perfidy

Gene Heally, him of the Cato Institute, has an op-ed up here regarding the growing power of obnoxious thugs passing laws to protect us from those notorious fools, criminals and scofflaws, us.

Right here in the District of Columbia, our nation's capital,

Last Tuesday, the D.C. City Council heard testimony on a bill that would make it illegal to smoke in a bar, even if the owner, the employees and the customers all agree that smoking should be permitted.

...The pro-ban forces have packaged their message in the rhetoric of workers' rights. It's an effective strategy, one that draws on the insights of smoking-ban pioneer Stanton Glantz. At a 1986 conference of anti-smoking activists, Glantz advised that "the issue should be framed in the rhetoric of the environment, toxic chemicals, and public health rather than the rhetoric of saving smokers from themselves."

And that was the gist of many of those supporting the ban. After kicking the smokers out of the bars, the next step is to ban smoking on sidewalks, in parks, and in one extreme case, even in the smoker's own home. Thankfully, that last didn't survive scrutiny. But these laws are eating away at our freedom as surely as the erosion of property rights we've been discussing here the last couple days.

Once nanny laws are in place, the next step is enforcement. What police officer wouldn't rather pull over a soccer mom for a seat belt violation than chase down some dangerous criminal? It's safe, and even if only unconsciously, they're going to emphasize that kind of behavior. And some police forces are going to absurd lengths to protect us. Witness:

One wonders if this is really the sort of thing police should be focusing on in the on-again, off-again murder capital of the United States. But the idea that the police should focus solely on protecting us from crime is one that many have come to think of as archaic. The new view is that it's also law enforcement's job to protect us from our own bad habits. In a 2003 sting operation, Fairfax, Va., police officers entered 20 bars, administered breathalyzer tests, and arrested nine patrons for intoxication. Fairfax police Chief J. Thomas Manger declaimed: "Public intoxication is against the law. You can't be drunk in a bar."

And two weeks ago, using night-vision equipment on loan from the National Guard, Maryland state troopers swept out and nabbed 111 offenders for the crime of driving without a seatbelt. Scores of people who were driving along, minding their own business, had their evening ruined by an unpleasant encounter with the business end of the law. Welcome to the era of jackbooted nags.

It's things like this that make my testicles clench whenever I see a cop, never mind the fact that I am a law abiding citizen going about my lawful business.

... and black people drive like this!

Ha ha! He's so right! It's funny because it's true!!

You may also find funny this uncannily on-target George W. Bush conspiracy generator. Make your own, or set it on random! Did you know that George W. Bush has not captured Osama bin Laden so that Ann Coulter and oil companies could kill minorities? And that he allowed 9/11 to happen so SUV owners could oppress the Jews?

According to the internets, it's wall to wall fact!!

Mark Steyn, in a typically ambiguously phrased article in Tuesday's Telegraph, informs that "Islam does incubate terrorism".

On reading the article, it's clear that he's had difficulty forcing himself to just get out with his point. I don't know what the problem is - they gave him 1000 words (+/-) of space to speak his mind, and he got all tongue-tied. Like this:

Oh, dear. "Britain can take it" (as they said in the Blitz): that's never been in doubt. The question is whether Britain can still dish it out. When events such as last Thursday's occur, two things happen, usually within hours if not minutes: first, spokespersons for Islamic lobby groups issue warnings about an imminent backlash against Muslims.

In fairness to British organisations, I believe they were beaten to the punch by the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress whose instant response to the London bombings was to issue a statement calling for prayers that "Canadian Muslims will not pay a price for being found guilty by association".

In most circumstances it would be regarded as appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a non-existent one. But it seems the real tragedy of every act of "intolerance" by Islamist bigots is that it might hypothetically provoke even more intolerance from us irredeemable white imperialist racists. My colleague Peter Simple must surely marvel at how the identity-group grievance industry has effortlessly diversified into pre-emptively complaining about acts of prejudice that have not yet occurred.

If there's a point in there, I wish he could get himself to make it. Damned polite Canadians! He continues:

Most of us instinctively understand that when a senior Metropolitan Police figure says bullishly that "Islam and terrorism don't go together", he's talking drivel.

Many of us excuse it on the grounds that, well, golly, it must be a bit embarrassing to be a Muslim on days like last Thursday and it doesn't do any harm to cheer 'em up a bit with some harmless feel-good blather. But is this so?

He wraps up the piece (which I won't continue to quote because, after all, fair use is fair use and you really should just go and read the whole thing), with some veiled thoughts that, to some folks, might be read as his encouragement for Islam to pull its head out of its 1200 year old rectal cavity, before the decision is taken irrevocably from its control, because this P.C. bullshit has gone just about far enough, and the West had best stop allowing its best institutions, intentions, and tools to be used to its detriment.

But only to certain readers, I'm sure. (OK - just one more quote)

Shame on us for championing Islamic thought-police over Western liberty.

Heh. Indeed.

Whatever else you might think about the whole Valerie Plame thing that bored me to tears even before I was through hearing about it the first time, and that was what?... six months ago, that story has recently turned hi-larious.

Turns out Rove did it.

For all the screeching some folks do about Rove did this and Rove did that and Rove snacks on the entrails of blind orphan babies it has become difficult to remember that Carl Rove is... a slimy heartless douchebag of a human being.

Obsidian Wings has an absolute howler of a transcript from today's White House press gaggle. Go read their account; all I could do here is repeat what they wrote. The gist is this: the press, who remember like the rest of us how the President vowed that whoever leaked the Plame info would be hung by the neck until dead! dead! dead! (in a career sense, of course). Now that it's Rove, Scott McClellan in best Ari Fleischer mode has a lot to say about how it's not appropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation and evidence has to be weighed and whatnot... we need to make sure that justice is served yadda yadda but we can't comment at this time about this ongoing investigation, the names of the innocent etc., etc., while all the while he's been talking in great and excruciating detail for months about this newly secret ongoing investigation.

Feh.

I'm sure justice will be served, and I'm sure OJ will find the real killers any day now.

While everyone was (justifiably) freaking out over the stupendously bad Supreme Court ruling in Kelo, other property rights are taking a beating as well. Richard Diamond reports on the accelerating trend of state and local governments taking you car with the flimsiest of excuses.

Just days after the Supreme Court ruled that cities could take homes from private owners to build strip malls, the US House of Representatives issued a non-binding condemnation of the court’s decision. While the publicity firestorm could eventually result in stronger laws against public seizure of private property, state governments are happy to continue confiscating automobiles like property rights never existed.

The number of excuses given for government automobile seizures is expanding dramatically. Since 1991, the Commonwealth of Virginia has permanently seized 6,450 automobiles for crimes ranging from drug-running to “frequenting a bawdy place.” Now other jurisdictions are deploying new technologies to seize cars for the most minor offenses imaginable.

A key technology in the desperate fight against citizens with unpaid parking tickets or library fines is something known as APNR, or Automatic Number Plate Recognition. This system was originally developed to recover stolen vehicles. A small camera snaps a picture of a license plate, and a computer instantly performs a background check. In a large scale test in the UK last year, police took 28 million pictures, stopped over a hundred thousand motorists, and recovered eleven hundred vehicles. All to the good. But while they were at it, they also issued "51,000 tickets to drivers for offenses ranging from speeding, to drinking from a water bottle, to talking on a mobile phone." A system designed to recover stolen vehicles discovers its killer app: a honking big revenue stream for government.

Leave it to the Americans to take a good idea and take it to its logical endpoint. Just around the corner from me in Arlington, VA, city treasurer Frank O’Leary said in a TV interview, "I rub my hands together in great glee and anticipation... I think it’s beautiful. It gives us a whole new dimension to collection." Combining the new technology with the existing practice of vehicle seizure in complete disregard of the Constitution is the new way of doing business. Says Richard,

Before ANPR-facilitated seizure was deemed acceptable, a screwed-up parking ticket database was a minor hassle. Now it’s a Constitutional nightmare, mocking fundamental and cherished legal protections: the right to be presumed innocent, the right to a trial by jury, the right not to have excessive fines imposed, the right not to be searched or have your property seized without reason or warrant, and the right to due process.

States conducting automotive seizure rely on a doctrine found in a 1931 Supreme Court ruling stating "It is the property which is preceded against, and, by resort to a legal fiction, held guilty and condemned as though it were conscious instead of inanimate and insentient." In other words, it’s OK to confiscate your car because you forgot to pay an $85 parking ticket; you didn’t commit the crime, your car did. In 1980, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the concept, convicting a 1976 Mercedes Benz 280S of drug-running. The Bill of Rights, the court argued, applies to people not to cars.

That ruling - the lynchpin of the RICO civil forfeiture process - makes a complete mockery of any rational conception of property rights. There are whole websites devoted to cataloguing the evils of civil forfeiture. While these laws were intended as a way of punishing slippery drug dealers and mafiosi, as is the way with all law enforcement powers they were soon used against other targets. And eventually, against ordinary citizens.

If the police take your car, they do not have to prove that it violated some RICO statute. You have to prove that your vehicle was "innocent." And now that these new laws are allowing the police to take cars for things like unpaid library fees (and who among is is without sin on that count?) basically they can take your car for any reason whatsoever. The only way in which this is different from auto theft is that the police are the thieves.

Many people say that the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. But property rights seem to be on a slip 'n' slide right now, headed for the abyss.

[wik] Here's a good summary of the asset forfeiture phenomenon.

The Boston Globe has a long article today on the (Democratic Republic of the)Congo's recent turn of the corner from hopeless morass of civil war and atrocity to tattered but hopeful region. In light of our recent discussions of Africa and the best way to give aid to nations that need it, it is worth remembering that many problems African nations face aren't entirely of their own making, but are the partial artifacts of centuries of colonial action.

Don't get me wrong. I got over my imperial-white-people guilt years ago, and I'm not about to lay all Africa's problems at the feet of honkie Europeans. More than just being fatuous, that line of thinking absolves troubled African nations from any responsibility for their own troubles. No. The fucking of Africa was and always has been a collaborative effort between wealthy nations and individuals and unscrupulous (or merely tragically unwise) agents within Africa.

Witness the article's history of the Democractic Republic of the Congo. After the Belgians buggered out, leaving a collapsed national infrastructure, national rule passed briefly to an ineffectual president and then to Mobutu Sese Seko, who raped the country for his own ends for 32 years. The Belgians aren't responsible for Seko, not directly, but the destabilizing effects of postcolonialism, as in many other nations, created the conditions which allowed a monster like Seko to seize power. And in a nation so rich in resources and poor in local organizations that can manage them, massive corruption is a given.

The DRC has a long, long road back from chaos to nation, but at least the press now feels comfortable sounding some hopeful notes. Shockingly, considering our recent discussions of aid to Africa, there are only two international aid organizations operating in the entire country. The UN still "controls" swaths of the east, in that they maintain armed outposts that they dare not venture outside of, and the Congolese army in the words of one of its organizers is "pathetic... with nothing to eat, nothing to wear, and almost no training. [But] they are getting better."

Where are the Red Cross and the Red Crescent? Where is Doctors Without Borders? The DRC is probably years away from being stable enough to admit the Peace Corps and similar groups, but it looks like they are on the verge of getting their shit together for the first time in, well... ever. Hopefully our guys will get there before the professional terrorists do.

[wik] Does this remind anyone else of some sort of crazy new-era domino theory/containment game? Have we left one Cold War (which might have been better termed a Proxy War anyway) behind, only to become embroiled in another? The developed world is desperate to stabilize places like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, the DRC, and most of Eastern Africa in order to stave off the encroachment of terrorist organizations that take root in the backcountry and then prove harder to kill off than Florida roaches in August. In that way, Iraq is still not like Vietnam, since the libervasion there was for other (but arguably) related ends than the spread of Islamist terrorism. But maybe the war in Afghanistan, maybe that one, is like Vietnam, or more aptly like Korea. Remember, I am Special Minister of Crazy Ideas That Just Might Be True.)

A Kenyan economist, in an interview with Der Spiegel, says “Stop it with the aid and the money and the hurting, ‘n’ d’hoy glavin, Mr. money people!. Well, he didn’t actually say it in the style of Professor John Frink, but he did say, and I quote, “For God’s sake, please stop the aid!”

A couple weeks ago my esteemed coblogger Patton observed that much or even most of the money sent by wealthy nations to help in Africa ends up doing much harm by enriching bad men. Now an actual African economist from a nation who has a lot of problems that it would seem like giant piles of money could help solve says, please stop.

Two instances do not an argument make, but they are food for thought. Sometimes asking people to get their own shit together is a heartless abdication of humanitarian responsibility. But sometimes it is the right thing to do, especially if it means less money for plutocrats to buy AK-47s, gold toilets, and abbatoirs for their dissenting citizens. Maybe giving money to some African nations is, in the words of the great Otis Rush, pouring water on a drowning man.

It looks like our good friends the Russkies have designs on the American heartland. I am told that a Russian observation plane will be making flights from Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, taking photos of the United States under the Open Skies Treaty.

Good God. What can they be looking for? I know they are interested in more than ariel shots of Jacobs Field and the Football Hall of Fame. Perhaps they are interested in what went on here, the old Ravenna Arsenal. Although ostensibly closed down for decades, I myself as a tot wondered at the gigantic C-130s making landings at the old closed-down munitions arsenal. My guess: zombies. The entire place is surrounded by barbed wire, and although they let hunters on the land each fall to cull the resident deer horde, there are some places the hunters cannot go.

The zombie places.

Though it could also be nukes. Satellite images that already exist show a curiously large number of earth mounds, set in long rows, in several areas of the old Arsenal. Are they munitions bunkers? ICBM silos? Or maybe… where they keep the giant robots? Only the President, and soon, our good-souled friend Vladimir Putin, know.

But this is all simply conjecture. What is fact is that the Russians have long had it in for Chainsaw Mick and his tenacious brand of termite-level capitalism. Whatever else they are for, these Russian flyovers are just a front for ongoing operations by the Russians to keep track on Chainsaw and what he’s up to.

For years Chainsaw Mick has been training secret cadres of small-equipment salesmen and repairmen in remote camps, building elite squadrons of highly trained mechanics. These enterprising men and women will return to their home countries – Guatemala, Uzbekistan, the Ukraine, Chad, Russia – and there start small home businesses of their own. That is Phase One. Phase Two is secret and unknown even to me, but Phase Three involves these sleeper cells of insurgent capitalists bursting forth from the countryside and small manufacturing zones of their nations and sweeping across the land, leaving behind them a riot of small-scale wealth, economic well being and stability, individual self-reliance, and immaculately maintained lawn equipment.

Small wonder the Russians want to keep tabs on ol’ Chainsaw. He holds the key to their future, the future they fear will one day come to pass.

Rock on, Chainsaw. The future of the world is in your hands.

The Venerable Bede: FUCK YEAH!

Click here for a fascinating and darkly humorous look at the antics of the less, well, able of the Iraqi insurgents/regime holdouts/foriegn jihadi/fucknuts.

My personal favorite:

Item 6: And an oldie but a goodie from the early days of military operations in Iraq. The enemy will always try to provoke you into doing something impulsive and, let's face it, stupid - so don't let them. This simple lesson was, alas, lost on Saddam's brave but foolhardy irregulars:

Before plunging into Iraq, U.S. psychological-warfare operators studied certain cultural stereotypes. One was that young Arab toughs cannot tolerate insults to their manhood. So, as American armored columns pushed down the road to Baghdad, 400-watt loudspeakers mounted on Humvees would, from time to time, blare out in Arabic that Iraqi men are impotent. The Fedayeen, the fierce but undisciplined and untrained Iraqi irregulars, could not bear to be taunted. Whether they took the bait or saw an opportunity to attack, many Iraqis stormed out of their concealed or dug-in positions, pushing aside their human shields in some cases to be slaughtered by American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

Not impotent; just stupid.