So the space shuttle Discovery has flown its last mission; it’s been towed over the nation’s capital like a bruised Chevy after a demolition derby before being deposited at the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum in northern Virginia.
Other space junkers — Atlantis and Endeavour — are being retired like Brett Favre in a pair of Crocs, too, bringing to end an underwhelming three decades of fruitless and tragic exploration of low-earth orbiting patterns.
Let’s face it: Once we beat the Russians to the moon, the national rocket grew limper than Liberace at a speculum convention. NASA has been dining out on a single 1969 hit longer than Zager and Evans.
The good news is that amateur hour is now over and the private space race has begun. Where two Cold War superpowers failed, let a thousand business plans bloom!
April 18, 2012
Reason.tv: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God!)
Another Conservative comes around on marijuana legalization
This time, it’s National Post columnist Barbara Kay accepting the arguments on legalization:
Tobacco is harmful in any amount and it remains perfectly legal. Alcohol, while benign in reasonable quantities, is a gateway to alcoholism — the most intractable and damaging of addictions — which causes far more domestic and social misery than marijuana possibly could. And finally, there comes a certain tipping point when resisting the common will for no easily defined reason stops making social or economic sense.
Two thirds of Canadians want marijuana to be decriminalized. It seems clear to me that sooner or later marijuana is going to join alcohol and tobacco as a substance that the government recognizes cannot be eradicated.
Unless the moral argument is too powerful to override — in this case it isn’t — economic realities can’t be ignored. The street value of the cannabis industry in British Columbia is worth an estimated $30-billion a year; it would be worth double or triple that amount if it could legally attract tourists from the U.S. and other countries. Enforcement of our present laws is said to cost $1-billion a year; that money could be put to better use by rehabilitating hard drug addicts. The federal government brings in about $5-billion annually in tobacco taxes; legalizing marijuana would bring in at least a billion or two more.
However, she’s still a Conservative (as the tax angle above clearly shows):
I’d like to see marijuana legalized, but highly regulated. The government should oversee its growth, its potency and its distribution. It should be heavily taxed, as all recreational substances that can be abused are. But I’m not naive. Because it wouldn’t be legally available to minors, and because the strength would be too muted for many potheads, a black market in more potent stuff would spring up immediately. Criminals will focus their efforts on marketing stronger, illegal marijuana to minors. And we shouldn’t be surprised if our First Nations suddenly discover that growing and selling pot are ancient traditions in their culture that exempt them from paying sales taxes.
Legalization will no doubt come with its own set of problems. Commercialization and widespread marketing will bring in masses of new users. And, as I’ve argued before, for accountability and liability purposes, legalization will embroil government, insurance companies, schools and the medicare system in such a tortuous maze of regulatory and enforcement interference with their privacy, that potheads — and the libertarians who see legalization as a liberating panacea — will yearn for the paradoxical simplicity of illegal, but unencumbered access.
April 17, 2012
Chateauguay Magazine: a clear and present danger to the integrity of the French language in Quebec
Because it publishes with both French and English contents, the Quebec government’s language police have launched an investigation:
A monthly newsletter in the city of Chateauguay, Quebec, has caused a stir and it has nothing to do with its content. A resident complained there was too much English in the newsletter and now, Quebec’s language watchdog has launched an investigation.
The Office Quebecois de La Langue Francaise is looking into why the newsletter, called the “Chateauguay magazine,” is written in both French and English. The office says that’s a clear violation of the Charter of the French language, or Bill 101.
The office wants to ensure that the all the city’s communication with citizens is done only in the official language of French.
The folks in Chateauguay are apparently being oppressed because the magazine includes content addressed to the 26% of the population that speaks English.
Stephen Harper admits the current drug war approach is “not working”
Okay, pretty pedestrian stuff for most Canadians, but an amazing admission for one of Canada’s foremost and outspoken drug warriors to make:
Harper met Canadian journalists and readily admitted differences over the exclusion of Cuba from the Latin summit. He admitted, too, to a disagreement over British rule in the Falkland Islands.
But he was not ready to agree that the division over drug policy is so clear-cut. Rather, he insisted that there is much agreement. Then came the most interesting quote of the day.
“What I think everybody believes,” Harper said, “is that the current approach is not working. But it is not clear what we should do.”
This would be intriguing from any prime minister. From Stephen Harper, whose government’s crime bill ratchets up the penalties for drug possession, it was startling.
But don’t worry, Conservative hard-liners: after that brief slip into honest talk about the ongoing failure of drug prohibition, he quickly rallied and got back to the standard drug warrior talking points:
Lest anyone think he’d undergone a conversion in Cartagena, Harper quickly added the other side of the story.
Drugs, he said, “are illegal because they quickly and totally — with many of the drugs — destroy people’s lives.”
Update: Chris Selley reads the tea leaves and thinks there’s a hint in Harper’s words that may indicate a slight improvement:
So, there’s the same old lunacy. Ending alcohol prohibition was a pretty “simple answer,” wasn’t it? One doesn’t hear many regrets about it nowadays. It is amazing that it still needs to be said, but one more time: Prohibition ensures the overall supply of any given drug will be far more dangerous, if not more addictive, than it would be otherwise. Criminals have only made as much money trafficking drugs, only killed as many scores of thousands of people as they have, because those drugs are illegal. And in light of this, cracking down on otherwise law-abiding people for growing and distributing small amounts of marijuana is patently insane.
Still, if we parse Mr. Harper’s words closely — perhaps too closely — we find him arguing that “many” drugs “destroy people’s lives,” which implies that some don’t. If the “current approach is not working,” as Mr. Harper says, and if “there is a willingness” to consider other approaches … well, what else can we possibly be talking about except, at the very least, lightening up on pot?
Most likely, of course, this was just situational rhetoric. If Mr. Harper was going to go temporarily squishy on drugs, it would be among presidents and prime ministers whose constituents are slaughtered to feed Mr. Harper’s constituents’ habits. Central and South American leaders grow weary of this, as you might imagine.
April 15, 2012
April 14, 2012
April 12, 2012
Reason.tv: Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election
“We had a non-Obama president recently, his name was George W. Bush, it wasn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows,” says Reason’s Matt Welch. “Being Republican is not enough to counter Obama. Mitt Romney is not offering an alternative to Obama,” adds Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie.
From Newt Gingrich’s inexplicable campaign chatter about a taxpayer-subsidized colony on the moon to Mitt Romney’s refusal to discuss any specific spending cuts he would implement as president, Republicans continue to offer no real substantive alternative to President Obama’s spendthrift economic policies.
Welch and Gillespie, the co-authors of “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” hosted the discussion “Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election” at Reason Weekend, the annual donor event held by Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).
QotD: Atheists in America
This ongoing conflict between sectarianism and secularism is the raison d’etre for a non-theist movement, and it is why categorical disrespect for godlessness matters. The assumption that religious belief is essential to morality advances mistrust of secular governance. Of course, religious people have a right to their biases, and the irreligious have a right to challenge them. Non-theists can always voice their opinions individually, but, like other ideological and demographic minorities, they need a movement to amplify their voices. And regardless of their individual psychic needs for recognition (which do not interest me), non-theists have a collective political need for a movement that encourages openness about disbelief: The more godlessness is normalised, the less it will seem inherently immoral, the more likely the perspectives of non-theists will be considered, instead of reflexively condemned.
What should they bring to the church/state debates? As a small, disrespected, irreligious minority, non-theists should appreciate freedom of conscience. Non-theism is often associated with hostility toward religion, thanks partly to the prominence of a few ‘New Atheists’, but it can and should promote respect for religious liberty. People who believe in no religions are not apt to privilege any one of them: evangelicals tend to be wary of Mormonism, as the Republican primaries have demonstrated, but to an atheist or agnostic, belief in the resurrection is no more or less worthy of respect than belief in the Angel Moroni.
Scepticism is a great leveller; it favours extending equal speech and religious rights to all orthodoxies, which is the essence of civil liberty. Freedom of conscience doesn’t distinguish between new, outré religions derided as cults and traditional mainstream faiths, as former American Civil Liberties Union executive director Ira Glasser tried explaining to an interviewer years ago. He was asked about the chanting, saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, who commanded little popular respect. They were ‘weird’, the interviewer remarked to Glasser. ‘I don’t know’, he replied. ‘Have you taken a look at the College of Cardinals?’
Wendy Kaminer “In America, atheists are still in the closet”, Spiked!, 2012-04-11
April 10, 2012
Mark Steyn: Derbyshire should not have been fired
On the National Review Online‘s “The Corner” blog, Mark Steyn expresses the unpopular-even-among-Republians thought that John Derbyshire’s sins did not amount to a firing offence:
… for what it’s worth, I regret the loss of John Derbyshire to National Review. Short version: Didn’t like the piece, but don’t think NR should have hustled him into the drive-thru guillotine on the basis of 24 hours of hysteria from the Internet’s sans-culottes.
[. . .]
On the career-detonating column, I don’t have anything terribly useful to add. But Derb’s wife is Chinese and his children are biracial. And I can see why, in a world in which a four-time mayor of America’s capital city can disparage your own family’s race (“these Asians coming in . . . those dirty shops . . . they ought to go”) and pay no price, a chap might come to resent the way polite society’s indulgence of racism is so highly selective.
[. . .]
The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors. Yet what are we to make of wee, inoffensive Dave Weigel over at Slate? The water still churning with blood, the sharks are circling poor old Dave for the sin of insufficiently denouncing the racist Derbyshire. Weigel must go for not enthusiastically bellowing, “Derbyshire must go!” Come to think of it, I should probably go for querying whether Weigel should go.
April 9, 2012
An illustrated summary of David Friedman’s “Machinery of Freedom”
April 8, 2012
L. Neil Smith’s Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh
From today’s edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith’s open letter to Rush Limbaugh:
Dear Mr. Limbaugh,
I began listening to you early in the Clinton Administration. For years you’ve said you’re playing with half your brain tied behind your back “just to make it fair”. For the same number of years, I’ve been saying (admittedly to a much smaller audience), that if you ever untied and started using the other half of your brain, you’d be a libertarian.
That was all in fun (although I do believe it). But what I have to tell you now is intended quite seriously. I’ve been involved in the libertarian movement for 50 years, since 1962, when I was 16 years old — almost before the word “libertarian” was in common currency. In all of that time, we libertarians have learned to handle the Left, better, I think, than the Right does. Partly that’s because we aspire to many of the same things that they do — except that we really mean it.
The chronicle of the declining “old media” empires
Matt Welch explains why, even though more reporting is being done now than ever before in human history, the “old media” portrays the situation in the same way the dinosaurs might view the end of their era:
Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.
That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.
It is no insult to the hard work and good faith of either newspaper reporters or media-beat writers (and I’ve been both) to acknowledge that their conflict of interest in this story far exceeds that of, say, academic researchers who occasionally take corporate money, or politicians who pocket campaign donations from entities they help regulate, to name two perennial targets of newspaper editorial boards. We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter.
This goes a long way toward explaining a persistent media-criticism dissonance that has been puzzling observers since at least the mid-1990s: Successful, established journalism insiders tend to be the most dour about the future of the craft, while marginalized and even unpaid aspirants are almost giddy about what might come next. More kids than ever go to journalism school; more commencement speeches than ever warn graduates that, sadly, there’s no more gold in them thar hills. Consumers are having palpable fun finding, sharing, packaging, supplementing, and dreaming up pieces of editorial content; newsroom veterans are consistently among the most depressed of all modern professionals.
Sexual humiliation as a tool of political control
Writing in the Guardian, Naomi Wolf discusses the ways the US government has incorporated sexual humiliation into their toolkit for dealing with both prisoners and innocent people:
In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”
[. . .]
Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.
The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.
[. . .]
The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy’s striking use of the term “detainees” for “United States citizens under arrest”. Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy’s new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.
Ten years of association have given “detainee” the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply — especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term — with its associations of “those to whom anything may be done” — is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.
April 7, 2012
Arizona’s internet-trolls-go-to-jail bill
Interestingly, aside from the occasional mention of the Arizona Cardinals, almost every post I’ve marked with the Arizona tag over the last three years is about stupid laws or bills that infringe constitutional rights. What up, Arizona?
April 5, 2012
A useful idiot wants even more state surveillance, more Big Brother
Dan Hodges on his love affair with the surveillance state, and his overwhelming desire for even more government snooping:
I want to live in a surveillance state. Big Brother, come cast your watchful eye over me and mine. I love you, bro.
Seriously, when I saw the outcry over Government plans to gain access to telephone, email and internet, my initial reaction was: “You mean they can’t do that already?”
I assumed, somewhat stupidly, that everything we said, typed or viewed was routinely monitored, and then filtered by some giant, super-secret computer tucked away in a heavily guarded subterranean basement of GCHQ: “Hodges has just said he wants to shoot another Liverpool player, sir.” “Oh, he’s always saying that, Jones. Ignore him.”
I don’t want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff. My idea of the perfect society is one where every street corner has a CCTV camera, everyone has a nice shiny ID card tucked in their wallet and no extremist can even think of logging onto a dodgy website without an SAS squad abseiling swiftly through their window.
