Quotulatiousness

November 7, 2010

See? Anti-drug education is finally working

Filed under: Education, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:37

Now that we can get kids to turn in their parents for pot possession:

Two parents are facing drug charges after their child took their drugs to school and told a school officer his parents were breaking the law.

WBTV is not releasing the names of the parents or the name of the school to protect the child’s identity.

The 11-year-old student is in 5th grade at a an elementary school in Matthews. Police say he brought his parents’ marijuana cigarettes to school when he reported them.

Matthews Police say he reported his parents after a lesson about marijuana was delivered by a police officer who is part of the D.A.R.E. program, which teaches kids about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.

Well, thank goodness that this kid’s parents have been saved! I’m sure they’ll just get a stern talking-to from Officer Friendly, they’ll see the error of their ways, and everyone will go out for ice cream sundaes afterwards!

Poor kid. A brief moment of “doing the right thing” may well have ruined three lives. Nice work, Officer Friendly!

Police say both the 11-year old and a sibling have been removed from the parents’ house by social services. Police say they are staying with relatives.

If there were no relatives handy, the two children would probably become wards of the state. And that is something to wish on nobody.

October 29, 2010

“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 18, 2010

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.

October 7, 2010

Isn’t this a barbaric practice for a free society?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

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.

September 20, 2010

Comparative prices for marijuana

Filed under: Economics, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:22

By way of Tim Harford‘s Twitter feed, a site which claims to track the current prices for high, medium, and low quality marijuana:


Click on the image to go to the site

September 5, 2010

Craigslist surrenders, problem totally resolved

Filed under: Humour, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Dan Tynan recounts the glorious moral victory scored by unhappy state legislators against the final bastion of sin and decadence, Craigslist:

Bowing to pressure from 17 state attorneys general, Craigslist has begun censoring its Adult Services ads. Visitors coming to any of the 400+ Craigslist sites will encounter a big black CENSORED tab where Adult Services used to be.

As we all know, the scourge of prostitution had been entirely eradicated from modern society before Craigslist came along. And now that Adult Service ads are banned, you can expect all those hard-working gals to pack up their condoms and lubricants and enroll in secretarial school.

Alas, we fear that — despite the best intentions of 17 state attorneys general desperately trying to get re-elected — a ban on Adult Services won’t quite put an end to adult-oriented advertising on Craigslist.

August 14, 2010

QotD: Canadians and booze smuggling

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:28

Colourful, aggressively marketed and bad for you unless consumed in moderation, spirits have a lot in common with breakfast cereal. And just as Trix are for American kids only, Canadian adults are denied quite a number of wonderful products, many of them taken for granted abroad. It’s the fault of our provincial booze monopolies, of course. The only remedy for now is to cross the border and spend those 96¢ loonies. Rather than filling the trunk with discount Smirnoff on your next trip to the States, I would suggest bringing home some of the alcoholic flavours you cannot buy here, as listed below.

Review the rules on alcohol importing on the Canada Border Services Agency’s website at beaware.gc.ca. The best policy is honestly declaring what you have; if you’re over the limit you’ll just have to pay taxes and duty (unless you live in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories, which restrict the amount of booze you bring into the country).

Also note: Alberta residents are advised to use the search function at alberta-liquor-guide.com before making any suitcase-stuffing plans. There’s a chance the products below are available at home. Surprise, surprise: The lone province that doesn’t put shelf-stocking decisions in the hands of bureaucrats offers a superior selection.

Adam McDowell, “Happy Hour: Making the most of cross-border booze shopping”, National Post, 2010-08-13

August 9, 2010

The inevitable decline in public respect for the police

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Paul Bonneau examines the declining levels of respect among members of the public for the police:

I’ve gotten the impression lately that cops aren’t getting very much support in Internet forums these days, even in places where in the past you’d find almost unqualified support. About everyone seems fed up with ’em.

I wondered why this should be. Why are they becoming so much more frequently scorned?

[. . .]

I think one reason cops are hated is that people generally don’t like being scrutinized, and put under suspicion for minding their own business; they really, really don’t like that. Cops are always checking you out, looking for a reason to “brace” you (an old meaning of the word that looks very useful these days).

The War on Some Drugs has to cause some hatred, as more and more peoples’ lives are ruined by it. Indeed, this prison industry boondoggle has stained all aspects of the “Justice” system, not just cops.

Another reason is that cops are treated, and see themselves, as superior to the rest of us. In innumerable ways, cops are always given the benefit of the doubt; certainly legally, and also informally — although the latter seems to be fading a bit, as trust in cops fades. They are “The Only Ones”, we are “mundanes”, “proles”, peons. They can lie to us, we can’t lie to them; they can beat us up and torture us, but if we touch them it is “assault”.

Along with this insufferable attitude is a self-regard that what they are about is important and good. I suppose everyone suffers from this malady, but usually it does not impact a person as it does when one runs into a cop in the throes of it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good, will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” What are cops, if not “omnipotent moral busybodies”? At least when the Mafia runs a protection racket, they don’t deceive themselves they are doing you a benefit. One appreciates the Mafia’s honesty, in comparison.

August 6, 2010

Tide turning on porn prosecutions in the UK?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

After the US government’s prosecution of a pornography company owner collapsed last month, the British anti-porn campaign has suffered a setback. The Register reports on the case:

A stunning reversal for police and prosecution in North Wales may herald the beginning of the end for controversial legislation on possession of extreme porn.

The case, scheduled to be heard yesterday in Mold Crown Court, was the culmination of a year-long nightmare for Andrew Robert Holland, of Coedpoeth, Wrexham, Clwyd as the CPS declined to offer any evidence, and he left court a free man. The saga began last summer when, following a tip-off, police raided Holland’s home looking for indecent images of children. They found none, but they did find two clips, one involving a woman purportedly having sex with a tiger, and one which is believed to have depicted sado-masochistic activity between adults.

Despite Holland’s protests that he had no interest in the material, and that it had been sent to him unsolicited “as a joke”, he was charged with possessing extreme porn. In a first court appearance in January of this year, the “tiger porn” charge was dropped when prosecuting counsel discovered the volume control and at the end of the action heard the tiger turn to camera and say: “That beats doing adverts for a living.”

The laws are seriously skewed when the potential punishment for simple possession of “extreme” pornography approaches the actual punishment for serious violent crime.

April 1, 2010

Also, mandatory sobriety checks for judges, legislators

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

The Law Society of Upper Canada is planning to do mandatory random drug testing on law students starting this fall:

The move comes in response to requests made by faculty leaders, said Mahamad Accord, director of public relations at the regulatory body. “Why should we accept a lower standard for professional athletes than we do for society’s guardians of the truth?”

Although some professors of law view the move as intruding too far into the personal lives of lawyers and students, others applaud the measure.

“Lawyers play an essential role in society and the impact of drug-addicted lawyers is demonstrable and negative,” according to Professor Shubert at Osgoode Hall. “These changes are long overdue and will have a tangible benefit for legal aid recipients.”

But I’m exaggerating in the title to the post. The guidelines don’t go that far . . . but they probably should. I suspect there’s at least the same level of drug use and alcohol abuse in those selected groups as there is in the general population, even if their chances of detection (and judicial punishment) is demonstrably much lower than “ordinary people”.

March 29, 2010

Americans to lose privacy in offshore banking

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Of course, the headline assumes that they had any such privilege in the past . . .

Samuel Taliaferro is disturbed by provisions in a new law which will extend US government intervention into foreign bank business:

The name of the bill is the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487) commonly known as the HIRE Act. This is the jobs incentive bill that was signed by the President on March 18th amid little fanfare.

Relatively small by Washington standards (“just” an $18 billion stimulus package) the bill was drafted to provide incentives to employers to hire more people but contains some very disturbing language concerning the ownership and transference of money to any overseas account. The truly galling part of the bill is that it attempts to require “foreign financial and non-financial institutions to withhold 30% of payments made to such institutions by U.S. individuals unless such institutions agree to disclose the identity of such individuals and report on the bank transactions”. Think about this — the U.S. government is attempting to strong arm foreign financial and non-financial institutions (think banks and law firms) to either withhold 30% of the transactions in a U.S. individual’s account (and presumably remit this to the U.S. Treasury) or disclose the account details to the U.S.. The language of the bill addresses both bank accounts and any foreign trusts (ie- Private Interest Foundations).

In other words, the US government is afraid more Americans are going to be worried about the security of their money and will look to offshore institutions to preserve their savings. The government is moving pre-emptively to deter that flow of money away from their direct control. You’d almost think they didn’t trust their own citizenry.

March 23, 2010

The Canadian “flavour” of free speech

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

Marni Soupcoff hits the nail on the head with this observation:

Do Canadians understand freedom of expression? For several years, I’ve been arguing that the majority of them don’t — that despite freedom of speech’s prominent place in the Charter, they think it means the ability to say critical things provided these things don’t offend or upset anybody. Protest away, as long as you don’t actually rock the boat.

It’s part of that notorious “Canadian nice” thing: we’re so terribly afraid of offending someone that we’ve empowered the state to monitor and “correct” our speech and behaviour. We like the idea of free speech, but we also undercut the spirit by carving out exceptions to ensure that free speech is not free to offend or insult or demean the listener (or bystanders, or people totally unconnected to the conversation).

This is the genesis of our “hate speech” legislation, which legally defines certain kinds of speech as being so harmful that the use must be proscribed. We appear to fear the use of certain words and phrases as much as if they were literal clubs or bludgeons or some other kind of blunt instrument. In other words, we think it worse to hear offensive speech than to be physically threatened with bodily harm.

This is why the University of Ottawa’s François Houle not only felt it necessary to warn Ann Coulter about our draconian speech laws, but almost certainly felt that without such a warning, those laws were likely to be put into motion. The unspoken but hardly concealed subtext is that we recognize that Americans are more mature than Canadians: they can hear those horrible, horrible words without taking damage or harm.

What initially sounds like another example of Canadian smugness turns out to be an example of Canadian inferiority. Again.

December 5, 2009

Speaking of disproportional punishment

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

BoingBoing reports on yet another vastly disproportional punishment for a victimless crime:

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures — blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing “Happy Birthday” at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry’s pitch to us remains, “Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don’t stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence.”

Despite (legal) danger, teens still hot for sexting

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

In another example of the state’s threat of legal punishment being hugely disproportional to the perceived or actual damage of the ‘crime’, so-called sexting can carry a life-long legal penalty for an act with little or no actual danger to the parties involved. In a case of “well, duh”, kids are still eager to send one another pictures of themselves nude or partially clothed, in spite of (or in ignorance of) the legal threats:

The latest figures come from a poll organised by the Associated Press and MTV, which questioned around 1200 youths and semi-youths aged from 14 to 24. What they discovered, among other things, is that boys think naked pictures are “hot” while girls consider them “slutty”.

We’ll go out on a limb here and say that boys and girls feel much the same ways about thigh-high boots and micro-skirts — one boy’s hot is another girl’s slutty, but that’s another issue. Young people do seem peculiarly blind to the long-term risks of naked photographs, though perhaps they should be admired for having such confidence in their own bodies.

About half of those surveyed thought the risks were overplayed — the rest were suitably wary, but did it anyway. Greater education about the risks doesn’t seem to be the answer: it’s almost as though young people aren’t listening to the advice provided by their elders and betters.

The risks they run include both sender and receiver being charged with various sex crimes, resulting in potentially being added to the sex offender registry for their state(s) of residence, which pretty much ends any possibility of them being able to go to university, hold a job, or lead a normal life.

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