We’re approaching primary season for the mid-term congressional elections. So to make Congressmen and senators looks like they’re doing good things so people will re-elect them, they propose stupid laws and resolutions that rarely serve a purpose except to make them look good, and the ones that serve a purpose are usually pretty bad purposes. A constitutional amendment to illegalize flag-burning here, a hearing on steroid use in professional baseball there. Frankly, I wouldn’t be suprised to hear of a resolution stating that the members of Congress like puppies, kittens, long walks on the beach, and cuddling after a long day. The most recent attempt at legislative grandstanding comes from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Corn). He has proposed a “Pimp Tax” on sex workers.

“Recent headlines have focused on sex trafficking in connection with the World Cup in Germany,” Grassley said. “This vile crime is under our noses in the United States, and it’s a no-brainer to have the IRS go after sex traffickers. Prosecuting these tax code violations can get these guys off the street and yank from their grasp the girls and women they exploit.”

Grassley said the problem is “especially horrible” when underage girls are involved.

Asked if taxing sex workers would legitimize their trade, a Grassley spokesman said the goal was simply to find “yet another alternative to track the money flowing in this industry to get at potential criminals.”

Currently, the IRS has to prove a prostitute’s or pimp’s income to pursue a tax law violation. But under Grassley’s proposal, a pimp could get up to 10 years in prison for each prostitute for whom the pimp hasn’t filed a W-2, which means a pimp caught with 10 unregistered prostitutes faces a century in prison.

Unfortunately for Mr. Grassley there’s actual case law striking down the use of tax law to do what he’s trying to do. In 1969, the Supreme Court heard a case about a law requiring people posessing marijuana to bring it to government buildings and pay taxes on it. LSD guru Timothy Leary challenged the law in court, and won on the theory that paying such a tax violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

But on pure policy grounds, isn’t punishing pimps this harshly just going to make them more violent and abusive? Isn’t is reasonable to assume that a pimp, knowing he could get 10 years in jail if his girls dropped a dime on him, would do everything he could to induce a near-terminal case of Battered Woman Syndrome? Make his women so psychologically dependent on him that they could never turn against him? Is this really the best way to help women? Pimps hold their power because prostitution is an illegal activity. Nevada doesn’t have problems with pimps where it’s legal. It’s the cleanest, safest environment a prostitute can work in the U.S.

A fourteen-year-old girl is suing MySpace over an incident in which another MySpace user (gasp!) lied about his age and was a bad person!

Allegedly, nineteen-year-old Texan Pete Solis lied in his profile about being a high school senior on a football team to gain a minor’s trust. The girl alleges that after she had contact with Solis on the site, he asked for her cellphone number, she gave it to him, they met up in person, and he sexually assaulted her.

[...] the plaintiff’s negligence claim has at least some chance of success. But to support such a claim, plaintiff must establish both a “duty of care” and a breach of that duty.

The “duty of care” question is a difficult question of state law. But courts may hesitate in imposing a duty of care in cyberspace, for fear that it would unfairly burden companies with too little control to be held responsible for what happens to their users offline.

But let’s suppose that there is a duty of care. Did MySpace breach it? To prove it did, the plaintiff has to explain how the site could have done more.

One additional measure the suit claims MySpace should have taken, but did not, is to force users to verify their ages. But such a requirement may be impracticable - and for the law to force one on websites might well be a First Amendment violation.

I can’t come up with a theory of duty that doesn’t scare me half to death. If providers of communications tools are responsible for keeping users from being defrauded, what does that imply for e-mail systems, “Instant Messaging”, chat, and online games like Dungeons & Dragons Online or World of Warcraft? If the duty is inherent to social forums, what does that say about bars, dance clubs, or other types of non-virtual social gathering places? I just don’t see what sort of theory her lawyer could be using.

Geek-extraordinaire Peter David, on sports fans.

I mean, where the hell does the media get off being snotty about fans who are dressed as Klingons when you can go to any Yankees game and see 1800 guys wearing jerseys that say “Jeter” on the back. The Klingon language may be incomprehensible, but no less so than watching two sports fanatics tossing around stats, names and abbreviations (”When he wasn’t able to DH he was HBP and wound up on the DL when his ERA was 0.73, or else he would have been MVP.”) How is it 1500 people, mostly sober, spending a weekend enjoying a mutual interest at a hotel and talking about space exploration, how to avoid global warming, and whether the Hulk can beat Superman…how is that automatically inferior to 43,000, mostly drunkly drunk, spending a day enjoying a mutual interest at a stadium and talking about playoffs, how to avoid the line at the bathroom, and whether the 1953 Dodgers could beat the 1962 Yankees?

Read the whole thing. Especially where he compares golf to…. well, you’ll see.

“You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior, but every day I hear people crying for one.”
–Superman to Lois Lane, in Superman Returns

A researcher from England is reporting that people’s brains are staying, in his words, “more immature” for longer periods of time. Why? Because people are staying in school longer and longer.

The theory’s creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue.

Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends.

A “child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge” is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, “unfinished.”

“The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product — the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity,” he explained.

“But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility.”

“When formal education continues into the early twenties,” he continued, “it probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age.”

[...] “By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people,” he said.

“People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”

Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, “immature” people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift.

If Charlton’s suggestion is that people are being selected for this, I’m not sure enough time has passed to really say that. It’s more likely that social pressures are pushing people into higher education which is causing people’s brains to maintain their elasticity longer. It’s still cool to hear that this is becoming a noticeable phenomenon.

“It is now time for you to rejoin your new world, and to serve its collective humanity. Live as one of them Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed. But always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all–their capacity for good–I have sent them you, my only son.”
– Jor-El, in Superman: The Movie

The Clean Water Act authorizes the EPA to regulate the usage of “navigable waters of the United States”. In the past, the EPA claimed that any land that that had any water that might eventually effect what we generally think of as a water body. Recently, the Supreme Court issued an opinion about the legitimacy of such a rule. However, it’s pretty unclear from the reporting what the opinion actually says. The Cato Institute’s Mark Moller talks about this in a recent podcast.

If you just look at Scalia’s opinion, I would say yes, the Rapanos case is a victory for Federalism.

[...] But unfortunately, Justice Scalia’s opinion only captured 4 votes on the court. And the 5th vote was Justice Kennedy. And Justice Kennedy comes up with a much murkier test. He says Federal environmental regulators can reach any land with a significant nexus with navigable water, but I don’t want to say what that would be and we would have to determine that on a case by case basis. And it’s very unclear what the scope of environmental regulators’ power is under that decision.

You’d think that mainstream outlets would be able to pick up on the uncertainty of the decision and report that. But many of them are reporting it with headlines like “Supreme Court Curtails Clean Water Law”. Maybe it did curtail the Clean Water Act, but only because the EPA was acting outside the scope of the law. Isn’t that what courts are supposed to do when the government behaves like that?

“I’m confused, Kent. See, I’ve lived in Metropolis most of my life and I can’t figure out how some yokel from Smallville is suddenly getting every hot story in town.”

“Well, Lois, the truth is I’m actually Superman in disguise, and I only pretend to be a journalist in order to hear about disasters as they happen and then squeeze you out of the byline.”

“You’re a sick man, Kent.”
– Lois Lane and Clark Kent from Superman: The Animated Series

A librarian in New Jersey might be in serious trouble for not bending over for the cops, because she thought the law required her not to.

Reutty, the director for 17 years, now faces possible discipline by the library board. Members of the Borough Council have suggested she receive punishment ranging from a letter of reprimand in her personnel file to a 30-day unpaid suspension. But the Library Board of Trustees said it would reserve judgment until a closed-door hearing next month.

Police received a report May 10 that a 12-year-old borough girl was allegedly sexually threatened by a man outside the municipal building. The library is on the second floor. The girl told her parents, who called police.

The suspect, who has been identified as a 23-year-old Hackensack man, did not molest the girl, said borough Police Chief Michael Colaneri. The investigation is ongoing through the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, Colaneri said.

The girl told police the man was carrying a library book with a certain title. The next day, borough police detectives asked Reutty to tell them who took out that book.

Reutty said she refused to give the information to police without a subpoena — in accordance with New Jersey state statutes governing access of private information from libraries, she said.

Police came back with a subpoena later that day. Reutty conducted the search and told police she could not find a book with that title.

So, police asked her to show them all the records of everyone who took out or renewed a book for the previous 10 days. Reutty asked for another subpoena because those records are computerized and not kept at the library.

On May 12, Reutty said, she complied with the second subpoena — which required a special computer program by the Bergen County Cooperative Library System. Police found the information right away, which helped them to identify the suspect, according to Colaneri.

It’s amazing how people who clamor for the rule of law with regards to things like illegal immigration are so willing to chuck that principle when it might interfere with other objectives.

Skepticism against the veracity of human-caused global warming has taken yet another blow, as the National Research Council has adopted a finding that global warming is real and has human causes.

After a comprehensive review of climate change data, the nation’s preeminent scientific body found that average temperatures on Earth had risen by about 1 degree over the last century, a development that “is unprecedented for the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”

The report from the National Research Council also concluded that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.”

Coupled with a report last month from the Bush administration’s Climate Change Science Program that found “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system,” the new study from the council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, signals a growing acceptance in Washington of widely held scientific views on the causes of global warming.

It’s interesting to see just how much the snowball has been rolling on climate change lately. I was a global warming sketpic a few years back, but the data since has become much more convincing now. It’s clear that the climate is changing and that human activity is at least a partial cause of that change. There’s way too much data out there now to deny it.

For those who are interested in a history of the science of global warming, I’d highly recommend The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery.