding is not a “new” method of “enhanced interrogation” but is actually a torture practice dating back to the 14^th century.  Now of course, back then there were definitely harsher interrogation techniques, but nevertheless water boarding was believed to be a form of torture.  As in matter in fact, the phenomenon of calling it a form of “enhanced interrogation” is actually quite recent.

First, let’s look at the history of water boarding.  It was the Spanish Inquisition that first implemented it and since then it has been used throughout the Middle Ages.  Once the Enlightenment hit however, some people became “enlightened” and thought the practice as barbaric and inhumane.  So soon after, the practice moved away from the public eye and was done rarely and secretly.  In the 20^th century however, water boarding made a comeback as the Brits used it in Palestine, the French in Algeria, the U.S. in the Philippines, the Japanese in World War II, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Focusing more on the U.S.’s history with water boarding, during the Spanish American War, a U.S. major implemented it.  Consequently, that major was suspended for a month and fined; the reason was, according to the judge, because “the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture.”  It’s also important to note that the U.S. convicted a Japanese official in 1947 of war crimes for water boarding an American civilian. The criminal was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.  Another case of water boarding happened in the Vietnam War, when an American soldier was found to have water boarded a North Vietnamese soldier to extract information.  The U.S. military promptly investigated and had the soldier court martialed. 

So, this all begs the question, why is water boarding torture?  Well I think common sense alone can explain this quite sufficiently, but for those more in tune with the artificial legality of things, perhaps this will help.  According to the UN Convention of Torture that President Ronald Reagan signed, “torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him…information…” Now if you’re at this point in the article and still don’t think water boarding is torture; I highly recommend you go and experience water boarding.  Perhaps then, after you undergo simulated drowning with your throat being filled with water 83 times, or in the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammad, 183 times; maybe then you’ll realize water boarding does actually cause “severe pain” and “suffering” that is both “physical” and “mental.”  And please, don’t pull any Orwellian shenanigans. 

More dangerous than the outright, blatantly obvious damages that modern-day humans inflict upon our planet’s fragile ecosystem are the injuries we inflict that are more deleterious than anything; that is to say, those injuries which we don’t realize as having a negative impact upon our environment until it is too late. While there is a matter of debate among scientists as to whether the space just beyond Earth’s atmosphere can be described as part of this planet’s ecosystem, one certainly cannot deny that this planet’s upper atmosphere is part of the environment in which we live.

With the advent of space flight, governments and private entities (both wealthy individuals and private corporations) have been blasting off rockets into space, or at least into the border area where the Earth’s atmosphere generally ends and outer space begins (scientists are a bit fuzzy regarding this point, too). While certainly well within their rights to do so, humanity’s early forays into space have been slowly contributing to a problem that, while carefully monitored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), we as humans are currently powerless to remedy and, worse still, not only threatens the inherent natural and political rights of all humans but also endangers Homo sapiens as a species.

This problem, not widely recognized now but sure to be a well-known phrase in the coming decades, is known as the Kessler Syndrome. Explicitly defined, the Kessler Syndrome is the idea that space debris collisions can occur at an ever-increasing rate to the point that a self-sustaining system is created in the form of a positive feedback loop. While this definition may be abstruse, the Kessler Syndrome itself is easy to illustrate. Basically explained, the scenario calls for any number satellites (satellite being defined as any object in orbit above a planetary body) in space around Earth, each traveling at varying velocities and in different directions, to crash into each other. The analogy of a car accident is appropriate. While certain minor car accidents, such as fender-benders, result in little to no damage to one or both automobiles involved, a major accident, such as one that results in the “totaling” of at least one car (totaling being defined as destroying the automobile to the point that repair costs would be greater than the cost of buying a new vehicle), often produces debris. Pieces of one or more of the automobiles often break off and become scattered around the scene of the original collision. This is where the automobile accidents and real-life satellite collisions start to differ. When automobiles collide violently, debris disperses around the immediate area. When satellites collide, something entirely different occurs. Due to the greatly lessened affect of Earth’s gravity upon the satellites, collisions in space are far more dangerous. When two satellites violently collide, pieces of both satellites do not stay in the immediately vicinity. Instead, they shoot off at different vectors, often traveling at thousands of miles per hour. Within a matter of moments, two large satellites can break up into hundreds of smaller pieces, all flying and falling in different directions. Each of the smaller pieces is now a projectile that could possibly crash into other satellites. For every impact that produces debris, more small satellites are created, meaning the Kessler syndrome is a positive feedback loop (it feeds on itself). While much space debris would eventually fall to Earth within a few years due to gravity, the debris that becomes trapped in a higher orbit can linger for as much as a thousand years, destroying the possibility of a safe exit from Earth’s atmosphere.

Should there ever be a case where the Kessler Syndrome would prevent humans from launching space-faring vessels and exploring beyond this planet’s bounds, the societal ramifications would be incredibly far reaching.

In the modern era we live in, man has spread to every corner of the globe where life can be sustained, and some places where it cannot (Antarctica, for example). Due to the wave of democratic revolutions that took place during the 20^th Century, the world went from a continuous period of autocratic-dominated rule to an era in which democratic countries with representative governments now vastly outnumber countries that maintain monarchies and autocracies. This is remarkable considering how all of written human history up until the 20^th Century provides us with a record that currently confirms the fact that governments of the people are a relatively new phenomenon.

Representative governments, generally being very liberal regarding the rights of citizens, tend to enact few systematic barriers regarding travel. This usually holds true for both travel within a country’s bounds and travel that has individuals leaving a specified country. While this is certainly an ability that many people, even prolific travelers, take for granted, one must remember that many countries throughout history had governments that prevented their people from leaving, or at least had institutionalized roadblocks that made travel all but impossible. Severe travel restrictions visited many countries, including the United States, during both World Wars. It is easy to forget that the Soviet Union, a country that greatly restricted both in-country and out-of-country travel before its collapse in 1991, was the world’s largest country in terms of land area and among its most populous. To think that the almost three-hundred million people of the Soviet Union were trapped within their country less than twenty years ago is mind-boggling.

If the Kessler Syndrome were to result in a situation where space flight from planet Earth were not practically feasible due to the danger of collision with orbiting debris, humanity, both as a collective and as individual members, would be trapped on this planet. While this explanation seems plain enough, it would most assuredly have almost immediate drastic consequences.

Given that the vast majority of governments throughout human history have been autocratic in nature, it is not unreasonable to assume that sometime in the future at least one sizeable autocratic government will be established. Depending on the reactions of both world leaders and common citizens, this theoretical autocratic regime will either be shunned and will eventually fall by the weight of its own people or, worse, will inspire a world-wide power grab as the leaders of nations either centralize power or new political factions arise, these factions then implementing for stronger centralized states. At this point in time, history shows just how real both scenarios could become. For an example of the former, see Josefa Iloilo, the current president and now-dictator of Fiji (he recently dissolved the country’s highest court and suspended the country’s constitution), rose to power simply out of his own might but is destined to fall, both due to the fact that there is institutionalized popular sovereignty in Fiji based on the country’s constitution but also because, at age eighty-eight, many Fijians wishing for a new leader are just waiting for him to die rather than start a revolution. For examples of the latter, one needs only to turn to Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, men who both rose due to popular sovereignty, or at least, were confirmed as leaders due to the support of their respective country’s citizens.

But how exactly does the Kessler syndrome figure into these postulations? Time and time again, history has shown that autocratic governments almost always trample on the rights of individual citizens in order to carry out government goals. It should be noted that these aims could just as easily be due to the desires of an elite oligarchy as they could be due to calls for action by an enraged, blood-thirty general populace. During these times of social unrest and/or governmental oppression, the primary danger of the Kessler syndrome is revealed: the destruction of the ability to have vessels leave this planet effectively prevents escape from planet Earth. While this may seem like a particularly bold claim, the interconnectivity of our world today due to both advanced telecommunications emplacements and speedy travel possibilities has effectively shrunken the world; what two-hundred years ago would have been a several-months journey by horse-and-buggy or by foot became a few-days journey with the invention of the coal-powered locomotive and the establishment of train systems. From 1803 to 1806, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled from the western boundaries of the small American republic (pre-Louisiana Purchase) to the Pacific Ocean. With the completion of the United States Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, an individual could travel from New York to San Francisco, an even greater distance, in just under a week. With the advent of cheap air travel during the 20^th Century, any individual could pay a modest sum of money to travel the same distance in about six hours. With the shrinking of our world, any motivated and well-resourced government could easily hunt down individuals. Totalitarian governments in particular have shown to have complete disregard for the sovereignty of other countries by illegally pursing individuals who have fled to escape political oppression. Examples are numerous, including famous Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated in his home in Mexico by a Soviet agent; Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian who fled to the United Kingdom but was later famously murdered in London by a KGB agent who used a specially-designed umbrella gun; Karim Mohammedzadeh, an Iranian who fled to Sweden and was later killed in his Stockholm-suburb apartment; and recently Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB who in 2006 was poisoned in Britain with radioactive element polonium-210 by a suspected Russian national acting on government orders. With our world becoming ever more interconnected, escape from active, murderous governments has become almost impossible. A runaway Kessler syndrome scenario would close our final frontier and our only real escape: outer space.

When noting how the Kessler syndrome prevents escape from this planet, we must not focus on just individuals or even sizeable groups of individuals who wish for a change of scenery. Humanity itself is threatened by being forced to stay within this planet’s bounds. Each year, millions of objects stray into the path of Earth as our planet passes around the sun. These objects are known as meteoroids. When they come into contact with Earth’s atmosphere, they usually burn up and can be seen in the night sky as shooting stars. However, an incredibly small fraction of meteoroids fail to burn up in the atmosphere, coming all the way down to the ground. These objects are meteorites and the greatly threaten the survival of our species. The most famous historical example, one that very clearly illustrates just how deadly meteorites actually are, is the case of the rock that crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula over sixty-five million years ago. This giant meteorite had such a massive impact on Earth’s surface that geologists believe that it carved out much of what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Paleontologists usually attribute this meteorite for causing the global destruction that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Astronomers predict that the Earth is long overdue for another object to stray into this planet’s path and become a meteorite, reigning destruction down upon the fragile ecosystem we have here. That a runaway-case of Kessler syndrome could effectively prevent both planetary countermeasures as well as a last-ditch escape could mean that we would be trapped on Earth, facing our own demise as a species with almost no chance of survival.

The Kessler syndrome will certainly be a hot topic on the lips of many, astrophysicist, politician, and layman, in the coming decades. Preempting the angry rhetoric sure to be found in the speeches of future firebrands and aspiring office-holders, NASA has already established a network which tracks objects larger than five centimeters in size. For larger pieces that may endanger flying aircraft and ground populations, the United States Strategic Command, a section of the United States Department of Defense, tracks pieces and advises pilots and local law enforcement officials accordingly. Our knowledge today of how dangerous Kessler really is certainly our strongest weapon in the arsenal to battle this developing problem, with scientists and researchers worldwide working day and night to create technologies that will combat this future danger. Because of what we know now, we can only hope that our future is one where our skies aren’t plagued with debris so that we may freely leave Earth for beyond as we do please.

Copyright Dan Downs 2009

I was expecting a full blown critique of American culture, or as Mrs. Jacoby refers to it: infotainment. (I can’t believe the computer recognizes that as a word). Besides telling me, just like Barack Obama, that parents need to take control and turn off the video games, I learned very little. Futhermore, when I asked the author what my generation can do about the so called “culture of junk” she failed to give me a decent answer. Once again, I had hoped for a vibrant discussion on common sense in America, possibly incorporating chats on absurb legal matters and how it is rational to think the opposite of certain American norms. Didn’t happen.

Actually, something interesting did happened. A gentleman asked if Mrs. Jacoby agreed with Ayn Rand’s objectivist school of thought, as he thought the two had much in common. Mrs. Jacoby responded, “I think it’s a crock”. The crowd cheered. Wow, openly lambasting Ayn Rand requires courage. The other thing that is needed when attacking one of the foremost capitalist authors of our day is a strong, detailed opinion that can persuade the audience to believe you. Mrs. Jacoby did not provide any “ensightful” (EM shoutout) information to help me understand the contemporary American fascination with “unreason”.

Disclaimer: If you did not see the speech, therefore you do not understand what I’m getting at, check it out on C-SPAN.