Quotulatiousness

September 18, 2009

I didn’t think this was legal

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:49

Linked from The Agitator, a little bit of legal trivia . . . even if the jury finds you not guilty, the judge can still sentence you to prison anyway:

Indeed, my friends, welcome to our world.

Not only have many defendants been sentenced for stuff the jury said they didn’t do (or at least wasn’t proven), but yesterday the Supreme Court refused to do anything about it. The cert denial came in the case of Mark Hurn of my hometown, Madison, Wis. Hurn ate 15 years extra years in prison for possessing crack cocaine, even though a jury acquitted him of the charge. It’s true. Though he was convicted of having powder cocaine in his house, (for which he was looking at two or three years in prison), he was sentenced to almost 18 years. Why? Because even though the jury acquitted him of the crack charge, the judge kind of figured he’d done it and therefore found, by a preponderance of the evidence that he’d done it, and sent him to prison as if the jury had actually said “Guilty” rather than “Not Guilty.”

Magicians by night, detectives by day?

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:24

My favourite magicians, Penn and Teller, are set to star in a new ABC comedy:

Comedy/illusionist duo Penn and Teller have signed on to star in a project for ABC loosely based on their own lives.

Also at the Alphabet, the net has given a pilot production commitment to a relationship comedy from scribe Shana Goldberg-Meehan (“Friends”).

ABC has given a script order to the Penn and Teller project. Comedic one-hour stars the duo as Penn Jillette and Teller — Las Vegas magicians by night. But here’s how the show takes a slight twist from real life: By day, the duo become reluctant detectives.

Leonard Dick (“House”) is writing the project and will exec produce along with Jillette and Teller. Peter Golden is onboard as a co-exec producer, while Warner Bros. TV is producing.

Um. Okay, I guess. At least they’re not trying to pretend that it’s supposed to be realistic . . .

We’ve gone far past the “let the punishment fit the crime” stage

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

A very disturbing post at Classically Liberal that I urge you to read:

What was once considering a normal rite of passage, typical curiosity that the newly sexualized young have about themselves, their bodies, and the bodies of others, has become a heinous crime. Not long ago a curious adolescent or child, caught exploring, or playing doctor in the back yard, was given a talking-to, sent to bed early, and warned to not do it again — a warning most heeded for at least another few years, after which time warnings were useless. Today, it has been criminalized, and criminalized in a way far exceeding crimes of violence. A youth who has sex with another youth, even if voluntary, could well face legal sentences far worse than if they had killed their friend.

The absurdity of charging a teenager with statutory rape for having sex with another teenager (and sometimes even charging each partner for victimizing the other) shouldn’t need to be discussed — it’s flat-out insane for the legal system to be involved in the vast majority of these cases. They shouldn’t even be cases!

It is literally true that a teen would be punished far less severely for murder than for consensual sexual contact with another teen. A murderer, after a trial is sentenced to a term in prision (with the possibility of parole/early release in many cases). After being released from prison, they’ve “paid their debt to society” and at least in theory can try to resume a normal life.

Someone who gets caught up in the “sexual offender” category will be punished for the rest of his or her life: once their names go on the official register, they will never, ever, be free again. They can’t work in any job that might mean contact with the general public (if they can even get hired at all). They can’t live within arbitrary distances of schools, playgrounds, or other areas where children might gather . . . which in practice means they can’t legally live anywhere.

How is this in any way proportional to the “crime”? How can this be called “justice”?

US tariff on Chinese tires “a colossal blunder”

Filed under: China, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I don’t read The Economist regularly these days, having given up my 20-year subscription about five years back. Their steady drift away from free markets towards statist models made the publication less and less interesting (and much more live most other financial publications). This article, however, at least covers the situation in an even-handed way:

You can be fairly sure that when a government slips an announcement out at nine o’clock on a Friday night, it is not proud of what it is doing. That is one of the only things that makes sense about Barack Obama’s decision to break a commitment he, along with other G20 leaders, reaffirmed last April: to avoid protectionist measures at a time of great economic peril. In every other way the president’s decision to slap a 35% tariff on imported Chinese tyres looks like a colossal blunder, confirming his critics’ worst fears about the president’s inability to stand up to his party’s special interests and stick to the centre ground he promised to occupy in office.

This newspaper endorsed Mr Obama at last year’s election in part because he had surrounded himself with enough intelligent centrists. We also said that the eventual success of his presidency would be based on two things: resuscitating the world economy; and bringing the new emerging powers into the Western order. He has now hurt both objectives.

Several sources mentioned that yesterday’s announcement about cancelling the ABM systems that were to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic was an attempt to cozy up to Russia. This move can only be interpreted as an attempt to look tough against the Chinese — which would just be dumb — or (even more disturbingly) solid proof that Barack Obama doesn’t have a clue on international trade.

September 17, 2009

Admin update

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:18

Sorry for the broken page display over the last half hour or so . . . I’d miscoded a URL and it broke the sidebar template, so that the sidebar appeared in place of the main blog body at the point of the error. I think it’s fixed now.

An alternate reading of Inglourious Basterds

Filed under: Media, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:08

Tyler Cowen has a very different view of Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, Inglourious Basterds:

Tarantino made his Hong Kong movie, his martial arts movie, and his Blaxpoitation flick but I never expected him to dip into Nazi cinema. He sure loves hearing those Germans talk — boy are they eloquent — and fascist chattering takes up most of the movie. There is a veneer of a Jewish revenge plot against the Germans, but most of the movie strikes me as a re-aestheticization of various Nazi ideals, cinematic, linguistic, and otherwise. I’m not suggesting Tarantino literally favors the rule of Hitler, rather he probably got a kick out of getting away with such a swindle, right under the noses of Hollywood and with commercial success to boot. The Jewish assassin squad members hardly seem virtuous (in some ways they’re portrayed to fit Nazi stereotypes), whereas the German characters light up the screen and show extreme cleverness. (Hitler by the way is a “crummy Austrian,” not up to the more rigorous German ideal.) The sniper “movie within a movie” — which has Tarantino constructing a Nazi movie for a screening scene — is a stand-in for the broader enterprise. Throughout one wonders what are the implied references to Israel, such as when the Jewish suicide bombers strap explosives to themselves. There is homage to Riefenstahl, Pabst, Emil Jannings, Nazi “mountain movies” and other unsavory bits. I found viewing this movie a disturbing and negative experience. I’ve done a lot of work on the history of the state and the arts; if you don’t believe me, go away and research Nazi cinema and watch the film again.

Once again, it isn’t a movie I was particularly interested in seeing, and this interpretation makes me even less likely to shell out the price of admission.

The Ontario wine scene

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Michael Pinkus doesn’t pull punches as he reports on some of the big names in the Ontario wine arena:

As you can see, the Cellared in Canada problem has not waned one little bit, in fact, this summer I watched the debate intensify. I even saw the train wreck known as Hillary Dawson, president of the Wine Council of Ontario, defend the practice as “[allowing] Ontario growers and winemakers to compete with low-priced foreign wines”. I really do wonder about this woman sometimes, she says some pretty asinine things and you’d better believe I’m keeping her press clipping cause you can always count on at least one, juicy piece of inanity. The more she opens her mouth, the further she sticks her foot into it. Many have wondered out loud whether she is just a lackey (or mouthpiece) for the larger wineries, those that currently make Cellared product. Hillary, if I could have given you any advice this summer, it would have been to take a vacation, put away the pens, don’t write another word to a newspaper and for God’s sake don’t give another interview. If the topic of Cellared wine comes up, run the other way. Her vacation mate should be my favourite whipping boy Bruce Walker of Vincor. He was at it again, blaming the lack of a winery home for grapes, both this year and last on the growers (“I would suggest less grapes be grown in Canada …”) and not on the thousands of litres his company brings in to make Cellared in Canada CRAP (Cheap Readily Available Plonk).

I also found myself embroiled in the Buckhorn debate , as organizers try to figure out the direction of the festival for next year. Something tells me I’ve probably given my last seminar at Buckhorn, unless they want me to talk about VQA. They should talk to the Shores of Erie organizers about that one. But hopefully, finding their focus will make the festival better in the long run.

Here’s an earlier post on the whole wretched Cellared in Canada mess.

On demand book printing

Filed under: Books, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:17

Want a copy of a rare old out-of-print volume? For collectors and antiquarians, this is probably of lesser interest, but for researchers and readers, this is great news:

What’s hot off the presses come Thursday?

Any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain.

Over the last seven years, Google has scanned millions of dusty tomes from deep in the stacks of the nation’s leading university libraries and turned them into searchable documents available anywhere in the world through its search box.

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials.

US to abandon plans for ABM system in Europe

Filed under: Europe, Military, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:04

From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Thursday that the plan was changed to better protect U.S. forces and allies in Europe from Iranian missile attacks.

The U.S. based its decision on a determination that Iran’s long-range missile program hasn’t progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Subtext to those plucky pro-US nations in eastern Europe: “So long, suckers.”

Update: The Guardian reports:

The US decision will cheer many in government in western Europe who believed the scheme was an unnecessary provocation to the Russians. But today the Czech Republic and Poland expressed disappointment at the White House’s decision to reverse track after six years of difficult negotiations. Senior sources in Warsaw and Prague said they would insist on the Americans honouring pledges they made to the Nato allies in return for agreeing last year to the plan for missile defence deployments.

Alexandr Vondra, a former Czech deputy prime minister and ambassador to Washington intimately involved in the negotiations with the Americans, said he was surprised. “This is a U-turn in US policy,” he said. “But first we expect the US to honour its commitments. If they don’t they may have problems generating support for Afghanistan and on other things.”

Another example of public funding misdirected

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

Following up from a post the other day, here’s another example of public money being used to create something, but the public (who funded the development through their taxes) not being allowed to use the result for free:

Wikileaks is hosting a copy of the “all 1,841,177 post codes together with precise geographic coordinates and other information” for the UK.

One odd thing about Britain is that databases produced at public expense — maps of the country, lists of postal codes, transcripts of Parliamentary debate and so on — do not belong to the public. In order to use this data, you have to pay gigantic licensing fees to the government, who accordingly threatens to sue people who use them without permission.

Just how much do governments owe?

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:51

The Economist has a depressing little graphic display for you, showing you just how much your government is in debt:

Global_Debt

September 16, 2009

Adrian Peterson makes the cover of Sports Illustrated

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

After his very impressive outing on Sunday, Adrian Peterson’s photo was chosen for this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated:

Adrian Peterson on the cover of SI

That’s great, but I do feel sorry for Cleveland’s number 52: he makes the cover too, but not at all the way you want to be shown to a national audience.

An appreciation of the life and work of Norman Borlaug

Filed under: Environment, India, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Gregg Easterbrook looks at the accomplishments of Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday:

Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

“Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.” Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

Hope, change, but we’ll still do warrantless wiretaps

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:54

So much for any realistic hope that the Obama administration was making a clean break from the anti-civil liberty policies of the former Bush administration:

The Obama administration has told Congress it supports renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act due to expire at year’s end, measures making it easier for the government to spy within the United States.

In a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said the administration might consider “modifications” to the act in order to protect civil liberties.

“The administration is willing to consider such ideas, provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities,” Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, wrote to Leahy, whose committee is expected to consider renewing the three expiring Patriot Act provisions next week. The government disclosed the letter Tuesday.

It’s funny how certain laws — in the hands of the opposition, anyway — are evil, wrong, and fattening, but miraculously transmogrify into essential tools of state once you’re the one in power. It doesn’t seem to matter which party you’re talking about either.

Latest brain fart from the British government

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:54

Cory Doctorow sent a Twitter message yesterday, linking to the OpenRightsGroup.org petition page:

The freedom for each and everyone of us to express our views on the internet is under threat like never before. The UK government is now considering laws that would allow individuals to be cut off from the internet. They say the reason is to protect the economic prosperity of the creative industries.

Our coalition comprises organisations, charities and people who believe disconnection from the internet would mean that people like us would be unable to engage in banking, socialising, campaigning, home admin and many other activities that are increasingly moving online. Worse, disconnection would restrict our long standing right of freedom of expression just at the time when we all need to be able to critique and engage more than ever.

If Lord Mandelson’s plan becomes law, disconnection may start for copyright infringement, with no guarantee it would not be extended for other things.

You don’t have to have much imagination to come up with lots of ways this little policy initiative could go pear-shaped very quickly. Pear-shaped, that is, for the poor folks caught up in the legal machinery. ASBOs were a terrible notion — and appear to be worse in practice than anyone thought when they were first introduced, but they’ll pale into insignificance if this horrible idea gets accepted by the government.

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