LuminousVoid

The creationists lost in the Dover, PA trial. Lost big. The opinion is fantastic, the best Christmas present one could hope to get this year! Everyone interested in preserving science against the myths of fundamentalist creationism should read it. It properly concludes that ID is not science; that ID is just rehashed creationism; that the attempt to infuse ID into the curriculum was religiously inspired; and that the school board members were lying about their motivations on the stand.

The citizens of the Dover area are poorly served by the members of the board who voted for the ID policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.
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Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with it’s resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

The FTC recently settled with DirectTV over it’s calling of costumers on the Do Not Call list.

Kevin Drum uses some back of the envelope calculations to estimate that, if you’re a corporate wrongdoer with good lawyers, crime does pay:

At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that they apparently received 1.4 million complaints about DirecTV, so that’s only about four bucks per complaint. And at a rough guess that fewer than one in ten people complains when they get a call, that’s less than 40 cents per illegal call. And it took DirecTV 485 days just to start talking to the FTC, let alone settle. And I’ll bet they raked in more than $11,000 per day in business from their illegal calls during the period they were telling the FTC to pound sand.

Maybe crime pays after all.

UPDATE: It looks like Kevin has revised his numbers.

Via Boing Boing I learn that the Saint Mary’s College of California is teaching a course in culture jamming. Among other things, students tried to plant a fake news story in the media. None succeeded.

Beldner said he wanted to teach students how to bring issues to the public eye using creative methods. His course syllabus defines “culture jamming” as “a resistance movement to the perceived hegemony of popular culture.”

Some people are concerned though. Should we be teachings students to lie, to undermine journalism, and essentially make the job of publishing the truth harder?

But journalists already have their hands full sifting facts from fiction without having to worry about deliberate misinformation, said Austin Long-Scott, who teaches journalism ethics at San Francisco State University. He compared the hoax to a computer virus.

“He is teaching students to try to screw up an important system that has enough trouble getting things right,” Long-Scott said. “It’s a destructive thing to do, and it violates a general societal ethic.”

Maybe those students should stick to taking Public Relations and Corporate Communications courses. I wonder what the folks at the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of PR Watch, think. Their about page gives us a hint:

PR Watch specializes in blowing the lid off today’s multi-billion dollar propaganda-for-hire industry, naming names and revealing how public relations wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony ‘grassroots’ front groups, spy on citizens, and conspire with lobbyists and politicians to thwart democracy

So today is the first of four exams. I haven’t been this unprepared — as in, done so little work — for exams ever. But yet, I think they’ll go over fine. It’s almost as if in the 2.5 years of law school, the main skill I'’ve learned was how to take and prepare for these exams. Its amazing the difference from first year. There, we were all nervous, hand-wringing. Exams were, to some extent, a great unknown. Now they feel like just a pile of work, a predictable but annoying process we have to go through.

On the other hand, I did spend quite a bit of time this semester looking for a job. I’m happy to say I got basically a dream job. I’m going to be a Skadden Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

At the end of the summer I spent with EPIC I proposed that we do a project to help legal service providers protect the privacy of their clients. The idea is that these are vulnerable populations that would see privacy violations as part of the harms they face. Furthermore, these legal service providers may not have the resources, or even the local need, to justify investing in privacy knowledge. So the idea is that we would step in and create materials and consult for these service providers.

We decided to focus the project on domestic violence clinics, where the privacy risks were intense and varied — ID theft of survivors, stalking, etc. . . . Just imagine that as relationships are the domain of the private and intimate, so too is this privacy abused when the relationships are abusive.

I spent the rest of the semester refining the project and trying to find funding. Everyone I talked to in the service commnunity said there was a great need for this project, both from the point of view of the harm the population faces and from the point of view of the capacity of the service providers to mitigate these harms. There was a lot of excitement — and I got great results.

Goes to show what you can do if you think that interviewing at firms is an unexciting use of your mind. There are still other ways to get a job and take charge of your future, rather than hypothecating it to firm life.