Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2011

The decline and fall of Righthaven

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Ars Technica has what should be the final legal chapter in the Righthaven saga:

Looks like it’s time to turn out the lights on Righthaven. The US Marshal for the District of Nevada has just been authorized by a federal court to use “reasonable force” to seize $63,720.80 in cash and/or assets from the Las Vegas copyright troll after Righthaven failed to pay a court judgment from August 15.

Righthaven made a national name for itself by suing mostly small-time bloggers and forum posters over the occasional copied newspaper article, initially going so far as to demand that targeted websites turn over their domain names to Righthaven. The several hundred cases went septic on Righthaven, however, once it became clear that Righthaven didn’t own the copyrights over which it was suing. Righthaven, ailing, was soon buffeted by negative court decisions as a result.

[. . .]

The appeals court has refused to act on Righthaven’s request to delay its August judgment further, and the money was due last Friday. When it didn’t show up, Randazza Legal Group went back to the Nevada District Court to request a Writ of Execution to use the court’s enforcers, the US Marshals, to collect the money. The court clerk issued the writ today, and Righthaven’s $34,045.50 judgment has now ballooned to $63,720.80 with all the additional costs and fees from the delay.

I spoke to Marc Randazza this evening, who tells me, “We’re going to enlist the US Marshal in marking sure this court’s order has some meaning.” He looks forward to heading over to Righthaven’s offices as soon as possible. Should Righthaven not have the cash in its bank accounts, the writ allows Randazza to “identify to the US Marshal or his representative assets that are to be seized to satisfy the judgment/order.”

The degree of threat that Righthaven and other lawfare groups posed to bloggers and anyone else who quoted material on the internet was discussed back in May.

Universities are far from being bastions of free speech

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

George Jonas on the sorry state of free speech in Canadian universities:

Are Canadian universities a threat to free speech? If you ask me, yes, and if you ask civil rights lawyer John Carpay, he’ll go even further. Carpay has ranked universities so that you can see which one is a bigger threat than the other. He demonstrated it last week at a breakfast organized by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy for Calgary’s Chamber of Commerce, where guests in the Fireside Parlor were treated to a preview of Carpay’s “Campus Freedom Index.”

[. . .]

Saying that universities reflect the Zeitgeist is an understatement. Universities are more fashion conscious than Women’s Wear Daily. Academics go sashaying and flouncing like so many models on a catwalk in their ivory towers as they display the latest whim of the great designer, Intellectual Currency. Philosophers have better centuries and worse centuries, as the spirit of the times changes. The 18th century was good; the 19th century mixed, the 20th century baneful. Universities incubated both fascism and communism, along with their many sub-versions (pun intended). Although the great democracies defeated those two particular monstrosities in the end, it was a close-run thing and no thanks to their academic elites. As for the 21st century, with jihadists infesting campuses all over the world, we’re off to a rocky start.

[. . .]

When some brave souls associated with universities speak out against censorship, as they do on occasion, they’re the inspirational exception. The rule is an obedient dissemination of the dogma of the day, including terrorist chic, with Hamas apologists shouting: “No freedom of speech for racists.” I heard them do it at the Alma Mater of a noxious doctrine called “Israeli Apartheid,” a.k.a. University of Toronto.

A Canadian institution of higher learning is the least likely place, I’d say, to encourage a clash of ideas to discover the truth. Greasing the squeakiest wheel of an intellectual bandwagon, then handing out honorary doctorates to those who hitch a ride on it, would be more of its speed.

November 1, 2011

Niall Ferguson on the West’s “killer applications”

Filed under: Economics, History, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

Niall Ferguson points to several key institutional innovations that were key to the rise of the West, compared to the rest of the world:

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:

1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world.

October 28, 2011

Peter Foster suggests a rewritten plot for the Atlas Shrugged movie

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Peter Foster reviews the Atlas Shrugged movie:

The movie is set in today’s not-too-distant future, but has kept Dagny in railroads and Hank in metals by positing a massive oil crisis due to the implosion of the Middle East. The Dow at 4,000 we can believe, but oil at $37.50 a gallon? At that price, a Chevy Volt might actually not be such a bad deal. Domestic oil is once again king (despite being utterly unaffordable) but is being carried by train. Whatever happened to pipelines?

None of this makes much sense. Perhaps the plot should have been left as a future-of-the-past, like, say, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or it should have been thoroughly reformulated to reflect statism’s new threats. How’s this for a rewrite? Dagny now runs a pipeline company trying to build a huge new system for a form of oil previously uneconomic but now made available by wonderful advances in capitalist technology. Let’s say this oil is located in Alberta and her line is to go to the U.S. refineries of the Gulf Coast, to replace imports from dictatorships.

Hank is still in the steel industry but his new wonder metal is now to be used to build a cheaper, stronger and safer type of pipe. However, he is opposed not by other steel or pipe makers, but by a pack of meretricious, politically-savvy environmental NGOs. These organizations are fronted by naive chanting muddle heads, who have no idea where their rich lifestyles originate, and backed by capitalist foundations (the irony!) that have been hijacked by socialists, and by CEOs either too cowardly or stupid to say no (or by those who seek to take advantage of government handouts to produce throwback technologies). These NGOs claim that the oil is “dirty” and destroying the climate and that Hank Rearden’s new and better steel in unsafe, and threatens aquifers and environmentally sensitive areas. Their hysterical claims are eagerly swallowed by a gullible liberal media. Meanwhile politicians, despite high unemployment, are prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of jobs because they, too, are cowed by the ENGOs, and in any case attracted by the unparalleled power prospects of aspiring to control the weather.

I know this is all a bit far fetched, but we are talking a movie plot here.

“The ultimate measure of this institution’s value [is] the elevation of human dignity and liberty for all their citizens”

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Stephen Harper made a speech yesterday that expressed a lovely sentiment. It’s not clear if the other heads of government attending the meeting will be quite as taken with it:

­ If the Commonwealth continues to ignore member countries that violate human rights and ignore the rule of law and democratic principles, the 60-year-old organization will fade into irrelevance, Commonwealth leaders meeting here are being told.

It¹s a message Canada and Prime Minister Stephen Harper strongly endorses but one which is expected to produce divisions at the biennial summit of Commonwealth Heads of Government. The summit got underway Friday morning in a ceremony presided over by Queen Elizabeth II.

“The ultimate measure of this institution’s value going forward will remain the commitment asked of member governments to the elevation of human dignity and liberty for all their citizens,” Harper said in a speech here Thursday after arriving from Ottawa. “In the next few days, it is my strong hope, that the Commonwealth shall reaffirm, and reinvigorate, this great purpose.”

Member countries are typically loathe to point fingers at the laggards in the 54-country Commonwealth when it comes to human rights and democracy but not Harper.

He has already singled out Sri Lanka’s government for sharp criticism over Sri Lanka¹s failure to investigate what a United Nations panel called “credible allegations” that the Sri Lankan army committed war crimes as that country’s 25-year-old civil war was drawing to a close in 2009.

October 27, 2011

Up next: the Great Firewall of … America

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

The headline on this article says it all: E-PARASITES Bill: ‘The End Of The Internet As We Know It’.

We already wrote about the ridiculously bad E-PARASITES bill (the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act), but having now had a chance go to through the full bill a few more times, there are even more bad things in there that I missed on the first read-through. Now I understand why Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s first reaction to this bill was to say that “this would mean the end of the Internet as we know it.”

She’s right. The more you look at the details, the more you realize how this bill is an astounding wishlist of everything that the legacy entertainment gatekeepers have wanted in the law for decades and were unable to get. It effectively dismantles the DMCA’s safe harbors, what’s left of the Sony Betamax decision, puts massive liability on tons of US-based websites, and will lead to widespread blocking of websites and services based solely on accusations of some infringement. It’s hard to overstate just how bad this bill is.

And, while its mechanisms are similar to the way China’s Great Firewall works (by putting liability on service providers if they fail to block sites), it’s even worse than that. At least the Chinese Great Firewall is determined by government talking points. The E-PARASITES bill allows for a massive private right of action that effectively lets any copyright holder take action against sites they don’t like. (Oh, and the bill is being called both the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and E-PARASITES (which covers the PROTECT IP-like parts of the bill, SOPA refers to the larger bill that also includes the felony streaming part).

Ten years of Patriot Act intrusions into civil liberties

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation marks the tenth anniversary of the awful Patriot Act:

Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.

Much of the PATRIOT Act was a wish list of changes to surveillance law that Congress had previously rejected because of civil liberties concerns. When reintroduced as the PATRIOT Act after September 11th, those changes — and others — passed with only limited congressional debate.

Just what sort of powers does the PATRIOT Act grant law enforcement when it comes to surveillance and sidestepping due process? Here are three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were sold to the American public as necessary anti-terrorism measures, but are now used in ways that infringe on ordinary citizens’ rights

October 26, 2011

Giving the government even more weasel-room on FOIA requests

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

A proposed rule change would allow the US government and its agencies to lie about the very existence of requested records in Freedom of Information Act requests:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist — even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal — part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice — would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

October 25, 2011

“For strong personalities, the hyper-egalitarian mantras of anarchism act as a smokescreen for authoritarianism”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Jonathan Kay discusses the contradictions of Julian Assange and his dictatorial control of WikiLeaks and uses the Occupy Wall Street “anarchists” to explain why anarchy usually turns into dictatorship:

In a fascinating report filed last Thursday, New York Magazine’s Alex Klein found that the protesters had splintered on the question of music. Many of the Occupiers, apparently, have been passing their time with daily 10-hour drum sessions. The tom toms help keep up morale, apparently. But they also anger those protesters who are trying to sleep, and have disrupted classes at a local high school.

So, the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street “general assembly” — a sort of self-appointed protester executive body — decreed that drumming shall be limited to two hours a day. The general assembly has also imposed a 50% tax on the donations that drummers earn from passersby.

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” complained one drumming protester. “We’re like, ‘What’s going on here?’ They’re like the banks we’re protesting,” said another.

And that’s not all. The general assembly is also ordering protesters to clean up their camp sites in advance of a local community board inspection. In some cases, they’re taking down tents and sending people away, so that new protesters can set up shop. Fist-fights have ensued. But Lauren Digion, a leader of Occupy Wall Street’s “sanitation working group” isn’t phased. “Someone needs to give orders” she told Klein, after barking commands about who could use the communal sleeping bags and who couldn’t. “There’s no sense of order in this f–king place.”

And that’s anarchism in a nutshell for you. It’s all drum circles and “natural flow” and “consensus” — until the time comes to actually get something done; at which point the self-appointed dictators start emerging naturally from amidst the protesters, like mushrooms after a week of rainstorms. For strong personalities, the hyper-egalitarian mantras of anarchism act as a smokescreen for authoritarianism.

October 24, 2011

Wendy McElroy: Get government out of the food-banning business

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Wendy McElroy thinks that governments should get their “greasy hands” off her food choices:

Thus, when government dictates what you may or may not eat — takes away your choice — it is restricting your heritage, your religious and political choices, the control over your own body; telling you that a choice every bit as personal as freedom of speech or the art you view is not yours to make. It is making a fundamental decision for you, and they try to make it better by telling you it’s for your own good.

Imagine if the government had literary experts that decided that certain books weren’t good for you. They didn’t make you smarter or teach you anything. They weren’t classic pieces of literature. And even though you were happy to buy your books with your own money and read them privately, the state still decided it didn’t want you to have access to them. People would be outraged. Why is it any different when the government is counting calories instead of artistic merit?

The typical counter-argument is to say that since society pays for our health care, we owe it to society to lead healthy lives. In short, your neighbour has a vested financial interest in what goes into your body. If you won’t take care of it, the government will make you.

This line of reasoning — rather than justifying a Nanny State or a nosy neighbor dictating your personal choices — constitutes a powerful argument against socialized medicine, but it doesn’t do much to say that the government should control what you eat. If socialized medicine had been advertised decades ago as a government mandate to control the minutia of your daily life, then it would probably have never been implemented.

All of us should of course take care of ourselves, but for our own sake. We are the architects of our own lives and that includes our health. It is not the place of the state to try and control what we can eat because some people make bad decisions. Though it seems trivial to many, it’s an important point to make. Food is part of who we are and how we related to the world. We need to kick the government out of our kitchens.

October 21, 2011

Incentives matter, police edition

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Jonathan Blanks explains that the incentives provided to police officers clearly do influence their behaviour:

Last week, former undercover police officer Stephen Anderson told the New York State Supreme Court that planting drugs on innocent people was so common that it didn’t even register emotionally to him. The story is starting to get traction in the media as an egregious example of police corruption, but it’s notable only because of the admission to the practice in open court. Each year, there are hundreds of cases in which police officers are caught stealing, using, selling, or planting drugs or pocketing the proceeds from drug busts. Despite the obligatory PR protestations that any given instance of corruption is an isolated case, the systemic, legal, social, and economic incentives in every law enforcement agency in America combine to make police corruption virtually inevitable. And with no other category of crimes are these incentives stronger than with drug crimes.

Anderson testified that drugs would be seized from suspects at a given bust, divided, and then used again as evidence against other people on site (or at a time later) who had nothing to do with the initial arrest. This was, in part, due to established drug arrest quotas the officers needed to meet. As public servants, police departments face the same budgetary pressures as any other government entity and thus their officers are required to meet certain benchmarks set by the powers that be. Added to the normal budgetary justification, however, many police officers are in the position to confiscate cash and property that can be sold at auction thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws. Many departments across the country keep a percentage or the entirety of forfeiture proceeds, so pressure to maintain a certain level of drug arrests is something straight out of Public Choice: 101.

New study shows Tasers often misused by police

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Robert Farago lists some of the findings from a recent New York Civil Liberties Union study on the use and mis-use of TASERs:

  • Nearly 60 percent of reported Taser incidents did not meet expert-recommended criteria that limit the weapon’s use to situations where officers can document active aggression or a risk of physical injury.
  • Fifteen percent of incident reports indicated clearly inappropriate Taser use, such as officers shocking people who were already handcuffed or restrained.
  • Only 15 percent of documented Taser incidents involved people who were armed or who were thought to be armed, belying the myth that Tasers are most frequently used as an alternative to deadly force.
  • More than one-third of Taser incidents involved multiple or prolonged shocks, which experts link to an increased risk of injury and death.
  • More than a quarter of Taser incidents involved shocks directly to subjects’ chest area, despite explicit warnings by the weapon’s manufacturer that targeting the chest can cause cardiac arrest.
  • In 75 percent of incidents, no verbal warnings were reported, despite expert recommendations that verbal warnings precede Taser firings.
  • 40 percent of the Taser incidents analyzed involved at-risk subjects, such as children, the elderly, the visibly infirm and individuals who are seriously intoxicated or mentally ill.

    October 20, 2011

    Polls indicate 50% of Americans now support legalizing marijuana

    Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

    Cue all the “what are they smoking?” jokes:

    Once in office, Jimmy Carter didn’t abandon his temperate approach to cannabis. He proposed that the federal government stop treating possession of small amounts as a crime, making a sensible but novel argument: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

    Nothing came of it, of course. Carter’s logic was unassailable even 35 years ago, but it has yet to be translated into federal policy. The American experience with prohibition of alcohol proved that we are capable of learning from our mistakes. The experience with prohibition of marijuana proves that we are also capable of doing just the opposite.

    The stupidity and futility of the federal war on weed, however, has slowly permeated the mass consciousness. This week, the Gallup organization reported that fully 50 percent of Americans now think marijuana should be made legal. This is the first time since Gallup began asking in 1969 that more Americans support legalization than oppose it.

    [. . .]

    Over the past 30 years, federal spending to fight drugs has risen seven times over, after inflation. Since 1991, arrests for possession of pot have nearly tripled. But all for naught.

    As a report last year by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy noted, more high school students and young adults get high today than 20 years ago. More than 16 million Americans smoke dope at least once a month. Pot is just as available to kids as it ever was, and cheaper than before.

    If we had gotten results like this after reducing enforcement, the new policy would be blamed. But politicians who support the drug war never consider that their remedies may be aggravating the disease. They follow the customary formula for government programs: If it works, spend more on it, and if it fails, spend more on it.

    October 19, 2011

    Four year sentence for . . . posting an idiotic suggestion to Facebook

    Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

    Patrick Hayes attempts to point out that the sentence imposed on Facebook idiot Jordan Blackshaw is both disproportional and a clear and present danger to free speech rights in Britain:

    Did you know that all it took for people to trash their own neighbourhoods this summer, such was the ‘collective insanity’ then gripping the UK, was for someone to suggest they do so on Facebook? A few words saying something like ‘let’s have a riot’ and, hey presto, off people went to have a riot.

    This didn’t happen, of course. But it is a view of last August’s riots that seems to provide the rationale behind the sentencing of 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw. This was the man, lest we forget, who on 9 August set up a Facebook ‘event’ entitled ‘Smash Down in Northwich town’. This hardly inspiring suggestion involved would-be rioters meeting up for said ‘smash down’ outside a local McDonald’s.

    In explaining why Blackshaw was to receive a four-year jail sentence for doing nothing more than publishing words online, the judge claimed that ‘this happened at a time when collective insanity gripped the nation’. Blackshaw’s conduct, he continued, ‘was quite disgraceful and the title of the message you posted on Facebook chills the blood’. Yesterday, Blackshaw’s appeal against the harsh sentencing, alongside that of another ‘Facebook rioter’, was rejected by the Crown Court.

    So, how many people responded to Blackshaw’s online suggestion during this period of ‘collective insanity’? The answer is one: Blackshaw himself. (He was immediately arrested). In fact, only nine of his 147 Facebook friends even responded online. Yet the reason for this collective no-show, at least as far as the judge was concerned, was ‘the prompt and efficient actions of police’ who eventually took Blackshaw’s Facebook page offline.

    October 14, 2011

    Jonathan Turley: “President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties”

    Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

    In an interview at NPR, Jonathan Turley explains that while President Bush was bad news for civil liberties, President Obama has been even worse:

    It is a strong language, but I think civil libertarians are coming to grips with what is really a building disaster for our movement, and it’s been a rather difficult process. You know, I have a large civil liberties blog, and there’s a lot of soul-searching among civil libertarians about what exactly happened. But we are engaging in a sense of collective denial when we deal with President Obama.

    [. . .]

    And I think that’s part of the purpose of this column, is to address the fact that President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties. He not only adopted most of President Bush’s policies in the civil liberties areas when it comes to terrorism, but he actually expanded on them. He outdid George Bush.

    And they range. His position on torture and refusing to have people investigated or prosecuted for torture, on privacy lawsuits. He pushed aggressively for the dismissal of dozens of lawsuits brought by private interest organizations. He’s for immunity for people who engaged in warrantless surveillance. He has fought standing for people even to be able to get courts to review his programs, much like George Bush. He kept military tribunals and the authority to make the discretionary choice of sending some people to a real court, some people to a military tribunal. He has asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens based solely on his own discretion, that he believes them to be a threat to the country.

    His administration has, once again, as with the Bush administration, cited secret law, that — and including a case of assassinating citizens — a law that we’re not allowed to see, but we have to trust them.

    [. . .]

    They just have a very difficult time opposing a man who’s an icon and has made history — the first black president, but also the guy that replaced George Bush. And the result is something akin to the Stockholm syndrome, where you’ve got this identification with your captor. I mean, the Democratic Party is split, civil libertarians are split, and the Democratic Party itself is now viewed by most of libertarians as very hostile toward civil liberties.

    Senators and members of the House, it turns out, were aware of many of these abuses and never informed people.

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