August 10, 2009
At the intersection of Unsound Policy and Political Expediency
August 7, 2009
August 4, 2009
California looking for all kinds of new sources of income
Neil Gaiman has some issues with the California tax department (individual Twitter messages, in sequence):
It wasn’t identity theft screwing up my credit rating. Twas the idiot state of idiot california deciding I lived there & wasn’t paying tax.
I know that California is bankrupt and stupid, but ohhhh the stupidness and ohhh the cupidity. Twerps.
They decided I lived there & wasn’t paying tax & took out a Tax Lien; then cancelled it when we yelled, but it lives on in the credit rpt.
Right. I just spoke to a nice man who pretended he wasn’t in India who said he’d get onto fixing it. We shall see what happens.
July 31, 2009
QotD: It’s the institutions, not the people
But after you put down the peace pipe, a legitimate and important difference remains. It’s structural, and cultural, and (over the past four decades of relentless Drug Warring and Constitution-eroding), judicial as well. There is a strain in law enforcement, backed by various vague statutes, thousands of politicians, and everyone who tends to side with authority against an obnoxious popoff, in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable form to arrest, detain, or otherwise punish a non-threatening person for being an asshole. This includes the perceived assholery of yelling about one’s real (and sometimes imagined) trampled rights. If a person is considered undesirable by a police officer, for whatever reason, it’s far too easy to ruin his day, even if no law has remotely been broken. And as Balko has led the world in documenting, the literal militarization of domestic police forces, combined with awful Drug War-related enforcement, has caused grave injustice and the death of innocents.
The past two weeks has been a conversation about race, I guess (I tend to tune out such things pretty quickly, being a privileged white male and all). It’s always appropriate to point out, as in the Drug War in general, that disfavored minority groups (whether defined by skin color, class, lifestyle choice, politics, or whatever) will take a disproportionate brunt of abused power. But thankfully in modern America, when we peel back the general stereotype to the specific individual, most people (least I don’t think) aren’t racists and aren’t assholes. It may take two weeks to make that realization, or two decades, but after that you’re left with the underlying structural problem, one that might be even harder to dislodge. The pendulum of law enforcement in this country, as relates to the individual citizen, has for far too long swung in the same Constitution/individual-disrespecting direction.
Matt Welch, “‘When he’s not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy'”, Hit and Run, 2009-07-31
July 29, 2009
Not at all sure how to take these . . .
. . . paintings of Barack Obama with a unicorn. This is a not-unrepresentative example:
Obama, Stalin, a unicorn, and House. I’m having difficulties coming up with a connection other than they’re all on the same image here.
H/T to John Scalzi for the link.
QotD: Conspiracy theorists
Science fiction writer Damon Knight once claimed that the popularity of conspiracy theories could be explained by our “desire to believe that there is some group of folks who know what they’re doing.”
Wishful thinking. And few “groups of folks” have displayed less aptitude in the art of keeping secrets than government.
Yet no matter who is in power, no matter how incompetent they may be, there always exists this irate minority that believes politicians possess supernatural powers of deception.
The mystery the nation faces isn’t President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The mystery is how any American could believe that all the president’s former political opponents, both the Republican and Democratic parties, Hawaiian officials and two Honolulu newspapers (nay, the entire press corps) could work in concert to conceal the biggest con of the eon.
David Harsanyi, “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind: What the Obama birth certificate conspiracy says about American politics”, Reason Online, 2009-07-29
July 28, 2009
And now, in our special poetry section, William Shatner
This is, according to Peter Suderman, “an actual, unedited passage from her speech”.
Shatner flubs a word or two right around the bit about “ice fogged frigid beauty,” but otherwise, this is lifted verbatim. Students of Washington are used to politicians who don’t make sense, but this is rather more brazen than is typical. I think I have to agree with Gawker’s Alex Pareene: Palin is growing steadily more incoherent as we watch.
Still, there may be an upside: With luck, the discovery of her lyrical talents will end Palin’s terrifying political career and usher in the happy day when aimless lit majors can spend four years puzzling over her “verbiage” in order to turn out papers with titles like “Gertrude Stein and Robert Frost: Sarah Palin’s Poetic Lineage.”
Update: And in a stunning, but not-at-all-unexpected move, NBC Universal has demanded that this clip be removed by YouTube. Idiots. Do they fail to understand that clips like this might bring untold numbers who didn’t see that part of the show live to watch the show now?
If you didn’t see it, it was a reading by William Shatner of a highly poetic (for certain values of “poetic”) section of former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. If you can find a non-interdicted-by-NBC-Universal-version, do watch/listen. It’s more than worth the price of admission.
NBC Universal, while your claim may be legal under current law . . . you demonstrate both your ignorance of popular culture and your contempt for the very people who made you successful in the first place. Nice work. Give yourself a bonus . . . while you’re still profitable.
QotD: Re-interpreting that number
There have been two trends in US health care over the last decade. On the one hand, a lot of Americans have become, in any rational sense, over-insured: They get tested for things they’ll never get. On the other, there has been an abandonment of health insurance by the rich. If you peel the Census Bureau and DHHS figures, of those alleged “45 million uninsured Americans”, one-fifth aren’t Americans; another fifth aren’t uninsured but are covered by Medicare; another two-fifths are the young and mobile (they don’t have health insurance, but they don’t have life insurance or home insurance, either: they’re 22 and immortal and life’s a party); and the remaining fifth are wealthier than the insured population. Really. According to a 2006 Census Bureau report, 19 per cent of the uninsured have household income of over $75,000. Since the last round of government “reform” in the Nineties, wealthy Americans have been fleeing insurance and opting to bring health care back to a normal market transaction. And, if you look at the “uninsured discount” offered by doctors, one can appreciate that, for everything but chronic disability, it’s not an irrational decision to say I’ll get a better deal for my broken leg or my colonoscopy or my heavy cold if I just write a check for it.
Mark Steyn, “The Nationalization of Your Body”, National Review, 2009-07-28
“The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States”
Ryan Grim looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade:
Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, leaving South Florida with an idle army of welltrained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of the dark arts that would become valuable in the cocaine smuggling business. They knew how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades’ hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload, or dock elsewhere along Florida’s 3,000 miles of coastline.
The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn’t created solely for cocaine, or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and other products subject to tariffs. A “mother ship,” either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the shore, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats — named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco — would zip out to the offshore vessel to load up with coke. The drug also came in by air. In the late ’70s and early ’80s customs officials estimated that more than 80 cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980 the U.S. Customs Service seized 200 cigarette boats and 50 airplanes, one of which was a World War II–era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations.
July 27, 2009
More on the Gates-Crowley affair
Radley Balko says that this affair is newsworthy, but not for the reasons you might think:
The arrest of Harvard African-American Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates has certainly got everyone talking. Unfortunately, everyone’s talking about the wrong issue.
[. . .]
The conversation we ought to be having in response to the July 16 incident and its heated aftermath isn’t about race, it’s about police arrest powers, and the right to criticize armed agents of the government.
By any account of what happened — Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between — Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.
He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights.
There are undoubtedly good interactions between police officers and “civilians” (as the police tend to refer to non-police), but much of the interaction is related to actual or perceived violation of the law . . . which means the interaction is fraught with tension, fear, and potential altercation. The police officer feels the need to have the visible signs of respect from “civilians”, yet the more contact “civilians” have with the police, the less that outwardly subservient attitude will be displayed.
Police over-reach
A story of rather amazing police pursuit of Krister Evertson, a criminal mastermind who failed to put a federally mandated safety sticker on a package he sent:
Krister never had so much as a traffic ticket before he was run off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him.
Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he’d done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.
Krister’s lack of a criminal record did nothing to prevent federal agents from ransacking his mother’s home in their search for evidence on this oh-so-dangerous criminal.
The good news is that, in spite of the aggressive attempt to gather evidence, Krister was acquitted. But apparently the American justice system has managed to get rid of the whole pesky concept of “double jeopardy“:
So he was convicted of “abandoning” the hazardous materials in Idaho because he was in an Alaska jail awaiting trial on the bogus safety sticker charge for which he was acquitted. But he wasn’t allowed to use that in his defense. Nor were prosecutors required to prove that the materials he didn’t really abandon were actually waste. Note too the ridiculously paramilitary confrontation and arrest for the non-crime of failing to affix a safety sticker to a UPS package.
July 23, 2009
QotD: The Gates Arrest
It needs to be said that, though I casually threw it out there, I really have no clue whether race played a role in Gates’ arrest. It’s important to say that. I don’t know what I would have done if I were in [his] shoes, but I don’t know that I’d [have] assumed [it was based on] race. I think the decision to arrest a guy for, at worst, being rude in his own house is shockingly stupid. The thought of someone like that carrying the power of life and death is mind-boggling.
That said, the wind is leaving my sails over this one and I’m not sure why. I keep getting this “doth protest too much” vibe every time I read Gates’s interviews. It’s interesting that it took his own arrest for Gates to decide to make a doc about this. Maybe he’s had a Come To Jesus moment. Who can know? Who can really know?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On Gates”, The Atlantic, 2009-07-22
July 22, 2009
QotD: Republican government
Republican government is impossible in an age where not only are the bills too long for a reasonably engaged citizen to read, not only are they too long for a legislator to read, but they’re too long to write down before they’re passed into law. We just have to trust our rulers, and they just have to trust whichever aides negotiated whichever boondoggles with whichever lobbyists.
Mark Steyn, “Jacksonian America”, National Review, 2009-07-20
