Quotulatiousness

May 17, 2012

Official response to UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

As you’ll know if you’ve been visiting the blog for a while, I’m not a cheerleader for the federal government and I often disagree with their policies and statements. However, I can’t find much to disagree with in this:

May 16, 2012 (OTTAWA, ON) — The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of Health, and Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, today issued the following statement:

Today I met with Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

As an aboriginal person from the North, I was insulted that Mr. Schutter chose to “study” us, but chose not to “visit” us.

In fact, Mr. De Schutter confirmed to me that he did not visit a single Arctic community in Canada during nearly two weeks of travel within Canada.

I asked him what stance he would take in his report on uninformed, international attacks on the seal and polar bear hunt that make it harder for aboriginal hunters to earn a livelihood. I told him that I would be reviewing his final report closely, to see if he makes any recommendations to activist groups to stop interfering in the hunting and gathering of traditional foods.

I was concerned that he had not been fully informed of the problems with the discontinued Food Mail program that subsidized the shipping of tires and skidoo parts, as opposed to Nutrition North, which improves access to nutritious and perishable foods.

He made several suggestions that would require the federal government to interfere in the jurisdiction of other levels of government. It was clear that he had little understanding of Canada’s division of powers between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government despite his extensive briefings with technical officials from the Government of Canada.

Our government is surprised that this organization is focused on what appears to be a political agenda rather than on addressing food shortages in the developing world. By the United Nations’ own measure, Canada ranks sixth best of all the world’s countries on their human development index. Canadians donate significant funding to address poverty and hunger around the world, and we find it unacceptable that these resources are not being used to address food shortages in the countries that need the most help.

-30-

This month’s prize-winner for bureaucratic over-reaction goes to…

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… Indiana’s Dr. Patrick Spray, superintendent of Mill Creek Schools for his breathtaking performance of over-reactor in an educational role:

So here’s the story: Five high school seniors in Indiana went into their school after hours, when it was officially off-limits, and decorated it with 10,000 Post-It notes. They used the notes to create a big, cheery “2012″ on the gym floor, for instance. They made bright patterns on the doors, and another big “2012″ on some windows. And for this, they were suspended for two days (during finals) and the janitor who supervised them got fired.

What kills me most, though, is how the superintendent described the event: “It was just Post-It notes: no damage, thank goodness, occurred. Nobody was injured, thank goodness. It’s the unintended stuff that sometimes causes issues…”

The five kids who were suspended got vocal support from their classmates, so another over-reaction was called for … and delivered:

Here’s an update on today’s story about the five seniors suspended from Indiana’s Cascade High School for decorating it, at night, with Post-It Notes. Now a whopping 67 students have been suspended, because they were protesting the suspension of the Cascade Five.

As you can hear in the TV report — presented by the stations “Crime Beat” reporter (making you wonder what exactly constitutes crime in Indiana) — the kids who did the “prank” got permission from a school board member and the head custodian. And even if they didn’t, I agree with one of the commenters on my original post: While it’s being labeled a “‘prank” it could just as easily have been labeled a beautification effort, or a morale booster.

May 16, 2012

Toronto Police “violated civil rights, detained people illegally and used excessive force”

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:45

Toronto was not a good place to be on a certain weekend in 2010, as the police made many mistakes in trying to control crowds around the G20 gathering. After being too easygoing on Saturday, they flipped completely on Sunday and were on a rampage against protestors, bystanders, and anyone who didn’t obey mindlessly and without hesitation. It’s taken nearly two full years, but we finally have formal acknowledgement from the police watchdog that things were out of control. Colin Perkel writes in the Globe and Mail:

Police violated civil rights, detained people illegally and used excessive force during the G20 summit two years ago, a new report concludes.

The report by Ontario’s independent police watchdog also blasts the temporary detention centre that Toronto police set up for its poor planning, design and operation that saw people detained illegally.

The Office of the Independent Police Review Director found police breached several constitutional rights during the tumultuous event, in which more than 1,100 people were arrested, most to be released without charge.

“Some police officers ignored basic rights citizens have under the Charter and overstepped their authority when they stopped and searched people arbitrarily and without legal justification,” the report states.

[. . .]

“Numerous police officers used excessive force when arresting individuals and seemed to send a message that violence would be met with violence,” the report states.

“The reaction created a cycle of escalating responses from both sides.”

The report takes aim at police tactics at the provincial legislature, which had been set up in advance as a protest zone. It says the force used for crowd control and in making arrests was “in some cases excessive.”

“It is fair to say the level of force used in controlling the crowds and making arrests at Queen’s Park was higher than anything the general public had witnessed before in Toronto.”

I had lots of criticisms of the whole G20-in-Toronto farce, starting even before the event itself. We had the on-again, off-again stupidity of “secret laws“. Then, after the protests actually got underway, the police were refusing to release information about arrests to the media. Followed shortly by the smell of burning police cars. At that point, the police appeared to take a more serious (but still measured) approach, then they stopped pretending to be obeying the law they were supposed to uphold. Even well away from the scene of the protests, police officers were demanding the submission to authority from anyone who happened to be in their way.

And then we started to get a better view of what had actually happened. Having failed in their primary quest to keep the peace, some (many) then took out their frustrations on the citizenry. The courts also failed to exercise their traditional role and threw in with the rogue police actions. And of course we can’t forget “Officer Bubbles“.

Thomas Mulcair: your “go-to guy [for] cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theor[ies]”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells gets in a small dig at Stephen Harper before unloading on Thomas Mulcair:

Before I make a bit more fun of Mulcair, and then try to take some of his arguments seriously, I should first stipulate that the Harper government is fully capable of childish absurdity on the energy/environment front. Indeed I think the confrontation between resource exports and environmental activism is turning into less of a slam-dunk political winner for Harper than he seemed to think in the New Year.

But we see two longstanding Mulcair traits in his remarks. First, a kind of Byzantine certainty. Not just that he knows what’s going on, but inevitably that what’s going on is so complex that only a fellow such as he can grasp its intricacy. Journalists have known for a long time that Mulcair was their go-to guy for some cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theory about his opponents’ motives and actions. It cannot possibly be that Alison Redford, Christy Clark and Brad Wall simply disagree with Mulcair, or even that they don’t care whether he’s right but are playing to different electorates. No, they say what they say because they are in league with Harper against him. Mulcair surely knows Christy Clark’s chief of staff, Ken Boessenkool, helped script Harper’s winning 2006 campaign. If he didn’t know that Brad Wall’s former environment minister, Nancy Heppner, worked in Harper’s PMO for a year after that campaign, he knows it now and will take great satisfaction in tucking it away for future use. See? She’s the go-between. I knew it.

The notion that Alison Redford is Harper’s preferred Alberta premier, or that she scans the skies at night for the light from the Harpsignal, is harder to square with the available data, but whatever. On to the second Mulcair characteristic: the belief that disagreement is synonymous with illegitimate attack against him. You will tell me that’s hardly unique. You’ll be right. Just look at the prime minister. But now we know Mulcair is no more immune from the garden-variety political martyr complex. Wells would write crap like “martyr complex.” He’s from Maclean’s. They hate me.

The real reason for Ron Paul’s surprising announcement

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Edward Morrissey thinks the reason Ron Paul won’t be contesting any more primaries is that he’s already achieved his real aim:

On Monday, the Republican nomination fight finally got reduced to a single candidate. This might surprise people who believed that the departure of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had already made Mitt Romney the official nominee. But until Monday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had continued to raise funds and campaign in upcoming primary states.

That changed with a statement from the candidate himself — or at least it changed somewhat. Unlike Santorum and Gingrich, who suspended their campaigns entirely, Paul has instead decided not to contest any more states. Paul explained that his efforts in the rest of the nomination process would focus on consolidating his delegate gains in states that had already held their contests. “Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process,” Paul explained in his message. “We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.”

[. . .]

So what is the real endgame? Some wonder whether Paul wants to stage a demonstration at the Republican convention, which he adamantly denied last week. Rumors have also circulated that Paul would flex his muscle to get the rules changed and unbind all delegates at the convention, but he doesn’t have that kind of muscle, and it wouldn’t result in a Paul nomination even if he did. Paul’s delegates will have an impact on the party platform, which most believe is the object of Paul’s strategy, but party platforms don’t really have that much practical impact. Few people read them, and even fewer candidates feel bound to them.

Most people miss the fact that Paul has already achieved his end game, or is within a few weeks of its conclusion. The aim for Paul isn’t the convention, which is a mainly meaningless but entertaining exercise in American politics. The real goal was to seize control of party apparatuses in states that rely on caucuses. With that in hand, Paul’s organization can direct party funds and operations to recruit and support candidates that follow Paul’s platform, and in that way exert some influence on the national Republican Party as well, potentially for years to come. Paul hasn’t won every battle in that fight, but Minnesota will probably end up being more the rule than the exception.

Disruptive technologies and naval warfare

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Naval warfare has seen several revolutions as new technology disrupts the status quo. The pace of innovation has meant shorter spans of time between revolutionary developments, and this is a serious problem for naval powers as ships take so long to build and have to serve for lengthy periods of time.

Last year, I posted an article about how the Royal Navy had attempted to ride the technological changes during the Victorian era, with varying levels of success:

Fifty years later, the stasis is being broken technologically. Wind power is giving way to steam. Solid shell cannon are starting to give way to both larger and more complex weapons. Iron is starting to supplant oak as the material of choice for shipbuilding. The renowned duel between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimac) sets all the major navies of the world busy considering how to protect their existing fleets and merchant vessels against the new threat of the ironclad.

The English government is suddenly faced with the stark reality that their entire fleet has become or is about to become obsolete. Neither Monitor nor Virginia are ocean-going ships, but the message is clear that no wooden vessel has a prayer of survival against the modern steam-powered ironclad. And even the greatest economic power in the world can’t replace an entire fleet overnight.

The Admiralty couldn’t depend on past experience for guidance, as everything they’d done for hundreds of years was now undecided: what kind of ships do you need to build? How will they be armed? How will they be armoured? How will they be propelled? Bureaucracies are, by nature, not well equipped to face challenges like this. The Royal Navy, from the late 1860′s until the late 1880′s struggled with finding the correct answer, or combination of answers, to meet the needs of the day.

It’s not just a single change — like the switch from sail to steam power — it’s multiple changes, each with their own array of materials, training, support, and maintenance changes that force organizations to adapt. This runs directly into the problem that it takes years to design, build, arm, equip, and crew a new ship. The pace of change was so brisk in that period that ships could literally be obsolete before they were commissioned into the fleet. And bureaucracies are by their very nature, ill-suited to cope with disruptive change: they thrive on routine and predictability.

Today, the US Navy finds itself in the same relative situation as the Royal Navy of Queen Victoria: the most powerful fleet in the world, but facing uncertainty due to technological changes. Strategy Page has a brief run-down of the potentially disruptive developments we may see in the near future:

The 21st century is barely underway, and much unknown technology is yet to be invented. Many of the key warship technologies were unknown in 1912. But we can already see some new stuff which is leading revolutionary changes in how navies will operate this century. Here some of the more obvious ones.

Unmanned vehicles. Unlike aircraft, which were a new vehicle, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) and USVs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) are radically new technologies. There are already examples of all three in service. There will be more and they will change everything by incorporating more powerful AI and new weapons. That said, UUVs were first developed in the 19th century (the modern torpedo) and 20th (guided missiles). But these two weapons were not flexible enough to change as many aspects of naval warfare as unmanned vehicles will be doing.

Super Sensors. Sonar (using sound to detect objects underwater) appeared during World War I (1914-18) while radar (using radio signals to detect objects in the air) was developed during the 1930s and widely used during World War II (1939-45). Widely recognized as the first electronic sensors (although the earliest sonars were all-acoustic), their 21st century descendants are much more capable. More powerful computers and transmitting technology has since produced several generations of cheaper, more reliable and more powerful sensors. This is continuing and the power of new sensors will make it much more difficult to hide. Stealth is still important for spoiling the aim of long range guided weapons. But the super sensors make it much more difficult to achieve surprise by coming out of nowhere.

Other items on this list include artificial intelligence (AI), all-electric ships, stealth technology, networking, composite materials, space-based services, nanotech, and laser weapons. Lots of ways for admirals to lose sleep over the next few years.

Scotland’s latest moral panic, soon to spread to England

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

A spectre is haunting Scotland: the spectre of cheap booze and binge drinkers. The most recent regulatory answer, raising the minimum price of alcohol, won’t solve the problem.

Scotland announced minimum pricing for alcohol this week, at 50p a unit; the price of the cheapest spirits will now rise by almost 50%. It will arrive in England soon, although possibly at the more timid rate of 40p per unit. It will only make a tiny difference, says the government, as it contemplates raising prices for a commodity almost all citizens enjoy (86% of the adult population drink alcohol), and at a time when prices are rising everywhere.

So why bother doing it? The government says it will save lives, even as it announces the speed limit on some motorways will be raised to 80mph, which will cost lives. I am not sure if the deaths created on the roads will be offset by the lives saved from gin, but it seems that more deaths on the roads are acceptable, but more deaths from alcohol are not. Do I smell snobbery? David Cameron says that alcohol “generates mayhem on our streets and spreads fear in our communities” — so I suppose I do.

Minimum pricing is a result of a national moral panic about alcohol, which follows on the trail of moral panics about tobacco and obesity, which are created by the tabloids and their beloved pictures of girls vomiting into gutters with their skirts hitched round their waists; there is a whole crocodile of moral panics, squeezing its way into Downing Street as more important issues are ignored.

[. . .]

Drinking is something that terrifies some but delights many. Drinkers can be ghastly, but so can politicians, and so can sober politicians. Minimum pricing comes from an ancient place – the desire for a neat society – and it expresses Cameron’s desire to appear to be doing something, while he does nothing elsewhere. Where one stands on minimum pricing depends entirely on whether you believe it is a person’s unalienable right to get shit-faced drunk at the market price, no matter what your income. When so many rights are threatened, who would dispute it?

Nanny knows best, part MCMLXII

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Chris Snowdon at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

When we scheduled the release of The Wages of Sin Taxes for 15th May, we did not guess that it would be sandwiched between the announcement of a 50p minimum price for alcohol in Scotland (Monday) and a new campaign for sin taxes on food and soft drinks (today). Writing in the British Medical Journal, two academics have just called for price hikes on sugar-sweetened beverages and ‘junk food’ as a way of dealing with Britain’s alleged obesity epidemic.

Obesity rates, like drinking rates, have not actually risen for ten years, but the same decade saw the medical profession gain an uncanny grip on the nation’s political process and they are in no mood to relinquish it. Taking a break from hassling smokers and drinkers, the mandarins of public health have taken the ‘next logical step’ and moved on to the general population.

“Economists generally agree,” they write, “that government intervention, including taxation, is justified when the market fails to provide the optimum amount of a good for society’s wellbeing.” Even if this dubious statement were true, there has never been a time when the market offered more choice in what we eat than drink than today. And, contrary to popular belief, it is much cheaper for a family to subsist on fresh fruit and vegetables than it is to eat out at McDonalds three times a day. For the spokespeople of public health, the problem is not that there is a lack of options, but that we plebs are not choosing the right ones.

Defining junk food is notoriously difficult. As Rob Lyons explains in his excellent book Panic on a Plate, a portion of McDonalds fries contains a quarter of an adult’s recommended intake of Vitamin C, while middle class favourites like olive oil, parmesan and pasta are rather fattening. A tax on “sugar sweetened beverages” will presumably leave apple juice and smoothies untouched, despite the fact that fruit juices are often sweeter and more calorific than Coca-Cola.

May 15, 2012

Conducting espionage operations in the age of the internet

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

Shashank Joshi in the Telegraph on the good and bad news coming out of the recently foiled “underwear bomber” incident:

This week began with news of a remarkable intelligence coup. It has ended in ignominy, and a reminder that the pathological leakiness of the American bureaucracy has consequences for counterterrorism.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the CIA foiled an audacious plot by Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack an aircraft using an upgraded version of the underwear bomb that failed three years ago. The AP had, apparently, shown great responsibility in delaying publication for days at the request of the White House.

Then, the story grew both muddier and more remarkable still. The would-be bomber was in fact a mole. He was a British national of Saudi Arabian origin, recruited by MI5 in Europe and later run, with Saudi Arabia, by MI6. This is a testament to the unimaginable courage of the agent in question, and the ingenuity of British intelligence.

But the emergence of this story, with a blow-by-blow account of operational detail, is the result of reckless, impetuous leaking that could cost lives and compromise operations in the future.

Israel and the draft dodgers

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:21

Israel’s growing ultra-orthodox community are exempt from the military draft, and even those who choose to join the military are demanding changes in the way the military operates. Strategy Page explains:

Israeli police have declared open season on young men and women who refuse to serve in the armed forces. Last year 2,700 Israeli men and over a thousand women illegally avoided military service. That’s fifty percent more than in 2010. This trend is partly in response to the growing number of Jewish Israelis claiming religious exemptions. Government efforts to placate the religious conservatives have not worked. This perceived unfairness is making it difficult to maintain morale and high standards in its armed forces.

The most obvious sign of this declining morale is the growing number of young men and women who are avoiding service (draft dodgers, in U.S. parlance). The Israeli armed forces has about 175,000 people on active duty, about 60 percent of those are draftees (men serving for 36 months, women for 21 months) and a third are women (who can serve in 90 percent of military jobs). There are another 450,000 reservists (those who have already completed their active service). You get drafted at 18, unless you have a deferment. Currently about a quarter of men and nearly half the women get some kind of deferment.

The military expects this deferment rate to keep increasing. In an effort to get more young men with a religious deferment to volunteer, the army is giving in to conservative Jewish sects that demand unmarried men and women remain separated while in the military. At first, this meant smaller (company and battalion size) units containing only “religious” (actually, very religious) Jews. But when these units came together for operations or ceremonies, the religious Jews demanded that female soldiers be segregated from the men. They also demanded that women soldiers not sing (Israeli soldiers sing a lot) when religious male soldiers are around. In general, female soldiers were increasingly not allowed to mingle with male soldiers if there are religious soldiers present. All this sort of thing has been bad for morale, angered the female soldiers and caused a public uproar over the issue.

[. . .]

But the most contentious problem is, ironically, the religious one. Israeli women know very well how women are mistreated in Moslem countries and they see ultra-religious Jews as a local version of that. The ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews are becoming more aggressive in imposing their rules on others. Violence by religious extremists is becoming more common. The most conservative religious Jews have increasingly used violence in Jerusalem. For example, they oppose the government allowing cars to park near Haredi neighborhoods on Saturday (the Sabbath). They also oppose billboard ads that feature women anywhere near where Haredi live, and segregate women on buses in their neighborhoods. Now they want to segregate the military as well, in addition to keeping most of their young men and women out, and that has aroused a lot of public opposition.

The Singularity, ruined by lawyers

Filed under: Humour, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

Credit to Tom Scott. H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke.

Nerd politics: problems and opportunities

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the current state of “nerd politics:

In the aftermath of the Sopa fight, as top Eurocrats are declaring the imminent demise of Acta, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership begins to founder, as the German Pirate party takes seats in a third German regional election, it’s worth taking stock of “nerd politics” and see where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.

In “nerd determinism,” technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

But, while it’s true that geeks can get around this sort of thing — and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers — this isn’t enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn’t matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.

[. . .]

If people who understand technology don’t claim positions that defend the positive uses of technology, if we don’t operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, if we don’t speak out for the rights of our technically unsophisticated friends and neighbours, then we will also be lost. Technology lets us organise and work together in new ways, and to build new kinds of institutions and groups, but these will always be in the wider world, not above it.

May 14, 2012

The shady back alleys of the wine trade

Filed under: Law, USA, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:41

Benjamin Wallace (who wrote the fascinating book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, mentioned here in connection with a lawsuit), has a lengthy article in New York magazine about shady practices in the rare wine business, and the even shadier practitioners:

Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having “poured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening” and told him that “the scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.” Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan’s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan’s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. “I thought at the time, ‘Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,’ ” Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world’s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan “a very sweet and generous man.”

[. . .]

In October 2004, Kurniawan posted on Parker’s website under the header “Last weekend where I tried to kill John Kapon with legendary wines!!” He wrote about an extravagant four-day run in New York in which he and a group of wine lovers had gorged on priceless Bordeaux and Burgundy. Kurniawan had brought with him what seemed an inexhaustible supply of hyperrarities from a “magic cellar” — including two cases of the extremely rare 1945 Romanée-Conti—which he said he’d bought from a collector in Asia for $2 million. Every night, the group would drink from Kurniawan’s stash and then end up at Cru, the Greenwich Village restaurant with a 150,000-bottle wine list, which stayed open as late as 3 a.m. as Kurniawan ordered one expensive bottle after another off the list.

For instance, Kurniawan didn’t mention the five FedEx packages he received from Cru that year, containing the empty bottles from his wild nights at the restaurant. It wasn’t unusual for a customer to take away a memorable bottle after it was spent. But over the course of Cru’s six-year run until it closed in 2010, no other customer ordered as many bottles and then systematically claimed the empties. Kurniawan was building a bottle museum in his garage, he explained to the sommelier.

Though Kurniawan presented himself publicly as a mere wine lover, a buyer and not a seller, by the time he made his splash on the wine boards, he was already consigning at auction. And problems had cropped up. As early as 2003, Internet entrepreneur Eric Greenberg was threatening to sue online auction site Winebid over some “suspect/bad mags,” e-mailing, “My goal is to bury the consignor’s reputation in the wine world.” Soon after, he reported that he had spoken to the consignor, Rudy Kurniawan, and was convinced that he, too, had been duped by whoever sold him the wine.

H/T to Bob Tarantino for the link.

On the TSA’s most recent security theatre follies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:48

Bruce Schneier:

I too am incensed — but not surprised — when the TSA manhandles four-year old girls, children with cerebral palsy, pretty women, the elderly, and wheelchair users for humiliation, abuse, and sometimes theft. Any bureaucracy that processes 630 million people per year will generate stories like this. When people propose profiling, they are really asking for a security system that can apply judgment. Unfortunately, that’s really hard. Rules are easier to explain and train. Zero tolerance is easier to justify and defend. Judgment requires better-educated, more expert, and much-higher-paid screeners. And the personal career risks to a TSA agent of being wrong when exercising judgment far outweigh any benefits from being sensible.

The proper reaction to screening horror stories isn’t to subject only “those people” to it; it’s to subject no one to it. (Can anyone even explain what hypothetical terrorist plot could successfully evade normal security, but would be discovered during secondary screening?) Invasive TSA screening is nothing more than security theater. It doesn’t make us safer, and it’s not worth the cost. Even more strongly, security isn’t our society’s only value. Do we really want the full power of government to act out our stereotypes and prejudices? Have we Americans ever done something like this and not been ashamed later? This is what we have a Constitution for: to help us live up to our values and not down to our fears.

Scottish minimum alcohol pricing: “Health fascism is back with a vengeance”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

A released statement from Sam Bowman, Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, responding to Scotland’s minimum alcohol price decision:

“Minimum alcohol pricing is a miserable, Victorian-era measure that explicitly targets the poor and the frugal, leaving the more expensive drinks of the middle classes untouched. It’s regressive and paternalistic, treating people as if they’re children to be nannied by the government.

“To make things worse, all signs suggest that the minimum price will be successively raised once it’s in place. This is what happened in the UK with alcohol and tobacco taxes, which are now among the highest in the world. It’s like boiling a frog – bring in a low minimum price that only affects the most marginalized part of society, the poor, and raise it gradually every year without people noticing.

“The reality is that Britain does not have a drink problem. The definition of “binge drinking” has been redefined so that a grown man drinking more than two pints of lager is considered to be “binging”. The number of diseases defined as “alcohol-related” has tripled in the last twenty-five years. In fact, we drink less than we did ten years ago, less than we did one hundred years ago, and far less than we did in the 19th Century. Hysteria about drinking alcohol is a red herring invented by the health lobby. Health fascism is back with a vengeance, and minimum alcohol pricing is just another brick in the wall.”

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