Samizdata

According to American Thinker, there is a move afoot to nationalise the ability of people to control the temperatures of their own homes (yes, really!) in, where else, the People’s Republic of California:

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

Good grief. Presumably the same logic will be extended into all your household functions. As for the “and you would not be able to alter them”, has the political class’ dislike of so-called ‘assault weapons’ been extended to ban hammers and screwdrivers?

However I must say that American Thinker demonstrates what a big part of the problem is:

Building codes and engineering standards are generally good things.

By which I assume they mean politically derived and state imposed building codes and engineering standards (and if they do not, ignore all that follows). Well guys, all your are doing is reporting on the logical progression of these ‘good things’ that you like so much. Building codes and engineering standards demanded by insurance companies on the other hand are far less likely to have ‘mission creep’ built into the process. American Thinker makes the classic statist mistake of assuming that order can only be imposed by the state regardless of all the evidence to the contrary (or as Bastiat put it, “Paris gets fed” without any central planner). People want and need order. Order is at the core of what civilisation is about. But it makes little sense allowing a monopoly provider of order to decide how best to achieve that. When you do, you end up with shit like this.

(hat tip to Dropsafe)

There is an article on Pajamas Media which, if largely true, would have certainly been enough to tip me over the edge into not supporting Ron Paul. Admittedly I have always been rather equivocal in my support of him, but if some the statements attributed to him are indeed what they seem when viewed in context, then I have even more difficulty lining up behind him.

However…

A lot of the ‘damning’ statement attributed to him are things I have no problem with in the slightest and to describe them as evidence of racism or conspiracy theories is unconvincing and in a few cases actually absurd.

So let us fisk the statements offered up as evidence of Ron Paul’s wickedness by Daniel Koffler, starting with the ones described as ‘Racists Pull Quotes’… → Continue reading: When Ron Paul is wrong… and when he is not

There is a powerful strain of thought in the United States which sees the world as essentially capable of reduction to a series of legal processes, and more specifically American legal processes. Acts of war by foreigners are seen as ‘crimes’, legal infractions, rather than acts of war, and anything that happens anywhere can be a source of legal action (and income) for American lawyers.

A case in point is the strange Biom case. David Boim, a 17 year old American, was murdered in Israel by some Palestinian psychos associated with Hamas and this ends up as the subject of a civil lawsuit by his parents in Chicago.

The actual details of this case are not what concerns me and gawd knows I am far from sad to see bad things happen to Islamist groups in the United States or anywhere else, but the logic underpinning this sort of thing strikes me as being based on a great many questionable and downright dangerous assumptions.

David Boim was an American, but he chose to leave America and go to another country with its own laws and courts, so surely Israel is where any legal issues should be sorted out as that is where he was murdered. Moreover, as the case in Chicago seems to be based on suing people for their political support of Hamas, if those organisations in the USA are legal, is allowing them to be sued for their political views really acceptable? If however they are declared to be proscribed organisations by the American state, surely they should not exist at all within the USA and that would presumably be a criminal matter, not a civil one.

Would it be regarded as acceptable in the USA for American organisations in some third country with links to the Republican Party or just the US government generally, to be sued by people critical of US foreign policy? Can the relatives of people killed by US troops in Iraq sue US commercial or political interests in Europe based on their presumed support for US policies? It strikes me as a ludicrous notion much like the preposterous ‘libel tourism‘ used by the odious Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz to silence US author Rachel Ehrenfeld (amongst others) by using British court rulings.

Yet as long as people in the USA are sanguine about US courts being used to sue people for things that happen outside the USA, they can hardly complain if others use foreign courts against US citizens for things they do in the USA (such as publishing a book, for example).