Some cool legal law help images:
#1 The Doc Electric (Dr. Alfred Hammersmith Electravio ABD)
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I must confess, the profile I am about to tell is one full of hearsay, conjecture, presumptions, and all together known lies. I had not had the pleasure to meet let alone interview Dr Alfred H Electravio until well after his capture by the Utah State Police and incarceration to ________ Asylum. Because of this late meeting I had to base this extremely summarized biography on the Doctor’s own insane and often times incoherent ramblings, often filled with non-sequiter interjections and ejaculations as the examples that follow: "King Cabbage dines politely without haste inside his hat! HIS HAT I TELL YOU!" "Grrrrrrrrrrrrr hisssss grrrrrrrrrr hisssssss FAPUNKTIK!" "Have you no pocket wrenches man?! They are only Three Cents a Doubles!"
Born in Berkeley, California (that hotbed of Mad Scientists) to an Assyrian candlestick maker and the daughter of an Italian-American haberdasher, young Al H Electravio spent his rugratting years at the heels of giants. The Doctor was conceived in the People’s Park, on May 15th admidst the wild violence of Bloody Thursday, brought down onto Berkeley by the Governor Ronald W Reagan. Coincidentally, years later, it would be Reagan who would then promote the young genius Electravio’s vision of a fleet orbiting Death Lasers to strike down Hippies and Communists and anyone who found their way on to the Doctor’s ever expanding "shit list".
By the age of two and seven months, before he uttered his first word, Electravio had already learned the craft of his forebears so well that he was able to successfully combine the two; working long past bedtime in his father’s wax cellar using his mother’s old sewing machine. The invention he formed would be marketed to great regional success as The Nite-Coat., A sporty and wearable dinner jacket for the dapper gad-about-town made only from a special tallow the Doctor had engineered himself, that could be ignited at the lapels and elbows to provide enough luminescence to read good honest American words in some of the cities danker and poorly lit Beatnik juice bars. Ironically, in light of the Doctor’s future hatred of all nature, peace, and free loving counter culturalists, the jacket was a big hit among the hippies of the West Coast, as it saved energy and electricity, and also the wax being homegrown and organic was indeed a sanctioned product of the great Earth Mother, Gaia.
He would face his first great emotional trial at age twelve, when his mother was crushed to death by a falling redwood. Not a redwood in the great forests of Northern California and the Cascade Mountains, but at Lumberjack Lou’s Restaurant and Lube off of route 101 in San Jose. The Mother Electravio, a noted environmental activist in the local community, was leading a protest of the establishment for having a forty foot long redwood log chained to its facade. The protest turned for the worse when some of the members attempted to cut the redwood from its bonds so that they could return it to Gaia. Unfortunately they did not take in to account physical laws, and once the chains were cut, the log was pulled at rapidly increasing pace over the welcoming arms of the Mother Electravio. She did not flee from it but saw it as a welcome boon from the Earth Mother, and looked to embrace it with the love and respect it deserved. That day the Doctor hardened his heart against the hippys and treehuggers who put his beloved mam in front of that rolling redwood, and began to seek the making of all things green and growing obsolete and unnecessary for human life.
Electravio first gained international attention when he bought ten thousand acres of the Brazilian Rainforest and destroyed all of it within twenty and five tenth seconds using his prototype neutrino bomb. Electravio was not only testing the bomb, but also wanted to test his fleet of OxyGenerators, and measure the scalable effects on Earth’s atmosphere and on the local fauna. Several environmental and global bodies moved to seek action against him, but could not because of his complete legal claim over the land and all that was contained in it, and the fact that he had safely employed and trained the indigenous inhabitants to help him run the experiments. Regardless of the anger and fist-shaking, nothing could be done, and if it weren’t for the automated Liberal-Indignance seeking targeting system that Electravio had installed on his orbiting death ray, the Human-Ultraviolet-Biometric-comBustion-Light-Emitter or Hubble , he would have never been stopped.
The first few instances of famous liberal environmental activists spontaneously combusting were seen just as mere unrelated coincidence. In fact in the early nineties the string of human-combustion cases were used as propaganda against the low fat and grain heavy diets of vegetarians and vegans. Detractors claimed it was high fat content meats that prevented good honest red blooded people from just exploding willy nilly, spreading their leftist ash and entrails about, as if they owned everything. It wasn’t until data collected from Hubble included pictures of Ed Begley Jr’s house, his favorite restaurant, and his favorite electric car dealership, that the government became suspicious of what Hubble was really being used for.
But red tape and bureaucracy tarried too long, and Electravio wasn’t ever brought before a federal court. On his twenty-eighth birthday he received a summons from the Utah State Supreme court. He had tested, somewhat successfully, on the salt flats of Utah the usage of high proofed grain alcohol as fuel for his never finished rocket-suit. He attempted to flee in the suit, but his fuel reserves had been consumed the night before by a group of Brigham-Young University Graduate Students, who were assisting him for course credit. Affronted with these great insults to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the highest court of Utah saw only fit to sentence Electravio to a life time at an un-named Mormon Re-Education Center, at the bottom of The Great Salt Lake.
@ your service
Image by brexians
ser·vice noun
Definition of SERVICE
1
a : the occupation or function of serving
b : employment as a servant
2
a : the work performed by one that serves
b : help, use, benefit
c : contribution to the welfare of others
d : disposal for use
3
a : a form followed in worship or in a religious ceremony
b : a meeting for worship —often used in plural
4
: the act of serving: as
a : a helpful act
b : useful labor that does not produce a tangible commodity —usually used in plural
c : serve
5
: a set of articles for a particular use
6
a : an administrative division (as of a government or business)
b : one of a nation’s military forces (as the army or navy)
7
a : a facility supplying some public demand
b : a facility providing maintenance and repair
8
: the materials (as spun yarn, small lines, or canvas) used for serving a rope
9
: the act of bringing a legal writ, process, or summons to notice as prescribed by law
10
: the act of a male animal copulating with a female animal
11
: a branch of a hospital medical staff devoted to a particular specialty
Peter Swire
Image by Center for American Progress
Government and Web 2.0 “grew up in different neighborhoods—they don’t play by the same rules,” said Andrew Sherry, Senior Vice President for Online Communications at the Center for American Progress at a CAP event on Monday. Barack Obama’s campaign embraced the participatory nature of Web 2.0, but using social media in the federal government is a different proposition, with different rules.
The event’s expert panel included Peter Swire, CAP Senior Fellow and Ohio State law professor; Alec Ross, senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc.; and Faiz Shakir, Research Director for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at Center for American Progress Action Fund. The event coincided with the release of several papers authored by Swire exploring the White House’s use of Web 2.0 technology and challenges facing its implementation.
The Obama administration has done more than previous administrations to experiment with new media and Web 2.0 technologies, but it has still been timid in some applications. "A government is a means of collective action," said O’Reilly, especially as the Founding Fathers envisioned ours. "Technology,” he said, “gives us an amazing chance to update that vision." Indeed, the Obama administration has already begun to use technology to engage the public despite some initial hurdles.
Those hurdles are what differentiates governing with technology from campaigning with it. Three major challenges to implementing Web 2.0 technologies are scale—the large volume of communication to small number of staff ratio; clearance—the issue of getting an accurate and useful response that has been “cleared” with all relevant agencies; and limits on how the government can delegate outsiders to act on its behalf. As the lawyer for www.change.gov and www.whitehouse.gov during the Obama transition, Swire helped the transition team address these issues.
Ross has led the State Department’s foray into engaging the public through what he called “21st-century statecraft.” The goal is to move beyond just government-to-government relationships and enhance the relationships between governments and people around the world.
The State Department has already been at the forefront of the federal government’s innovative engagement efforts, from releasing an online video featuring President Obama speaking directly to Persian speakers to mounting a text-message campaign to raise 0 million to help internally displaced persons in the Pakistani region of Swat. These campaigns and others like them will “expand and enhance the way the United States government and its citizens can engage with the world,” said Ross.
Ross said that one of his goals at the State Department is to empower people around the world to participate in the global economy. This is already happening, mostly through mobile devices. In the future, mobile phones and smart phones will be even more common as a way to access the Internet, and they will help to bridge the digital divide, said O’Reilly. For now, government can’t wait for ubiquitous access to broadband, or even to the Internet, to take advantage of web technologies. It’s gratifying, said Ross, to “see the government moving at Internet speed.”
Web 2.0 means “harnessing collective intelligence” and “building a system that gets better the more people use it,” said O’Reilly. And he should know. O’Reilly is credited with popularizing the term "Web 2.0." Government can harness this collective intelligence and create a new partnership with the American people. “Technology is a two-way conversation that government is leading,” said Shakir. The main strength of Web 2.0 is allowing for greater participation that adds value to news and policy. What’s more, said Shakir, the first opportunity the administration now has to shape its relationship with the public online is so critical.
Yet there is no legal framework for managing government adoption of web technologies. The underlying statutes are outdated, and “analog-age laws are attached to things we’re trying to make happen in the 21st century,” said Ross. “Social media is a messy space, and government doesn’t always lend itself to messy spaces,” said O’Reilly.
We are entering a “messy, exciting time with a lot of potential,” said O’Reilly. “Let’s figure out how to use this opportunity to build a better country.”
