"At a CoinSummit panel on Wednesday, [venture capitalist and ex-Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya] also said he thinks Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg thinks bitcoin is cool. Facebook declined to comment."

With Rep. Jackie Speier's announcement yesterday that she intends to introduce a federal bill criminalizing "revenge porn" into the house in the month, people were asking the same question they often ask about revenge porn: Why isn't this already illegal?

The short answer is that law enforcement often doesn't take it seriously. There are existing laws against harassment, but even victims of ordinary harassment have always had a hard time getting the authorities to pay attention. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the cops tend to presume that harassment laws don't apply to the behavior of the kind of people who contribute to websites like Is Anyone Up, You Got Posted, and myex.com ("It's just online").

So: absent specific criminal laws addressing the subject, people who are harassed in this particularly vile way can't convince anyone to do anything about it.

This is why, once Speier has actually got a draft of this proposed bill out there, we're going to have to have a discussion about making the non-consensual distribution of each other's naked photographs a federal crime.

State politicians, moved by all the news stories you've also been reading about this varietal of internet cruelty, have begun to respond too. Of course, they've done so in the lethargic and occasionally ham-fisted way of state legislatures. California, New Jersey, and (as of two weeks or so ago) Idaho do now all have laws on the books designed to address revenge porn specifically. Alaska and Texas also have broader statutes that could apply to the dissemination of nude pictures. Some of these laws are better drafted than others — the California law (stupidly) excludes selfies from protection, and the Texas law has already been declared unconstitutional by an appeals court.

More than twenty other states, including Florida, Maryland, and Utah, have bills designed to address revenge porn moving along somewhere in their legislative processes. The map below simply shows where the bills and legislation are either in place or in progress, and where they aren't, per the National Conference of State Legislatures:

Not exactly the kind of patchwork quilt that makes one feel warm and protected, is it? Over half of the states have nothing going on. And of course not all the bills in varying stages of life will make it to the law books.

As Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor who studies cyber-harassment, put it to me in an email this morning, "A federal criminal law would be a crucial companion to state efforts. It would provide legal protection against revenge porn in cases where the states either failed to pass legislation or state law enforcement refused to act."

So that's one reason to have a federal law that covers this behavior. It would offer actual protection. It would also, as a matter of symbolism, perhaps go a long way towards convincing cops that it is a real problem they should act on. (Training would help too, Citron notes.)

Another reason has to do with the immunity that website owners have from being held liable for the acts of the people who post on them, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor who is working on the Speier bill, wrote to me in an email:

... online entities protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act are provided with a special defense against state criminal laws, but not against federal criminal laws (or federal copyright laws, for that matter). A federal law means that a revenge porn site claiming to merely provide a platform for angry exes to upload sexually explicit images of their former partners will not be able to hide behind Section 230.

In other words? Having a federal law against revenge porn might mean that instead of having to bust people like Hunter Moore for hacking if we want to put them in prison, we could just prosecute them directly for, as Sam Biddle once put it, "building an entire career atop posting stolen naked images of women across the country."

Are there First Amendment concerns to consider here? Yes. In the original article on the Speier bill, one attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the concern quite nicely:

"Frequently, almost inevitably, statutes that try to do this type of thing overreach," he said. "The concern is that they're going to shrink the universe of speech that's available online."

But Citron adds that she doesn't think a federal law, if drafted properly, would have that effect. Existing laws against cyber-stalking and extortion have not chilled people's freedom of speech so far, she notes, so a law singling out malicious and intentional revenge porn would not likely do so either.

Franks, who says Speier's bill will look something like the model statute she provides here, adds, "I take very seriously both the grave nature of the harm and the First Amendment implications of regulating it. I have worked very hard to ensure that the definitions of the conduct are very narrow and that the type of conduct prohibited is very clear. I have also worked very hard to include exceptions for disclosures that serve the public interest."

Any future social media activities of one Anthony D. Weiner, in other words, probably will still be reportable under this law.

[Images by Jim Cooke.]

Greatest human being Bill Murray kicked off his 14th annual Murray Bros. Caddyshack Charity Golf Tournament today in Florida. And he did it wearing these incredible golf pants:

Murray was at Jacksonville's River Bend Golf Links to raise money for the Firehouse Subs Public Safety Foundation and show off his sweet Pabst Blue Ribbon golf pants, which are apparently a thing that exist.

Oh, and this was his shirt:

Quite appropriate for a man who will receive total consciousness on his deathbed. He's definitely got that going for him.

Murray has a history of amazing golf fashions, including a pair of "camouflage" pants he wore to the Ryder Cup in 2012. On closer inspection, the camo pattern was made up of ladies in short skirts:

[H/T: Uproxx, Photos: FCNLindsey, AP Images]

This week, President Obama mentioned that he is "concerned" with "the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan." What are the chances that that will happen in our lifetime? Let's guess!

We know that there are many forces at work that would like to detonate a nuclear device in Manhattan. We know that there is a black market for nuclear materials. We know that such a catastrophe would make 9/11 look like child's play—this piece, for example, estimates more than 800,000 deaths from a 150-kiloton nuclear bomb (the size of a US nuclear cruise missile) detonated in Times Square. (These things always assume the bomb will detonate in Times Square. It is a fair assumption. Even New York City residents often dream of detonating a bomb in Times Square.)

We know it would be bad. What we don't know is how likely such an attack really is. Is it a total impossibility? A faint outlier of a chance? Or a near inevitability, given the extent of our enemies in the world? Your answer will depend on your knowledge of geopolitics, your personal views on human nature, and your general confidence in the accuracy of your own uninformed opinions.

I put the chances at 68% at some point in my lifetime.

Put your own estimates in the discussion section below. When it happens, none of your guesses will matter.

[Pic via]

Florida Man might take over the Westboro Baptist Church. The circle is complete.

What else do you need? (The answer is nothing. You need nothing else in your life but this.)

[H/T TMZ]

Earlier today, the Air Force fired nine nuclear commanders and announced plans to discipline dozens of junior officers in response to a widespread exam-cheating scandal.

Today, a Montana federal court sentenced 22-year-old Jordan Graham to thirty years in prison for, well, there's really no delicate way of putting this: Shoving her husband of approximately eight days, 25-year-old Cody Johnson, off a cliff in Glacier National Park.

That sentence might seem light to you. It is indeed far less than the prosecution asked for, which was, to quote their sentencing brief, "certainly no less than 600 months imprisonment." The relatively brief sentence suggests that the judge was not impressed by what turned out the be the prosecution's complicated theorizing about what, exactly, happened between this couple on the evening of July 7, 2013.

Let's be absolutely clear. Graham has confessed that yes, she put her hands on her husband's back and shoved him face-first off that cliff. There isn't an active question about whether or not she did that.

But there is is an active question about why.

Yes, according to testimony given in court and some text messages Graham had been sending a friend, she had been having second thoughts about the marriage. She did text a friend that evening that, "but dead serious if you don't hear from me at all against [sic] tonight, something happened."

She also, in the aftermath, lied about whether she'd been to the park at all even though she "found" the body herself, and even fabricated an email from a fake friend "Tony," to supplement her cover story that he'd taken off with others:

"Hello Jordan, My name is Tony. There is no bother in looking for Cody anymore. He is gone. I saw your post on twitter and thought I would email you..."

While she eventually confessed to a story—something along the lines of there was a fight and I pushed him in the heat of passion—the details of that were moving targets, too.

That said, there still seemed to me a wide and mysterious gap between Graham's obvious and ineffective attempts to cover up what she did wrong and the attempt the prosecution was making to present her as a calculating mastermind.

They had to, of course, to get her convincted of first-degree felony murder, which is what she was originally charged with, along with second degree murder and a count of making false statements. (They were federal charges because the crime occurred in a national park.)

Yet Graham had no documented history of violence. Not to mention that not-wanting-to-be-married-anymore somehow didn't quite fly as a motive of anyone other than a one-hundred-percent pure psychopath.

Evidently the judge was not impressed by the prosecution's zeal in this regard. At one point, shortly before the scheduled trial, the U.S. Attorney suddenly announced to the judge that they needed more time to prepare for trial. They said that because they'd found a cloth near Johnson's body, and Graham had said something about blindfolds in her interview, they had a new theory:

A Kalispell bride accused of pushing her husband to his death in Glacier National Park in July may have blindfolded him first, prosecutors contended in U.S. District Court on Friday.

"Oh, come on," U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said in disbelief during the court hearing, at which prosecutors asked to delay the trial until February.

Molloy said he's inclined to decline that request and called the hypothesis that 22-year-old Jordan Linn Graham blindfolded 25-year-old Cody Johnson before his death "rank speculation."

After a short trial, but before the jury could be instructed on a verdict, Graham's lawyers agreed to a plea deal, in which she pled guilty to second-degree murder, and they dropped the first-degree and false statements charges.

But then the prosecution, ever aggressive, brought up evidence they had of Graham's premeditation in their sentencing recommendation to the judge. That's how they got to that fifty-year recommendation. That the verdict was far shorter than the prosecution asked for suggests the judge didn't buy the prosecution's theory that Graham did what she did with premeditated intent.

But then, given that she's likely to spend a minimum of 25 years in a federal penitentiary, per my favorite sentencing expert, she did not really get off easy, either.

[Photo via AP.]

To contact the author of this post, please email michelle.dean@gawker.com.

A fourth person has died from injuries sustained during this month's deadly car accident at the South by Southwest festival.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is in hot water with the FBI after an investigative report by NBC News uncovered hundreds of instances where FEMA workers assigned a lower flood risk to high-risk properties, allowing the owners to save "as much as 97 percent" on their flood insurance premiums.

According to NBC, the agency has been conducting interviews with FEMA employees for the past 10 days to get to the bottom of the fixed flood maps.

The NBC investigation published in February shows that 533 properties in Alaska, Hawaii, and across coastal areas of the continental United States were removed from high-risk flood zones under questionable circumstances, including these luxury beachfront condominiums in hurricane-prone Alabama.

On a single day -– Oct. 25, 2012, as agency officials were closely monitoring Hurricane Sandy as it barreled toward the Atlantic Coast — FEMA remapped more than a mile of the oceanfront in Gulf Shores [Alabama], including condos on the spot where a Holiday Inn and a McDonald's were destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The document that made that change, issued by a FEMA manager, redrew the lines to exclude 25 condo buildings from the highest-risk flood zone, and was one of just 533 cases found nationwide by NBC News.

NBC illustrated all 533 cases of questionable changes to flood risk on a map hosted by GIS software company Esri.

FEMA's flood maps are crucial for property owners and insurance companies alike, as they assess the risk for flooding at a particular location in the United States based on information such as proximity to a body of water, elevation, and climatological risk for hazards like hurricanes or major river flooding. Flood insurance premiums are heavily dependent on a property's FEMA-analyzed flood risk, with the highest-risk properties costing the most to insure per year.

FloodSmart.gov serves as "the official site of the National Flood Insurance Program," providing homeowners with information regarding both flood risk and flood insurance.

[Images via AP and NBC]

We live in a marvelous, annoying era in which startup geniuses constantly getting rich by "disrupting" mundane industries. Hotels? Disrupted. Taxis? Disrupted. On behalf of the beleaguered apartment hunters of New York City, I humbly request that someone disrupt real estate agents out of existence.

Real estate agents are everywhere of course—exercising their clammy grip over the housing supply from Olympia to Ocean City. But in cities like New York (and San Francisco, and... whatever other cities have real estate markets that resemble gladiatorial contests), renting apartments is a uniquely one-sided experience. With vacancy rates in the very low single digits, high demand, and competition from not only Wall Street motherfuckers but also international motherfuckers, renters are at a hopeless disadvantage to landlords. You will take what is offered, and you will pay what is asked, and you will accept it, or else you will pack your shit and mosey on back to where you came from and give up the dream of ever becoming a fashion person.

So here you are, the poor renter, already faced with insanely high rent prices and short supply. And into this mix comes: the real estate agent. Who is the real estate agent? He is a middleman. He is a toll to pay. He is the coin slot on the pay toilet that you must deposit money into in order to be allowed to shit. In this metaphor, shit represents "your entire bank account."

I do not want to exaggerate my point here. It needs no exaggeration. It is common, in New York City, for a real estate agent handling rentals—not sales, in which huge sums of money are spent and mortgages are signed and homes are made for a lifetime, but common apartment rentals—to charge a fee of 15% of the annual rent in exchange for their services. And what services do you get, in exchange for this monstrous tax?

• The real estate agent will unlock the door of the apartment so that you can look at it.
• The real estate agent will hand you lengthy forms to fill out to apply for the apartment.
• The real estate agent will give those forms to the landlord and tell you whether or not the landlord will deign to rent their apartment to you.

That is all. That is everything that the real estate agent does. I am referring to good real estate agents. The below average (or even average!) real estate agent will be unresponsive to emails, late to appointments, and completely ignorant of facts about the apartment you are trying to rent. That's okay; they know quite well that they don't need to provide any added value to you. They have the keys. And if you want the keys, you will pay them. And if you won't, some other poor bastard will.

Elements of the real estate process have indeed been "disrupted" by the internet already. Apartment listings are available on Craigslist and a million other sites. Facts about buildings can be found on Trulia. Recommendations for various neighborhood amenities are on Yelp. All of these things mean that real estate agents are actually providing fewer real services than ever. And yet they persist in existing. Today, it is easy for you, the aspiring renter, to make yourself a list of potential apartments to rent and arrange times to view them. You do not need a real estate agent's imaginary expertise to help you with this. All you need the real estate agent to do is open that door.

Sorry—you don't need the real estate agent to do that. You don't need a real estate agent to do anything! Renters at the low to moderate end of the price spectrum (most of us) would benefit from the immediate disappearance of all real estate agents. If apartment owners and landlords would show their places themselves and hand out applications themselves and award the apartment to the renter themselves, then we could save ourselves an extra 15% of the annual rent in fees. The problem is that real estate agents usually charge the renters, not the landlords, and the landlord can save a bit of hassle, and they know that there is a high demand for their apartments, so what do they care how much the renters need to pay? It will be paid.

For now. Until someone disrupts this bullshit. The outrageous fees that real estate agents charge amount to a tax on people who are obligated to move soon and therefore desperate to literally avoid homelessness. It is not a fair dynamic. Of course, since real estate agents are paid on commission, it's only natural for them to want to grab as much as they can when they can get it. It's a feast or famine mentality, and it hurts everyone.

Let's be honest: an idiot can unlock an apartment door and hand over some forms. What if there were a low-cost service that paid (vetted, accountable) people a reasonable hourly wage to—stay with me here—go around opening doors for people and handing out forms? This is a relatively straightforward, low-skill job. Landlords just want to save themselves a little time. They just need someone who will show up and hand over applications. People who are trying to rent an apartment without bankrupting themselves and who are capable of using Craigslist to find listings would surely be happy to have a very small surcharge added onto the price of the apartment for this sort of basic service, rather than having the entire application process held hostage by a middleman demanding a fee of $3,600 to unlock the door of a $2,000 per month apartment. Rich people looking for something fancy can continue to use deluxe brokers.

We'll see which is more popular.

[If someone starts this company please give me a 15% fee. Image by Jim Cooke]

NEMA, the luxury apartment building located 256 feet from Twitter's Mid-Market headquarters has been ham-fisted in its attempts to woo The Vested. They have to be when one-bedrooms start at $3,388/month.

The owners already put out a casting call for "upscale, classy, clean" people to star in a promotional video. Models were required to "look like you live full time in a 4 star luxury resort-like high-rise" because where would we be without pattern-matching, right? NEMA (short for "New Market") also held an open house with "mermaids, dancing monkeys, and plant people." At that event, a model was paid to soak in a tub.

Considering NEMA's track record of opulence and obliviousness, these ground-floor signs are just another data point on the hockey stick growth of gentrification. But according to Curbed, the strategy is working. For their next event, we suggest a bonfire of Aeron chairs.

Isn't it cool when your condo matches your app?

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

In a month that has seen the exoneration of both the world's and our nation's longest-serving death row inmates, it is worth asking: where the hell does all the support for the death penalty come from? The answer may not surprise you.

Today brings us a new, up-to-date survey from the Pew Center about America's attitudes towards the death penalty. A meager 55% of Americans now support capital punishment. More is revealed when you consider that the following is the only racial demographic group in which a majority of members support the death penalty:

-White people (63% support)

Support is even higher among white evangelical Protestants. Among Latino people, 36% support the death penalty; among black people, 40% support it. (Those are the only racial groups included in the survey figures.)

America's death row population includes a far higher percentage of black people than are represented in the population at large.

As American gets less white, it seems to be getting less bloodthirsty as well.

[Photo: AP]

Jennifer Kent's Australian thriller The Babadook is of the big success stories from this year's Sundance Film Festival. The story seems standard enough: A boogieman character named the Babadook terrorizes a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who's so poorly behaved, he's a bit of a monster himself. But the film has surprising depth.

Using familiar horror tropes (among them: the bad kid, the haunted house, and my favorite, the woman telling the truth whom no one believes), Kent creates something far more thoughtful than typical jump-scare fare: a meditation on the hell of parenting especially in the wake of tragedy. IFC Midnight snapped up the rights to the movie, which currently has a perfect 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Babadook is set to be released later this year, possibly around October to coincide with Halloween. It played over the weekend at New York's New Directors/New Films festival, and I spoke with Kent while she was in town about her film, horror's misogyny, and empowerment.

Gawker: I feel like calling The Babadook a horror movie doesn't exactly do the job of describing it. Do you consider this a horror movie?

Jennifer Kent: I don't look down on horror, but I my definition of horror is probably quite a lot broader than most. I don't see it as a straight horror film. Gavin Smith (Film Comment editor and the Film Society of Lincoln Center senior programmer) intro'd the Q&A on Saturday night. And he said after watching it again, it's like 10 percent horror and 90 percent something altogether different. I thought that was a really big compliment, actually.

And it's also, like, what is the true horror of the movie? I mean, the Babadook character is a terrible thing to live with, but a child that you can't love that seems like the real horror.

Yeah, that's the real horror. I was fortunate enough to have a supremely loving mum, really felt safe as a kid. And for me to kind of think of the worst horror was to go there and think, what if I didn't have that? What if, and some people don't. And I think that is the real horror of the film, for both of them [the mother and the son]. For him, clearly, but for her it's agony to not be able to—to really, physically, not be able to love her son.

That said, I detected a subtle sense of humor at times. There's a broadness in some of the acting, and when Amelia's hair is all tangled and teased out, she's cartoonishly frazzled.

I did want to create a crazy world. My friends say, "You should write a comedy!" But, you know, I don't think I'll get many comedy offers after this. I wanted the outer world to kind of reflect how Amelia sees it, so it's larger than life, and that was really intentional: the police, the [other] mothers, the rest of the world is just a little bit off-kilter and a little bit too big to be real. I think to have a story where this entity can sit and be believably there, the world itself had to be heightened. It's not the kind of found-footage kind of approach where everything is completely, supposedly, real and natural.

I love how ultimately pragmatic this movie is. The message I gathered was: Bad shit happens, and you either live with it or die.

Yeah. Well, that's a great compliment, Rich, because that's the reason why I wrote the film. Because I feel we're all feeling like everyone else is coping and we're not. We're all looking on the outside in, at other people's perfect worlds. You know, you only have to go on Facebook for half an hour to feel like, "Shit, everyone else is together and I'm not!" And I think I was really interested in exploring a character that was presenting to the outside world, "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine." But then was, you know, drowning inside. And every human being, I'm sure, can relate to that.

Horror is often criticized for its misogyny.

Yeah.

Do you agree with that critique? Is your involvement with it a feminist move?

I don't think it's a conscious, "Oh, I'm going to make this kind of film and I'm going to make it a feminist statement," or anything like that. But I just think through the nature of who I am, I couldn't tell a horror story and have a woman just be chased and killed. I watch them and I go, "Ohhh, OK, that's a really well crafted film." But, you know, I think, "Come on, I've had enough of this." And I don't find those kind of heroines that end up seeking revenge on guys and things like the new I Spit on Your Grave…

Or even the old I Spit on Your Grave, right?

Yeah, I don't find them particularly empowering, either. Because it's just offering a masculine perspective on a kind of feminine problem.

You also have to sit through watching them get raped for a half an hour.

That's right!

On one hand I don't want to look at a movie like: This is a woman's movie...

Yeah.

...But on the other hand, there are too few women directors, and here you are.

Yeah. I think you can't deny the elephant in the room. It's there. But I wouldn't want to say I'm a feminist filmmaker because I don't understand what that actually means. I'm just trying to make stories that appeal to human beings. And in fact, before we released Babadook in any capacity, we were saying, "Oh, it'll be appealing to women." You know, you've got to do those demographic things, between the ages of, I don't know, 25 and 45 or whatever. But then it was the 15-year-old boys who came up to me at Sundance, going, "That was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life!" That really touched me. Because I thought, OK, so they can hear a story like this, see it, and still get something from it.

This does not strike me as something a man would have made.

No, no. Why do you think?

Well, because you care so much about the interior life of this woman, this mother, you know?

Yeah. Yeah.

In general, men just don't care like that, you know?

[laughs] Right! So true. And was that – I'm not going to interview you – but I'm curious if that was a surprise.

It was definitely a surprise. But like I said, the word "horror" just seemed too simplistic when I watched this movie. I love horror. That's why I rushed to see it as soon as I got the invite. I couldn't wait. But I was surprised at the issues that the movie was dealing with and how it was really just more of a tragedy and then a triumph, really.

And it's sort of ungodly that people have to live through. And I don't judge my characters, generally. Even if they are liars, or they're not so strong, you know? So I really sat within her skin. I think it comes from my experience as an actor, that I have empathy. And I think as a person I just have empathy for others. But it's interesting, going back to that idea of different characters for women, especially in horror. There was a great review from Slant. Actually, I don't normally read them, but my producer said, "Please read these." It was a really great review. It talked about how the film felt like an echo of these kind of seventies horror heroines, for want of a better word. But not with the sardonic male P.O.V. And I think that's a really big complement. I really wanted the audience to have two gentle hands placed around their neck until they felt like, "I can't breathe. Make this stop." And then it explodes. So I did. I wanted it to be uncomfortable. I wanted them to feel what it feels like to deny your own experience.

Do you have kids?

No. I've got a lot of nieces and nephews. I've got, like, 16 of them. So I know kids. But I think actually not having them gave me some perspective to write this,

I think maybe somebody else would have too soft of a heart to write a kid that is not just unloved by his mom but is also kind of unlikeable in general.

Yeah. And you have to find a line with that.

It's a hard line to find, right?

Yeah. Because you don't want the audience going, "Kill him!" So it was in the casting as well, but in the writing of it, you know, it's a fine line. You had to make him adorable but also infuriating and exhausting and… Yeah, but I love kids, and I love working with them. I'm just really proud of Noah's performance in this film because he's just 6. But yeah, not having them, I think, has given me a little distance from the horrors of motherhood.

Those waiting to learn the fate of the Bitcoins they stored with the troubled Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox will have to wait a little longer. The investigator appointed by the Japanese bankruptcy court, who was due to report findings today, was given until May 9 to figure out what the hell happened.

Peak Frozen continued last week when firefighters in Reading, Mass. sang "Let It Go" to keep a little girl from freaking out while they rescued her from a stuck elevator.

As dads themselves, firefighters Scott Myette and John Keough are able to speak conversational Frozen, the majority language of America's four-year-old girls. Their singing quickly eased little Kaelyn Kerr's panic, and they were able to get her up a ladder to safety.

"John said, 'Do you like the movie Frozen?'" Myette told NBC. "So she just nodded yes and when she did, I guess my father instinct kind of kicked in and I just started singing the song, and John did, too."

Kaelyn had been trapped in the elevator with her mom Kristen and baby brother Jackson for 30 minutes. By the time they were rescued, she was calm enough to go to the hair appointment that had brought them to the building in the first place.

[H/T: Mediaite]

Banksy's official verified Facebook page, with 2.4 million likes, has been unverified because it is a fake.

"I have nightmares about me seeing my naked body on the Internet," Maricopa's vice mayor said, by way of explaining why he'd posted "We need more Fred Phelps in this world... May you rest in peace sir" on his Facebook wall.

Those of you looking for wild mood swings on your evening commute might enjoy listening to audio of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearings on the contraception mandate in the Hobby Lobby case . We remind you not to rage and drive.

Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It's going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people's deaths. It's time to punish the climate-change liars.

This is an argument that's just being discussed seriously in some circles. It was laid out earlier this month, with all the appropriate caveats, by Lawrence Torcello, a philosophy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

There is a clear precedent, Torcello says, in L'Aquila, Italy, where six seismologists were convicted of manslaughter in connection with a 2009 earthquake that killed 309 people. The scientists weren't convicted because they failed to predict an earthquake; no one can make such a prediction with reliable precision. But they were convened to study a series of tremors the week before the quake, and tacitly signed off on a government official's public message that "the situation looks favorable" and residents should chill out with some wine.

Their "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information," the court found, contributed to the residents' fatal lack of preparations for bigger tremors.

This is one reason why in the coastal South, where I'm from, you rarely hear TV weathermen and laboratory meteorologists dismiss a tropical storm as no big deal, especially after Katrina. Hurricane season is a big deal, and residents are encouraged to take safety precautions, to prevent a weather pattern from becoming a life-altering nightmare. Constant vigilance is a very American response to external threats.

Except, that is, where climate change is concerned. It is one of the rare threats to safety and stability where a large swath of U.S. commercial culture has marshaled tons of resources to tell Americans: It's not happening. Don't sweat it. It's no big deal.

Those people are criminally negligent. As Torcello puts it:

Imagine if in L'Aquila, scientists themselves had made every effort to communicate the risks of living in an earthquake zone. Imagine that they even advocated for a scientifically informed but costly earthquake readiness plan.

If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism.

Attempts to deceive the public on climate change, and to consequently block any public policy to tackle it, contribute to roughly 150,000 deaths a year already—Torcello again:

More deaths can already be attributed to climate change than the L'Aquila earthquake and we can be certain that deaths from climate change will continue to rise with global warming. Nonetheless, climate denial remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action in the very countries most responsible for the crisis.

Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.

Let's make a clear distinction here: I'm not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth's atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150's gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.

Nor am I talking about simple skeptics, particularly the scientists who must constantly hypo-test our existing assumptions about the world in order to check their accuracy. That is part and parcel of the important public policy discussion about what we do next.

But there is scientific skepticism... and there is a malicious, profiteering quietist agenda posturing as skepticism. There is uncertainty about whether man-made climate change can be stopped or reversed... and there is the body of purulent pundits, paid sponsors, and corporate grifters who exploit the smallest uncertainty at the edges of a settled science.

I'm talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I'm talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I'm talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.

Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.

Deniers will, of course, fuss and stomp and beat their breasts and claim this is persecution, this is a violation of free speech. Of course, they already say that now, when judges force them into doing penance for comparing climate scientists to child-rapist and denial poster-boy Jerry Sandusky.

But First Amendment rights have never been absolute. You still can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. You shouldn't be able to yell "balderdash" at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year , all saying the same thing: This is a problem, and we should take some preparations for when it becomes a bigger problem.

Willful, profiteering public deniers of climate change can compare themselves to Galileo all they want, pretending that they're voices of sanity in a cruel wilderness. But Galileo had science on his side. He had a telescope aimed at the cosmos. Climate deniers have their heads jammed in the sand... or in a barrel of money.

There is a lot we can do societally, now, not just in terms of reducing our contributions to the global climate's maladies but in terms of preparing for its effects: rising seas and temperatures. Changes in crops and food supplies. Increased population density and disease. There is a chance to make society safer and smarter.

If you have all of this information at your command and that reform project still scares you, if you think it necessarily entails a sacrifice of your personal freedom that you cannot brook, fine. That's a debate we can have. But if you are actively trying to deny people the tools they need to inform themselves, to protect themselves against a scientifically proven threat to life and limb, you shouldn't be part of the debate. You should be punished for your self-serving malice.

[Photo credit: Vadim Petrakov/Shutterstock; graphics: NASA]