The man who brought us the ultimate tough private eye, Mike Hammer, has died at the age of 88. I quite liked Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled fiction, though goodness knows it never pretended to be Henry James or Proust (and was all the better for it, probably). Bob Bidinotto has a nice article saying farewell to the old fella. Here is a report over at Bloomberg. I am sure Hammer is laughing over a large bourbon somewhere before going out to tangle with treacherous dames and cut down the bad guys.
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Thank goodness we have the Republicans to protect people from themselves and limit international on-line commerce.
‘Our’ society? Bob Goodlatte should really get out of the coercion business and follow his natural career as a barista and leave the series of social interactions we call ‘society’ to its members, rather than using force to distort it. Now can someone remind me why the Elephants are supposed to be trusted with imperfect edifice of American capitalism and civil liberty but the wicked ol’ Donkeys cannot? A pox of both parties I say but at least the Democrats were on the right side of this issue. My prediction: People who want to gamble on-line will start registering with trusted on-line off-shore providers, who will change a forwarder URL of their sites every few days and notify their clients of the new URL via or-mail or SMS in order to get around ISP blocking for those unable to use proxies and other ways to confuse the ISP where you are really going. Payment will be between the client and a series of disposable off-the-shelf companies in Panama or Grand Cayman which shut down, only to be replaced by a new company, as soon as the US credit card companies identify them as receiving money from gambling. The US state can make it harder but if people want to wager their own money, they will always find a way. If i was a betting man (i.e. statistically challenged, which I am not), I would put my money on the Feds getting their arses kicked when they try to shut the off-shore sites down (particularly as they are legal in the countries they operate in and can take clients from the rest of the world without much difficulty). Can anyone say “Drug War”? July 12th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In case anyone missed it, here is a fine article summing up what I think is the truth behind the case of the three NatWest bankers who are to be extradited to the United States on charges related to the collapse of Enron. The author, business writer Jeff Randall, fingers what he sees as the reason why the banks have been so coy about defending their employees from the U.S. legal authorities. Unlike Stephen Pollard, who huffs and puffs about how this controversy is largely a matter of anti-Americanism, I do not like the smell of this case at all. I think Pollard’s argument – which has its merits – misses the point of how one-sided the operation of U.S. extradition powers are. These men are not regarded by the British authorities of being guilty of any offence. The U.S. authorities appear not – to the best of my knowledge – to have given even the semblance of a prima facie case justifying the extradition of this trio. And yet as the article points out, while the U.S. can use these powers – supposedly justified by the War on Terror – Britain has no corresponding right to extradite alleged U.S. wrongdoers (powers associated with terrorism have a habit of branching out). As with the British blogger Clive Davis, I am a pro-American who also thinks the U.S. authorities sometimes do a lousy job at treating what they should regard as their close allies. Okay, I can hear the comments coming that even if they did a great job, it would make no difference. I am not so sure. While I agree with Stephen Pollard that U.S. authorities are arguably right to get nasty on financial wrongdoings and are often tougher than we Brits, this use of extradition powers looks a step too far. It does not strike me as smart diplomacy or right law, and I hope, perhaps naively, that the British government shows rather more backbone on this case than hitherto. Here is more on the story, and more here. UPDATE: And of course let’s not forget the continuing outrage of the EU arrest warrant. I should have mentioned this fact earlier, in case our American readers think I am picking on them. July 10th, 2006 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The June edition of technology, futurism and culture magazine Wired has a fascinating piece by Steve Silberman about growing government restrictions in the United States on home-chemistry kits and how this could bar children from learning from, and getting excited by, science. Instead, children are likely to increasingly encounter chemistry and science not up close in a lab and by playing around with kits, but via video or school labs where experiments are conducted in highly protected environments. I can see the thought process here: “If youngsters get home-kits to make chemical experiments, then the odd potential bin Laden brewing up a concoction in his bedroom could go out and try to blow people up.” Small-scale amateur rocketry has already experienced similar bans or restrictions on stuff like the fuel used (“some nut might shoot a plane out of the sky!”). But the security services are missing the “Pack not a herd” point of Glenn Reynolds and others: namely, that in a rich civil society where lots of people have hobbies and interests including messing around with chemistry, physics and technology in their spare time, it creates a natural “social capital”, if you will, of people who can prove mighty useful in an emergency. The same edition of Wired magazine has an article on how companies like Proctor and Gamble use home-based scientists – what Wired calls “crowdsourcing” – to fix problems that their own in-house professionals take more time and a lot more money to solve. If I were a defence or security official, instead of treating all amateur scientists as potential trouble-makers, I’d co-opt them, issue prizes for new ideas, and so forth. I suppose this links to my point below about the value of X-Prize contests. So by all means be vigilant in the fight against terror. But if geeky children want to learn more about chemistry at home, I think that is a healthy thing to be encouraged. Our ancestors, such as these fellows, who often arrived at scientific breakthroughs after exploring scientific ideas in a far less regulated environment than today, certainly would have agreed. July 9th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Speed limits, especially highway speed limits, are one of those things that bring out the inner libertarian in many Americans. Which is to say, when Americans get on the open road, they tend to drive as fast as they damn well please. Even on crowded urban freeways, the speed limit is routinely ignored. It is universally assumed that the occasional ticket is just a cost of doing business, and that speed limit enforcement isn’t about public safety but about revenue generation. On the flip side, few things will get a nanny stater on his high horse faster than automotive travel. In some ways, the 55 mph speed limit (signed into law by Richard Nixon, no friend of limited government, but widely associated with Jimmy Carter, the very model of a modern nanny stater) stands as a high watermark of government bossiness. Aside from claims about gas savings (about which more later), 55 mph is universally lauded by Our Betters as saving lives. Except, it does no such thing. When the 55 mph federal mandate was being repealed:
So were St. Ralph and his cohort of busybodies correct? The envelope, please:
So what about conservation? Everyone opposed to driving fast parrots the bare fact that driving 55 mph is more efficient, but oddly no one seems to mention what percentage we could reduce our total energy use if everyone did so. Given that most driving is done off the freeways, one suspects that the global impact of 55 mph is not great. While there is no doubt that driving slower uses less gas, driving slower is not cost free:
So do not forget to offset any savings with the cost of achieving them. Efficiency is good, no doubt about that. Efficiency is generally not achieved via government mandate, but by the to and fro of the market. All things being equal, a more efficient gizmo, automotive or otherwise, is more attractive the consumer. So what is the case for 55 mph? Like so many nanny state initiatives, it is rooted not so much in safety (impact: minimal) or efficiency (net global impact: minimal), but in a puritanical desire to control. July 8th, 2006 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
A budget impasse caused by New Jersey state governor Jon Corzine attempting to increase taxes has caused many of the state’s functions to be shut down for the first time in New Jersey’s history. This is of course splendid news and I hope the longer the shut down lasts, the more people in that bastion of statism that is New Jersey will realise that life goes on without the nanny state constantly interfering. More than half the state work force, 45,000 people, have been ordered to stay home. Perhaps people will eventually conclude this is actually rather a good thing and wonder why they have been paying for these people all these years. Moreover when it comes to things people really do seem to want, I would be willing to bet that most of the statistically challenged folks who entertain themselves in the now closed Atlantic City casinos would be just as happy to gamble without state regulators on the premises (who after all are there primarily to make sure the state gets their tax money). Jon Corzine is showing the way: the world is not going to come to an end when large chunks of the state stop functioning. More and faster please. July 6th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 4th, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mike Hudack of blip.tv wishes all a happy Independence Day with a few thoughts worth noting:
His personal hero of the American revolution is Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, whose arguments created conditions for writing the Declaration of Independence.
It is allowed to be idealistic today:
Such words are very encouraging, especially coming from someone who has set up and runs a videoblogging community. It means that this particular community and the company behind it is driven by an understanding of the profound impact that individual creativity and its distribution will have on the future. And, surely, that is a Good Thing. July 4th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few days ago former Clinton Secretary of State Madelein Albright condemned the American Libraries Association (ALA) for its tepid response to the Cuban state’s repression of intellectual freedoms by its policies of banning certain books and imprisoning independent librarians who do not follow the party line. However all I ever need to know about the ALA is revealed in this article with the line “But she won her loudest applause for oblique slaps at President Bush”. Hostility to Bush roused the emotions of more ALA librarians than defending oppressed librarians in Cuba. Of course that Americans are more concerned with American affairs is hardly surprising but when an organisation decries its government’s leadership at home on civil rights grounds and yet balks at heaping any significant opprobrium on an old style communist tyranny off the American coast, I think this is an organisation that can be safely consigned to the useful idiots category. No doubt many in the ALA are impressed by the more than ten fold increase in the number of public libraries under Castro, ignoring the fact that these libraries can only stock books which are not deemed ideologically unacceptable by the regime. Somehow I rather doubt books by the oafish Michael Moore or Marx are in any shortage in the American libraries presided over by the ALA (and rightly so). July 2nd, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story about a drugs bust at a drive-thru restaurant may get some folk chuckling but I am not getting the joke. One of thousands of examples, in fact, of how the war on drugs is a waste of time, energy and law-enforcement talent. At a time when we live with the threat of terrorism, one would like to think that priorities were a touch different on both sides of the Atlantic. June 29th, 2006 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
President Bush, a man I have never had much affection for and about whom I have very few good things to say, has just struck a blow for the good guys of the issue of eminent domain abuse (UK= compulsory purchase) by signing an executive order that the US federal government can only seize private property for public use and not in order to turn it over to private property developers. Although the vast majority of property seized in the United State is does by state and local authorities, this is nevertheless a very welcome development indeed and a definite move in the right direction. June 24th, 2006 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Daryl Hannah was arrested yesterday for sitting in a tree, defending the South Central Farm, a community garden in Los Angeles scheduled for development by the property’s owner, Ralph Horowitz. The City of LA, which has most recently owned the land, had been kind enough to allow locals to use the acreage to grow tomatoes and corn whilst it lay fallow. Then it sold the land to Horowitz, who evily has decided to develop the property… The kicker? Horowitz is the property’s rightful owner from away back – the city having seized the land from him in the first place in 1986, citing immanent domain, when it wanted to build an incinerator on the site. He’s now being accused of being an ‘evil developer’, and member of the LA Jewish Mafia. Then along came the D-list celebrity activists, including Hannah and folk singer Joan Baez, who took up the ill-conceived cause, found a tree on the property, and started sitting in it. Far from being a bleeding-heart shoe-in, the farm is so stinky a lefty effort that the local alt-weekly newspaper, the LA Weekly, ran an investigative expose about thuggery on the part of pro-farm organizers and their intimidation tactics in pressuring the ‘farmers’ to support the ’cause’. The only net effect, of course, will be to prevent any landowner, including the government, from allowing community gardens anywhere, ever, or any other benevolent use of property, for fear of squatter confiscation. A brutally ‘fair’ outcome, satisfactory only to those who fail to recognize that unfairness is the basis of benevolence – it is what we call charity. June 15th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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