The week in banning

• Florida bans bath salts that may double as drugs. [link]

• China bans smoking. Smokers unimpressed. [link]

• Indianapolis bans texting while driving. [link]

• Appeals court undoes ban on government money for embryonic cell stem research. [link]

• White House bans “pen-and-pad” reporter Carla Marinucci from presidential access after she uses a cellphone camera to record protesters during an Obama fundraiser; then team Obama flat-out denies the whole thing ever happened. [link]

• Denver business district bans promotional sandwich boards. [link]

• Despite Snyder v. Phelps, the funeral-picketing case recently decided by the Supreme Court in favor of the protesters, Oregon attempts to ban protests at any funeral, burial, or memorial service. [link]

• Philadelphia bans questions about job applicants’ criminal past from application forms. [link]

• San Francisco may vote to ban male circumcision. [link]

• Minnesota Senate committee pushes bill banning same-sex marriage. [link]

• Following in France’s footsteps, Belgian politicians propose to ban Islamic face veils. [link]

• California aims to ban the use of tanning beds by all minors. [link]

Linkavaganza

• A new court ruling makes it a federal crime for an employee to use a work computer in a manner that violates employer-authorized access. What’s that mean? Blogger and law professor Orin Kerr points out that the following common workplace behavior may now be subject to prosecution:

The best employee in a larger company might spend thirty minutes writing up a report, and then spend one minute checking personal e-mail and twenty seconds to check the weather to see if the baseball game after work might be rained out. He might then spend ten more minutes working on the report followed by two minutes to check the online news. Over the course of the day, he might use the computer for primarily personal reasons dozens or even hundreds of times.

All verboten, says the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Astonishing implications for the scope of government power,” concludes Kerr.

• So using a taser on a handcuffed man more than 15 times in under a minute is not supposed to be standard operating procedure? Huh. News to these Alaska cops, who were found not culpable (for now, at least) for using excessive force on one Thomas Olson. That’s because, the judge decided, when the incident occurred back in 2006, there wasn’t enough case law to determine “how much Tasing was too much Tasing, so [the officers] had no way of knowing whether they violated Olson’s rights.”

• It was a big day for the hundreds of millions who excitedly pucker their lips when presented with royal arse-cheeks. Matt Zoller Seitz, in Salon: “The coverage of this whole ceremony and its run-up was revoltingly obsequious and almost entirely devoid of news value, and so altogether bubble-brained that it makes me think that if there is such a thing as karmic payback for wrong priorities, we’re due for some major trauma.”

• Bubble-brained? Like this Mexican teenager who went on a 16-day hunger strike until someone paid for her visit to the Will+Kate wedding? Surely not. [Update: La Migra said no.]

• Corporatist Donald Trump is the runner-up candidate among the current field of Republican presidential contenders. Is there a rational reason why so many GOP-leaning voters favor a guy who passionately supports the Supreme Court’s Kelo vs New London outrage? Kelo is a virtual litmus test of a candidate’s commitment to small government and to property rights, two of the cornerstones of the GOP’s professed ideology. Trump not only fails the test, he doesn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed or conflicted by it (of course, he’s a man who, for better or for worse, has made a career out of not being embarrassed or conflicted). Stephen Littau has more.

• Bonus: The Onion has also been in a Trump state of mind lately.

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, shit peddlers extraordinaire

They’re at it again. If there was a Pulitzer for patently despicable journalism that twists facts into statements that are nominally true but 100% intended to deceive, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine should receive a Pulitzer.

In keeping with their very special brand of ethics, were they to ever quote from this blog, I’ll bet it’ll be the preceding sentence, but only the part after the comma.

More about the duo’s mounting misdeeds here.

Cables from Absurdistan U.S.A.

Beltway bureaucrats are powerful. How powerful are they? They are so powerful that they can create their own reality.

Some foreigners applying for asylum in the United States have attached [Wikleaks] diplomatic cables printed from the Internet that describe repression in their native countries — requiring the Department of Homeland Security to store their applications in special safes and to apply cumbersome security rules.

So anyone with an Internet connection can look up these documents, read them, forward them, print them, and discuss them.

U.S. government workers, on the other hand,  are not only prohibited from doing the same; in their chimerical la-la land, they must actively, knowingly, and at great pains keep treating the materials as if the Wiki data dump never happened.

The absurdity at DHS and other government agencies is in their DNA. It’s what they do.

How to win the fight for freedom in America

The story first came out yesterday afternoon of yet another screwed-up police raid. (And if you read Radley Balko a lot, you won’t be surprised to learn that it happened in Broward County, Florida.) Things didn’t quite turn out the way the police expected:

Broward Circuit Court Judge Ilona Holmes, her sister and her sister’s family says they were ordered at gun point by several Broward Sheriffs Deputies on Easter Sunday to come out of her sister’s home with their hands up.

…

“There’s a man with a gun and he’s going to shoot me!!” yelled Carmita. “I thought it was the robber!” Her sister, Judge Holmes, came running to the kitchen. The judge carries a legal firearm and immediately pulled it out and held it in her hand.

“She said ‘Who are you!? What are you doing?!’ He said ‘this is BSO.’ She said, ‘this is Circuit Court Judge Ilona Holmes!!’” Carmita said.

Heh. That’s probably not the response police were expecting. As the incident quieted down, the judge’s sister was still upset:

But Carmita was downright angry. Remember the man outside her kitchen window who pointed a gun at her? Still wearing her pajamas and footies, she approached him afterward. “I said ‘you had a gun pointed at me!’ He said ‘because I felt threatened.’ I said ‘threatened how?'”

She said other officers explained to her that they have families, too, and they want to make it home alive each night. But she says they did so in a condescending way, lecturing her as if she’d done something wrong.

“I know no one apologized, OK? And, to me, if you want to make amends for something, you want to make peace, you apologize, you shake, you leave, you say ‘I’m sorry,’” she said. “And, you know, the cop that had his gun on me, he said ‘well, I was fearing for my life.’ I said ‘really! You were fearing for your life? Really?’ He said ‘forget it – I’m out of here.'”

Here’s the key observation by reporter Jeff Burnside:

Judge Holmes, one of the very few black judges in Broward County, saw justice from a whole new perspective. Tuesday night she was in her courtroom conducting a late–running trial and would not comment.

Yup, “a whole new perspective.” Another story has more reactions:

Holmes, who told deputies she was armed before she came outside, refused to sit on the ground because she had a bad back.

“None of the residence complied with police,” a deputy wrote.

…

When investigators went to question Holmes further about what happened, she was in no mood to talk.

“She stated to me from inside that she was soaking her feet and now was not a good time,” the report read.

Given the title of this post, you might think I’m about to commend the judge for her resistance to the Broward County deputies. And yeah, I would, because that’s how everybody should be able to behave when police treat them like crap.

But Judge Holmes is not the real freedom fighter here. No, because that honor goes to the unnamed officer who lead the raid on the home where Judge Holmes was visiting. He probably did more to change Judge Holme’s opinions on crime and the police than any ten criminal defense attorneys ever would.

Dear readers, fellow lovers of liberty, this is how we win.

You may think the fight is best fought as a criminal defense lawyer, a civil rights lawyer, a crusading journalist, or even (God help us) a libertarian blogger, but you’re wrong. If you want to fight for liberty, become a cop.

And start harassing judges.

I figure we need about 200 of you, mostly young white males so you blend right in with the local police. We need at least three of you in each state to move to the seat of government and become a cop. We also need people in the seats of every federal district, and we need about 25 people in and around Washington D.C.

Look up the names of all the appellate judges, find out where they live, find out what car they drive. Then whenever you have some spare time, catch one of them on the road. Pull them over, treat them like shit, empty the entire contents of their cars out into the rain. Lie on the stand when asked if they gave permission for the search. If they give you any trouble at the side of the road, hit them with the Taser and arrest them for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

If you have more time, find a judge’s house and search the neighborhood for someone to arrest. Use the arrest as leverage to get that person to say they bought drugs at the judge’s house, then swear out a search warrant and hit the judge’s house at dinner time when the whole family is there. Be sure to shoot the family dog and then claim you felt threatened. Arrest everyone who complains, and lie in court about what they did to get arrested.

The D.C. team will have to make an effort to do this specifically to Supreme Court judges. Punch them in the face if no one’s watching and there aren’t any cameras. If you can’t find any judges — there aren’t that many of them — do this to a legislator instead.

You won’t last long as a cop. Oh, sure, cops do this to ordinary people for years, but if you do this to judges and other powerful people, they will pull strings to get rid of you. Don’t worry, you won’t go to jail or anything (you are, after all, a cop), but you’ll probably get driven out of the department in a few years. Which is no big deal, because you didn’t want to be a cop anyway, right?

After a few years of this, I’ll bet judges start taking those constitutional rights and burdens of proof a whole lot more seriously. Just think, with a few years of service to your country before starting your real career, you could turn the tide of freedom.

I’m sure some of you think this plan is awful, and that you don’t want do anything this cruel and heartless, even in service of liberty. Hmm… I’ll tell you what, let’s compromise on a milder approach: Don’t shoot the family dog.

Linkavaganza

• Donald Trump wants to see Obama’s report cards.

• Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks scratch Guantanamo’s putrid underbelly.

• Can Ron Paul 2012 do better than Ron Paul 2008? The New York Times sums up half a dozen reasons why the answer is yes.

• Pilot Patrick Smith, in Salon, finds the TSA’s ‘liquids and gels’ rules utterly absurd. I don’t know if the best response is a polite “they are indeed” or a more strident “no shit Sherlock.”

• In light of the TSA’s largely unopposed assaults on passengers’ liberties, this Joseph Schumpeter quote bears reflection:

“Humanity does not care for freedom. The mass of the people realize they are not up to it: what they want is being fed, led, amused, and above everything, drilled. But they do care for the phrase.”

• Politician condemns pot use, is busted with pot. [via Balko]

• The new New York: Buy a knockoff, go to jail.

• Bonus: A friend who lives in Cape Town shared this photo he took of a wine-bottle label.

Suggestions for future government warnings: “Don’t drink and take a shower, you may slip and fall.” “Don’t drink and screw, your condom could slip off.” Also, “Don’t drink and drink, ’cause man is your dumb head gonna hurt.” You’re welcome, South Africa.

Assange again

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, L. Gordon Crovitz again pushes for the United States to prosecute Wikileaks’ Julian Assange as a traitor.

Crovitz is actually not as hawkish as some. While raging hotheads on the right have made no secret of their desire to also see the editors of the New York Times and other news organizations indicted for publishing the classified Wikileaks documents, Crovitz makes an interesting distinction: intent. Emphasis in bold mine:

[W]ithout focusing on intent, the [Espionage Act] would raise serious First Amendment issues. Many academics and media commentators — and perhaps overly cautious prosecutors — have missed the point that WikiLeaks is different from the New York Times. It’s the political motivation of Mr. Assange that qualifies him to be prosecuted. The publisher is not liable for its reporting.

I’m glad to see that Bill Keller won’t soon be joining Bradley Manning in the Leavenworth pen. I’m also glad to see Mr. Crovitz’s nod to the First Amendment, cursory though it may seem. Beyond that, color me confused.

Crovitz is, after all, proposing that the fundamental factor in deciding whether to prosecute Assange ought to be the Wikileaker’s intent, which springs from — and is practically inseparable from — Assange’s political persuasions. Those persuasions (and there’s Crovitz’s rub) are presumably anti-American, though I see them primarily as anti-secrecy and pro-accountability. Putting a guy on trial for not being sufficiently rah-rah about America’s military adventures doesn’t strike me as particularly laudable, or as particularly in keeping with the spirit of the First Amendment.

There’s a war for that

The United States of America was born out a war for freedom from what was perceived as an oppressive government. The Constitution of the United States which “constituted” — in other words, created — our country, was deliberately written to try to ensure our new government did not develop into one just as oppressive as that from which we’d just fought and died to free ourselves.

At the end of the constitutional convention — the birthplace of the Constitution — a woman supposedly asked Benjamin Franklin something to the effect of,

So, doctor, what kind of government have you all given us?

Franklin’s pithy reply was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Continue reading “There’s a war for that”

Chinese prosperity is not necessarily a threat

Yesterday, my Esteemed Co-Blogger Rogier posted with some concern about a recent IMF forecast that the United States will soon no longer be the world’s largest economy. According to a Brett Arends at MarketWatch, this will be a disaster:

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.

I don’t know much about the Treasury market, and I know even less about the currency markets, so I’m willing to believe that a change in the U.S. economy’s world ranking could spell disaster for either of those, but I’m not sure why the rest of us should care. In fact, I think we can be cautiously optimistic.

For one thing, the major nations of the world don’t compete against each other the same way that companies do. One key reason is that the majority of goods and services produced by a country are consumed by that country. If nearly all Coca-Cola was consumed by Coca-Cola employees, and nearly all Pepsi was consumed by Pepsi employees, they would not be competing against each other, and a change in the size of the Coca-Cola market would not affect the welfare of Pepsi employees very much. For similar reasons, a change in Chinese GDP doesn’t have a huge negative effect on the welfare of American citizens.

Also, when it comes to individual well-being, GDP figures are not a good indicator because GDP is not adjusted for population size. We can make a better comparison by switching to per-capita figures. For example, in 2010, U.S. GDP was $14.6 trillion, and Chinese GDP was $9.4 trillion. However, the 2010 populations of the U.S. and China were 309 million and 1,350 million, respectively, meaning that China had about 2/3 the GDP despite having a population almost 4 times larger.

The upshot is the Chinese economy provides the average Chinese resident approximately$7000 per year in consumable goods and services, whereas the U.S. economy provides each person with an average of $47,000 worth of consumable goods and services.

That’s a ratio of about 6.8 to 1, which means it will take China a lot longer to raise individual well-being to U.S. levels that it would take to simply match our aggregate GDP with their much larger population. And again, the U.S. and China are not in direct economic competition, so the increase in Chinese welfare does not come at our expense.

Finally, Arends’ article includes this interesting graph:

Graph From MarketWatch Article

Note that this displays the sizes of the U.S. and Chinese economies as a percentage of the world economy. This means that if the economies of other countries are improving, the U.S. share of the world economy could go down, even if GDP rises in the U.S.

Instead, let’s look at absolute Purchasing Power Parity GDP:

Purchasing Power Parity, US and China
Purchasing Power Parity, US and China

In this chart, you can see that for most of the last three decades, U.S. GDP has been rising pretty steadily, with only a few hiccups, at least until the start of our current recession (which is, as this chart makes clear, shockingly larger than any other recession in the last 30 years).

However, the current recession only explains part of China’s gain on the U.S. economy. The other half of the story is visible in the Chinese GDP data which after 2000 begins rising much more rapidly than before. So while some of China’s gain is due to our recent economic problems, an awful lot of the gain is due to improvements in the Chinese economy.

There are three reasons not to worry about this sudden Chinese growth spurt. First, this period of rapid growth is happening because, after decades of inefficiency under a command economy, Chinese rulers have finally permitted some market reforms, and Chinese businesses are modernizing. Basically, China’s economy is growing quickly because it is finally starting to catch up to the modern world. And in economics, catching up is always faster, because equipment and factories can be upgraded directly to the latest technology, rather than having to evolve it the way the economic leaders did.

Second, there’s reason to believe that economic growth brings freedom. As more and more people become wealthier and wealthier, they begin to use that wealth to exert control over their own lives. Free countries are less likely to get into wars with each other.

Third, once China’s economy catches up to the economic leaders, its growth will have to slow down because it will no longer be adopting off-the-shelf technology. China will be restrained by the rate of invention of new technology like everybody else, which will spur enterprising Chinese firms to invest heavily in improving technology. Those technological advances will become available to other countries as well, raising the standard of living everywhere. Basically, the more people who are inventing new technology (instead of just playing catch-up), the better we all are.

Having written all these optimistic observations, I have to point out that China’s leaders might very well use some of their new wealth to fund militaristic adventures and, as we in the U.S. are learning, even wealthy countries can lose ground on freedom.

(Since the MarketWatch article used the Purchasing Power Parity GDP, so did I, pulling data from the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine. Population figures are the latest figures from the CIA World Fact Book.)

 

Young people these days: selfish, preening monsters

Kids these days, and their damn music! The self-absorbed little shits actually dare stress their individuality over their commonality, complains Nathan DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, who has analyzed the lyrics of almost three decades of chart toppers.

Hit songs in the 1980s were more likely to emphasize happy togetherness, like the racial harmony sought by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder in “Ebony and Ivory” and the group exuberance promoted by Kool & the Gang: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.” Diana Ross and Lionel Richie sang of “two hearts that beat as one,” and John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” emphasized the preciousness of “our life together.”

It’s interesting that all those artists are baby boomers, a generation about which the exact same claims of self-centeredness and vanity were made ad infinitum.

Then we had the Me Generation (anyone born in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s), and the social-sciences commentariat found those young’uns likewise in the horrible throes of inflated self esteem.

A subset of the Me Generation was Generation X. Same story: Egotistical and self-absorbed, GenX’ers supposedly sucked.

Unfortunately but predictably, GenY’ers were then found wanting, too.

And so it goes.

There is, it appears, a whole cottage industry dedicated to helping us realize that in real life, young people don’t actually behave like the über-virtuous offspring of Doris Day and Mr. Rogers. In case you need to be reminded of the vanity of youth, Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism) made a mint of it in the seventies; Sam Vaknin (Malignant Self-love) provided the nineties’ sequel; and now we have Nathan DeWall and Jean M. Twenge carrying on the proud tradition.

None of this is intended as a defense of narcissism. It just seems to me that the never-ending hand-wringing over self-centered adolescents (not to mention that infernal racket they listen to) is not just an epic and slightly embarrassing yawner; it is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit that social scientists will have you sample. I had my fill long ago.

We’re #1! Well, we used to be, anyway.

It was fun while it lasted.

Ten years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s. In five years, China’s will be bigger, according to the International Monetary Fund. Marketwatch notes that

…whomever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy. … This is more than a statistical story. It is the end of the Age of America. As a bond strategist in Europe told me two weeks ago, “We are witnessing the end of America’s economic hegemony. We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. for so long that there is no longer anyone alive who remembers anything else.”

I should probably come up with some insightful rant on what’s likely brought us to this point. I could start with decades-long blind partisan Beltway slugfests; then move on to the deeply-felt sense of gimme-gimme entitlement by a majority of voters; the high crimes of Wall Street, never on more naked display than during the 2008/2009 crisis and bailout; the interventionist policies and the unnecessary wars that have bled us dry; the pigheaded national insistence on a no-cost-is-too-high domestic-security apparatus that is is used bullishly (bullshittishly?) and indiscriminately. Yadda yadda.

But I’m weary, and suddenly a bit sad, and it occurred to me the Traditional Values Coalition will probably insist our decline is due to sexting teenagers and guys kissing, so who am I to argue?