Can Prosecutors Be Sued By People They Framed?

Do prosecutors have total immunity from lawsuits for anything they do, including framing someone for murder? That is the question the justices of the Supreme Court face Wednesday.

On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend “there is no freestanding right not to be framed.” They are backed by the Obama administration, 28 states and every major prosecutors organization in the country.

On the other side are two black men — Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee — men who served 25 years in prison before evidence long hidden in police files resulted in them being freed.

The mentality at work among the prosecutors and the Obama administration seems to the fabled can of worms. Let these men, sent to jail on fabricated evidence be allowed compensatory damages and it will be the end of the republic. Its probably not much consolation for spending 25 years in jail for a wrongful conviction, but the prosecuots can probably be prosecuted on the crminal level, as can the police. The lawyers arguing the case before the SCOTUS claim that as far as liability goes, especially in case such as this where the prosecutors participated in fabricating evidence before trial ( framing the defendants) the prosecutors should enjoy no more then the limited liability that police officers have.

Since there will be few click over, one irony is that the likely perpetrator was a white man named Charles Gates who had been seen near the crime carrying a shotgun, questioned and released.

autumn leaves wallpaper

Anyone else see that 60 Minutes report on alleged Medicare fraud. They might have played fast and loss with the actual dollar figures and assigned the figures to Medicare out of the carelessness one would expect from a third grader’s research paper. Loose with numbers: Medicare fraud report a fiction

McCaleb and the attorney general were wrong, too. GAO has never estimated total Medicare fraud. It investigates targeted programs within Medicare, finding fraud in the millions, not billions. And it’s not total federal expenditure that those estimates McCaleb referred to are based on. It’s total public and private expenditure on health care. The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, a partnership between private insurers and the federal government, says that it “estimates conservatively that 3 percent of all health care spending — or $68 billion — is lost to health care fraud.” The association bases that figure on 2007 total health care spending of $2.27 trillion in the United States. It’s an unscientific, very dubious way of making estimates. (emphasis mine)

Too late now. For the most part the numbers as reported by 60 Minutes will become part of the popular lore.

pentecost river wallpaper in western Australia. named after a person, not a religious sect.

Recently Jonathan Chait did a review-article of two books on Ayn Rand (Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Ayn Rand and the World She Made) called Wealthcare. Chait went into quite a bit of detail, historical context and poor guy, even delved into Rand’s bizarre sex cult life style. I was thinking – pretty much the definitive review, but  Johann Hari in How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon – The perverse allure of a damaged woman manages to quite a bit more to the picture.

Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: “I came to look on her as a killer of people.” The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand’s claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.

[   ]…The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand’s cult isn’t confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America’s major political parties.

Hari rightly calls Rand’s world view, one which was supposedly the opposite of Bolsheviks, their twin. Then is clearly a collectivism about far right. Instead of the state, on the economic level they’ve substituted corporations and greed  and on the cultural level they’ve pawned off a god and religion made in their image.

eight individuals wallpaper

I wanted to continue this discussion of individualism. The kind of individualism I talked about in that post, which I am not walking back, is what might be called a individualism that one subscribes to. That is the kind that fuels the culture of  me that permeates much of western civilization’s concept. Not all of its bad, but like being health conscious ( anti-smoking for instance), being fugal with money or being positive, the concept can be carried to extremes that range from merely pretentious to destructive.  There is also an intrinsic individualism that derives from the physical reality of our discrete existence. While existential philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Satre seemed direct enough in their philosophy dealing with the inner conflicts and the individual’s struggle with ambiguity in a vast seemingly indifferent universe, they did not address the consequences of individual as a discreet physical entity head on. To the existentialist, human beings were containers of the all important consciousness. It Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908 – May 3, 1961) that insisted we recognize that ephemeral consciousness, the plain on which many philosophers  had placed human beings, should not be separated from our physical bodies. Merleau-Ponty was a Newtonian of philosophy in recognizing that no two people could occupy the same body, nor the same space at the same time and thus individuals each experienced the universe in a unique way. For a multitude of reasons from one’s genetic make-up, our parents religion, whether we were raised on a land locked farm or a coastal fishing town, speaking Spanish or Mandarin, male or female, each of us would filter experience and apprehend the world and life events differently from each other. Regardless of how similar two people might be they cannot separate experience from their physical beings. Those differences are obviously minuscule in many ways, but the physicality of human existence cannot be ignored. That is not to say that our bodies dictate reality – though it does it many ways – we cannot know what our experience and perception of the world would be like if we were an orangutan or a space alien with a human’s brain, only that reality cannot be separated from our bodies – our containers as it were. One should be careful in assuming humans are thus reduced to physical experience, but rather for us to perceive the world we cannot do so without physical existence hand in hand with the opportunities and limitations imposed by our biology. We are and are not mere objects. There is us, the physical mass that operates for large part without conscious thinking – even our brains operate and manage our biological survival without being told to do so, but there is also us the self-aware physical person constantly having a sense of ourselves and the world around us. That same us never stops and becomes a final product – until death of course – we are always ourselves yet always a changing self because our consciousness is always accumulating more experiences. Our basic biology being the same this accounts in some ways for the history of mankind’s struggle to get along with each other and to settle on some ultimate objective truths. So yes there is something called individualism, but it has to do with the implications of our existence as discreet beings, not a group we decide to join.

This gentleman has gone to the the other extreme. We are so ensconced in our individuality that we are incapable of genuinely thinking of others, You, yourself and you: Why being self-centered is a good thing

So if we think our self-interest is singularly significant, we are not being fooled. Instead, the fact that we know ourselves best reinforces our sense of individuality over time; we do have stable identities, and our minds are more than a shifting kaleidoscope of impressions. Our ability to make moral judgments flows from this fact.

On the other hand, Hare asserts, our minds are independent enough from the rest of the world that, when other people state their pleasures and pains are present, we should not regard their statements as true. Instead, Hare writes, we should regard those claims as “false, but rightly so.”

In so arguing, Hare is reviving the philosophical concept of solipsism — the notion that one’s own self has a special status in the world. More specifically, Hare claims in his book that we exist in a mildly solipsistic state he calls “egocentric presentism.” To make sound moral judgments despite this condition, Hare asserts, just takes an act of imagination.

Hare is proof of concept. One can take almost any concept and corrupt it. The core of Hare’s argument and a dangerous one is to regard other people’s claims of pain as false. That is pretty much the core text book definition of a sociopath. Empathy and sympathy are to a large part learned behaviors, as is assigning values. Though they are not simply hat tricks of our imagination. That these mental abilities are so pervasive in every human civilization means they also have concrete repercussions for our survival as a species.

river and tarantula tree wallpaper

Anyone interested in further reading about Maurice Merleau-Ponty this is good place to start. As most summaries of a philosophy inevitably do I have left out many of the intricate facets to Merleau-Ponty’s writings.

Joe Conason is a pretty rational guy. His book Big Lies is one of the better exposes on the right-wing/conservative movement in the U.S. but his argument here might be too rational, Why does Joe Lieberman oppose healthcare reform? Ask his wife Both Lieberman and Evan Bayh have spouses who have profited from the healthcare industry

If Democrats are disappointed by Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, they shouldn’t be. Despite all of his past promises to support universal healthcare, nothing was more predictable than the Connecticut senator’s fealty to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

Much the same can be said of Sen. Evan Bayh, who emerged from hiding on healthcare to announce that he too plans to filibuster against reform with the Republicans, regardless of what his constituents and Americans in general plainly want. Like Lieberman, his state is home to powerful corporations that want reform killed — and like Lieberman, his wife has brought home very big paychecks from those same interests.

The senator’s connections to health care special interests might be true and may well be influencing Bayh in particular. Lieberman is probably doing it because he can. Because Joe’s agenda is all about Joe, not doing what’s in the best interest of the average American family. Joementum is coming up for reelection in 2012. It will literally take a miracle for him to win another term. So he is certainly not motivated by the wishes of the people of Connecticut and the need to be reelected. He seems to be relishing his roll as mad bomber of reform. Maybe he’s motivated by money/special interests, or maybe he like a kid that enjoys kicking down other kid’s sand castles.

“Clean Coal” Exec Lies Under Oath to Cover Up Forgery Scandal. Twice. Embarrassment, shame, loss of one’s good name, being caught on tape. All approaching meaningless in the age of two new scandals a day. What’s a mutli-millionaire with an army of sharks attorneys got to lose by telling some lies under oath. The smug smile on the way to the bank remains unchanged.

a singular duck

Maybe human are more complicated then plants, but its still hard to tell for sure and difficult to explain, ‘Moonlighting’ molecules discovered

Since the completion of the human genome sequence, a question has baffled researchers studying gene control: How is it that humans, being far more complex than the lowly yeast, do not proportionally contain in our genome significantly more gene-control proteins?

[  ]…The team suspects that many more proteins encoded by the human genome might also be moonlighting to control genes, which brings researchers to the paradox that less complex organisms, such as plants, appear to have more transcription factors than humans. “Maybe most of our genes are doing double, triple or quadruple the work,” says Zhu. “This may be a widespread phenomenon in humans and the key to how we can be so complex without significantly more genes than organisms like plants.”

This is huge news. For years it was the trinity of DNA, RNA and then proteins. There seems to be a feed back loop in which proteins, very complex structures that fill research journals yearly with new discoveries, also influence how the genes that created them behave. These encoded proteins are called transcription factors.

back body paint

In this Gemma Ray Video – Hard Shoulder – you can see her back tattoo at one point. be careful, if you blink you’ll miss it. I like the song ‘Rise of the Runts’ better, but the Hard Shoulder video is a good demonstration of some cool effects that can be accomplished with a bare bones budget – a blue screen for the moody skies, a truck and it looks like they used After Effects or maybe some Avid software. Best of What’s Next: Gemma Ray

Her style has been termed “indie noir,” a cinematic blend of flamenco, rockabilly and vintage pop that would fit nicely on the scratched celluloid of forgotten exploitation films. Appropriately, Ray dresses the part a 60s femme fatale—hair plastered vertically into a modern beehive, figure draped in pastel sweaters and skirts, eyes ringed with obsidian mascara, she looks an awful lot like the music she plays.

slightly askew

‘Culture of we’ buffers genetic tendency to depression

A genetic tendency to depression is much less likely to be realized in a culture centered on collectivistic rather than individualistic values, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

“People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group,” said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

[   ]…What surprised them was the robust association they found between the degree of collectiveness of a particular nation and the degree to which a disproportionate number of people carried the short allele of the STG. Collectivistic nations were found to have significantly more individuals who carry the short allele of the STG. Even more remarkably, they found, collectivistic nations, such as East Asia, where nearly 80 percent of the population is genetically susceptible to depression, the actual prevalence of depression is significantly lower than in individualistic nations, such as the United States and Western Europe.

Its difficult to argue with alleles, they’re short or long. I would give pause to thinking about western culture as placing actual emphasis on individuality. The U.S. and western Europe in general likes to think their culture esteems individuality as a virtue, but we might be talking more about a belief in the myth of rugged individualism then the actuality – some interesting history on this in the U.S. - The Cultural Myth of the Cowboy, or, How the West Was Won. Since the researchers did not say they controlled for any behaviors that could be measured as uniquely individual, I suspect that we are talking about self and national perception. What we seem to do frequently in the U.S. and not being particularly judgmental about the phenomenon, is have a kind of generally agreed upon framework of individuality. Anyone that goes to some of the larger biker conventions or just reads the coverage in the local papers will see interviews with participants in which the words – individualism, personal freedom, liberty, free to be yourself are used often. What the bikers say varies very little from person to person or year to year. Then look at the pictures and video. You have a lot of people that talk alike, dress alike and behave alike. Not to pick on bikers, corporate executives are pretty locked into a different style within the same framework. Many of the southern good old boys that I grew up around form their own sub-culture in which they all very much feel as though they’re rugged individualists – they dress similarly, use much of the same vocabulary, have similar interests and work at jobs that are about the same on the social ranking scale. The Ivy League realm of academia – Princeton, Yale, Brown -are pretty close to following the same pattern. So maybe its the myth of individuality in western cultures rather then the actual culture. In some ways it would seem like that pursuit of individualism in the west where its easy to find some kindred spirits would lesson the national depression level. Why aren’t the peer groups that most of us end up being a part of  failing to fill the void where depression enters. These sub-cultures – you don’t have to dress in all  black or worship a strange deity to be a sub-culture – are ironically a kind of emotional collective.

The east may not have those same same modern pressures in terms of splintering people off into groups, but in general Asia may not have that option. Not because of politics, or at least politics exclusively, but because in general the populations are poorer. When you’re struggling to meet basic needs, just the right pair of Harley-Davidson boots or the newest Armani tie is a luxury. An luxury of illusion about expressing one’s individuality that the average person cannot afford. Your survival might rely much more on group/family success at finding work and food. Under the circumstances they cannot afford the luxury of depression or entertain ideas about self express through means that are ultimately mostly appearances, then aligning oneself with like minded peers.

A related post – The Body and the Individual

Torture in America – San Jose Ed.

A cell phone video shows San Jose police officers repeatedly using batons and a Taser gun on an unarmed San Jose State student, including at least one baton strike that appears to come after the man is handcuffed, as they took him into custody inside his home last month.

Most police do not engage in this type of behavior. I wonder if law enforcement just attracts a certain percentage of people with a sadistic streak. Its pretty well known among professional firefighters they have a similar problem, their profession attracts arsonists. Every time we have one of these police brutality events some spokesperson will say they just need better training. That might be part of the problem, but how about creating a better psychological screening process.