Tag: laws

Terror Autodeath

Who is the man who dies in every terrorist attack?

To verify this story, FRANCE 24 managed to contact the man pictured in all these photos. We decided not to publish his real name. When speaking to our team, he didn’t deny being caught up in legal proceedings. My photo is everywhere because of someone who started it as a prank after a legal dispute. I never reported the people who did this to me because, in Mexico, nothing ever happens in these kind of cases. Now, my photo has appeared in several stories that were widely shared on Twitter. I contacted several media outlets like the BBC and the New York Times and asked them to delete my photo but they never responded.

Pseudolaw

Would you like to stop paying taxes? Just renounce your 14th Amendment United States citizenship and claim ownership of the secret cestui que (beneficiary) trust that the US government created in your name on the day that you were born. Credit card debt? No problem, the trust is flush with millions or billions of dollars that you can use, just as soon as you establish ownership of your verified birth certificate and the corporate entity that has your name – but in all-capital letters. These are some of the claims advanced by the self-styled experts who insist that everything you know about the legal system is wrong. These days, we are distressingly familiar with alternative, conspiracy-theory versions of science and medicine. Less well-known is the legal version of this phenomenon, not as visible as creationism or anti-vaccine activism but in many ways as destructive. Just ask the residents of Harney County, Oregon, who recently saw militants occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge emboldened by ‘judges’ and ‘citizen grand juries’ who had less to do with actual law than fantasy football does with the US National Football League.

Routinely breaking the law

While some people like to imagine that important ethical questions for robocars revolve around choosing who to kill in an accident, that’s actually an extremely rare event. The real ethical issues revolve around this issue of how to drive when driving involves routinely breaking the law — not once in a 100 lifetimes, but once every minute. Or once every second, as is the case in India.

Creationist evolution

creationist bills mutate, with being passed as the fitness function. heh.

Some 90 years out from the Scopes Monkey Trial, and a full 10 years after the legal defeat of “intelligent design” in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the fight to teach creationism alongside evolution in American public schools has yet to go extinct. On the contrary, a new analysis in the journal Science suggests that such efforts have themselves evolved over time—adapting into a complex form of “stealth creationism” that’s steadily tougher to detect.

Fossil fuel lawsuits

The fossil-fuel industry—which, for 2 centuries, underwrote our civilization and then became its greatest threat—has started to take serious hits. Today, President Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline, becoming the first world leader to turn down a major project on climate grounds. 18 hours earlier, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued subpoenas to Exxon, the richest and most profitable energy company in history, after substantial evidence emerged that it had deceived the world about climate change.

Robot abuse

a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a SoftBank store. Weng is advocating for special robot laws to address the unique nature of human-robot interactions. He argues that humans perceive highly intelligent, social robots like Pepper (which can read human emotions) differently than normal machines—maybe more like pets—and so the inappropriate treatment of robots by humans should be handled with this in mind.