Of course 9/11 was a tremendously important event in our nation's history.

But our reaction to it is important as well. Such adversity can make us stronger, or it can make us weaker.

Some people seem to want to see 9/11 make us weaker. I'm not just talking about the people with a professional and political interest in making our liberties weaker. I'm talking about people who use 9/11 for the general wussification of our discourse.

Take, for instance, people who comment on the the Washington Post blog and complained because the paper ran a photo that had a building and a plane in the same frame.

Commenter Icemanchills said: “Do not like photo, and that should not require explaining. The plane in the background of the monument is insensitive and needlessly evocative of a horrible day in contemporary American history.”

I know that bullying is extremely unpopular right now, but don't you think that America is a weaker place because no one is pushing Icemanchills down, stealing his lunch money, kicking sand in his face, and generally deterring him from breeding?

A nation full of people like Icemanchills is a nation full of people who agree that we ought to censor speech that doesn't make weaklings feel welcome, safe and secure. A nation full of Icemanchills never accomplished anything, except possibly the growth of the freshwater-pearl and fainting-couch industry.

Edited to add: Is it perhaps irrationally curmudgeonly to make a point based on one comment on a paper's blog? Maybe. Curmudgeonliness makes America great. Don't make me go Google other examples, damn you. (Or, for that matter, cite the far more incendiary one I was thinking of.)

Last year I wrote about the Institute for Justice and their lawsuit on behalf of the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey of St. Benedict, Louisiana. The monks, you may recall, made beautiful handcrafted caskets, but labored under a ridiculous Louisiana law that required them to become a "funeral director" if they wanted to sell them. As I said then:

Louisiana law purports to require that anyone who is going to sell a casket has to jump through all same regulatory hoops as a full-fledged mortuary operation that embalms bodies. See, selling “funeral merchandise” (including caskets) means you are a “funeral director.” And to be a “funeral director,” you must be approved for “good moral character and temperate habits” by a funeral-related government entity [of course, that's in Louisiana, but still], complete 30 semester hours at college, apprentice with a funeral director for a year, pay an application fee, and pass an exam. But that’s not all. If you want your facility to sell caskets, it’s got to qualify as a facility for funeral directing, including a showroom and “embalming facilities for the sanitation, disinfection, and preparation of a human body.”

So, to sum up: Louisiana would like the monks of Saint Joseph to take college classes, intern with a funeral director for a year, pass an exam, pay a fee, be approved by a board, and convert part of their monastery into a professional mortuary in order to sell hand-crafted wooden caskets. If they don’t, they are guilty of a crime.

This was classic rent-seeking: a protectionist measure calculated to defend Louisiana's existing "funeral directors" from competition, so that they could continue to sell over-chromed ass-ugly caskets at an enormous markup.

At the time, I expressed skepticism that the ILJ would succeed in its suit.

Oh, me of little faith. ILJ won:

The Honorable Stanwood Duval of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana ruled, “Simply put, there is nothing in the licensing procedures that bestows any benefit to the public in the context of the retail sale of caskets. The license has no bearing on the manufacturing and sale of coffins. It appears that the sole reason for these laws is the economic protection of the funeral industry which reason the Court has previously found not to be a valid government interest standing alone to provide a constitutionally valid reason for these provisions.”

I would have taken a sweet win like this and locked myself in my office for a couple of years to play Minecraft at my desk, which incidentally would have been a hand-crafted upside-down casket by that point. ILJ is made of sterner stuff, though. Via Amy Alkon, I see that ILJ is now crusading against another loathsome example of rent-seeking and crony-supporting pseudo-nanny-statism: taxi regulations in Milwaukee.

In 1991, the city of Milwaukee prohibited any new entrepreneurs from entering the taxi market. The city council imposed a hard cap of 321 taxis for the entire city, and made it so that the only way to get a taxi permit was to purchase one from an existing permit holder. As a result, today the city has just one taxi for every 1,850 residents (compared to 1 in 90 for Washington DC and 1 in 480 for Denver) and taxi permits have risen in price from $85 to $150,000—more than the average cost of a house in Milwaukee.

Why would the Milwaukee City Council do that? Who are they protecting?

As explained in an Institute for Justice study, Unhappy Days for Milwaukee Entrepreneurs, the city’s taxi law does nothing but funnel money to a small group of entrenched businesses at the expense of entrepreneurs, who lose out on opportunities, and at the expense of consumers, who face poor service and long wait times. One taxi owner, Milwaukee County Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo, owns almost half the city’s taxi permits. His brother Mike runs one of the city’s biggest taxicab companies, American United.

As always, the rent-seeking beneficiaries of protectionist regulation cite (albeit unusually unconvincingly) concerns for public safety:

One of the biggest permit holders is Michael Sanfelippo, who controls 162 permits. He says that when Milwaukee had more permits, no one could make a decent living and the quality of cabs and service suffered.

"This is not a cab town," he said.

Yes, that's the County Supervisor defending his government-granted monopoly. No, the newspaper didn't see fit to point that out.

Go get 'em, IJ.

Okay, I have to make a confession.  I am an AWFUL prognosticator.  Anyone who has played me in Fantasy Football can tell you that.  I'm pretty good at analysis after the fact, but when it comes to predicting future events, I'm bloody-effing-terrible.  Of course, there was one shining moment where I correctly predicted the result of the 2004 NBA finals game-by-game, but to be honest I was just trying to be funny since everyone and their mom was predicting the Lakers to win.

ANYWAY, that's my horrible excuse as to why I never followed up and wrote something about the Tea Party.  Because frankly, I became terrified that I would be wrong.  Or worse, not funny.  Plus, I forgot my password and was too embarrassed to ask for it.   In any case, I'm sure you're all confused.  To the casual observer, the Tea Party is a loose conglomerate of similarly minded and mildly racist individuals who have HIT THE POLITICAL SCENE LIKE A TIDAL WAVE OF PATRIOTIC DOUCHEBAGGERY.  But you're wrong!  It's really… okay, you might be right there.  But it's clear at this point that they are a very big factor, for obvious reasons.  So the big question is… how does one counter them?  We're not talking [DEM] people, that's for another article.  For me, the more intriguing question is, "How does one get out of the Republican Primaries without coming off as a little unhinged?"  IT'S AN ELEPHANT PARTY UP IN THIS.

Continue Reading »

The other day I described how University of Wisconsin-Stout police got all censorious and thuggish about a rather inoffensive Firefly poster and an anti-fascism follow-up. Nathan Fillion and others took notice of the story, spreading it widely. The general hope was that once the matter left the hands of UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter and reached the hands of someone with a room-temperature IQ and even a tenuous grasp of freedom of expression, the problem would be corrected.

We should have known better.

As FIRE reports, UWS Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen has reacted to nationwide ridicule by acting in an even more ridiculous fashion.

FIRE has posted Chancellor Sorensen's email here:

There have been recent news reports about an incident in which two posters hung by a UW-Stout professor outside his office were removed by campus police. There are some important points to consider in the wake of these incidents:

UW-Stout administrators believe strongly in the right of all students, faculty and staff to express themselves freely about issues on campus and off. This freedom is fundamental on a public university campus.

However, we also have the responsibility to promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind—both direct and implied. It was our belief, after consultation with UW System legal counsel, that the posters in question constituted an implied threat of violence. That is why they were removed.

This was not an act of censorship. This was an act of sensitivity to and care for our shared community, and was intended to maintain a campus climate in which everyone can feel welcome, safe and secure.

Chancellor Sorensen had some "important points to consider." I have some for him, as well:

1. The obligatory "we believe in freedom of expression" paragraph in the standard defend-our-censorship communique is simply embarrassing. That's why the Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits ("CMSCD") recommends eschewing it and launching straight into the meat of your uninformed and conclusory stomping on First Amendment law.

2. The problem with demanding a campus free of "implied threats" is illustrated by this case. Campus police first censored a poster of an imaginary space cowboy with a fan-pleasing quote. Next, just to say FUCK YOU IRONY they used threats of official retaliation against a poster condemning threats of official retaliation. No rational person could construe either poster as a threat, actual or implied, to commit violence against any person (although I suppose the second could be construed as a warning — a correct one — that thugs will act thuggishly when questioned.) If a rational person wouldn't take it as an actual threat of violence, then it's not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise.

3. Similarly, this case illustrates the problem with an approach to freedom of expression premised on "sensitivity" and making people feel "welcome, safe and secure." "Sensitivity to hurt feelings" is not, in fact, a First Amendment value or a justification for censorship. In fact, stopping people from speaking because the speech hurts people's feelings is the essence of censorship. A system in which what we can say is premised upon the likely reactions of the mentally ill and the undernourished pussywillows of the world is a system that encourages suppression of all unpopular, forceful, interesting, or challenging speech. The irrational and the morally and mentally weak are not entitled to have their feelings protected through the force of law, however prevalent they are on campus.

4. If your "UW System Legal Counsel" told you that these posters could be censored based on their content, then stop hiring lawyers out of the back of a bait shop. Or were you using someone who splits their duties between "UW System Legal Counsel" and "Assistant Professor of Western Hegemony And Hurt Feelings Studies"?

5. "No it isn't!" and "nuh-uh" may be entertaining, but they are not actually legal arguments.

6. Fuck you, you censorship-apologizing, rule-of-law-obscuring, equivocating, worthless bureaucrat.

I think we need a new tag for "Twits in Academia" here at the hat. But the task of going back to all the old posts about academic twits and editing them to add the tag is daunting.

If Australians like Andrew Bolt spent more time studying the law and less time watching imported tv shows, they'd know that this "Freedom of Speech" notion is a whimsical fantasy from America.

Andrew Bolt has lost his race discrimination case in the Federal Court of Australia.

One hundred and seventy-five days after the Herald Sun columnist's defence lawyer Neil Young, QC, delivered the final words of his two-day closing address, Justice Mordecai Bromberg delivered a stinging judgment in which he found Bolt had contravened section 18 (c) of the Racial Discrimination Act in two articles published in the Herald Sun in 2009.

“I am satisfied that fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were reasonably likely … to have been offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations conveyed by the newspaper articles,” Justice Bromberg said to a packed courtroom in Melbourne.

Bolt is "guilty" of writing that white-skinned Australians who are not culturally Aboriginal, some with blonde or red hair, nevertheless self-identify as Aboriginal in order to get preferences under Australia's affirmative action / positive discrimination laws.  It's the sort of thing said from time to time in America about certain "Indians", by people like, well, me.

In fact two years ago I said the exact same thing one of the people Bolt offended, Dr. Mark Rose of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, whose face is paler than the one my Scandinavian ancestors passed on to me.  (I believe that you can see Dr. Rose prancing about in his robes and shark's tooth necklace at a video in the first link.)

Fortunately the Australian Federal Court cannot force me to remove what I wrote about Dr. Rose, nor to apologize.

Even more fortunately, the Australian Press Council is on the case, leaping to Bolt's defense with this full-throated endorsement of free speech:

Australian Press Council chairman Julian Disney, who heads the print media's self-regulatory watchdog, welcomed the judge's decision to leave racial identification open to media scrutiny.

"I think there would be a very clear and worrying risk to free speech and I think also to eventual social cohesion if … this case was seen as establishing a no-go area," Disney told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

In other words, Disney approves of the decision because the Judge held, while censoring Bolt, that Australians are free to discuss race as long as they do so with respect.

Sarcasm, like free speech, is an American concept, completely alien to the Australian way of life.

You may read Bolt's offending article, in a form that is unlikely to disappear through court order, by clicking here.  Australians in particular are cautioned never to hit that link.

It contains sarcasm (and possibly dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire).  You have been warned.

Via Walter Olson.

There are several arguments that defend the need for a coercive State. Most of the interesting ones tend to be utilitarian arguments. Now, I'm not a utilitarian, but I refer to these as the "interesting" arguments as they are debatable – if someone argues in favor of a theocratic state because Allah wills it, or in favor of a monarchical state because "it's always been that way", I just reject those axioms…and there's not much interesting about shouting "is too" and "is not".

…so if we limit ourselves to the utilitarian arguments for the State, they tend to fall into two classes:

• greater utility for some via redistribution (e.g. "'society' should take care of the poor").
• greater utility for almost everyone via collective action.

In this essay rant, I'd like to argue that while the State may have improved (or, at least, been CAPABLE of improving) collective utility at some point in time, we are undergoing a stunning novel revolution right now (comparable in scale the change from nomadism to pastoralism, and from farming to industrial society), and the outcome of that revolution in information technology and financial technology will render the utility of the State in collective action null and moot.

(You can see why I crossed out "essay" and replaced it with "rant": what follows are the crack-addled rantings of an anarchocapitalist who hopes to see the entire Westphalian system overthrown, kicked into pieces, set on fire, and then defecated on once it cools sufficiently.)

The concept of "greater utility for almost everyone via collective action" is known by the shorter term public good. The idea is that there are some things in life – immunizations, roads, national defense, education, etc., which (a) improve utility for almost everyone, (b) are very hard to coordinate via non-coercive one-to-one coordination.

Consider the game theory problem of the prisoner's dilemma. If the prisoners cooperate they get minimal punishments…but there is a very strong incentive for one prisoner to defect from the coalition. The TOTAL utility is highest when the prisoners cooperate, and the TOTAL utility drops when one defects…but the INDIVIDUAL incentives push each towards defecting.

(I should footnote this to mention that I'm talking only about the utility totaled across the two prisoners: the guards, the staff of the guard's union, the firm supplying food to the prison under a no-bid contract, and the three sisters, the niece, and the pool boy of various politicians who get hired for do-nothing jobs in the probation department, etc. are all higher when BOTH of the prisoners are convicted).

Anyway: the point is that (a) sometimes the best outcomes occur when people can coordinate and create binding contracts, (b) nuanced, bottom-up coordination is hard.

There is one kind of coordination that is easier than nuanced, bottom-up, negotiated coordination: naked force.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but no one ever said anything about the pen being particularly quick.

Let's imagine an example of how high transaction costs can be solved by force, to the benefit of everyone…or, at least, almost everyone:

We imagine thirty folks all living in houses on a small dirt road… a road so narrow that delivery trucks can't get down it.

A few bright folks say "hey…we could all deed our front yards over to the village, move our fences back a bit, and then get Amazon deliveries to our front door, instead of having to trudge down to the village green every day where the UPS guy unceremoniously dumps them now".

A few dozen folks chat the idea up, but several others are unsure: "Well, even if we do that, will UPS drive up this new road?" "What if I deed over my front yard but no one else does: I've lost my yard, and yet I still don't get UPS deliveries", etc.

One day the local bully comes by with his crew, smashes down all the front fences, paves the road, and announces "There, it's done. The first UPS truck rolls in tomorrow. …also, you each owe me $200 for blacktop and labor".

There's some grumbling, but a few weeks later, everyone acknowledges that $200 and a lack of a front yard is a small price to pay to have the latest Twilight novel delivered to one's front step on release day. Also, it's nice not to have neighbors snooping over the pile of packages down at the village green and ask suspiciously "Sooooo….what exactly did you order from bukake.jp ?"

Yay, government! Yay collective action!

( Oh, and, yeah, it sucks that we had to knock down all of Old Man Fielder's house because it was too close to the new road, and now he's left the Village of New London and is writing cranky things about "takings" on the Internet, but progress is progress, cost be damned! )

So, anyway, if we posit that the benefits to everyone else exceed the pain to Old Man Fielder, and if we posit that somehow a good chunk of the money collected went to paying off Fielder and getting him to take down his cranky blog, we can see that total utility created is above zero, and progress was accomplished.

…and we also see that with out government it wouldn't have happened.

I assert that we haven't learned that "force is necessary to solve coordination problems" – I assert that what we've ACTUALLY learned is "force is necessary to solve coordination problems…where those 'problems' are defined AS A FUNCTION OF THE COST OF COMPUTATION".

Folks of a certain bent love the story of the Uniform Penny Post – the British post office realized that the costs of computing variable postage prices exceeded the extra revenue gained by the higher prices.

The response was the fairly clever idea of slashing the price to one low fixed point and then charging the same to deliver an envelope two doors down or 200 miles away.

This was a quite-clever bit of systems thinking and we should be impressed at the revolutionary idea (think it's not revolutionary? It was. It was such a revolution that it's reshaped our world to the point where we regard fixed pricing even over variable costs as "obvious").

…but it's also somewhat appalling: brute force labor was so much cheaper than computation that it made sense to replace expensive brains with cheap muscles.

We no longer live in a world where the computation of functions of multiple arguments is expensive. In fact, it's effectively free.

Which is a point with some radical implications.

It says that societal consensuses that were created in an era of cheap labor and expensive processing are perhaps exactly backwards.

What sorts of societal consensus? In this rant I'm arguing that "the State" is one big example.

The costs of coordination – or transaction costs – have several sub parts: search and information costs, bargaining costs, and enforcement costs.

At least two of these three are amenable to efficiencies from technological and financial engineering.

To explain why search costs are falling is to belabor the obvious.

Information costs fall for similar reason.

I'd say "we'll soon be at the point where you can go to a search engine and find a Chinese factory that will build drums to your custom specifications using Nigerian wood"…except we reached that point several years back.

Bargaining costs are likewise amenable to technological tools – we've got auctions, Dutch auctions, reverse Dutch auctions, and I'd have to do a quick Internet search to verify that "bi-curious Belgian auctions" are just a product of my fevered imagination, and not an actual thing.

Dominant assurance contracts may have been invented (or at least popularized) by anarchocapitalists, but they've been embraced by the hipster set (or, in this age of startups, is that "Hipstr"?).

There's no technical reason that we can't already coordinate the provision of shared goods like a new road serving a bunch of private homes via the tools and concepts we've already got on hand: futures markets, assurance contracts, microfinance, quick and easy online incorporation of single issue bodies, etc.

Leftists at this point trot out the talking point "Roads are public goods!"

Something is a public good if it satisfies the criteria of a public good. Merely saying " [ my favorite government program ] is a public good …as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end" is a statement of faith, not an argument.

Public goods are those things that are

nonrival and non-excludable.

Non-rivalry means that consumption of the good by one individual does not reduce availability of the good for consumption by others;

non-excludability means that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good.

Education is clearly rivalrous. If it was not so, we would not have admissions committees at colleges or residency requirements in high schools.

Good leftists tell us over and over that highways have fixed capacities.

(In fact, good leftists spend a very large percent of their waking hours telling us how finite and limited everything is, including toilet paper and our ability to heat and cool our homes…

but that is neither here nor there. Smarter people make different arguments. )

Anyway, many of the things that we're told aren't rivalrous – education, roads, security, etc. – are actually rivalrous.

The other prong of the public good fork is non-excludability…and again we find that the arguments of the left are wrong and getting wronger as technology progresses.

Car parking is excludable, and meters these days take credit cards.

…and so do the roads.

As microprocessors get smaller, faster and cheaper at such a rate that industrial contracts specify price declines by the week, we are not at the point where there is a microchip in every car and every keyring – we're well beyond that point. There are more CPUs in your house than there are human beings.

…and one can almost envision the day when there will be more CPUs in your house than there are bacteria.

Television was once non-excludable, but now you pick a bundle that matches your programming choice and pay for it. Perhaps you pay more than your neighbors because you're a history fan and want to pay more for serious educational programming, or perhaps you make do with less material and pay less.

Roads were once non-excludable (except for turnpikes, and the computational overhead was fairly expensive, as you had to pay a human to stand in the toll-house and turn the wall of pikes after being paid), but now RFID cards and credit card merchant accounts make them more common. Do a "mashup" (as the kids say) of GPS, cheap transmitters, cheap security cameras repurposed, and you can do a business model inversion that name checks Zipcar.com but makes the roads the item you subscribe to.

Or in the space of education, put the source material up for free and pair with private tutors.

The examples are numerous – technology lets us

• narrow cast benefits to individuals
• disambiguate those who use services from those who do not
• charge just those who use services
• allow individuals to coordinate for expensive development projects

Almost all of what are described as public goods are no longer so.

The world has changed.

…and thus technology is making anarchocapitalism far more realistic
than ever before.

P.S. Oh, right. Don't want to lose that bet with Ken. Wait. For. It. "crazy monkey sex".

Dateline: Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, theater professor James Miller put up a poster on his door with an image of Nathan Fillion in the character of Captain Malcolm Reynolds with one of Mal's better lines: "You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing me. And you'll be armed."

In a better world, nothing would happen — except perhaps Firefly fans would geek out and people who roll their eyes at geek culture references would roll their eyes.

But this is modern America. In modern America, the Browncoats are people who like to use vigorous figurative language to speak their mind, and they are often outnumbered and outgunned by the Alliance, made up of silly, professionally frightened moral and intellectual weaklings who see expressions of dissent (particularly dissent rendered in vivid figurative terms) as upsetting and potentially all terroristy.

So naturally the campus police at University of Wisconsin-Stout went all Mrs.-Grundy-With-A-Gun-And-A-Badge on Professor Miller. They threatened Prof. Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct, taking a page from the cops at Sam Houston state. They also took the poster down. The redoubtable FIRE has the story and has sent the necessary letter asking the University to grow the fuck up and pull its shit together. (That might be kind of a paraphrase by me.)

FIRE describes how the UWS cops and administration, confronted with their idiocy, doubled down in classic fashion:

Later on September 16, Miller placed a new poster on his office door in response to Walter's censorship. The poster read "Warning: Fascism" and included a cartoon image of a silhouetted police officer striking a civilian. The poster mocked, "Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets."

Astoundingly, Walter escalated the absurdity. On September 20, Walter emailed Miller again, stating that her office had removed the poster because it "depicts violence and mentions violence and death." She added that UWS's "threat assessment team," in consultation with the university general counsel's office, had decided to have the poster removed, and that this poster was reasonably expected to "cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat." College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Interim Dean Raymond Hayes has scheduled a meeting with Miller about "the concerns raised by the campus threat assessment team" for this Friday.

My days of taking UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter seriously are certainly coming to a middle. Strike that, they've gone past the middle. She's too ignorant of fundamental American rights and too mindlessly thuggish to have a badge or a gun. If Dean Raymond Hayes' meeting with Professor Miller consists of anything other than Hayes buying Miller a beer and saying "Christ, I'm sorry, that cop's a lunatic," then I'll have no respect for Hayes either.

These are the sorts of people who are running the schools educating our kids. They are legion.

Browncoats represent.

It's time for another chapter of my discussion of how to investigate a scam, using UST Development and its principals as an example.

I've gotten sick of repeating all the prior chapters, so I've put them in an index post. Here it is: Index of "Anatomy of a Scam" Chapters.

In this chapter, I'm going to talk about two things: follow-ups and criminal records.

Continue Reading »

Here's the index for the Anatomy of Scam series:

• The prologue: I receive the UST Development, Inc. invoice, write an email, and get a response.
• Chapter One: UST Development, Inc. sends me a bogus invoice. I explain why it's fraudulent and talk about the purpose of this series.
• Chapter Two: I discussed online search methodology and Google search techniques.
• Chapter Three I examined some Google search results for UST Development, Inc. and its principals and tried to chase down different entities.
• Chapter Four I pointed to some signs that the Better Business Bureau and the public have caught on to the UST Development scam, and further discussed the reason for this series.
• Chapter Five: I talked about searching state court records for UST Development and its principals and affiliates, including David Bell, and also examined PACER records for corroboration of fraudulent intent and trends of con-man behavior.
• Chapter Six:  I talked about the optimal methods of reporting a scammer.
• Chapter Seven:  I discussed PACER records of trademark actions against the principals of UST, and examined criminal records of David Bell.
• Chapter Eight:  Tipsters emerge, and I corroborate a tip with lawsuits and Fictitious Business Name records.
• Chapter Nine: More tipsters emerge, and David Bell starts using a new entity.

See also my important note about the series.

We haven't written much about Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's ambitious reforms, partly because I'm the only person here who gives or knows a damn about Russia, and partly because I thought Medvedev was a pawn all along.

But it's nice to have confirmation that Medvedev is a pawn.  All of those meetings between Clinton and Medvedev?  She met a pawn. Handshakes between Obama and Medvedev?  He shook hands with a pawn.  The "Reset" button that read "Supercharge"? Pressed by Hillary Clinton, and a pawn.

What a strange world we live in, where the Tsar has to take a four year vacation every eight years just to assure the West that the Russian Empire is a democracy.

Don't think about that when you consider your own democracy:  This is Russia.

FUCK OBAMA.

When Sam Houston State mathematics professor Joe E. Kirk saw that phrase written on a student organization sponsored "free speech" wall, he first ordered students to remove it.  When they refused, he attacked the wall with a box cutter.

Do not allow this man access to knives, scalpels, box cutters, or other sharp instruments!

The President's self-appointed censor, notably, did not savage a nearby inscription that read FUCK BUSH. Fortunately, the Sam Houston State University police responded to student complaints about the vandalism quickly…

By ordering the students to tear down the wall, or face a disorderly conduct charge.

Over 150 years ago, Sam Houston State's namesake proclaimed proudly that "Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may."  No doubt Sam Houston would be dismayed to find that the school named after him, led by faculty like Joe Kirk, is teaching young Texans exactly that: to submit to oppression.

Blogger JJ seems to think so. [Edited to add: JJ has now sent the original post down the memory-hole and posted a much shorter and less emo post. Fortunately I have some quotes below]

See, though JJ assures us that he is not a "law-suit [sic] kind of guy", he believes he has a strong case against overpriced-coffee-and-muffin-behemoth-and-hipster-hangout Starbucks:

Do I want to file a law-suit against the company for discrimination and emotional distress? Absolutely not, although I know I would have a case for that.

My God, my God. What did Starbucks do? Did they refuse to serve him because of his race? Did they scream obscenities at him because of his religion, thus humiliating him? Did they disclose his ludicrously convoluted coffee order to the world for everybody's amusement?

Nope. They asked him to order more product, or move on, after he sat and worked for three hours. [Edit: again, note that he has now changed the post.]

This morning, like yesterday morning and many other mornings, I woke up and felt that need to be around people. I arrived at Starbucks at approximately 9:30 am. Like many other mornings, I stood in line, ordered my toasted bagel with cream cheese along with a grande, bold coffee in a venti cup. My total came in at just under $5. After I received my order in a very timely manner, I found an open seat, began eating and continued my work from earlier that morning. After playing a bit of musical chairs, I finally ended up on a cushioned bench near an electrical outlet. As always, I was minding my business and being productive. At about 12:00 pm (less than 3 hours after my arrival), a man in a button down approached me and politely asked, “What brings you into Starbucks today?”. I glanced up from the work I was doing and replied, “Just here to get some work done”. Here is where the story takes a sharp left. I was expecting his next sentence to be something along the lines of ”How has your experience been in our store today?” or “Would you mind filling out a feedback form?”. My prediction was off…WAY off. He stated, “Okay well we like to reserve our seating for those who are enjoying our beverages”. Go ahead and let that simmer. Being completely caught off-guard, I looked at the store employee who was cowering behind him and I said, “I had breakfast and coffee this morning”. He reiterated, “Yes, but we would like to reserve our seating for those who are enjoying one of our beverages. Would you like another beverage?”. I replied, “No, I’m not quite ready for another one yet”. He, again, repeated his previous 2 statements. At this point, he’s literally standing over me waiting for me to either say “Okay I would like something else” or “No thanks, I’ll leave”

Read the whole thing, to get more flavor.

JJ thinks that he has been discriminated against, in a way that gives him a cause of action against Starbucks. It's not clear what JJ means by "discrimination", which normally requires an invidious distinction — JJ implies, without saying, that Starbucks might have it out for laptop users. So far as I know, pertinent discrimination laws do not identify laptop-users as a traditionally despised class. JJ also thinks that Starbucks has inflicted emotional harm against him in a way that gives him a cause of action against Starbucks — even if this man-child with his lap-top is not in favor of law-suits and therefore will not file one at the court-house. JJ may or may not know that the tort of infliction of emotional distress generally requires extreme and outrageous conduct beyond the bounds of decent society, though somehow I suspect if he knows that it would not be a deterrent. JJ thinks that Starbucks has an obligation to let people buy $5 worth of product and then use their space as an office or hangout for more than three hours, and an obligation not to embarrass anyone who takes advantage of this obligation.

JJ deserves congratulations for not filing suit. People who have profoundly disordered senses of entitlement often do. JJ is taking the approach that Americans ought to take — writing about his discontents and, one hopes, voting with his feet and going to some other coffee shop that will cheerfully serve as a substitute for his mother's basement.

But in JJ's yawp is the seed of everything that is weak and soft and pampered and needy about us — the feeling that everyone else ought to be in the business of coddling us.

JJ might not sue Starbucks. But as he wanders through life with this set of expectations, chances seem high that he will sue somebody, sometime, for not indulging him. If he files pro se, I hope that he somehow comes up with a better grasp of the law than he has right now. If not, maybe we can recommend a lawyer.

Via.

By the way, if this is performance art or satire by JJ, then bra-fucking-vo.

Citing a complaint from State Senator John Whitmire (D., Harris County), the Texas Department of Corrections has announced it will stop offering condemned inmates the "inappropriate" luxury of choosing their last meal.

Prison officials halted the practice Thursday after a state senator complained about the last meal served to Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who was executed on Wednesday for chaining a black man, James Byrd Jr., 49, to the back of his pickup truck and dragging him down a bumpy country road to his death a decade ago.

Brewer requested two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. Prison officials said Brewer didn't eat any of it.

I'll bet they had a Texas-sized feast in the prison guards' break room that night.

In its way Whitmire's complaint makes sense.  It does appear that some condemned men as a final, and pathetic, blow against the State that's about to terminate their lives, order ridiculously large and varied meals they have no intention of eating.  So perhaps it makes sense, from a petty penny-pincher's perspective, to end such nonsense.  "You'll have corned beef hash, and like it!"

But even in a State which fervently accepts the idea that lethal injection is an appropriate penalty for murder, there's something especially cruel and unusual in Whitmire's demand that the old custom, which dates back to Roman times, be abolished even for inmates who don't abuse the "privilege" of a last meal.   The death penalty is supposed to be civilization's response to those who commit the ultimate crime, and it's supposed to be carried out in a humane fashion.  I'm not about to say that by making execution harder than it already is, by denying the condemned man even this little luxury, we show ourselves to be just as cruel as the murderer.  We simply show ourselves to be petty, and mean.

John Whitmire is one mean son of a bitch.

Rodney Dangerfield Should Have Run For Mayor: Via Marc Randazza, I see that Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup thinks that people petitioning the local government should be compelled by law to show "respect." Mayor Walken alleges that City Attorney Mike Rankin told him that a law requiring that petitions be respectful would pass First Amendment muster. Hey Mayor Walkup — with all respect, you're a douchebag and a moral weakling. And with all respect to Mike Rankin, if he told Mayor Walkup that the respect requirement is constitutional, he's incompetent.

Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, A Goth?: Via Free Range Kids, I see that if your kid cuts her finger in shop class (something that happens when messing around with tools, you know), she may be subjected to an inquisition and forced to sign statements guaranteeing that she is not a self-cutter:

They forced this girl to fill out a range of forms stating that she did not cut herself on purpose, and that she would pledge NOT to start cutting herself on purpose in the future.

The Government Knows Best: Via SayUncle, here is a story of a judicial decision about food freedom that is all the more appalling because it is probably a correct exposition of the state of our Wickard v. Filburn law:

“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a dairy herd;”

“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;”

“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice…”

I've Always Thought That Interpretive Dance Was Shovel-Ready: Finally, courtesy of , a story about how stimulus dollars were used. As reflected on Recovery.org, you — the taxpayer — spent $762,372 to create 1.5 jobs doing this:

The PI and her team of technologists, choreographers and artists will work together to define an evolving system that assists in the design and production of interactive dance performances with real-time audience interaction. The Dance.Draw system will enable dancers' motions, tracked via small RF transmitters worn in satin cuffs, to act as input streams that can be flexibly applied as control parameters for interactive visualizations. The system will log dancers' motions and will be able to composite video of the dancers with different visualizations, enabling post-hoc analysis of the choreography and exploration of prospective mappings between the motion and the projected media. This will allow choreographers to explore interactive dance without always having a full cast of dancers present. In addition, it will enable other stakeholders, such as artists and musicians, to experiment offline with their media and adjust how these interplay with the choreography.

Leaving aside the thorny question of the role of the government in the arts, let me ask this: if stimulus money is supposed to create jobs to stimulate the economy, can we really not do better than paying half a million dollars per job?

Conventional wisdom changes over time.

There are two ways to discuss this, the crude, and the technical.

If you're crude, it's fun to discuss things the technical way; if you're technical, it's fun to discuss it crudely. I'm a a bit crude and a bit technical, so I'll share my thoughts on how convention wisdom changes in both ways.

The crude first.

There are two folks sayings (one is actually a Gandhi quote, but that makes it sound a bit high-falutin', so let's just ignore that weird old sexually hung-up dude and call it a folk saying). Anyway:

Science doesn't advance when minds are changed; it advances when old scientists die.

and

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

The point being contrary to the nice crisp models of the scientific process, (a) the more data you get to support your side, the more vehement the other side gets, and (b) there's no amount of data that can convince some people. You just have to wait until they get somewhat less attractive, and corpsified, and gross, and then continue the conversation over their age-whithered remains.

Now the technical:

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of those books that everyone with pretensions to intellectualism should read.

For that matter, so is C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures".

The difference is that I've actually read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's not quite as deep – nor as original – as its reputation suggests, nor could it be. The name of the book has become something of a totem – loaded (not "freighted". I hate that term. Unless there are actual, literal forklifts or cranes involved you can stick your "freighted" right next to your "fraught" in your hipster-pretentious-J-school three ring binder, and shelve it next to Salon.com and the NYT style pages).

Uh…where was I?

Right, right. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". "Freighted". "Hipsters".

Anyway, the name of the book is loaded with a lot of cultural signifiers and baggage, because that's what pretentious intellectuals do, and because the book is a convenient stick in the dirt and thus its title is as good a phrase as any to label that patch of ground.

The patch of ground being the social process by which conventional wisdom changes.

Kuhn argues (to simplify) that at any given point in time there is a dominant theory. If the theory is hugely dominant, and there are no observed problems with it, there's little action, and no one much cares.

Had any rousing debates about electron shells, the mass of a neutron, of the photovoltaic effect recently?

Nor have I.

However, from time to time, a theory that was dominant gets some countervailing data piled up against it.

…and then a bit more.

…and then a bit more.

In theory there's no difference between the model of the scientific process and the actual practice of science.

…but in actual practice there is.

In theory academics of whatever stripe – physicists, chemists, economists, political scientists – would welcome contrary opinions and contrary data.

We all know what we really see, though: anger, fear, and outrage.

This is because the theory of the scientific process oversimplifies: it forgets that academics are first and foremost humans, and humans are the end product of a whole butt-load of tribal living.

…and when it comes to tribal living, the powerful get first choice of meat and first choice of nubile hunter-gatherers-of-the-curvy-variety.

Thus we humans can be fairly prickly about power, status, and signaling (you can Google up Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson on your own). When it comes to power dynamics in the nerd – ah – academic set, there's something a lot worse than being challenged by the first-row, second-seat sax player, or having your rook snatched by the kid with an Elo score one notch down from yours. These challenges will just have you lose one or two ranks. The thing that's a lot worse is being kicked out of the group all together: being made a laughing stock and mocked as utterly, entirely wrong.

And, of course, this is exactly what the scientific process – as it's SUPPOSED to work – threatens to do to non-ideal actual-human-meat academics.

So the Old Guard fight as hard and as long as possible…and they get more and more angry as the evidence piles up against them.

…and eventually the expire and the old much-hated ideas are allowed to be spoken in public.

Paul Graham touched on this in his essay What you Can't Say:

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.

Anyway, having quoted two bumper stickers, one philosopher of science, and one start-up millionaire (as well as mocking a universally-beloved 20th century saint), I arrive at my point:

After almost 150 years, the idea of the universal welfare state may be crumbling before our eyes.

The welfare state – at least the American version of it – is like a shark that must constantly swim forward or die. It's like an embezzling employee who must not only show up at work every day to cover her tracks, but must steal more and more to cover the old debts plus new expenses. It's like a Ponzi scheme.

In fact, it's not like a Ponzi scheme, it is a Ponzi scheme. Both at a concrete level and at a conceptual meta-level.

The American welfare state must constantly grow because it is as much a social system of outrage, signaling, and demonstrated "compassion" (those damn dirty apes – uh, I mean "humans" – again). If you're a good progressive and you're born into a system that already has emergency health care for the poor, welfare, free schooling for all, etc., etc. ad nauseam, then how do you demonstrate to the 20th century version of the hunter-gatherers-of-the-curvy-variety that you're a good person with all the right opinions and thus deserve a bunch of crazy monkey sex worthy of a Dan Savage column?

You agitate for even more welfare statism.

(I note that I could have merely referenced the hedonic treadmill to explain all of this, but that wouldn't have allowed me to use the phrase "crazy monkey sex", and I bet Ken two free hours of dental-expert-witnessing that I could work that phrase into every single post for the remainder of the year. I won't even tell you what I get if I win.)

And thus we run into the problem we see today: the economic meltdown.

As Margaret Thatcher famously said "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".

Bush bought an election or two by buying off the votes of elderly with prescription drug benefits.

Obama's been trying to buy himself a second term since Day One buy buying GM from its creditor/owners and handing it to the unions…along with a thousand other equally stupid schemes.

…but the moment of reckoning that many of us have seen since the 1980s has finally arrived.

We've run out of other people's money.

You can see the graphs everywhere in the economic blogosphere: expenditures racing far beyond revenues and never ever ever being caught.

This leads us to the second shoe drop, which is only a few years away: the point where the government is not just spending wildly more than it takes in, but the point where it becomes physically impossible to even keep up with the interest payments on the debt.

And then the – uh – gripping foot drops a third shoe: as the market sees this point coming, it gets more and more leery of lending any more money to the government, thus bidding up the interest that the government must pay in order to borrow additional dollars.

This is basically a tripwire: as soon as the apocalypse can be seen on the horizon we're rapidly accelerated towards it.

So, back to Kuhn and others: this has all been clear to some folks for a quarter century or more, but it's finally becoming more and more clear to the average man in the street.

In a better world the Krugmans and others would say "hmm…this isn't how I expected things to play out; perhaps my theories are wrong".

…but the Krugmans and others are afraid of losing their status and their access to crazy monkey sex (although I think the NYT still pays in dollars and suggests that columnists go procure on their own…although I admit that that may change as the dollar devalues).

Over the last few decades libertarianism / governmental minimalism / the night watchman state has gone from being a term that most folks had never heard of, to being a concept that just a bunch of low status geeks and freaks chatted about in between rolling the d20, to being a virulent / arrogant / hateful / racist concept.

The welfare state is dying, the evidence is becoming more and more clear, the Chief Monkeys are losing their power, and the world is about to undergo the kind of intellectual revolution and tumult that it only sees once every few centuries or so.

Punctuated equilibrium – it's not just for meatspace evolution any more.

P.S. Hi. I'm Clark. Nice to meet y'all.