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At the risk of saying it again, whatever the Supreme Court’s decision regarding Obamacare in June, the net effect of the case has been to illustrate how dramatically the nation’s federal courts have shifted to the right. This shift isn’t evident only in terms of the judiciary’s willingness to embrace long-dormant libertarian ideas, but also in its willingness to wholeheartedly adopt the political language and tone in which these ideas are packaged. Liberals who don’t think of the courts as a political issue should read Judge Brown’s concurrence closely, not merely as an example of the ways partisan politics are bleeding into the federal courts, but as a warning about how radically the federal courts are poised to reshape our politics.
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System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose laws that systematically impede or hamper innovation, especially those enforced in the name of defending "intellectual property," such as patent and copyright; these should be radically reformed or entirely abolished.
"But it goes, I think, even deeper than that. Control of drugs is deeply embedded in the DNA of modern government. The criminalisation of drug use, in the west at least, is almost entirely a 20th-century development. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was in common use in Victorian England and Coca-Cola, invented in 1886, contained cocaine until 1903. No US state banned cannabis until 1915 and it remained legal in England until the 1920s, as did heroin and cocaine. The rise of conscript armies and Fordist mass production prompted the change, briefly affecting alcohol – the US took the first steps towards prohibition during the first world war – along with other drugs. Nobody wanted a drowsy numbness to overcome men marching into battle or clocking onto the production line."
David Bollier outlines some possible online governing strategies for the commons.
Long story about a Colorado murder and the on-off investigation of Tim Masters who was convicted 12 years after the crime based on his "violent" drawings from a notebook he had kept as a teenager.
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Defense attorneys are for the first time submitting a controversial neurological lie-detection test as evidence in U.S. court.
<script type="text/javascript">digg_url ="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/noliemri.html";</script><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script> In an upcoming juvenile-sex-abuse case in San Diego, the defense is hoping to get an fMRI scan, which shows brain activity based on oxygen levels, admitted to prove the abuse didn't happen.
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Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent (pdf). But some scientists and lawyers like Greely doubt that those results will prove replicable outside the lab setting, and others say it just isn't ready yet.
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