Politics & Law Archives - The Travelin' Librarian

Jun

23

2017

June 23rd, 2017 by Michael Sauers

‘Pirate’ sites Sci-Hub and LibGen have been ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. A New York District Court granted Elsevier’s request for a default judgment of $15 million in damages. Sci-Hub’s founder says that she can’t pay the damages even if she wanted to, and for now, the “Pirate Bay for science” isn’t going anywhere.

Read the full article @ TorrentFreak.

Posted in Politics & Law Tagged with: copyright

Jun

09

2017

June 9th, 2017 by Michael Sauers

Wed, May 3 from 6:00 – 7:00pm CDT

Posted in Politics & Law, Tech, video Tagged with: cory doctorow, edward snowden, nypl

May

12

2017

May 12th, 2017 by Michael Sauers

Posted in Internet, Politics & Law, video Tagged with: #fridayvideo, john oliver, net neutrality

Apr

14

2017

April 14th, 2017 by Michael Sauers

From Amazon.com:

New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation.

America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure―wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation―reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first “law and order” president. With the clarity and originality that distinguished his prescient bestseller, Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes upends our national conversation on policing and democracy in a book of wide-ranging historical, social, and political analysis.

Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights, and aggressive policing resembles occupation. A Colony in a Nation explains how a country founded on justice now looks like something uncomfortably close to a police state. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution?

A Colony in a Nation examines the surge in crime that began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s, and the unprecedented decline that followed. Drawing on close-hand reporting at flashpoints of racial conflict, as well as deeply personal experiences with policing, Hayes explores cultural touchstones, from the influential “broken windows” theory to the “squeegee men” of late-1980s Manhattan, to show how fear causes us to make dangerous and unfortunate choices, both in our society and at the personal level. With great empathy, he seeks to understand the challenges of policing communities haunted by the omnipresent threat of guns. Most important, he shows that a more democratic and sympathetic justice system already exists―in a place we least suspect.

A Colony in a Nation is an essential book―searing and insightful―that will reframe our thinking about law and order in the years to come.

Posted in Books, Politics & Law Tagged with: #fridayreads

Mar

30

2017

March 30th, 2017 by Michael Sauers

My blog post from this day in 2005…

I was sitting outside the Pella, IA public library earlier this morning waiting for it to open when I saw a cop come out of the police station across the street. He held in his had something that looked like a golf club, a long stick with a bend at the far end. I sat there as I witnessed him walk down the street behind all the parked cars (on-street angled parking) and poke his stick under each car and look down. It seems that his pole had a mirror on the end and he was checking the undersides of all of the card on the street. Witnessing this just creeped me out. Town cops walking down the street and randomly looking under parked cars. I realize that this was probably legal since the cars were parked on a public street but the only thing that would make this practice less creepy (or maybe more creepy) is is this cop had a reasonable suspicion of some nefarious goings-on.

Posted in Politics & Law Tagged with: #TBT

Mar

18

2017

March 18th, 2017 by Michael Sauers

All rights reserved. All lefts are reserved too. And while we’re reserving things, I’ll also take front row seats to all NBA Finals games. Unless you are observing the doctrine of fair use, please do not reproduce, distribute or transmit this work as it took a long time to make and I’d like to be paid for it, just as you would. If you are from the future and are in the possession of winning lottery numbers some exceptions can be made, so get in touch. Otherwise go in peace into my book with reciprocal author/reader respect. We need each other to do well. Cheers.

Dance of The Possible / Scott Berkun—1st ed.
March 2017

Posted in Books, Politics & Law Tagged with: copyright

Feb

17

2017