Florida, Pride of the Nation, Part 48
We don't usually rock three FPOTN entries in a row, but... you gotta go with your "A" material. And the quality tips keep rollin' in. This first entry comes our way from the proprietor of the only hockey blog you'll ever need, Off Wing Opinion.
What do you call a 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend, who take snapshots of themselves making whoopee and then email them from the girlfriend's account to the boyfriend's account?
From the files of "Those Tallahassee Attorneys: What Won't They Prosecute?" comes this sordid story that proves that Franz Kafka -- bless his dark heart -- had some Sunshine in him after all. Not only were the teens convicted, but the conviction was held up on appeal.
Judge James Wolf, a former prosecutor, wrote the majority opinion.
Wolf speculated that Amber and Jeremy could have ended up selling the photos to child pornographers ("one motive for revealing the photos is profit") or showing the images to their friends. He claimed that Amber had neither the "foresight or maturity" to make a reasonable estimation of the risks on her own. And he said that transferring the images from a digital camera to a PC created innumerable problems: "The two computers (can) be hacked."
Got that? Amber and Jeremy, by virtue of taking pictures of themselves, pictures that they could potentially sell or lose, are now convicted sex offenders.
Radley Balko puts it best:
Oh, but there's more. From the majority opinion:
Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives. These children are not mature enough to make rational decisions concerning all the possible negative implications of producing these videos.
Emphasis mine. And what effect, I wonder, does Judge Wolf think a child pornography conviction will have on "these minors' careers or personal lives?"
Also note that the acts themselves weren't illegal. Only the "documentation" of them.
***
Meanwhile, down south, there's been something about Miami that's been gnawing at my soul: In the glorious American real estate bubble of this decade, perhaps no place in the universe has been more bubblicious than downtown Miami, once a humble cluster of a dozen high-rises, now a steel forest of construction cranes erecting condominiums that flippers snapped up before ground ever broke.
Forget your random TriBeCa rehabs or your weak-ass SOMA gentrification. Downtown Miami is being transformed like Dubai or Ashlee Simpson's face. Hundreds of thousands of units are coming online the coming years, constructed by billions of dollars of capital flows from all over the planet.
And yet, here's the unspoken rub: In the coming decades, these investments will be underwater. Literally.
Here's Miami with a teeny tiny one-meter ocean level rise. The red parts are land reclaimed by the Atlantic.
And a not-entirely-unlikely two-meter rise:
Ah yes. Undersea retail. Salt water pools. Glitzy.
You can have your own fun plotting a watery doomsday for Miami or your own personal Sodom with the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences Environmental Studies Lab. Booyah!
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