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Showing posts with label by: J. D. Heyes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label by: J. D. Heyes. Show all posts
New program plans to mandate electronic updateable license plates that track your every move
Amnesty for illegal immigrants will turn America into another Mexico: Socialism, corruption, destruction of Bill of Rights
Just another amnesty, you ask? Yes. Just another amnesty. As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun here.
Immigration amnesty bill would instantly put millions on welfare
At a time when the U.S. government is spending a trillion dollars more a year than it takes in, it makes no sense at all for our elected leaders to be considering any legislation that adds to the federal deficit, which is already more than 100 percent of our entire gross domestic product.
Obama's new budget a complete lie: Massive spending increases, virtually no cuts
Most Americans know that politicians use a lot of fiction when it comes to things like budget calculations. That is especially true in the nation's capital, where simply not increasing spending as much from one year to the next qualifies as a real budget cut.
U.S. government plans to scan your private emails using cybersecurity program as a cover
As mainstream political and media figures head-fake the country with near wall-to-wall coverage of whether men and women should be allowed to marry each other, the U.S. government is planning to snoop through more and more of your private email, using the "threat of cyber terrorism" as its excuse.
America is veering towards dictatorship, Supreme court justices and top government officials warn
When you hear some pundit or historian compare the loss of democratic republican rule currently taking place in the United States with how it happened in ancient Rome, you may be tempted to shrug it off as hyperbole or over dramatization.
When you hear a U.S. Supreme Court Justice and other top government officials use the comparison, it should alarm you tremendously because they are, in essence, firing a warning shot.
In a recent Q & A with students of the University of New Hampshire, former Justice David Souter made the comparison above, along with several other observations that he says all add up to a potential loss of democratic government - and freedom - for Americans at some point in the future.
Stand with Rand meme goes mega-viral across net as citizens get fed up with Obama's lawlessness
Patriotic Americans fed up with the growing lawlessness of the Obama administration and the opposition party's chronic inability to counter him got a huge shot in the arm the evening of March 6, when Sen. Rand Paul took to the floor of the Senate to stand up for the Constitution.
Jury nullification education still barely 'legal' in USA, rules judge
Julian P. Heicklen says he merely hands out brochures.
Jury nullification, a legal concept that dates back to 17th century England, remains perfectly lawful in the United States, according to a ruling by a federal judge last month.
U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood said 80-year-old Julian Heicklin, who was arrested by FBI agents for passing out pamphlets marked "Jury Info" from an organization known as the Fully Informed Jury Association to an undercover agent, was within his legal rights under law to do so. Prosecutors had argued that Heicklin was in violation of U.S. law, which prohibits influencing jurors through written communication.
"Heicklen advocates passionately for the right of jurors to determine the law as well as the facts," Wood wrote. "The pamphlets state that a juror has not just the responsibility to determine the facts of a case before her on the basis of the evidence presented, but also the power to determine the law according to her conscience."
Jurors can be told about nullification, not about how to decide a specific case
Wood said Heicklen well understood his legal rights, and noted that Title 18 United States Code, which government lawyers cited in their prosecution, prevents trying to influence a juror in relation to specific cases or points of law. Heicklen was not doing that, Wood said.
"The statute thus prohibits a defendant from trying to influence a juror upon any case or point in dispute before that juror by means of a written communication in relation to that case or that point in dispute," the 27-page order says.
"It also prohibits a defendant from trying to influence a juror's actions or decisions pertaining to that juror's duties, but only if the defendant made that communication in relation to a case or point in dispute before that juror," the order continues. "The statute therefore squarely criminalizes efforts to influence the outcome of a case, but exempts the broad categories of journalistic, academic, political, and other writings that discuss the roles and responsibilities of jurors in general, as well as innocent notes from friends and spouses encouraging jurors to arrive on time or to rush home, to listen closely or to deliberate carefully, but with no relation to the outcome of a particular case."
Judge the law instead of the lawbreaker
The concept of jury nullification is that jurors should be able to not only decide whether a defendant violated the law, but whether the law itself is just and proper. Another way to describe the process is that it's a constitutional doctrine allowing juries to acquit defendants who are technically guilty of a crime on the books but who juries don't feel deserve to be punished. In essence, the jury is saying the law is unfair or unjust.
In Heicklen's case, Wood wrote, "the court reads the plain text of the [federal] statute to require that a defendant must have sought to influence a juror through a written communication in relation either to a specific case before that juror or to a substantive point in dispute between two or more parties before that juror." And Heinklen, a retired chemistry professor, didn't do that, Wood ruled; he was simply informing juries outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan, from October 2009 to May 2010, that they were under no obligation to find defendants guilty of laws they didn't feel were just or proper.
In his dialogue with the undercover FBI agent who posed as a juror, Heicklen said the pamphlet he was handing out was just general information regarding the nullification process.
"The jury has the right to judge the law as well as the facts. The judge will tell you otherwise, but there are several Supreme Court decisions which said that was true. In other words, if you think the law is unjust you can find a person innocent," he said, according to a transcript of the conversation released by the court.
Prosecutors argued that "advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred."
"His speech is not protected by the First Amendment," they added. "No legal system could long survive if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable," they said.
Prosecutors were seeking six months in jail. They didn't get it.
U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood said 80-year-old Julian Heicklin, who was arrested by FBI agents for passing out pamphlets marked "Jury Info" from an organization known as the Fully Informed Jury Association to an undercover agent, was within his legal rights under law to do so. Prosecutors had argued that Heicklin was in violation of U.S. law, which prohibits influencing jurors through written communication.
"Heicklen advocates passionately for the right of jurors to determine the law as well as the facts," Wood wrote. "The pamphlets state that a juror has not just the responsibility to determine the facts of a case before her on the basis of the evidence presented, but also the power to determine the law according to her conscience."
Jurors can be told about nullification, not about how to decide a specific case
Wood said Heicklen well understood his legal rights, and noted that Title 18 United States Code, which government lawyers cited in their prosecution, prevents trying to influence a juror in relation to specific cases or points of law. Heicklen was not doing that, Wood said.
"The statute thus prohibits a defendant from trying to influence a juror upon any case or point in dispute before that juror by means of a written communication in relation to that case or that point in dispute," the 27-page order says.
"It also prohibits a defendant from trying to influence a juror's actions or decisions pertaining to that juror's duties, but only if the defendant made that communication in relation to a case or point in dispute before that juror," the order continues. "The statute therefore squarely criminalizes efforts to influence the outcome of a case, but exempts the broad categories of journalistic, academic, political, and other writings that discuss the roles and responsibilities of jurors in general, as well as innocent notes from friends and spouses encouraging jurors to arrive on time or to rush home, to listen closely or to deliberate carefully, but with no relation to the outcome of a particular case."
Judge the law instead of the lawbreaker
The concept of jury nullification is that jurors should be able to not only decide whether a defendant violated the law, but whether the law itself is just and proper. Another way to describe the process is that it's a constitutional doctrine allowing juries to acquit defendants who are technically guilty of a crime on the books but who juries don't feel deserve to be punished. In essence, the jury is saying the law is unfair or unjust.
In Heicklen's case, Wood wrote, "the court reads the plain text of the [federal] statute to require that a defendant must have sought to influence a juror through a written communication in relation either to a specific case before that juror or to a substantive point in dispute between two or more parties before that juror." And Heinklen, a retired chemistry professor, didn't do that, Wood ruled; he was simply informing juries outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan, from October 2009 to May 2010, that they were under no obligation to find defendants guilty of laws they didn't feel were just or proper.
In his dialogue with the undercover FBI agent who posed as a juror, Heicklen said the pamphlet he was handing out was just general information regarding the nullification process.
"The jury has the right to judge the law as well as the facts. The judge will tell you otherwise, but there are several Supreme Court decisions which said that was true. In other words, if you think the law is unjust you can find a person innocent," he said, according to a transcript of the conversation released by the court.
Prosecutors argued that "advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred."
"His speech is not protected by the First Amendment," they added. "No legal system could long survive if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable," they said.
Prosecutors were seeking six months in jail. They didn't get it.
by: J. D. Heyes
Sources for this article include:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/04/23/45865.htm
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.letsgetfreethebook.com
Global Eonomic Collapse in less than 20 years
MIT computer simulation predicts total global economic collapse in less than 20 years
by: J. D. HeyesDon't look now, but some of the world's smartest people are even predicting the end of the global economic order as we know it, and they're saying it'll happen within the next two decades.
According to a group of researchers from the Jay W. Forrester's institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a computer simulation concluded that the world could suffer a "global economic collapse" coupled by a "precipitous population decline" at current rates of resource consumption.
The research was conducted on behalf of a group known as the The Club of Rome, which bills itself "as an informal association of independent leading personalities from politics, business and science, men and women who are long-term thinkers interested in contributing in a systemic interdisciplinary and holistic manner to a better world." Founded in 1968, The Club of Rome aims "to identify the most crucial problems which will determine the future of humanity through integrated and forward-looking analysis; to evaluate alternative scenarios for the future and to assess risks, choices and opportunities," and to help find solutions to "challenges."
According to the group's web site, the research project "took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios."
"Part of the modeling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection," it said.
World still on course for self-destruction
The recent MIT research builds upon an earlier body of work from the same esteemed institution, dated 1972, that some in the scientific community regard infamous. According to a report in the Smithsonian Magazine, a team led by researcher Dennis Meadows used computer modeling for the first time in an attempt to answer "a centuries-old question: When will the population outgrow the planet and the natural resources it has to offer?"
That work was later made into a book titled The Limits to Growth and has since sold over 10 million copies in 37 languages. Essentially it "warned that if current trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continued, that dark time -- marked by a plummeting population, a contracting economy and environmental collapse -- would come within 100 years," the Smithsonian Magazine reported.
That work was later supported by data presented in the form of a graph designed by Australian physicist Graham Turner, which purports to show how actual data from the 30-year period between 1970 and 2000 matches almost exactly predictions set forth in Meadows' work.
Meadows, who retired in 2004 after 35 years as a professor at MIT, Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire, discussed his original research with the Smithsonian on the 40th anniversary of the publishing of The Limits to Growth. He said his team's "goal was to gather empirical data to test" a theoretical situation showing "the interrelationship of some key global growth factors: population, resources, persistent pollution, food production and industrial activity."
In describing what he meant by a "collapse," Meadows said the model assumed a "business-as-usual" approach to pressing issues of overuse and over-consumption.
"In the world model, if you don't make big changes soon -- back in the '70s or '80s -- then in the period from 2020 to 2050, population, industry, food and the other variables reach their peaks and then start to fall," he said. "That's what we call collapse."
Most of the computer models found steady population and economic growth rates until about 2030. Then, the researchers found, conditions begin to decline, and without "drastic measures for environmental protection," scenarios began predicting higher likelihoods of population and economic crashes.
But is there a bright spot?
Despite the dire predictions, the research team said not all hope is lost.
The study said "unlimited economic growth" was still very possible, providing governments develop and enact policies and invest in clean- or green-energy technologies that limit the widening of the human ecological footprint.
Others say the situation is not nearly as ominous as the MIT report makes it sound. For instance, the late Yale University economist Henry Wallich, who served a dozen years as a governor of the Federal Research Board, for a time as its chief international economics expert, said once that any attempts to regulate global growth would be akin to "consigning billions to permanent poverty."
Still, other experts believe the matching trends of the earlier 1972 study and the most recently completed body of work are telling, in that they show a similar trajectory of demise.
"The issue of global carrying capacity is one that is fraught with all sorts of technical, scientific and philosophical problems," admits Meadows. But he believes now, as he did four decades ago, that sustainable development is not possible.
"When I use the term sustainable development -- which I consider to be an oxymoron actually -- I am trying to capture the meaning that most people seem to have," he said. "Either way you use the term, it is just a fantasy. [...] We're at 150 percent of the global carrying capacity."
Sources for this article include:
http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=32713
http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=326
http://www.smithsonianmag.com
http://www.smithsonianmag.com
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