Quotulatiousness

October 5, 2009

Maybe this is why some eBay sellers don’t ship outside the US

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:10

Words fail me:

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with — get this — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary — based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

[. . .]

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal — but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

H/T to Radley Balko.

Challenging Canada’s prostitution laws

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Canada’s archaic laws governing the sex trade are being challenged in court:

If she could do it herself, Terri-Jean Bedford would strike down Canada’s prostitution laws, perhaps using the riding crop she plans to bring to court.

Instead, the Toronto dominatrix and two other sex workers have launched a sweeping constitutional challenge to the legislation, arguing it perpetuates violence against women.

The landmark case gets underway Tuesday in a University Ave. courtroom where Bedford, in a nod to traditionalism, is promising to arrive conservatively attired, even if she is packing a tool of her trade.

Prostitution is legal in Canada: that fact always seems to be a surprise to most people. What isn’t legal are all the other activities surrounding the act: soliciting customers, having a safe place to conduct your business, and so on. This has always made prostitutes more liable to be injured or killed because they have to ply their trade in unsafe conditions, and they are rarely taken seriously when they attempt to get the police protection they should be entitled to.

The 49-year-old Toronto grandmother, along with prostitutes Valerie Scott, 51, and Amy Lebovitch, 30, is asking Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice to invalidate Criminal Code provisions that serve as Canada’s policy response to the world’s oldest profession.

They argue that prohibitions on keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living on the avails of the trade force them from the safety of their homes to the insecurity of the street, where they are exposed to physical and psychological violence.

Publius reviews Fearful Symmetry by Brian Lee Crowley

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

I tend to avoid reading right-wing rants about Canada, having had a surfeit of them in my youth. Publius makes a case for Fearful Symmetry being, perhaps, an exception to my general rule:

Crowley, a founder and long-time head of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, has spent decades preaching the free market gospel in some of the most inhospitable climes in North America for such a message. The theme of the book is tradition, Canadian tradition. A mental framework that dominated the first century of Canada’s existence as a federal state. Thrift, family, economic individualism and small and limited governments were the hallmarks of Canada then. A confluence of two powerful forces, the first the entrance of the baby boomers into the workforce, and second the emergence of Quebec nationalism in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, provoked a dramatic – and detrimental change in public policy and cultural attitudes. Crowley does not dismiss the importance of ideas in the shift to bigger and more intrusive government. He notes that Canada’s volte face from its traditional approach was more dramatic than other nations with a similar history, notably the United States and Australia. Broad intellectual trends set the stage, but it was specific Canadian factors that gave us our current Canadian sized government.

Crowley begins with demography; the baby boom. A jump in the birth rate in the fifteen or so years after the end of the Second World War. This major blip in the demographic charts was more intense in Canada than elsewhere in the developed world.

[. . .]

Economists have blamed this liberalization for Canada’s higher structural unemployment over the last forty years. UI, over time, also acquired regional variations, being especially generous to underdeveloped parts of Canada. In tandem with liberalized UI, straight welfare was also expanded. Combined they produced a gigantic welfare trap. The end result can be seen in Margaret Wente’s notorious, though accurate, description of Newfoundland as “the most vast and scenic welfare ghetto in the world.” To finance this generosity the federal government expanded equalization, the transfer of wealth between the richer and poorer regions of Canada. Until the mid-1970s there were only two “have” provinces, Ontario and British Columbia. The main weight of equalization, however, fell upon the Dominion’s largest, richest and most industrialized province, Ontario. When the province’s premier in the 1960s, the charismatic John P Robarts, was questioned about the burdens of equalization, he justified it thusly: Ontario was in effect exporting purchasing power to the other regions of Canada.

It really is just another game

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

Judd Zulgad on tonight’s Monday Night Football extravaganza:

The NFL’s version of the perfect storm is about to hit the Metrodome.

After a week of buildup, hype and denial of a quest for revenge, Brett Favre is finally going to get the chance to face his former team. And did we mention the Vikings will be playing host to the Packers, too?

Try as Favre might to downplay the magnitude of tonight’s matchup — “It’s just another game,” he said with a straight face last week — there is no denying what this means. Not only to Favre but to many others who have eagerly anticipated an event that will be as much theater as football. The scorned superstar, playing for his former team’s arch-rival, given his chance at redemption on a national stage.

It’s no wonder ESPN executives were giddy when Favre ended his retirement on Aug. 18. That made an already attractive Monday night game between the Vikings and Packers a must-see spectacle that could break the cable viewership record ESPN set on Sept. 15, 2008, when 18.6 million tuned in to watch the Eagles-Cowboys.

Anonymous and the Church of Scientology

Filed under: Liberty, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Julian Dibbell looks at the beginnings of the “Anonymous” campaign against the Scientologists:

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like “I Can Has Cheezburger?” to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley’s ghastly “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world’s injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the “only ones who can help” at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

Tweet of the Day: Nostalgia

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:27

Dita von Teese: I of all people told someone not to “romance the past” the other night. But not everthing was better back then, that’s a fact!

Tension in the Himalayas?

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Strategy Page has a short primer on the potentially volatile issue of where the borders are in the Himalayas:

China is causing considerable consternation in India by reviving old claims to border areas. In northeast India, the state of Arunachal Pradesh has long been claimed as part of Tibet (although when Tibet was an independent nation a century ago, it agreed that Arunachal Pradesh was part of India.) Arunachal Pradesh has a population of about a million people, spread among 84,000 square kilometers of mountains and valleys. The Himalayan mountains, the tallest in the world, are the northern border of Arunachal Pradesh, and serve as the border, even if currently disputed, with China. This is a really remote part of the world, and neither China nor India want to go to war over the place. But the two countries did fight a short war, up in these mountains, in 1962. The Indians lost, and are determined not to lose if there is a rematch.

Powered by WordPress