Category: masters and servants.

in the news. masters and servants. things that go boom.

the impartial media and virtual scarlet letters.

So a newspaper called The Journal News put up an interactive map marking the location of every single registered pistol permit holder in two New York counties. Predictably, they’re getting a little bit of flak for that.

Also predictably, the paper’s defense is all “that’s public information, and the public has a right to know.” This is a weaselly cop-out. Lots of things are public information, but not smart to collate and present on an interactive map for easy access. Can you imagine the (rightful) uproar if  a conservative-leaning rag published the names and addresses of every single gay married couple in their county? It would be correctly interpreted as an attempt to intimidate and stigmatize the gay couples, and lambasted as a shopping list for gay-bashers to find homes to deface and people to harass. Yes, you can still get that information if you really want it, but you’d have to file a FOIA request and put together all the data by yourself, which is not something the average knuckle-dragging gay-hater is going to do.

To anyone who is entirely honest with themselves, the newspaper’s publication of gun permit holders has only one purpose: to stigmatize gun owners along the lines of sex offenders. There is no public safety interest in this. The map only shows the legally licensed handguns in the area. It does not show the illegally owned guns (which are far more likely to be used in a crime), nor does it show shotguns and rifles, which do not need to be registered in New York state. (With all the concern about “assault rifles”, why publish a map that only shows the handgun owners, and only the properly licensed ones at that?) More importantly, it also exposes the “call for sensible gun laws” as a lie. The map makes no distinction between someone with a .22 target pistol, a five-shot revolver, or a Glock 19 with those evil high-capacity magazines. The people on that map are already following the “sensible laws” that are being proposed by anti-gun activists on a federal level. They are a.) licensed, b.) registered, and c.) subject to an “assault weapons ban” (New York has one that closely follows the expired 1994 AWB they want revived on the federal level.) Why pick on the legal handgun owners if assault rifles are the problem? Why pick on the legal handgun owners if lack of registration or licensing are the problem? Why do so in a state that already has mandatory handgun registration and an assault weapons ban?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t care about that sort of stuff. To them “sensible gun laws” really mean “no guns in private hands”. They also don’t care about the public safety they proclaim their map serves. People who care about public safety don’t provide criminals with an easy-to-use map of who owns guns and who doesn’t. If you know where the legally owned guns are, you know where to break in while the home owner is at work. If you know where there’s no legally registered gun, you know where to break in if you want fewer occupational hazards. And if you’re a disgruntled ex-husband whose battered former spouse chose to back up the restraining order with a pistol permit and a .38 in her purse, you can find her new address and map out directions to her place with two mouse clicks. No, there is nothing you can do with that sort of map that actually enhances public safety.

But like I said—that’s not what it’s for. It’s an attempt of a nominally impartial newspaper to influence a public policy debate by taking a side and clumsily attempting to stigmatize the other side by equating them with sex offenders. Regardless of where you stand on guns and private gun ownership, that sort of tactic should raise eyebrows.

history. masters and servants.

do you hate a plant more than you love your rights?

Prohibition causes huge profit margins for dealers cause turf wars cause violence causes public concern causes calls to “do something” cause gun control. If you’re for prohibition, you are for gun control. That’s irrespective of the substance to be prohibited.

I posted that on Facebook yesterday, in response to one of my FB friends posting about the pot legalization law in Colorado. I want to expand on that statement a little, even though in its current form it’s pretty much distilled down into the TL;DR form already.

Prohibition of a desired substance or item always causes a black market, unless you have police powers and social controls similar to the German occupation forces in WWII Eastern Europe. (And the fact that even the Nazis were never able to fully suppress the black market for cigarettes and butter despite death penalties for “economic parasites” just shows how nigh-impossible it is to kill that sort of entrepreneurship.) The reason is simple: government prohibition of a desired good makes that good artificially expensive, and all the profits go to those willing to risk bucking the system. As the Prohibition was an effective price control and profit guarantee for bootleggers, hooch runners, and speakeasies, the current War on Some Drugs serves in the same fashion for pot growers, cocaine smugglers, and meth cooks. The risks are high, but when you pass a law that effectively puts a 10,000% profit margin on a simple plant product, you will always have plenty of people taking the risks involved in its manufacture and distribution. That’s a simple economic fact, and working against it is as pointless as working against gravity.

(It may not seem obvious from the position of a reasonably prosperous American suburbanite, but imagine I put an ad on Craigslist and offer twenty times the average annual U.S. salary to volunteers willing to smuggle twenty pounds of banned Earl Grey tea into a foreign country. How many takers do you think I would get per week? Answer that question to yourself, and you’ll realize why it’s utterly pointless when the DEA busts some scraggly smuggler at the border crossing with a few pounds of Colombian marching powder sewn into his car seat.)

Because people can make astronomical profits serving the market for the prohibited goods, turf wars between the suppliers are also inevitable. And because they’re all operating in an extralegal space already, they solve their competition issues in an extralegal way—gang violence. Prohibitions drive up the crime statistics directly (turf warfare between the gangs and syndicates involved), and indirectly (the ancillary crime related to the customers of those syndicates having to finance their purchases via property crime). Sooner or later, the public violence gets to a point where Joe and Jane Q. Public want Something To Be Done, and that something is often a push for arms control. The Prohibition violence brought us NFA ‘34, banning what were perceived the typical tools of the trade of gangsters: short-barreled shotguns and automatic weapons. (Machine guns got slapped with a tax rather than banned outright, but a $200 tax stamp on a gun retailing for less than half that in a time where the average annual wage is $1,300 is effectively a ban.) The 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill was a result of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s (and Joe and Jane Q. Public watching Miami Vice as a documentary). And that stuff is a mere inconvenience compared to the awful excesses of asset forfeiture laws, which have given police departments all over the country a financial incentive to outright steal property from citizens without the inconvenience of having to prove that a crime occurred.

It’s interesting how the same people who scoff at the notion that criminals won’t use guns if they’re banned can simultaneously hold the opinion that people will stop using or trading in drugs when they’re banned. They’ll use the same arguments the gun control crowd makes in favor of gun bans: at least it’ll be more difficult to get them, we can just come up with really draconian punishments for offenders, and doing nothing will make things worse. If that logic doesn’t apply to guns, why should it apply to drugs—which are easier to make and smuggle, and carry much higher profit margins? The rules of the market are what they are, and they don’t bend around a pet cause. And what if that “doing something” is in fact far worse than doing nothing? Gun control is unilateral disarmament of the law-abiding citizen in favor of the criminal. Drug prohibition is government-enforced price control for drug cartels, and a universal adaptor for an overreaching police state. Both cures are far more poisonous to the host than the problems they mean to fix. And the kicker is that support for the latter invariably results in getting more of the former.

in the news. masters and servants.

the surveillance state eats its own.

Here’s an excellent Salon.com article on the most worrisome and least-addressed aspect of the Petraeus affair—the fact that the Feds were able to dig up what they did without evidence of a crime, and without any warrants.

Money quote:

“Having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.”

One assumes General Petraeus fully supports the current reach of the surveillance state in much the same way post-Reconstruction whites supported gun control—it’s all fine and dandy as long as the Sheriffs remember that it’s just supposed to be used against Those People. But if the director of the CIA can have his emails snooped without a warrant or evidence of a crime, I doubt that looking through mine or yours would give the FBI even a twinge of civil liberties concerns.

capitalism. in the news. masters and servants.

capitalism is bad, except when it’s *my* profit.

There’s a new party in Germany. They call themselves the “Pirate Party”, and they’re a loose conglomerate of people well left of the already pretty left-of-center mainstream Social Democrats: anti-Capitalism, anti-establishment, anti-soap-and-deodorant, the usual coffee house anarchists.

One of the platforms of the Pirate Party is that “information should be free.” They advocate unrestricted Internet sharing of books, music, movies, and whatever else can be uploaded to a file-sharing server, without any regard for copyright or intellectual property. One of the members of the Pirate Party’s executive committee, a 26-year-old named Julia Schramm, even called the idea of intellectual property “disgusting.”

Here’s where it gets really hilarious. Said Julia Schramm just landed a book deal with Albrecht Knaus, a German publisher owned by Random House. She netted a 100,000 euro advance for her anti-capitalist book “Click Me”. Some people uploaded the PDF version of the book to a file-sharing server and spread the link around via Twitter and Facebook, along with info about the Pirate Party’s stance on “free information”.

The author promptly issued a DMCA take-down request, and the file was removed.

There’s a saying in German that goes something like, “Preaching water and drinking wine.” It’s pretty amazing how often a politician’s bedrock philosophies only apply to other people, and are conveniently forgotten when one’s own ox is in line for goring. (And no, it’s not just those on the left of the political spectrum.)

in the news. masters and servants. this monkey house.

how u spel deficet?

So the Chicago Public Day Care System’s wardens—who, on average, earn $76,000 a year—are striking because the 16% pay increase over four years offered by the city just won’t cut it. Meanwhile, the Chicago school system has a dropout rate that’s close to 50%. But if you question the right of public sector union workers to have a guaranteed job for life and cushy pensions, you’re “playing political games on the backs of our children,” or something like that.

I’m not anti-union, strictly speaking, but between the strike in Chicago and the public sector unions in California driving the state into bankruptcy, it’s not all that hard to see where this is going. With our tax bills, we’re feeding an ever-expanding public sector whose unions have no qualms at all about blackmailing everyone else for 16% pay increases. (Remember—that money isn’t out of some mystical Chicago city money bin, it comes out of the paychecks of everyone else.) Don’t want to pony up For The Children™? Here are 400,000 kids on the streets—good luck finding daycare.

Meanwhile, Joe and Jane Taxpayer get shafted twice. They get to contribute an ever-increasing portion of their paycheck to enlarge the public sector, and that public sector’s busywork usually involves nickel-and-diming Joe and Jane and gagging them with red tape.

in the news. masters and servants.

most transparent administration evar.

So the White House is asserting “executive privilege” on the release of the Fast & Furious documents to the House committee.

What the hell is “executive privilege”? Does it have something to do with the restroom use at the White House, or maybe toll-free calls from the phone in the Oval Office. I don’t rightly know, because my copy of the Constitution says precisely fuck-all about “executive privilege”.

You know, that’s part of the reason why we’re a Constitutional republic—so the #1 public employee can’t assert special rights. You let them claim “executive privilege” when it comes to testimony in Congressional committees, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Chief Executive who dresses in fantasy uniforms and renames the days of the week after maternal ancestors or favorite race horses.

in the news. masters and servants.

I like my soda in “fuck you” sized bottles.

When did we reach the point when we considered it acceptable for people to run around and try to tell other adults what size soda they may or may not buy?

Of course, the people supporting this kind of paternalistic nonsense will argue that we’re all footing the bill for the health care costs that come with obesity and diabetes. To me, that’s actually a big reason to oppose a single payer health care system. When the government pays for everyone’s boo-boo strips and insulin shots, then there’s nothing you do with your body that isn’t the government’s business. It’s a universal adapter for the Nanny State.