Whatever one thinks about Conrad Black’s guilt or innocence, there is no doubt that he has proven his claim that America’s legal deck is stacked in prosecutors’ favour: Even before his conviction, he had to endure a genuinely Kafkaesque ordeal of assets being frozen and seized by the FBI, email and phone lines hacked, backroom deals with sleazy witnesses (David Radler, please call your office), and outrageous leveraging of blunderbuss statutes to generate dozens of charges on the basis of tangential procedural indiscretions. The very institution meant to protect innocent people from this machinery of state — the private legal sector — is an old-boys’ club whose members often seem just as concerned with seven-figure paydays as with keeping clients out of jail. The fact that Mr. Black happens to be a famous person makes the claims more credible because, as the author writes, if all this could happen to Conrad Black, it “could happen to anyone, and often does.”
Jonathan Kay, “Conrad Black and his new book: A man in full pay-back mode”, National Post, 2011-09-03
September 3, 2011
QotD: The American judicial system
August 31, 2011
August 30, 2011
QotD: Casinos are a neon-decorated IRS
. . . no phenomenon of nature could possibly be as strange as the alternative reality one encounters entering Wendover, Nevada. In that physical regime, hotels and restaurants are connected to—and often concentric with—caverns with mirrored ceilings, walls, and columns, making it difficult to find your way across the room. Serried ranks of electronic slot machines are clung to by half-starved-looking wights — the cigarettes in their hands nothing but long cylinders of gray ash — worshipping runes that appear when they insert a coin and watch the lights and listen to musical notes that would make a Pac-Man fan start screaming, tearing his hair, and running for the roof with a rifle.
To be sure, there are other kinds of gambling going on. I saw a poker room, roulette wheels, and a genuine James Bond baccarat table. But they were truly lost in a great labyrinth of electronic slots. I was surprised not to see slot machines on a free wall of the men’s room.
I’d seen all of this before, mind you. I was in Las Vegas last year, and it was my second time. I first saw it only a couple of years after Bugsy Siegal did. And I gotta confess to youse guys, I just don’ geddit.
What I mean is, there are a number of points of view that various human beings have, which I am forced to accept purely intellectually. I know there are men who find other men sexually attractive, but I don’t really understand it. I know there are grownup people who seem to go into shock when they discover that their aged parents still enjoy sex — I think my mother would have lived longer if she’d had a boyfriend. And I know — but do not understand that folks like to hand their hard-earned money to casino owners who already have plenty of it.
Casinos are like a neon-decorated IRS.
L. Neil Smith, “The Past That Never Was — The Future That Will Never Be”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-08-28
Trivializing rape
Wendy McElroy points out how the underlying messages of the SlutWalkers have overwhelmed the original intent:
One message: It is fabulous for women to publicly flaunt their sexuality but an intolerable offense if men respond nonviolently. Wolf-whistles are taken as an attack. Disapproving or overly approving comments from men are an assault. But isn’t provoking a response the entire purpose of wearing fishnet stockings topped by a leather bustier?
Another message, as pointed out by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail: “Slutwalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.” In other words, SlutWalks are an expression of privileged women who mistake a costume party for a political cause. While Iranian women fight for the right to pursue an education, North American feminists fight to reclaim pride in the word “slut.” SlutWalk is an extreme expression of mainstream feminism’s political impoverishment.
Yet SlutWalkers proclaim they are performing a political service by protesting the trivialization of rape. Nonsense. They are using the ill-considered words of one ignorant policeman as a reason to throw a street party.
I do not begrudge anyone having a good time but as a woman who has experienced rape, I object to the political agenda being attached to a costume party. I object to the posters and attitudes that vilify men as predators. I do so because I was attacked by one man, not by mankind, and when I was helped, it was by men. I object to the notion that women do not bear any responsibility for controlling their circumstances, such as attire. I object to rape being trivialized by associating it with sluttiness and making it part of a celebration.
August 29, 2011
Freedom, Science Fiction and the Singularity: A conversation with author Vernor Vinge
August 25, 2011
August 22, 2011
August 19, 2011
Cage match: Jason Kenney against Amnesty International
Paul Wells on the ongoing war of words between Canada’s immigration minister and the earnest folks at Amnesty International:
Some stories are so odd nobody knows how to handle them. I don’t know how else to explain why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s extraordinary public feud with Amnesty International has attracted so little coverage.
Here’s a senior Conservative minister departing from the Conservatives’ normal bland talking points and unleashing a written broadside against a critic. And Kenney’s sparring partner wasn’t a predictable target. It was the Canadian branch of Amnesty, one of the most revered human rights organizations in the world. But that didn’t stop the minister from calling Amnesty’s concerns “poppycock,” “sloppy and irresponsible” and “self-congratulatory moral preening.”
Here’s what the fuss was about: last month, Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews released the names and photos of 30 fugitives who’d evaded immigration authorities since being found inadmissible because they’re believed to be complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In short, the ministers were asking the public to help track down fleeing war crimes suspects. The public has stepped up: since the ministers’ announcements, six of the 30 men have been apprehended and three of those six deported.
August 18, 2011
Omnibus bills: Canada’s equivalent to “riders” on US legislation
An omnibus bill is a collection of several individual bills that may or may not have been able to pass muster individually. It’s (from the government’s point of view) a great way to get a lot of legislative changes through parliament in relatively short order, but it encourages legislators to include their pet projects and special causes because of the decreased opportunity for opposition. The Conservative government’s proposed omnibus crime bill is a good example of this, as it is likely to incorporate warrantless data searches for police:
When Canada’s Conservatives took the most votes in the May 2011 federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that an “omnibus” security/crime bill would be introduced within 100 days. The bill would wrap up a whole host of ideas that were previously introduced as separate bills — and make individual ideas much more difficult to debate. A key part of the omnibus bill will apparently be “lawful access” rules giving police greater access to ISP and geolocation data — often without a warrant — and privacy advocates and liberals are up in arms.
Writing yesterday in The Globe & Mail, columnist Lawrence Martin said that the bill “will compel Internet service providers to disclose customer information to authorities without a court order. In other words — blunter words — law enforcement agencies will have a freer hand in spying on the private lives of Canadians.”
He quotes former Conservative public safety minister Stockwell Day, now retired, as swearing off warrantless access. “We are not in any way, shape or form wanting extra powers for police to pursue [information online] without warrants,” Day said—but there’s a new Conservative sheriff in town, and he wants his “lawful access.”
How bad were the last set of “lawful access” proposals? This bad:
Even the government’s own Privacy Commissioner is upset about the lawful access idea. On March 9, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart sent a letter to Public Safety Canada in which she and other provincial privacy officials said the bill would “give authorities access to a wide scope of personal information without a warrant; for example, unlisted numbers, e-mail account data and IP addresses. The Government itself took the view that this information was sensitive enough to make trafficking in such ‘identity information’ a Criminal Code offence. Many Canadians consider this information sensitive and worthy of protection, which does not fit with the proposed self-authorized access model.”
“In our view, law enforcement and security agency access to information linking subscribers to devices and devices to subscribers should generally be subject to prior judicial scrutiny accompanied by the appropriate checks and balances.”
H/T to Brian Switzer for the link.
How unique (and therefore how easy to track) is your web browser?
The good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have a new tool you can use to find out how easy it would be for third parties to track your browser usage, based on how it differs from others:
As you can see from my test (on a brand new machine), I have a unique browser configuration among the 1.7 million tested so far. My browser would be easy to track.
August 17, 2011
Penn Jillette: The word “God” is just another way of saying “I don’t know”
Penn is promoting his new book, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, which includes appearances on various TV shows. I suspect this is rather typical:
Last week I was interviewed for Piers Morgan’s show (which used to be Larry King’s show). Piers beat me up a bit for being an atheist (that’s his job) and then beat me up a bit for being a libertarian (also his job). He did this by asking me impossible questions, questions that none of us, Harold, Richard, me, (or Piers), could ever answer.
He started with “How did you get here?” and I started talking about my road to showbiz and atheism and he interrupted and said he meant how the universe was created. I said, “I don’t know.”
He said, “God,” an answer that meant Piers didn’t know either, but he had a word for it that was supposed to make me feel left out of his enlightened club.
Then he asked me what we could do to help poor people. I said I donated money, food, medical care, and services and he said, “No,” he meant, what could society do to solve the problem of poor people. Again, I was stumped.
He said the government had to do it, which I interpreted as another way of saying he didn’t know, but he thought that made me look mean … even though I do care and do try to help.
What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist — I don’t know. If I don’t know, I don’t believe. I don’t know exactly how we got here, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we’ll get more, but I’m not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I’m not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I’ll wait for real evidence and then I’ll believe.
August 14, 2011
Mark Steyn wants to thank Londoners for re-enacting chapter 5 of his new book
In a column at the Orange County Register, he shows how well-timed certain recent news items have been for illustrating parts of his latest book, After America:
The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book — the usual doom ‘n’ gloom stuff — and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor’s went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history. Obligingly enough they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be the initials of my book: After America. Okay, there’s not a lot of “+” in that, but you can’t have everything.
But the news cycle moves on, and a day or two later, the news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western Civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.
August 1, 2011
QotD: Redefining guilt
I’m aware that Obama, Napolitano, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a host of organized collectivists have been working hard for a long time to defame and smear everything and everybody that once made this nation great. They want as many of its people as possible to believe that knowing the Constitution, or calling upon its provisions at need, is as good as a criminal act. I have been concerned that in television dramas from CSI, through NCIS, to Castle, whenever the accused demands to see a lawyer, it’s considered a confession of guilt.
L. Neil Smith, “Madison’s Ghost”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-07-31
A quick plug for a useful EFF plug-in for Firefox
I’ve mentioned this before, but I was just reminded about it as I started using the new laptop with its new install of Firefox:
This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser’s communications with some other sites:
- Google Search
- Wikipedia
- Twitter and Identi.ca
- EFF and Tor
- Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines and lots more!
Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere by following this link.
As always, even if you’re at an HTTPS page, remember that unless Firefox displays a colored address bar and an unbroken lock icon in the bottom-right corner, the page is not completely encrypted and you may still be vulnerable to various forms of eavesdropping or hacking (in many cases, HTTPS Everywhere can’t prevent this because sites incorporate insecure third-party content).
July 29, 2011
“This is the first global human rights legislation. How can people not know about it?”
I’m ashamed to say that this was news to me:
Monday, August 1, is a holiday in Canada. Everyone knows that. But what is the name of the holiday?
[. . .]
It is “Emancipation Day.”
You’re scratching your head, aren’t you? Don’t be embarrassed. Be angry — angry that you have been denied a truly majestic story all Canadians should know and cherish.
On August 1, 1834, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. “Emancipation Day” has been celebrated ever since in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and elsewhere.
[. . .]
In 1793, a free black man named Peter Martin – who had served with Butler’s Rangers in the American Revolution – told the legislature of the abduction of Chloe Cooley, a black slave who had been bound, gagged, thrown in a boat, and taken to the United States for sale. Simcoe seized the opportunity and moved to immediately abolish slavery.
It was a radical, audacious move. And it was too much. Wealthy slaveowners in the legislature resisted and Simcoe was forced to compromise: Existing slaves would be denied their freedom but the importation of slaves would stop and the children of slaves would be freed when they reached age 25. In effect, slavery would slowly vanish.
It was not the sweeping victory Simcoe wanted. But it was the abolitionists’ first legislative victory anywhere in the British Empire.
