Not Guilty by Reason of Civil Disobedience

I am resolved to put some of my down time here at "the Point" to constructive use by drafting an article on the need for a plea of Not Guilty by Reason of Civil Disobedience in American jurisprudence.

I haven't done any research on this thesis as of yet, but I plan to hit the Perryvilled Community Library next Saturday. I'll post later on my progress.

Below are my tentative arguments for establing a please of Not Guilty by Reason of Civili Disobedience.

1. It is generally accepted that what is lawful and what is just are not always one in the same.


2. The United States has a tradition of venerating those who engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in order to push the letter and spirit of the law toward greater justice.


3. The jury box is the most direct, law-abiding means a citizen has to decide whether or not a law and its application are just.


4. Juries already make determinations about the motivations and mental states of defendants. Why, then, would they be unable to weigh in on a person's moral convictions and the law the defendant considers unjust?

Player Piano Anyone?

BBC's website was featuring this article about intelligent machines. As a recent X-barista who is disgusted with the increased use of automatic espresso machines slowly taking all the brain-work out of the profession, I'm a little unnerved. I was always comfortable with the idea that a monkey could make a mocha, because I knew that the cappuccino is the true dividing line between humans and beasts... but it appears that one day the machines may take over the mocha and the cappuccino. And I'd rather be lumped in with the beasts than with machines.

quotes from the article:
"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," Kurzweil said.
"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

link to article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7248875.stm

Everything is Illuminated

I finished Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated recently. Below is a passage I particularly enjoyed.

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water.

They say that?

They do. Of course, your great-great-great-grandmother was right. It was terrible at first. We couldn't stand to be in the house for more than a few hours at a time. The first two weeks were filled with nights of intermittent sleep and quarelling for the sake of being heard over the water. We fought so much to remind ourselves that we were in love, and not in hate.

But the next weeks were a little better. It was possible to sleep a few good hours each night and eat in only mild discomfort. Your great-great-great-grandmother still cursed the water, but less frequently, and with less fury. Her attacks on me also quieted. It's your fault, she would say. You wanted to live here.

Life continued, as life continues, and time passed, as time passes, and after a little more than two months: Do you hear that? I asked her on one of the rare morning we sat at the table together. Hear it? I put down my coffee and rose from my chair. You hear that thing?

What thing? she asked.

Exactly! I said, running outside to pump my fist at the waterfall. Exactly!

We danced, throwing handfuls of water in the air, hearing nothing at all. We alternated hugs of forgiveness and shouts of human triumph at the water. Who wins the day? Who wins the day, waterfall? We do! We do!