Archive for the ‘9th dan’ Category

MY NINJA PLEASE! 7.3.08 : WorldsNest :: Habitat Universe

I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again. DO NOT SLEEP ::: via WorldsNest

Prospect Magazine : Top 25 Intellectuals

1 Fethullah GAAlen (*)

2 Muhammad Yunus (*)

3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)

4 Orhan Pamuk (54)

5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)

6 Amr Khaled (*)

7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)

8 Tariq Ramadan (58)

9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)

10 Shirin Ebadi (12)

11 Noam Chomsky (1)

12 Al Gore (*)

13 Bernard Lewis (34)

14 Umberto Eco (2)

15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16 Amartya Sen (8)

17 Fareed Zakaria (35)

18 Garry Kasparov (*)

19 Richard Dawkins (3)

20 Mario Vargas Llosa (29)

21 Lee Smolin (*)

22 JAArgen Habermas (7)

23 Salman Rushdie (10)

24 Sari Nusseibeh (65)

25 Slavoj Zizek (23)

Prospect Magazine

2008 Chicago Street Soccer Cup

We are looking for a few good soccerus to play on a squad….drop a comment and the first 3 players will share in the trophy………..hit us with an e-mail too….

Sorry Fellas - You’ve been Rondo’d

Commercials, presented without program interruption.

For all of you who aren’t from around Boston and haven’t seen the three commercials, here you have it. If you don’t know what it’s referring to, you’ve obviously been Rondo’d. Obviously.

Celts in Six!!

Nothing much to say here - because you already know what it is. BTW, this must be the wildest post-game speech in the history of the NBA. I love this game.

"That should be yo’ mantra - ommm, never let up.’

"Jet Man"

May 15, 2008 A 48-year-old Swiss man has successfully jumped out of a plane over the Alps using a new improved version of his jet propelled hang-glider. Yves Rossy has spent five years training for the event and was helped by four jet engines.

Video Mondays is still in effect, as you can clearly see.

Plymouth-Dakar Challenge

Julian Nowill created the concept of the ‘Banger Challenge’ in 2002 to take the piss out of the real Dakar, showing that people on a limited budget can go where the big boys go. The idea is now copied by a large number of people, some with charitable objectives and some not. The original 3-week Banjul Challenge continues to the finishing line in Banjul, The Gambia, where the LHD cars are auctioned for charity. The year 2007 saw the launch of the Timbuktu Challenge where LHD and RHD cars are auctioned in Bamako, Mali - again for good causes. For 2008, there will be a new route to Baku on the Caspian …’The Silk Road Challenge’ again with a charity auction, while for those who cannot afford to give their cars away, there will be a ‘Morocco Offroad Trial’ with a roadbook written specifically for the teams by Sahara guru Chris Scott. Teams will spend as much time as they like in Morocco from 1 week upwards and the aim is to push 2WD and 4WD vehicles to the limit… within the security of a group of cars. This will suit off roaders who rightly are concerned with the risk of solo off piste driving in remote areas. plymouth-banjul

Court gives detainees habeas rights

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows a€" when the country faces rebellion or invasion.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released a€" that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that a€oewe do not address whether the President has authority to detaina€A individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.

The Court also declared that detainees do not have to go through the special civilian court review process that Congress created in 2005, since that is not an adequate substitute for habeas rights. The Court refused to interpret the Detainee Treatment Act a€" as the Bush Administration had suggested a€" to include enough legal protection to make it an adequate replacement for habeas. Congress, it concluded, unconstitutionally suspended the writ in enacting that Act.

The Court also found serious defects in the process that the Pentagon set up in 2004 to decide which prisoners are to be designated as a€oeenemy combatantsa€A a€" the status that leads to their continued confinement. This process is the system of so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The procedures used by CSRTs, the Court said, a€oefall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review.a€A

Justice Anthony M. Kennedya€™s opinion for the majority in Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196) was an almost rhapsodic review of the history of the Great Writ. The Suspension Clause, he wrote, a€oeprotects the rights of the detained by a means consistent with the essential design of the Constitution. It ensures that, except during periods of formal suspension, the Judiciary will have a time-tested device, the writ, to maintain the a€delicate balance of governancea€™ that is itself the surest safeguard of liberty.a€A Those who wrote the Constitution, he added, a€oedeemed the writ to be an essential mechanism in the separation-of-powers scheme.a€A

Even though the two political branches a€" the President and Congress a€" had agreed to take away the detaineesa€™ habeas rights, Kennedy said those branches do not have a€oethe power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.a€A

In a second ruling on habeas, the Court decided unanimously that U.S. citizens held by U.S. military forces in Iraq have a right to file habeas cases, because it does extend to them, but it went on to rule that federal judges do not have any authority to bar the transfer of those individuals to Iraqi authorites to face prosecution or punishment for crimes committed in that country in violation of Iraqi laws.

via scotusblog

Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech

VANCOUVER, British Columbia a€" A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The articlea€™s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Macleana€™s, Canadaa€™s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their a€oedignity, feelings and self-respect.a€A

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Macleana€™s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

a€oeIta€™s hate speech!a€A yelled one man.

a€oeIta€™s free speech!a€A yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions a€" even false, provocative or hateful things a€" without legal consequence.

The Macleana€™s article, a€oeThe Future Belongs to Islam,a€A was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called a€oeAmerica Alonea€A (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

a€oeIn much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at onea€™s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,a€A Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called a€oeThe Exceptional First Amendment.a€A

a€oeBut in the United States,a€A Professor Schauer continued, a€oeall such speech remains constitutionally protected.a€A

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.

By contrast, American courts would not stop a planned march by the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps a€oebasically a Puerto Rican program.a€A The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase a€oethe general level of prejudice.a€A

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

a€oeIt is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,a€A Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, a€oewhen they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.a€A

Professor Waldron was reviewing a€oeFreedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendmenta€A by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of efforts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections a€oein an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.a€A In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Courta€™s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry mob to immediately assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article a€" or any publication a€" intended to stir up racial hatred surely does not.

Mr. Lewis wrote that there was a€oegenuinely dangerousa€A speech that did not meet the imminence requirement.

the remainder of this article can be found at nytimes