Illegal Raid Over Twitter Postings (from Pharyngula)

I sure have less readers than PZ Myers, but I bet I have some that are at least different...

So if I can do a little to take this story to more people, I'll do it.

(Edit: Also from Pharyngula, people get life in jail for torture, when they are civilians. If they are soldiers, they get away with a nothing, or with a medal).

Wired magazine has a story on the CNN website about the federal government raiding the home of a writer and seizing enormous amounts of "evidence" for the crime of twittering during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh.
An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.
In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious "evidence" from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.
Here's why they raided his house:

Madison, who counsels more than 100 severely mentally ill patients in New York, seems to have first drawn attention from the authorities at September's G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops -- an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran.
A week later, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, armed with a search warrant and backed by a federal grand jury investigation, raided Madison's house, which he shares with his wife of 13 years and several roommates. The squad seized his computers, camera memory cards, books, air-filtration masks, bumper stickers and political posters -- all purportedly evidence that the 41-year old social worker had broken a federal anti-rioting law that carries up to five years in prison.
But a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty of the government's nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.
Madison, his wife and his lawyer Martin Stolar say the search violates the Constitution's protections against general searches and prosecution for political speech. The police also seized mobile phones, citizen emergency kits, manuscripts, posters and even the couple's marriage license...
If Madison were an Iranian using Twitter to coordinate government protests, he'd likely be considered a hero in the West. Instead, the self-identified anarchist -- who volunteered in Louisiana after Katrina -- is now facing up to five years in prison for each count a grand jury cares to indict him on.
Interestingly, they are charged with violations of the same law that was used against the Chicago 7 during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Those convictions were all thrown out.

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Un muppet sería mejor economista

Y sin embargo, en mi tierra tenemos pedazos de carne dirigiendo la "recuperación" de nuestro país.

Hay pérdidas de empleo, y quieren incrementar impuestos al consumo generalizados que afectan a los más pobres.

Hay empresas que evaden el fisco pero aumentan impuestos sobre los ingresos que afectan a los profesionistas y no solo a empresas e industrias.

Y la justificación es un impuesto de "combate" a la pobreza, cuando la pobreza no es una persona ni una entidad. Es un concepto abstracto que representa, en la práctica, la falta de una redistribución adecuada de la riqueza... O sea, el que unos pocos ganan casi todo y los demás mueran de hambre. Y es que prefieren tirar un poco de dinero en programas existentes de "combate a la pobreza", en lugar de cambiar la forma en la que se distribuye la riqueza (cobrando más a los que más tienen, y creando medidas verdaderamente de ayuda y protección a los pobres (que no es lo mismo que "combatir a la pobreza" (como seguros de desempleo, sistema de salud gratuito con fondos suficientes, fondo de creación de viviendas, bancos de alimentos, pagar a los mas pobres por que estudien educación básica y técnica, etcétera).

¿Qué diablos pasa con este país? el Fecal no pudo ser peor presidente salvo usando el ejército en las ciudades... ¡Esperen! ¡Ya lo hizo! Ahora sólo le falta atacar a civiles.

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Overview: What's on my Browser right now?

Let's say for a moment than listing what is there on our internet browser tabs can help some people get an idea on where's our mind currently. In a way, it tells us about what are we looking for.

Well.. here we go with my Firefox tabs right now:
Is Brain Damage a good Alibi for Violent Behavior? That's a video on Youtube intresting, brief, and to the point.

10-year-old bride forced back to her 80-year-old husband. A note on Austin Cline's Atheist Blog. Very scary, and a source of anger.

Protecting the powerful is a feature, not a bug. Courtesy of Bad Science, the blog from Ben Goldacre who also writes for the British newspaper The Guardian. This article is also scary and worriesome, as most stuff from Goldacre: It's all about the absurd libel laws in Britain, and their extraterritorial influence.

There is also a very funny cartoon about babies and lobsters at Hemant Mehta's Friendly Atheist blog. A great blog, often a mixture of light and heavy topics.

PZ Myers, the Flail of the Faithful and the Polls, is talking at Pharyngula about the worries of fundamentalist and Christians, and how they are not so bad. For us. Sadly for me, I can't comment on Pharyngula right now.


Congregation Embraces Transgender Minister, reads the headline over ABCNews. A Methodist minister gave his congregation the sermon of his life. And they're still his congretation. If only most folks were like that...

Also, from The Guardian. A piece from a dumbass who is mad with the banning on tobacco. Poor dude does not understand the real health impact of smoking near others, nor the fact that in public health there is a point where democracy is not an option, and you have to suck-it-up.

And well, excluding my own DevArt page (because adding it here is like self-advertising myself), that's all there is in my blog right now. Quite varied, I hope...

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For my Mage parties, new and old.

This video is quite... exceptional. I hope you get a grasp of at least a tenth of what they say (that's about what I got from it on my first watch).

It is all about the nature of the universe.

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El infierno pa'l pueblo, y el dinero pa'l... pa'l gobierno?

¡Felicidades! ¡Bienvenidos a Carstenlandia, la Tierra de los Pobres! Donde puede pagar más por vivir peor.

Vivimos en un país esquizofrénico. No me quedan más explicaciones...

Subir impuestos a todos los bienes y servicios, aun cuando sea 2%, involucra aumentar el precio en alimentos y medicinas. En un país donde el salario mínimo está entre los 51 y los 55 pesos por día... está jodido. Y si dicen (dicen, no he sacado yo la cuenta) que la cansta básica anda por ahí de 900 pesos al mes... Aún peor. ¿La idea es que "ahorre" cien pesos el trabajador de salario mínimo? Y eso es con los precios ideales, ojo. Y ahí no está contemplado el costo de la vivienda, de cajón. Idioteces.

Parece que vamos a hacer más pobres. Supongo que piensan venderlos de una manera u otra: Si hay gente que no puede pagar alimentos y vivienda, ahora habrán más. Y si había gente que apenas pagaba ambas cosas, ahora no podrán pagarlo.

(Y no soy el único que lo dice)

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Blogging from the road

Very well. I'm currently in the road from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, as I often am. there is a lot of fog around the road, which means people should be worried about things going bad with far easier than they do in a sunny day.

It also means that the road looks exceptionally beautiful, as only the rows of trees and a small strip of green grass can be seen at either side, and then all is white. It would have some sort of mystical feel to it, were it not for the "rancheras" the driver put on the stereo.

Crap. I'm complaining about bad music in a beautiful scenery, and the scenery then changes with wires and small, grey houses. We're entering the ring of urban poverty around Mexico City. It expands for several kilometers, diluiting the bright green of life with a dull gray of concrete and blocks. Thousands of families that do not have the resources to have a decent living, much less a pretty home, live and die here everyday. There is next to nobody to tell the world the history of their lives, much less to help them better the living conditions they have.

I can understand why people might just look here and think "how ugly does this look". But I cannot understand why those people wouldn't be able to see beyond aesthetics and into ethics, and realize that sometimes people does not have a choice on how or where to live. Or that it is not enough to have strong convictions, a lot of effort or faith in some god or other to make things better.

Sometimes it is needed some luck. Sometimes the goodwill of others. And yet sometimes, there is probably nothing anyone can do on an individual basis, and only big groups of people (and then the right people) can have a decision on the fate of very large numbers of people.

People die of starvation in Mexico, one of the biggest producers of food in the world. We have a lack of clean water that will make people use non-sanitized water in the southern region, where water is most abundant, and in the north, we simply don't have enough water even if we do have the way to make it drinkable and to send it to everyone.

We already got into Mexico City properly. Soon I'll stop writing for today. For now, I see hundreds of cars in the road, as it is currently the time when people get to their offices. And now I have to think: Do we really need to use that many vehicles? Is there no way to make a rational use of vehicles, and of working hours?

Are there no jobs that could start earlier, or later, to keep the streets and avenues a bit faster, with less cars and trucks at peak hours and a more continuous usage all day? And besides... it shouldn't be too difficult for companies to make use of collective transportation for their workers. Just like schools in Mexico City must do now (by law), big manufacturing plants, or large offices could be forced to use collective transportation for their workforce, or at least for a percentage of it. Maybe It's just some hallucinogen cuality of being awake and writing for a blog since so early, but it's something I just thought about.

It was 7:35 am when we got into the City. Let's see how long it takes to reach Taxqueña, the terminal where I get off the bus. Right now it's 7:55...

In any case, I'm putting the laptop on my backpack. Whenever I post this, I'll include the time I arrived Taxqueña here: 8:05am

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Radio, News and Jazz at work

If I don't make much sense, tell me so. I'm sleepy.

Some people talk their workdays away, chatting every once in a while to stay awake and make time go by, but for that you need first and foremost smart workmates, the kind that can sustain an intelligent conversation for more than 15 minutes in a row. If you don't, then you require workmates that are funny, which makes the time at work more fun an bearable (specially in tedious workplaces, or when your job is too repetitive). If neither smart nor fun people can be found around, then most people resort to music. Ipods have made a lot in way to better the posibilities of people to stay focused on their job ahead and to forget about tedious workplaces or cube companions, even if they are only the heirs of a tradition started by brick-sized walkmans, portable radios, and later, the discman.

Right now, I'm sort of near the cutting edge but not quite so. I'm using my cell phone as a portable radio. Yes! with 4GB of music stored in the microSD memory of my Sony MusicXpress cell phone, I would rather listen to the radio most of the day: there was simply something missing, like a lack of interaction with human beings or something like that (not that everyone was a complete waste at the office, but you can't show too openly that you don't have a minimum faith in other people's humanity). Rather than hearing music I love and hold dear, I prefered to start my day with a radio news program by Carmen Aristegui, then follow with a science program called El Explicador (The Explainer), and then a healthy dose of light news, entertainment and jokes in a show called "Tal Cual" (translating that is difficult, but is close to "As Is"). In total, some 5 hours of continuous radio listening at MVS Noticias, a single radio station. Sometimes I listen the second newshow, sometimes I don't. Either way, later in the day, I listen to Horizonte (107.9 FM) a station that promises news AND Jazz. And casually, that's what I'm listening to right now, with great pleasure.

Later, at 6pm, I listen (when I can) to El Weso, at W Radio. The only program I'll ever listen from that radio station, for a story too long to talk about right now.

So... just like that, I spend more time listening to radio than working, and most probably, more than I spend talking with human beings, or sleeping. TV? who needs that?!

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About the wedding, part 1

All right. I promised to write something about the wedding, so here I am.
Maybe because I'm partially paranoid, or maybe the lack of an habit.

The date was July 25th. It was sunny all day long, and I was able to sleep until 11 o'clock in the morning. That was a very good thing indeed, as I arrived San Luis Potosi at 5am the day before, and as the civil union took place that day, I was zombie-like through the Friday.

The Westin Hotel, at San Luis, is a great place. It has beautiful gardens, a pond with those elegant, orange fishes, and a wonderful pool. It is decorated with amazing colonial-baroque architecture, and services the sort of a first class hotel. The room I got had sandals, a video game-included TV set with PPV on demand, a water jet bathtub with bubble bath and all that stuff, a shaving kit, a sewing kit, a dental kit... Did I mention that the room-service menu has lasagne in there?

All of my family stayed there, as it was in the same hotel that the party would take place, and just 3 blocks away was the church for the ceremony, so it was very practical for everyone.


I most thank specially those that came in representation of many friends at the same time, as Areteseeker did (in the name of many who couldn't make it from one of my former gaming parties), Vampiro (also as representing quite a few friends and gamers), and Elena (from Psychology school). Thank you, everyone!

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