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“If someone had told me when I retired from the Supreme Court that I would be speaking at a conference about digital games, I would have been very skeptical, maybe thinking you have had one drink too many.”

Her journey to cyberspace started on the floors of the United States Congress and state legislatures where she heard an increasing number of challenges to the idea that the judiciary should be independent of political pressure, a value she holds dear. “I always thought an ‘activist judge’ was one that got up in the morning and went to work,” she quipped.

To change Congress, she figured, she needed to change public opinion, and that led to the need to improve knowledge of government among students.

“Two-thirds of Americans know at least one of the judges on the Fox TV show “American Idol,” but less than one in ten can name the chief justice of the Supreme Court,” she said.

The No Child Left Behind Act has made matters worse, she argued, because it has diverted resources from civics education to math and science. Our Courts is meant to help by developing curriculum for middle school classrooms and the game, which can be used both in classes and by anyone else who is interested.

I don’t really know what else to say, but she’s my hero of the moment.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that leading someone to believe you have child pornography to show or exchange is a federal crime, brushing aside concerns that the law could apply to mainstream movies that depict adolescent sex, classic literature or even innocent e-mails that describe pictures of grandchildren.

 So pretending to be a 14 year old wanting to have sex with someone is okay, but pretending to have pictures of a 14 year old wanting to have sex with someone is now a federal crime.

The new law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child pornography. It does not require that someone actually possesses child pornography.

 Hello thoughtcrime!

Opponents argue that inmates are often not rendered fully unconscious by the first drug in the cocktail as they are supposed to be before the second drug, a paralytic, is administered. They suffer when they are conscious while the paralytic and the third drug, which burns as it enters the system, are given.

Well, we have fancy fucking brain monitoring equipment, we can scan their brains for signs that the suffering system is active or not and how much it is, and we can actually find out, instead of just guessing whether or not these people are dying ‘in peace’ or whatever it’s supposed to be.

Why not offer an option of mental reconditioning against whatever crime it is they have committed? Like build into them an aversion of young people, if they are convicted pedophiles, or an aversion to weapons and violence if they are violent offenders. We have therapy programs for drug users that seek to instill in them a conviction that drugs are ruining their life and their only hope is to quit forever and go to meetings. Why don’t we have PA or MA (paedophilia anonymous or murderers anonymous)?