October 27, 2010
Why can’t Chuck get his business off the ground?
October 25, 2010
In praise of Sir Wilfrid Laurier
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?
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
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!
<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!”
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
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
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.
October 17, 2010
October 16, 2010
Court makes a mockery of “freedom of speech” in bail conditions
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.
“Officer Bubbles” sues YouTube for defamation
The Globe and Mail reports that police constable Adam Josephs has launched a suit against YouTube in an attempt to force them to divulge the identities of posters and commenters:
A Toronto police officer whose stiff upper lip made him an inadvertent YouTube sensation and a symbol of police heavy-handedness at the G20 protests has launched a $1.2-million defamation lawsuit against the website.
Constable Adam Josephs was nicknamed “Officer Bubbles” after a video surfaced of him online admonishing a young protester during the summit for blowing bubbles.
[. . .]
The original video shows Constable Josephs and a number of other officers holding a police line near Queen Street West in front of a crowd of protesters, when a young woman begins blowing bubbles in front of them.
“If the bubble touches me, you’re going to be arrested for assault,” he tells her sternly. When she questions him about the warning, he continues to warn her.
“You want to bait the police. You get that on me or that other officer and it gets in her eyes, it’s a detergent. You’ll be going into custody.”
The video of “Officer Bubbles” intimidating the dangerous bubble-blower:
Update, 18 October: By way of the Twitter feed of Colby Cosh, here’s the link to the actual document.
October 10, 2010
Amsterdam failing to protect its gay population from attack
Ezra Levant looks at the worsening situation in Amsterdam for gay and lesbian residents:
If you think Amsterdam is the gay capital of Europe, you’re half-right, but 10 years out of date. Today it’s the gay-bashing capital of Europe.
Because Amsterdam isn’t just gay. Now it’s Muslim, too. A million Moroccans and Turks have immigrated to the Netherlands, and sharia law rules the streets.
If you doubt it, then you haven’t been paying attention. Actually, that’s not fair. Gay-bashing is front-page news only when it’s committed by a straight, white male.
The media is terribly uncomfortable writing about gay-bashing by minorities. It’s the same reason why Canadian feminists are so eerily quiet about honour killings of Muslim girls.
According to an “offender study” by the University of Amsterdam, there were 201 reports of anti-gay violence in that city in 2007 and researchers believe for every reported case there are as many as 25 unreported ones. Two thirds of the predators are Muslim youths.
The violence couldn’t be more brazen. It’s not in the back alleys in the dark, it’s in the heart of the city, often in broad daylight. It’s a direct dare to the Dutch government to show who rules the streets.
We’ve already seen how wary the Dutch government has been about protecting freedom of speech (when the speech offended Muslim sensibilities). Now we’re starting to see how little protection from violence the police can offer. The Netherlands have had a reputation for tolerance for decades, but it won’t last much longer if the authorities don’t start cracking down on this kind of flagrant criminality.
October 9, 2010
QotD: The American car
In making automobiles more safe and ecologically friendly, we’ve often lost sight of the basic cost benefit factor — I think this is probably more true in the safety than in ecology — and one of the things that is precious about the American automobile industry is that it provided a cheap and reliable means of transportation for practically everyone in society, and then when those vehicles became used vehicles, it gave cheap and mostly reliable transportation to everybody, to the point where the Oakies in the dust bowl were in Model T fords and not on foot. When we undertake to make the automobile this humming, electronic device that provides a perfect egg of safety and closure and creates no adverse externalities (as people like to say these days) we lose sight of the purpose of the damn thing in the first place. And the purpose was to allow freedom — freedom and horizontal mobility to the masses. That’s why cash for clunkers was just sinful. You’re taking a bunch of perfectly good vehicles, inexpensive vehicles that could be used by people without much in the way of material means, and crushing them. If someone took a valuable resource — something that could really be useful to people — and destroyed it, they’d be in jail if they were private citizens.
P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke Likes Puppies and America, Dislikes Flip Flops at the Airport [Texas Book Festival Interview]”, Austinist.com, 2010-10-08
October 7, 2010
Isn’t this a barbaric practice for a free society?
I’m generally fine with our American neighbours, our societies are similar in so many respects, but this whole “Pledge of Allegiance” thing is something that I just don’t get. A country that theoretically prides itself on being the “home of the free” can still put you in jail for failing to recite it on command?
Danny Lampley (who clerked for me in law school), was jailed by Chancery Court Judge Littlejohn in Tupelo for failing to recite the pledge of allegiance in open court today. Danny was one of the local lawyers who represented the plaintiff in the Pontotoc school prayer case years ago, working with the ACLU and People for the American Way.
I’m informed that Danny rose and was respectful, but did not recite the pledge.
Is this just Judge Littlejohn being a prick, or does this sort of thing happen regularly? What penalty would he get for not singing the national anthem?
H/T to Radley Balko for the link.
