Virtual Illusions

Sex Offender Paranoia - How We’ve Gone Too Far

Skip down to number 8.  A 2 year old girl wandered away from her pre-school.  She is seen by a man driving down the road.  The man thinks he should do something but is afraid that he’ll be accused of trying to abduct her.

The girl is later found downed to death in a pond.

In that same article is the story of Thomas Pauli and man convicted of second degree criminal sexual conduct, who froze to death because he was denied access to a homeless shelter because he was on “the list”.   He couldn’t stay in the homeless shelters because they were to close to a school.  The article makes no comment about whether he had ever hurt a child, and given that his crime doesn’t include the word minor, it seems likely that he never did.

In this article Stephen Marshall kills two sex offenders.  One of his victims committed the crime of having consensual sex with his girlfriend three weeks before the age of consent.  Marshall got their home addresses from the registry of sexual offenders along with 34 other potential victims and murdered two men in one day.  I assume he will have murdered more if given more time.

Given that 83% of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim and that the recitvism rate among sex offenders is 2/3rd that of released prisoners in general and of those that reoffend only 5.3% are re-arrested for a sex crime, it seems clear that sex offender paranoia does more harm than good.  [source]

I’m not sure what society thinks will happen when they release people from prison who can’t get a job, get a place to live or have any friends, it seems to me the intended effect of the sex offender registries is that more people (children or otherwise) get hurt.

Culture, Justice

President Obama’s inauguration is coming up in just a week.  Soon after that inauguration the Boy Scouts of America will attempt to make him their honorary president.

Obama should decline.

The fact that the Boy Scouts of America discriminates is a decided question.  They were sued and changed from being a quasi-public organization to a private religious organization so they could continue discriminating.  They consider it a core function of their organization to expel members for no other reason than their religious or sexual orientation.

The fact that they discriminate against anyone should be sufficient for Obama to decline the “honor” of serving as their honorary president.

Instead he should choose to serve as the actual president of all Americans.  He should begin delivering on his promises of change and inclusion.  This small symbolic action would clearly telegraph that they he will not be party to discrimination against anyone.

It would be a welcome change.

Culture, Philosophy/Religion, Politics

I recently was looking for Creative Commons images to put into some of my Nephilim Song stuff.  This seemed like a perfect use for such work, I was producing freely distributed game supplements that had no budget and would be greatly enhanced with some images to break up walls of text and my art skills are limited at best.

One of the places I went looking for images was Deviant Art since they have a proper Creative Commons tag easily searchable using a google site search if not their built in search.  What surprised me is the number of times I encountered something to the effect of:

Licensed under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license.  You can not use my work ANYWHERE without my express written permission and if you do, you are a thief.

I also encountered something along the lines of:

This work protected by copyright and creative commons.

This led me to believe that a sizable part of the Deviant Art community that was releasing works under the creative commons license, simply didn’t know what they were doing.

My understanding without being a lawyer is that the creative commons licenses are just that licenses, not protections.  When  you license your work under creative commons you are giving  your express written permission for your work to be used without further consultation under limited conditions laid out in the specific creative commons license.

The creative commons license does not offer any additional protections above straight copyright, in fact it is a formal release of some those rights so your work can be used by the culture.   There are very good reasons for doing this, it is only with a rich public exchange that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

If you do not wish to participate in that exchange, I do not wish to use your work without your blessing which is why I found the mislabeling so distressing.  Some people made it obvious despite releasing their work under the creative commons that they did not wish for others to use their works, others made it clear that they did wish for others to be able to build new things using their work as a building block.

The ones in between worry me.  They licensed the work, but my survey doesn’t fill me with confidence that they knew what they were doing.

I messaged a few of the artists who’s comments made it clear they did not wish to license their work and tried to inform them of what the license meant and I wrote this trying to further the educate the Internet.

Culture, Media

Over at the Atheist Experience blog they do a wonderful comparison of the Batman Begins movie with the Sodom and Gomorrah story.  It’s a bit long but the argument that Batman Begins is a retelling of the story with a humanist twist is fairly complelling.

Culture, Media, Philosophy/Religion

I really like these T-Shirts.  Sadly I think many will misread them.

Culture, Philosophy/Religion, Politics

From Fred Hicks livejournal:

I need a banner in my gaming area that says:

This is how I make you awesome.

I think if people kept that in mind while gaming it would definitely awesome up the experience.

Culture, Gaming

New High in U.S. Prison Poplulation

Apparently we hit a new record… go us?

More than 1% of the U.S. population is presently in jail. Obviously if you are minority or poor than more than 1% or your community is currently in jail. I don’t understand how we accept that state of affairs as if it is acceptable.

For my conservative readers: We are spending $55 billion dollars a year to lock up 2.3 million people. Since we are operating in a deficit that means we continue to spend millions of dollars each year on interest on borrowing that money. With all that money consumed in the prison system it hinders our ability to build roads, fund the armed forces, have another round of tax cuts or whatever else conservatives think governments should be spending their money.

For me it’s simply inhuman to lock up that many people. Clearly the current system isn’t working and what we are doing now simply isn’t practical. We can’t just keep putting people in jail and hope that makes things better. What happens is people people who went to jail for minor things, come out hardened criminals with socialized contacts into the criminal world.

They get out and look for a job and we don’t hire them because they have the habits, demeanor, tattoos, etc of someone who’s been in jail. That’s before the we even consider the stigma of the criminal record once a background check is done or the interviewer asks about the five year blank space in the resume. Looking for a place to live and way to make ends meet they are more likely than ever to take a shady job that allows them to support themselves. With that sort of cycle it’s only a matter of time before they return to jail.

We have more of our population in jail both as a percentage and an absolute number. The argument could be made that the numbers reported for the distant second place holder, China, aren’t very accurate. Even if you accept that without any evidence to suggest it’s true you still have to contend with the fact that we imprison a greater percentage of our country than any other industrialized nation who’s data you trust.

Prisons are not the answer. They don’t make us safer, they are merely deficit spending of public safety. Eventually people get out of jail, it’s neither moral, nor can we afford to keep them there forever. When they are released they are even more distant from legal society. Their ability to change their lives are diminished and the problem that prison was supposed to solve surges again in 5, 10 or 20 years.

While there may be a temporary benefit to public safety by locking a lot of people up, it is dwarfed by the effect of reducing poverty or unemployment has on the crime rate. We need to concentrate on the longterm meaningful, humane solutions. Work on poverty and person’s ability to meaningfully employed and provide for their own welfare and there will be a much more longterm benefit to public safety.

Related Items:

• Prisons
• Death Penalty

Culture, Politics

Due to the subtitle of this blog I get a number of people who appear to be searching for the difference between the words illusion and allusion washing up on the shores of my web pages. I suspect they flail about a bit and flee, whatever they gained from their visit it was not the answer to the question that they asked.  This post is to correct that sad situation.

In definition the words aren’t too similar. An illusion is an erroneous mental representation. In a literary sense it is something that is false that appears, or people believe to be, true. “He had the illusion of faith” for example. It is a disjunction between perceived reality and objective reality.

Magic tricks are often called illusions as they hinge on the audience perceiving something different from what is really happening. Optical illusions trick the senses so that the brain perceives something different than what is real.

An allusion on the other hand is a reference within a work, usually literary or artistic, to an external work, person, character, etc. with the assumption that the audience will be familiar with the reference. The reference can be either direct or more veiled. “This task makes me feel like Sisyphus.“, would be a direct allusion to the fact that every time the task is almost done it encounters a setback.

A homage or “nod of the head” to earlier actors or directors in cinema is a form of allusion. My favorite hidden allusion was a soap opera I once saw that had a plane with the id numbers NCC-1701, the registration of the Enterprise in Star Trek. The reference to Star Trek would be an allusion, one that was lost on the people who were watching the soap opera, versus me, who was trying to take a nap in the college lounge.

So as I suggested earlier, with the exception of spelling and pronunciation, the two words aren’t that similar. In Summary:

Illusion: Cutting your assistant in half, balanced budget, your computer is secure, privacy, etc.

Allusion: Catch-22 (Joseph Heller novel), 15 minutes of fame (Andy Warhol quote), Romeo (Shakespeare character), David and Goliath (Bible story), billions and billions (Carl Sagan) more.

Culture

I recently received an offensive and wildly inaccurate email about immigration. I took the time to respond to it rather than ignore it and thought I’d share it with my close person friend the Internet.

The following email was forwarded to me (formatting was scrambled but this is my bet guess of its intended format):

This is a subject close to my heart. Do you know that we have adult students at the school where I teach who are not US citizens and who get the PELL grant, which is a federal grant (no pay back required) plus other federal grants to go to school? One student from the Dominican Republic told me that she didn’t want me to find a job for her after she finished my program, because she was getting housing from our housing
department and she was getting PELL grant which paid for her total tuition and books, plus money left over. She was looking into WAIT which gives students a CREDIT CARD for gas to come to school, and into CARIBE which is a special program for immigrants and it pays for child care and all sorts of needs while they go to school or training. The one student I just mentioned told me she was not going to be a US citizen because she plans to return to the Dominican Republic someday and that she “loves HER country.” I asked her if she felt guilty taking what the US is giving her and then not even bothering to become a citizen and she told me that it doesn’t bother her, because that is what the money is there for!

I asked the CARIBE administration about their program and if you ARE a US citizen, you don’t qualify for their program. And all the while, I am working a full day, my son-in-law works more than 60 hours a week, and everyone in my family works and pays for our education.

Something is wrong here. … Right?

I am sorry but after hearing they want to sing the National Anthem in Spanish - enough is enough. Nowhere did they sing it in Italian, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German or any other language because of immigration. It was written by Francis Scott Key and should be sung word for word the way it was written The news broadcasts even gave the translation — not even close.

Sorry if this offends anyone but this is MY COUNTRY - IF IT IS YOUR COUNTRY SPEAK UP — please pass this along.

I am not against immigration — just come through like everyone else. Get a sponsor; have a place to lay your head; have a job; pay your taxes and live by the rules –AND LEARN THE LANGUAGE as all other immigrants have in the past — and GOD BLESS AMERICA!

PART OF THE PROBLEM

Think about this: If you don’t want to forward this for fear of offending someone — YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM! It is Time for America to Speak up

If you agree — pass this along, if you don’t agree — delete it!

Yep, I passed it on !

Since writing my response I also researched Pell grants and confirmed they require legal status, congruent with my belief that the immigrant in question has refugee status. Also keep in mind that the PELL grant caps out at about $5k/year so no one is really sitting pretty on a Pell grant. Also a Pell grant only applies to educational costs.

Although it probably needs more polish, this is my response (I feel like I need some phrases in all caps to scream back):

Someone who disagrees should not silently delete this, they should respond and enter into a dialog. Of course most of the facts of this idealogical screed are unverifiable by intent, but we can discover some things.

According to the Internet Caribe stands for Career Recruitment and Instruction in Basic English. So when the author (whoever that is) screams that immigrants should learn the language, this is a program to do exactly that. As it happens it is only available to immigrants who have been given refuge or asylum status. So it isn’t surprising that this person would like to return to their country if they could do so safely.

So to be clear this “horrible” person described in the screed is not an illegal immigrant but actually a legal immigrant here under refugee or asylum status. So when they say they are all for legal immigration they are lying.

The refugee status explains the access to the pell grants and all the other assistance granted a refugee to this country. Many of these programs trigger negative consequences for the recipient if they start
making money or are not sufficiently a full time student. I do not know if that applies in this case because I don’t think I can trust as unbiased most of the information provided.

Are you aware that as part of our foreign policy each year the federal government assists students from all over the world to come to the united states and become educated in American schools. We don’t do this out of the goodness of our heart. We do it so that they return to their country and spread our culture or at the very least a tolerance of American attitudes.

My sister-in-law is one of them and because of the program they can not return to the United States for any length of time for another six months despite the fact that she married my brother and now have a child who is a U.S. citizen.

As for singing the National Anthem in Spanish, I am proud of them. I am glad that someone believes that the anthem isn’t a hollow symbol but is meaningful enough in their lives that they would like to make it part of themselves.

For a symbol to have meaning it needs to periodically be reinvented. Jimi Hendrix reinvented that very same symbol while on acid in the ’60s. Someone is making the effort to make a symbol of America accessible to more people. They are doing America a boon, not a disservice.

By the way it was translated into German in 1861, Yiddish in the 1940’s as well as French, Samoan and Latin. Francis Scott Key wrote it as a poem and he had nothing to do with turning it into a song (the tune is a British drinking song). It wasn’t our national anthem until 1931 and can’t even be construed as a defacto anthem until 1916 at the earliest. Things change, that isn’t always bad.

Immigration is a complicated issue. Recent studies in Virginia indicated that immigrant entrepreneurship ended up generating millions of dollars of revenue in excess of the cost of services to immigrants.

Our immigration system is fundamentally broken, the defacto compromise that has been brokered over the years is that if you make it into the country and keep your head down and work low wage jobs we will turn out heads and provide opportunities to your children.

Recently it has been suggested that we need to normalize immigration. This includes expelling people who arrived in the United States before their first memory, kids who arrived here before their third birthday and are now graduating high school or college. This is their cultural home and they’ve never known anything else.

However even if it was just, expelling 12,000,000 people is logistically impossible in any reasonable time frame. If you did expel that many people we don’t have spare capable workforce to replace them. I don’t mean that business would have to pay more, I’m all for that, I mean the actual physical people with minimal physical and social skills (keep in mind they are replacing people who may not speak English, so I do mean minimal) do not exist.

I do take offense at the email, I don’t think it is anything more than undisguised bigotry. This may be your country but it is mine as well and I’d prefer a rational policy towards immigration that deals with the actual needs and pressures on this country rather than some idealogical kick out every one who isn’t a “real” American for some value of “American.”

Culture, Justice, Politics

I was discussing prisons over lunch with some co-workers and came up with two ideas which seem interesting and certainly couldn’t hurt our prison problem.

First as a qualification to become a warden at a prison an applicant would need to have served some time in jail. Selecting and finding these people may be difficult, ideally they would have served and then gone on to become contributing members of society. But they would have to choose to step back into a prison, which seems like it would difficult even if you are doing it on the other side of the cell door. My suggestions below may make this easier.

Having wardens with prisoner experience would make sure the agency keeping order in prisons remembered that the prisoners were human and still had the potential for a successful civilized life. They would also know what parts are the most de-humanizing and thus stand in the way of a rehabilitation process. They’d also know how prison culture works and may be able to nudge it without heavy handed techniques.

The second and much larger change would be create a matriculation process. Create a number of levels, each independently housed, which a prisoner would be expected to move through during their time in jail. Each level affording more freedoms and demanding more responsibility from the prisoner. At each level the prisoner is incentivized to get to the next level and greater freedoms and privacy, but also have the risk of stepping out of line and being sent back down to a previous level.

Getting to higher levels isn’t just about not breaking the rules it is about conforming to what we expect out of a contributing member of middle class society. There are social, moral linguistic and even dress norms that are expected to be adhered to at least in public. I’m not suggesting that prisoners have to become something they aren’t but they need to become adept at donning the guise or respectability which will serve them in job interviews and holding down jobs once they are released.

With luck, at higher levels the prison environment should be very similar to a boarding school. Prisoners should be attending classes, either in tradecraft or a two or four year degree. At some point prisoners should function in a “cash” economy (in quotes because actual cash may or may not be in the hands of prisoners).

They should hold down and get paid for jobs which can be accomplished from prison. A call center comes immediately to mind (though anything being outsourced can likely be done by prisoners who can’t leave the prison yet). Once they are paid for their work, they will be gradually ramped up to paying for going market rates for room and board and they will start being able to make choices on how to spend their money on different accommodations and benefits (pay more for a larger room, a better dinner occasionally or save it for later uses).

Prisoners aren’t just released all at once, there would be levels where the prisoner is aided in finding employment outside the prison and is allowed to travel on their own to these jobs but is expected to return to the facility for room and board. There would a be a number of slow incremental steps weening the prisoner away from the facility until they could stand productively on their own two feet (even then the prison system should always stand prepared to lend aid and advice when requested/required).

Which such a matriculation system a judge could assign a prisoner to a particular level as they are sentenced for a major crime and when they finish the program their sentence has been served. This may take longer or shorter depending on whether the prisoner embraces or fights the process.

It was an interesting enough idea that I thought I’d present it to the Internet.

This would serve well for prisoners who committed crimes primarily due to their economic or cultural roots, however, a true sociopath or drug kingpin would easily pass through the system without necessarily changing or growing. I’m not sure how the system should be adjusted to handle this.

Related Items:

• 1% Incarceration
• Death Penalty

Culture, Justice