Entertaining Satan: Why We Tolerate Terrorist Incitement

Words are dangerous. That is why governments sometimes want to suppress speech. The law of free speech reflects a settled decision that, at the time that law was adopted, the dangers were worth tolerating. But people keep dreaming up nasty new things to do with speech. Recently, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other terrorist organizations have employed a small army of Iagos on the internet to recruit new instruments of destruction. Some of what they have posted is protected speech under present First Amendment law. In response, scholars have suggested that there should be some new exception to the law of free speech. Thus far, no workable exception has been suggested

The time evolution of gaps in tidal streams

We model the time evolution of gaps in tidal streams caused by the impact of a dark matter subhalo, while both orbit a spherical gravitational potential. To this end, we make use of the simple behaviour of orbits in action-angle space. A gap effectively results from the divergence of two nearby orbits whose initial phase-space separation is, for very cold thin streams, largely given by the impulse induced by the subhalo. We find that in a spherical potential the size of a gap increases linearly with time for sufficiently long timescales. We have derived an analytic expression that shows how the growth rate depends on the mass of the perturbing subhalo, its scale and its relative velocity with respect to the stream. We have verified these scalings using N-body simulations and find excellent agreement. For example, a subhalo of mass 10^8 Msun directly impacting a very cold thin stream on an inclined orbit can induce a gap that may reach a size of several tens of kpc after a few Gyr. The gap size fluctuates importantly with phase on the orbit, and it is largest close to pericentre. This indicates that it may not be fully straightforward to invert the spectrum of gaps present in a stream to recover the mass spectrum of the subhalos.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, ApJ Letters in pres

One large blob and many streams frosting the nearby stellar halo in Gaia DR2

We explore the phase-space structure of nearby halo stars identified kinematically from Gaia DR2 data. We focus on their distribution in velocity and in "integrals of motion" space as well as on their photometric properties. Our sample of stars selected to be moving at a relative velocity of at least 210 km/s with respect to the Local Standard of Rest, contains an important contribution from the low rotational velocity tail of the disk(s). The $V_R$-distribution of these stars depicts a small asymmetry similar to that seen for the faster rotating thin disk stars near the Sun. We also identify a prominent, slightly retrograde "blob", which traces the metal-poor halo main sequence reported by Gaia Collaboration et al. (2018d). We also find many small clumps especially noticeable in the tails of the velocity distribution of the stars in our sample. Their HR diagrams disclose narrow sequences characteristic of simple stellar populations. This stream-frosting confirms predictions from cosmological simulations, namely that substructure is most apparent amongst the fastest moving stars, typically reflecting more recent accretion events.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

Corruption of Religion and the Establishment Clause

Government neutrality toward religion is based on familiar considerations: the importance of avoiding religious conflict, alienation of religious minorities, and the danger that religious considerations will introduce a dangerous irrational dogmatism into politics and make democratic compromise more difficult. This paper explores one consideration, prominent at the time of the framing, that is often overlooked: the idea that religion can be corrupted by state involvement with it. This idea is friendly to religion but, precisely for that reason, is determined to keep the state away from religion. If the religion-protective argument for disestablishment is to be useful today, it cannot be adopted in the form in which it was understood in the 17th and 18th centuries, because in that form it is loaded with assumptions rooted in a particular variety of Protestant Christianity. Nonetheless, suitably revised, it provides a powerful reason for government, as a general matter, to keep its hands off religious doctrine. It offers the best explanation for many otherwise mysterious rules of Establishment Clause law

Reauthorizing Head Start: The Future Federal Role in Preschool Programs for the Poor

This paper describes the implications of President Bush’s proposal to devolve authority for running the Head Start program to the states and to alter the organization and funding of all government early childhood programs—with the goal of improving the school readiness skills of low-income children. The administration plan to allow states to mix Head Start funds with state-funded preschool money and, if desired, child care monies to create a more uniform early childhood care system with an educational focus raises numerous questions. This paper addresses questions raised by this plan, including the potential quality of these new systems, the extent to which the programs will offer health and family support services (as Head Start now does), the capacity of states to administer large-scale preschool systems, and the prospects for adequate funding of new systems, given state budget deficits and demands for providing more child care for low-income working parents

Federal Child Care Funding for Low-Income Families: How Much Is Needed?

With reauthorization of the 1996 welfare reform law being debated, this paper looks at the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant and the Child Care and Development Fund — key components of congressional proposals to set a dollar amount for government spending on child care. This issue brief provides background on current child care use, arrangements, and cost, as well as research findings on the measurement of quality in child care programs

Madisonian Pornography or, the Importance of Jeffrey Sherman

James Madison\u27s classic attack on the Sedition Act shows how free speech protection is vital to the functioning of democracy. His argument reaches toward, but does not fully defend, a right to pornography. Jeffrey Sherman\u27s work, which shows that gay pornography played a significant role in the genesis of the gay rights movement, completes the Madisonian argument. The more general lesson is that speech consisting of claims about what goods are worth pursuing—such as pornography, which implicitly contains claims about what sexual goods are worth pursuing—should always be understood to be part of protected public discourses