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Amy Goodman, host of the New York City-based leftist news programme Democracy Now! was charged with criminal trespass by the North Dakota state's attorney (prosecutor). The charge was changed to riot, then was dismissed due to lack of evidence when Goodman appeared in court on Monday. The charges stemmed from her presence at a protest in September against construction of the Dakota Access (Bakken) oil pipeline, after the protest was reported on her show.
Coverage:
- Ars Technica
- Democracy Now!
- Democracy Now! (with video and transcript)
- New York Times
- Salon
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed
- The Nation (prior to dismissal)
- Fortune
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Journalist Charged in North Dakota with Rioting; Case is Dismissed
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Knock, knock!
Who's there?
Sam and Janet.
Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet Evening...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:47PM
North Dakota folks like to think they are libertarian, take-care-of-our-own, bunch, but apparently they are also fascists.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 19 2016, @02:04PM
Well, duh. The Spice must flow.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @02:54PM
> North Dakota folks like to think they are libertarian, take-care-of-our-own, bunch, but apparently they are also fascists.
Remember that old joke that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch?
That's how libertarianism ends up working in the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @03:32PM
oh yeah, the old stale propaganda of the slaves, "if it weren't for government telling us what to do we'd all kill each other". so scared of freedom, the ultimate terror. you're the cancer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:14PM
Yeah. bring back company towns, 80 hour work weeks, child labor, pinkertons and cuyahoga fires. Freedom!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:48PM
If history has shown us anything its that humans need some degree of regulation. Without the EPA the US would be a polluted hell hole (more so) with shit like Flint's water crisis being a minor event. We'd have a huge hole in the ozone layer right now instead of a shrinking one, and skin cancer would be through the roof.
But keep clinging the the idea of total freedom, any vigilante justice would be smacked down by those with money and power.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:28PM
Without the EPA the US would be a polluted hell hole (more so) with shit like Flint's water crisis being a minor event.
And currently the US is adding regulation faster than a human can read it with the EPA being a significant contributor to that regulatory growth.
We'd have a huge hole in the ozone layer right now instead of a shrinking one, and skin cancer would be through the roof.
The shrinking hole might grow again. We don't exactly have a long term record of the ozone layer over the Antarctica and the hole might be naturally growing and shrinking without any help from us.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:38PM
Sorry, I'm not particularly interested in regulating your ass. I have better things to do with my time. Maybe you could keep yourself out of trouble instead?
That's cool. I'm going to move in next door and open a foul smelling waste processing plant. Why didn't you keep yourself out of that trouble I just created for you?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:08PM
Its a free market, he can pack all his stuff and move somewhere else, taking the loss on the property values as a libertarian badge of courage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:25PM
No one is asking you to regulate anything, we want competent people that understand environmental impacts.
EPA regulations are generally good, but I'm not averse to a review process.
Geebus corporate shilling Christ. I hope you're getting paid for this level of bullshit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @07:05PM
EPA regulations are generally good, but I'm not averse to a review process.
As of mid 2015 [cnsnews.com], the new EPA regulations added since the beginning of the Obama administration was almost 30,000 pages. So no, EPA regulations aren't generally good. I think a prudent "review process" here would be a reduction of the amount of EPA regulation from its beginning by a factor of ten.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @07:39PM
Gee, callow thinks complexity means failure. Which is why the linux kernel is only 500,000 lines of code.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @08:19PM
Gee, callow thinks complexity means failure.
Yes, I do. You should too. The cost of complying with regulation is superlinear due to interaction between regulation. The more you add, the worse it gets.
Which is why the linux kernel is only 500,000 lines of code.
I don't think it's a good idea to brag that the Linux kernel has 20 million lines of code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:41PM
Honduras Is Sold as a Libertarian Paradise; I Went--and Discovered a Capitalist Nightmare [alternet.org]
Now, when the profit-before-all-else Capitalists stop poisoning us in order to make $0.01 more, -then- we can stop with the regulations.
...and, just to show us how honorable their intentions are, they can put up a $1 trillion surety bond. EACH.
.
...and the day that Windoze supports the number of devices Linux does, -then- we can start talking honestly about code bloat.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:18PM
Now at this point, you might be surprised. Have you ever heard any libertarian claiming that Honduras is a paradise, or an experiment in the philosophy? I sure haven’t.
For example, the Fraser Institute’s most recent Freedom index [freetheworld.com] ranks Honduras as the 55th freest country in the world (as of 2012), right behind Botswana and just ahead of Uganda. To be fair, there are other notable countries like Israel and France right next to Honduras in the rankings, so I’m not claiming that it’s a socialist nightmare. But 55th in the world is hardly a libertarian experiment, and most progressives don’t point to France as a Ron Paul ideal.
To get more specific numbers, we can consult the Heritage Foundation’s ranking. In its 2015 Index [heritage.org], Heritage puts Honduras as 116th in the world in terms of economic freedom. It shows that Honduras has government expenditures of 27% of domestic output, and government debt of 40% of GDP. The overall tax burden is 16% of domestic income. The consumer price inflation rate is 5.2%. It’s not North Korea, granted, but it’s hardly the stuff of Atlas Shrugged either.
And the high point:
For example, the very next sentences say: “In Honduras, the police ride around in pickup trucks with machine guns, but they aren’t there to protect most people. They are scary to locals and travelers alike.” So if the government has been disbanded with no taxes and expenditures, and full privatization, then how can there be government police riding around?
What’s happening here is that the author is conflating “libertarians don’t like government doing anything” with “a government doing things badly.” So for example, if (say) North Korean soldiers lined up a bunch of students who were caught plotting against the regime and executed them, our Salon writer would think, “This is applied libertarianism, because Murray Rothbard didn’t like government schools.” But let’s go back to the piece, to the single most absurd paragraph:
The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.
The cognitive dissonance here is astounding. The guy types out that the government “won’t fix the roads,” that private entrepreneurs do the best they can to fix the government’s mess, and then ask for voluntary donations, rather than shaking people down. And this is taken as an indictment of capitalism, rather than the State. Let me ask the author: What would the world need to look like, for the author to think the State had failed in its duties?
OriginalOwner, you keep that flame burning. Maybe some day we can all escape to the libertarian paradise of Honduras!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:25PM
It is interesting how you claim to not use the karma bonus, yet every single post you make has one upmod... statistically the least likely event to ever occur, unless you have multiple shill accounts. Better write a script that logs in your other accounts to post all the time so we can't analyze post history to find out which accounts are likely tied together.
You're an idealistically naive person BTW.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:58PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:25PM
SN shares the default karma values from the green site. Posts by ACs default to zero, registered users (with at least zero or positive account karma) default to one, and registered users with high (30+?) karma have the option to set their default post karma to two. khallow's post you replied to has (at time of this writing) no moderation applied to it at all. The score of "1" is the default for a registered user with non-negative karma.
So I guess this all makes you an ignorant person...?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:24PM
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:36PM
Ozone denial? REALLY? Enjoy the yummy moon dust!
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:36AM
Khallow worked for Du Pont.
/comments.pl?sid=15661&cid=407668#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:55PM
However, my views on the ozone hole are more recent. For a while in climate research I've seen a lot of cases of a particular form of observation bias. It's where someone looks at a climate or related system in detail for the first time, finds some problem, and then blames it on global warming without even thinking to ask if the problem has happened before they started measurement. Later I read a typical Slashdot argument when someone used the faulty logic that since we got the Montreal Protocol right implied that we got the Kyoto Treaty right as well. I realized that even the priors could be wrong. We didn't really know that we had gotten the science of the former treaty right, particularly the alarming ozone hole. It was merely assumed so.
It's kind of an enormous knowledge gap to simply not known whether the ozone hole is a new thing that sprung up in the 70s and 80s when we first started measuring the ozone layer in Antarctica. Or whether it's an ongoing thing that's been around off and on for say 2 million years during which we weren't measuring the ozone over Antarctica.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday October 21 2016, @04:40AM
[...] simply not known whether the ozone hole is a new thing that sprung up in the 70s and 80s when we first started measuring the ozone layer in Antarctica.
Rubbish.
In 1956, the British Antarctic Survey set up the Halley Bay Observatory on Antarctica in preparation for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957. In that year, ozone measurements using a Dobson Spectrophotometer began.
[graph omitted]
Instruments on the ground (at Halley) and high above Antarctica (the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer [TOMS] and Ozone Monitoring Instrument [OMI]) measured an acute drop in total atmospheric ozone during October in the early and middle 1980s. (Halley data supplied by J. D. Shanklin, British Antarctic Survey).
-- http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/history_SH.html [nasa.gov]
In 1957, the International Geophysical Year, a network of 85 Dobson stations was established to measure global ozone. This network has provided long-term data showing significant ozone loss on a global scale over the past 25 years
-- https://www.ucar.edu/communications/gcip/m1sod/m1pdfc1.pdf [ucar.edu]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 21 2016, @01:29PM
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday October 21 2016, @04:35PM
The Rowland–Molina hypothesis can explain the secular trend. Have you an alternate hypothesis?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 21 2016, @07:04PM
The hypothesis that CFCs destroy stratospheric ozone is not a bad hypothesis and it is far from ruled out by what we know. But you're falling for one of the classic scientific blunders: assuming that a phenomenon that you've seen for the first time has happened for the first time.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday October 22 2016, @07:22AM
> So can the hypothesis that ozone holes happen on a regular basis for the past two million years.
I'll accept that that statement amounts to a hypothesis. We have observations of an 11-year solar cycle and a 1-year seasonal cycle. Those changes in solar flux would be expected to result in changes to the ozone. Your hypothesis "explains" the Dobson unit measurements by supposing there are longer-term oscillations; it doesn't explain what would cause oscillations on a longer time scale.
> But you're falling for one of the classic scientific blunders: assuming that a phenomenon that you've seen for the first time has happened for the first time.
The sources I quoted say there's not only an ozone hole but a global decrease in ozone. If that's been happening repeatedly on a time scale that's much longer than the Dobson unit observations (which at one station in Switzerland go back to 1932), we should expect that the current ozone levels are neither the highest nor the lowest that have occurred. Extreme ozone depletion in the past could be observed indirectly through its effects on organisms. People have looked into that (emphasis added):
We analyzed bulk UV absorbance of methanolic extracts and levels of five UV-absorbing compounds (hydroxycinnamic acid derivatives) in 135 herbarium samples of the liverwort Jungermannia exsertifolia subsp. cordifolia from northern Europe. Samples had been collected in 1850–2006 (96% in June–August). Both UV absorbance and compound levels were correlated positively with collection year. p-Coumaroylmalic acid (C1) was the only compound showing a significant (and negative) correlation with stratospheric ozone and UV irradiance in the period that real data of these variables existed. Stratospheric ozone reconstruction (1850–2006) based on C1 showed higher values in June than in July and August, which coincides with the normal monthly variation of ozone. Combining all the data, there was no long-term temporal trend from 1850 to 2006. Reconstructed UV showed higher values in June–July than in August, but again no temporal trend was detected in 1918–2006 using the joint data. This agrees with previous UV reconstructions.
--http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/40887145/retrospective-bioindication-of-stratospheric-ozone-and-ultraviolet-radiation-using-hydroxycinnamic [microsoft.com]
Just going by the abstract, those researchers saw what they call "monthly" variation, which I would call a yearly cycle. They didn't see long-term variations. Of course, their idea of what's "long-term" is nothing like two million years. It is, however, multi-decadal.
Another author wrote (emphasis added):
The stratospheric ozone layer, which protects the biosphere from biologically active (mostly harmful) ultraviolet-B (UV-B) solar radiation, thinned during the latter half of the 20th century. In this paper some of the effects of UV-B radiation on cryptogams (cyanobacteria, algae, lichens, mosses, liverworts, pteridophytes and fungi) are reviewed. Effects vary among species, and therefore changes in UV-B radiation may affect species frequencies. Effects also depend on other factors, such as water conditions.
--http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/40330816/stratospheric-ozone-ultraviolet-radiation-and-cryptogams [microsoft.com]
> You need data that distinguishes between hypotheses rather than merely assume that your favorite hypothesis is true.
It's all right to have just one hypothesis; the alternative of acknowledging our ignorance is always available.
> The hypothesis that CFCs destroy stratospheric ozone is not a bad hypothesis and it is far from ruled out by what we know.
Destruction of ozone by chlorine species was observed in the laboratory, and there was the global "experiment" with CFCs. Data from those--apart, perhaps, from the liverwort paper I quoted above--seem adequately consistent with the hypothesis, although ozone depletion happened more quickly than was predicted. It doesn't look to me as though acknowledging our ignorance is preferable. Supposing that the ozone oscillates naturally for unknown reasons isn't much different than that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 22 2016, @02:40PM
Your hypothesis "explains" the Dobson unit measurements by supposing there are longer-term oscillations; it doesn't explain what would cause oscillations on a longer time scale.
We do know there are such variations in both climate and solar output and both are relevant (though climate related effects matter significantly more) to ozone production over the Antarctic. In particular, we know that the ozone hole is due in large part [wikipedia.org] to isolation of the upper atmosphere due to polar vortex and high altitude cloud formation prior to the beginning of the Southern hemisphere spring (and return of sunlight to the Antarctic).
It's all right to have just one hypothesis; the alternative of acknowledging our ignorance is always available.
Sure, it is when the consequences of the hypothesis being more or less correct can be ignored. A key problem here is that global policy on refrigerants has been decided on the basis of a certain chemistry model of the stratosphere. But if natural variation is being ignored, then it indicates that the model's estimates of, for example ozone generation and depletion as well as the life span and effects of chlorine in the stratosphere can be very wrong, resulting in policy affected billions of people being based on bad models and data.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:14PM
Awesome! Forget Yucca Mountain, now we can back the trucks up to khallow's fence line and pour the waste. Any takers on how fast he'd cry, "why, there oughta be a law!!!"?
Washington DC delenda est.