Challenging Opinions >>

Scot Faulkner was the National Director of Personnel for the Reagan-Bush presidential Campaign of 1980. He went on to serve the Reagan Administration in executive positions at the Federal Aviation Administration, the General Services Administration, and the Peace Corps. He serves on the boards of numerous corporations and foundations and he’s the author of a bestselling book called Naked Emperors: The Failure of the Republican Revolution, published in 2007.

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I was talking last week about how the libel laws in England prevent journalists from working, and keep stories about the rich and powerful under wraps. That doesn’t happen much in the US.

As I mentioned last week, the US follows a 1964 precedent called New York Times v O’Sullivan, from a libel case taken by Montgomery police commissioner LB Sullivan who said that some inaccuracies in a piece about the policing of civil rights demonstrations in Alabama libeled him.

In the UK he would have been certain of a

win and probably a big payout, but the Supreme Court agreed with the New York

Times that they are going to make some honest mistakes from time to time and if

that could put them out of business, that would effectively restrain their free

expression.

They ruled that proving the facts is not

enough to sue. You must prove the journalist knew, or should have known the

truth and maliciously or recklessly wrote something false anyway. Basically you

have to prove what was in their mind, an almost impossible task.

That’s why there is no big libel business

in the US. But someone did win a libel case recently. His name is Leonard

Pozner, he’s the father of Noah Pozner who was murdered at the age of six years

in the Sandy Hook school shooting. The court

ruled that James Fetzer,

Richard Vedder is an economist, historian, author, and columnist. He is a professor emeritus of economics at Ohio University and senior fellow at The Independent Institute. Who have just published his latest book called Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.

In our discussion, I mentioned the fact that the number of hours of minimum-wage working required to fund a year at university has skyrocketed since the 1960s:

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There was an interesting little aside in an

episode of South Park a few years back, but if you live in the UK, you may not

have caught it, because that episode of South Park, the cartoon with

eight-year-old Colorado boys who seem to know too much and too little about

life was never shown in the UK. The episode had a poorly-drawn caricature of

the actor Tom Cruise, who improbably shows up at the house of one of the boys,

gets offended, hides in the boy’s wardrobe and won’t come out.

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You get the impression that the writers are

trying to make a point.

But don’t make that point in England.

American libel laws started out very

similar to the ones in England, but they have diverged radically, and that

change has become such a part of the culture in the US that it’s hard for many

people grasp the difference. The main change came about from a case in the US

called New

York Times v O’Sullivan. I don’t want to go deep into the legality, but

basically, in 1964, the New York Times published a piece on policing civil

rights demonstrations in Alabama which contained some inaccuracies, and the Montgomery

police commissioner LB Sullivan considered that constituted a libel against

him.

He sued for libel. In the UK that would be

a slam-dunk.

Wen Fa is an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a national, nonprofit legal organization that represents clients free of charge.

We talked about his work on cases including Rentberry v. City of Seattle about rent-bidding laws, and another tenant/landlord case, Pakdel v. City and County of San Francisco, and various cases about Vaping.

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Francis

Rawls is in jail. And that’s where he’s staying. He lost his case at the

3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. So what has he been convicted

of? Nothing.

Rawls, a former Philadelphia police officer

has been in jail 17 months because he invoked the

Fifth Amendment, he said he wouldn’t give self-incriminating information to

police investigating him. But the Fifth Amendment is, you know, the Fifth

Amendment. It guarantees the right not to incriminate yourself.

The exact text is no person “shall be

compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”. So how come

the court denied his appeal, with three judges voting unanimously against him? It’s

partly because the information that the police and the courts want him to hand

over, and that he is refusing, are the passwords to encrypted external hard drives

that were connected to his computer. The police seized them, along with his

computer because they believe they contain child porn, and they do have good

reason to believe that, and they convinced a judge to give them a warrant to

seize and search his computer.

The appeals court ruled that forensic

examination showed that Rawls had downloaded thousands of files, the hash

values of which indicated they were child pornography.  That’s a bit of geek-speak but it means they

were monitoring his online activity, they didn’t get the actual files, but they

Challenging Opinions brings you a special showcase edition of the Getting Off podcast, presented by Jessa and Nick. It’s dark-humored criminal defense attorneys discussing famous crimes, trials, and all things criminal justice.

Go to GettingOffPod.com to subscribe, or search Getting Off Podcast in wherever you get your podcasts.

Steven Taylor  is Professor of Political Science and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Troy University, Alabama. He specialises in political parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. We discussed an article he wrote for Outside the Beltway.

We’ve been hearing a lot about Ukraine in the past week, and

I can promise you’ll be hearing a lot more about it the coming weeks and

months, and maybe even years. I’m not going to try to keep you up to date with

what’s going on in the White House, that’s not really the job of a podcast, certainly

not this podcast.

But, since we’re going to be hearing a lot

about Ukraine, it’s worth knowing something about that country. Ukraine is big,

40 million people and about the size of Texas, it was the second-largest

republic of the USSR – of course it’s vastly smaller than the largest, Russia.

And they’re poor. They’re not third-world

poor, but they are poor, the GDP per capita is about $3,200 a year, but that’s

the average, a few billionaires hog most of it, I’ve seen fleets of Porches and

Maseratis run red lights and speed through the centre of Kiev. The typical

Ukrainian is much poorer than the $3,200 a year figure.

In the Soviet era Ukraine suffered

unspeakably; it took the brunt of the Nazi invasion and the Holocaust, although

some Ukrainians collaborated because they saw the Nazis as opposition to the Soviets.

A decade earlier the Soviets – Stalin specifically – had caused the Holmodor, a genocide the

Ukrainians view as on a par with the Holocaust, and not without reason, because

a roughly equal number of people died when almost all the harvest was

confiscated,

Anthony Galace is the director of health equity at the Greenlining Institute.

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Our brains don’t really work so well with

very small or very large numbers. If I ask you to imagine the distance from

earth to the sun, from earth to the nearest star, or earth to the nearest

galaxy, it’s tempting to just think very, very far in all three cases, even

though each one is millions of times more than the previous one.

Similarly, if you try to imagine the size

of a bacterium, a virus, or an atom, you’re probably just thinking very small,

even though each of those is millions of times smaller than the previous one.

For that reason it’s hard to get our heads around some of the statistics that

are important for the way the world works. It’s hard even to imagine the

difference between a million and a billion, there are a few illustrations out

there, but I like this one. Imagine you won a million dollars in the lottery,

and you decided to go on a shopping spree. You spend $1,000 per day – how long

will your money last? Answer: less than three years. Obviously I’m ignoring interest

and inflation here.

This podcast is coming out on Monday,

September 23, 2019. If you had won that million and started your $1,000-a-day shopping

spree on Christmas day 2016, you would have run out of money last Saturday.

But what if you had won a billion dollars?

If you were spending it at the same rate, $1000 a day, to run out of money about

now, you would need to start spending, not years ago, not decades ago, not

centuries ago but thousands of years ago. About 718 BC, to be exact. To finish

spending a billion dollars, at the rate of $1000 a day you would have to have

started while the Pharaohs ruled Egypt, before ancient Rome was even founded.

That gives you a just an idea of the

difference in scale between a million dollars and a billion dollars.

And I think that the reason that many

people don’t react proportionately sometimes is because our brains can’t re...

Sky Palma is the founder of DeadState, and a senior editor at Raw Story.

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If I was to ask you what was the most

dangerous animal in the world, and you were to think tigers, bears or sharks,

you’d be wildly wrong, particularly with sharks. Despite Shark Week, despite Jaws,

sharks are not statistically dangerous to humans – quite the reverse, humans

kill millions, many, many millions of times more sharks that sharks kill humans.

I’m sure some smartass out there will be

thinking that the most dangerous animal is man, but I’m thinking of other

animals that kill humans.

A shark…

And by a mile, the

winner is the mosquito. To put it in context, sharks typically kill five or

six humans per year, worldwide. Depending on your sources, mosquitoes kill somewhere

between 700,000 and 2.7m

people per year. Get that, mosquitoes kill at the very least 100,000 times

more people than sharks. They are estimated to be responsible for about 17 per

cent of all the disease on the planet. I can’t wait for Mosquito Week on the Discovery Channel.

They kill, of course, by spreading diseases

when they bite, notably malaria, but also zika, dengue, and yellow fever, and

many others. If you live in a western country and get one of these diseases,

you will probably survive – probably – because you have access to good

healthcare, but millions of people around the world don’t, and die.

But there’s hope.

… or a mosquito. Which should you fear most?

A newly-developed

vaccine to malaria is now being deployed in Kenya, and hopefully soon to

other countries, and it is proving very effective. This is significant because

around the world,

Jared Moffat is campaign coordinator for the Marijuana Policy Project.

I mentioned that Ferguson, Missouri gains an extrordinary amount of its revenue from motoring fines.

Black people make up 27 percent of the population, but represent 71 percent of drivers pulled over by police officers. Last year, the town issued 29,072 traffic citations, according to statistics from the Missouri attorney general’s office.

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A couple

of weeks back an international group of scientists announced that they had

detected a black hole swallowing a neutron star.

I say a couple of weeks back, but the

detection made last month was actually of something that happened 900 million

years ago, long before the dinosaurs walked the earth. It was detected last month

because that’s how long it took the gravitational waves to arrive at earth from

where this event happened, 900 million light years away.

I’m reminded of the observation that the

length of time between the first powered flight, the Wright brothers, in 1903

and the moon landing in 1969 was just 66 years. It’s likely that a child who

observed the first flight in Kitty Hawk would have watched the moon landing on

TV. That’s an incredible advance in technology in the span of one lifetime,

without even counting the invention of television.

Black holes were

proposed by Einstein in 1915, barely a century ago, but he didn’t say that

they existed, he thought that they may not; he just calculated that the physics

of relativity made them theoretically possible. Those calculations, by the way,

were made with pencil and paper, or sometimes chalk and a blackboard. There was

no high-powered computers to work these things out on.

In barely a century, we have gone from

Reese Erlich has won numerous journalism awards including a Peabody award. He’s also a freelance journalist who writes for CBS Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corp., NPR and VICE News, and his Foreign Correspondent column distributed nationally in the US.

Last year he published his latest book with the title The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story Inside Iran and What’s Wrong with U.S. Policy.

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I mentioned the pro-democracy protests in

Hong Kong a few weeks back, particularly the fact that a huge proportion of the

city’s population was taking part in them. Since I talked about them, the

protests have been covered widely in the western media, and they haven’t

dissipated, they are continuing every weekend.

It’s notable that in the meantime protests

have started in Moscow on a similar theme. People, mostly young people, are

taking to the streets complaining about the lack of democracy. There are some

notable similarities, but also big differences.

The main similarity is that they started in

much the same way, over a seemingly minor issue. In Hong Kong that was an

extradition bill that would have allowed authorities to forcibly take anyone

they arrested to China where the rule of law is much weaker, where the

government can basically lock up anyone they want.

In Moscow, it was about banning opposition

candidates from standing in elections for the Moscow local government. This is

a relatively minor issue, if Putin lost control of the local government there,

it would in theory barely cause a blip on his total control of the country, and

that was never going to happen anyway because the chances of more than a few of

those opposition candidates winning were remote.

But in reality, Putin runs a régime where

no uncontrolled opposition can be tolerated. If they can win a few seats in

this election, they can more the next time, then maybe a majority, and then

challenge Putin in more serious ways.

Gautam Tejas Ganeshan is a musician and a writer and blogger, and we talked about a piece that he wrote titled ‘Is there an intelligible “anti-vaxx” position?‘