Quotulatiousness

June 13, 2011

Police SWAT teams under fewer restrictions than troops in Afghanistan

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:12

John W. Whitehead recounts the ongoing militarization of police and other non-military government agencies:

The militarization of American police — no doubt a blowback effect of the military empire — has become an unfortunate part of American life. In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense now see the need for their own paramilitary units. Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, to name just a few. These agencies have secured the services of fully armed agents — often in SWAT team attire — through a typical bureaucratic sleight-of-hand provision allowing for the creation of Offices of Inspectors General (OIG). Each OIG office is supposedly charged with not only auditing their particular agency’s actions but also uncovering possible misconduct, waste, fraud, theft, or certain types of criminal activity by individuals or groups related to the agency’s operation. At present, there are 73 such OIG offices in the federal government that, at times, perpetuate a police state aura about them.

[. . .]

How did we allow ourselves to travel so far down the road to a police state? While we are now grappling with a power-hungry police state at the federal level, the militarization of domestic American law enforcement is largely the result of the militarization of local police forces, which are increasingly militaristic in their uniforms, weaponry, language, training, and tactics and have come to rely on SWAT teams in matters that once could have been satisfactorily performed by traditional civilian officers. Even so, this transformation of law enforcement at the local level could not have been possible without substantial assistance from on high.

What’s worse than the vast increase in the use of heavily armed police SWAT teams for law enforcement is the casual way the teams are used:

Ironically, despite the fact that SWAT team members are subject to greater legal restraints than their counterparts in the military, they are often less well-trained in the use of force than are the special ops soldiers on which they model themselves. Indeed, SWAT teams frequently fail to conform to the basic precautions required in military raids. For instance, after reading about a drug raid in Missouri, an army officer currently serving in Afghanistan commented:

     My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan. For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods.

Remember, SWAT teams originated as specialized units dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations. As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers.

QotD: Canadian foreign policy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Further proof of the Americanization of our politics: the journalistic elevation of the drunkard’s walk known as Stephen Harper’s foreign policy to the level of a “doctrine.” We spent the post-Gulf War nineties hearing about “the Powell doctrine”, and in 2001, Charles Krauthammer gave George W. Bush a doctrine of his own as a post 9/11 present. Today, the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson gifts our prime minister with his very own “Harper Doctrine,” spelled out as follows:

     “We know where our interests lie and who our friends are,” he declared, “and we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations, whether popular or not.”

I’m no foreign policy guy, and John Ibbitson has taught me more about how Canada works over the years than I like to admit. But apart from supporting Israel “four-square, without reservation” — which Harper does seem keen on — I don’t see the evidence for the rest of it. “No foreign aid funding for abortion” doesn’t seem like much of a doctrine to me. As for “aggressively asserting our sovereignty in the North” … how so?

Andrew Potter, “Canada’s foreign policy, in black and white and orange”, Maclean’s, 2011-06-13

World Bank: smaller governments produce higher economic growth

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Tim Worstall summarizes a recent World Bank report that seems to have reached quite sensible conclusions:

Given the level of economic debate currently in the UK the results might surprise. For they support an economic and civil liberalism entirely unlike anything that any political party currently puts forward. This first result is that:

For instance, a one unit change in the initial level of economic freedom between two countries (on a scale of one to 10) is associated with an almost one percentage point differential in their average long-run economic growth rates.

This is unlikely to please those we think of as being on the political left: what, you mean people should just be allowed to get on with things without the direction of a beneficent state? But there’s not that much support for the sort of One Nation Tory paternalism of the other lot either:

In the case of civil and political liberties, the long-term effect is also positive and significant with a differential of 0.3 percentage point.

Yes, people really should be left alone, to shag and to smoke and to live their lives as they please. And finally, it’s going to absolutely appal all of those who insist that it’s the positive freedoms that really produce economic growth:

In contrast, no evidence was found that the initial level of entitlement rights or their change over time had any significant effects on long-term per capita income, except for a negative effect in some specifications of the model.

Income redistribution, high (or low) unemployment pay, child care subsidies, they just don’t make any positive difference to growth but might have negative ones.

In other words, the less your government tries to do outside the basic duties of protecting the citizens from external threats and domestic crime, and providing an honest and transparent set of laws and a stable legal framework, the better off your country will be both economically and socially. Kinda like that minarchistic “night watchman state”.

June 12, 2011

Bureaucratic details of the wild camel slaughter proposal

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Remember the deliberate destruction of the massive bison herds that used to roam the central plains of North America? Australia’s environmentalists are looking to do an Outback version of their own. Viv Forbes looks at the details included in that Australian government “climate change” proposal:

Think this is all a hoax? Then check this out:


http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/carbon-farming-initative/methodology-development/methodologies-under-consideration/management-of-feral-herbivores.aspx

Yep, our bureaucrats have put together a 62 page proposal to issue carbon credits for killing feral camels. They note that there is not much use in killing an old camel so the cullers will be required to declare the age of each camel killed, so that that the Government auditors can determine how much pollution will be saved. To help this complex calculation the government is researching the average life expectancy for feral camels.

The document is full of endless dribble, including how the cullers discount the credits they will get by the amount of pollution that is created by the culling.

Here is a sample:

“There are two options for measuring fuel consumption for EVc,j,y as detailed below. Option 1 is preferred.

Option 1) Recording of all fuel purchased or pumped for use in these vehicles during the management activities.

Option 2) Recording of all ground vehicle and fuel types and odometer readings before and after management activities.

For Option 2 the amount of fuel consumed is calculated by taking the fuel consumption rating of the vehicle as a litres per kilometre figure and multiplying this by the kilometres of travel undertaken as part of the management activity, then divided by 1000 to convert to kiloLitres, as per the equation below:

Where:

GDgv,c,j,y = Ground distance travelled by vehicle gv using fuel type j in undertaking the management activities c in year y
LPKgv,j = Litres of fuel type j combusted per kilometre for vehicle gv

Update: The Retronaut has some photos from the near-annihilation of the buffalo in the late 1800s.

June 11, 2011

Redefining “high speed” as 45 mph

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

This is very amusing, unless you’re a taxpayer:

The latest in lunacy in high-speed rail lunacy: at Joel Kotkin’s newgeography.com Wendell Cox reports that the U.S. Transportation Department is dangling money before the government of Iowa seeking matching funds from the state for a high-speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago. The “high-speed” trains would average 45 miles per hour and take five hours to reach Chicago from Iowa City. One might wonder how big the market for this service is, since Iowa City and Johnson County have only 130,882 people; add in adjoining Linn County (Cedar Rapids) and you’re only up to 342,108 — not really enough, one would think, to supply enough riders to cover operating costs much less construction costs.

The federal government must be getting desperate to find some state willing to take this deal . . .

QotD: OPEC’s 50-year fishing trip

Filed under: Economics, Government, Middle East, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

The petroleum-exporting countries have kept America as a gigantic fish on a steel line for nearly 50 years, reeling it in slowly, and letting it out (relaxing oil prices), when the United States made purposeful noises about raising domestic production, cutting consumption, and going to alternate sources. As soon as OPEC fine-tuned the fishing reel, the great fish went with the docility of the addicted consumer back to its default position mainlining on foreign oil at steadily increasing prices and in ever larger quantities. Every president starting with Richard Nixon warned of the danger in this addiction, but none has done anything useful about it. There must be an emphasis on cheap and plentiful natural gas, more nuclear (with maximum safety standards), more off-shore drilling (with maximum environmental-protection arrangements), and higher gasoline taxes to raise revenues and restrain use. All of this will bring down the international price and reduce the amount of money available for the Iranians, Saudis, Venezuelans, and others to finance terrorism around the world, and will ultimately reduce U.S. defense costs. None of this has been done, though the need for it has been obvious for decades.

Conrad Black, “Why America is suffering”, National Post, 2011-06-11

They “buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Virginia Postrel talks about the looming ban-that-isn’t-a-ban on incandescent lightbulbs:

One serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the largest participant at OneBillionBulbs.com, a bulb-switching campaign organized by the consulting firm Symmetric Technologies. But Reynolds himself has changed his mind.

“I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs,” he wrote last month on his blog. “I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multiyear service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.”

That was our experience with the early CFL bulbs, too: they didn’t come close to achieving the longevity we were supposedly paying all the extra money for. And, as I’ve posted before, they’re not as easy to clean up after breakage as the older bulbs.

So the activists offended by the public’s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

Crony capitalism is what the general public is coming to think is the only kind of capitalism, because they have seen so much of it during the last few presidencies. Your business can be plagued with petty regulators enforcing nitpicking rules, while Congress showers money and special privileges on big businesses and banks.

But, as she points out, it’s not technically a true ban:

Now, I realize that by complaining about the bulb ban — indeed, by calling it a ban — I am declaring myself an unsophisticated rube, the sort of person who supposedly takes marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. In a New York Times article last month, Penelope Green set people like me straight. The law, she patiently explained, “simply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014.”

True, the law doesn’t affect all bulbs — just the vast majority. (It exempts certain special types, like the one in your refrigerator.) The domed halogen bulbs meet the new standards yet are technically incandescents; judging from my personal experiments, they produce light similar to that of old- fashioned bulbs. They do, however, cost twice as much as traditional bulbs and, if the packages are to be believed, don’t last as long.

I keep hoping that LED lights will be able to produce the kind of long-life that we used to be able to depend upon from incandescents, as CFLs and halogen bulbs have not come close to living up to the promises. However, LEDs have not yet managed that trick in commercial applications.

So, aside from allowing lobbyists to flex their muscles, what is the ban attempting to achieve? That’s not quite clear-cut:

Though anti-populist in the extreme, the bulb ban in fact evinces none of the polished wonkery you’d expect from sophisticated technocrats. For starters, it’s not clear what the point is. Why should the government try to make consumers use less electricity? There’s no foreign policy reason. Electricity comes mostly from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, all domestic sources. So presumably the reason has something to do with air pollution or carbon-dioxide emissions.

But banning light bulbs is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to attack those problems. A lamp using power from a clean source is treated the same as a lamp using power from a dirty source. A ban gives electricity producers no incentive to reduce emissions.

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

June 9, 2011

Those ungrateful peasants

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

I had wondered about the origins of that bit of verse:

I asked if people were perhaps not tricked, but legitimately voting against the left because they objected to socialist policies such a massive spending and multiculturalism.

He responded that these issues were indeed difficult for ‘common people’ to comprehend, and therefore for the right to take advantage of. He reiterated however that the problem was not with the policies, it was that people did not ‘understand’.

This was a revealing statement, for it is a typical line of thinking across the left-wing political spectrum, from the most hardened communist to the most moderate social-democrat. While all leftists claim to be for the ‘people’, at the same time they have utter contempt for the people.

They believe they know what is best for the people, and if the people — uppity ungrateful peasants — object, then the people be damned.

Bertolt Brecht — ironically himself a dedicated Marxist — poked fun at this leftist mentality in a now famous poem, Die Lösung (The Solution), following a workers uprising against the Communist East German government in 1956.

    After the uprising of the 17th of June
    The Secretary of the Writers Union
    Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
    Stating that the people
    Had forfeited the confidence of the government
    And could win it back only
    By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
    In that case for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?

June 7, 2011

QotD: The Bill of Rights on federal government property

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Friends,

There’s been a hassle on FaceBook about what civilians and cops can or can’t do on “government property”, with some saying the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply there. I wrote this in response:

A little civics lesson, gentlemen, if you will allow me. The Bill of Rights is misnamed. It is not a list of things we are “allowed” to do, it is a list of things that government is not allowed to do, principally to trespass against certain natural liberties that are ours simply by virtue of our having been born.

The Bill of rights, therefore, is actively in force any time, any place that there are human beings. If it were metaphysically possible (it is not) it would apply even more on so-called government property than anyplace else, since it is specifically government that is constrained by it.

Moreover, since it is not just Americans who are human beings (contrary to what many seem to believe) it puts a whole new face on the legality — or illegality — of war, and in particular the treatment being accorded to the political prisoners at Guantanamo and similar places.

L. Neil Smith, “Letters to the Editor”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-06-05.

June 6, 2011

Further extending the powers of the “Imperial Presidency”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:51

All that’s left is to start posting proscription lists and calling him “Father of his country” and getting his Secret Service detail to carry fasces1:

Let’s leave aside whether your position on bombing Libya while leading NATO from behind has anything to do with hawk or dove status. You don’t need to be the real Bob Taft or Bob Dole to start muttering about “Democrat wars.”

It’s a sad day for the Republic when insisting that the president actually, you know, get an authorization of force as kinda sorta suggested by the Constitution is seen as akin to open rebellion or creating a fifth column. What is this, Star Wars? Rome? As Tim Cavanaugh and that other super-peacenik outfit, the Washington Times, point out, between Kucinich’s and Boehner’s all-too-timid requests, three-quarters of the House of Representatives have expressed dissatisfaction when it comes to how Obama is deploying troops. The only real question is when Congress is going to take the advice of good ol’ Sharron Angle and man up already and start playing its actual role as a counterweight to an imperial presidency that has never served the nation any good.

1 The fasces were bundles of rods wrapped around an axe carried by Roman lictors who accompanied magistrates in Republican Rome. They represented the ability of the magistrate to dispense low justice (the rods, symbolizing corporal punishment) and high justice (the axe for capital punishment). The symbol was adopted by other nations and political movements after the fall of the empire.

Oxfam’s latest report a Curate’s Egg

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Tim Worstall points out the good bits first:

Oxfam’s latest campaign, “Grow”, seems so lovely and cuddly that to criticise it is almost like torturing puppies. What could be wrong with trying to feed the hungry and thus make the world a better place? Alas, if wishes were kings we could all be monarchs for the day and what’s wrong with the campaign is not the initial wish but the list of damn fool things it intends to do.

Praise first: Oxfam is quite right that there are several entirely stupid things that are being done about food currently. The first and most obvious is the biofuels nonsense: food should go into people, or at least animals we can eat, not into cars. But the European Union has insisted that 10 per cent (to rise to 15 per cent) of all petrol/diesel must be made from plants instead. Oxfam seems to think that this will reduce emissions: despite every scientist worthy of his slide rule pointing out that growing and processing the plants emits more than the oil being replaced.

Another policy we should stop yesterday is the subsidy of the rich world’s farmers. Can’t make a profit growing what people want to eat? Then stop and do something else. We say this to car makers, to buggy whip makers and there’s nothing about wading in cow shit that makes farming any different. New Zealand did it and farming profits went up.

Well, that’s about it for the good:

And then the report goes entirely doolally over commodities speculation, over futures and options. One of the points the report makes (in one of the good bits) is that price volatility is damaging both to producers and consumers. So we’d like to have some method of dampening such volatility. At which point it insists that this means we must lessen speculation in foodstuffs. But, umm, speculation in foodstuffs is what dampens price volatility in foodstuffs.

If any Oxfam type happens to read this by mischance, here’s why. To make money in commodities you have to buy low and sell high. When you buy low you prevent prices from falling further, in fact you raise them: maybe only a little depending on how much of the market you’re buying, but raise them you do. Good, so we’ve just reduced the slumping of prices which do so much damage to farmers. When you sell high you’re increasing the supply onto the market at a time of shortage. This reduces the price volatility at the high end which does such damage to consumers. So, our speculator making money reduces price volatility: it’s only the speculator who buys high and sells low who increases it and as he goes bust very quickly we don’t need to worry about him.

The term in the headline explained.

June 3, 2011

June 6 is Tax Freedom Day in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:27

You can find your personal tax freedom day (if you live in Canada) by visiting the Fraser Institute’s Tax Freedom Day Calculator.

QotD: New York City, the capital city of Nanny State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

The lowest blow in City Hall’s war on wicked food is its recurring efforts to ban the buying of fizzy pop with food stamps. In an initiative that could easily be titled ‘No Coke for poor black folk’, the Bloombergers have sought federal permission to prevent welfare recipients from using government cash to purchase fizzy drinks. The killjoyism of this campaign, the Scrooge-infused miserabilism of it, is astounding. City Hall has launched an advertising campaign demonising sugary drinks as one of the great evils of our time, and its internal email correspondence about the campaign, which was leaked to the New York Times, shines a rather harsh light on the evidence-lite nastiness of the modern-day nudge-and-nanny industry. Scientific advisers emailed Thomas Farley, Bloomberg’s overactive health adviser, to say that the ad’s claim that drinking pop can make you gain 10 or 15 pounds is ‘simplistic’ and ‘exaggerated’. Overriding them, Farley responded: ‘I think what people fear is getting fat, so we need some statement about what is bad about consuming so many calories.’ Who needs evidence when you have fear? The ad shows human fat gurgling from the top of a can of soda. One City Hall employee could barely conceal his excitement: it is ‘deliciously disgusting’, he said in one of the emails that was leaked.

‘Deliciously disgusting’ — that just about sums up how New York’s new rulers view the huddled masses of this extravagant city. In a complete reversal of the traditional democratic relationship, Bloomberg and co don’t consider it their duty to mirror the desires and outlook of those who elected them. They want to remake New Yorkers as models of what they consider to be healthy citizenship. Much of this stuff comes from Thomas Farley, who is championed by both Bloomberg and the liberal media as an admirably thin jogging aficionado who believes in the power of the nudge to remould the citizenry. He is a ‘superman’, the New York Times recently gushed, who has ‘grasshopper-like legs’ (eurgh), a result of the fact that ‘he exercises seven days a week, loves his vegetables and has never smoked a cigarette’ (boring). This fanboy fluff piece was illustrated with a picture of Farley leading a workout of not-so-thin black New Yorkers, his grasshopper-like legs just as sure a sign of his superiority as his white skin would have been 100 years ago.

Brendan O’Neill, “The men who killed New York”, The Spectator, 2011-06-04

For the federal government, $1B is a rounding error

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

Terence Corcoran glares balefully at what the federal government considers “deep cuts”:

We are destined for two days of political self-congratulation in Ottawa. Throne speech Friday. Budget Monday. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, will use these opportunities to heap praise on their even-keeled and prudent handling of the economy, their deft manoeuvring of federal finances through the global storm, and their unwavering determination to guide us through the many uncertainties that lie ahead.

What they will not talk about is how they are going to balance the federal budget on target. Even less likely are any signs of enthusiasm for what should be a Conservative priority: reducing government spending.

That project has been shuffled off to Tony Clement at Treasury Board, where he will chair a small Cabinet committee that will dither away for a year trying to find the fiscal equivalent of nickels and dimes in a piggy bank the size of the House of Commons. Their first year target is $1-billion in cuts in departmental budgets of $120-billion, a spending reduction of less than 1%.

This is not good enough, not even close. For future years, Mr. Clement’s team will be hunting for an additional $3-billion in annual savings aiming for a total reduction of $4-billion by 2014, or about 1.3% of Ottawa’s total expenses of $300-billion.

As anyone who has ever done a family budget, or worked through tough times on a corporate budget, a 1% cut is a piece of cake, not much more than a rounding error.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress