A few news items

[tangaroa]

A U.S. man was arrested at an airport for a short time for carrying $4,700 in cash, and he got a lot of grief from the police for refusing to cooperate with them. The man was a campaigner for Congressman Ron Paul, a believer in very limited government power.

This raises an issue of human behaviour. Most people will follow police orders to avoid a confrontation, and this obedience allows police powers to grow until it becomes expected that anyone who fails to follow orders must be a criminal. Eventually, refusing to cooperate with what years ago might have been excessive police conduct immediately raises suspicion of criminal activity.

The ACLU is filing a lawsuit over this case, alleging that the Transportation Security Administration overstepped its legal bounds.

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Iran has been in a state of unrest since elections results showed a landslide victory for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I have heard plenty of unconfirmable reports to strongly suggest fraud on the part of the government, such as a story of elections officials being barred from their offices on elections day and being replaced by Ahmadinejad campaigners, but I cannot tell if these reports are any more accurate than the government's numbers. What is known is that a lot of Iranians are unhappy and the partisan militia Basij is beating up people who are protesting the result.

• A Fark.com user called Tatsuma has a good collection of information about the overall situation in Iran.
• The Soros Foundation site Eurasianet describes the unrest as stemming from a dispute between clerics at the top of Iran's government.
• U.S. elections blog FiveThirtyEight has several informative posts on Iran.
• MSNBC describes the information warfare techniques being used by the government and the opposition
• U.S. journalist Cyrus Farivar has a long list of information sources about the situation in Iran

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Jihadist ideologue Abu Yahya has called for the overthrow of the Pakistani government by arguing that Pakistan is U.S.-occupied. Pakistan already is a fundamentalist government that has been directly responsible for decades of terrorism against India and for the rise of the Taliban army, but they are not jihadi enough for the jihadists. It is also not new for Pakistan to be influenced by the U.S., as Pakistan was a U.S. client state throughout the Cold War while its enemy India was a client of the Soviet Union. The change in modern times is that the jihadists have begin waging a more open war against the U.S., the U.S. has fought back in force, and Pakistan is no longer assisting the jihadists who fight against its old ally. To the jihadists, it is as if Pakistan has suddenly switched sides.

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Four high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology have gone to the media with allegations of violent abuse at the top of the church.

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit nearly unanimously upheld an obscenity conviction for sending a pornographic e-mail.