Domelights is a web forum much like our own, except that where our members discuss games, adoption, and what not, the members of Domelights discuss how great it is to be a cop in Philadelphia.

Officer Rochelle Bilal of the Philadelphia Police Department is not a fan of Domelights.  While Officer Bilal, who is black, agrees that it's great to be a Philadelphia cop, she doesn't understand why some of the members at Domelights, presumably cops themselves, feel compelled to spend so much time discussing black people in derogatory terms.

So Officer Rochelle is suing to have the site shut down.

The suit maintains that officers often make postings from department computers and that it is well-known among members of the nation's fourth-largest department. Though postings are anonymous, the site's founder and moderator — who uses the screen name "McQ" — is known to be an active sergeant in the department, the suit alleges.

"The Guardian Civic League has been watching Domelights for the past two years," said Rochelle Bilal, the group's president. "We are sick and tired of them hurting our people by their comments. … They are further dividing this institution."

The lawsuit cites racially derogatory commentary on the site, including one posting that says: "Guns don't kill people … Dangerous minorities do." Other posts include racial slurs and encourage racial profiling, according to the lawsuit.

I've uploaded a copy of the suit here: Guardian Civic v Philadelphia PD Domelights

In fairneess to Domelights, in addition to discussing how much they hate black people, the forum also hosts discussions on Philadelphia sports, restaurants, politics in general, and more.  It's a general interest forum, populated by cops.

The members of the Domelights forum, it's safe to say, aren't too pleased about the suit.  While Domelights itself is named as a party (by the way, good luck collecting damages from the owner of an open web forum just because its members write mean things), the main thrust of the suit is that the Philadelphia Police Department, itself a party, should be compelled to order its officers not to participate on the forum.  On pain of firing.

The suit is phrased in terms of civil rights, alleging that by allowing officers to post at Domelights, on or off the job, the Department subjects Bilal and other black officers to a hostile work environment.  I've poked around Domelights myself, and can't say that I like much of what I read there.  (Surprise – they also hate lawyers.) Nor for that matter am I fan of the Philadelphia PD in general, for reasons covered by my co-blogger Ken. But eh, I've read and heard worse.  Ultimately the case may end with the city ordering officers not to use work computers for any personal purpose, leaving more interesting First Amendment issues undecided.

But here's where the case gets interesting.  Right now at Domelights, there are a number of discussions (based on the New Haven firefighter case) of what a horrible, racist judge Sonia Sotomayor is and will be when she's confirmed for the Supreme Court.  Now I can't say what Third Circuit case law has to say about whether a public employer, such as the Philadelphia Police Department, can fire its employees for holding racist beliefs or for racist speech.

But I do know what the nearby Second Circuit has to say on the issue: YES WE CAN!

That was the conclusive holding of Pappas v. Giuliani, a 2002 decision in which the Court held, 2-1, that the New York Police Department could fire Officer Thomas Pappas for mailing racist materials and belonging to something called The National Association for the Advancement of White People.

The lone dissenting judge in the case?  Sonia Sotomayor, who would have held that Pappas's ideas and actions, while repulsive, were constitutionally protected even though he held a position of public responsibility as a police officer.

Pappas is a hard case from either side.  Personally I'm reluctantly inclined to side, with Sotomayor while at the same time shuddering in the knowledge that, had one of Sotomayor's colleagues joined her, a thoroughly vile character might still be on the New York Police Department.

Of course in some ways the Pappas case is easier than what's alleged here.  Pappas's speech was far more loathsome than the "locker room" casual redneck racism that's complained of in Domelights.  But in others the Pappas case is harder.  There was no evidence Pappas's speech was repeated on the job, while the Philly PD allegedly allows officers to post at Domelights from work computers.

This case, if its litigated fully (and it should be, as it presents interesting issues on the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act), may wind up before Sonia Sotomayor one day.  If and when that happens, she may have the opportunity, in the most emphatic way, to reverse her Second Circuit colleagues.

Do you think the folks at Domelights will appreciate her if that day comes?

Patrick previously wrote about Australia's internet censorship laws, which prohibit linking to various banned sites. I wrote about the censorious ambitions of some of its politicians, including in regards to games.

So I was interested to read Canadian free speech advocate Ezra Levant's article discussing — well, more accurately, ridiculing, Australia's internet blacklist. In what should be no shock to anyone who has ever read about a list of banned books, a no-fly list, or any other list of forbidden people or topics put together by the government, it's arbitrary, capricious, and laughable:

Needless to say, I was tempted to skim the names of the banned sites. Most of them are porn sites, and some have names that suggest child pornography, which is a crime. But that’s what we have courts for. The Australian blacklist wasn’t written by a court; there was no hearing where evidence was brought that these sites were criminal sites. A group of busybody human rights activists simply wrote the blacklist. Sounds Canadian, actually.

Many banned sites are merely offensive, but not illegal. And some sites are perfectly innocuous. For some secret reason, the web site www.vanbokhorst.nl is on the blacklist. If you’re not in Australia, feel free to give that one a click. It’s not a pornographic site. My Dutch is rusty, but it appears to be a web site for a forklift rental company in Holland.

How did Van Bokhorst get on the blacklist in Australia? Nobody knows because the process was kept secret, even from Van Bokhorst. It’s unlikely that Van Bokhorst had any Australian customers. But that’s not the point. Someone is making these clandestine decisions about what Australians can or can’t see.

Well, now, "forklift" just sounds dirty, so maybe that's it.

By the way — not only is the process secret, apparently the list itself is secret. So some group of bureaucrats — or possibly special interests selected by bureaucrats — are using secret, unreviewed, and unreviewable criteria to make a secret list of sites that Australians can't visit. For their own good.

Are Australians putting up with this? If so, why?

Perhaps you do, with some assistance from the NAACP.

An innovative national program to help fight crime in American cities and towns will be unveiled Monday, July 13th at the NAACP Centennial Convention in New York City.

The initiative includes a bold new online effort, the NAACP Rapid Report System (RRS), a quick, effective way for citizens to report instances of police misconduct, and to help public safety officials move beyond the “tough on crime” policies that have lost their effectiveness.

The Rapid Report System will be available starting July 6, through the NAACP website (www.naacp.org). The user-friendly online RRS form will allow residents to send instant texts, emails, or video reports of police abuse to the association via cell phone.

A mobile phone, at the right time, makes investigative journalists of us all.

Texts and emails are of limited value.  "He said. She said."  But photos, while they can be explained away, do capture a moment in time in a fairly indisputable fashion.  As for video, particularly extended video, I challenge anyone to show an innocent explanation for what happened to Father James Manship. Or, and while I was reluctant to use this video because its aftermath distracts from the point, this:

News media reports on this innovation call it an effort "to fight racism," particularly againt black people.  I wouldn't dispute that black people are on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of police abuse.  So are Latinos.  But it can happen to a white redneck who looks low rent, or an Asian-American, or a blue person.  It can happen to anyone.

I think that Radley Balko, who's made it a mission to document police abuse among many other things, is the most important journalist I regularly read.  The most important blogger to have emerged in the past year is Packratt, of Injustice Everywhere, who takes Balko's focus on police misconduct and injects it with steroids.  Sadly Packratt may shut his site down, but we are slowly, a little more every day, approaching a point where the thickheads who've given the honorable profession of policeman a bad name will realize that they may be watched at any time.   Someday, even police who are inclined to abuse may govern themselves accordingly.

But the resources that people like Balko and Packratt have are peanuts compared to the NAACP.  The added assistance and credibility of a powerful, almost establishment organization like the NAACP, will only hurry that day up.  If you care to see the NAACP's reporting page for mobile phones, click here.

America stands at a precipice, friends.

If we take one wrong step, we will plunge into an abyss filled with Lenin-quoting vampires, atheistic secret police, world serfdom, and rampant inflation.

If we take the right step, we will enter a new age.  Jesus and Friedrich Hayek will descend from Heaven, routing the atheists with gold-plated .45 revolvers of love.  King Odysseus and Queen Penelope will rule over an America reborn in the image of Ithaca, dispensing justice to the Leninist vampires who would steal Telemachus's birthright.

But there's a problem.  It is pitch black at the precipice.  Which way shall we step?

What America needs is a guide: a man who can show us the light, lead us into the new era of respect for individual rights, freedom, and ample quotation of the collected works of Burke, Locke, and Friedman.  Away from slavery, cannibalism, and Marxist Che-quoting vampires.

That man is Dr. Elliot McGucken, visiting instructor at the Seaver College of Business Administration at Pepperdine University, and inventor of the patented (pending) "System and Method for Creating Exalted Video Games and Virtual Realities."

Dr. McGucken recognizes that video games are a force in this world, a force which can be used for good, or evil.  Where Dr. McGucken differs from past video game designers, such as Richard Garriott, Sid Meier, Warren Spector, and the guy who wrote Leather Goddesses of Phobos, is that he intends to introduce the element of moral choice into games.  To show players, and therefore America, that each of us, at all times, has a choice between good and evil.  A choice between quoting the collected works of Hayek, and those of the insidious communist Mao Tse-Tung!

But McGucken's work doesn't stop there.  McGucken also proves that choices have consequences.  Whereas in pre-McGucken era video games, the choice between shooting a communist space invader and not shooting the communist space invader had no consequences whatsoever, under the patented (pending) McGucken system, the player's choice, upon meeting a woman of low character, to quote the work of Ayn Rand or Thomas Jefferson, as opposed to that of Mikhail Bakunin or Joseph Stalin, may be one of earth-shattering consequences.  Quote Rand, and the player (and by extension America) will convert the loose woman into a God-fearing virgin warrior for freedom and justice, suitable for marriage.  Quote Stalin, and the Earth will be consumed in a holocaust of communist vampire slavery!

Every time.

McGucken's patented (pending) System proves that by playing video games the McGucken way, America's moral fibre will be regenerated, and the nation reborn.  Play them the old-fashioned way, and, well, best not to think about that.

Don't believe me?  I understand that McGucken's concepts of video game design, choice, consequence, and opposition to communist star vampires may prove difficult to understand for those who've not been exposed to the System.  Perhaps these diagrams and flowcharts, from the great man's patent application, may prove useful:

Begins to make sense, doesn't it?

Now you understand why Elliot McGucken is quoted by the New York Times as an expert on art, video games, and many other things besides, and you're not.

I for one look forward to the day when I can make a difference, shooting communist space vampires under the patented McGucken system to promote freedom and Jesus, rather than shooting them mindlessly as I've done in the past.

Via Metafilter.

Update: I see that I am not alone in my appreciation for the McGucken Plan for the Betterment of Loose Women, America, and Video Games.

Tchaikovsky abused his wife, Antonina Milyukova.  He led Milyukova into a loveless marriage based on false pretenses.  He verbally abused her, calling her a "reptile."  He probably beat her.

And so, according to Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, we should replace children's showings of "The Nutcracker" each Christmas with music by other composers, such as Liszt.  Well, Antonovich doesn't go that far.  He just wants to remove all of Richard Wagner's music from the Los Angeles County Ring festival, and replace it with Mozart.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich is demanding that Los Angeles Opera discontinue the Ring Festival L.A. planned for next year, calling Richard Wagner a, “Nazi composer.”

“To specifically honor and glorify the man whose music and racist anti-Semitic writings inspired Hitler and became the de facto soundtrack for the Holocaust in a countywide festival is an affront to those who have suffered or have been impacted by the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialistic Worker Party,” Antonovich said in a statement released today.

Leaving aside that a Ring festival with out Wagner wouldn't be a Ring festival, Wagner is an unfortunate illustration of the truth that great artists are not always great men.  He is doubly unfortunate in that he shows us that genuinely bad men sometimes have good taste in art.  Although Wagner was by most accounts a gentle man who never lifted a hand in anger, he was a vocal anti-semite, which might have played some role in the attraction Hitler felt to Wagner's operas.

Or it might not have.  As an Austrian German, Hitler also appreciated the work of Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, the Strausses, and other composers whose work isn't proposed for a ban in Los Angeles.  Hitler was born six years after Wagner died.  There is no evidence that Wagner's music or librettos played any role in forming Hitler's anti-semitism.

In fact, what are the allegedly anti-semitic elements of the Ring?  Dwarves.  Wagner's Ring cycle, drawn from German pagan / Norse mythology, concerns in part the fate of a magic ring, forged by a dwarf.  According to those who'd ban Wagner, the dwarf is a stand-in, an allegory for Jewish people, because as we all know, Jews are short people who live underground and love gold.

No doubt that's what the Danes were thinking, all the way over in Scandinavia, when they spun the myth cycles on which The Ring is based.  No doubt that's what Tolkien was thinking, when he, like Wagner, drew on these myths to create his own art based around magic rings and gold-loving dwarves.  As did the Japanese, the pagan Welsh, and the Iroquois, all of whom also had myths of powerful but little people living underground.

Or perhaps The Ring isn't an anti-semitic allegory at all.  As a famous dwarf once said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," and sometimes a 14 hour opera about the end of the world is just a silly mythological story with great music.  In either case, I suspect Mike Antonovich is no more qualified to judge Wagner's music by its aesthetic merit than he is the music of Tchaikovsky because the man mistreated his wife.

We'll have to throw out a lot of great art if we judge work by the character of its producer.  We'll start with Wagner, no doubt, but it won't end there.  We'll have to throw out Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Debussy, and more.  We'll move on to literature, pulling Twain, Poe, T S Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway from the shelves.  Then we'll burn El Greco, Picasso, and Van Gogh.  And so on and so forth.

And finally, when art is purified of bad men, Mike Antonovich and all the good people of Los Angeles can enjoy a county-sponsored exhibition of the works of Thomas Kinkade, followed by a concert featuring the music of Barry Manilow, and a nice glass of lemonade.

Mark Bennett, consummate defense attorney and proprietor of the hold-no-punches-take-no-prisoners Defending People blog, will no longer accept anonymous comments — we wants real names and verifiable email addresses. In this, he is joining a minor movement.

I'll miss commenting at Mark's blog. I'm secure in my reasons for blogging semi-anonymously, and at peace with the fact that some people I respect think it's chickenshit. Obviously, as semi-anonymous bloggers, we won't be requiring commenters here to use their real names. We will, however, continue to reap your credit card information and your hot cousin's beach pictures from your hard drives.

Read this open letter from the faculty of the University of California at San Diego, and weep.  Not for the University, or the faculty, but for the taxpayers and citizens of the state of California.

A few thoughts:

• The tenured faculty also weep, WEEP!, at the thought of taking a five percent pay cut at their tenured, guaranteed-for-life jobs. Not for themselves, but for the people of the State, which risks losing a "world class" university system.  A system whose world-classness includes the University of California at San Diego (which I've barely heard of, but what do I know?), but excludes all universities lower on the system totem pole.
• Meanwhile, the state which pays them is issuing kited checks to pay its obligations.  The taxpayers of California are losing their jobs in droves.  But they'll have a "world class" department of sociology at UCSD, which is also known to billions for its oceanography department.
• In the spirit of oceanography, the faculty propose savage cuts for "scrub" schools such as UC-Riverside, which serve the poor and modest who can't get into UCSD.  Throw those kids, and their schools, to Shamu the killer whale, so long as we don't have to eat five percent less food on the lifeboat.
• The chair of the economics department, who also signed, evidently fails to consider that if a pay cut for the economics faculty at "world class" UCSD is bad, but a pay cut for faculty at smaller schools is good, perhaps eliminating UCSD and funneling the money to genuinely world class Berkeley and UCLA might be even better.
• The faculty protest their undying loyalty to the University, which they've struggled so hard to build, and then admit that if their pay is cut they'll cut and run to better paying schools as soon as the economy improves.  The lone historian who signed the letter, if candid, might describe himself and his compatriots as "mercenaries."
• It's ok to be a mercenary.  It's an ancient and honest profession with roots going back to ancient Greece.  But there's another Greek-derived term for a mercenary who refuses to admit he's a mercenary: hypocrite.
• Another historian, classically trained, might describe the lament as fiddling while Rome burns.  It's not as though much of California's financial crisis can't be laid at the feet of sociologists and the like, who in better times urged their government to spend like a coke fiend on whatever crisis commanded the attention of sociologists that day.
• And speaking of economics, if the faculty believe that generous salaries from private universities, or other state systems, are just around the corner, well perhaps they should consult a member of the oceanographic zoology department on how long it takes a starved killer whale to rebuild its reserves of fat.

I have a more radical proposal, which would be of equal benefit to the taxpayers of California, and allow San Diego to keep its world class university.  Approximately half of the signatories belong to departments which produce students who may in turn produce something of economic value to California.  Fire them, but keep and reorganize their departments.

As for the other half, from the departments of sociology, music, political science, international studies, philosophy, communication, and education studies, whatever those are, eliminate their departments entirely, and transfer the money to UCLA and Berkeley.  Because what California needs, more than a government able to pay its bills with dollars instead of scrip, is a world class university.

America has long faced stiff competition in the sciences, from Japan, Europe, Russia, and now China and India. But if Kansas Senator Sam Brownback's Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act of 2009 passes, expect our lead in science to vanish:

It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly, in or otherwise affecting interstate commerce:

1. create or attempt to create a human-animal hybrid;
2. transfer or attempt to transfer a human embryo into a non-human womb;
3. transfer or attempt to transfer a non-human embryo into a human womb; or
4. transport or receive for any purpose a human-animal hybrid.

Under Brownback's bill, the simple creation of new forms of life, even for the noblest of purposes, would be punishable be up to ten years in prison and a fine of one million dollars.  The overall effect on research into forbidden knowledge would be catastrophic.

Lest you call me mad, consider that this law goes far beyond the dark art of forming so-called "human-animal hybrids," and it's not only the Doctor Moreaus of America whose inquiries into advanced biology would be prohibited.  Why entire fields of research would shut down:

The term `human-animal hybrid' means …

a non-human life form engineered such that it contains a human brain or a brain derived wholly or predominantly from human neural tissues.

Yes, under a restrictive reading even the creation of cybernetic organisms would become a crime, not just against the so-called Natural Order, but against the laws of man as well.  And where will it stop?  What will they forbid next?  Mathematical study of the non-Euclidean geometries of space-time? The creation of new life from dead matter? Exploration of the building blocks of matter? Spectacular advances in the field of medicine? Unorthodox theories of cartography? Basic nanotechnological research? Design of autonomous self-replicating machines programmed to relentlessly destroy all life in the universe?

What's worse is that laws of this sort will have no lasting effect.  While the loss of so many great minds would indeed be a tragedy for the American economy, geniuses whose gifts are unappreciated, those whom society calls mad, will simply transfer their researches overseas.  Even in the conventional sciences, America faces a "brain drain."  But those whose lust for knowledge, for power, for conquest!, carries them into that which is forbidden will go overseas, to Transylvania, to uncharted volcanic islands, or to serve the Nazi Hell Creatures Who Live Within The Hollow Earth.

I, for one, decry this attempt to strangle budding sciences in the crib.  Senators such as Sam Brownback, while well-intentioned and obviously lacking for work, may make useful servants to the race of Human-Animal Hybrid Supermen of tomorrow, but they're not qualified to legislate on science, much less on The Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

I want my country to keep its lead in sciences of all description, so that other nations may tremble when some misunderstood genius cries, "Today America. Tomorrow the world!"

"The right of martial artists, to keep and bear numchucks, shall not be infringed."

Today is without a doubt one of the oddest in the history of Supreme Court nominations, or indeed Senate debate (and that's setting the bar low indeed), in that we have heard repeated references, from Senators and the media, to "numchucks".

In the spirit of the times, it behooves us all to learn these facts about nunchaku:

• Sonia Sotomayor is, to our knowledge, the most prominent federal judge to address the question of whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms includes the right to brandish nunchaku. Unfortunately, Judge Sotomayor dodged the important question of whether nunchaku are "arms" of the sort used by founding era militia.
• The most famous wielder of nunchaku was undoubtedly Bruce Lee, whose rout of Mr. Han's private army in Enter the Dragon is rightly regarded as one of the greatest fight scenes in movie history.  Unfortunately, British film and dvd viewers could not watch this scene in its original glory, because the British Board of Film Classification banned the depiction of nunchaku in any form.

• Considering recent controversy regarding alleged misuse or overuse of the TASER by police, it's comforting to know that  Orcutt Police Defensive Systems, Inc., of Denver Colorado, markets the Orcutt Police Nunchaku, or OPN-III, as a safe and non-lethal alternative for control of suspects.  According to the manufacturer, "over 200 law enforcement agencies across the United States have field tested and adopted the Orcutt Police Nunchaku as their primary control device."
• In addition to its primary modern role as a safe and non-lethal tool for the police, nunchaku can be used to drive golf balls, open wine bottles, and to light up a cigar.

(Thanks to Twitter user Stwbrry_Blonde for the tip.)

In competition with Ken's post immediately below, we do have a competitor for the "Quickest to act like an asshat lawyer" record: Dora V. Chen, "Esq.," assistant general counsel to the Service Employees International Union.

Ms. Chen wants Little Rock Arkansas television station KTHV, and a few similar stations, to know that if they continue to run paid ads opposing the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, a federal bill which would abolish anonymous voting for employees considering the question of whether to unionize, her union, its officials, and members might, just might, flood the station with complaints to the Federal Communications Commission seeking revocation of broadcast licenses:

As you undoubtedly know, unlike federal candidates, political organizations do not have a right to command the use of broadcast facilities.  Because you have no legal obligation to air the advertisement, your station bears  responsibility for its content when you do grant access.  As a broadcast licensee, you must assume responsibility for all material which is broadcast through your facilities and therefore have a duty to protect the public from false, misleading, or deceptive advertising.  Failure to prevent the airing of false, misleading, or deceptive advertising may be probative of an abdication of licensee responsibility.

You should immediately cease airing this false and deceitful advertisement.  [Citations omitted.]

Let's be clear here, since Ms. Chen isn't.  Her warning is an implicit threat to file a grievance against television stations with the FCC concerning political speech.  It is highly, highly unlikely that even the FCC, a board consisting of appointed partisan hacks, would ever uphold such a complaint.  Even if it did, by the time the matter got to a federal court for review, the complaint would instantly be dismissed on First Amendment grounds.

The cases Ms. Chen cites in her letter concern broadcaster liability for the tort of defaming a private person (calling a politician a "communist" in 1947), and technical license violations by a broadcaster which obtained its license through false pretenses, informing the FCC that it would show news programming, which in fact consisted of reading the Racing Report in Hungarian.  Neither case applies.  The "communist" case was decided before New York Times v. Sullivan (actual malice for defamation of public figures) and a host of post-1960 First Amendment cases, and there's no evidence that KTHV deceived the FCC, or anyone else, to obtain its license.

In any event, how can one defame a bill? This little guy:

presumably lacks standing to sue, or to file an FCC complaint.

No, what SEIU and Dora V. Chen, "Esq" (incidentaly, it is a hallmark of pomposity and pretension in a lawyer when one refers to herself as "Esquire") are doing is using the threat of litigation to shut down public debate, political speech they, for understandable reasons, doesn't like.  They know they couldn't get away with suing the ad's creators for defaming the Employee Free Choice Act, or anything else, so they'll intimidate anyone who dares to run the ad, making sure its message isn't heard, by threatening a license revocation complaint.

Winning the complaint wouldn't be the issue.  Intimidation would be.  Of course any complaint against a small-town television station, no matter how frivolous, against the federal government as well as a million-plus member union like SEIU (which can spend its members' money without their consent for this sort of intimidation), would be ruinous.  Don't like it?  Enjoy the the legal bills, hicks!

And so political speech is shut down without a shot fired, or a suit filed.  Of course, threats and complaints of this sort could be addressed, and the tables turned, if federal law included remedies such as California's anti-SLAPP law, which allows the victim of a complaint directed against legal speech to recover damages and attorneys' fees from those, such as the SEIU, who abuse litigation to shut it down.

Perhaps KTHV and others in their situation should run a television ad in favor of a federal anti-SLAPP statute.  I'd watch.

Note: The title of this post is intended to remind the reader that many unions, such as but not necessarily including the Service Employees International Union, were or are affiliated with the Mafia and other organized crime gangs, and that many unions, such as but not necessarily including the Service Employees International Union, use intimidation, including the threat of baseless legal complaints, to enforce their will.

Perhaps Dora Chen, "Esq." will now seek to have my blogging license revoked.

Via Walter Olson, through Twitter.

Failblog was originally a creation of Eric Nakagawa, who discovered a method of monetizing lolcats. Had he used that level of creativity for good, we might now all be riding cancer-free solar hovercars to a peaceful Gaza. Thanks a lot, asshole. Anyway, failblog runs pictures of various human failures, with FAIL printed over them for those of its readers who are a little slow on the uptake.

Recently Failblog had a good one. Noting that the Guiness World Records site featured a "Break This Record!" button on many of the pages describing various records, they searched for a record that would make that exhortation embarrassing. It wasn't hard to find:

In case you can't read it, Guinness just encouraged you to break the record for most people killed in a terrorist attack.

Funny. That is to say, amusing, to normal human beings. Not, though, to lawyers. Quick, send in the lawyers. Don't worry, they're here.

Dear Sir/Madam,
I represent and write on behalf of GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS LIMITED . . . .

. . . and so on, claiming trademark infringement. I guess it's possible that Guinness's lawyers are unfamiliar with the concept of fair use. Maybe they don't have fair use in England. God knows their libel law is ludicrous enough; it wouldn't surprise me. Anywhere else in the world, though, this is a patently frivolous cease-and-desist letter.

Failblog, to its credit, mocks them in response:

Thanks for writing us an email regarding the “Record Breaking Fail”. Unfortunately, douchebaggy cyber-bullying emails will only bring upon you more shame on your house. I am also resisting the urge to write this email in ALL CAPS.

It's hard to imagine how Guinness could have thought that this would bring them anything but ridicule.

1. Cracked.com's Five Stages of Political Excuses chart is satirical, but also frighteningly accurate.

2. Despite the fact that Dungeons & Dragons players and Trekkies are rougly equivalent on the geek hierarchy, you might think that Trekkies get a raw deal, because D&D players have outdoor diversions like live action roleplaying and the Society for Creative Anachronisms, and Trekkies don't. At least in Oregon, you would be wrong.

Last week's dress rehearsal at the Northeast Portland park attracted some curious onlookers, a neighborhood kid the cast seems to have adopted as its mascot and a confused bicyclist who rode through the middle of the set and parked his bike during a dramatic standoff — proof that this is not a production of Shakespeare in the Park. Characters communicating with the Enterprise were played by an actor wielding a bullhorn offstage. An actress doubling as T'Pau, a high-ranking member of Vulcan society, sang the operatic opening as the synthesizer made spooky noises. Spock's pointy ears looked a little fake, but Graff said he'll have better ones by opening night.

Item the First: John Cougar Mellencamp is a censorious twit:

“I don’t think people fought and gave their lives so that some guy can sit in his bedroom and be mean. I don’t think that’s what freedom of speech is,” he continued. “Freedom of speech is really about assembly — for us to collectively have an idea. We want to get our point of view out so we can assemble and I can appoint you to be the spokesman. That’s freedom of speech — to be able to collectively speak for a sector of people. But somehow it’s turned into ‘I can be an asshole whenever I feel like, say whatever I like, be disrespectful to people and not be courteous.’ It’s not good for our society. Not being courteous is not really freedom of speech. …

John, if it's any comfort to you, I'm sitting on the living-room couch as I type that you are a whiny douche. (hat tip: Kathy Shaidle.)

Item the Second: Hey, turns out that Obama is a terrorist threat to America after all:

Court papers filed Thursday show that prison officials twice rejected requests by inmate Ahmed Omar Abu Ali to read "Dreams from my Father" and "The Audacity of Hope."

The books contained material "potentially detrimental to national security," prison officials said in two separate rejections from August and September.

Are boredom and mild nausea dangerous to national security? And are Obama's books dangerous only if read by Supermaxed terrorists, or by anybody? Because there's a shitload of Freepers out there going over it like the Bible code, looking for seeekret Moooslem messages.

On Friday, bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley said the bureau reversed course in November and let him read the books.

Abu Ali is serving 30 years in the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., for joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate then-President George W. Bush.

That's bad. Nevertheless, making him read "The Audacity of Hope" seems a bit harsh.

Item the Third: South Dakota Judge John Delaney gave marijuana activist Bob Newland a choice: take two years in prison, or take 45 days in prison, probation, and a gag order prohibiting him from advocating the legalization of marijuana.

Judges generally have broad discretion to frame conditions of probation. Eugene Volokh — blogging about the subject in the context of a woman ordered to have no more children as a condition of probation — asserts that "generally probation conditions are constitutional — even when they restrict constitutional rights such as the freedom of speech or the freedom of association — whenever they are "reasonably related to legitimate penological interests," a test that is easy to meet." Here, Judge Delaney's order prohibits Newland from not just telling people they ought to smoke marijuana — it prohibits him from arguing that marijuana laws should be changed:

While under the court's supervision for the next year, Newland must not exercise his First Amendment right to advocate for marijuana law reform in South Dakota.

Here's the question: how is it legitimate, in a free society, for the state to prevent a citizen from advocating a change in the law? Judge Delaney expresses concern that Newland will encourage marijuana use among youth by advocating the repeal of marijuana prohibition. Which is more corrosive to our youth: the message that some people question the legitimacy of marijuana laws, or the message that it is appropriate for the state to restrict them from doing so?

A 9th Circuit panel ruled today that pharmacists may not refuse to stock Plan B, the morning after pill on the grounds that it is a violation of their religion. A Seattle district court had earlier enjoined Washington from enforcing a state law that required pharmacies to stock the pill; today's ruling dissolves that injunction. The 9th Circuit found that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment did not override a generally applicable pharmacy regulation. Good for them.

I don't accept that the objecting pharmacists are the victims here. Pharmacists are licensed gatekeepers to restricted medication. Refusal to fill a Plan B prescription is an abuse of authority not far removed from a judge refusing bail to prevent a pregnant woman from obtaining an abortion.

My father was a pharmacist. For most of my childhood he owned his own small pharmacy. He frequently let his conscience be his guide in deciding how to do his job. Fortunately for the people of Queens, my father's conscience guided him to, say, sell condoms to young teens (because they were clearly going to have sex with or without his approval) or provide small-pox vaccine injections without always collecting the mandatory fee (because small pox shouldn't be a consequence of poverty). What he didn't do was act as if his conscience permitted him to override his customer's agency or substitute his own judgment for that of his patients' doctors.

There are probably less-restrictive alternatives than a must-stock law. The Oregon Board of Pharmacy Code of Conduct, for example, does not require a pharmacy to stock any particular drug but, in the absence of a non-objecting pharmacist, requires timely referrals to a pharmacy that does stock Plan B. In their words, "It is the Board's belief that pharmacy policies and procedures could allow a pharmacist to exercise his or her choice to not participate, and at the same time not interfere with the patient's right to receive appropriate and lawfully prescribed drug therapy."

Since it was Justice Scalia that first announced, in Employment Division v. Smith, that the free exercise clause did not override non-discriminatory, generally applicable legislation, I'm curious to see how he rules when the proscribed activity is something he is a bit more sympathetic to than peyote use.

If you visit any gaming-related sites, you've probably seen advertisements for a browser-based strategy game called "Evony." No, I won't link it, for reasons that will become obvious. The advertisements emphasize three primary themes: (1) boobs, (2) boobs, and (3) the ability to "play discreetly," by which I think they mean at work without getting fired. (Good luck with that. As an employer familiar with computers and loafing, please be informed that you are not as clever as you think you are, and I am not as dumb.)

Browser games are a fun diversion. We've recommended many here. I've played many of them. I like strategy games, and I love the Civilization series on which Evony is apparently heavily based. I'm the target audience for this thing.

But I will never, in a million years, play it, and I will suggest that others avoid it like the plague.

Why? Well it's not, as Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror suggests, because Evony's entirely boob-based advertising treats me like a drooling 14-year-old. I drink beer, after all; it would be hypocritical to complain about that.

No, it's because for the last few weeks Evony has been deluging us with obnoxious comment spam:

I just started playing this new game called evony. It’s pretty sweet I think you guys would like it. Just a simple little flash game, but damn its addicting. You can sign up for an account at [ ].

I just found this cool new game called evony. Check it out at []

And so on. They're automatically posted here in the comments to game-related posts, sometimes as often as dozens of times a day.

Let's get this straight. Online pharmacies and questionable purveyors of herbal remedies advertise by comment spam. Substances and devices allegedly capable of improving my dick advertise by comment spam. Porn sites advertise by comment spam. Nigerian princes advertise by comment spam. Fraudulent financial services advertise by comment spam. Sites designed to cripple your system with malware and viruses advertise by comment spam.

Legitimate business, and legitimate sites, do not advertise by comment spam. I associate comment spam with the underbelly of the web, with fraud and crime and child porn and things that will break my computer in ways I am too dumb to understand. Why would I possibly go to a site that advertises this way? Am I that stupid? Maybe Evony's site won't inflict malware on my computer. But I won't take that chance. Given the company Evony has chosen to keep, you shouldn't either.

Edit: I see that Bruce on Games is annoyed by the same thing.