PHOENIX — An Arizona couple accused of sexual abuse after taking bath-time photos of their children and then trying to have them developed at Walmart are suing the state and the retail giant.

Lisa and Anthony “A.J.” Demaree’s three young daughters were taken away by Arizona Child Protective Services last fall when a Walmart employee found partially nude pictures of the girls on a camera memory stick taken to the store for processing, according to the suit.

The Peoria couple’s attorney said Walmart turned the photos over to police and the Demarees were not allowed to see their children for several days and didn’t regain custody for a month while the state investigated.

Neither parent was charged with sexual abuse and they regained custody of their children — then ages 1 1/2, 4 and 5 — but the Demarees claim the incident inflicted lasting harm.

The couple is seeking undetermined monetary damages from both Walmart and the state and have requested a jury trial.

Richard Treon, the lawyer for the Demarees, said the images of the girls were part of a group of 144 photographs taken mostly during the family’s vacation in San Diego.

There were seven to eight bath- and playtime photos of the girls that showed a “portion or outline or genitalia.”

“There was nothing sexual about it,” Treon said. “This is a parent’s worst nightmare.”

I’ve written about this before, and what I said then is equally applicable now:

Parents are being persecuted for taking pictures that parents have taken since cameras were invented. There is nothing lewd or pornographic about it. In today’s era, when even being charged with an offense like this is the equivalent of a Scarlet Letter, the eagerness with which police and photo store employees to jump at something like this and scream “child abuse” should be a concern to anyone.

I hope these people get every penny they’re asking for.

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Will Bill O’Reilly or anyone else who saw the hand of God in the safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549 this January please explain why God chose not to save Continental Connection Flight 3407, which plunged into a house outside of Buffalo last night, killing all 49 people on board and a resident on the ground?

Good question…..

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Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else�s hobby. I hadn�t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom�s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else�s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in �The Matrix,� in which most humans don�t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom�s notion of reality, you wouldn�t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn�t, as in �The Matrix,� unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn�t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or �posthumans,� could run �ancestor simulations� of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn�t matter for Dr. Bostrom�s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

It’s a fascinating concept to think about, but does it really matter whether its true or not ?

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing�s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn�t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom�s simulation hypothesis isn�t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you�re touching now � a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug � is real to you even if it�s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world � and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe it just means living your life and not worrying about the ramblings of philosophers.

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He asks us to raise a pint to him tonight……..

Just a pint Brad ?

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Monopoly board game players can now pay for properties with debit cards.

Game?makers Parker have phased out the standard multi-coloured cash in a new version.

Players will instead use a Visa mock debit card to keep track of how much they win or lose.

It is?inserted into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders’ earnings and payments.

Parker said replacing of cash with plastic showed the game was moving with the times.

No word on whether the new version of the game will include the business cards of local bankruptcy attorneys.

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Sometimes the memory comes out of nowhere. Maybe you’re sitting on your deck on a summer night after the kids have gone to bed. Or stuck in traffic after work, thinking about the 800 things you have to pack for vacation. A certain song comes on the radio, and all of a sudden it’s summer, years ago. You’re 16 or 17, and there’s a boy, and you’re looking at him and thinking, “It’s going to happen. Not now, but soon.”

And it did. He’s the one you lost your virginity to. Remembering, you may feel a small smile tug at your face. Or a touch of sadness.

More girls lose their virginity in the summer than at any other time of year, according to researchers at Mississippi State University. There are all kinds of reasons. You remember. You had more free time and less supervision. You met a new guy at church camp whom you’d never see again, or were about to say goodbye to an old friend before you both went away to college. Maybe you were in love or maybe you weren’t, but those sticky summer nights almost demanded surrender.

This story wasn’t buried somewhere either. In the print edition, its featured right on the front page of the Style section, which has bothered at least one blogger.

At least this article is on the front-page of the Style section (the section which includes the comics) with an eye-catching cartoon. We wouldn’t want this generation of young women missing out on the victories of the sexual revolution. And what better way to let our teen daughters know that its time for them to have sex?

I guess the only good thing is that teenagers really don’t read newspapers.

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Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., where summers are short and heat advisories are rare, Elissa David never had air conditioning. Her parents didn’t believe in it. Now she lives here, where on some summer days the only thing higher than the temperature is the humidity, but she is sticking with family tradition: She never switches on the window unit in her fourth-floor Arlington apartment. She keeps her shades half-drawn, turns on a few fans and dresses in shorts.

To each his own I suppose, but I just don’t get it. For the record, we are definately fans of air conditioning here at the Mataconis homestead. More than once, actually, I’ve wondered if Benedict XVI would consider granting sainthood to Willis Haviland Carrier.

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As usual during the trip, we took several photos. Because I forgot my digital camera, I bought a disposable camera at a gas station on the way to the campground. I took pictures of the kids using sticks to beat on old bottles and cans and logs as musical instruments. I took a few of my youngest daughter, Eliza, then age 3, skinny-dipping in the lake, and my son, Noah, then age 8, swimming in the lake in his underwear, and another of Noah naked, hamming it up while using a long stick to hold his underwear over the fire to dry. Finally, I took a photo of everyone, as was our camping tradition, peeing on the ashes of the fire to put it out for the last time. We also let the kids take photos of their own.

You can imagine what happened next, I’m sure:

When we returned on Sunday, I forgot the throwaway camera and Rusty found it in his car. He gave it to his wife, whom I’ll call Janet, to get developed, and she dropped it off the next day with two other rolls of film at a local Eckerd drugstore. On Tuesday, when she returned to pick up the film, she was approached by two officers from the Savannah Police Department. They told her they had been called by Eckerd due to “questionable photos.”

One officer told Janet “there were pictures of little kids running around with no clothes on, pictures of minors drinking alcohol,” she recounted for me in an e-mail. “I asked to see the pictures and was told I couldn’t. I explained there must be a mistake. I was kind of laughing, you know, ‘Come on guys. There must be an explanation. This is crazy. Let me see the pictures.’ The officer told me that he personally did not find [the photos] offensive and that he had camped himself as a kid and knows what goes on.” But the officer also told Janet that “because Eckerd’s had called them and that because there were pictures of children naked, genitalia and alcohol, they would have to investigate.”

Janet asked the photo lab clerk what was on the photos and the clerk “replied very seriously that they were bad, that there was one that looked like a child’s head had been cut off, one with children drinking beer and pictures of naked kids.” As she drove to her house, Janet said, “I was in shock and felt sick to the pit of my stomach and was trying to process all of it.” She called my wife, who was driving home, and explained what had happened. Sensing how bad this might become, my wife pulled her car to the side of the road and fought the urge to throw up.

Neither my wife nor I, Rusty nor Janet has a criminal record of any sort. Yet over the next several weeks, the Savannah Police Department and the Department of Family and Child Services (DFCS) investigated us for “child pornography” and then “sexual exploitation of a minor.” We suffered the embarrassment of having DFCS interview our family, friends, employers and our children’s teachers, asking them whether we were suitable parents and what kind of relationship we had with our kids.

The article goes on from there, and, if you want to read the entire thing and don’t subscribe to Salon, you’ll have to sit through a commercial, but its worth it. While the charges will ultimately thrown out, this family was quite literally torn apart and branded as sex offenders thanks to overzealousness of a camera store employee and the overzealousness of the state, all in the name of the children.

This is not the first time something like this has happened to a parent:

For instance, in Dallas in 2003, as the result of a complaint by an Eckerd drugstore employee, a 33-year-old woman was charged with “sexual performance of a child,” a second-degree felony punishable by 20 years in prison, based on a picture of her breast-feeding her 1-year-old son. Although the district attorney dropped the charges in the case, the parents had to fight for weeks to get their two children back from the Dallas County Child Protective Services.

Also, Salon ran a story on this issue six years ago that showed the ways that parents were being caught in a web that was supposedly designed to trap pedophiles. Two examples from that article:

David Urban in 1989 took photos of his wife and 15-month-old grandson, both nude, as she was giving him a bath. Kmart turned him in and he was convicted by a Missouri court (later overturned).>

More recently, Cynthia Stewart turned in bath-time pictures of her 8-year-old daughter to a Fuji film processing lab in Oberlin, Ohio. The lab contacted the local police, who found the pictures “over the line” and arrested the mother for, among other things, snapping in the same frame with her daughter a showerhead, which the prosecution apparently planned to relate somehow to hints of masturbation.

The charges against Stewart were ultimately settled.

I’m not excusing child abuse or exploitation, but the point is this. Parents are being persecuted for taking pictures that parents have taken since cameras were invented. There is nothing lewd or pornographic about it. In today’s era, when even being charged with an offense like this is the equivalent of a Scarlet Letter, the eagerness with which police and photo store employees to jump at something like this and scream “child abuse” should be a concern to anyone.

More thoughts from Alex Knapp at Outside The Beltway

H/T: Hit & Run

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Lightning strikes Las Vegas:

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