Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2011

ATF sting turns into arms pipeline for drug gang

Filed under: Americas, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Operation Fast and Furious may have been intended to work as a trap for gun smugglers but appears to have become a reliable source of guns for Mexican gangsters:

Congressional investigators examining a gun-trafficking sting investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious have identified 122 weapons linked to the operation that have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, according to a report they are expected to release Tuesday.

The report, which offers new details about the operation, lists 48 occasions between November 2009 and February 2011 in which Mexican authorities found one or more such weapons, based on internal e-mails of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose Phoenix office set up the operation. It was compiled by the staffs of Representative Darrell Issa of California and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the two Republicans leading the investigation.

“The faulty design of Operation Fast and Furious led to tragic consequences,” the report concludes. “Countless United States and Mexican citizens suffered as a result.”

July 8, 2011

Shifting in the general direction of legalizing marijuana?

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:30

Ace is still not eager to see pot legalized, but he’s had a bit of a change of heart lately:

The liberty argument is a strong one.

The counter-argument, and the one I have previously relied upon/acceded to, was that the state has such a powerful interest in protecting people from harming themselves that our Duty to Protect outweighs the case for liberty.

But I don’t believe that any more. For one thing, I am becoming, little by little, and belatedly, very suspicious of any argument that assigns liberty a lower priority than another value. And I’m becoming, again belatedly, very very suspicious of the general claim that we can use the Coercive Power of the State to make people live better lives.

It’s not so much a slippery slope argument — of the type “If we say the state can do X to supposedly improve our lives, who’s to say they can’t do Y, as well, making the same claim?” — as it is an argument about that first step itself.

I don’t think I want the state using its coercive power to lock people up any more for doing drugs.

What business is it of mine? I do lots of things that others may look down upon but I wouldn’t be at all happy about having State Coercion brought to bear upon me for any of it.

So, cut through all the stuff about medicinal marijuana and the like… it’s really just about respecting a citizens’ basic right to do as he pleases without state coercion, so long as what he pleases does not produce direct harm for anyone else.

And I just don’t buy the case for “direct harm” anymore.

June 23, 2011

More on Mexico’s plight

Filed under: Americas, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

With the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives losing control of their crack-brained “Operation Fast and Furious” (aka “Gunwalker”), you’d think that the firearm problem in Mexico has gotten worse. Even if the low estimate of 2500 weapons delivered to the narcotrafficers is accurate (most think it’s at least 4 times that number), it barely puts a dent in the extent of Mexico’s problems:

By now it should be clear that the Mexican drug cartels have taken over the country. They’ve murdered journalists, politicians, judges, businessmen, police, soldiers and each other, with impunity. Their control is so complete that they’ve set up roadblocks to extort blood money from anyone bold enough to believe they have the right to travel freely. They’ve murdered so many people that they’ve resorted to dumping lifeless bodies into mass graves.

Every single day, there’s a fresh story of murder and mayhem. Today, it’s “Eight Bodies Found in Mountains in Northern Mexico” and “Gunmen Kidnap 7 from Drug Rehab Center in Northern Mexico”. The crime-related casualties number in the tens of thousands. That’s to say nothing of the thousands physically and psychologically maimed by torture, or the millions of Mexican living in fear, denied their basic human rights. The Taliban have nothing on these guys.

In other words, adding a few thousand guns from American sources isn’t even a drop in the bucket as far as Mexico’s real problems are concerned:

The ATF purposely mislead Americans to believe that “90 percent of Mexican cartels guns come from Bob’s Gun Store.” That lie was exposed: 88 percent of guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities and successfully submitted for trace to the ATF came from America. (Not necessarily American gun dealers either, BTW). How many qualifiers can you stick in a stat to make it bark like a dog? More importantly, the total population of guns confiscated by the Mexicans in that stat was 30,000.

Now consider the fact that the Mexican police and military are thoroughly corrupt. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that these two entities have supplied the drug cartels with majority of their box fresh military-grade weapons. Weapons that American and foreign weapons makers sold to the Mexican authorities legally. And that means the Mexican have no reason to confiscate any weapons — other than creating a little security theater and transferring ownership from one cartel to another.

June 20, 2011

Operation Gunrunner

Filed under: Americas, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Also from the latest Libertarian Enterprise:

BATFE started Operation Fast and Furious, now better known as Gunrunner, as a sting to catch people smuggling weapons to the narcotraficantes in Mexico. They ran into a problem. Gun dealers in the area involved “made” the straw men buyers and called the BATFE to report these types. ATFE told the gun dealers not to worry and sell the guns. Not ten or twenty times, not a couple of hundred times like a reasonable person would expect. The lowest figure I’ve seen is about 2,500, enough weapons for a small brigade.

Let us clearly summarize this idea, the ATFE ordered law abiding American merchants to arm a brigade of criminals.

In effect ATFE armed an army of murderers, rapists, extortionists, and slavers who financed their actions by smuggling drugs into the US. This has helped destabilize the government of Mexico and led to the terrorizing of the honest working people of that nation. The last time I checked such behavior constitutes an act of war. Either it is the policy of the United States to destabilize the government of friendly nations ( given some of the stunts we’ve pulled this is less unreasonable than it ought to be) or elements of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abused their police authority in the United States to conduct a filibuster (look up original meeting) against Mexico. Not only that, they did so with the approval and support of Attorney General Eric Holder.

May 31, 2011

QotD: The paternalistic view of (some) crime victims

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:47

. . . there are certain regularities, and one of them is the way in which the victims of men such as Griffiths are described in the Guardian, the house journal of the British intelligentsia and its bureaucratic hangers-on. This is important because it illustrates the way in which a dominant elite — dominant de facto if not always de jure — thinks about social problems.

An article describing the victims of Wright, the Ipswich murderer, was titled THE WOMEN PUT INTO HARM’S WAY BY DRUGS. A similar article about Griffiths’s victims was headed “CROSSBOW CANNIBAL” VICTIMS’ DRUG HABITS MADE THEM VULNERABLE TO VIOLENCE. In other words, these women became prostitutes by force majeure, on the streets not because of choices they had made but because of chemical substances that controlled them without any conscious intervention on their part — no more than if, say, an abyss caused by an earthquake had suddenly opened up and swallowed them.

Now either we are all like this — no different from inanimate objects, which act and react mechanically, as Descartes supposed that dogs and cats did — or we are not. The view that we are brings with it certain difficulties. No one could live as if it were true; no one thinks of himself, or of those about him, as automatons; we are all faced with the need to make conscious decisions, to weigh alternatives in our minds, every waking hour of every day. Human life would be impossible, literally inconceivable, without consciousness and conscious decision making. It is true that certain medical conditions, such as temporal-lobe epilepsy during fits, deprive people of normal consciousness and that they nevertheless continue to behave in a recognizably human way; but if all, or even most, of humanity suffered from those conditions, human life would soon be at an end.

Assuming, then, that not everyone is driven to what he does by his own equivalent of drug addiction, the Guardian must assume that Wright’s and Griffiths’s victims were fundamentally different from you and me. Unlike us, they were not responsible for their actions; they did not make choices; they were not human in the fullest sense. Not only is this a view unlikely to find much favor with women who resemble the victims in some way; it also has potentially the most illiberal consequences. For it would justify us, the full human beings, in depriving such women of liberty. If “their hopeless addiction to heroin, alcohol or crack cocaine led them to sell their bodies in the red light district on the edge of Bradford city centre and made them vulnerable to violence,” as the article tells us, surely we should force our help on them to recover their full humanity, or, if that proves impossible, take them into preventive detention to protect them. They are the sheep, we the shepherds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Murder Most Academic: A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice”, City Journal, 2011-05-31

May 22, 2011

The Tory “omnibus crime legislation” overview

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Kathryn Blaze Carlson looks at the likely form of the new federal government’s “tough on crime” omnibus bill:

The Conservative government’s omnibus crime legislation, due ‘‘within 100 days,’’ will mark a watershed moment in Canadian legal history, imposing many controversial changes to how police and the courts operate, experts say.

The bill is sweeping in scale and scope: It is expected to usher new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes — growing five marijuana plants to sell the drug would automatically bring six months in jail — and for certain sexual offences against children. It will expand police powers online without court orders, reintroduce controversial aspects of the Anti-Terrorism Act that expired in 2007, end house arrest for serious crimes, and impact young offenders and their privacy.

“This bundle of crime legislation represents the most comprehensive agenda for crime reform since the Criminal Code was introduced,” said Steven Skurka, a Toronto-based criminal defence lawyer.

As always, when the government bundles together a lot of bills, there are some good and some bad ideas all headed down the chute at the same time. An especially bad bit is the preventative arrest provision that expired with the original Anti-Terrorism Act, and another one is the one allowing the police to demand internet records from ISPs without a court order (or, one assumes, notice to the people whose internet records are of interest to the police).

May 12, 2011

Afghanistan isn’t a “state”

Filed under: Asia, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

Much of the problem with current expectations about the eventual outcome of the Afghan mission rest on the notion that Afghanistan is a country in the same way that Hungary or Denmark is a state. It’s not a state:

While the foreign troops are in Afghanistan to deal with international terrorism and the heroin (90 percent of it comes from Afghanistan), most Afghans see all this foreign intervention as a splendid opportunity. It’s as if Afghans were saying to foreign troops, “to you it’s a war, to me it’s an opportunity.” This is an ancient Afghan attitude. Afghanistan may appear to be at the corner of no and where, but it is actually astride the primary invasion route from Central Asia to India (including Pakistan which is still, historically and culturally, part of India). The Afghans have long since learned to step aside as the foreign invaders move through. Actually, many Afghans would join the invaders, so much so that these invasions, and the loot and stories the survivors brought back, have become a major part of the Afghan collective memory. Most Westerners have not got a clue about this cultural tradition, and how much it influences the behavior of most Afghans. Such culture shock is not unusual, but because of the greater isolation of Afghanistan from the rest of the world, there is more of it.

Part of the culture shock is the realization that Afghanistan is not a country, at least not in the Western sense of the world. In Western terms, Afghanistan is a feudal monarchy. That means that the “king” (president Karzai) serves, and survives, at the sufferance of the local barons (warlords, drug gang leaders, provincial governors, tribal leaders). Until the last few centuries, this was how things worked in the West. But in many parts of the world, and especially in Afghanistan, the medieval mind, and form of government, is alive and well.

While many residents of Kabul (the capital and largest city) would like a modern (efficient and much less corrupt) Western style government, the “rural aristocracy” (corrupt local leaders) have no interest in this kind of central control. Thus the rural leaders do whatever they can to prevent an the creation of efficient national army or police force. Local leaders will attempt, often successfully, to corrupt the military and police units in their neighborhood. National level politicians also like to “own” army or police units, and if they can’t do that, they will try to steal money meant for the security forces. So NATO commanders have come to evaluate the effectiveness of Afghan police and army units based on the honesty of the commander, and his ability to deal with all those officials who want to buy him off. There are not many Afghan unit commanders who make the grade. To do so means you must behave in a decidedly unconventional manner.

This is why the whole notion of “nation building” is the right title for the wrong idea. Afghanistan needs a nation to be constructed, but it will take much more than just suppressing the Taliban and the heroin trade. No nation can go from a feudal/tribal level to nation-state in a generation — at least, no nation ever has, and there’s no chance that Afghanistan will be the first to do so.

April 27, 2011

High computer use linked to “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Talk about upsetting the stereotype of basement dwelling, dateless nerds:

The revelations come in research conducted lately in Canada among 10 to 16-year-olds by epidemiology PhD candidate Valerie Carson.

“This research is based on social cognitive theory, which suggests that seeing people engaged in a behaviour is a way of learning that behaviour,” explains Carson. “Since adolescents are exposed to considerable screen time — over 4.5 hours on average each day — they’re constantly seeing images of behaviours they can then potentially adopt.”

Apparently the study found that high computer use was associated with approximately 50 per cent increased engagement with “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”. High television use was also associated with a modestly increased engagement in these activities.

According to Ms Carson this is because TV is much more effectively controlled and censored in order to prevent impressionable youths seeing people puffing tabs or jazz cigarettes while indulging in unprotected sex etc. The driving without seatbelts thing seems a bit odd until one reflects that old episodes of the The Professionals, the Rockford Files etc are no doubt torrent favourites.

April 13, 2011

Ontario now closer to legal marijuana after court decision

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:30

This news was rather unexpected (that is, I didn’t expect it):

Ontario is one step closer to the legalization of marijuana after the Ontario Superior Court struck down two key parts of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit the possession and production of pot.

The court declared the rules that govern medical marijuana access and the prohibitions laid out in Sections 4 and 7 of the act “constitutionally invalid and of no force and effect” on Monday, effectively paving the way for legalization.

If the government does not respond within 90 days with a successful delay or re-regulation of marijuana, the drug will be legal to possess and produce in Ontario, where the decision is binding.

This is great news for those who need pot for pain relief: even though medical marijuana has been theoretically available for years, in practical terms, many could not get their doctors to sign the necessary paperwork.

In what will be a very obscure reference to non-Ontarians, Andrew Coyne twittered, “A place to grow . . .”

Update: However, carbon counters may be less than impressed, as a new study claims that marijuana “grow ops” alone consume 1% of the energy of the US:

Stoners are helping destroy the planet. Not by excessive snacking, but thanks to the high-energy demands of indoor marijuana cultivation. So says a US Government policy analyst with a Puritanical streak and an EYE for a SHOUTY HEADLINE.

Evan Mills, who works at Lawrence Livermore Labs but conducted the study in his own time, estimates that indoor pot growing accounts for 1 per cent of energy usage in the United States, with each spliff representing two pounds of CO2 emission. Heavy.

About 32 per cent of energy in the cultivation process is used by lighting equipment, including motorised lamp rails; 26 per cent by ventilation systems and dehumidifiers; 18 per cent by air conditioning; and the rest… uh, we can’t remember.

So, on current trends, just as the drug war heaves its final dying breath and marijuana is legalized in the United States, it’ll be banned under Green economy rules, right?

April 12, 2011

A “gun-crazed oil-drunk Albertan” on the NDP and Green platforms

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Colby Cosh tries to be nice about the Green Party and NDP platforms:

The contrast between the parties’ platforms is interesting: the Green ideas induce slightly more sheer nausea of the “literally everything in here is eye-slashingly horrible” kind, but at the same time there is a consoling breath of radicalism pervading Vision Green, a redeeming Small Is Beautiful spirit. At least, one feels, their nonsense is addressed to the individual. A typical laissez-faire economist would probably like the Green platform the least of the four on offer from national parties, but the Greens may be the strongest of all in advocating the core precept that prices are signals. At one point, denouncing market distortions created by corporate welfare, Vision Green approvingly quotes the maxim “Governments are not adept at picking winners, but losers are adept at picking governments.” (The saying is attributed to a 2006 book by Mark Milke of the Fraser Institute, but a gentleman named Paul Martin Jr. had uttered a version of it as early as 2000.)

That has always been the biggest failing of the regulatory view of politics: no matter how carefully you select the regulators, the regulated have many, many ways to (eventually) suborn them. Regulatory capture is the most common result, as the regulators become more closely attuned to the needs of their “charges” and work to protect them from competitors and social and technological change. What may have started as an attempt to rein-in over powerful industrial interests slowly becomes a de facto arm of government protection over the existing major players in that industry.

The New Democratic platform is more adult and serious than the Greens’ overall, which comes as no surprise. But it occurs to me, not for the first time this year, how much some folks love “trickle-down politics” when they are not busy denouncing “trickle-down economics”. How does Jack Layton hope to remedy the plight of the Canadian Indian? By “building a new relationship” with his politicians and band chiefs. How does he propose to improve the lot of artists? By flooding movie and TV producers, and funding agencies, with money and tax credits. He’ll help parents by giving money to day care entrepreneurs; he’ll sweeten the pot for “women’s groups” and “civil society groups”. One detects, perhaps mostly from prejudice, a suffocating sense of system-building, of unskeptical passion for bureaucracy, of disrespect for the sheer power of middlemen to make value disappear.

It’s useful to check who would be the actual beneficiaries of this kind of increased bureaucratization of life — and we’re generally not talking about the putative winners, but the actual ones — the ones who will staff the new agencies, bureaux, and commissions, the ones who will provide consulting services, and the ones who will study the results.

The Greens get a big thumbs-up from this corner for this particular clause of their platfom:

In 2008, according to the Treasury Board, Canada spent $61.3 million targeting illicit drugs, with a majority of that money going to law enforcement. Most of that was for the “war” against cannabis (marijuana). Marijuana prohibition is also prohibitively costly in other ways, including criminalizing youth and fostering organized crime. Cannabis prohibition, which has gone on for decades, has utterly failed and has not led to reduced drug use in Canada.

The Greens promise that cannabis would be removed from the schedule of illegal drugs and that the growth and sale of cannabis products would be regularized (and taxed), although with the usual shibboleth about the market needing to be restricted to small producers. If you’re making the stuff legal to sell, you shouldn’t try to micro-manage the product and producers you’re moving into the legal marketplace.

April 2, 2011

The continued risk of antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:59

The Economist has a good piece on the problems with mis-use of antibiotics:

Convenience and laziness top the list of causes of antibiotic resistance. That is because those who misuse these drugs mostly do not pay the cost. Antibiotics work against bacteria, not viruses, yet patients who press their doctors to prescribe them for viral infections such as colds or influenza are seldom harmed by their self-indulgence. Nor are the doctors who write useless prescriptions in order to rid their surgeries of such hypochondriacs. The hypochondriacs can, though, act as breeding grounds for resistant bacteria that may infect others. Even when the drug has been correctly prescribed, those who fail to finish the course are similarly guilty of promoting resistance. In some parts of the world, even prescription is unnecessary. Many antibiotics are bought over the counter, with neither diagnosis nor proper recommendations for use, multiplying still further the number of human reaction vessels from which resistance can emerge.

Nor is the problem confined to people. Analysing official figures, Louise Slaughter, an American congresswoman who is also a microbiologist, calculates that four-fifths of the antibiotics used in America are given to livestock, often to get perfectly healthy animals to grow faster. That is convenient, because it produces cheaper meat, but it creates yet more opportunities for bugs to evolve resistance.

All this matters because antibiotic resistance has both medical and financial costs. It causes longer and more serious illnesses, lengthening people’s stays in hospital and complicating their treatment. Sometimes people die unnecessarily. In one study, which sampled almost 1,400 patients at Cook County hospital in Chicago, researchers found resistant strains of bacteria infecting 188 people, 12 of whom died because they could not be treated adequately. At the moment, resistant bacteria threaten mostly children, the old, cancer patients and the chronically ill (especially those infected with HIV). However, there could be worse to come. Nearly 450,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are recorded each year; one-third of these people die from the disease. More than a quarter of new cases of TB identified recently in parts of Russia were of this troublesome kind.

February 10, 2011

Reason.tv responds to Hillary Clinton

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

February 9, 2011

I guess we’re all going to Hell

Filed under: Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:40


“Name Something You Pass Around” – Watch more Funny Videos

H/T to Jason “I’m still laughing” Ciastko for the link.

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 23, 2010

Aspirin, the rediscovered wonder drug

Filed under: Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:51

A recent study intended to verify that small doses of aspirin did reduce the chances of heart attack and stroke has also shown that it reduces the incidence of certain cancers:

In trials lasting between four and eight years, the patients who had been given aspirin were 21% less likely to die from cancer than those who had been given a placebo. These results were based on 674 cancer deaths, so are unlikely to represent the kind of statistical oddity that can beset studies on cancer risks that sometimes create headlines.

The benefits of aspirin were also apparent many years after the trials had ended. After five years, death rates for all cancers fell by 35% and for gastrointestinal cancers by 54%. A long-term follow-up of patients showed that the 20-year risk of cancer death remained 20% lower in those who had taken aspirin.

The study revealed that the effect takes time to accrue, so aspirin must be taken over a long period. The latent period for improving oesophageal, pancreatic, brain and lung cancer was about five years of aspirin taking on a daily basis. For stomach and colorectal cancer the effects took ten years and for prostate cancer about 15 years. The means by which aspirin prevents cancer is not well understood. It is believed that it inhibits an enzyme that promotes cell proliferation in tumours.

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