sabadoGigante

Exonerations, cont.

""A Texas man wrongfully convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife is scheduled to be officially exonerated on Monday.

That is no longer so unusual in Texas, where 45 inmates have been exonerated in the last decade based on DNA evidence. What is unprecedented is the move planned by lawyers for the man, Michael Morton: They are expected to file a request for a special hearing to determine whether the prosecutor broke state laws or ethics rules by withholding evidence that could have led to Morton’s acquittal 25 years ago.

“I haven’t seen anything like this, ever,” said Bennet L. Gershman, an expert on prosecutorial misconduct at Pace University in New York. “It’s an extraordinary legal event...”

To most in Consumerland this may be another cheesy drama-of-the-week. For the wrongfully convicted it's a miracle (tho'..a reasonable miracle, which shows the system does at times function).

Related: the Adventures of Billy Puta-ford continued.

Anthem protocol

Yahoo

""The bill, introduced by Indiana senator Vaneta Becker, would apply only to singers at public school and university-sponsored events, and would be dictated by guidelines instituted and enforced by the State Department of Education and the Commission for Higher Education.

Performers would be required to sign a performance contract agreeing to the department's specifications, and schools would be required to keep recordings of all renditions for two years for their review if complaints are filed."""

                              Igor S., guilty of anthem desecration (pedaled on a dom. 7th for a few dissonant nano-seconds-- not major 7th as some claimed)

~(Rosanne)

"you don't have free will"

Jerry Lewis Coyne/USA Today:

"""Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons."""

As Feyerabend was reportedly wont to say...Yes, and No.

 More

Fangness

LA Times/wolf in CA

"""A GPS collar plots the journey of the lone gray wolf — loping over mountains, through forests and across highways.

The young male left his pack in northeastern Oregon in early September, setting out to find a mate and territory of his own. By the end of November, he had meandered 761 miles. Lately he has been lingering a day or two's trot from California.

If OR7, as he is known, crosses the border, he will be the first wild wolf recorded in the Golden State since 1924.

Even if he doesn't, the trek has made it evident that the return of the mythic native predator is imminent."""

holidaze

""This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be."" Schopenhauer

mo': The Billy Wankford holiday medley

PKDick-Co

LA Times

"""Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back.
Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick.


As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: "Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated." She was talking specifically about the personal life of her father — she's the offspring of the third of his five marriages. But her observation applies well to the dispute over the 2011 Matt Damon film "The Adjustment Bureau which was based on "Adjustment Team," a short story Dick wrote in the 1950s.
If you haven't heard of Philip K. Dick, you're at least familiar with his work. He produced a huge corpus of visionary fiction before his death in 1982, including stories that became the basis for the films "Blade Runner," "Minority Report" and "Total Recall."The Dick estate, which is managed by Coelho, 51, and her half-sister Isa Dick Hackett, 44, optioned the film rights to "Adjustment Team" to writer/director George Nolfi in 2001 for $25,000. Nolfi, who subsequently wrote the screenplay and directed the retitled film version, had transferred the rights to Media Rights Capital, an independent studio. The producers exercised the option by paying the estate $1.4 million, with at least $500,000 more due once the film achieved its break-even point.

unReality for sale

unrelated: Dennis Dunderson in... Zero 6-hundred hour, soldier