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One remarkable feature of the debate on women in science is the eager participation of bystanders who don't have the first clue as to how the academia works, but nonetheless hold very strong opinions on the subject based on whatever they might or might not have observed in their own walks of life. I'd like to try to explain a couple of things to them.

Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists - and they are trying to give it the force of law.

A coalition of 295 legal scholars from universities around the world have signed a letter protesting the torture of Bradley Manning, and published this week in the New York Review of Books. Composed and drafted by Bruce Ackerman, of Yale Law School, and Yochai Benkler, of Harvard, the letter details his treatment, and points out that it is a violation of both the Eighth and Fifth Amendments. "If continued," the letter states, "it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, 'the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.'"

"In just a few short months, we've witnessed people power in action. From the Middle East to the Midwest, movements have risen up to overturn tired dogma and challenge entrenched power. Many of us were inspired by these events. And many of us were surprised. Perhaps we were growing skeptical that people power could still work. Maybe we had forgotten a vital fact about our world: that bold citizens, united around a common mission, can still come together to create major change against enormous odds." - 350.org (April 7, 2011) "Even when people are willing to take action in concert to redistribute the pie, whether by Gandhian mobilization or use of force, this may resonate falsely, for the pie is disintegrating. Its recipe and ingredients are obsolete. And freedom attained in harsh austerity, characterized by intense competition for food, will be doubtful or of little comfort." - Jan Lundberg ("Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation")

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist.

To find the best lawyer to handle your case, it is important that you ask recommendation from family members or friends. Also list down all question to wanted to clarify. There are firms that offer free evaluation so grab the change and decide who to trust with your case.

"under certain circumstances, the F.B.I. has the ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on the freedom of others."

As a black man in my 20s, I've incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might be pushed against a wall or thrown to the ground by a police officer at any time.

The candidate supported by progressives - President Obama - himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians - Muslim children by the dozens - not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents - in secret and with no checks - to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

While filming a police line at Occupy Oakland after midnight on Nov. 3 following the Nov. 2 general strike, an officer opens fire and shoots me with a rubber bullet. I was standing well back. There was no violence or confrontations of any kind underway. At 0:31 seconds you can see a tall officer in the front raise his weapon and then fire. This is the full clip of the incident.

Join University of California at Davis Assistant Professor Nathan Brown in calling for the resignation of UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi for her failure to protect UC Davis student's First Amendment right to assemble, or even their physical safety. Nathan Brown's Open Letter To The Chancellor is below:

TEDtalksDirector - September 18, 2008 - Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

Economics: I'm going to discuss trillions of dollars in a moment. As an economics teacher, I understand numbers this large are extremely difficult to imagine. If you are among the majority with this difficulty, I recommend that you follow the expert testimony that paints the picture, and know that success in this area of public education transformation that unleashes trillions of our dollars for human creative capacity in unimaginable power is sufficient to end the current economic crisis. This is the longest section of my briefing. If you tire in reading, please consider that at trillions of dollars of annual public benefits, you literally have nothing more valuable to do than understand the following facts and ideas. Harvard's Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ($30-$50,000 per US household of $50,000/year income), with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion. Remember, as demonstrated by the evidence disclosed by our own government, all the reasons Americans were told to go to war were known to be lies as they were told and applicable law proves these wars Orwellian unlawful. Just down the Charles River from Harvard, MIT's Simon Johnson (and former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund) describes our economy being lead by gambling oligarchs who have captured government as in banana republics (his words), and might plunge the US into an economy worse than the Great Depression. From his article under the telling title, The Quiet Coup: "Elite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The govern

Why More Equality? Our thirty years research shows that: 1) In rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier, and more successful population. Just look at the US, the UK, Portugal, and New Zealand in the top right of this graph, doing much worse than Japan, Sweden or Norway in the bottom left.

Sometimes inequality is bad for almost everyone, and sometimes only for certain people; sometimes it is worst for the people at the bottom, and sometimes it is just as bad for the people at the top. Different societies are equal or unequal for different reasons, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice. More equality is a good thing and it's an idea that's worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit.