Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2012

The “sex traffic” meme is this decade’s version of the “Satanic panic” of the late 1980s

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

An interesting post at The Honest Courtesan on the strong similarities between the media freak-out about Satanic ritualists kidnapping children back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the current media meme about sex trafficking rings:

How well do you remember the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s and ‘90s? Do you remember when you first heard about it, and what your reactions were? Do you remember how widespread and exaggerated the claims were, and how seriously everyone took them? The reactions from believers when skeptics pointed out the tremendous absurdities? The decline and fall of the hysteria? I sure do, and if you do as well you’ve probably noticed the strong resemblance of “trafficking” hysteria to its older sibling. Both revolve around gigantic international conspiracies which supposedly abduct children into a netherworld of sexual abuse; both are conflated with adult sex work, especially prostitution and porn; both make fantastic claims of vast numbers which are not remotely substantiated by anything like actual figures from “law enforcement” agencies or any other investigative body; both rely on circular logic, claiming the lack of evidence as “proof” of the size of the conspiracy and the lengths to which its participants will go to “hide” their nefarious doings; both encourage paranoia and foment distrust of strangers, especially male strangers; etc, etc, etc.

[. . .]

Once one is able to examine the hysteria from an historical and sociological perspective, it becomes rather fascinating (though none the less frightening for those of us whose profession is being targeted by the witch hunters). For example, one can see how events that would have been interpreted one way 15 years ago are now seen through the lens of “human trafficking”; this recent trial in which members of a Somali gang were convicted for forcing young female members into prostitution would have been reported as a “gang-related violence” story in the late ‘90s, but is now labeled a “sex trafficking case”. In the ‘80s, every city in America imagined itself overrun with Satanic cultists; now it’s “human traffickers”, and there’s a creepy competition for the title of “leading hub for sex trafficking”, generally on the basis of how many interstate highways pass through or near the city (since none of them have any actual statistics to support their claims). In the past year I’ve heard New York, Dallas, Miami, Portland, Atlanta and Sacramento vying for this dubious distinction, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma is as well.

H/T to Jesse Walker for the link.

June 1, 2012

Bloomberg’s latest “nudge” experiment

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

In his Maclean’s column, Colby Cosh explains the problem with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to solve the obesity problem 32 ounces at a time:

Stopping people from exercising preferences is harm. You say Internet Commentator X doesn’t think having a Big Gulp is an important freedom? Does he not see Commentators Y through Upsilon standing right behind him, making the same case against marijuana and hijabs and labour unions and skiing?

This innate prejudice against social engineering for its own sake, which ought to be strong in liberals but is utterly absent in Bloomberg, is paired with an empirical prejudice against social engineering because of the near-inevitable consequences — chief among them being that the institutions created to enforce a for-your-own-good law wander very quickly from anyone’s good but that of the enforcers. I stacked the deck a little by mentioning the Eighteenth Amendment, because it shouldn’t form part of the justification for anything: it took literally six years [for] the U.S.A. to go from “Let’s roust these poor addicted creatures out of the saloon” to “Let’s deliberately poison thousands of Americans to death, that the majesty of the law may be respected”. But the Eighteenth Amendment is worth mentioning, because modern-day prohibitionists never feel the need to accept its lessons or even acknowledge its existence.

When Bloomberg and his deputy mayor for health are ridiculed and their volumetric crusade is ignored, whom do you suppose will end up crucified by bureaucrats in defence of their “nudge’? The logic requires it. If soft drinks really are prematurely killing thousands, and a ban on large containers is the magic answer, how far will be too far when it comes to encouraging compliance? When it comes to “nudges”, we have to recognize a distinction between what is being enforced and the means of enforcement; the mildness and restraint of the former does not guarantee that of the latter.

He also links to this wonderful piece at Hit and Run by Jacob Sullum saying “The mayor’s own pretext for the program had logical holes that Reason‘s Jacob Sullum quickly drove five tanker trucks of frappuccino through.”

May 31, 2012

Bush violated US constitution by authorizing drone strikes

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

At Reason, Judge Andrew Napolitano on the presidential “kill list” and the limits of presidential power under the constitution:

The leader of the government regularly sits down with his senior generals and spies and advisers and reviews a list of the people they want him to authorize their agents to kill. They do this every Tuesday morning when the leader is in town. The leader once condemned any practice even close to this, but now relishes the killing because he has convinced himself that it is a sane and sterile way to keep his country safe and himself in power. The leader, who is running for re-election, even invited his campaign manager to join the group that decides whom to kill.

This is not from a work of fiction, and it is not describing a series of events in the Kremlin or Beijing or Pyongyang. It is a fair summary of a 6,000-word investigative report in The New York Times earlier this week about the White House of Barack Obama. Two Times journalists, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, painstakingly and chillingly reported that the former lecturer in constitutional law and liberal senator who railed against torture and Gitmo now weekly reviews a secret kill list, personally decides who should be killed and then dispatches killers all over the world — and some of his killers have killed Americans.

[. . .]

The president cannot lawfully order the killing of anyone, except according to the Constitution and federal law. Under the Constitution, he can only order killing using the military when the U.S. has been attacked, or when an attack is so imminent and certain that delay would cost innocent American lives, or in pursuit of a congressional declaration of war. Under federal law, he can only order killing using civilians when a person has been sentenced lawfully to death by a federal court and the jury verdict and the death sentence have been upheld on appeal. If he uses the military to kill, federal law requires public reports of its use to Congress and congressional approval after 180 days.

Penn Jillette: Obama’s War on Weed

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

Old worry: the “digital divide”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

The good news is that the much-feared “digital divide” between the rich and poor never came to pass. Now the worry is rather different:

Remember the “digital divide”? Back in the 1990s, the problem was that poor people did not have enough access to computers and the Internet. Today the problem is that they have too much access. Evidently the digital divide has given way to the “time-wasting gap.” I shit you not. The New York Times reports that bridging the digital divide “created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government [naturally] now wants to fix”: “As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites.” Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure? Something must be done

QotD: A plague on both your houses!

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Protestations from the Obama side that this is all just proof that recession/depression was so much worse than any of us knew that it’s a goddamn great and good thing that Obama is helming the ship of state because if it had been one of those idiot Republicans like George W. Bush we wouldn’t have had bailouts and a stimulus that was too small to really effect the economy — even smaller than the $150 billion tax thingamajig that Bush tried in early 2008 that was really pathetic because we now know that even Obama’s $800 billion attempt was obviously too small christ it should have been two or three or even four times bigger and for god’s sake can’t we just prepare for the alien invasion that Paul Krugman — he won a Nobel Prize so just shut up already! — says will create enough of a multiplier effect to finally restart the economy and screw the debt because we’ll have thousands of years to pay that down, especially now that thank Zardoz we’ve got universal health care that will be awesome if the d-bags on the SCOTUS don’t FUBAR it and Dodd-Frank means there won’t be any fraud or dumb lending!

And of course the Republicans will counter with: See, none of this would have happened if we’d only followed George W. Bush’s disastrous big-government spending ways and expansion of major entitlements and a defense buildup because sharia law is taking over whole hamlets in Oklahoma and our plan to increase annual spending over the next decade by just $1 trillion is so much better than the Prez’s to spend $2 trillion more, especially after increasing federal outlays by 60 percent or more over the previous decade when we controlled things is exactly the tonic the economy needs right now! But seriously folks, what do you expect when you let gay marriage happen? No economy can recover from that!

Nick Gillespie, “Is the Obama Recovery Over? Or Has it Not Really Started Yet?”, Hit and Run, 2012-05-30

May 30, 2012

The end of the “predictable” China

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Robert D. Kaplan on the end of an era in geopolitical calculations:

The United States has had it easy over the past third of a century in regards to China. Washington has been able to proclaim moral superiority over the Communist Party dictatorship in Beijing, even as those very dictators provided Washington with a stable, businesslike relationship that fostered immense opportunities for American companies in China and for the American economy overall. China’s rulers, ever since Deng Xiaoping consolidated power in 1978, may have been nominally communists, but they have also been professionals and technocrats who have ruled in a self-effacing, collegial style. Yes, they may oppress dissidents, but they have also been enlightened autocrats by the standards of the suffocating rulers who have governed in the Middle East.

But the purging of the pseudo populist boss of the megacity of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, may indicate that a less predictable period in Chinese politics lies ahead. Bo was something not seen in China since Mao Zedong: a leader with real charisma. Bo may indicate that the age of the technocrats will give way to the age of politicians — and politicians, even in liberal democracies, exploit people’s emotions. That could lead to more erratic, nationalistic rulers.

[. . .]

China’s autocrats have for many years been nervously riding a domestic tiger. With communism no longer a philosophical organizing principle for the state, they have had to justify their rule by delivering double-digit annual economic growth — or close to that — to provide jobs for a potentially restive younger generation. Thus, even while China has amassed impressive new air and sea power, it has — by and large — not tried to employ that power in a particularly hostile way. China’s communist rulers have had too much domestically to worry about without creating new problems for themselves by constantly challenging the United States or its allies on the high seas. While China’s push to acquire air-sea power most specifically dates to 1996, when Beijing was humiliated by Washington’s ability to drive two aircraft carrier strike groups through waters near the Taiwan Strait, the building of a substantial air force and navy have so far been part of the natural, organic process of a new and rising great power. At least so far, it has not been particularly destabilizing to the world or regional order, unlike Iran’s push to develop a nuclear capability as part of a drive for Near Eastern leadership. China’s rulers may be dictatorial, but they are not radical and messianic.

May 29, 2012

Is junk science more credible when presented with a British accent?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

In Slate, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism to get republished in the United States:

More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products, and then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months so as to “minimize risk” from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the “researchers” and “scientists” described in media reports amounted to one person — a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.

Let’s not single out the Mancunians, though: Industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the U.K. press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to possess a scientifically validated, perfect face, while the British version of HuffPo reported on a mathematical formula for the “perfect sandwich” — produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer. Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we’ve seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra. As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations — a means of calculating the perfect horror movie, in that case. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King’s College London, who’d watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. “We only spent a couple of hours doing it,” one of them told me, “and didn’t put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is.”

I love the use of the sure-to-be-useful-frequently term “labvertisements” for this sort of science-flavoured PR spam.

A review of the War of 1812 (non-Canadian-centric version)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

The DiploMad appears to be blogging again, and for proof, here’s a neat little capsule of the War of 1812 without the Canadian aspect being treated as the most significant campaigning area of the war:

The war was brought about by British arrogance and American stupidity. The British were not reconciled to an independent United States, and could not take the place and its bombastic pronouncements about liberty seriously. They basically ignored the USA’s assertion of being a sovereign state, and proceeded to treat American ships and seaman as some sort of Brits gone rogue. The USA, for its part, could not understand that the British were in what they saw as a life-and-death struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte. We did not respect that. We reckoned we could trade and make deals with France, such as the spectacular Louisiana Purchase which filled Napoleon’s coffers and served his aim of helping create a huge potential rival to Britain, without raising British concerns or provoking them into action.

[. . .]

The British, despite the war in Europe managed to put together a more than credible military and naval force against the distant United States. The Americans, in turn, showed a talent that would serve us well in future wars by getting our act together at the last minute and putting on a damn good defense of the country. The US army, however, remained plainly horrendous throughout the war with its corrupt and politicized officer corps, and its half-baked, ill-planned and even worse executed invasion of Canada. The US also set the precedent of burning York — today’s Toronto — which led to the British burning of the nascent US capital which the army failed to defend. The army partially redeemed itself in the Battle of New Orleans, under the otherwise reprehensible Andrew Jackson (Note: Why is he on our $20 bill?)

The US navy, however, proved completely different, and did an amazing job of fighting off the much larger British navy, wreaking havoc on it, carrying the war into British waters, and even eliciting a warning from the Admiralty to the Royal Navy to avoid one-on-one combat with US ships. The US navy also fought a superb campaign on the Great Lakes which resulted in the British fleet withdrawing from those waters.

Minor quibble: the Royal Navy withdrew from Lake Erie, not from all the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario was still the scene of a major fleet-building contest with vessels of up to 130 guns under construction or entering service when the war ended.

May 27, 2012

Ron Paul’s Ten Principles of a Free Society

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

From Ron Paul’s book Liberty Defined, posted at The Daily Paul:

  1. Rights belong to individuals, not groups; they derive from our nature and can neither be granted nor taken away by government.
  2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.
  3. Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments.
  4. Government may not redistribute private wealth or grant special privileges to any individual or group.
  5. Individuals are responsible for their own actions; government cannot and should not protect us from ourselves.
  6. Government may not claim the monopoly over a people’s money and governments must never engage in official counterfeiting, even in the name of macroeconomic stability.
  7. Aggressive wars, even when called preventative, and even when they pertain only to trade relations, are forbidden.
  8. Jury nullification, that is, the right of jurors to judge the law as well as the facts, is a right of the people and the courtroom norm.
  9. All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution.
  10. Government must obey the law that it expects other people to obey and thereby must never use force to mold behavior, manipulate social outcomes, manage the economy, or tell other countries how to behave.

May 26, 2012

Does being an organic foodie increase your chances of being a total jerk?

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Baylen Linnekin at Reason on the organic foodies and the rise of anti-social snobbery among them:

Eskine knows a thing or two about the links between thought, self, other, and eating. His body of research focuses on “how our everyday embodied experiences shape our cognitive architecture.”

His latest paper, “Wholesome Foods and Wholesome Morals? Organic Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgments,” looks at whether people exposed to organic food marketing are so self-satisfied that they are less likely to express empathy toward others.

Extrapolating from existing research on “moral licensing” that found a negative relationship between altruism and salient moral identity, Eskine theorized his research would reveal “that those exposed to organic foods would help less and make harsher moral judgments compared to those exposed to non-organic foods.”

Indeed Eskine’s latest research, published last week in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, pegs organic consumers as anti-social jerks. Or at least those are the sort of stark terms that the press has used to frame Eskine’s research.

And while at least some segment of organic consumers has been painted as pretentious and elitist since even before Dave Barry was cracking timely Windows 98 jokes, Eskine says that lumping his research in with such anti-organic digs misses his point.

“I’m not arguing that organic food itself is making people harsh judgers or non-altrustic,” he tells me by email. “What the data suggest is that mere exposure to organic labeling can be enough to lead people to affirm their moral identities, which in much past research can lead people to act unethically later.

The cost of getting to space

Filed under: Economics, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

According to a tweet passed along by Tim Harford, the Dragon flight is a huge bargain:

RT @dcurtis: SpaceX’s entire history, incl. rocket design, testing, and launch operations, has cost less than Facebook paid for Instagram.

May 25, 2012

Herbert Hoover, far from a poster boy for laissez faire government

Filed under: Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

Steven Horwitz in The Freeman debunks the “high school history” notion that President Hoover was a proponent of laissez faire capitalism which caused the Great Depression. They’ve got the right culprit, but the wrong crime:

One of the most pernicious myths in the economic history of the twentieth century is the belief that the Great Depression was caused, or at least worsened, by Herbert Hoover’s dogmatic commitment to a “do nothing” laissez-faire policy in the aftermath of the stock market crash. This argument is part and parcel of the set of beliefs about the Great Depression that I have dubbed the “high school history” version of that event. (It includes the claims that laissez faire caused it, Hoover’s inaction worsened it, the New Deal did wonders, and World War II got us all the way out.) This claim about Hoover’s dedication to laissez faire is, as I have suggested, utterly false.

In fact Herbert Hoover was long known as a Progressive who favored much more government intervention in the economy. From his days with the U.S. Food Administration in World War I through his time in the 1920s as secretary of commerce, Hoover constantly pushed his beliefs that laissez faire did not work and that government must take a more active role. When the economy went south during his first year as president, it came as no surprise that he put those beliefs into action.

Hoover not only signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, as everyone knows, he also encouraged businessmen to keep wages up, expanded the real amount of government spending, reduced immigration to near zero, set up all manner of government lending facilities, and increased the budget deficit. Along with the Federal Reserve System’s failure to do its job, resulting in a 30 percent drop in the money supply, these Hoover interventions were responsible for turning what might have been a severe, but short recession into a Great Depression. So the “high school history” story is right to blame Hoover — but it does so for exactly the wrong reasons.

But it’s been a great way to tarnish free market advocates and effortlessly refute their arguments, because “everybody knows” that laissez faire doesn’t work. Our high school teachers wouldn’t have mislead us all about that, would they?

Grabbing the Dragon‘s tail

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:20

Brid-Aine Parnell at The Register on today’s successful rendezvous with the ISS:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has just made history with the first ever commercial cargoship to be captured by the International Space Station’s robotic arm.


Image from NASA TV

Flying above northwestern Australia, flight engineer Don Pettit aboard the ISS reached out with the Canadarm and grabbed the Dragon at 9.56am EDT, 14.56 GMT.

Reg staff are not sure if astronauts are given cheesy lines to say at these big moments, but Pettit had a great one ready.

“Looks like we’ve got a dragon by the tail,” he announced to Mission Control Centre in Houston.

“Looks like this sim went really well, we’re ready to turn it around and do it for real,” he joked.

“SWATting”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

This is a rather disturbing development:

At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.

When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.

They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?

I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.

Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.

Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.

The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.

Because I could have been killed.

A “prank” phonecall that could easily have gotten the victim killed. Difficult to describe that as a mere “prank”. Bordering on terrorism, if not over the line.

It actually happened. The phenomenon is called “SWATting,” because it can bring a SWAT team to your front door. SWATting is a particularly dangerous hoax in which a caller, generally a computer hacker, calls a police department to report a shooting at the home of his enemy. The caller will place this call to the police department’s business line, using Skype or a similar service, and hiding behind Internet proxies to make the call impossible to trace. Anxious police, believing they are responding to the home of an armed and dangerous man, show up at the front door pointing guns and screaming orders.

That is exactly what happened to me. It is a very dangerous hoax that could get the target killed.

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