Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

A Community’s Quest to Document Every Species on Their Island Home – Hakai Magazine

Posted: June 29, 2022 at 12:47 am

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On the southern tip of Galiano Island, a diagonal, 28-kilometer-long strip of land suspended off the coast of southern British Columbia, a thicket of Douglas fir thins to a small clearing overlooking Active Pass. A layered vista of darkly green Gulf Islandsthe archipelago of which Galiano is a partextends in every direction. Directly below the viewpoint, the blare of a ferrys horn alerts us to a boatload of passengers headed for the nearby city of Vancouver.

This is the spot, says Andrew Simon, a naturalist. Ill let you find it.

A mosaic of ground-cover plants makes a living carpet. I recognize only one of them: tiny spears of common pincushion moss spring from their leafy bedding, patched together against the dirt and bedrock. Then I spot a yellowy moss turned crisp from a dry summer and ask Simon if thats the one were looking for.

He furrows his brow. No, thats Niphotrichum elongatum, he says. Its another of the more ordinary rock mosses of the Pacific Northwest coast. Simon has brought me here in search of Triquetrella californica, a far rarer moss. Its a small, inconspicuous thing, he says. But it is beautiful.

Among the discoveries on Galiano Island, British Columbia, is Triquetrella californica, one of the rarest mosses in Canada. Photo by Shanna Baker

I look around for a few moments longer before declaring that I give up. Simon crouches on his hands and knees, the tip of his nose inches from the soil as he holds back walnut-colored tresses. Look at how abundant it is around here! he says. Were seeing it everywhere.

On this sunny July day, Triquetrella californica looks like little more than a sprinkling of dried ramen noodle crumbs. But, like ramen, the moss is made to be hydrated. At Simons suggestion, I pour a sip of water over the desiccated sprigs, and they instantly animate into a miniaturized copse of limey-green spires with leaves growing out in ranks of threehence the tri in Triquetrella. The nondescript plant has not only come back to life, it has also, with Simons help, erupted into my consciousness.

The author, right, and slime mold expert Pam Janszen add water to Triquetrella californica, to watch the desiccated moss rehydrate and unfurl. Photo by Shanna Baker

Youve found the rarest moss in Canada, says Simon. Theres your sensationalist headline. Simon is being facetiousan exacting scientist, he would hate to read an overblown valuation of the modest moss. Yet his superlative was true. At the time, this rocky outcrop was the only place the plant was found north of the Canada-US border. Since then, a friend of Simons has found a patch near Comox on Vancouver Island.

As we step back into the forest, I test Simons knowledge further, pointing to plants along the hiking path. He rapturously rattles off the Latin names of each species. When I naively point to a spindly bush with what looks like black beans dangling from its otherwise bare branches, Simon informs me it is Scotch broom, Cytisus scoparius, a widespread invasive species. I feel a flush of embarrassment for not knowing even the most commonplace of plants. Though life teems all around us, most of us can scarcely put a name to the nearest animal, vegetable, or mineral. When Simon walks in the woods, hes among old friends.

For the past six years, the thin 36-year-old with a macro-lens Olympus point-and-shoot forever around his wrist has been on a quixotic mission to document every last species on Galiano Island, from the lone pair of elk that swam ashore one day from another of the Gulf Islands, to the orb spiders guarding glistening webs, to the oysters clustered beneath the tides. His project spans animal, plant, fungal, and protozoan life forms, and includes marine life up to a kilometer offshore and down to a reef 120 meters below the surface, as well as every bird that flies overhead. Biodiversity Galiano (better known as BioGaliano) is among the more ambitious, comprehensive, and grassroots biological inventories being carried out anywhere on Earth.

Andrew Simon, the naturalist spearheading the Biodiversity Galiano project, uses the macro lens on his camera to inspect the minute details on a sample of lichen. Photo by Shanna Baker

Scientifically, BioGaliano is a formidable ledger of scientific knowledge and a baseline against which to measure ecological change in the future. In its first few years, the project has already documented a host of species never before recorded on the island, and in some cases, like Triquetrella californica, entirely new to Canada.

At least as importantly, Simon has given the likes of sideband snails, snowberries, and fairy slippers a space in the conscious minds of Galiano Islands human residents. Putting a name to something is fundamentally an act of acknowledgmentthe starting point for the kind of intimate relationship that can inspire us to protect the natural world. Judith Winston, a former commissioner with the Singapore-based International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the body that oversees the scientific naming of animals, puts it bluntly: If a species doesnt have a name, it doesnt exist. If it doesnt have a name, its never going to be conserved.

Simon may know about an impressive number of things living beneath the forest canopy now, but his dedication to understanding nature didnt really kick in until his early 20s. Growing up by the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, he always held an interest in the wild world, but as a young man he became what he describes as a disillusioned political activist type. He spent his latter teens and early 20s as a volunteer with Canada World Youth and on organic farms, bouncing around such destinations as Brazil, Hawaii, and Mexico. Finally, in 2007, he landed on the property of Trevor Goward in British Columbias dry interior near Kamloops.

Goward is a passionate gardener, a self-taught lichenologist, and a researcher with the University of British Columbia (UBC). He calls himself a bit of a hermit, but Goward is kind and affable, the sort of big-picture thinker that can tie every modern-day crisis back to the avarice of a capitalistic worldview.

One of the tasks Goward assigned to Simon was transcribing voice recordings that Goward took while in the field. Parmeliopsis ambigua, Candelaria concolor, Agonimia tristicula. As the euphony of Latin names rolled over him, Simon found that the role of scribe offered an unexpected doorway into Gowards worldview. I met Trevor and I realized that theres a lot more stories out there than just the human story, Simon says. Learning the names of mosses and lichens allowed him to focus his attention outward to the exuberant richness of the planets diverse living things rather than dwell on his inner discontent.

A piqued passion for biodiversity eventually led Simon to focus on environmental studies and cognitive science at Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia, and his experience with Goward helped him land an internship on Galiano Island in 2010. After a summer spent pulling weeds, propagating native plants, and teaching environmental education classes for the Galiano Conservancy Association, a local nonprofit dedicated to ecological stewardship, Simon set to work conducting biodiversity surveys on the island.

Simons fascination with nature eventually led him to Galiano Island in 2010 where he delved into the islands biodiversity doing surveys for the Galiano Conservancy Association. Photo by Shanna Baker

It proved to be a fascinating place for a budding naturalist. Hidden in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island and Washington States Olympic Mountains, Galiano is the driest of the Gulf Islands, but it used to be even drier. Nine thousand years ago, the tilt of the Earths axis placed the islands at a more southerly latitude than they are today, giving them a semiarid climate. The planets shifting alignment gradually moved the archipelago northward, and around 5,000 years ago, the BC coast became inundated with rain. Since Galiano Island was still sheltered between mountain ranges, though, it retained some of the species and ecosystems of its warmer past.

Today, the island is a patchwork of rain-loving evergreens like western red cedar and dry-meadow trees like Garry oak. The island is within the unsurrendered territories of the Penelakut and other Coast Salish Nations, but settlers from elsewhere began arriving in the 19th century. Most of the 1,400 current year-round residents have made homes of scattered cabins in the woods, and over the summer months the island is flush with visiting kayakers, campers, and hikers. Come nightfall, eerie darkness envelops land and sea, and the morning is greeted by the scent of evergreens and the chorus of thrush and warbler.

At first, Simon wanted to create a comprehensive field guide to the species found on a large property owned by the Galiano Conservancy. By the time he had written a rambling, 100-page manuscript that hadnt yet moved beyond marine algae, he realized that there were probably better ways to engage the community in learning about the local biodiversity. Having himself been changed by the process of getting to know his nonhuman neighbors, he wanted to help the local community deepen its appreciation for the island that he had grown to love. Around the same time, iNaturalist, a free app that makes it easy for even novice naturalists to identify species, became available. Users can simply upload a photo of drooping purple flowers, for example, and a machine-learning algorithm will spit out a nameDigitalis purpurea, a perennial plant commonly called foxglovewith a high degree of accuracy. The wider iNaturalist community, which includes many experts, confirms the identifications or fills in blanks where the algorithm fails.

BioGaliano participants can use iNaturalist, an online platform and app, to identify species by simply uploading a photo like the one above. The app would identify the plant as Digitalis purpurea, or common foxglove. Photo by Maria Janicki/Alamy Stock Photo

The first main goal was just initially this obsessive goal of documenting all of the living things, says Simon. The second goal was to engage the community in that process and to make biodiversity research more friendly and participatory.

One of the first steps for the BioGaliano project was collecting the names of every species that had previously been documented on the island. Simon gathered records dating back to 1859 from explorers who had visited the island, as well as findings from local naturalists; he scoured natural history museum archives, and drew on the knowledge of Jeannine Georgeson, a Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene friend who had grown up on Galiano and collaborates with Indigenous knowledge keepers. In the end, Simon had a list of nearly 2,800 species of animals, plants, and fungi known from the islandand a launching point for his mission to identify every species yet to be found. Its like a scavenger hunt, he says.

Naming and learning names are among the most central elements of language. They are foundational steps in being able to communicate and speak specifically about the world around us. Toddlers will instinctively repeat the names of the objects that they hear being said around them. In the Old Testament, God parades the animals in front of Adam to be named; in a Mayan creation story, it is the deities who name all life, bringing it out of emptiness and into being.

Our current understanding of the breadth of life forms has roots in the age of exploration that occurred between the 15th and 17th centuries. People started to make voyages around the world and bring back all kinds of stuff, including plants and animals, says Winston of the ICZN. Naming is how we began to make sense of what we now call biodiversity. Inundated with new species in the thousands, from dodos to dugongs, scientists needed a standardized way of referring to species across continents and languages. In the mid-18th century, a Swedish species classification expert, or taxonomist, called Carl Linnaeus developed and popularized binomial nomenclature, which remains the official system of scientific naming. A species is identified by its genus, which is shared with any close relatives, followed by a unique specific epithet; the two combined are its species name. For example, human beings: genus Homo (no close relatives currently exist), specific epithet sapiens, species name Homo sapiens.

Once a new species is confirmed by the scientific community, its presence can be added to the grand encyclopedia of recognized life forms. According to the Catalogue of Life, an international effort to create a universal species compendium, there are 2.3 million known species, from microbes to the worlds largest living animal, the blue whale. While calculations are rough, scientists estimate there are another 8.7 million yet to be identified.

Each year, up to 18,000 species are named or renamed, with 2021 adding the likes of the emperor Dumbo octopus and the nano-chameleon, perhaps the worlds tiniest reptile, which can comfortably perch on the tip of your pinkie finger. Many, such as Eunota mecocheila, an iridescent tiger beetle, and Scolopendra alcyona, a rare amphibious centipede, have only a scientific name. With no known common moniker in any language, awareness of these species is likely limited.

While new names are constantly added to the scientific vernacular, an increasing number of species is also being permanently erased from the catalog. Estimates vary widely, but up to 55,000 species are lost each year from forces such as habitat loss, climate change, and pollutiona rate 1,000 times higher than before humans became the dominant influence on the environment. Most of these vanished species are nameless.

A similar pattern of loss is reflected in day-to-day speech. Subjects that carry heavy cultural significance often have a more diversified lexicon. The Scots have an impressive vocabulary for describing bad weather, such as snell for a biting cold that pierces the skin, or drookit for being soaked to the bone; Hawaiians have around 65 words to describe fishing nets and 180 associated with sweet potatoes. In the 2015 revision of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, around 50 nature words, such as herring, lobster, and otter, were dropped and replaced with words like cut-and-paste and broadbanda microcosmic reflection of what holds relevance, and what no longer does, in the modern world. This is exactly the tide of change that Simon is trying to hold back.

Its October, and a gray sky hints at a future storm as a BioGaliano search party, made up of nine expert and novice species identifiers, myself included, moves into the trees on the southern edge of the island. With retractable magnifying glasses dangling off necks like pendants, our group treads softly over the soggy forest floor, pausing frequently to examine infinitesimal colonies of life. Previous BioGaliano hunts have focused on insects, fungi, and plants, but we are on the lookout for more overlooked branches of the evolutionary tree. Simon has emailed the participants a 21-page document listing every species of lichen (a life form that is a symbiotic fusion of fungi and algae) and bryophyte (mosses and their cousins the liverworts and hornworts) ever recorded on the island (263 lichens, 179 bryophytes). Our mission is to confirm whether the species previously noted in historical records are still out there, as well as to document new discoveries.

But nature is endlessly distracting. Brightly colored jelly fungi spring from dead wood. One species, sometimes referred to as witchs butter, grows in clusters on a fallen log like gelatinous orange brains. A forestry student from UBC pops a piece in her mouth and says it just tastes like water.

Pam Janszen, a naturalist who collected her first slime mold more than 25 years ago, spreads a heavy-duty plastic bag on the ground to protect her legs from the damp earth as she kneels to peel back the bark on a rotting log. Ooh, she says with delight. Holding her breath to keep still, she carefully inspects a slime mold through her cameras macro lens. With the naked eye, I can barely make out minute black baubles standing erect on stems, like alien lollipops. Pulling out a knife, Janszen gently nicks a sample of the mold and stashes it in a metal tin for later identification.

Janszen collects a sample of slime mold for later identification. Photo by Kristina Blanchflower

Simons knowledge isnt limitlessaltogether he credits over 50 taxonomic experts with assisting the project, each committed to discerning the fractal details of their selected branch of the evolutionary tree. People that can identify species are often rarer than the species themselves, says Simon.

Over the years, he has organized various biodiversity missions on Galiano. The specialists convene for a day or a weekend to collectively identify as many species as possible. Theyre often joined by interested enthusiastsBioGalianos Facebook page now has over 800 followers, around half of the local population. On iNaturalist, the project has over 500 unique contributors, some of whom are visitors to the island. Together, these participants have marched up forested mounts, waded through swamps, and dived beneath the ocean surface in search of species to add to the islands biodiversity catalog.

Wins in the quest came early. In 2016, Olivia Lee, a bryophyte specialist and former collections manager at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, was hiking on Galiano Island and collecting unfamiliar mosses. A soft, green variety caught her attention, and she collected a sample. After flipping through her guidebook of Pacific Northwest mosses, the specimen remained a mystery. She passed along images of it to other specialists until Richard Zander from the Missouri Botanical Garden determined it was Triquetrella californicathe species that is now among the rarest known mosses in Canada.

I never thought I would discover something, Lee tells me in a video call, beaming sheepishly. Ive never won the lottery before. It just felt really, really good.

In 2019, Jessica Kirkwood, a Galiano local, was driving through Bluffs Park on the southern tip of the island when she noticed a heavyset, sienna-colored snake coil and hiss next to her truck. She posted a video of the creature on the Facebook page. At the time, the islands only known snakes were three species of timid garter snakes and the sharp-tailed snake. The aggressive serpent that Kirkwood sawwith the girth of a muscly armstood in stark contrast. Simon sent the video to herpetologists in Canada, who dismissed it as a garter snake. Later, herpetologists in California identified it as a Pacific gopher snake. The last time one had been seen in Canada was in 1957on Galiano Island.

The Pacific gopher snakerecognizable with its chain-like patternwas believed to be extinct in Canada until a member of the BioGaliano Facebook group spotted one on Galiano Island in 2019. The finding could usher in new conservation measures. Photo by John Cancalosi/Minden Pictures

Rediscovery of the Pacific gopher snake could potentially usher in new conservation measures. The snake is listed as extirpatedno longer presentin Canada, and if additional herpetologists confirm a population in Bluffs Park, the area could be granted special federal or provincial protection.

By the end of 2021, BioGaliano had documented over 4,000 species in its six years of operation, including 1,241 arthropods, 931 plants, 482 fungi, 264 lichens, 230 mollusks, 186 birds, 83 fish, and 42 mammals. Theyve documented over 1,200 speciessuch as a rare coralroot orchid and an unusual jumping spidernever before recorded on the island, on top of the approximately 2,800 historically identified species. Theyve also confirmed the continuing presence of half the species from the historical roster. Some of the missing species have probably been extirpated, Simon says, but many are rare or obscure enough that they may still be found. One on Simons to-find list is Ostrea lurida, also known as the Olympia oyster, an endemic species that Jeannine Georgeson says her family often used to eat.

Driving through a patch of old-growth forest mottled with the gargantuan stumps of even more ancient giants felled by loggers decades ago, Simon and a few other bioblitzers pull over to quickly peek at the mosses and lichens. Dan Tucker, an avid, young bryophyte enthusiast from Cortes Island, British Columbia, shows Simon a shard of decaying wood coated in a manicured lawn of green growth. Despite spending hours staring at mosses by this point, the distinguishing characteristics are still lost on me. That looks exactly like every other moss, I remark. Anticipating my question on how the hell he can differentiate this from other mosses, Tucker smiles and says, After a while, these things sort of start to have an essence.

With over 4,000 species on Galiano Island, it is critical that the project has participants with a wide range of expertise and interests. Dan Tucker, a BioGaliano participant, has particular interest in mosses and other nonvascular plants. Photo by Kristina Blanchflower

Documenting bryophytes, Tucker tells me, is just something he feels like he has to doa compulsion. Donna Gibbs, a marine naturalist who has participated in a BioGaliano marine foray, tells me something similar. For three decades, she and her husband made a routine of diving near their home in Port Coquitlam, just east of Vancouver, and recording every species that they saw, from harbor seals to the nudibranchs. Its a complete labor of love, she says.

I was amazed by the things I could find in my backyard and in my neighborhood, says Scott Gilmore, a biologist who is one of Simons go-to insect experts, explaining his own motivations. Whenever I find something and I dont know what it is, I try and go and work it out. Its just been a lifelong passion putting names to things.

Can the rest of us really become more like Simon and his environmental entourage? Goward points to psychologist Howard Gardners theory of multiple intelligences, which posits that people can be intelligent in eight different ways. Mozart, for example, was blessed with musical genius; at the age of 14 he is said to have transcribed every note of a 15-minute-long choral piece after listening to it only once. Einsteins logical-mathematical intelligence revolutionized the way we understand the universe.

In Gardners book, Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons, he recalls presenting his theorywhich originally included seven intelligencesto a lecture hall of academics. The renowned ecologist Ernst Mayr was in the audience and reportedly commented, But youll never explain Charles Darwin with your taxonomy of intelligences. Gardners next iteration of the theory included an eighth intelligence: the naturalist.

Its a special way of recognizing patterns and seeing how they fit together, says Goward. There are some people in the world who are simply born naturalists. They see patterns rather than physical things.

Yet all of us may share in that propensity for nature, in the same way that, while very few people are geniuses like Mozart, nearly everyone appreciates music. The eighth intelligence is written into the human experience. Acclaimed philosopher Erich Fromm described the human instinct to connect with nature and other living beings as biophilia, a term later popularized by naturalist E. O. Wilson. Science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon builds on that idea in her book Naming Nature. She argues that millennia of foraging for food and fending off predators have carved out a universal capacity to perceive the natural ordera hardwired human instinct she calls the Umwelt. The term stems from a German word meaning the environment or the world around, but biologists use it to refer to each species unique perception or experience.

With the help of mycologists like Juliet Pendray, BioGaliano has documented 482 species of fungi so far. Photo by Kristina Blanchflower

Living separate from the wild world has severed us from our intrinsic Umwelts, Yoon writes. To hone our sense of nature and our place in it, we can begin by learning the names of species around usmuch like children do with their first words, or like the taxonomists distinguishing between different species. As BioGaliano has shown, biodiversity thrives in the most unexpected of places: on an escarpment overlooking a channel, alongside the road in a community park, inside a rotten log. Naturalists like Simon can serve as guides to reawaken a dormant Umwelt.

Recall that the second goal of BioGaliano is to rekindle the intrinsic joy found in the wild world. People really care about what they seewhat they experience, says Kevin Toomer, a BioGaliano participant. Small things that I wouldnt have placed much importance in before have more importance to me now. Toomer says that since hes known Simon, he has developed an especially heightened awareness of bees and, of course, mosses and lichens.

If you learn the name of a birda robin, a varied thrush, or what have youyouve learned a word and you can begin to talk about that creature, and people that dont know those words cant, says Goward. While the Oxford people are trying to take words out, Simon is trying to put words in. Yet BioGaliano is more than a field-based immersion into natures whos who. Returning wild words to our vocabularies also serves as a gateway to understanding natures complexity.

Evening is falling, and the BioGaliano team conglomerates at the Galiano Community Hall, a small, shake-shingled building where folding tables have been set up near electrical outlets to power the microscopes. Simon has ordered pizzas for everyone, and the naturalists unpack samples stashed in brown paper bags and begin working at identifying the specimens.

Janszen slips the slime mold she collected under a dissecting microscope and brings it into focus, revealing spherical heads atop hair-thin stems. The black bobbleheads are decorated with a corona of light-brown speckles, their netted pattern revealing that the species is Cribraria vulgaris. It has been found around the world, but this is the first record of it on Galiano Island. The BioGaliano list grows longer by one more name.

It will take weeks, perhaps even months, to review and identify the dozens of samples taken in the blitz. Preliminary results indicate that, in a single days effort, the team confirmed the continuing presence of seven species historically found on the island, and added 25 new species to the overall list. Five are new to British Columbia, four of those are also new to Canada, two are new to all of North America, and one is even new to the Americas. This last species, a fungus, had previously only been found in Russia.

Throughout Simons adventures in species seeking, hes been teased by the possibility that BioGaliano will identify a life form entirely new to science. If and when that happens, Simonor whichever of his naturalist friends makes the discoverywill be in the rarefied position of distinguishing the finding with a name.

With such an intense focus on cataloging every living thing on the island, projects such as BioGaliano have the potential to make new discoveries. Simon hands Alejandro Huereca Delgado, left, an expert on fungal parasites of lichen, a specimen that they hope could yield a new discovery. Photo by Kristina Blanchflower

On a philosophical level, naming is imbued with power. Naming is an act of claiming, and more often than not reflects the worldview of the namer rather than the named. In naming an individual animal or a species, we not only choose how we want to represent that animal, but also how others are to represent and perceive it, writes Sune Borkfelt, an animal studies and literature scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark. We lay the foundations of representations and perceptions to come. The roly-poly bug, for instance, brings to mind a more congenial image than the red-eye medusa, though neither animal is necessarily endearing: the former is a type of wood louse and the latter a jellyfish.

According to Borkfelt, the names we bestow can also bring us closer to or distance us from species. Perhaps the most anthropocentric are names taken from influential Europeans in the pastAnnas hummingbird, Stellers jay, Scoulers willow. A more ecological worldview is reflected in names that describe the species itself. In Hulquminum, the language historically spoken by the Indigenous people of Galiano Island, alder is kwulalaulhp, roughly meaning orange plant for the trees tangerine inner bark. Oregon grape is lulutsulhp, meaning yellow plant for the bushs bunches of sunny blossoms. Many scientific names are descriptive as well. For the Pacific gopher snake, Pituophis catenifer, its epithet refers to the chain-like pattern that adorns the serpents back.

Simon is formalizing BioGalianos findings in the scientific literature by publishing a series of papers, and later this year he will start a PhD program with UBC researching biodiversity data science. He recognizes, though, that he still has heaps left to find on Galiano Island and that his growing list of identified species is only a starting point.

These names are all just like the words in a sentence, Simon tells me. To really appreciate a place and its ecology, its about learning how those words fit together.

His words remind me of another discovery that came out of the October foray. Simon and Alejandro Huereca Delgado, a specialist in fungal parasites of lichens, had collected a speckle that looked like a coarse-ground pepper flake entangled in a tuft of mint-green fibers. Under closer inspection, it proved to be much morea composite of at least four different species: an alga and a fungus hosting a fungus hosting yet another fungus. Ecology can live within language as much as landscape.

A Community's Quest to Document Every Species on Their Island Home - Hakai Magazine

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After FBI Seizes His Phone, Trump Coup Lawyer John Eastman Decides The Fourth Amendment Is Good Actually – Above the Law

Posted: at 12:45 am

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

John Eastman, the nebbishy law professor who somehow masterminded a coup plot, slid into the PACER DMs again last night with yet another lawsuit against the federal government. This time hes suing in New Mexico after the FBI showed up outside a restaurant in Santa Fe on June 22 with a warrant to seize his phone.

June 22 is also the day when the feds showed up at former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clarks house with a warrant for his electronics. Like Eastman, Clark was the subject of a recent congressional hearing on his efforts to overturn President Bidens electoral win by substituting slates of fake electors. And like Clark, Eastman made a beeline for Fox News to tell Tucker Carlson his tale of woe, simultaneously confirming that the Justice Departments investigation of their plot is proceeding apace.

They havent charged you with a crime. They havent given you evidence that theyre going to charge you with a crime. But they treat you like a drug kingpin or a rapist and seize your phone, fumed Carlson. Is this legal?

No, I dont think so, Eastman replied, adding that he had an ethical obligation to do everything I can to protect the privileged communications with my clients.

Yes, about that

In his motion to get the device back and force the government to delete any data taken from it, Eastman made sure to put as much information on the public record as possible, including the warrant itself, which reads, in part:

The investigative team will not review the contents of the device(s) until further order of a court of competent jurisdiction. If a forensic extraction or manual screen capture of the contents of the device(s) occurs during the execution of the search warrant, the contents will not be reviewed by the investigative team until further order of a court of competent jurisdiction.

So despite his howling on TV and in his motion, the government is not pawing through his privileged communications.

Eastman refers to the intense, five-month privilege dispute with the January 6 Select Committee over his emails, although he neglects to mention that US District Judge David Carter found that at least one of those emails was likely evidence of a crime related to obstructing a congressional proceeding. Instead, Eastman huffs that That litigation has received extensive media attention, so it is hard to imagine that the Department of Justice, which apparently submitted the application for the warrant at issue here, was not aware of it.

In point of fact, the government wasclearly aware of the privilege issue, and made specific provision to seize the device and its contents, without intruding on privileged communications or indeed any communications at all absent judicial review.

Eastmans motion is a grab bag of Fourth Amendment complaints, pled with varying degrees of chutzpah. For instance, he argues that the warrant is overbroad because it provides no allegation that Movant owned, possessed, or had control over any electronic devices.

True, many people now own cellular phones, he concedes, But this warrant provides no indication otherwise of [movants] ownership of a cell phone at any time.' Which is ridiculous, not least because Eastman is suing the January 6 Select Committee to stop them getting metadata for his cellphone. And not for nothing, but the entire world has seen his emails with the signature line saying Sent from my mobile device. Please excuse any typos or brevity.

Eastman is pissed that the affidavit wasnt attached to the warrant; that the agents confiscated the phone before showing him the warrant; that the warrant authorized the government to unlock the phone using biometric data, but not to compel him to unlock it if a passcode was required; that he was dumb enough, despite being smack in the middle of multiple federal investigations, to enable the FBI to unlock it simply by holding it up to his face; that the device is being transmitted to the DOJs Office of the Inspector Generals forensic lab, and he says hes outside the legal purview of the DOJs IG, having never worked there.

In short, hes pissed that he was treated like every other suspect, minus the danger that hed get shot for resisting arrest. How very dare the government treat him as if he has no more Fourth Amendment rights than a rapist or a drug kingpin! Which is more than a little ironic coming from a guy who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and never showed any particular concern for the privacy rights of suspects. Maybe if he wasnt so busy kibbitzing with Ginny Thomas, hed have time to write a law review article on the grievous threat to the Fourth Amendment posed by government agents being able to intrude on our digital lives by taking advantage of ubiquitous technology.

TL, DR? This is the day that the Federalist Society overlords hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Eastman v. US [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dyelives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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After FBI Seizes His Phone, Trump Coup Lawyer John Eastman Decides The Fourth Amendment Is Good Actually - Above the Law

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Four Things to Know About the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Egbert v. Boule | News & Commentary – ACLU

Posted: at 12:45 am

The Supreme Court recently dealt a blow to federal police accountability in Egbert v. Boule. The case, in which the ACLU filed an amicus brief, centers on Robert Boule, who runs a bed-and-breakfast on the U.S.-Canada border. Boule sued Border Patrol agent Erik Egbert for damages for violating his rights under the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The court ruled that Boule is not entitled to seek money damages for the harm caused by Egberts excessive force and retaliation.

When Egbert entered the inn without a warrant to investigate a guest staying there, Boule stepped between the guest and the agent and asked the agent to leave. Egbert then threw Boule to the ground, injuring him. After Boule exercised his First Amendment right to file a complaint and administrative claim with Egberts supervisor, the agent retaliated against him by prompting multiple unfounded investigations into Boule.

The court ruled in a 6-3 decision that Boule is not entitled to seek money damages for the harm caused by Egberts excessive force and retaliation. For over 50 years, under the Supreme Courts ruling in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, people have sought money damages against federal agents for violating their constitutional rights. But the court called Boules case a new context for Bivens liability and would not allow his claims. While the ruling further limits peoples ability to hold Border Patrol agents accountable in court, and undercuts an important deterrent to misconduct, it did not sanction the agents unconstitutional actions or grant agents permission to violate peoples rights in the future.

Credit: AP Photo/Greg Bull

Here are four things you need to know about the ruling:

The ruling does not eliminate your rights in the border region

The courts decision in no way changes your constitutional rights when interacting with border agents in the border region. While the facts of the case involve Border Patrols intrusion of the inn without a warrant, the courts decision does not sanction those actions.

Border Patrol, and its parent agency Customs and Border Protection (CBP), are bound by constitutional limitations, which prohibit agents from entering your home without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects against arbitrary searches and seizures of people and their property, in the border region and beyond. Within 25 miles of the border, as permitted by a separate statute not at issue in this case, Border Patrol is permitted to enter private property, such as your yard or ranch land, without a warrant but is explicitly barred, even that close to the border, from entering a dwelling, such as your house, without a warrant.

The court has narrowed the options to seek justice for border agents violations of constitutional protections in the border region.

Border Patrol also remains obligated to respect a broad range of other constitutional rights. For example, a Border Patrol agent cannot lawfully pull you over or otherwise detain you without reasonable suspicion, which means the agent must have specific, articulable facts that make it reasonable to believe you committed or are committing a violation of immigration or other federal law, not just a hunch. A Border Patrol agent also cannot search you or your belongings without your voluntary consent, unless they have probable cause, a higher standard requiring a reasonable belief that an immigration violation or crime has occurred. You always have the right to remain silent and say you wish to speak with an attorney.

In other words, your constitutional rights are still intact, even in the border region, but the courts decision will make it more difficult to hold federal agents accountable when they violate those rights. By further cutting off the ability to seek money damages under Bivens, the court has narrowed the options available to seek justice for border agents frequent violations of constitutional protections in the border region.

The Constitution still applies in 100 mile border zone

Much has been made of the 100 mile border zone, but you have the same constitutional rights within the border zone as you do anywhere else in the country. There are only two narrow circumstances in which the Border Patrol is permitted to act outside of normal Fourth Amendment limitations on searches and seizures.

Outside of these specific circumstances, all other constitutional protections apply within the border zone, and to individuals who interact with Border Patrol agents. The 100 mile border zone is not a Constitution-free zone.

American Civil Liberties Union

Know Your Rights | 100 Mile Border Zone | American Civil Liberties Union

The ProblemThe Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects Americans from random and arbitrary stops and searches.

CBPs internal administrative accountability process is in urgent need of an overhaul

In denying Boules Bivens claim, the court argued that the Border Patrols non-binding administrative grievance process offered an adequate alternative to money damages for Robert Boule. It does not as clearly evidenced by the retaliation Boule faced after filing a grievance, and Border Patrols decision to keep Egbert on even after finding he acted inappropriately.

We know how frustrating the grievance process is first hand. The ACLU has filed over a dozen administrative complaints since 2020 documenting abuses suffered by hundreds of individuals that went unanswered for months and resulted in few, if any, changes to agency policy. The process, which is not subject to judicial review and has no mechanism for complainants to participate, focuses on disciplining officer misconduct rather than any other individual remedy to complainants.

This decision means that people whove suffered abuse by the Border Patrol abuse in the same way as Boule cannot obtain monetary compensation in court.

If administrative oversight mechanisms are to provide any kind of justice, the Department of Homeland Security, CBPs parent agency, must urgently make several changes. The department should create a uniform process to review and investigate all immigration and border related complaints, including implementing screening procedures for ensuring prompt assignment of a neutral investigator; prompt confirmation of receipt and whether an investigation has been initiated; a requirement that all relevant records (including video and audio files) be turned over to to investigators within 14 calendar days; written resolution of complaints; and appointment of an independent decision maker to impose discipline. The agency then must ensure individuals who they find at fault face meaningful accountability, rather than giving them a pass, as they did with Egbert.

Congress should codify and strengthen the right to sue federal law enforcement for abuse.

This decision has significant consequences for the victims of abuse by federal law enforcement. It means that people who have been subjected to Border Patrol abuse in the same way as Boule cannot obtain monetary compensation in court, and it may make it more difficult for other victims of abuse by federal law enforcement to bring their claims, as well.

While the ruling is a disappointment, the fight is not over. Congress can, and should, pass legislation to enshrine the right of individuals to sue federal law enforcement officers and receive damages from agents who violate their rights. If it did so, victims of Border Patrol abuse would no longer have to contend with the Egbert ruling, and more broadly, the availability of this important remedy for abuse by federal agents would no longer depend on the willingness of increasingly-hostile courts to allow Bivens cases to go forward.

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Four Things to Know About the Supreme Court's Ruling in Egbert v. Boule | News & Commentary - ACLU

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Columnist is shamefully uninformed on abortion | Letters To Editor | thesunchronicle.com – The Sun Chronicle

Posted: at 12:45 am

To the editor:

Re: What if Obama had been behind Jan. 6?, by Peter Gay, column, June 27:

I know how negative I must sound, but after reading the two stunningly, vacuous statements in Peter Gays column this week, I have to speak up.

Gay wrote, I am neither in favor of abortion or against it ... but I do believe that the abortions that Massachusetts and the other states allow should be limited to only residents of those states.

Wait. He doesnt care about abortion, but he cares about where and to whom it is administered? He obviously doesnt understand the impact of the terrifying theft of civil liberties taken from every woman in our country. In his confused mind, if a state has restrictive laws that may endanger a womans life, then Gay wants to refuse safe harbor to that woman and block the protection of this commonwealth, which would be assisting in the denial of her equal rights.

Sounds like an opinion about abortion to me. A shamefully uninformed one, but an opinion, none the less. Perhaps, Gay could educate himself by taking a few moments to read the Fourth Amendment. This clearly states, that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, shall not be violated.

Please, explain to poor Pietro that the Roe v Wade decision is not, and never really has been, about fetal abortion. It has always been about the illegal abortion of womens rights.

Dave Kane

Johnston, R.I.

The writer is host of the Kane & Co. radio talk show, which broadcasts from 9 a.m. to noon, Saturdays, on WARA, 1320-AM.

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Columnist is shamefully uninformed on abortion | Letters To Editor | thesunchronicle.com - The Sun Chronicle

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Simplification of procedure and standardization of formats of documents for transmission of securities – Lexology

Posted: at 12:45 am

On 18 May 2022, SEBI issued a circular on simplification of procedure and standardization of formats of documents for transmission of securities pursuant to amendments to SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations 2015. In order to enhance ease of dealing in securities markets and with a view to make the transmission process more efficient and investor friendly, the procedure for transmission of securities has been further simplified vide the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) (Fourth Amendment) Regulations, 2022 dated 25 April 2022 (LODR Amendment Regulations). The LODR Amendment Regulations has inter alia enhanced the monetary limits for simplified documentation for transmission of securities, allowed Legal Heirship Certificate or equivalent certificate as one of the acceptable documents for transmission and provided clarification regarding acceptability of Will as one of the valid documents for transmission of securities. Pursuant to the notification of the LODR Amendment Regulations, this Circular is being issued to specify the formats of various documents which are required to be furnished for the processing of transmission of securities. There are various annexures attached to this Circular some of which provide details of the documents required for transmission of securities, operational guidelines for processing investors service request for the purpose of transmission of securities, format of the form to be filed by nominee/claimant(s)/legal heir(s) while requesting transmission of securities, format of the Letter of Confirmation to be issued by RTAs/ Issuer Companies, etc.

The common norms stipulated in SEBI Circular SEBI/HO/MIRSD/MIRSD_RTAMB/P/CIR/2021/655 dated 3 November 2021 and SEBI Circular SEBI/HO/MIRSD/MIRSD_RTAMB/P/CIR/2021/687 dated 14 December 2021 shall be applicable for transmission service requests. The provisions of this Circular shall come into force with immediate effect in supersession of the following circulars:

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Simplification of procedure and standardization of formats of documents for transmission of securities - Lexology

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Why The J6 Committee’s Attacks On Ginni Thomas Harm Every American – The Federalist

Posted: at 12:45 am

The left has expressed a special hatred for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for decades. Thomas stands for everything our elites hate: free speech, due process, fair elections, and every individual right in the Constitutions Bill of Rights. Paradoxically, the left seems to find this especially galling because he is the descendant of slaves.

But for all these decades, they havent been able to get him. Cue House Speaker Nancy Pelosis show trial masquerading as an investigation of a three-hour protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was a protest that got out of hand when the Capitol Police took the most peculiar step of opening the Capitol doors wide to the protesters.

And who is the congressional committees scapegoat of choice for the J6 star chamber? Thomass wife, Ginni. Interestingly, PolitiFact concluded that there is no evidence Mrs. Thomas had anything to do with organizing the Jan. 6 protests. So the committee and its media cohorts have been on a propagandistic fishing expedition.

For example, they located some text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in which Thomas expressed concerns about the 2020 electoral process. They dug up emails in which she asked Trump lawyer John Eastman to provide updates on what was going on with election litigation. And so on. Theyll keep trying to cobble together their desired picture. In the end, theyll just make it all up (a specialty of Rep. Adam Schiffs, D-Calif.)

So, since they havent been able to destroy Justice Thomas after years of trying, they hope to get to him through his wife. Its a sickening tactic, one reflecting the worst of totalitarian regimes, including Joseph Stalins Russia and Mao Zedongs China. But the tactic reveals an even deeper goal. They detest anyone who dares defend real freedom. And they cant stand anyone who exercises that freedom.

So watch what they are doing to Ginni Thomas: their disrespect for her private life, their double standards of justice, their shameless smear campaigns. Observe their intent to destroy her husband through her. Watch it. Because it is what they have in mind for you and me and any American who values freedom and a private life.

If youve ever heard Ginni Thomas speak (to the extent the media permits you to really hear her) you can immediately see she is the real deal. If you are a person of good will, you will see a kind-hearted person who strives for fairness and looks for goodness in everyone.

She obviously loves America. She values its constitutional guarantees of individual rights for everybody. There is absolutely no guile in her.

But in the eyes of this congressional witch hunt, Thomass devotion to the American concept of liberty and justice for all is the big crime. Its a concept that leads to the idea of one man, one vote and free speech and real debate all of which run counter to the Democrats self-professed goal of permanent one-party rule.

Everyone needs to understand that if Ginni Thomas has no right to express her opinions and have conversations about those opinions with family, friends, and acquaintances as a private citizen, then neither do you. If she has no right to ask obvious questions in this case questions about election integrity, but it could be about anything else then neither do you. Everything they are trying to pin on Thomas about her activism and possibly influencing her husband or trying to overturn the 2020 election is b-llsh-t.

Everybody has a right to question any election they want. Just as the Democrats in Congress put on non-stop show trials for four years in which they pushed the now-proven bald-faced lie that the 2016 election was stolen, every private citizen has the right to ask questions, especially about weird and unprecedented electoral procedures. Particularly in light of the elites Time magazine admission of how they rigged it, after all.

So if you really want to understand where the J6 hearings are going with their attack on Ginni Thomas, you should see it as a proxy attack on every American citizen. Just look at the scandalous treatment of non-violent J6 defendants who are handled like Soviet-era political prisoners by a now putrefied Department of Justice (DOJ), all with the apparent concurrence of congressional Democrats. Just look at the Stalinist-styled pre-dawn raids being conducted by the Federal Bureau of so-called Investigation. If Congress wasnt so corrupt, wed have an investigation into these heinous, un-American acts.

The Democrat-controlled Congress apparently has contempt for each and every right enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The policy positions they push are all about destroying your private life. Lets check them off, one by one.

They routinely limit your First Amendment rights to freedom of thought, speech, writing, and association under the guise of non-discrimination. As the treatment of J6 protesters shows, you have no right to petition for an address of your grievances. The Second Amendment is now on their chopping block because they dont want you to be able to defend your rights or the people you love.

The Democrats constant attacks on the right to private property and giving license to mobs to harass officials at their homes look like attacks on the Third Amendment. The FBIs middle-of-the-night raids on the homes of citizens like Jeff Clark and James OKeefe and Roger Stone spits in the face of the Fourth Amendment.

Democrats subpoena of Ginni Thomas is a ruse to try to invent testimony against her husband as well as against herself, in violation both of spousal privilege and of the Fifth Amendment. (Or, as Schiff seems to be aiming for: creating the impression of impropriety by publicly airing what spouses talk about in their private lives.)

The DOJ has clearly violated the Sixth Amendment by preventing J6 defendants from having a speedy trial. Many were detained and incarcerated without being charged. This brings us to the Seventh Amendments right to a trial by jury, presumably an impartial jury. It is laughable to presume that any jury pool in the exceedingly leftist District of Columbia would allow a fair trial to any Jan. 6 defendant.

If you follow Julie Kellys superb investigative reporting on the treatment of J6 defendants in the D.C. jail, you should be outraged that the cruel and unusual punishment of defendants including solitary confinement for long periods, beatings, and the withholding of medical treatment for offenses like parading are in direct violation of the Eighth Amendment.

No doubt congressional Democrats view the Ninth Amendment as a total joke since they dont seem to believe Americans should have any individual rights at all. Finally, they hate the Tenth Amendment because it means that you might be able to escape their grasp by regaining your individual rights in a state like Florida governed by Ron DeSantis.

So much for the Bill of Rights. Attacking family members and the private lives of perceived opponents is behavior typical of all totalitarian systems. Ginni Thomas is simply the private citizen whom the committee hopes to parade as an example of what will happen to you (and your families) if you dont conform and comply with their demands.

If you think youll be able to live unmolested by elitists who so routinely abuse their power, think again.

One of the committees key goals is to tamper with the Supreme Court. They want to eliminate a justice who has a non-negotiable respect for due process. But they also hope to make sure his wife, a private citizen, doesnt speak to him without their express permission and surveillance. If they can do that to her, theyre on the road to doing it to every one of us.

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Why The J6 Committee's Attacks On Ginni Thomas Harm Every American - The Federalist

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Creator of ‘The Wire’ talks to the Reformer about troubled police departments like MPD – Minnesota Reformer

Posted: at 12:45 am

David Simon hates the war on drugs. But he doesnt hate all police. He takes issue with police militarization, but he doesnt have time for slogans. In fact, hell cuss out anything from ACAB on the left to Back the Blue on the right. For him, the solutions to problematic law enforcement, even here in Minneapolis, are more complex than slogan-chanting political action, but not impossible.

A longtime Baltimore Sun crime reporter-turned-author, screenwriter and TV producer, Simon is most known for creating The Wire, a five-season look at how the city dealt with drugs and crime. In 2008, The Atlantic called him The Angriest Man in Television.

With his writing partner and production team, he just pulled off a six-episode HBO series called We Own This City that returns to Baltimore to tell stories of corrupt cops. The work is based on the reporting of Justin Fenton, a former crime reporter at The Sun now with a nonprofit newspaper called The Baltimore Banner. Twin Cities readers will see similarities between Baltimore post-Freddie Gray and Minneapolis post-George Floyd. Among them:

The Reformer talked to Simon about those similarities. Heres his view of what bad law enforcement looks like, what good policing can look like, and what it takes to get there (edited heavily for space):

I cant speak to most demographics of every city or what the crime problems are. Baltimore is a post-industrial, very heavily Rust Belt dynamic, with a very high rate of drug addiction, and its a city that has committed for about 30, 40 years to aggressively pursuing the drug war. So that sort of has colored and affected everything. I dont know if that marries up to the Twin Cities or not, but thats who we are.

I thought it was incredibly overt. The video was a little bit astonishing. How long it went on and how indifferent (Derek Chauvin) was. He seemed to be completely devoid of awareness that he was taking somebodys life or coming close to taking someones life. He doesnt seem to be comprehending. And the inertia of the cops around him was pretty shocking as well. But I mean just how long it went on.

There are moments of police violence that are over very quickly. You might argue from the premise of a cop that an instinctive or impulsive moment resulted in a death or police violence. Six, seven, eight seconds one blow, one battering. When it gets to be minutes thats something Ill always remember the premeditation becomes utterly convincing.

The Freddie Gray thing was very different in that were not quite sure what happened. At a minimum, the Baltimore Police Department had a guy in distress, who had suffered a spinal injury, and they rode him around unattended for 45 minutes in the back of a wagon. So theres definitely a case of negligence there.

The prosecutors looked for video of this van going around west Baltimore to see if they were giving him a rough ride. It doesnt seem so. That was the initial presumption. The more video came in, the more the van seems to be traveling at relatively normal speeds.

Its a little bit more of an enigma than George Floyd. George Floyd theres nothing enigmatic about it at all.

The work slowdown is a pretty remarkable thing. Clearly the arrests nosedived (in Baltimore) and the police stopped getting out of their cars to clear corners or go affect an arrest. They decided fundamentally that they werent going to do that. It was not organized, it was not called for by the union or anything like that, but it clearly happened. And definitively so because the arrests collapsed. And suddenly. I have no way of proving that. I think its incredibly unprofessional on the part of the police to stop doing their jobs and continue to take pay for it.

On the other hand, there is an argument that police were making a point that a lot of people didnt want to contend with, which is this: In Baltimore, its really subtle, but the prosecutor I hate to bring up racial politics, but this is just true the prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, whose political base is African American and critical for her, politically, she did not want to go into another weekend without delivering some sort of indictment.

They were hoping to in some way mollify the protests. So she charged the death in the back of the wagon. She overcharged it as a second-degree murder there was certainly a negligence case there and possibly manslaughter, I dont know. But she charged it as second-degree depraved heart murder.

And this is sort of the subtle nuance here: The three officers who were involved in the transport were African American. The three who were involved in the arrest the knife arrest, which, whatever else it was, was effectively a legal arrest. Im not saying it was the best police work or that they needed to make that case for a pocketed knife, but they did. They were white. They were white officers who made the arrest.

By charging the Fourth Amendment case criminally which is to say false arrest or they in some way abused his civil liberties and denied his due process by arresting him she got a mixed-race group of defendants. Three and three. Which was important for her politically.

Unfortunately, what that did was, the entire police department watched what she did and said, Wait a second. Its one thing to start debating about what happened to this guy in the back of the van the fact that they werent around for 45 minutes. If youre telling me that even if I make a mistake on a Fourth Amendment case and when I can do a Terry stop (stop and frisk) or when I can detain a suspect

The Supreme Court changes Fourth Amendment stuff every term. They come up with different rules every term. If youre the average cop, you know, the chance of you making an arrest that will be thrown out in court on probable cause is pretty high. Eventually its gonna happen. Some judge is gonna say No, that isnt probable cause. Its not a distinct fine line every time.

And Gray he ran. He looked at the cops and he ran. Now, do I think that should be probable cause that you cant run from a cop without being chased? I dont, but unfortunately the U.S. Supreme Court does. That is reason to pursue and detain. Look up the law, which Mosby, of course, was unwilling to acknowledge.

So these cops, they were gonna beat it in court anyway. It was a legal arrest. But she basically sent a message to the Baltimore Police Department that if you make a mistake, if I decide you made a mistake, even a good faith mistake on probable cause, Im gonna charge you criminally. Im gonna try to put you in jail and take away your pension. And so a lot of cops said, Hey, why am I getting out of my car?

Thats a huge problem and that comes hand-in-glove with having positions empty. They cant fill the post cars, they cant fill the radio cars some nights without having guys work doubles.

So part of it is legitimate in that theyre down so many positions because of the exodus and because its (Baltimore) a poor city and theyre not throwing academy classes through at the rate they used to.

So some of the overtime is legitimate, but a lot of it is overtime fraud In Baltimore, you get paid overtime for a couple of things: Obviously, if you get involved in something and you have to work over, and then also for court pay, meaning youre working (4 p.m. to midnight) and you have to come in at nine in the morning to go to district court on your arrests.

That creates an incentive to do a couple of things, one of which is make a cheap, shitty CDS (controlled dangerous substance) arrest 40 minutes from the end of shift and then make sure you spend two hours processing drugs down at evidence control, processing a prisoner, and youre gonna get paid extra.

Or even better, make a bunch of shitty, meaningless arrests failure to yield, loitering in a drug-free zone, whatever. It doesnt matter whether it goes to court; youre not trying to actually convict anyone of anything. But they all gotta show up in court. And if you fill the days docket, youre gonna get paid for whatever the prosecutor signs your slip for, saying that (the officer) was in court on his cases.

And then if youve arrested so many people on such bullshit, then you get three days, four days, five days (OT). Meanwhile, the guy whos actually working on his post to try to solve whoevers robbing people with a gun, burglarizing churches and he makes one arrest for the month because he actually solved the case, he gets paid for going to court one time.

So theres actually an incentive to do bad police work to get paid more. And thats the overtime demon actually transforming police work into the worst possible thing.

Well, youve got to end the drug war Its not as if police work was devoid of violence or devoid of racism or any of these things. But tellingly, the police department in 1980 and certainly in 1970 was majority-majority white. It was run by white guys, the mayor was white, the power structure was white.

And now the Baltimore department is majority-minority. The command staffs African American and the mayors African American. The power structure is now no longer white, and yet the levels of police violence and corruption and dysfunction are worse. Think about that. I mean, thats probably very different from Minnesota.

Its not that the department of 1970 wasnt capable of considerable police violence against neighborhoods of color and people of color. I know that they were capable of predatory policing.

So we start from a position where of course it was bad. But in 1970, 1977, 1980, all the way through those years, the clearance rate for things like murder, robbery, rape, assault they were at or above the national average. We solved more of our crimes. And thats kind of one thing you want police to do its the one thing that a police department can do for a city is when people hurt people and theres actual crime as opposed to drug warring.

There is a linkage between the clearance rates for felonies and and the rate of crime, and you can point to Boston in 1991, what they did. Its actually been demonstrated that if you lock up the right people for the crimes that matter, you can actually affect the quality of life in your city.

Well, the clearance rate when I was in the homicide unit to write a book in 88 was 71 or 72%, somewhere in there. In the end, and of course, that doesnt mean 72% went to jail. It means like four out of 10 people who committed murder once you shake it out at the courthouse, and rightly so, not everyone should be convicted, there are not guilty verdicts and there are cases that are dropped because of insufficient evidence, but by and large four out of 10 people, if you killed somebody in Baltimore, you saw the inside of a prison cell for some length of time.

Right now, the clearance rate is about 38%. Its probably one in 10 (in jail after committing murder). So the difference is back then you had 230 murders a year in a city of 730,000. Now, we have about about 120,000 less people, and we have 350 murders a year.

Because we trained two generations of cops how not to do the things that solve crime. They cant do retroactive investigation. They cant write a search warrant that doesnt get thrown out. They cant testify on the stand without perjuring themselves. They dont know how to properly interview people. They cant write a f***in report.

What they can do is go up on the street and grab bodies and throw them against the wall and decide whos going to go in the van for the ground stash. Or not even the ground stash for loitering or whatever.

We train them in the policies of mass arrest and drug war, which doesnt fix anything. Not only did it destroy neighborhoods and lives and the people being policed were over-policed brutally it destroyed law enforcement, it raised a generation of cops who cant actually do the f***ing job you need them to do and thats the police department now. Those skill sets dont exist anymore. So the drug war destroyed us.

And I would argue that that is why there was no peace dividend. If you think about the fact that the police department went from being majority white to being majority-minority Black command staff, Black city hall, and yet its worse? It should have gotten better. Instead, racial integration had been achieved in a fundamental way and yet its worse.

And the only thing that can explain that, to my argument, is the mission got worse. Weve committed to a mission that is incredibly destructive and alienating. Everyone has been locked up for something. My own film crew kept getting locked up whenever we finished filming and tried to drive out of the ghetto.

The Fourth Amendment ceased to exist under the last 20, 30 years of the drug war. It just got worse and worse. Until you had this Gun Trace Task Force that created this racially mixed group of officers who had come together to create the perfect predatory machine to just rob the shit out of people under the cover of the drug war.

And until we change that, until we get rid of drug prohibition and return the mission creep that thats created for law enforcement, police reform is doomed.

We have to accept that the drug war has brought us to this point.

How many slogans can I sneer at? All cops are not bastards. I know cops who have done credible and worthy police work that made my city better and werent shit who would go into peoples pockets. I knew guys who were just playing the stat game and didnt care about the people they are policing. Ive known all kinds of cops. All cops are not bastards.

However, the drug war will manufacture more bastards out of young cops than anything Ive ever seen. So theres some truth in what people were feeling. Although the slogan itself is alienating from anybody whos ever known a cop who ever tried to do the job the right way.

I dont believe you can back the blue unequivocally, in any sense if these are the policies that the police are being asked to enforce.

On the other hand, I dont believe in defunding police as an agency. I would certainly love to take away the money they spend on trying to do drug interdiction prosecution and give that to social programming. But Id also like to see the actual investigative, retroactive felony investigation enhanced to get the clearance rates back up to where theres an actual deterrent to violence. Because that, as I said before, that matters.

There was a great experiment done in Boston in 1991 where the police department went around to all their investigative units and they basically asked for police intelligence. Who were the 100 worst badasses in Boston, right? Who are the 100 guys a week that keep showing up in our files, keep showing up in our lineups? But that we cant every time we make a case, the witnesses end up intimidated. Who are the guys basically who keep showing up in case after case of violence and we know their names. Lets make a list and then they went out for those 100 guys, just 100 guys, and they got them on everything from parole violations to weapons violations. They basically targeted the people who were their repeat violent offenders. And they dropped the murder rate by 40%. Did anyone pay attention?

When we did Hamsterdam, we assumed, I mean, obviously, no ones ever tried it. They tried it in Zurich, in Amsterdam and Portugal and theyve had no increase in crime. In areas where you practice this level of tolerance for drug use, it becomes untenable for normal people. You dont want anyone living there. Huge amounts of human degradation. And your overdoses probably do go up, especially during this time of fentanyl.

But youre basically practicing harm reduction. Youre saying, We cant arrest our way out of this. And maybe by putting it all in place, we can direct all of our social services into that quadrant If you had someplace to push it, to practice, not to make some glorious libertarian moment of free love and drug use, but just harm reduction and its never been tried because no politician would dare stand behind them.

When you say progressives, are they white? Do they live in the inner city? Do they live in the area where crimes are occurring? Because let me tell you something, I still know a lot of people who live in east, west Baltimore they do not want to be unpoliced. Thats not what they want.

If you ask them what they want out of their police department, they say they want to not be harassed. They want to get treated with dignity when theyre trying to get from the car to the curb. They want to be respected They want to not be over-policed. They want no predatory police.

And then when you talk to them about whats wrong with their neighborhood and why its unbearable to them, they say Im scared. They want the police to come and lock up the badasses who are shooting people or robbing people or breaking into the houses. Thats what they want. And I am absolutely and firmly convinced progressives arent talking to them.

They want the police to do the job, the only job that police are good at and (criminologist Ernest) Burgess called that taking out the trash. And by that he meant the guys who were hurting other people. Not the guys who are hurting themselves with drugs, not the guys who were selling contraband so somebody could hurt themselves.

But everybody you talk to whos trying to make a life and in the hardest places in Baltimore, they want the police to do the one job they can do. And the police cant do it anymore. They learn to do the wrong f***ing thing.

Change the goddamn mission, and then from there, theres a basis for reform. But thats not satisfying enough to the lefties who want all police vanquished. Invariably, they dont live in these neighborhoods. They just imagine what its like but they dont actually live there. And it doesnt satisfy the people on the right who are convinced every time they read of a drug overdose or drug-related murder that the dysfunction of the drug war has to be applied harder and longer and more brutally. The people in either extreme are f***ing useless. They just are.

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Creator of 'The Wire' talks to the Reformer about troubled police departments like MPD - Minnesota Reformer

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ALAUNOS THERAPEUTICS, INC. : Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement, Regulation FD Disclosure, Financial Statements and Exhibits (form 8-K) -…

Posted: at 12:45 am

Item 1.01 Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement.

On June 24, 2022, Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. (the "Company") entered intoAmendment #4 (the "Fourth Amendment") to a Cooperative Research and DevelopmentAgreement, dated January 9, 2017, by and among the National Cancer Institute,the Company and Precigen, Inc., as amended (the "CRADA"). The Fourth Amendment,among other things, extends the term of the CRADA until January 9, 2025.

The foregoing summary of the Fourth Amendment does not purport to be completeand is qualified in its entirety by reference to the full text of the FourthAmendment, a copy of which, subject to any applicable confidential treatment,will be filed as an exhibit to the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q forthe period ended June 30, 2022.

Item 7.01 Regulation FD Disclosure.

On June 27, 2022, the Company issued a press release announcing the entry intothe Fourth Amendment. A copy of the press release is furnished as Exhibit 99.1to this Current Report on Form 8-K and is incorporated herein by reference.

The information contained in this Item 7.01, including Exhibit 99.1, is being"furnished" and shall not be deemed "filed" for purposes of Section 18 of theSecurities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"), or otherwisesubject to the liability of that Section or Sections 11 and 12(a)(2) of theSecurities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"). The informationcontained in this Item 7.01, including Exhibit 99.1, shall not be incorporatedby reference into any registration statement or other document pursuant to theSecurities Act or into any filing or other document pursuant to the ExchangeAct, except as otherwise expressly stated in any such filing.

Item 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits.

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ALAUNOS THERAPEUTICS, INC. : Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement, Regulation FD Disclosure, Financial Statements and Exhibits (form 8-K) -...

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Griswold Is Not About ‘Contraception.’ It’s About the Right to Privacy. – Esquire

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On February 24, 1761, a Boston lawyer named James Otis really went to town. He had been engaged by some Boston merchantswhich is to say, in many cases, smugglersto fight against the Writs of Assistance, which were odious general warrants that allowed agents of the Crown to barge into just about any business and/or dwelling to search for smuggled goods. Otis spoke for five hours.

The heart of Otiss lengthy denunciation of the writs came fairly early on in his presentation. To Otis, granting the unlimited ability to search and seize created tyrants out of citizens. He also made it clear that the writs were contrary in spirit to the oldest precepts of English common law.

Listening in the courtroom, a 26-year-old Boston lawyer named John Adams found that Otiss eloquence lit a fire in him. The moment is immortalized in a mural on the wall of the Massachusetts State House. Somewhere in those five hours were the seeds of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as the importance of privacy to the life of that entire document. The concept of privacy was the reason they all fought the damn war in the first place.

All that being said, can folks please stop referring to the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut as having been "about contraception"? Griswold confirmed the existence of a right to privacy within the Constitution. That's everything. It's about marriage. It's about sex. It's about what we read. It's about how we communicate with each other. It's about the limits to search and seizure. It's about medical records and genetic information. It's about libraries and the internet. Its about what we learn and how we learn it. Its all tied in together in a fervent prayer to keep us all safe from, as Thomas Jefferson put it, every form of tyranny over the mind of man. As Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg put it in his Griswold concurrence:

So, if Justice Clarence Thomas has his way, and this Supreme Court of dubious legitimacy decides to reconsider Griswold and all its progenyand I make the odds of that no worse than 50-50a lot more than pills and rubbers and diaphragms are on the line. So is the principle that we are entitled to the public expression of our private thoughts, and in that principle, we have the right to be as safe from intrusion as James Otis said those Boston smugglahmerchants were safe against intrusions into their basements by agents of the Crown. Remember, also, as vigilantism among the populace becomes a vital part of law enforcement, that Otis warned us that giving our fellow citizens that power was to make tyrants of them all. Mr. Madison recognized that fundamental truth when he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1788:

They all knew. That was why they fought the damn war.

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Griswold Is Not About 'Contraception.' It's About the Right to Privacy. - Esquire

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What the government gets to know about you should be your choice – The Hill

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Every year, government agents descend on peoples homes threatening them with huge fines if they do not divulge intimate details about their lives. The American Community Survey (ACS) is sent to about 3.5 million randomly selected Americans every year. It demands personal information such as how many beds, cars and phones the household has. It asks people to disclose their fertility history, sexual orientation, and history of marriage and divorce. It asks about daily commute time to work, detailed work history, and how much a person pays in taxes, rent, mortgage and utility bills.

In 1790, Congress authorized the first census. The law it passed authorized six simple questions about the number of people who lived in each home to ensure congressional representation was accurately apportioned. Interestingly, Congress rejected James Madisons proposal to ask about peoples occupations as a waste of trouble. That first Congress, which was closest in time to when the Constitution was written, rejected the notion that government agents could collect peoples personal information under its power to count the nations population.

Under the Constitution, the Census Bureau has one job: to count the number of people in the country for apportioning congressional seats in the house of representatives. Thats it.

But many people dont realize that the bureau now also conducts other surveys in addition to the decennial census. Most of them are voluntary. For some, the federal government even pays participants. But the American Community Survey is mandatory, and that compulsion makes it constitutionally suspect.

The American Community Survey, which asks more than 100 questions, goes far beyond a simple headcount. If this were a voluntary survey, people would be free to not answer the questions. No consequences would follow. But refusing to answer the ACS carries criminal prosecution and potentially ruinous fines. The Census Bureau acknowledges that threatening people makes many buckle under the pressure and disclose their lifes private details to the government agents. And the bureau doesnt see any problem with that.

We have seen a steady march toward protecting peoples privacy in the United States over the last century. As recently as Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the Supreme Court has recognized that people have a constitutional right to shield information from disclosure. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau has marched in the opposite direction and ended up with a legal position that is unsustainable under the narrow authority Congress has given it. In short, the bureau believes that it can compel anyone to divulge any information it may be interested in under the threat of criminal charges and fines.

Ordering people to disclose highly personal information, or else pay hefty fines, without suspicion of wrongdoing, without probable cause, or without a warrant, is unconstitutional. Yet the Census Bureau asserts it has authority akin to a general warrant the power to search and seize anyone they choose for any or no reason at all when it randomly selects millions of Americans and orders them to answer the American Community Survey.

The Bill of Rights zealously safeguards the right to privacy. And this is exactly the kind of invasion of privacy that Judge Janice Rogers Brown decried in People v. McKay as the inevitable [revival] of the general warrant and precisely the kind of arbitrary authority which gave rise to the Fourth Amendment.

That is why Maureen Murphy, John Huddleston and thousands of other Americans are fighting the Census Bureaus unwarranted intrusion into their lives. Their pending class-action lawsuit asks the court to settle once and for all that the bureau lacks the authority to compel individuals to answer the American Community Survey. The relevant statute simply does not give the Census Bureau as much power as the bureau thinks it does.

The right to privacy is as American as apple pie or a baseball game on the Fourth of July. Simply put, what the government gets to know about you should be your choice to make. And if a government agent comes to your home asking you intrusive questions without a warrant or probable cause, you should have the undiluted right to tell the agent to take a hike.

Adi Dynar is an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans liberties when threatened by government overreach and abuse.

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Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

A Community’s Quest to Document Every Species on Their Island Home – Hakai Magazine

After FBI Seizes His Phone, Trump Coup Lawyer John Eastman Decides The Fourth Amendment Is Good Actually – Above the Law

Four Things to Know About the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Egbert v. Boule | News & Commentary – ACLU

Columnist is shamefully uninformed on abortion | Letters To Editor | thesunchronicle.com – The Sun Chronicle

Simplification of procedure and standardization of formats of documents for transmission of securities – Lexology

Why The J6 Committee’s Attacks On Ginni Thomas Harm Every American – The Federalist

Creator of ‘The Wire’ talks to the Reformer about troubled police departments like MPD – Minnesota Reformer

ALAUNOS THERAPEUTICS, INC. : Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement, Regulation FD Disclosure, Financial Statements and Exhibits (form 8-K) -…

Griswold Is Not About ‘Contraception.’ It’s About the Right to Privacy. – Esquire

What the government gets to know about you should be your choice – The Hill

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