In a legal system in which you can pluck out your own eye and eat it and still be sufficiently sane to execute, it should not be a surprise that some damned odd terms creep up in plea bargains now and again. Buying a guilty plea with a bucket of fried chicken, for instance. Or the time back when I was a prosecutor when I got a tax protester to plead guilty by adding a term to the plea agreement saying that the United States was taking no official stance on whether he was a separate sovereign nation. (I sort of forgot to run that one past the front office.)

But this pushes the envelope. Ria Ramkissoon has entered a guilty plea to child abuse leading to death in the case brought after her son was starved to death. Apparently Ramkissson and other members of the One Mind Ministries — which the indelicate among us might call a cult — decided to withhold food from one-year-old Javon when he would not say "amen" after meals. How did prosecutors get her to enter a plea, and even cooperate against other cult members?

They agreed that she can withdraw her plea if Javon is resurrected, as she expects that he will be.

Ramkissoon, a member of a group called One Mind Ministries, believes Javon Thompson, her year-old son, will rise again, and as part of her plea agreement, authorities agreed to the clause.

If Ramkissoon is malingering, this strikes me as a no-harm-no-foul outcome. But if she's genuinely delusional, it strikes me as cruel and inappropriate to forge plea terms that reinforce and encourage her delusional structure. And there seem to be some genuine doubts about her capacity:

On one level, she certainly is competent to stand trial, because she does recognize that as far as her legal entanglements are concerned, this is a grand-slam resolution for her," Silverman said. "On the other hand, she's still brainwashed, she's still delusional as far as the teachings and influence of this cult, and she certainly is going to benefit with professional help and deprogramming."

Yeah, OK. She can recognize a good deal (suspended sentence if she cooperates) if it is offered to her. But is she really competent? If she believes that it was God's will that her son be starved to death so that he could be resurrected, did she appreciate the nature of her actions, and is she able to participate meaningfully in her defense? And are we only led to ask these questions because her delusions are more florid and noticeable than most of the flood of humanity that flows through our courtrooms?

Though its groundbreaking occurred fifty years ago, there is no question that architect Richard Neutra's Cyclorama building belongs on the National Historic Register.  The Cyclorama is one of the finest examples of (now misleadingly named) modernist architecture, a bygone style of building which brings to mind what Americans of the fifties thought the future might look like:

Unfortunately, the future is now, and they're not making buildings of the fifties modernist post-bauhaus style, certainly nothing as impressive as the Cyclorama.  From an architectural perspective, the Cyclorama is a treasure, especially in a country where descendants of Europeans have only been putting up buildings for four hundred years.

There is a problem:  The Cyclorama sits on sacred ground.  It defiles that ground.  So it must be knocked down.

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It's time for the Road to Popehat, the feature in which we peruse the traffic logs to determine what searches brought you here, and then check the locks and make a note to tip the front gate guard.

Here are some recent searches that brought wanderers to our shores:

names associated with a penis Um . . . Dick?

octopus sex I'd like to think this person wasn't disappointed with our site, but I think it is very likely that he was.

fat people It doesn't hurt me that people are Google-searching "fat people." It just hurts me that the search brought them here.

is it hard to become a police officer in Missouri Now that you mention it, apparently not.

legal animal sex states There are about ten ways to parse that, and I don't care for any of them.

defense against being called a racist up-up-left-B-B-up-right-A

should people starve Our long, tiring efforts to establish libertarian creds are finally bearing fruit.

movies where "little girls" are used as "sex objects" Gratuitous and inappropriate use of quotation marks: so annoying that it can even make internet pedophiles seem creepier.

I am pretty sure I could have lived a long and full life without my downstairs neighbor telling me that a friend of hers I had briefly chatted with the day before thought "you had such cute little ears. She talked about nibbling them." Really? Who tells someone else that sort of thing? Now I'm just creeped out.

You know, this got me thinking about the bizarre people I have had living below in the ten years I have lived in this apartment. There was Bobby, who once knocked on my door and announced that it was "International Yodel to your Neighbor Day" and did just that. There was the crack addled woman who spent most evenings screaming at her kids (or sometimes the TV) and listened to way too much easy listening music. There was the family that ran their (very loud) dishwasher only after midnight for some reason. And, of course, there was the morbidly obese shut in who once asked if I wanted to see his gun collection.

I've been arguing for a while that what we need is a serious, thoughtful, thorough discussion of our national policy of criminalizing drug use and drug distribution. I'm not even promising that after the full dialogue I'm going to come out pro-legalization or even pro-decriminalization on everything. All I want is a national discussion in which our leaders grow a spine and dare to question the largely unquestioned strategy of prohibition, and smart people on both sides of the issue argue it out. I don't think it's going to happen — no one of any political prominence is showing any signs of even a vestigial spine, and JAIL ALL CRIMINALS remains the political default.

Now, there is some dialogue about drugs going on amongst nationally recognized and prominent figures. But it's not a dialogue that questions the status quo. At least, not in the direction you might expect. From a recent meeting of the minds: Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingritch discuss how using Singapore as a model, instituting mandatory testing, and compelling treatment might get the job done:

O'Reilly: I don't know whether you know this, but I did one of my papers at Harvard on this — on how to reduce demand for drugs.**** But the United States has never figured it out. You can't lock up drug users, I mean, that doesn't work. And you can't force them into rehab, you have to want rehab, and even if you want it, it's very hard to get off hard drugs and alcohol. Very hard.

What you can do, though, is sanction people along the way. And this is what they do in Singapore. If you're caught possessing drugs — and that means drugs in your bloodstream, they have a little hair thing, and they put it in there — then you have to go to mandatory rehab. And they have centers where you go.

Now, they have no drug problem in Singapore at all, number one, because they hang drug dealers — they execute them. And number two, the market is very thin, because when they catch you using, you go away with a mandatory rehab. You go to some rehab center, which they have, which the government has built.

The United States does not have the stomach for that. We don't have the stomach for that, Mr. Speaker.

Gingrich: Well, I think it's time we get the stomach for that, Bill. And I think we need a program — I would dramatically expand testing. I think we have — and I agree with you. I would try to use rehabilitation, I'd make it mandatory. And I think we have every right as a country to demand of our citizens that they quit doing illegal things which are funding, both in Afghanistan and in Mexico and in Colombia, people who are destroying civilization.

*** The true mark of a Harvard man — even in the midst of advocating totalitarian sociopathy, he cannot resist dropping the H-bomb.

Yeah, Singapore's approach is just a model of rationality:

The statute's penal provisions are draconian by most nations' standards, providing for long terms of imprisonment, caning, and capital punishment. The law creates a presumption of trafficking for certain threshold amounts, e.g. 30 grams of cannabis. It also creates a presumption that a person possesses drugs if he possesses the keys to a premises containing the drugs, and that "Any person found in or escaping from any place or premises which is proved or presumed to be used for the purpose of smoking or administering a controlled drug shall, until the contrary is proved, be presumed to have been smoking or administering a controlled drug in that place or premises." Thus, one runs the risk of arrest for drug use by simply being in the company of drug users. The law also allows officers to search premises and individuals, without a search warrant, if he "reasonably suspects that there is to be found a controlled drug or article liable to seizure". Moreover, Section 31 allows officers to demand urinalysis of suspected drug offenders.

And yet this is what passes for a Drug War dialogue in this country.

Something a little different this time, as I will be spotlighting a "story game" (a role playing game that focuses mainly on telling a story, not mechanics or combat) instead of a board game. The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a simple game. The tagline is: "are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization? No? Even if it will grant you tenure?" It's a game of doing horrible things to get ahead in the cut throat world of academia.

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I'm been unforgivably lax in my schadenfreude. I've taken far too long to note the public humiliation of the loathsome Richard Warman, Canada's censorious serial litigant and crusader against incorrect speech, a man whose contemptible excesses we have covered before.

Warman's weapons and sources of income are Canada's Human Rights Commission and its Human Rights Tribunals, upjumped bureaucratic star chambers with the power to punish various species of bigoted and moronic speech if it offends anyone — even if Warman is the only one to read and be offended by it. But now Canada's professionally censorious human rights apparatus — already under heavy fire from left and right — has turned on its one-time favorite son. Ezra Levant, a long-time foe and critic of Warman, notes that the Human Rights Tribunal has sharply and publicly criticized Warman. Why? Because Warman likes to hang out on racist internet sites under an alias and post racial invective, hoping to draw out similar invective from others so that he can haul them before the Tribuna, to his profitl. Warman, in other words, is a professional race-baiter.

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If a defamatory statement is made on Twitter, and no is able to understand it, does the plaintiff have a cause of action?

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At his informative blog Photography Is Not A Crime, Carlos Miller covered the appalling case of a Florida woman who was arrested for videotaping police officers arresting her son, an arrest that culminated in her receiving suggestive and crude email from (it appears) one of the arresting officers. Prosecutors, showing good judgment, dropped all charges against her, making what appears to me to be a rather remarkably broad declination statement:

“Based upon the facts and circumstances articulated in the probable cause affidavit and police report, the Committee unanimously determined that the State will not be able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt either that the defendant’s actions constituted a violation of the interception of communication statute or that the officers were acting in the lawful execution of a legal duty.”

So naturally she sought to get her camera back. It was no longer evidence of a crime (if it had ever genuinely been evidence of the crime), and the police had no right to detain it.

But anyone who has to deal with the government knows that there are rights, and then there is the ability to vindicate those rights. Even though she has no longer charged with a crime, she encountered a preposterous bureaucratic morass in her attempt to retrieve her own property.

This is not, as one might assume based on contact with other agencies, only about indifference or incompetence. It's also by design. Bureaucratic delay, like main force, is a tool the state wields to thwart and retaliate against citizens who exercise their rights in ways that the state's agents do not like. That's why, for instance, it once took me twelve days to get a client out of federal custody after he had been acquitted of all charges in a manner that infuriated the case agents and the judge; I was met at every turn by a wall of implacable leave-at-4:30, lose-paperwork, don't-return-calls bureaucracy. That's why I am still trying, three years later, to get a client's car keys back from the police department that arrested him. And I do this for a living. The vast majority of citizens, confronted with smug indifference or thinly-veiled hostility, give up before they succeed in forcing the government to respect their rights.

What's the answer? I don't know. But people like Carlos Miller covering the case and naming the names of the bureaucrats is a step in the right direction.

I know that I tend to be not a big fan of the institution of Police. All too often they (and here I usually mean the administrations) are a bullying lot striving to be unaccountable. Interestingly, every personal interaction I have had with officers has been positive (heck, an Alameda officer helped me break into my brother's house so I could feed their cats.) Still, the Oscar Grant story is the image that remains, or the Ryan Moats story or Amadou Diallo or the many clever things the NYPD can do with broomsticks. And that doesn't even begin to talk about the many cases of non-brutality good old fashioned corruption.

Oakland, post Oscar Grant, has been an interesting place. There is definitely racial tension, and a lot of anger against the authorities. I was on a bus the day after four Oakland Police were shot & killed by a criminal with an assault rifle and heard people talking about how it was revenge for Oscar Grant, or other stupidity. The simmering anger that lead to tear gas and riots in January remains under the surface.

And yet, in all this venom, a simple story of hope and beauty emerging from tragedy is what I care to remember. Officer John Hege, the last of the four officers to die, was an organ donor and his organs have already been used to give four men a new lease on life. He had reaffirmed his desire to be an organ donor last year. Sadly, he was the only one of the four officers that was an organ donor, who knows how much more life could have sprung from this tragedy.

The government — more specifically, the Federal Aviation Administration — thinks that you should be protected, for your own good, from your tendency towards irrational panic.

See, in the wake of this year's miraculous post-bird-strike Hudson River crash landing — or, as the airline industry prefers to call it, "unscheduled indefinite layover" — there's been a lot of curiosity about how often this sort of things happen. How many bird strikes are there every year? How often do they impede a flight? Are they on the rise? Has Tippi Hedren been warned?

Surely our public servants at the FAA have some information for us about such things. May we have it, please?

Nothing doing, citizen! Move along. You wouldn't make responsible use of that information.

Last Thursday, the FAA quietly published its proposal to keep the data secret in the Federal Register, a dry compendium of rules and proposals the government publishes daily.

The agency based its proposal on the assumption that the industry it regulates is more concerned about its image and profits than about the safety of its passengers.

"The agency is concerned that there is a serious potential that information related to bird strikes will not be submitted because of fear that the disclosure of raw data could unfairly cast unfounded aspersions on the submitter," the FAA said in the Federal Register.

See, we'd give you the information, but you just wouldn't be fair about it. It's your fault, really.

Now, you would think that the FAA operates on a free information and market theory principle that underlies our capitalistic system, under which consumers, fully informed, can make risk assessments and choose airlines accordingly, and thus reward safer airlines and punish more dangerous airlines.

The FAA thinks that's all bullshit.

The FAA is particularly worried that the public will compare the data on various airports. "Drawing comparisons between airports is difficult because of the unevenness of reporting," it said. Not only do some airports do a better job than others of reporting strikes, they also face different challenges based on the bird habitats in their areas, the agency said.

"Inaccurate portrayals of airports and airlines could have a negative impact on their participation in reporting bird strikes," FAA added.

Of course, consumer data will always have reporting flaws and perverse incentives. Part of the process of being an informed decision-maker is learning to detect and account for such deficiencies. But the FAA doesn't think we can be trusted to take such problems into account, doesn't think we should be allowed to see the raw data with appropriate caveats. The FAA does not think that we shall know the truth and the truth shall set us free. The FAA, rather, thinks that we can't handle the truth — not a truth about national security, but a truth about how many geese got pulverized by jet engines last year. It's not entirely clear if the FAA realizes that it's American. It's attitude sounds more Soviet to me.

The FAA has its own database of this information. It's a database created with my tax money, containing information gathered using my tax money, maintained by employees paid with my tax money, their fat civil-servant asses bechaired with my tax money.

I want my data.

Jeff Vogel has his second in a two part blog post detailing some of the cost and sales numbers for Spider Web's games (part the first). It's pretty fascinating even though he doesn't hand out every last detail. It also shows how leveraging online distribution allows a game maker to benefit from the long tail. Geneforge 4, the game detailed, is not yet profitable but is on the cusp. And is a sure thing to be a long-term money earner even if it's not spectacular by indie standards (which are irrelevant by the money-hat-making standards of someone like Blizzard or even the money-bracelet-making standards of Valve).  It costs Spiderweb software nothing to offer Geneforge 4 alongside all of its other games.  Here's hoping it sells at a steady rate from now until the stage 4 zombie outbreak Popehat has predicted for 2016, and that he and his are able to weather those trying times and begin making games anew as the remnants of society begin to pick up the pieces (we will need diversions to help ease the burden of the horrors that we came through, of course).

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A mysterious and mobile criminal stalked Germany. She was linked to seven murders and many other crimes. There were no clues to her identity — only her DNA, found at 39 crime scenes over two years. Was she a serial killer? A terrorist?

Nope. She worked at the factory that made the cotton swabs that the police used to collect DNA evidence. The supposedly sterile evidence collection tools were tainted.

As law enforcement becomes more reliant on high-tech methods, and as the public becomes more confident in them based on the influence of television forensics, it's important to remember that technological law enforcement is no more trustworthy than the people who design, manufacture, and use its tools.

I remember when it was quite the achievement that satellites could show the Great Wall of China, the most visible man-made object on Earth, in great detail.  Now, the International Space Station is poised soon to eclipse Venus, not literally but figuratively and only at some times, as a visible object in the solar system. Soon enough, the ISS will be visible to the keen-eyed without a telescope.

Someday the granchildren of my grandchildren, researching archaeology from the Ringworld, will find this post and smile.  But my smile is wider, at this moment.

Via The Gormogons.

There's probably about 1.1 million people in federal, state, and local custody right now based on drug charges. That's more people than live in Rhode Island — or in seven of our other states. The federal government spends about $20 billion a year on the War on Drugs, and the states spend about another $30 billion. (That's not counting the cost of incarcerating all those people, by the way — that costs a rough average of $70 per prisoner per day — try to multiply that by 1.1 million prisoners and 365 days and watch your calculator flash ERROR.) Granted, $50 billion doesn't sound like as much money as it did before the last six months, but it's still a fair piece of cash.

Despite all of this, the notion that we may want to reconsider the War on Drugs is, apparently, an occasion for giggles in the highest circles of power.

When President Obama encountered numerous questions about the potential legalization of marijuana in his online outreach today, he — and the people surrounding him, and the media reporting on it — responded like they were watching a Cheech and Chong movie:

Given the opportunity to say what’s really on their minds without going through the filter of the mainstream media, people “buzzed up” a series of questions that seemed to suggest broad interest in legalizing marijuana and taxing it.

That's Politico writer John Ward Anderson going for the rather lame pot joke. To his credit, he goes for the rest of the article without mentioning Doritos or bongwater.

After taking questions lower on the list, Obama addressed the pot issue head on, noting the huge number of questions about marijuana legalization and remarking with a chuckle, “I don't know what that says about the online audience."

"Hyuck hyuck! This new technology that got me elected is FILLED WITH HIPPIES! Hyuck!"

The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy," he said, as the audience in the room applauded and joined him in a laugh.

There are perfectly good reasons to be skeptical about whether legalizing marijuana and taxing it would have a substantial revenue impact. But there's no excuse for treating the subject of drug legalization as a joke. Obama can at least be credited with not reacting with mock OMG NO THINK OF THE CHIIILDRUUUN outrage, which is the standard response among mainstream politicians. But so long as he treats the issue as a joke, he's part of the problem. Drug legalization will remain a fringe issue until politicians have the courage to address it directly and seriously. Until then, we will continue to spend untold billions on an utterly hopeless war and incarcerate a sizable portion of the populace without significant reflection on whether it makes sense to be doing it. It's entirely possible that society will decide that the right answer is to continue criminalization. But right now, that's the decision by default, an unreflective reaction. The issue deserves more than that. It deserves more than jokes.