Month: June 2003

St. Louis Magazine has a story in its June issue (not yet online) about St. Louis gangs in the 1920s and their wacky whackings. Written in sepia-prose and laid on a parchmentesque watermark, this piece romanticizes a bloody bunch of men and their battles to control crime, which included mail truck robberies and control of the illegal drug market, which meant alcohol trafficking.

Contrast that with gangs today. Rap music, particularly gangsta rap, idealizes the lifestyle, and I suspect most people who turn to St. Louis Magazine to find dining plans or interior design ideas don’t care for gangsta rap and probably hate and fear the thought of current gangland violence.

Is the difference in gang perception based on race? That is, does middle America prefer its gangs Irish instead of another, differently-colored minority?

Maybe a little bit, but I reckon it’s more the long, long ago in galaxy far, far away aspect of it. Egan’s Rats and the Cuckoos, whose the survivors have died of old age by now, aren’t a current threat to law abiding, SUV-driving folk, but today’s gangs are.

Someday, I imagine our descendants will read about drive-by shootings with the same amused interest, thinking “Shooting from a car with a nine millimeter pistol! How quaint!”

It’s not clear which portions of the Bill of Rights or Constiturion Orrin Hatch considers sacred, but given his interest in allowing RIAAvens to destroy the computer of someone who downloads copyright songs illegally, I could only answer for certain “Article I, Section 3.”

Choice quotes from the linked article:

During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.

“No one is interested in destroying anyone’s computer,” replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can’t.

“I’m interested,” Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone’s computer “may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights.”

The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, “then destroy their computer.”

“If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we’d be interested in hearing about that,” Hatch said. “If that’s the only way, then I’m all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize” the seriousness of their actions, he said.

So Senator Hatch, a legislator, wants to cede law enforcement, the duty of the executive branch of the government to private industry. Further more, he wants that private industry to punish a civil offense with damage to personal property (I cannot fight the bold font any longer) without due process and without a warrant (illegal search and seizure).

He wants this to protect an industry that’s doing its best to hang itself with mediocre music, boy bands, American Idol, and targetting an audience with no disposable income but with Kazaa.

I wish I lived in Utah so I could vote against him.

“There’s no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws,” Hatch said.

Hang ’em high, Judge Roy Bean. Make it a capital strict liablitly offense then.

Aristotle said, “Everything in moderation,” and the bureaucrats at the forthcoming People’s Democratic Republic of Europe know that since a little moderation is good, a great deal of coerced moderation must be better. Hence, they want to moderate every type of Internet site to ensure that both sides of any issue get equal time to express their viewpoints. CNet’s Declan McCullagh has the details.

As I have said before, some think that the linchpin of democracy was the unlegislated mandate called the Fairness Doctrine.

Of course, the same people tend to think that your property, whether it’s your radio station or your Web hosting, does not belong to you, it belongs to the hoi polloi, and they get to administer the application of your limited rights to your own property. You’re not qualified to decide who gets to speak on your time and your dime.

According to the BBC, to whom I was pointed by Instapundit, it wants US intervention in its uprising against the ruling theocracy.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which I get delivered on weekends because, well…. hmm, I’ll get back to you on that, the Iranian people does not want US intervention in its uprising against the ruling theocracy.

Which is it? The answer is Yes.

Because The People of Iran is not an It, they’re a They. Because the individuals within any group of people, especially a group narrowly defined based on ethnicity, location, or nation, hold different and often contradictory positions on any number of issues, you can probably attribute any sentiment to The People and not be wrong.

However, it’s an interesting way of flushing out a “journalist” and his or her own personal biases. Whenever reading one of these pieces, you can determine the point of view closest to the heart of the “journalist” (not counting limited omniscient, which is the Point Of View many journalists think they have). The “journalist” projects this sentiment to the People.

I wish our governor was as frugal as South Carolina’s Mark Sanford.

Our governor keeps wasting red stamp ink on the budget cuts he keeps vetoing.

As I was reading a nice hefty copy of the printed Chicago Tribune last Sunday (since I was in Chicago, donchaknow), I came across a story entitled “Critics: Is broadcast TV worth saving?” with “Some question its relevance” as the subhead (if you’re quick, you can see an online copy of the article here but be advised it goes to the pay archive on the 15th).

Here’s what those critics say:

Yet some critics say the system is irreparably broken and growing more irrelevant in the face of competition from cable and satellite services, even as the federal government has moved to prop up the broadcast industry.

Yessiree, free broadcast television is irrelevant because we middle class writers and critics can instead spend $50 or more a month of our extensive writin’ and criticizin’ salaries on the licensed luxury of paying some company to pipe entertainment into our homes. Of course, when projecting our own experience of life onto the whole wide country, perhaps we ought to take into consideration those people who cannot afford digital-quality audio and sound (except when technical difficulties interrupt service, sorry, no prorated refund). Don’t the Critics normally champion the underprivileged?

Let me see if I can sum up the reasons the Critics want broadcast television to die:

• Selling the rights to those portions of the electromagnetic spectrum would raise money that the government could then fritter away as it normally fritters away money, typically in ways the Critics like.
• Broadcast viewers are disenfranchised because broadcasters target programs to the audiences advertisers want. That is, the broadcasters have some greedy commerce considerations.
• Broadcasters don’t act in the public interest, or in a public way that can be measured, at least by the arbitrary standards assigned according to the Critics’ preferences. Acting in a public way is hard to measure, I would guess, unless of course by in a public way they mean like NPR and PBS, who properly use government money to promote a proper-thinking point of view.

  Because “accessible to anyone in the nation owning a rooftop antenna and a TV” and “Even today, most Americans get their news from broadcast TV” are not enough.

• The Fairness Doctrine, which allowed advocacy groups to provide a counterpoint to station management (FREE AIR TIME! GET YOUR FREE NUTBAR AIR TIME HERE!), was eliminated. This probably isolated the Critics and their fellows, relegating them (but not regulating them) to unwatched, public interest minded outlets (see also NPR, PBS).

  How did the article put it at the very end, the pièce de résistance?

  “Where there is no fighting or opposition in viewpoints,” said Herbert Chao Gunther, chief executive of the nonprofit Public Media Center, “there is no democracy.”

  Got that? The linchpin of democracy was the unlegislated mandate called the Fairness Doctrine.

I think that about sums up this article. The FCC, an appointed body, not an elected body (as George Carlin often points out), should replace the current system, which allows any yahoo with a receiver to pick up entertainment and news broadcast for free, with a license-fee-based system that the industry loves, where that yahoo has to buy or rent the receiver (a television set) and then pay a monthly license fee of some sort to the cable company or dish company to keep the signal coming to the receiver. Apparently everyone the Critics know has a subscription system, and the Critics cannot imagine differently.

This same middle-class myopia allows policy squawkers to banshee the very thought (blasphemy!) of taxing Internet sales, not realizing (or caring, perhaps) that the duty-free world of Internet commerce unfairly burdens those who do not have a secure Internet connection and/or a credit or debit card with an artificially inflated percentage of sales taxes. But that’s a rant for another day.