Quotulatiousness

October 29, 2010

Would KFC’s Double Down have been a hit without the Food Police panic?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Lorne Gunter salutes KFC and their surprise hit menu item:

Way to go KFC! Your Double Down sandwich has the health police in a tizzy. Those preachy, prancing, eat-your-peas pokenoses can’t decide whether to tax you, shield their children’s eyes from you or send you to re-education camp — or perhaps all three at once.

I’m am happy to hear your new bun-less concoction is your most successful new-product launch in company history. May the marketing mastermind who came up with the Double-D get an unhealthy bonus.

To be honest, I can’t even imagine trying one — two deep-fried chicken breasts wrapped around two strips of bacon, two slices of processed cheese and some sauce doesn’t appeal to me — except maybe as a dare; a Double Down Dare. Still, I am genuinely pleased that you have had the chicken balls to come out with an item that thumbs its nose so completely at conventional public-health wisdom.

I’ll never eat one myself, but I cheer on the spirit of those who tell the Nanny State’s food police where to go.

“When I was taking dope, I was fully convinced that my body is my temple”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

The longevity of Keith Richards is a point of bafflement for drug warriors and rock groupies alike:

The Rolling Stone’s autobiography reveals a lifetime of substance abuse. Why on earth hasn’t it killed him?

His name is synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll excess, his memoirs detail a lifetime spent ingesting a Herculean quantity of illegal drugs and he only gave up cocaine, aged 62, after he split his head open falling from a tree while foraging for coconuts.

At 66, Keith Richards’ continued survival is a source of widespread bafflement.

According to addiction expert Dr Robert Lefever, director of the Promis recovery centre in Richards’ native Kent, there is only one possible explanation for his longevity: “He must have the constitution of an ox.”

October 28, 2010

Help some Canadian bloggers against “lawfare”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

Richard Warman is suing several Canadian bloggers (among many, many suits he’s launched), including Kathy Shaidle:

As many of you know, I — along with Ezra Levant and others — are already being sued by former Canadian “Human Rights” Commission employee Richard Warman.

Now my husband Arnie — a.k.a. the blogger BlazingCatFur — is also being sued by Warman, also for criticizing his activities at the CHRC.

Warman is suing for $500,000.

Arnie has already spent $10,000 in legal fees. We’ve put off asking for help for more than a year, but we now are coming to you for assistance.

Among the issues in the latest suit is the claim that merely linking to a “far right website” (in this case, SteynOnline) can be considered actionable.

New Orleans to abandon “crime camera” network

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:53

New Orleans installed a multi-million dollar camera network to try to reduce crime. It hasn’t been a good investment:

In seven years, New Orleans’ crime camera program has yielded six indictments: three for crimes caught on video and three for bribes and kickbacks a vendor is accused of paying a former city official to sell the cameras to City Hall.

Given that ignominious track record and the millions the city has paid for a camera network that rarely worked, Mayor Mitch Landrieu unceremoniously pulled the plug on the project Thursday.

“Most of us can agree that based on the way that they were installed, based on the way that they operated and the way that they were not maintained, that they were not a good investment,” Landrieu said as he announced his proposal to scratch the program from the city budget. The budget requires City Council approval.

For now, the cameras will stay in place, but won’t be maintained. Landrieu said he wants to wait to see if they are ever something they could use again before taking them down.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

October 27, 2010

Why can’t Chuck get his business off the ground?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:13

October 25, 2010

In praise of Sir Wilfrid Laurier

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:04

One of the few Canadian prime ministers I can admit a genuine fondness for, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, gets a bit of recognition:

Last May in a casual dinner conversation with Canadian libertarians in Vancouver, I named the better presidents and prime ministers, respectively, of the United States and Great Britain. It suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t name a single Canadian counterpart.

So I asked my dinner friends, “Among Canada’s political leaders, did you ever have a Grover Cleveland or a William Ewert Gladstone, a prime minister who believed in liberty and defended it?”

One name emerged, almost in unison: Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Embarrassed by my ignorance, I had to admit I had never heard of him. Never mind that he’s the guy with the bushy hair on the Canadian five-dollar bill; I just never noticed. Now that I’ve done a little research, I’m a fan.

Laurier’s political resume is impressive: fourth-longest-serving prime minister in Canada’s history (1896–1911, the longest unbroken term of office of all 22 PMs). Forty-five years in the House of Commons, an all-time record. Longest-serving leader of any Canadian political party (almost 32 years). Across Canada to this day, he is widely regarded as one of the country’s greatest statesmen.

It’s not his tenure in government that makes Laurier an admirable figure. It’s what he stood for while he was there. He really meant it when he declared, “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality” and “Nothing will prevent me from continuing my task of preserving at all cost our civil liberty.”

Laurier was the last Liberal leader who actually believed in “classic” liberalism, not the warmed-over socialism of later and current Liberal thought. We could use another Laurier today.

October 23, 2010

Has Molly Norris become an un-person to the Society for Professional Journalists?

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Matt Welch sees little positive effort and much bitchiness from one of the organizations that should have been front-and-centre to help Molly Norris:

On Sept. 15, it was announced that Molly Norris, the Seattle-based alt-weekly cartoonist who suggested, then eventually backed away from and repudiated, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” protest against Comedy Central censoring bits of a South Park episode, had gone into hiding with the FBI’s assistance so as to hopefully avoid being murdered by Islamic assassins. It was a dark, dark day for American journalism and the freedom of expression. On Sept. 20, the Washington Examiner newspaper wrote an editorial criticizing the professional journalism/free speech community for its comparative silence on the issue.

[. . .]

I don’t expect journalism organizations to share my priorities. But I do expect them to do more than raise an eyebrow when a cartoonist goes into hiding after being threatened with death, then act all bitchy when someone calls them out on it.

October 21, 2010

QotD: Linguistic voids and what they say about that culture

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

I thought a bit more about how languages differ on how they assign words to concepts and how this affects the thought processes of people who think in those languages. For example, imagine if some language had only one word that meant both “buy” and “steal”, and you had to express the notion of free markets to them. Yet equally absurd examples abound in English that, despite its huge vocabulary, still uses one word “love” to express how newlyweds love each other, a parent loves a child, a Southerner loves good barbeque and a liberal loves Che Guevara, even though all four are utterly different things. Equally oddly, the verb “play” is used for poker, hopscotch, trumpet and Hamlet: maybe this somehow makes sense for native speakers, but in Finnish all four are different words. Another gap in English that I find ever stranger the more I think about it is how you have to say “extended family” since English does not have a separate word for this hugely important concept (at least I have never heard of it). Such gaps reveal a lot about the speakers who develop the language; for example, recall how the Chinese have one word “crisatunity” to mean both crisis and opportunity, Russians have no word for “freedom” and the French lack the word for an “entrepreneur”.

Ilkka, “A word for everything and everything in a word”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2010-10-21

October 20, 2010

Shocker: terrorists now free to take photos of public buildings!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:51

<sarc>Speaking of giving terrorists a free ride, some liberal lame-brain has granted terrorists the right to take photographs of public buildings:

The New York Civil Liberties Union and Libertarian activist Antonio Musumeci just won a court case that affirms the right of photographers to take pictures and record video out front of federal courthouses. The US federal government settled the case by apologizing to Musumeci for his arrest, acknowledging that it is legal to record at courthouses, and promising to issue guidelines to federal officers explaining this fact to them.

Amazing. Next you’ll be telling me that just anyone can now brazenly take photos of any federal building at all!</sarc>

“We got an opt-out!”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:39

I’ve said before that I’ve been avoiding going anywhere by plane for the last few years, but I didn’t realize the security theatre also applied to aircrew:

My name is Michael Roberts, and I am a pilot for ExpressJet Airlines, Inc., based in Houston (that is, I still am for the time being). This morning as I attempted to pass through the security line for my commute to work I was denied access to the secured area of the terminal building at Memphis International Airport. I have passed through the same line roughly once per week for the past four and a half years without incident. Today, however, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at this checkpoint were using one of the new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) systems that are currently being deployed at airports across the nation. These are the controversial devices featured by the media in recent months, albeit sparingly, which enable screeners to see beneath people’s clothing to an extremely graphic and intrusive level of detail (virtual strip searching). Travelers refusing this indignity may instead be physically frisked by a government security agent until the agent is satisfied to release them on their way in what is being touted as an “alternative option” to AIT. The following is a somewhat hastily drafted account of my experience this morning.

As I loaded my bags onto the X-ray scanner belt, an agent told me to remove my shoes and send them through as well, which I’ve not normally been required to do when passing through the standard metal detectors in uniform. When I questioned her, she said it was necessary to remove my shoes for the AIT scanner. I explained that I did not wish to participate in the AIT program, so she told me I could keep my shoes and directed me through the metal detector that had been roped off. She then called somewhat urgently to the agents on the other side: “We got an opt-out!” and also reported the “opt-out” into her handheld radio. On the other side I was stopped by another agent and informed that because I had “opted out” of AIT screening, I would have to go through secondary screening. I asked for clarification to be sure he was talking about frisking me, which he confirmed, and I declined. At this point he and another agent explained the TSA’s latest decree, saying I would not be permitted to pass without showing them my naked body, and how my refusal to do so had now given them cause to put their hands on me as I evidently posed a threat to air transportation security (this, of course, is my nutshell synopsis of the exchange). I asked whether they did in fact suspect I was concealing something after I had passed through the metal detector, or whether they believed that I had made any threats or given other indications of malicious designs to warrant treating me, a law-abiding fellow citizen, so rudely. None of that was relevant, I was told. They were just doing their job.

I’m not surprised that they refused him entry after he declined to participate in the latest act of security theatre . . . but I wonder if aircrew have not — until now — been required to go through the full indignity that awaited mere travellers if they refused AIT screening.

H/T to Jon Henke for the link.

October 18, 2010

QotD: The primary achievement of modern schools

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

They were right — although I had to see it for myself before I fully grasped the magnitude of the phenomenon — children are learning machines, more or less in the same sense that sharks are eating machines.

The only phenomenon more astonishing than that is the way the public school system manages to kick, stomp, and crush a child’s inherent curiosity and love of learning, often destroying it altogether by the third or fourth grade. Yes, children are learning machines. The fact that government schools have managed to condition them against learning is an astonishing — if wholly negative — feat, achieved at the unspeakable cost of countless hundreds of billions of dollars.

Nobody has any choices in the matter. The government’s schools are underwritten by the kind of theft we call taxation, and nothing good can ever come of that. Their little desks are filled by a kind of conscription. The entire institution is administered and operated by unionized net tax consumers, who savagely resist any attempt to objectively assess their work and reward (or punish) them on that basis.

I’d like to have a nickel for every time I’ve had to listen to school administrators inviting parents to participate in the education of their own children — and then complaining when parents actually do it.

They want you to participate, all right, but only on their terms. They don’t want you questioning their policies and practices. They want you to validate whatever they do to your kids, to provide them with what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim”. And if you won’t do that, or if you won’t sit down and shut up — or better yet, just go away — then they identify you as “problem parents” and “trouble-makers”.

L. Neil Smith, “Salt on the Ruins: A Chapter from the Forthcoming Where We Stand“, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-16

Paramilitary police raids in the United States

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

The Cato Institute provides an interactive map of paramilitary police raids:


View Original Map and Database

Click on each marker on the map for a description of the incident and sources. Markers are precise in cases where the address of an incident was reported. Where media reports indicate only a town or neighborhood, markers are located at the closest post office, city hall, or landmark. Incident descriptions and outcomes are kept as current as possible.

Other map features:

– Using the “plus” and “minus” buttons in the map’s upper left-hand corner, users can zoom in on the map to street-level, as well as switch between street map and satellite views. In some large metropolitan areas, there are so many incidents in such close proximity that they tend to overlap unless viewed on a small scale (try zooming in on New York City, for example).

– Users may isolate the incidents by type by clicking on the colored markers in the key (see only “death of an innocent” markers, for example).

– The search function just below the map produces printable descriptions of the raids plotted on the map, and is sortable by state, year, and type of incident.

L. Neil Smith finds some new hope

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Taken from a speech for delivery at a Hollywood convention:

Once again we find ourselves standing at the brink. In just a few more days, our neighbors will choose — for themselves, and, to an unfortunate degree, for us — whether they want to live brave and free or would rather cower with the boot-heel of collectivism on their necks.

As individuals, we can vote, too, which may or may not be a futile effort — it’s been a subject of debate within our movement for three decades. However that may be, we libertarians, as a movement, have little or no power to change the course of events — a virtual river of blood — flowing violently all around us. The best we can do is to plan for what will come afterward, no matter what that may turn out to be.

[. . .]

And then, as I said, something happened, something that many of you may sneer at, but something, I believed (and still do) will prove to have been of unprecedented historical importance. Even more than that, it made politics exciting and fun all over again — I found myself laughing at the political situation for the first time in months.

John McCain had accepted Sarah Palin as his personal savior.

It didn’t work, of course, not for McCain. He was beyond saving. But Sarah spiced up the American political scene again, rendered it refreshingly unpredictable, and managed to make an ass of Barack Obama and all his works. Sure, she’s a Republican — although plenty of Republicans despise her, and she despises plenty of them. She’s even put a few of them in jail. In that respect, she’s Barry Goldwater’s revenge.

She’s a church-lady, war-supporter, anti-abortionist, and I, atheist and anarchist that I am, count myself as none of those things. But she’s solidly, provenly, for limited government and unafraid to be photographed with a sport-utility rifle in her hands, and empty cases in the air overhead. She hunts animals bigger than she is, and she’s cute.

Get over it.

October 17, 2010

P.J. O’Rourke interview

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

Parts 2 and 3 are at Liberty Pundits.

October 16, 2010

Court makes a mockery of “freedom of speech” in bail conditions

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

I’m not particularly fond of the organizers of the G20 protests (see the general tone of my posts during the G20 meetings for proof), but this court decision is obscene:

Alex Hundert’s words will not appear in this story.

Unlike other Canadians, he’s not allowed to speak to the press.

At least that’s how a court interpreted the new bail conditions placed on Hundert, an accused ringleader of violence during the G20 summit in June.

“It’s staggering in its breadth,” said John Norris, Hundert’s lawyer. “I’ve never heard of anything as broad as that.”

Hundert, 30, faces three counts of conspiracy pertaining to G20 activities, and was released in July on $100,000 bail with about 20 terms, including not participating in any public demonstration.

Shortly after his release, the Crown filed an appeal to revoke his bail. Superior Court Justice Todd Ducharme ruled against that appeal.

On Sept. 17, shortly after Ducharme’s decision, Hundert was arrested for participating in a panel discussion at Ryerson University — which police deemed to be a public demonstration.

On Wednesday Hundert agreed to the new, more stringent, bail conditions.

They include a clarification of the no-demonstration rule, to include a restriction on planning, participating in, or attending any public event that expresses views on a political issue.

This is just wrong. No government or court should have this power: he’s an accused criminal, but he has not been convicted of a crime. This is an unjustifiable restriction of his freedom and should never have been imposed.

H/T to Darian Worden for the link.

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