Quotulatiousness

January 31, 2011

Showing their true colours?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

To mark the Egyptian government’s shutdown of cellphone and internet access to their angry citizenry, the US government wants to have the power to do the same. Subtle, eh?

Legislation granting the president internet-killing powers is to be re-introduced soon to a Senate committee, the proposal’s chief sponsor told Wired.com on Friday.

The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.

The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.

Got to admire the balls of brass required to introduce legislation to do something in America at exactly the same time the US government is demanding that Egypt restore their citizens’ internet access. Breathtaking hypocrisy.

Update: By way of American Digest, a most appropriate image:

January 29, 2011

Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance gets some international attention

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

An article in The Economist reports on the state of play in the Alberta political realm:

Mr Stelmach seems to have been pushed out by his own party’s fiscal hawks, led by Ted Morton, his finance minister. The premier wanted to balance the budget gradually, without big cuts to services. Mr Morton, a leader of the party’s right-wing brought in by Mr Stelmach last year, wants fiscal balance now. Mr Morton and his allies in the party worry about the rise of the Wildrose Alliance, a libertarian, small-government group which won its first seat in the legislature in a by-election in 2009 but has since attracted three Conservative defectors and drawn close to the ruling party in some opinion polls. Its leader, Danielle Smith, sparkles in comparison to the Conservatives’ dull suits.

More surprisingly, the left is also showing signs of life in the shape of the Alberta Party, a moribund group newly revived last October by two smaller outfits. It gained a voice in the legislature when a former Liberal elected as an independent said he would represent the new party. The Liberals have been shunned in Alberta since the 1980s when a Liberal federal government imposed an energy plan widely seen by westerners as benefiting the rest of Canada at their expense. But with its new and different banner, the Alberta Party will hope to attract centrists dismayed by the Conservatives’ impending lurch further to the right.

Mr Morton, beaten by Mr Stelmach in a leadership election in 2006, may now take over as Conservative leader. He might steal the Wildrose ground. But Albertans have a habit of rejecting former governing parties so decisively that they disappear from the political landscape. That happened with the Social Credit party in 1971 and the United Farmers in 1935.

Wired How-to: Get back on the internet after a government shut-down

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:47

A post at the Wired How-to wiki on getting back online after your government attempts to shut down internet access:

Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.

This is what happened in Egypt January 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government has cut off approximately 88 percent of the country’s internet access. What do you do without Internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.

This article is part of a wiki anyone can edit. If you have advice to add, please log in and contribute.

January 28, 2011

Egypt goes dark, shuts down DNS servers

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Updates added to the bottom of this post

The Egyptian government is attempting to foil protests by eliminating internet traffic. Renesys reports:

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

I have seen very little traffic coming to this site from Egypt before the DNS server shutdown (under 40 unique visitors last year, according to FlagCounter), so the following information isn’t likely to be of direct assistance to Egyptians, but hopefully some can be filtered onwards.

The first suggestion (from Shereef Abbas) is to use Google’s Public DNS 2 to change “your DNS ‘switchboard’ operator from your ISP to Google Public DNS”.

John Perry Barlow suggests “more tools to access blocked websites and maintain anonymity”: http://jan25.in/how-to-access-blocked-websites-by-government and https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en.

Update: Vice President Joe Biden appears to be missing a wonderful opportunity to shut up.

Biden urged non-violence from both protesters and the government and said: “We’re encouraging the protesters to – as they assemble, do it peacefully. And we’re encouraging the government to act responsibly and – and to try to engage in a discussion as to what the legitimate claims being made are, if they are, and try to work them out.” He also said: “I think that what we should continue to do is to encourage reasonable… accommodation and discussion to try to resolve peacefully and amicably the concerns and claims made by those who have taken to the street. And those that are legitimate should be responded to because the economic well-being and the stability of Egypt rests upon that middle class buying into the future of Egypt.”

Egypt’s protesters, if they’re paying attention to Biden at all, will certainly be wondering which of their demands thus far have been illegitimate.

Update, the second: Live blogging the protests at the Guardian. And several sources are recommending the coverage streamed online from Al Jazeera’s English-language site.

Update, the third: The effectiveness of Egypt’s internet blackout shows why giving the American president (or any national leader) an internet “kill switch” is such a bad idea. To most of us, anyway. I’m sure that to some people it’s an argument in favour.

Update, the fourth: National Post has a graphic showing the locations of the reported activity:


Click to enlarge

January 27, 2011

Unanticipated outcome of increasing sexual equality

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

Caroline May is almost right in the title to this article: “Stay vertical a bit longer, ladies: Study claims men are winning the game of love”.

It’s not all men who benefit, even if we just talk about men who are unmarried and not in a long-term relationship. The men who benefit from this development are the kind of men who already had high “market value” before the days of sexual equality:

“Girl power” might have brought women and girls victories in academics and sports but, as a recent book out of the University of Texas reports, an unintended consequence of women’s success has given men a leg up in the game of love.

Based on research published in their new book,“Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, sociologists from the University of Texas at Austin, have found that with women becoming more educated and professionally successful than ever, it has become extremely difficult for them to find a committed man.

Part of the problem is that women traditionally have looked to have relationships with higher-status men (dating or marrying “up”). Now that women are achieving higher financial, academic, and professional status themselves, they’re finding a much-reduced group of men who meet their new (higher) expectations, but also facing much more competition from other women who have also achieved higher status. In economic terms, the market for high status men has more potential buyers chasing fewer sellers. Prices (in this case, willingness to offer sex earlier) must rise to compensate.

January 26, 2011

Is Julian Assange a modern Senator Joe McCarthy?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Jim Goad asks if the actions of WikiLeaks are the modern-day equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade:

Upon superficial inspection, still-living superstar hacker Julian Assange and long-dead commie-stalker Joseph McCarthy seem like natural-born enemies and political polar opposites. Technically, the Arctic and Antarctica are polar opposites, too, but are they really that different?

Comparing anyone to infamous anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy, as he is popularly understood in pop culture, is to accuse them of being a torch-carrying megalomaniac with a sociopathic disregard for the damage wrought by their ruthless, Spanish Inquisition-style paranoid purges, persecutions, pogroms, and perennial pickin’ on people. “McCarthyism” is considered a smear because we all must admit it was a shameful moment in American history when some upstart cheesehead Senator dared to suggest the American government was being infiltrated with communist sympathizers. Blot from your minds forever the fact that certain Soviet “cables” decrypted after McCarthy’s death seem to have at least partially vindicated him, and let us never teach in our public schools that communist governments murdered at least a hundred million human beings.

H/T to Ilkka for the link.

January 25, 2011

Did Ayn Rand experience “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:29

Patia Stephens investigates whether Ayn Rand and her husband ever took social security or medicare benefits:

Critics of Social Security and Medicare frequently invoke the words and ideals of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the fiercest critics of federal insurance programs. But a little-known fact is that Ayn Rand herself collected Social Security. She may also have received Medicare benefits.

An interview recently surfaced that was conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute with a social worker who says she helped Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, sign up for Social Security and Medicare in 1974.

[. . .]

According to a spokesman in the Baltimore headquarters of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Rand and O’Connor were eligible for both Part A, which provides hospital coverage, and Part B, medical. The spokesman said their eligibility for Part B means they did apply for Medicare; however, he said he was not authorized to release any documentation and referred the request to the CMS New York regional office. That office said they could not locate any records related to Rand and O’Connor.

January 24, 2011

Recognizing the right to self-defence

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Lorne Gunter wants our government to recognize that Canadians have a right to self-defence:

Canadian officialdom is conducting an all-out assault against self-defence. Quite simply, few politicians, Crown prosecutors, judges, law professors and police commanders believe ordinary Canadians have any business using force to defend themselves, their loved ones, homes, farms or businesses.

The latest example of the campaign against self-defence comes from southern Ontario. In August, retired crane operator Ian Thomson, who lives near Port Colborne, awoke early in the morning to find masked men attempting to burn his house down with him in it. When he fired at them with a licensed handgun he had stored in a safe, he was charged.

How out-of-touch are police and prosecutors when you are not even allowed to defend yourself and your property from thugs attempting to incinerate you? Their attitude seems to be that it is better to die waiting for police to respond than to take matters into your own hands.

[. . .]

When Canada became independent at Confederation in 1867, Canadians retained the rights they had at the time as British subjects. These included three “absolute rights”: the right to personal liberty, the right to private property and the right to self-defence, up to and including the right to kill an attacker or burglar.

William Blackstone, Britain’s famous constitutional expert, argued the right to self-defence included the right to kill even an agent of the king found on one’s property after dark, uninvited. He also traced the right to armed self-defence back to the time of King Canute (995–1035) when subjects could be fined for failing to keep weapons for their own protection.

January 22, 2011

How Big Government fans cast their arguments

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

L.A. Liberty rounds up the rhetorical conventions of Big Government sympathizers:

With discussions of “rhetoric” in the air, I thought it timely to propose what I have observed — from online discussions, family get-togethers, and everything in between — as the archetypal rhetorical conventions of big government sympathizers (i.e. the left, generally, though not exclusively):

* deflections (altering or averting the basis of the discussion to a different but seemingly related topic),
* assertions of pathos (appeals to one’s emotions, usually in the form of a sad hypothetical or a specific personal account, intended to either pity a concession or portray the opposition as a monster; this could also take the form of fear mongering),
* assertions of ethos (attempts to find hypocrisy in the opposition’s position, either by alleging that a different position held by the opposition is counter to their opposition’s current position, or by simply alleging “You would sing a different tune if it were you [or other person you care about] who needed [said government program]”)
* ad hominem attacks (related to pathos, such an attack charges either the opposition or another person who shares the opposition’s position in order to render an argument invalid, this often takes the form of accusations of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry),
* straw men (absurd conclusions, ostensibly based on the opposition’s argument, created in order to be refuted)
and perhaps most common of all…
* non-sequiturs (similar to straw men, these are failures in logic that assume incorrect conclusions; often a form of reducto ad absurdum based on incomplete or incorrect data)

These conventions can be explained by what is arguably the greatest weakness of big government sympathizers: a lack of reasoned thought and creativity that is the result of their inability to look beyond the status quo. In other words, because government does it, they have a hard time envisioning how it could be done without government.

January 20, 2011

QotD: The ongoing retreat of freedom of speech in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

It used to be there actually had to be a violent protest before public institutions caved in and cancelled controversial events. That was unjustifiable, too. Police and officials should always seek to protect law-abiding speakers and organizers from the angry mob. Those who seek to disrupt events just because they disagree with the speakers should be the ones inconvenienced, not those exercising their constitutional rights.

Now, though, it seems the mere whiff of protest is enough for officialdom to bow to would-be protestors’ demands. Get together a group of unhinged radicals or zealots in someone’s rumpus room, make a couple of angry phone calls and — poof! — you can get your way and silence free speech and free assembly. Organizers, especially those connected with public institutions such as universities, museums and galleries, apparently care not a whit about free expression or individual choice. Their first instinct is to crater to protestors; let the forces of oppression and extremism have their way. Forget about preserving democracy and open debate, officials will act as the forces of censorship want.

Some of this has to do with the increased anger and vehemence of protestors, no doubt. In recent years, young lefties in particular have convinced themselves that only their positions are fact-based and only their positions can save the world. All other opinions are lies, as well as being threats to mankind and the planet. Therefore they are justified in any action they take to stymie opposing views, which they also believe are unworthy of free speech protection. They truly believe they are doing a public service when they shout down speakers or force the cancellation of events by smashing windows or jostling attendees outside the doors.

Lorne Gunter, “We’ve become a wimpy state, as well as a nanny state”, National Post, 2011-01-20

January 17, 2011

Modern updates to Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Nicholas @ 09:03

I’ve always been a big fan of Ambrose Bierce’s collection of definitions, The Devil’s Dictionary. Many of his definitions ended up in various places in my original quotations website, as more than a century later, they were still both funny and true.

Paul Bonneau has a list of updates in the Bierce tradition:

A Cynic’s Political Dictionary

Democracy: Mob rule.

Republic: A euphemism for “police state”. See “Police State”. Also, a geographical region in which representative government is practiced. See “Representative Government”.

Representative Government: A refinement in Democracy in which a mob of people select the least moral among them, to police their morals.

Representative: A politician who claims to be able to simultaneously represent two other people who hate each other’s guts. See “Politician”.

Senator: A politician who spends more time drunk. See “Politician”.

Election: A type of circus, provided for entertainment and for giving a veneer of legitimacy to politicians. See “Politician”.

Politician: A euphemism for “liar”.

Public Servant: A euphemism for “master”.

Voter: A euphemism for “slave”.

Media: People whose job it is to propagate politicians’ lies far and wide.

Political party: A collection of people who participate in mindless team sports in an election. See “Election”.

Democrat: A Republican who claims to care. See “Republican”.

Republican: A Democrat who claims to support liberty. See “Democrat”.

Minarchist: An Anarchist in training. See “Anarchist”.

Anarchist: A slave suffering slavery burn-out.

Government: An amalgamation of masters.

State (or Country): An amalgamation of masters and slaves. Also, a plantation.

Police: Overseers on the plantation; also, tax collectors.

Taxes: A euphemism for “plunder”.

Police State: Typically refers to a country other than the one you happen to be a slave in. Also, a place where other people mind your business.

Jail: A jobs program for jailers.

School: A jobs program for teachers.

Teacher: One who turns children into voters for the government. See “Voter”.

January 16, 2011

Caledonia discussed on “The Agenda”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 22:13

Publius has a post up with the interview of Christie Blatchford, author of Helpless on Steve Paikin’s TVO show The Agenda.

January 13, 2011

Offensensitivity, the Canadian disease

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:46

Banned on the radio in Canada, but still (for the moment) legal on the internet:

Update, 14 January: I’ve been informed that this video isn’t playing for some, and it’s not working for me now either. I guess it’s another one of those content licensing issues. So I guess I’ll have to make this change:

Banned on the radio in Canada, but still (for the moment) legal on the internet. Banned on the radio in Canada, AND on the internet.

January 6, 2011

Drug-sniffing dogs nowhere near as accurate as billed

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:17

Everyone loves dogs, right? They’re “man’s best friend”. They’re also a significant part of the war on drugs. And they’re far from infallible:

Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

For something as important in the arsenal of drug warriors, drug-sniffing dogs and their handlers don’t appear to have training standards of any consistency:

But even advocates for the use of drug-sniffing dogs agree with experts who say many dog-and-officer teams are poorly trained and prone to false alerts that lead to unjustified searches. Leading a dog around a car too many times or spending too long examining a vehicle, for example, can cause a dog to give a signal for drugs where there are none, experts said.

“If you don’t train, you can’t be confident in your dog,” said Alex Rothacker, a trainer who works with dozens of local drug-sniffing dogs. “A lot of dogs don’t train. A lot of dogs aren’t good.”

The dog teams are not held to any statutory standard of performance in Illinois or most other states, experts and dog handlers said, though private groups offer certification for the canines.

No standards for training? Lucrative police department budgets? Nope, no possible way that unscrupulous folks would ever take advantage of that opening.

December 17, 2010

QotD: “all players in the game have revealed themselves to be interventionists”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:21

. . . all players in the game have revealed themselves to be interventionists. (Okay, we knew this already but confirmation is nice.) Regardless of party, they see the economy as something to fix by turning a knob here, pulling a lever there, and stepping on a pedal over yonder in order to get the desired performance: higher consumer spending, lower unemployment, increased investment, and so on. It’s as though the economy were a machine in need of adjustments and a few quarts of oil. But an economy is not a machine. It’s a network of people engaged in myriad exchanges of goods and services — pursuing end-oriented activities informed by subjective values and expectations. Such information is largely unavailable to politicians, bureaucrats, and their economic advisers.

With unemployment officially at 9.8 percent, the economy indeed remains in the doldrums. None of the palliatives that George W. Bush or Obama tried has worked, but instead of realizing that government and its corporate-state policies are the obstacles to a flourishing economy, the ruling elite remains committed to the managed economy. So it’s decided not to raise taxes — for two years — and to reduce the employee payroll tax — for one year. These expiration dates are signs of political management. Understanding the necessity of a freed market would lead one to call for permanent — not temporary — government retrenchment.

Some questions were apparently overlooked. If tax rates may go up in two years, why make tax-sensitive long-term plans? If the payroll tax is to be two points lower in 2011, that implies it will most likely be two points higher in 2012. Will people spend the extra money next year or save it in anticipation of the tax increase to come? At any rate, they will need to make an unpleasant adjustment in their household economies on January 1, 2012. People do think long term, even if politicians don’t.

Something worth noting about the debate is that there was scarcely an acknowledgment that money subject to taxation belongs to someone and not the State. You’d think it magically appears in a common pot and the government’s job is to ladle it out effectively and fairly. I can recall hearing only one member of Congress say, “It’s their money,” during a television interview about why tax rates shouldn’t go up on high-income people.

Sheldon Richman, “A Boost for the Managed Economy: What did you expect?”, The Freeman, 2010-12-17

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