We're trained to think that America owes its military prowess to a state-of-the-art technological advantage. While we are generally technologically superior, it's fascinating to see how much of the backbone of our military prowess depends on tech that is, in relative terms, ancient. Today South Bend Seven has an informative post about the F-15, the workhorse of our air force, with an impressive 107-0 kill ratio an an average venerable age of 24, with a technological age more than a decade older than that. Our air supremacy is built on the same tech level of the 8-track tape, and succeeds because no one will fly against it.

The phrase generally conjures up associations with Nazi Germany (where doctors euthanized the undesirable) and the Soviet Union, where politicians too popular for direct assault by Stalin were scheduled for operations, at the insistence of the Party, from which the victims never woke up.

The phrase "medical murder" is not generally associated with Louisiana.   But Radley Balko, at Reason, makes a compelling case that perhaps it should be.  Specifically, he examines the work of two medical examiners whose work was instrumental in placing Jimmie Duncan on death row for the murder of a child named Haley Oliveaux.  Duncan remains on death row today.  The only physical evidence linking Duncan to murder: bite marks found by medical examiners Steven Hayne and Michael West, which matched up with Duncan's teeth.  Hayne testified concerning the bite marks, using West's work to match them to Duncan, at Duncan's criminal trial.

Why might this be attempted medical murder?  Tape has surfaced of West jamming a plaster cast of Duncan's teeth, repeatedly, into the victim's face at the autopsy.  If the tape is accurate, West manufactured the bite marks that prosecutors used to send Jimmie Duncan to death row.

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Over at Shakespeare's Sister, Melissa McEwan indulges in a gloat over the news that the utterly loathsome Phelps clan has been denied entry to the United Kingdom, thus thwarting their plans to stage a bigoted protest against a pro-tolerance play called The Laramie Project.

Now, if McEwan wanted to engage in a serious discussion about whether nations may — or should — bar ideological "undesirables" from entry, I would be up for it. The United States has done so on many occasions, and the question presented — the contest between national and territorial sovereignty and freedom of expression — is open to colorable debate.

But McEwan is not satisfied to address this through the reasonably narrow prism of immigration control. She uses the exclusion of the Phelps clan to support a vastly broader proposition:

Rock.

That's what a free speech policy that recognizes the fundamental difference between speech and incitement to hatred looks like.

What nonsense. A policy that distinguishes between actual incitement of imminent violence and other speech is, potentially, principled. A policy that bans "promotion of hatred" or "incitement of discrimination" is unprincipled and infinitely malleable. Britain's vaguely stated policy of preventing "extremism in all its forms" and excluding those who "spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities" can be used largely at the whim of the state, as amply demonstrated by their recent exclusion of Dutch MP Geert Wilders over his overheated (but definitely not imminent-violence-inciting) rhetoric about Islam. Such a broad and unprincipled policy could very easily be used to exclude most of the writing staff at Shakespeare's Sister, given their penchant for ill-tempered rhetoric and given the right (or wrong) government.

It's tempting to say that people like McEwan are too dumb or addled by ideology to grasp this. But McEwan is not dumb, and that's not right. I think that people like McEwan simply don't care. Such people take too much pleasure in the temporary triumph of their ideals and beliefs over those of others, and don't want to sully the feeling with thought about the implications of how they got there. They are free speech's moral cowards.

Memo to the unnamed Oklahoma City police officer who stopped Chip Harrison for displaying a sign: "Abort" is not synonymous with "assassinate."

When the officer asked Harrison if he knew why he had been pulled over, Harrison said he did not.

"They said, 'It's because of the sign in your window,'" Harrison said.

"It's not meant to be a threat, it's a statement about abortion," Harrison said.

He said he disagrees with the president's position on abortion.

"I asked the officer, 'Do you know what abort means?'" Harrison said. "He said, 'Yeah, it means to kill.' I said, 'No, it means to remove or terminate.'"

Harrison said his sign was to be interpreted as saying something like: Remove Obama from office, not unborn babies from the womb.

The whole episode smacks of a Monty Python skit revolving around misinterpretations of common words, except that Chip Harrison has now been investigated by the Secret Service, has been told by the Oklahoma City police that he is "part of an investigation," and is no doubt on a dozen watch lists.

Oh, and he doesn't have his sign.  Give the man his sign back. Commenter Nate points out that, in fact, his sign was returned. Justice reigns in Oklahoma.

Update:  I see that in some of the weirder corners of the web, people are ranting as though Barack Obama himself ordered the man's sign confiscated.  Hogwash.  I agree with Patterico:

I can’t say I admire the sign, exactly — but seizing it is ridiculous.

But some people seem to be implying this is emblematic of the Obama regime. I hate to destroy a good outrage post with a question like this, but: what did Obama have to do with taking the guy’s sign?

This is a bad cop story, not a New World Order Seizing Our Signs story.

Some potential good news — Fox is reporting that President Obama has repeated his opposition to reinstatement of the appalling and Orwellian-named Fairness Doctrine:

"As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said.

As Patrick mentioned earlier this week, some Congressional Democrats have been making noise about reviving the entirely illiberal doctrine, the application of which is considerably more complex in an age of cable and internet news.

However, don't count the Congressional Democrats out yet. There's no telling whether the White House response to this question is misleading. Congress could pass some array of rules that has fundamentally the same impact as the Fairness Doctrine and simply slap a new label on it, and President Obama could use that new label as the excuse to sign off on it. I'd be considerably more comfortable with a stronger statement from the White House, like this: "the President disagrees with, and will not support, any attempt to regulate broadcast content by telling media entities what political or social views they must air, whether or not under the guise of 'fairness' or 'even-handedness.'" I doubt we'll get anything that blunt, though.

The argument over media bias reveals strange incongruities on both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives tend to oppose the Fairness Doctrine on the grounds that the market, not the government, should drive broadcast content. I agree with that proposition. Yet some conservatives constantly bemoan liberal bias in the media. Accepting for the sake of argument that there is such a bias (a proposition that I think is seriously oversimplified), isn't that bias a result of the same market forces that conservatives cherish? Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal illustrate that conservative media voices can succeed to the extent the market supports them — in other words, Americans can, and do, change the channel to one that suits their need for fairness and accuracy (if you like Fox News) or opinion porn (if you don't). Isn't conservative carping about liberal media bias therefore like my carping about reality TV — a thinly disguised expression of disgust for the taste and judgment of the populace forming the market?

Liberals are simply hoist from the other direction. Liberals like to claim that there is no liberal media bias, but an actual conservative or corporate bias (again, a highly oversimplified proposition, I think), and vigorously resist and ridicule conservative efforts to police the media for liberal excesses. Some liberals tell us that certain ideas are preferred in the media because the opposing ideas — conservative ideas — have failed, and that this is as it should be. Yet the same liberals are willing to let the government regulate talk radio on the pretense that there is some sort of market flaw preventing liberal thought from surviving there, and that it is somehow in the public interest to force each media outlet to be its own mini-market of ideas. But there is nothing structural that prevents talk radio, or any other media, from running liberal content if it is profitable. Arguments to the contrary rely on cartoonish visions of plutocrats passing up profit in favor of ideological purity — cartoonish visions that rather resemble conservative complaints about the liberal media, in fact.

We'll see whether Congress chooses to test the boundaries of President Obama's opposition to the Fairness Doctrine.

The New York Times, after months of neglect, has finally weighed in on the debacle that is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.  The Times' conclusion?  Everything is cool.  The law is vitally necessary.  And worries about what the law will do to small business are completely unfounded.

Last year, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, giving new authority and resources to a shockingly understaffed agency. The law has been described, accurately, as providing the safety net that consumers assumed they already had.

Unfortunately, the commission has yet to implement important aspects of the new law. The delay has caused confusion and allowed opponents to foment needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises like libraries, resale shops and handmade toy businesses.

My conclusion diverges rather sharply from that of the Times, but it can be expressed in fewer words:  The Times is full of shit.

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Oh for a Stanley Sporkin.  Now a retired federal judge, the former head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission was legendary for his tenacity in finding suspects who'd fled the country to escape prosecution.  About the only prominent figure to escape Sporkin was Robert Vesco, who wound up dying under house arrest in Cuba.

Surely the SEC, back in Sporkin's day, wouldn't have lost track of a fish as big as R. Allen Stanford, the head of Houston and Antigua-based Stanford Financial, which has set off bank runs overseas amid allegations it's nothing but a Ponzi scheme.

But it appears they have.

It's hard to get lost in America.  Oh it may be easy enough for a Ted Kaczynski to vanish for a while, living as a hermit, but billionaires leave big footprints, and leave cell phones, trophy wives, email accounts, and money trails in their wake.  Billionaires generally aren't willing to live in walled compounds in the failed state wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At the very least, Stanford leaves more than a few anxious senators behind, pining for his return.

Stanford's business is headquartered on the Caribbean island of Antigua. In the last decade, Stanford and his companies have spent more than $7 million on lobbyists and campaign contributions in efforts to loosen regulation of offshore banks.

Among the top recipients: Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the members who took a trip to Antigua where he was entertained by Stanford.

Sen Cornyn's office has said the trip "was strictly a fact-finding trip," and at the time, "there was nothing untoward or unseemly" about Stanford Financial.

A fact-finding trip?  In Antigua?

World of Warcraft has penetrated so far into the zeitgeist that it's no longer remotely cool.  As proof, even the NBA is getting into the act, with cheap, ripoff Tauren mascots.

Via Kids Prefer Cheese, where Angus is so behind the times that he thinks this is a Wookiee.

And then he'll settle down, in some quiet little town, and forget about everything.

It has become something of an internet sport to speculate on the fate of Gerry Rafferty, famous as the singer of "Baker Street" and "Stuck In The Middle With You."  Rafferty disappeared in the middle of 2008, checking himself out of a hospital into which he had been placed after a horrific incident in which he wrecked a five star hotel room so badly (by soiling himself) that the authorities had to intervene.  Rafferty then … vanished.

Until now. Fortunately, it appears Rafferty is living the line quoted from Baker Street, above.

The world is an increasingly odd place, really. It's getting very hard to be so bizarre and inappropriate that you get noticed. It's as if all the world is in a never-ending version of American Idol, performing acts of addle-headed freakishness instead of smarmy cover songs. What with the constant drone from the octuplet-basted crazy chick and the crooked politician with the Bob's-Big-Boy-Via-Gangster-Movie hair and the preachers doing stuff that would make a rent boy blush, what's the chance of someone actually diverting our attention?

Thank God for the Jacksons.

The Jacksons, via Marlon, one of their least fucked-up avatars, have decided to build a sort of resort/slavery theme park/Jackson museum. In Nigeria. Apparently Marlon thinks Nigeria is ripe to be the next Orlando.

The Badagry Historical Resort, located near Badagry's former slave port, will include a multimillion pound memorial, slave history theme park, five-star hotel and Jackson Five museum. The project is supported in part by Marlon Jackson, one of Michael Jackson's brothers.

"The Jackson family had been looking for a place to site their memorabilia collection," explained Gary Loster, chief executive of the Motherland Group, to the BBC. "We visited the site of the slave port in Badagry and Marlon turned to me and said: 'Let's put it here, this is right.'"

Marlon is hoping to capitalize on the recent success of ABBA-Splashoah, the Holocaust-themed water park and Swedish pop-music experience.

Look, I'm all for a museum that can set the standard for serious, thorough, and academic depictions of the history and consequences of slavery. I just think maybe it shouldn't have room service and middle-passage-themed complementary bottles of conditioner. And I don't want to every have a discussion with my kids featuring the question, "Well, should we see the Toussaint L'Ouverture exhibit now? Or do you want to go touch the Elephant Man skeleton?"

I waffle between being elated and morose about the fact that my livelihood is primarily dependent on the moronic behavior of my fellow man. Sure, good old-fashioned greed, malice, and wrath help to line my pockets as well — they all bring clients to my door. But it's the sheer, unmitigated idiocy that brings in both criminal defendants and civil litigants like clockwork. For a while I thought that my best efforts as a counsel worked against my bottom line — that if I became skillful enough at arguing clients out of their folly, they would not need me any more. Fortunately this does not seem to be a substantial danger. No matter how patiently I explain some fundamental rule of behavior or urge some seemingly obvious prudent course — like, for instance, when you engage in complex transactions with people you don't trust, you should have a written contract, preferably not on a napkin — they return to me reliably, dull faces contorted with puzzlement, having done the same damn thing over again with the same catastrophic result.

(I suspect, by the way, that my physicians, mechanics, computer technicians, and other counselors view me much the same.)

Stupidity makes the legal world go 'round. Case in point — and the reason that I am bringing this up — the executives of Peanut Corp. of America, including President Stewart Parnell, wove the noose now tightening around their necks out of extremely ill-advised emails in which they laid out their apparent scheme to ship products they knew to be contaminated, and then lie about it.

In one email, Sammy Lightsey, manger of the Blakely, Georgia plant at the center of one of the biggest food poisoning cases in recent history, wrote company president Stewart Parnell to discuss positive salmonella tests on one batch of its products. Parnell gave instructions to nonetheless “turn them loose” after getting a negative test result from another testing company.

Parnell and Peanut Corp. are going to be sending some lucky criminal defense lawyer's kid to Yale.

Typically, when one is concerned about what links to one's name on internet search engines, and the quality of the links associated with that name, the solution is to generate better and different links.  In the case of a person who is not famous, such as Beverly "Bev" Stayart of Wisconsin, this is easily accomplished by starting a website under one's name.

Of course suing search engines such as Yahoo is another strategy to create new links, but that carries its own risks.

According to the Complaint filed in Beverly Stayart v. Yahoo, Inc., et. al., Bev Stayart is the author of numerous scholarly bulletin board posts on the heritage of the Saponi Indian Nation, as well as two poems published at a Danish website concerning the plight of baby seals in Canada.  Ms. Stayart was therefore appalled when she visited the Yahoo and Alta Vista search engines to find the name "Bev Stayart" linked to spam sites advertising Cialis, sites infected with malware, and sites that offer adult-oriented images.

Though I'd never heard of her, apparently "[t]he name 'Bev Stayart' has commercial value because of her humanitarian endeavors, positive and wholesome image, and the popularity of her scholarly posts on the Internet."  She also claims to be the only Bev Stayart who uses the internet, in the entire world.

I suppose I've been living under a rock all these years.

And so Beverly Stayart did what any positive, wholesome, popular humanitarian scholar would do under such circumstances: She sued Yahoo and Alta Vista for trademark infringement, invasion of privacy, and "disregard of Bev Stayart's rights."

The case presents a few difficulties.  Leaving aside the problem of proving that there are no other Beverly Stayarts in the entire world who use the internet, as technology lawyer Eric Goldman points out, federal law shielding websites from liability for third party content may preempt or bar all of Ms. Stayart's claims.  Nonetheless, I sympathize with Ms. Stayart's plight.  Since it evidently has not occurred to her that a personal weblog might have driven the offending search results into page 10 oblivion, I'll offer her my own.

A few links to hold your attention, while we prepare for tomorrow's celebration of novelist Wallace Stegner's 100th birthday:

In a trial for criminal violations of environmental law, who are the victims?  If a company poisons an entire town with an asbestos mine, the sick and injured of that town do not qualify as victims, according to the federal judge presiding over the W.R. Grace trial.

I haven't read enough Blawg Reviews, or Carnivals of the Law Blogs, or whatever they're called, to know whether it counts as the best, but Mark Bennett's roundup of the last week in law is one of the best blog posts I've seen in some time, legal or otherwise.

Despite skepticism and denial from even the left, it appears that the "Fairness Doctrine" is indeed making a comeback.

The television news report on this arrest asks, "Did they go too far?"   Judge for yourself.  I prefer the Youtube title for the story, "Fascist cops beat homeless man."

Have no fear.  Our centennial retrospective of the life and work of Wallace Stegner is coming soon.

Try posting it again, or chalk it up to the winds of fate.

For the past week, I've noticed that the usually reliable comment spam filter we have in place here has been producing a much higher than usual number of false positives and negatives.  Chinese splogs are showing up as potentially valid comments needing only approval, while comments from friends who've previously posted here are getting trapped with the metaphorical hair at the bottom of the sink.  I even had to rescue a comment from one of my co-authors (evidently too obtuse to see for himself that his comment didn't appear immediately) from the filter.

Hopefully this will be fixed shortly, but if you've posted a legitimate comment or trackback here recently, and it didn't show up in due course, blame the gods, not us.

After a few stops and starts, I have become comfortable with blogging, and learned to enjoy it.  I came to Twitter reluctantly, and now enjoy it when I remember to check the account.  But I remain indifferent to the third point of the triangle that tech and style editors tell us that all Web 2.0-savvy individuals must use, Facebook.  Principally because I watch my wife play with it.  It bores me about as much as watching me play online games must bore her.

But I haven't hated Facebook, up until now.

This is how Facebook's terms of use read, before February 4:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Today it reads pretty much the same way, except without those last two sentences. Oh, and they added a provision that the license you granted them survives any termination of your Facebook account, forever.

Now this doesn't affect me too much.  My Facebook profile indicates that I am a Venezuelan dictator, who posts primarily about his crush on Jennifer Aniston.  Facebook's terms of use are probably not enforceable in Venezuela, certainly not against anyone whose nickname ends with "-ismo."

But suppose one isn't a Venezuelan dictator?  Suppose one is an aspiring actor, or politician, or writer.  Suppose that the next Updike is starting out with short stories on Facebook.  Under the terms of this agreement, if enforceable, Facebook could compile our future Updike's work, long after he'd become famous, to make a killing.  Or suppose a blogger is actually dumb enough to include a "Share Link" button on his web page?  Does Facebook own the blog?  Does Facebook own every image, word, and dumb status update that you post?

Their terms of use say they do.  Who are you to tell them otherwise?