Top-of-the-week Links: Ultra Edition

Well, it’s been too long again, dear readers. I return to coverage with another large accumulation of internet curiosities to share with you.

• Glenn Greenwald: Meet Jacob Appelbaum, the Free Bradley Manning advocate who was stopped at customs on his return from Mexico and had all of his electronics confiscated. He wouldn’t give up the encryption keys, but the bottom line is that thousands of dollars in property have not been returned to him in more than four months. All because he visited Bradley Manning in jail. But hey, this isn’t a police state, guys!
• The Vienna Review: Vienna’s famous and beloved coffee shops are under assault thanks to Austria’s adherence to EU-wide anti-smoking directives. Fascism is worse on national level than a local level, worse on a transnational level than a national level, and worst on a global level. We’re already to the transnational point. How long until we reach the global one? It is repulsive to see private property owners told how they can define owner-client relationships based on mutual consent, but even more sickening when it involves beloved cultural institutions.
• Jacob Sullum at Reason: The FDA is proposing to mandate the addition of graphic illustrations of cancer patients to cigarette packaging. Burn in hell, you losers! Even if you hate smoking, you should hate even more the spectacle of a bunch of useless bureaucrats trying to make themselves relevant by thinking up new ways to punish private corporations that sell products to adults.
• Via LewRockwell.com, Orlando Sentinel: It’s an old story at this point, but Orlando cops decided to “protect and serve” by arresting barbers at unlicensed shops. In one case, 14 armed thugs raided one shop. Does that make you feel tough, you bullies? They arrested 37 barbers in all. I guess it is nice that the state decided to be so blatant in playing their role in their symbiotic relationship with the licensed barber cartel.
• NYT: God, I wish this was a joke–Britain is now going to require the recording of all conversations conducted on the work cellphones of investment bankers and traders. This is like if the Stasi moved to modern-day Britain and wanted to monitor phone calls, but they were too lazy so they subcontracted the work out to the employers of the relevant people. Predictably, people aren’t up in arms because they hate bankers that much. The bad news is this is a gross extension of the surveillance state. The good news is that it will be laughably easy to circumvent. Stupid statists, always a step too slow.
• NYT: A Michigan town is seeking donations to its budget from non-profits in its jurisdiction. I like that they are at least not being coercive about it, but here’s a better idea for how to balance your city  budget: fire people! Lots of them. In fact, fire all of them.
• Via Andrew Sullivan, StopTheDrugWar.org: A couple had their newborn taken away by protective services goons for five days because the mother submitted a positive drug test. A lot of people are angry because she tested positive due to a poppy seed bagel. I’m angry that mothers are getting children taking away for drug test results at all! Do you really think smoking a bowl makes someone a bad parent? If yes, this is the wrong blog for you.
• NYT: I didn’t even read this story about NATO deciding to extend their stay in Afghanistan until at least 2014. I began seething as soon as I saw the photo of a beaming Karzai sitting across a table from the gleeful warmongers Obama and Petraeus. Of course Karzai is smiling! He is now guaranteed four more years as the mayor of Kabul, four more years of secret cash from Iran, four more years of secret cash being stored in Dubai, four more years of protection for his dope-baron half-brother in Kandahar. And for Obama and Petraeus, well, they get to continue to see American teenagers killed and killing innocents in a foreign land. What could make an imperialist happier?
• William Grigg: Grigg always does the best police brutality write-ups–“the city’s most violent street gang —  the El Paso Police Department.” In this case, an El Paso cop, sirens off, cut off a man who wrecked his motorcycle into him. The man was grievously injured and also got charged with evading arrest. The cop served a brief paid administrative leave and is now up for promotion. It’s their country, we just live in it.
• The Globe & Mail: Poor Canadian PM Stephen Harper said he “didn’t really want to do it, but felt compelled to bend” and keep Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan beyond his original deadline. Poor Steve! This spineless coward should be embarrassed to even spout such intelligence-insulting muck. What we are doing in Afghanistan is wrong. Shame on Harper for going along with it, whether it’s because he’s a lapdog of American imperialism or because he wanted to coopt soft imperialist liberal interventionist Michael Ignatieff’s position.
• The Globe & Mail: Canadian resident Saeed Malekpour is being held on a death sentence in Iran…for allegedly running a porn site. “Allegedly” is key–his confession was coerced. He’s already been in jail since October 2008. He could yet be killed for something that, at worst, was an expression of free speech and, at best, he didn’t even do.
• NYT: Briton Paul Chambers was found guilty of causing a “menace” and fined $4,800 for a joke he made on Twitter. He made the mistake of joking about bombing an airport. That might be a stupid thing to do, but it’s an expression of free speech that only a bunch of terrorist-obsessed loony tunes like the Anglo-American governments would bother to violate. And don’t even think of mentioning Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. or I might vomit.
• St. Petersburg Times: In late summer, Russia banned the once-ubiquitous currency exchange booths. It made me angry at the time, so I am glad to see that the entrepreneurs behind the booths basically just found a loophole and spit in the state’s eye. Good for them!
• Der Spiegel: Earlier reports were that Namibian airport officials had found a luggage bomb sent from Germany. Nope! Turns out that it was one of the state’s own test bombs. Part of me wants to laugh at the ineptitude of these fools, but a much larger part of me is angry because I know that it was the first headline that mattered, not the later correction. People have been scared again, lost rights will probably follow.
• Jacob Sullum at Reason: My new home state of Washington banned the caffeinated beer drink Four Loko recently. Basically, some kids got sick at a party and annoying public health bullies talked about how dangerous the drink was, so now an entire state of people won’t have the option of buying this beverage because three old hags on our state’s Liquor Control Board decided it was dangerous. I hate these kneejerkers who just think they are giving the people what they want. Stand up for freedom, you scum!
• Pat Buchanan: Taking on Helicopter Ben’s massive campaign of inflation Quantitative Easing II. It’s too bad Buchanan quotes Sarah Palin, but he did have this one really great section–
  

  But “sit on cash” is a definition of saving. Is saving bad? Once, Americans were taught that saving was a good thing.

  Not to Krugman. He wants to panic the public into believing the money they have put into savings accounts and CDs will be rapidly eaten up by Fed-created inflation, so they will run out and spend that money now to get the economy moving again.

  Whatever the economics of this, the morality of it is appalling.

• Glenn Greenwald: Vintage Greenwald–if giving terrorists civilian trials was about restoring the Constitution and getting rid of the Bush legacy, does Obama’s recent decision to put off indefinitely Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s civilian trial mean he is violating the Constitution? It’s pretty appalling to see how the Left went from being totally anti-torture under Bush to pro-torture, pro-naked scanners, pro-everything under Obama. This isn’t a partisan issue.
• St. Petersburg Times: Just ignore the title (“Russia Could Have Been China”–like being a corporate fascist state would be a good thing) and this is a great piece. It’s a debunking of all the people who say dumb things like, “Oh, what Stalin did was horrible, but it was the only way to get Russia over the hump and into modernity.” Did Stalin kill a ton of slave laborers in building things like the Moscow Metro, the dam at Dnipropetrovsk, and the Belomorkanal? Yeah, and those things did get built. But was that the only way they could have been built? Hell no. Late imperial Russia was actually one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Read Full Post »

Top-of-the-week links

• Via Andrew Sullivan, n+1: a useful idiot freelancer writes humorously of her time as a paid hack of the Chinese regime. Read this bit and cry: “Some might have considered it ethically fraught to shill for an organization best known for driving tanks over students. I thought it was wonderful. I felt like I was at the center of the world, the spot where all eyes were turning. Though a humble conduit for bureaucratic cant, I embraced what seemed like proximity to power.” You rotten waste of space. This is not a laughing matter.
• NYT: Guess what, the State Department’s travel alert for Europe is getting panned for being too vague. American tourists are being warned that “tourist infrastructure” and transport throughout the whole of Europe could be at risk. That narrows it down. Stop listening to these State Department hacks, people. They’re just like the rest of the U.S. government–they are deeply invested in making sure you live your life in fear and seek their “protection.”
• New Humanist: ooooh, it’s the Muhammad cartoon preemptively spiked by 20+ U.S. newspapers last week. Spoiler: it’s boring and not controversial at all. Still worth clicking through just to make a jihadist cry.
• William Grigg at LewRockwell.com: telling the story of an 11-year-old Brooklyn girl who may in part have died because an NYPD officer blocked in her mom’s car to write a parking ticket as the asthmatic girl fought for life in the back seat. I hope you never sleep a decent night again, Ofc. Alfonso Mendez.
• NYT: meet the families of the innocent Afghans killed by the 5-man murder squad in U.S. Army employ. If we weren’t in Afghanistan, this wouldn’t have happened. No matter how rogue these men were, the blood is still on our hands.
• NYT: putting the 5-man murder squad case in the context of recent U.S. abuse cases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why does there need to be a context? They are all evil and despicable.
• Free Keene: a guy in Keene gets police to accept his privately-issued ID as valid. Also worth looking at is the comments thread, where one guy mentions the World Passport. I’d never heard of it before, but if you really want to chuck your present passport and jump through a lot of visa hoops every time you go abroad, it’s worth checking out.
• South China  Morning Post: a profile of Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize contender. I’ll quote my remarks on him from last week: “The Peace Prize should be reserved for heroes like this guy, not spineless, war-perpetuating cowards like Obama.”
• NYT: NYPD pump a knife-wielding man full of lead, seven times over. He was tased, he wouldn’t drop the knife and he was advancing towards them, but isn’t there something else you could do? Pepper spray him? Shoot him in the leg? Did you have to kill the guy? I don’t know what it is about being a cop that requires you to turn your humanity off.
• NYT: headline–“More States Allowing Guns in Bars.” They sort of discussed this issue on Thinking Liberty last week. I’m not a gun owner and I don’t particularly like the idea of getting drunk in a room full of people carrying, but that doesn’t mean others shouldn’t have that right.
• The Globe & Mail: If you thought underwater McMansion mortgages were bad, how about an entire underwater Olympic Village? Welcome to Vancouver, where a private developer financed by city authorities is underwater to the tune of $150-200 million. At least it probably won’t be as costly as Canada’s last great Olympic blunder, Olympic Stadium in Montreal.
• National Post: a bill is introduced to the Canadian parliament that would make public the salaries and expenses for top First Nations (Native American) authorities. Oh, and what do you know, top First Nations authorities don’t like the idea. It’s good to be king.
• Liberale et Libertaire: debunking the statist Left’s grasping-at-straws attempt to conflate the South Fulton Fire Department incident last week with life in a libertarian state.
• The Independent: a British man goes to jail for four months for refusing to give police his encrypted, 50-character computer password. It looks like he might have been under suspicion for “child sexual exploitation,” but this remains a bizarre and upsetting case.
• Moscow Times: “Advertising by psychics, fortunetellers and others who promise medical cures and to bring back loved ones from the dead will be banned under legislation approved by the State Duma in a first reading Tuesday.” Ugh. And the Russian Orthodox Church is totally on board with it. This sort of manipulation of statism is a perfect example of why Tolstoy the Christian dissociated himself from the ROC.
• NYT: profiling the Karzais and their private fiefdom that is the Afghan government. You already know about Hamid the Mayor of Kabul, Ahmed Wali the dope baron of Kandahar and Mahmoud the banker, but how about Taj Ayubi, a cousin of the Karzais and former American thrift shop owner who is now the “senior foreign affairs adviser” to the president. Our soldiers are fighting, dying and killing for scum like this. Bring them home.
• Daily Anarchist: envisioning how a society with privatized roads would work.

Read Full Post »

Wednesday’s links, pt. II

• Center for a Stateless Society: covering the near-unbelievable story that Philadelphia wants to force bloggers to pay a $300 “business privilege” tax that some are calling a blogging license. You should just go ahead and pay the tax if you have any ads on your site at all because that indicates “potential profit.” I like the angle Free Talk Live took on this story–the fact that this issue even exists means people were self-reporting income from blogs on their tax returns, something that is a sad commentary on our obedient collaboration in our own oppression.
• The Globe & Mail: the Canadian Medical Association calls on the government to ban MMA fights because they are “barbaric spectacles that pose a high risk of brain injury.” Hmm, so just like football, rugby, boxing and Friday night boozing in a fraternity house? Dear Canadian doctors, why do you hate the idea of people doing what makes them happy? I don’t even care about the health data. My point is that if people want to soak their hands in cement and then bash each others brains in, I don’t care so long as they are reasonable adults who consented to participate.
• Slog: highlighting a ridiculous anti-prop 19/anti-pot legalization ad from California. It’s seriously produced by a group called MarijuanaHarmsFamilies.com. Of course, they throw out the lie that it’s a gateway drug. But the thing that I remember most is the idiotic line that it could be sold at supermarkets!! You mean like prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco and high fructose corn syrup are right now? The sad thing is that crappy ads like this one, with its dramatic, scary drum music, actually work on people who live their lives in fear.
• Via Matt Welch at Reason, Yahoo Sports: major league baseball franchise financials leaked to Deadspin reveal that team owners have been lying about profits. I wouldn’t care except that the same owners lowballing their profits have been the guys going to taxpayers hat in hand and talking about how hard it is to make money and how much they need public assistance in building new ballparks. I’ve spoken out before about how bad publicly financed stadium construction it is, but this revelation just makes it worse.
• National Post: the RCMP break up a “terror cell” in Ottawa. I love the tough, serious scare quote they use: “These guys were doing more than just talking about terrorism. They were planning it,” a police source said. Oooh, shiver me timbers! If a couple of college kids sit around a card table smoking joints and draw diagrams of how they could attack the military base in town, does that constitute planning? The difference between American and Canadian anti-terrorism doctrine must be that in America, we use agents provocateurs to rile you up and help you plan terrorist attacks so we can arrest you and scare people some more, and in Canada, they just arrest you.
• NYT: I’m not going to lie, I didn’t make it past the lede: “The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.” This just puts him in the elite company of another corrupt Afghan on the CIA payroll, Hamid Karzai’s dope baron brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. There’s really nothing at all surprising about this story, but at least it was written by Dexter Filkins. Just never forget, this is why our troops are dying and killing innocent people in Afghanistan!
• NYT: profiling Al Araqib, the Israeli Bedouin village razed again and again to make way for a forest…in the Negev Desert. It’s crap like this that makes it so hard to defend Israel abroad. The Bedouin are maybe the most emphatic members of the Israeli Arab community when it comes to casting their lot with the state of Israel, with some even fighting in the IDF. Maybe it would be better for everyone if the state went ahead and built this forest, but these people have homes there. They have a claim to the land. This seems like a classic “pick your battles” moment and Israel isn’t doing a very good job of picking.
• Jacob Sullum at Reason: seventeen state attorneys general sign a joint letter telling Craigslist to get rid of Adult Services ads. It’s an open and shut deal for me–if consenting adults want to negotiate business arrangements to offer sex, erotic massages or Shakespearean monologues, it’s no business of mine. But if you’re a lame person who can’t see the obvious rightness of that position, then how about the pragmatic case that these AGs have far more pressing issues to handle than Craigslist ads?
• NYT: 21-year-old loser stabs a NYC cabbie for being a Muslim. In fact, let’s not just say stabbed–he tried to slit the guy’s throat. What a great way to prove your superiority to Muslims, by resorting to the sort of tactics that  a Muslim radical used to murder Theo van Gogh. This guy just confuses me–he was working for Intersections International, a multicultural group that has advocated for the Park 51 Islamic community center. Hopefully he will have plenty of time to make sense of his confusion in jail.
• NYT: Russian dissident-hero Lev Ponomaryov gets sentenced to three days in prison for taking part in a protest. This Reuters hit is short on details, but I think based on what I read in The Economist yesterday, Ponomaryov was getting in trouble for having carried a Russian flag…on Flag Day. I look forward to the day when rebellious Western youth trade in their Che Guevara t-shirts for ones bearing images of Soviet-Russian dissidents like Ponomaryov, Larisa Bogoraz, Vladimir Bukovsky and Lyudmila Alexeyeva.
• Conor Friedersdorf at Andrew Sullivan: commenting on the National Review-sourced data that the average compensation for an Oakland cop is  $162,000 in a city in which the median family income is $47,000. Friedersdorf later published an email from a reader who said that he did not mind the disproportionate compensation level because it would make cop less likely to be corrupt and was a form of hazard pay. So should young black men get  hazard pay for being disproportionately targeted by police brutality? And am I to believe that there is no longer any police corruption now that our cops are so overpaid?
• Via Rational Review, Cato Institute: what the murder extrajudicial killing order for American citizen and jihai cleric Anwar al-Awlaki means for America. Hint: it might be even dangerous for our future than the national debt.
• Felix Salmon: after yesterday’s distressing news from the housing market, Felix says we’ve already tried cheap money and easy liquidity, so all that’s left to hope for are lower prices. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen–the federal government looks prepared to continue to fight market forces as hard as it can with subsidies. How dare the market reach a new stable equilibrium!
• South China Morning Post: a pro-Cantonese op-ed that talks about the value of regional and linguistic diversity in attaining a high degree of cultural richness. And yet high school history students are taught that revolutionary France was so cool because it centralized power and standardized so much of culture and administration. Uniformity is boring.
• Via Dan Savage at Slog, Mike Rogers: there were plenty of internet reactions to the news that former RNC chairman and Bush buddy Ken Mehlman came out today, but my favorite was this one. The author’s point is that Mehlman shouldn’t be accepted by the gay community until he apologizes for all the gay bashing he helped make possible under Bush. Of course, Mehlman wanted us to believe in his coming out statement that he advocated for gays behind the scenes, but the evidence doesn’t really support him. I think it’s ridiculous that he is only coming out now when he has nothing to lose, too–he works at a private equity firm, he’s not very famous anymore and lives in a sweet apartment. What better way to get famous again?

Read Full Post »

Weekend links

• Via Andrew Sullivan, Slate: interviewing the co-founder of the Innocence Project. These guys are heroes. They’ve freed 258 wrongfully convicted people from the horrors of our criminal justice system since 1992. How many convicts out there are in jail on rape or murder charges because they were too poor to afford a good lawyer? How long until we execute one of them by mistake? Let’s not find out and get rid of the absolute wrong that is the death penalty before then.
• The Globe & Mail: Omar Khadr’s military judge rules that Khadr, the man taken kept locked up at Guantanamo Bay since he was 15 in 2002, was neither tortured nor coerced into statements. Because threatening a teenager with stories of another inmate gang-raped to death is not coercing him into making the sort of statements his captors would want to hear. Clearly.
• NYT: profiling Defarra Gaymon, a likely-closeted gay business executive, and the plainclothes, entrapment-specialist cop who killed him in a New Jersey park. As the story points out at the end, the violent death of Gaymon at the hands of Officer Edward Esposito has done what years of police stings in the woods could not do and keep gay cruisers out of the park. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right? What’s one dead husband and father if it puts an end to consenting adults having sex in the woods?
• LewRockwell.com blog: drunk cop kills and injures people on his motorcycle, but won’t face DUI charges because, rather than letting a certified medical pro do it, the cops who arrived on the scene took his blood sample, meaning the test results will are inadmissible in court. That’s called protecting your own. Remember, it’s their country, we just live in it.
• Via Brian Doherty at Reason, SF Weekly: a vile lawyer and his disabled accomplice team up to shake down San Francisco-area businesses for ADA violations. ADA is a horrible violation of property rights to begin with, but to see this lawyer who is ten steps of dignity below an ambulance chaser essentially wheeling his buddy around just to get away with this kind of scam is sickening.
• Moscow Times: Russian opposition activists and rock musicians ignore city threats and organize a 3k-strong rally against the destruction of a forest. In what must have been a complete coincidence, the pro-Kremlin nationalist youth group Nashi showed up at the rally and tried to peel protesters away. The most disappointing news in all of it is that famous dissident Lev Ponomaryov was detained before he could reach the rally.
• NYT: Saudi judge asks local hospitals if they would be able to intentionally damage the spine of a man found guilty of paralyzing another man in a fight. Luckily, no hospitals have bitten so far; to do would constitute a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath. But what sort of interpreter of law in a modern society could go to sleep at night thinking this punishment would be just?
• Glenn Greenwald: Greenwald catches war-baiting, Iran-hating “serious pundit” Jeffrey Goldberg lying about him on NPR and documents his subsequent exchanges with the deceptive Goldberg. Goldberg is an even more repellent war-lover than Bill Kristol because Bill Kristol does not appear on NPR or in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. People call Kristol crazy, but they call Goldberg a sage. Don’t let this sage stooge trick us into another war.
• The Globe & Mail: British Columbia’s anti-HST petitioners win their first challenge and with it the right to take their petition to the legislature. I have little affection for populism, but it has been nice to see this ad hoc coalition of people rise up against a tax sprung on them without their consent. Almost any time we are treated to the sight of bureaucratic class hacks left confused by citizens’ rejection of their omniscient, omnipotent public policy master plan is a good time.
• Nick Gillespie at Reason: Kentucky newspapers discover that one of Rand Paul’s campaign contributors is a porn entrepreneur, leading Rand Paul to issue a lame statement about how much he hates pornography. For shame, Rand Paul. Freedom means freedom for the adult baby fetishists and porn stars, too. Rand Paul should be proud to accept this woman’s donation.
• Via Nick Gillespie at Reason, The Plain Dealer: Cleveland institutes program to inspect garbage for recyclable products and fine violators. Seriously? I’ve been aggressive about recycling since I was a kid, but this is absurd. People pay for curbside collection. They don’t pay for the right to get their trash searched and maybe incur fines. So whilst we should shame the non-recyclers into complying, we should also agree that fines are absurd.
• NYT: inside Zionist Wikipedia activist-editors conventions in Israel. What sort of tone-deaf fool came up with the idea of organizing conventions to tell people how to edit articles with a Zionist slant? Did that guy not realize how much fuel this would add to the fires of all the anti-Semites and Israel-haters out there? What an idiotic decision.
• Moscow Times: Ukrainian police search for a missing anti-corruption reporter. This comes less than a decade after the infamous and awful murder of another Ukrainian opposition journalist, Georgiy Gongadze. It’s moments like this that make me realize how lucky I am to be typing on a blog with impunity instead of having to worry about words that might get me killed. Keep all of the journalists who risk their lives and livelihoods for transparency and truth in your mind.
• NYT: profiling Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur dissident teaching in Beijing. Westerners love to talk about Tibet and Chinese brutalities there, whilst conveniently forgetting about Xinjiang and its Uyghurs. The struggle is one and the same. Both ethnic groups are kept firmly under the Han jackboot and see a concerted campaign to crowd out their unique cultures waged against them by Han in-migration. My only concern with this story is Tohti may well be  a sort of regime-approved Yevtushenko-type dissident if he is able to teach and advocate openly in Beijing, whilst the most important Uyghurs dissidents are abroad or in jail.
• Moscow Times: Russian health chief wants to ban alcohol advertising. Yes, violating fundamental rights is clearly the best way to solve an intractable cultural problem that has plagued Russia for hundreds of years. Even if it was the best way, this loser would still be calling for the state to use force against private companies.
• Der Spiegel: an inside look at the major actors and process behind the $5000/victim compensation agreement worked out between the Bundeswehr and the families of Afghans killed or injured in a bomb strike it ordered. The officer responsible has been found guilty of no misconduct. Afghan lives apparently go for $5000/pop. What a mess of a situation, and a mess of a situation that would have never happened had we not been in Afghanistan.
• NYT: Pakistanis admit to capturing Taliban Mullah Baradar last year in attempt to derail peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government…because they didn’t involve Pakistan. I have no idea why they would admit to this charge–it’s basically an admission that they screwed over ISAF and the Afghan government for the sake of their own self-interest. Do we really want to be in a war in which American soldiers are dying for Karzai the Corrupt and the Pakistani intelligence service?
• NYT: idiotic nature-dilettantes with a blind faith in technology are putting themselves at risk and taxpayers on the hook with ill-considered rescue requests. The most egregious case mentioned in the story is a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon who used a GPS beacon to call in helicopters three times–once because there was not enough water, again because they feared the water was salty and the last time…well, all that matters is the rangers took them out for good that time. Nature is serious business. Don’t think that because you watch a tv show you can go hike in the Yellowstone backcountry and count on your cellphone to save you. Especially not when it costs $3500/hour to put a helicopter in the air to save your butt.

Read Full Post »

Weekend links

• NYT: Lindsey Graham is a sick, sick puppy. A man equally dough-faced in politics and his own countenance, he has come under fire from the Republican base in his home state of South Carolina for being too liberal. Graham has seen what the Tea Party has done in getting rid of Republicans even more conservative than him this year and can’t hold much hope for his future. That’s what I think is behind his proposal to alter the 14th Amendment and get rid of birthright citizenship. It’s a page stolen from the playbook of “tough on crime” leftists, who knowingly sell out civil liberties and nonviolent criminals in an attempt to not look wimpy. In my mind, this ploy is even worse–the schmuck is talking about altering the Constitution and changing a working citizenship law just to protect his political future. I hope you will have many long years to reflect on your next term in the Senate when you are burning in hell, Lindsey!
• NYT: Senate passes an immigration bill by unanimous consent that will require increased U.S.-Mexico border security to in part be funded by raising fees on Indian-owned firms that employ Indian immigrant-majority staffs in the U.S. What? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Chuck Schumer was the guy behind this populist bit of hijacking. Please issue a moral defense of the idea that companies that hire too many Indians should pay for more wasteful security on a border with which they have no concern. I’m waiting.
• The Independent:  a British backpacker stands to be freed after serving six years of a ten-year sentence in an Indian jail cell shared with 50 other inmates. His crime? Drug possession. And the best part is that his trial was conducted entirely in Hindi (which  he does not speak) and presented no DNA or fingerprint evidence connecting him to the drugs. It took the guy four years to even get an appeal. The list of conditions he’s picked up in jail: “malaria, dysentery, rat bites, depression, prostatitis and urinary dysfunction.” Another life ruined by the drug war!
• Der Spiegel: Germany reaches a settlement with the families of Afghan civilians mistakenly killed in a bombing. I find it remarkable that the compensation will be $5000 per family. $5000 goes a long way in Afghanistan, but for us in the West–isn’t it sad that we’ve reached a point at which innocent life is worth only $5000? Do we really want this war tarnishing our souls any longer?
• Via Andrew Sullivan, Bill Kristol: giving Obama a checklist for reelection. This is one of those, “Oh no…my God, he’s serious!” sort of posts. The checklist Kristol offers: 1. extend tax rates, 2. rescind the Afghanistan withdrawal deadline and 3. oppose the not-really-at Ground Zero mosque. But hey, at least if Obama can get through the next year with that BORING list, Kristol has military action in Iran for him to look forward to. These policies would be bad enough in a vacuum, but it’s like Kristol completely missed the last decade.
• NYT: Hamid Karzai throws a hissy fit over anti-corruption investigators looking into the dealings of his government cronies. Because that’s what innocent guys who aren’t involved in corruption up to their eyeballs tend to do. But hey, at least it isn’t like American teenagers are dying and dropping bombs on innocent people for the sake of this guy and his dope baron brother. Oh wait….
• People’s World: article accusing Rand Paul of being a shill for anti-workplace safety coal companies. It’s not very interesting, except for this part: Paul also argued for “local and state” control instead of federal regulation of mining….”The bottom line is I’m not an expert, so don’t give me the power in Washington to be making rules. You live here, and you have to work in the mines.” But miner Tim Miller, a United Mine Workers representative in Madisonville, Ky., saw things differently. “Rand Paul and his deregulation – all he talks about is deregulation and the local authorities having total control over any regulation,” Miller told the Associated Press. “I think that takes us back at least 100 years, back to when 12-year-old kids could work in the coal mines.” Seriously? Rand Paul admitting the limits of his own knowledge and saying that coal regulations probably shouldn’t be made by people in Washington who have never even seen a coal mine rather than local actors who are intimately acquainted with every step of the production process makes him the bad guy? The left can be incredible at times. Here, it is like they are faulting Rand Paul for taking a textbook Hayekian position on information asymmetry rather than being humble enough to defer to the judgment of people who know more than him. Thou art a politician, thou must control!
• LewRockwell.com: one of those head-scratching articles that keeps LewRockwell.com confined to the fringe, this time railing against a 13-year-old Canadian girl for raising money to boost education for women in Afghanistan. Why publish an article like this one? It’s mainly meanness, and meanness  directed against someone in no position to defend herself. I get the point the author is making against universalist humanitarianism as grist for the mill of “humanitarian” interventionism and imperialism. But using this girl to make your point (along with some low blows against Canada) is stupid. And this is why LewRockwell.com will remain mired where it is.
• Glenn Greenwald: assessing Elena Kagan. Greenwald would prefer a justice more “progressive” than Kagan, I would prefer more of an originalist, but we can agree that Kagan will be no friend of civil liberties. Greenwald had one quote that I loved: The reality is — and this has long been clear — that Americans have little respect for, and even less interest in, people who stand for nothing and seem afraid of their own belief system.  Clarity of principle and courage of conviction are almost always more politically appealing than muddled incoherence, calibrated careerism, or muted cowardice. Here’s hoping we never see a candidate so artificial, self-censoring and calculating as Kagan again.
• South China Morning Post: a Western expat calls for the Hong Kong government to compel all licensed taxis to install GPS devices because this loser has trouble communicating with the cabbies in English. “Boo-hoo, I didn’t get where I was going fast enough, you need to put a gun to the head of private business owners so my feelings don’t get hurt again!” Hey guy–if you don’t like the taxis you’re hailing, then stop hailing cabs or book through a higher-end service. If enough people are like you and get tired of the low English capacity, then taxi companies will respond. Until then, take your force-loving whining back to Australia where they could probably use your help in building the internet firewall they want.
• Matt Welch at Reason: you’d think the government would have learned not to encourage people who can’t afford to own homes to buy them…but you’d have thought wrong. Even after the property bubble, even after we are encouraging Section 8 renters to rent McMansions in foreclosure-capital-of-the-world Las Vegas, these people still haven’t learned. I don’t know if it’s just that home “ownership” is really that much of an entrenched fetish in Washington or that there’s whole federal agencies and close buddies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would probably be in for significant layoffs if the market scaled back down to where it needs to be and are filled with self-preservation types.
• Via Andrew Sullivan, Jon Chait at the war-loving New Republic: “surely you can’t mean you only support defensive wars!” Chait is smugly shocked and argues that Joe Klein is over-reacting to the Iraq war in saying that we should only fight defensive wars–that is, wars in which we have been attacked first. What an insane standard for making wars! We can’t let our tanks and planes go to waste like that! Bring on the death!
• NYT: very interesting article on the Italian economy. It’s interesting that much of Italy’s huge public debt is owned by Italians themselves, not foreign creditors. It doesn’t really matter whose passport they are carrying if they all present their notes at once and demand payment, but it is an interesting point that probably help to explain why Italy had fewer problems with credit rating agencies than Greece, Spain or Ireland earlir this year. My favorite quote: “‘Before World War II, Argentina was rich,’ he says. ‘Even in 1960, the country was twice as rich as Italy.’ Today, he says, you can compare the per capita income of Argentina to that of Romania. ‘Because it didn’t grow. A country could get rich in 1900 just by producing corn and meat, but that is not true today. But it took them 100 years to realize they were becoming poor. And that is what worries me about Italy. We’re not going to starve next week. We are just going to decline, slowly, slowly, and I’m not sure what will turn that around.'”
• St. Petersburg Times: discussing whether Russia’s current policy course leads to a Soviet future for the country. Things you don’t want to miss include a fascistic drug cop who wants Moscow-area clubs to close at midnight because it would help him fight drugs and the revelation that an anti-red tape/corruption measure designed to cap corrupt inspections of businesses put a temporary dent in bureaucratic salaries is just being replaced by fewer inspections with higher payments.
• Via Publius at the Western Standard, Maclean’s: analyzing Canada’s stimulus. Publius pulls the particularly egregious case of $25 million ferry terminal for a village of 450 people that will admittedly be used for only a few hours per week. This is a big part of why centrally-planned projects like the ever-popular stimulus are doomed to failure–throwing productive dollars at unproductive, politically beneficial programs the market would never support. Publius wants to make the point that Conservative voters aren’t getting a very conservative deal under Harper. Agreed.
• LewRockwell.com blog: good post highlighting the recent disclosure that this will be the first year Social Security pays out more than it takes in, or the first year that people might be forced to recognize its insolvency.
• NYT: public sector pensions are bloated and they’re dragging down governments across the country, but at least public sector retirees recognize the problem and are cooperating. Not! The main guy profiled in the piece is a poor, pitiful 62-year-old who toiled away as a public school math teacher for an insufferable 29 (!) years and thinks the Colorado pension reforms could cost him half a million dollars over the rest of his life. Oh, poor you! Money quote:

Taxpayers, whose payments are also helping to restock Colorado’s pension fund, may not be as sympathetic, though. The average retiree in the fund stopped working at the sprightly age of 58 and deposits a check for $2,883 each month. Many of them also got a 3.5 percent annual raise, no matter what inflation was, until the rules changed this year.

Private sector retirees who want their own monthly $2,883 check for life, complete with inflation adjustments, would need an immediate fixed annuity if they don’t have a pension. A 58-year-old male shopping for one from an A-rated insurance company would have to hand over a minimum of $860,000, according to Craig Hemke of Buyapension.com. A woman would need at least $928,000, because of her longer life expectancy.

Read Full Post »

Thursday’s links

Phew, magazine internship app completed just in the nick of time! Wish me luck. Now for the links.

• The Independent: British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne tells the Defense Secretary to cut out the public whining over budget cuts. And Osborne’s a Tory. Now imagine any politician in the U.S., Republican or Democrat, telling the Department of Defense or the many agencies of the intelligence community to stop their politicized whining about budget cuts. It’s hard to imagine. Although I guess things are a bit different here because in America, the Secretary of Defense doesn’t have to beg for funding because he has a galaxy of congressmen fighting with each other to see who can simultaneously raise defense spending the most and defame anyone who wants to keep it level or cut it as a traitor the loudest. The burdens of empire…
• The Independent: in another good bit of news for the coalition, the Home Secretary announced plans to scrap the infamous anti-social behavior orders (Asbos) phased in at the height of tough-on-crime Labourism. I don’t think Labour even created Asbos in good faith–I think it was a quick and easy way for them to put more Labour-voting bureaucrats on the government payroll whilst looking tough on crime. Human rights and privacy are so 19th century! I also think we should realize that rather than feeling safe behind “tough on crime” candidates, we should run from them as fast as we can because they are just calculating scumbags who are willing to make the criminal justice system unfairer and more punitive than it needs to be so they can offset their weakness in some other part of their agenda.
• Afghanistan mega-linker: NYT covers the formerly-quiet Baghlan province, which is now overrun by Talibs. This is what happens when you try to garrison a rugged country like Afghanistan with just enough troops to keep the people at home from thinking about the war too much–counterinsurgency becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Also in the NYT, top U.S. political man in Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke tells Congress that far and away the top recruiting point for the Taliban is not morality police stuff but corruption. And yet American teenagers are dying on behalf of the election-stealing mayor of Kabul president and his dope baron half-brother. Clearly corruption is a top concern for us. Oh, and the Taliban’s anti-corruption program? It’s nothing new. It’s what brought them to power the first time, too. And in a sign that we’ve learned absolutely nothing, the WaPo (HT) reports that we are pinning our hopes in the Kandahar countryside on a corrupt drug baron. But hey, at least he has a cool back story and does all the right man’s man stuff. If that wasn’t enough bad news for you, Pat Buchanan recaps a lot of it in his most recent column and reminds us that the neocons are so tired of failure in two wars so far that they’re just itching to start a new one in Iran.
• NYT: from the department of right solution, wrong reason, Congress is considering overturning its ridiculous internet gambling ban. It isn’t because they suddenly realized they were violating the non-aggression principle and using force to keep consenting adults from engaging in free commercial transactions. That would be too extreme! It’s because the government hates competition and lost opportunities for revenue, so seeing money go offshore makes them hungry. They project taxing the industry could generate $42 billion in the next decade. What a bunch of sick puppies. I hope that if Congress legalizes internet gambling and brings in the IRS, we suddenly see a rash of Online Gamblers Anonymous chapters across the country. That might teach them a lesson in principle.
• Moscow Times: a Russian court bans YouTube for extremist content. Talk about burning down the barn to kill the rats. You also wonder how much this is about racism and Islamism versus how much it’s about people not needing to rely on the extremely unlikely chance of the state media covering any criticism of the government.
• South China Morning Post: sad report on human trafficking. Most of the article focuses on Thailand. I don’t have a problem with prostitution, but if you’re a Westerner who goes to Thailand for the hookers, you need to look at yourself and admit that you’re probably a pedophile, a willing supporter of human trafficking or some combination of both.
• Kelley Vlahos at The American Conservative: uses a WaPo piece about the Obama administration asking for more e-snooping powers for the FBI to make the point that Obama has been a disaster on civil liberties, in some ways even worse than Bush. And though she doesn’t say it, I get the sense that Vlahos is like me and a lot of other libertarians and old right-type people who maybe didn’t vote for Obama but at least favored him over “Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain for the “hope” he offered on peace, civil liberties and executive powers. That hope is now trampled into dust.
• Andrew Sullivan: making the case that a GOP this hopped up on Tea Party slogans and having spent far too little “time in the wilderness” could be even worse than the Dems for America’s fiscal future this fall. What cuts are they going to make? We know they aren’t going to end the wars. We know they won’t cut defense spending. We know they opposed Obamacare from the left by arguing that it made too many cuts to Medicare. As a collection of ideas, there’s more that I can sympathize with from the Republican platform than the Democratic one, but I think Andrew is right on this issue.
• From the Guardian, via Andrew Sullivan: David Cameron must still be too new to the world stage since he’s still telling the truth. First it was calling Gaza a “prison camp,” now it’s admitting that Pakistan exports terror. That Pakistan has not only been allowed to get away with its bad behavior but in fact has it subsidized extravagantly by Western governments is incredible.
• NYT: remember how China was supposed to have turned over a new environmental leaf just in time for the Beijing Olympics? Sorry Thomas Friedman, that narrative is dead. Pollution is getting worse.
• NYT: French woman accused of murdering eight of her own infants over a two-decade span and burying them in her yard. Why? “She explained that she didn’t want any more children and that she did not want to see a doctor about using contraception,” Mr. Vaillant said. Who needs to endure the shame of asking for birth control pills when you can smother your own innocent offspring and bury them in the garden? This is one of the most repulsive crimes I’ve encountered in a while.

Read Full Post »

Viva Wikileaks!

The biggest news of the day: Wikileaks releasing 90,000+ classified documents on the war in Afghanistan. Alleluia! Two quick thoughts:

1. If you can afford it, donate to Wikileaks here and help them continue to speak truth to power
2. If you hear or read anyone saying, “Look, this isn’t a big deal, this doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know,” ignore that person as a death-worshiping neocon and draw your own conclusion on the story. Nearly every pro-war response to the Wikileaks release has hewed so close to this line that it almost seems orchestrated. A perfectly good example is all-around horrible person Bill Kristol 2.0 Max Boot (HT). The people using this line are the equivalent of the cop at any major accident scene going, “Move along, nothing to see here.”

Coverage-wise, you should start with the main NYT article on it since they were one of three newspapers given access to the files weeks ahead of publication. Another of the lucky three papers was Der Spiegel, and their lead-in page with links to all of their articles can be found here. Make sure you don’t miss their interview with Wikileaks founded Julian Assange, who came up with an instant classic line: “I enjoy crushing bastards.” Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com pays tribute to Wikileaks, but also reminds us not to forget the brave whistle-blower who made all of this possible, the imprisoned Spc. Bradley Manning. Andrew Sullivan aggregates even more reactions here. Salon republishes some responses from government officials here, including everyone’s least favorite hawk, Joe Lieberman.

My favorite response was actually a very measured and balanced one, coming in this Globe & Mail editorial. Money quote:

If a war is to incur such a high cost, in lives and treasure, and is based on such a nuanced argument, then support for it cannot be taken for granted. Governments have a special duty to speak extensively about operations, including individual combat incidents. They need to disclose the facts – regarding the support of Pakistan or the effectiveness of the Afghan security forces – that underpin the strategy. Where such information is not forthcoming, leaks of raw military intelligence are a necessary, if extreme, service that fills in the picture.

Try to dispute that argument. Even a neocon, if he or she cares about liberal democratic values at home as much as they purport to care about them abroad, should have nothing to argue with in that statement.

My feelings on the case are mainly a deep sense of gratitude to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and everyone responsible for Wikileaks and a tiny breath of relief as a small bit of optimism creeps back into me and hopes that these revelations might turn public opinion against this awful war once and for all. Westerners have to be moved by these stories of targeted killing squads wearing our uniforms, innocent families accidentally being shot to death and, in the anecdote that was most disturbing to me, a deaf-mute man being shot dead for failing to heed a command to halt. We have to say these horrors–our teenagers coming home in body bags as they protect highways for Hamid Karzai’s dope baron half-brother to make a quick buck, our soldiers being put in bad situations that end up with them putting civilian lives at risk, our soldiers being ordered to do vile things like execute people without trial–will not continue in our name. It’s time that we make Obama earn his Peace Prize and end the war now.

Read Full Post »

Afghanistan roundup

Talk continues to rage over Afghanistan. I wonder how much of it is because we are watching Iraq fail to set up a coalition government and devolve into violence that goes against the nice little victorious Surge narrative we’ve crafted and how much of it is because Afghanistan really deserves this much attention on a daily basis. But on with the news…

Read Full Post »

Obama-Petraeus-Afghanistan mega-post

The conflagration set off in the blogosphere earlier this week by McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview looks to be winding down at last, but not before a flurry of prognostication about what’s to come. If you wanted the death to stop and were hoping the war might end, things aren’t looking rosy right now. Now for a quick jaunt through the (mostly) bad news.

Read Full Post »

McChrystal swapped for Petraeus

NYT coverage of McChrystal’s dismissal here. He’s been replaced by Iraq surge mastermind Gen. David Petraeus. I’m a bit surprised because it seems like Petraeus might have domestic political ambitions, which I imagine are fueled by the public’s “winner” association of his work in Iraq. Even in the rosiest Bill Kristol fantasies, I don’t know that Afghanistan is going to be a winner any time soon, so Petraeus will probably lose a bit of prestige. More after the jump.

Read Full Post »