End-of-the-week links

No, I didn’t forget about WikiLeaks, the TSA, and the FBI’s entrapment scam in Portland…there are just so many relevant links for each of those subjects that they deserve their own posts. So here’s the rest of the news.

• Globe & Mail: I’m a non-violent person, but if a politician who runs a community of 87 people told me they deserved their $243k tax-free salary, I would be tempted to head-butt them in their obscene little mouth. And that’s precisely what a First Nations chief in Nova Scotia has just done. The only salary you deserve is the $0.50/hour you get for working in a prison laundry, you criminal.
• Globe & Mail: One of the most interesting WikiLeaks cables was one showing the U.S. talking about how Canadian TV shows encourage “insidious” anti-American stereotypes. Seems the criminals running the U.S. don’t like the Canadians protesting against our border policies. Aww, poor little babies–our neighbors document exactly the way in which you humiliate and dehumanize innocent people every day and you don’t like it. Here’s an idea: stop doing it.
• Globe & Mail: B.C. courts have essentially rewritten a man’s will because he wrote out his four daughters and made his son the sole beneficiary. The judge said that he was a “racist” (bad, but completely irrelevant here) and demeaned his daughters. Shouldn’t they just be glad he is dead, then? The idea that courts can play ex post facto referee on solemn contracts is deeply upsetting and creates a horribly slippery slope.
• Globe & Mail: A wonderfully biting slam of American imperialism and the Harper government’s cooperation with it. This piece is a must-read. Sometimes, it takes a foreigner to make us see just how much of an incessantly war-mongering tyrant-state ours is. This is the Canada we need to be our neighbor.
• NYT: Meet the chengguan, China’s unthinking, skullcracking, government-issue thugs who keep urban order. These people are sick. They beat a man to death for videotaping them. And now they are recruiting attractive young women to put a prettier face on it. Even if you put make-up and lipstick on police power, it’s still a giant “boot stamping on a human face forever.”
• LewRockwell.com: Stupid fascist DHS secretary Janet Napolitano is now apparently forbidding all packages from Japan that “weigh more than .9 pounds, are not sent by a commercial enterprise, and do not have the receiver’s SS# written on the package.” All because a couple of explosive print cartridges got mailed once. Do you really think this will keep us safe, Napolitano? Of course not. You just want more power in your grubby little hands. Burn in hell.
• Der Spiegel: Europe freaks out over Switzerland’s newest referendum, which authorizes authorities to automatically expel criminal foreigners. I like open borders, but I also like people who respect the culture and way of life that goes on inside those borders. If you are lucky enough to get into Switzerland and you can’t behave yourself, I don’t see any problem in them getting rid of you….even better if they replace you with me.
• NYT: The Russian government has agreed to hand a ton of confiscated property back to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), an organization that suffered tremendously under the Soviets. But even this seemingly good news can still be bad as we are treated to the vile spectacle of the ROC happily taking over the deeds to confiscated Catholic and Lutheran churches in Kaliningrad, aka Koenigsberg, the former royal seat of Prussia that is only Russian today because Russia needed an ice-free Baltic port. Looks like Tolstoy was right about the ROC.
• Vienna Review: meditations on Western tech companies and their cozy relationships with authoritarian dictators and censors. I wasn’t even familiar with the lead example–Russian police breaking up an opposition NGO because their server computers might have used pirated Windows software. Microsoft said nothing. They had intellectual property to look after, you know!
• NYT: The yearly protests at the School of the Americas (now called WHISC) at Ft. Benning are dwindling in attendance. If you don’t know, SOA/WHISC is a friendly little place where American soldiers train Central American thugs how to crack skulls and disappear people. I remember my high school used to send protesters every year, and me, being the bien pensant nationalist that I was, was appalled. Now I’m sad to see the protests shrinking in yet another sign of the left rolling over now that Obama is in control.
• NYT: The EU is proposing to deny visas to 60 Russian officials implicated in the jailhouse death of the the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky…and the officials are all butthurt about it. Awww, poor little babies, you won’t get to go blow stolen money in London anymore! Maybe you should have thought about that before you participated in what very much looks like a murder.
• Via Andrew Sullivan, the Daily Beast: Meet Steve King, the Iowa Republican who will likely become the House’s top man on immigration. This guy is a real sickie: “He has dubbed illegal immigration not just a ‘slow-motion terrorist attack’ but a ‘slow-motion holocaust.'” All this from a jerk who lives in Iowa, eons away from the people in places like El Paso who should actually have a say in border policy.
• Via Andrew Sullivan, Gawker: Meet a girl who has nearly $200k in student loan debt…just from undergrad. People worried about student loans don’t spend a year abroad, missy. Oh, and the $200k that bought you a diploma at a pretty average liberal arts school like Northeastern could have bought you a better diploma at a state school and left you probably $120-140k to play around with. It’s hard to feel bad for people this stupid.
• Moscow Times: The artist who headed up the Voina (“War”) group that did so much to mock state power in Russia has been forced to escape into exile in Estonia. His name is Alexei Plutser-Sarno. I wish him well in continuing to mock the state.
• Globe & Mail: Canadian courts are currently wrestling with the issue of polygamy. If the polygamists win, Canada could become the only Western country to permit polygamy. Predictably, people are saying how awful this would be and what it might do to attract polygamist immigrants. First thing–there is nothing especially bad about polygamy. It’s not something I would do, but it works for some people. If women are being forced into it, that’s something worth fighting. But if everyone is ok, let it go. Second thing–the idea that polygamists will suddenly just descend upon Canada is laughable. How will they get in? I would crawl to Vancouver on my knees to get a Canadian work permit and I’m a graduate degree-holding, English-speaking, non-criminal. It’s not like these people can just start showing up on airplanes and building polygamist colonies.

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 »

End-of-the-week links

• Glenn Greenwald: doing vital reporting on an issue entirely neglected by the U.S. media–the release of findings from the UN’s inquiry into Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmara. Included in the findings: 19-year-old U.S. citizen Furkan Dogan was shot execution-style as he lay on the deck in a semi-conscious state. The only UN Human Rights Council member to vote against endorsing the report was the U.S. American-Israeli relations: where you execute an innocent citizen of ours and we help you cover it up!
• NYT: Norway says that three terrorist plotters arrested in July were planning an attack on the Danish hero-newspaper Jyllands-Posten–the paper that published the Muhammad cartoons. The best part is that all three plotters were permanent residents who arrived as asylum seekers. You came to the West seeking so asylum…so that you could violate the rights of others and make them seek asylum? Here’s hoping these three rot for a very, very long time.
• New Humanist: around 20 U.S. newspaper spike a cartoon for a perceived slight to Muhammad. This is when they’ve won, when we start self-censoring. Ugh.
• Carlos Miller: Michigan authorities bully a man and threaten to refer him to the Department of Homeland Security…for taking pictures of the town water tower. Similar photos are displayed on the town’s own website. Snap those shutters, people. We have to keep shaming these jerks into respecting our rights.
• Reason: their entire October issue is available for free online now!
• Free Keene: video of Pete and Adam from Liberty on Tour having a very well-handled, funny encounter with U.S. Border Patrol. Best part: the checkpoint is comfortably inside U.S. territory. And I used to think it was odd that Russians had to carry their papers everywhere.
• National Post: updating information on the conscientious objector safehaven bill being walked through the Canadian parliament by Liberal MP Gerard Kennedy. It’s too bad they are trying to make him limit it to U.S. objectors only, but at least this would be an improvement over the current system.
• Radley Balko at Reason: updating a police brutality case. The DEA gave a big, fat settlement to the innocent man who was brutalized. But now the only disciplinary action taken has been against the Kansas City (KS)  cop who blew the whistle. It’s their country, we just live in it.
• Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason: LA teachers union sickos blame the suicide of an LA teacher on the LA Times teacher effectiveness rankings. Vile. What other profession gets away with this sort of evidence-averse bullying yet still gets sympathy from the public?
• Armin Rosen at Reason: highlighting the stomach-churning hypocrisy of Obama on DC schools. First Obama listened to the evidence-averse, child-hating crazies teachers there and helped kill the popular voucher program. Now he stood by and let the pro-school reform mayor lose his reelection race. In the meantime, his kids attend the super-elite Sidwell Friends. Do you think of the lives you’ve ruined before you go to bed at night, Barack? What are a few schoolkids condemned to failing schools when you run Guantanamo Bay and oversee two bloody wars, I guess.
• The Globe & Mail: U.S. prepares to lock up a Canadian pot smuggler. 8 months for harming no one, for initiating no force, for respecting consent. Proud to be an American!
• Pat Buchanan: making the case that China overplayed its hand in the recent fishing boat face-off with Japan. By Buchanan’s logic, China has now proven itself a ruthless foe willing to use economic warfare to achieve its goals. I don’t see this as a revelation.
• The Globe & Mail: British Columbia’s political-administrative classes gang up on anti-harmonized sales tax (HST) leader Bill Vander Zalm because there happen to be some crazy people in his movement. What a load of spew. This is like that insane Google v. Viacom lawsuit, where Viacom tried to hold Google liable for individual users uploading licensed content, even if Google removed it. Vander Zalm is not responsible for the actions of individuals who support his cause. You’re getting desperate, guys.
• The Globe & Mail: French prosecutors were nice and helpful, gladly turning over information on 1,800 secret Swiss accounts held by Canadians to the Canadian Revenue Agency. How dare you hide your wealth from Leviathan! Leviathan is hungry!
• NYT: an Israeli publishes the country’s first pork cookbook. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you read this part: “Pork sellers routinely face protesters, and in recent years, arsonists have attacked shops in cities like Netanya and Safed, where Orthodox Jews live near secular immigrant communities.” Yes, burn down a store because someone inside is selling a product you don’t have to use.
• Glenn Greenwald: ridiculing Obama for his hypocrisy in talking tough on Iranian torturers whilst filing state secrecy claims to dismiss investigation of torture at home. It feels so refreshing to lose our moral credibility, doesn’t it?
• The Globe & Mail: Vancouver politicos can’t understand why food carts aren’t taking off there like they have in Portland. Well, they have some inkling that it was because they limited the number of licenses. But hey, let’s just set a new, arbitrarily-low number of licenses and tell people to put their carts in clusters and it will be ok! You’re doing it wrong, you imbeciles. Get rid of the licenses. Let people do what they want. Then the trucks will come.

Read Full Post »

Top-of-the-week links

• Radley Balko at Reason: covering the dismissal of felony charges against Anthony Graber, the Maryland motorcyclist who recorded a cop on his helmet cam. It’s tremendous news for people who love freedom. Balko poses a great question, though: “Instead, we have public officials who violated the law, who should have known they were violating the law, and who caused significant harm to someone else in the process. So what will be their punishment?”
• Via Radley Balko at Reason, The Spokesman-Review: Washington State Patrol shoots an unarmed, pregnant woman in a drug raid. At least she is alive. I hope we can find out the shooter’s name and get the bully fired. I don’t care if you think you are following orders. Orders didn’t make you pull the trigger as you aimed a gun at an unarmed, nonviolent, pregnant fellow human being who at worst was engaged in the drug trade.
• Via Damon Root at Reason, WSJ: previewing two big free speech cases about to come before the Supreme Court. The one that interests me is the case of a dead soldier’s dad who is seeking “emotional distress” damages from the Fred Phelps-Westboro Baptist Church scumbags for picketing his son’s funeral. Fred Phelps is a horrible human, but this response is entirely the wrong one. So long as he and his gang of dunces were not violating your private property rights, they were right to exercise their rights. Stop trying to ruin this country because your feelings got hurt.
• NYT: the Venezuelan opposition has a pretty decent showing in parliamentary elections. Much as I love to see the Chavista thugs embarrassed even a little bit, I think the opposition miscalculated here. Chavez will never let himself be unseated through the ballot box. Better to avoid his system altogether, see things get worse in the short term and hope for enough people to get angry enough to put the vile fat man against a wall.
• NYT: Chinese authorities look into a company that collaborates with local governments in putting petitioners in black jails. Color me skeptical on this one. My sense is that the black jail issue got too hot, so the Chinese are now scapegoating this company. Oh, but for the day when Wen Jiabao and his butchers learn what the inside of a cage looks like.
• NYT: South African authorities shut down businesses for not following minimum wage laws…as the workers inside resist them. What a sad story. A crude devotion to ideology trumps the need of poor people to put food on the table. Leave the people alone, you paternalistic thugs.
• NYT: Islamic thugs are restricting women’s rights in Chechnya, with what appears to be the full blessing of the republic’s president. I wish Russia would just cut ties with these people. It’s not worth the terrorist attacks and the budget drain to see women forced to wear the headscarf in a Russian Federation of supposedly equal rights before the law.
• Atlantic Free Press: an inside look at mortar use in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military. Money quote: “A gunman fired a few cents worth of AK-47 rounds at the U.S. Marines and in response the Marines probably fired $10,000.00 in mortar rounds that all missed their target, yet killed an innocent. This incident could sum up the entire Afghan war and helps explain why American efforts have largely failed.” Our soldiers shouldn’t be put in this position. Bring them home.
• NYT: remember how India tried to bully Research in Motion into giving them access to encrypted BlackBerry messages? Now they are talking about mobilizing against Skype and Google. Western companies are getting cold feet about doing business in India. Maybe the Big Brother squad will learn a valuable lesson, but I doubt it–it’s not like their jobs are at stake.

Read Full Post »

Monday’s links

• People’s Daily: China proposes to amend its criminal code so that there would only be 55 crimes punishable death, down from a present 68. Mein Gott! To give you an idea, this amendment would get rid of the death penalty for HEINOUS crimes such as smuggling cultural relics and precious metals, issuing false VAT invoices and teaching “crime-committing methods.” This is what they didn’t tell you during the opening ceremonies in 2008. This is what glib little losers like Thomas “Can’t we be China for a day” Friedman don’t want to talk about. China may be an economic powerhouse, but it remains an anti-humanistic dictatorship worthy of scorn. Of course, that scorn would mean a lot more if we got rid of the death penalty here…
• South China Morning Post: wonderful op-ed by a Hong Kong publisher calling out Chinese intellectuals in the PRC but mainly in free enclaves like Hong Kong for their complicity in the crimes of the Beijing dictatorship. There’s a very telling comparison offered in how many modern intellectuals took the side of the Chinese government in censoring an unauthorized Wen Jiabao biography, whilst republican Chinese intellectuals in 1912 were willing to stand up even for the free speech of an author who called for governmental leaders to be murdered. There are Havels and Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs in China, but they are in jail. Here’s hoping others will find the courage to take up their mantles and shame the Beijing dictatorship into liberalization.
• Radley Balko at Reason: the king of criminal justice horror stories unearths another one, this time covering the politicization of the North Carolina crime lab. Here’s a sample: a guy served 16 years for murder based on a blood sample…that wasn’t actually blood. Money quote: The report found that SBI agents withheld exculpatory evidence or distorted evidence in more than 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those cases resulted in execution. Still think they’re on our side? It’s time to stop collaborating with these anti-humanistic power-mongers.
• Der Spiegel International: an extremely valuable foreign perspective on the “end” of the war in Iraq. Most of the American-written pieces I’ve seen, even in the NYT, have been very patriotic and surge-friendly. This piece refuses to let us forget that probably more than 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since 2003, including 535 (Iraqi estimate) or 222 (American estimate) murders in July. When a much more populous country like Mexico sees murder figures like that, we write stories about it being a failed state. When it happens in Iraq, we call it victory.
• The Globe & Mail: a horrifying profile on the banality of food licensing fascism in British Columbia. Here’s a flavor for where this story is headed: Before Bowen Island beekeeper Stuart Cole could sell 25 bars of honey-infused hazelnut nougat at a local festival, he had to tell the health authority exactly how and where it was made and list the ingredients down to the nut. Then he had to cart his baking supplies to the local school’s FoodSafe-certified kitchen to make his supply for the festival. All that just to sell enough nougat to break even at BowFeast, an annual three-hour community festival celebrating food produced on Bowen Island. But at least he wasn’t selling jam. That would require a lab test to make sure bacteria wasn’t festering in it. Sweet Jesus, it’s a sweet! You can’t even sell “high-risk” home-cooked foods like guacamole and baked beans. Who asked for these regulations to be instituted? Outside of established, licensed food vendors who presumably helped write these regulations, who benefits from them?
• NYT: Germany announces plans to end military conscription. Thank God! The bad news is that community service conscription remains intact, but hopefully the Germans can eliminate that soon, too. The state does not own us. Our time on this earth is finite and for the state to use the threat of force against us to take some of that time away from us is a crime of the highest order.
• Glenn Greenwald: Greenwald says that we can’t afford to ignore the Park 51 Islamic community center (aka Ground Zero mosque) controversy and hope for it to go away. By Greenwald’s reasoning, letting the emotionalist bigots win this debate would just embolden them to pursue a more Islamophobic agenda across the country. I guess he’s probably right. Already the protests against the Murfreesboro mosque have been a distressing sign for tolerance in the heartland.
• Der Spiegel International: politicians can’t ever just sit still. The German government is preparing to pass a law that will make it illegal for employers to use social networking sites for pre-employment background checks. Well, unless it is a “business-oriented” site like LinkedIn–they wanted to make sure they got the much-coveted Bad Law Multiplier Effect ™ by introducing a completely arbitrary distinction to the law. What a stupid, unnecessary monstrosity. I think that employers who look through Facebook to see if they can find tagged photos of job candidates drinking are whiny prudes, but it’s their right to be prudes. If you don’t want to work for prudes, then don’t. Don’t pass this sort of idiotic law.
• Dan Savage at Slog: radical Christians in Toronto picket outside of a gay couple’s home, but are counter-picketed by supportive neighbors. What a bunch of sucks. If you want to hate gay people and pray for their “deliverance,” I don’t agree you with but it’s your right. But don’t harass them, for pete’s sake. I love that these neighbors went to bat for this couple and now I hope that all Toronto-area Savage readers will take Dan’s advice and protest outside of the harassment-church.
• The Western Standard blog: remember the Jaworski family, the refugees from communist Poland who now live in Ontario and face a $50,000 fine for hosting a conference on their property? Well, it turns out that they were ratted out for their private property “zoning violation” by an anonymous tipster. It’s hard to imagine how much of a soulless, passive-aggressive twerp you’d have to be to rat some people out for using their private property in a certain way, knowing it might well ruin their lives. This blog post offers a great, emotional meditation on authority’s collaborators and zoning laws.
• The Globe & Mail: a Canadian traveler writes about the ugliness of Canadian customs authorities. This was something that shocked me when I flew into Vancouver this year–I think my beard got me sent off for a secondary screening on my way out of the airport, which resulted in prying questions about my bank account and a phone call to the person I was visiting. The only good thing about the experience was that it gave me a sense for how foreign travelers must feel upon entering the U.S. and being forced to deal with our own border bullies. For shame, North America.
• Dan Savage at Slog: venting on the Democratic congress that is probably soon to be reduced to the minority on Capitol Hill and their failure to move on major issues like DADT and Guantanamo Bay/due process/torture. I think that Obama’s lies on Guantanamo Bay have been maybe the most upsetting part of his administration so far because he didn’t lie to us about the wars–he said he was going to escalate the dying in Afghanistan. But to see Omar Khadr and the others still rotting without trials and no end in sight, it feels like the Bush era never ended. Foot-dragging on DADT is awful, too, but not as surprising since Democrats take the gay vote for granted.
• Via the LewRockwell.com blog, WaPo: the California senate passes a bill that could put parents behind bars for up to a year if their kids are absent from school too much. Parents who put their kids a step behind in life by screwing up their education are sick, but putting them behind bars and leaving kids without parents is hardly the solution.
• Tyler Cowen: looking at polling numbers that indicate a majority of Americans are finally beginning to recognize government as an antagonistic, greedy, self-preserving force within society. I’d be more excited if I didn’t think this just means a lot of people are going to “vote out the bums” in November and then think they’ve fixed the system…even though the Republicans have no ideas except scaremongering on the Park 51 Islamic community center and some vague promises about eliminating waste in the federal budget so long as it doesn’t include defense.
• Conor Friedersdorf at Andrew Sullivan: examining the balanced work of Matt Yglesias and wondering why conservative and libertarian writers can’t make liberty-friendly points using the same liberal-targeted language he does. Well, as a libertarian-minded blogger, I can tell you that I don’t advocate for drug legalization using the increased tax revenues line because that’s a lame pragmatic point that doesn’t say anything at all about the fundamental rights of free adults. I wouldn’t like myself if I flirted with utilitarianism like that.

Read Full Post »

Thursday’s links

• NYT: a NATO airstrike kills somewhere between 4-32 Afghan civilians. More blood on our hands, everybody. We voted in the elections that produced the politicians who started this war just as we voted in the elections that produced the politicians who escalated this war. Our participation in those elections was our consent. So whilst the blood falls most immediately on the commanders who ordered this airstrike and the pilots who carried it out, it falls, too, on our hands. Still think it’s a just war? Still want to kill people to make peace and fail to protect noses? Hopefully you’ve woken up and realized it’s time to get involved in the sort of left-right peace coalition we discussed here yesterday.
• Nick Gillespie at Reason: covering one of the stories of the day, Michelle Obama’s vacation in Spain, for which taxpayers will at least be footing the tab for 70 Secret Service agents. The Europhile in me think it’s refreshing to see someone from the presidential family vacationing in glorious Europe. It bothers me that European leaders like Sarkozy feel no pressure in choosing to vacation in America, but the idea of an American president in Europe or elsewhere is apparently so deeply upsetting to the nationalistic American public that we can’t even discuss it. On the negative side of the ledger, I love that Ms. Obama is going to Spain with 40 of her supposedly closest friends. People don’t have 40 close friends, lady. Cut the artificiality. Also, it bugs me to no end that we the taxpaying masses will be footing her security bill. She’s a private citizen. If she wants Secret Service coverage on a voluntarily-scheduled vacation, then she should pay for it.
• NYT: Pentagon asks WikiLeaks to return leaked documents. At first glance, it sounds like a cute little kid demanding his toy back, but the more you read this article, the more you recognize that a lot of the statements from the Pentagon sound like threats to WikiLeaks. Consider: “Mr. Morrell said that if asking WikiLeaks respectfully did not work, the Pentagon would resort to other steps, which he did not describe. ‘We will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing,’ he said.” Julian Assange, watch your back!
• Jacob Sullum at Reason: feds admit that they’ve already broken their word about not saving body scan images from security x-ray scanners. I’m not prudish about nudity, but there’s no reason we need the x-ray scanners to begin with and there’s even less of a reason for the feds to save the resultant data. At least they are making sure we don’t forget how consistently they lie when it comes to matters of the security state and civil liberties. Oh, and remember–you never have to walk through an x-ray scanner, you can always request an alternate method like a metal detector, wanding or pat-down.
• Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason: guy starts a free shuttle service to prevent DUIs, gets ambushed by a protection racket local taxi operators. The best part is that he’s even been arrested for running his shuttles without licenses. I understand that the cabbies want to protect their turf and make money. I understand that they can’t really compete with a free shuttle service. Still, there must be a better way to resolve the issue, especially when you consider the guy they took down was trying to solve a real societal problem.
• AlterNet: UN General Assembly passes a resolution recognizing “the human right to water.” When exactly did this Enlightenment project go off the rails? Water issues are an unfortunately large problem in our world today. Helping people in problem areas access clean water is a priority I can support. However, creating new positive rights out of thin air is not the way to do it. How can people have a natural right to a material good or quantity? Natural rights are negative rights; that is, freedom from something, like censored speech or gun ownership restrictions.
• NYT: wealthy Chinese use money to buy their way out of their corrupt, anti-humanistic dictatorship. Good for these emigres. I guess I am glad that Western governments allow them to invest their way to permanent residency, but ideally Chinese who want to emigrate would be treated as refugees fleeing a dictatorship and given a fast-track to permanent residency in the free West, regardless of wealth.

Read Full Post »

Wednesday’s links

• Radley Balko at Reason doubles up on police anti-dog brutality: first there’s this dispatch from Willits, California, where cops shot and killed a dog in a drug raid that failed to turn up any evidence. Then there’s this even crazier post, citing an article in The Baltimore Sun, about a Baltimore cop who shot and killed an aggressive dog at a dog park. The cop didn’t like the way the murdered dog was playing with his dog and took out his gun and shot the dog before he’d even given the dog’s owner a chance to act on the officer’s request and calm his dog. Best part: subsequent examinations shows no scratches on either dog. Balko asks the important question: what would happen if a non-cop killed a dog like this? But hey, it’s the cops’ country, we just live in it. Oh, and in case you haven’t watched it, make sure you watch one of Balko’s classic police brutality finds, this infamous YouTube video of a wildly excessive force drug raid in Columbia, Mo. that killed two dogs.
• Marc Theissen at the American Enterprise Institute: you’ll remember Marc from his charming suggestion earlier this week that the U.S. should violate the sovereignty of Iceland in an attempt to shut down WikiLeaks and arrest Julian Assange. This mentally deficient thug popped up again today to argue that the Center for Constitutional Rights, the group that is co-suing with the ACLU to prevent the government from extrajudicially killing American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, is pro-al-Qaeda. See, they have defended terrorists, therefore they must support terrorism! It’s sort of like how everyone knows that if you defend an alleged murderer, you must support murder. I wouldn’t care much about a mob-bully like Theissen, except that he’s got a decent-sized pulpit to pitch this rot to people who believe it.
• Moscow Times doubles up on the Russian opposition taking action: in this article, bloggers and activists mobilize to identify and seek punishment for a cop who brutalized a man at a protest. There’s even a video of the brutality available on the other side of the link. And in this article, a rapper is arrested for criticizing bureaucrats, politicians and police during a concert. Oh, and one bonus blog post from The Economist–police use excessive force and kidnap Yevgenia Chirikova, an environmental activist who had just condemned violent attacks by activists on her side. Video footage included. It hasn’t reached the heroic level of the Soviet dissident movement yet, but the present-day Russian opposition has a lot of people who are incredibly brave and willing to take risks for the sake of freedom that would be incomprehensible to us in the West. Bless them.
• Via Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason, Seattle Weekly: Washington Liquor Board confiscates drinks from rockers on stage and files complaints against club owners for violating obscure state law. Maybe they thought they could achieve some sort of anti-freedom multiplier effect by violating the property rights of the club owners at the same time they were violating the rights of consenting adults to put chemicals in their body, in this case even chemicals arbitrarily defined as legal by the state. I love the textbook bureaucratic way it went down, too–an enforcement thug took  a guy’s drink when he wasn’t looking, poured it into a test tube for testing and then filed the complaint against the club. The time-honored tradition of passive-aggression among bureaucrats…
• Nick Gillespie at Reason: asking why “which taxes should we raise to meet our spending level” is the unchallenged policy wonk Washington consensus, rather than “what spending should we cut to meet our tax revenues?” This shouldn’t really be that unique of a point, but Washington has become an echo chamber in which even “serious men” of the right like Bruce Bartlett are calling for a VAT.
• Via Daniel Foster at The Corner, Politico: after the Senate’s surprise passage of the newest $26.1 billion stimulus bill which is larded up with $10 billion in handouts to teachers’ unions, Nancy Pelosi calls congressmen back to Washington to strike whilst the iron is hot and get the printing presses running again. Yuck. I love that Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this a “courageous” vote. What’s courageous about spending more of tomorrow’s dollars today and just kicking our problems down the road a bit more?
• Glenn Greenwald: Michael Hastings, the guy who wrote the McChrystal profile for Rolling Stone, had a previously-approved request to embed with troops in Afghanistan summarily denied today. I didn’t know this, but reporters are supposed to be allowed to embed regardless of their political leanings or their feelings on the war. In reality, Hastings is only the latest journalist to be denied an embed gig for what appear to be political reasons.
• People’s Daily: headline–“Chinese students lack imagination, creativity.” Here’s a telling quote: “Only 4.7 percent of Chinese primary and secondary school students think they have curiosity and imagination and 14.9 percent of them hope to have imagination and creativity.” Hmm, maybe it has something to do with your despotic, illiberal, anti-humanistic regime, Chinese Communist Party! Maybe it has something to do with censorship, internet firewalls, ideological education and your Han-chauvinist centralizing drive against the many vibrant minority cultures of your country. Your actions have consequences.
• New Humanist: it’s slightly NSFW, but this photo of a guy counter-protesting an anti-gay bigot is pretty awesome.
• Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy: following up on the strange case of Muslim runaway/Christian convert-teenager Rifqa Bary. After winning the right not to be sent back to her Muslim parents, Bary the luckless girl is living in foster care and has since come down with uterine cancer. The Columbus Dispatch reports that she has now won a court decision against a doctor-advised course of chemotherapy that her parents were trying to force upon her. At least she  is apparently healthy and disease-free for the moment, but I am more than a bit freaked out that she apparently reached the anti-chemo decision after attending what was called a “prayer conference” by her lawyers and a “faith-healing event” by her parents. I supported her 100% in running away from her parents and fearing for her safety if she had been placed back in their custody, but it’s looking more and more like she is an incredibly credulous girl who has fallen far too unquestioningly under the sway of Christian radicals.
• The Globe & Mail: a 20-year old becomes the first person to challenge Ontario’s ridiculously discriminatory zero-alcohol driving law for the 21 and unders. Money quote: “‘Statistics show that male drivers, for example, are more likely to get into certain kinds of accidents, but I think we can all agree that we would never see the government apply legislation selectively to one gender or race or national origin because of statistics,’ he said. ‘They seem to think it’s okay to do so for age. Maybe that’s because young people aren’t as likely to vote.'” His name is Kevin Wiener. I wish him well.

Read Full Post »

Monday’s links

• NYT: I take issue with the headline, “Targeted Killings Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan.” Let’s put an end to this obfuscation right now–“targeted killings” are assassinations. I guess “targeted killings” has become the euphemism of the year for 2010, much like “enhanced interrogation techniques” stood in for “torture” and “black sites” for “blatantly unconstitutional torture dungeons.” Ah, but for those simpler days! I guess the important thing we’ve learned in the past few months is that we wouldn’t want the beacon of American journalism to risk stirring up any political controversy with meaningful language.
• NYT: New Delhi traffic police create a Facebook page and citizens start voluntarily uploading photos (3000 in just two months) of fellow citizens breaking traffic laws. I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: why would you want to help the police? Unless you think there’s a real threat in the air or rights are being violated, there’s no reason to help these guys. On another level, this is yet another victory for the passive-aggressive losers of the world. Why confront a driver you believe to be in the wrong when you can just take a picture of his license plate and give it to the police? At least some of the people caught so far have been cops, but still…ugh, cut it out, New Delhi!
• NYT: Indonesia is finding its push to block internet porn before Ramadan starts to be an impossible goal. This story was originally covered by The Country Estate here and here’s a bonus link to the NYT piece on Nazril Irham, the Indonesian pop star who could go to jail for 12 years for being in a leaked adult consensual sex tape. Darn, guys–I guess you will have to go find another expression of free speech to censor to deprive your citizens of choice and make Allah happy.
• Via Robby Soave at Reason, Politico: meet Rep. Adam Schiff D-CA, the man who has filed a bill to allow the feds to delay reading Miranda rights to terrorist suspects. Miranda rights could be withheld “as long as necessary,” the feds could question suspects for up to four days and fully expect any evidence to hold up in court. Becoming what we hate alert…
• Moscow Times: Ella Pamfilova, head of the Kremlin’s human rights council, resigns. I had never heard of her before, but the article claims she was one of the last dissenting voices in the Kremlin. Still, I’m going to say that anyone who could remain in that job through the Politkovskaya and Estemirova assassinations, the Khodorkovsky imprisonment and a litany of equally bad rights violations against less famous people probably wasn’t that great of an ally of human rights anyway.
• NYT: GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty inspires about as much excitement in most people as a bowl of hospital cafeteria Yorkshire pudding. I think it was in an attempt to rectify that image that, on a weekend visit to Iowa, he was reduced to issuing one of the most cringe-worthy lines I’ve heard from a politician this year: “I’m very thankful for my red-hot smoking wife, the first lady of Minnesota,” said Gov. Tim Pawlenty, pointing to his wife, Mary, who was standing a few feet away. O mein Gott! We’ve finally found the line so corny and bad it made Al Gore’s attempts at humor in the 2000 vice presidential debates seem genuine.
• Via Andrew Sullivan, ThinkProgress: supposed GOP deficit hawk and Tea Party darling Rep. Mike Pence R-IN fights for  a redundant jet engine program for the F-35 jet that is opposed even by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. Andrew’s point in picking this link was that the GOP still isn’t serious about spending–they’re willing to cut taxes and oppose ObamaCare from the left, but they won’t dare to cut the sacred defense cow, even with Gates telling them to do it. Oh–coincidentally, engines for the F-35 are manufactured in Indiana.
• Der Spiegel: Greek tax police have been reduced to using Google Earth to search for people with unregistered swimming pools. Tax collection has historically been a very difficult enterprise in the rather anarchic society that is Greece, but that’s a reason to like Greece, not to hate it. The fact that citizens are paying the salaries of an army of sick little bureaucrats who are snooping through images of private property to find new opportunities to wring even more revenue out of those same citizens is vulgar.
• NYT: the Chinese real estate bubble is being fed in part by state-owned enterprises in other industries looking to diversify their portfolios to include real estate and hopefully make a quick buck. Of course, this goes against the anti-bubble mantra of the Communist Party. But the part that frightens me is that what are probably decent, profit-making companies are getting involved in real estate because it seems too good to be true. Bubbles pop eventually. Even when they pop and hurt the residential market alone, things are bad. But if the Chinese bubble pops and brings down a host of companies that got in to make cash, it will just make the resultant recession or depression that much worse. Much as I dislike the authoritarian thugs running China, a crippled Chinese economy is the last thing the world needs right now.
• Doubling up on WikiLeaks: Lew Rockwell links to a piece on how WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now maintaining a massive encrypted file of documents on his site as an insurance policy against capture since the Pentagon is apparently looking for him. So what’s the big idea, Max Boot–I thought it wasn’t important intelligence? Meanwhile, doltish thug Marc Thiessen at the American Enterprise Institute wants the U.S. to go after journalist-havens like Iceland. Ah-ha, yes…how did I not realize it before, of course we should actively impinge upon the sovereignty of other nations in an attempt to keep them from letting our public know what’s going on in our name!

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 »

Wednesday’s links

I hate to do this, but I’m going to just do links for one more night. I’m working hard to finish a magazine internship application due this Friday, so please bear with me.

• Der Spiegel: for me, this was the biggest headline of the day–Theo Albrecht, the younger of the two reclusive German billionaire brothers who had each pioneered and headed up their own division of Aldi, died. I loved Aldi much more before I cut processed foods out of my diet, but it’s still an incredible store with some killer, common sense business techniques–shopping cart rentals (no cart pushers), bag fees (green and efficient), simplicity of choice (usually only one in-house brand per item for sale) and merchandise stocked directly on its pallets. North American consumers should be especially sad because though Karl’s Aldi Sued division operates the Aldi stores here, it was Theo who owned Trader Joe’s.
• Jacob Sullum at Reason: Congress takes a sensible step toward fixing the ridiculous crack cocaine vs. regular cocaine sentencing disparity. They should both be outright legalized and if you’re going to stick with the status quo, decriminalizing use or at least equalizing the sentences 1:1 would make sense, but any step Congress takes in the right direction is worthy of some praise. Under the current system, 5g of crack gets you the same mandatory minimum sentence of five years as 500g of cocaine powder. Arbitrary justice is the best!
• NYT: federal judge blocks parts of the Arizona immigration bill. I haven’t had time to read the specifics, but anything that weakens that bill is a good thing in my book. I couldn’t help but think of the Arizona bill as I read this story about Cincinnati Reds farmhand Daniel Ray Herrerra, a Hispanic who was arrested for public intoxication yesterday for doing what sounds like nothing more than walking around whilst drunk and not white. We don’t need this sort of vileness in the land of the free.
• The Corner: Andy “I love torture” McCarthy calls David Cameron a “disgrace” for his honest remarks on Gaza yesterday. I guess calling an open-air prison like Gaza by a fitting term like “prison camp” is just as offensive for McCarthy as calling human rights violations like waterboarding a fitting term like “torture.” If he complains long and loud enough, maybe the NYT will decide to avoid political controversy and call Gaza whatever McCarthy wants.
• People’s Daily: so much for stories last weekend about the Great Firewall loosening up and more porn sites operating in China–the Chinese shut down or blocked 19,000 porn sites today. I don’t find much to like about the crazy evangelicals and Andrea Dworkinite feminists who rail against porn in the U.S., but at least they tend to focus their efforts on persuasion, education and boycotts, not the iron-fisted violations of free speech favored by their atheist, chauvinist Chinese comrades in thought.
• NYT: cash-strapped Russian government looks to sell off minority stakes in nationalized industries to generate revenue. The bottom line in this story is that almost twenty years after the fall of the USSR, Russia still has a deeply unhealthy and unreformed economy that was able to masquerade as a nascent power this past decade because high natural resource price levels. You’d think they would’ve learned a lesson from seeing how the tanking oil market of the 1980s laid bare the weaknesses of the Soviet economy and did more to drive the country to ruin than any burning tanks in Afghanistan. Also, if you’re an investor, why would you want to invest in these companies? Sure, they have access to incredible resources, but you’re choosing to trust a Russian government that hasn’t hesitated to renationalize companies before. My guess is that most investors will get involved to curry favor with the Kremlin.
• Juan Cole: the good doctor reacts to news that the Pentagon can’t account for more than $8 billion worth of Iraqi aid money. Cole came up with a pretty good quote: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was wrong when he declared in 1840 that ‘property is theft.’ But I can offer a more solid and more consistently true aphorism: ‘War is theft.’ And not only of money; of supposedly inalienable rights, as well.”
• Via Peter Suderman at Reason, WaPo: end the ethanol subsidies. They’re bad for the environment, they’re bad for price levels in agricultural commodity markets, they’re bad for pandering in the Iowa caucuses, they’re bad for the budget and most of all, they’re just not morally justifiable. Ethanol tax incentives cost the country $6 billion in 2009.
• The Corner: it doesn’t get much dumber and unoriginal than calling John Kerry a fake leftist for trying to avoid paying a yacht tax. It’s cute to see someone who is probably not a materialist using materialist, class interest arguments against Kerry.
• Der Spiegel: forget China’s military, worry about their international influence. I agree that the international influence is far more worrisome, but I think Der Spiegel has bee just as influenced by Chinese propaganda as anyone else. China isn’t about to take over the world, even  by soft power. China is living atop a tremendous bubble right now. They are the guy with his foot on a landmine. Let’s not rush to call this the Chinese century until China proves it can successfully integrate waves of newly-prosperous people into a dictatorship.
• National Post: review of what sounds like a cool book on everyday life in North Korea. I put it on my list. North Korea is so mysterious and secretive that I’m dying to know what things are like. Hopefully the regime will have met its deserved end before I have time to get around to reading the book.

Read Full Post »