Category: News

Kim du Toit is all over a story in the Seattle Workers’ Revolution story about Bill Gates buying properties surrounding his home and letting friends and family members live there. In some cases, the original owners are still there, living in Bill Gates’s house.

And this accumulation of property by a capitalist must be stopped, or so the story implies.

But let’s get to the point of the knife. The municipal government’s worried about its money:

If other residents follow Gates’ lead, that could present some challenges for the city of 3,000, said Medina City Manager Doug Schulze. Much of the money the city gets from the state is based on population. If people buy up surrounding houses and don’t have people living in them, the city’s share of state funding might decline, he said.

Ah, yes. Lest we forget, the government has a right to revenue from property owners. Or so it’s assuming.

That’s why your house is worth less to your local government than a dozen empty parking spaces in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and why this local government is beginning to make noise about preventing a man from acquiring property legally. For the neighborhood, and undoubtedly for the Children.

(Headline style appropriated from Charles Johnson.)

Speaking of outsourcing, Alan Lacy, CEO of Sears hits the nail on the head, and undoubtedly United States developers will shriek as though it was their collective thumbnails he hit:

But I think, beyond that, to me, a very interesting trend right now is the whole non-U.S. opportunity that’s available, and … if you think about personal intelligence and drive being randomly distributed by population — you know, there are four or five times as many smart, driven people in China than there are in the U.S. And there’s another four or five, three or four times as many people in India that are smarter or as smart or have more drive. And if technology is now going to basically reduce location as a barrier to competition, then essentially you’ve got something like whatever that was, seven or nine times, more smart, committed people that are now competing in this marketplace against certain activities.

Right on, brother. Give the jobs to the cheapest and smartest people you can find.

Don’t like it, fellow IT professional? Get smarter, get faster, get cheaper, or get out of the way.

Never mind. Seething and whining plays better to the id and on the network news.

When a “sexual predator” escaped a Missouri Sexually Violent Predator Unit, he didn’t break a law. According to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

It’s a crime in Missouri to escape from a jail or prison, and it’s a crime to escape from a mental health facility if the escapee was sent there in a criminal process, such as found not guilty but insane.

But the state of Missouri, in its hurry to follow other states’ lead into indefinitely extending the finished sentences of certain classes of offenders, managed to create a means of continued incarceration for violent sexual predators, but didn’t make leaving those means of continued, un-sentenced incarceration periods against the law.

Never fear, though. Prosecutors have a myriad of laws available for any occasion.

In fact, the interview is somewhat limited that he could give the Post-Dispatch because:

He said talking about that now could hurt his chances with his current criminal case, a charge of felony property damage for cutting the fence.

What? He must not have dropped the portion of the fence he cut away in his escape or else he would also face a charge of felony littering.

Meanwhile, after releasing himself from indefinite incarceration and a probable unsentenced life term, this guy goes to Florida, gets married, and apparently doesn’t commit another sex crime, or any crime for that matter:

Neither Florida authorities nor investigators here have been able to link Ingrassia to any new sex crimes.

Instead, he’s gone south, gotten a job, and gotten married. Granted, it was his wife who got suspicious of his past and led to his return to Missouri. Hey, I’m not some multiple-degreed, highly-paid state consultant, but that sounds almost reformed to me.

But he’s cheesed off some officials who feel that their power derives from the respect they feel should be paid to them, so they’re going to get him. Instead of a warehouse for undesirables, they’ll throw him back in prison, and when his sentence for vandalism is over, they’ll return him to his indefinite warehouse.

Don’t worry, citizen. It hasn’t happened to you. Yet.

Not only does it offer a taxpayer “bill of rights,” but it might also implement controls on eminent domain.

Boulder and Denver and all of that property-rights-infringing, cougar-loving nutbarism doesn’t cover the whole state, wot? In some places, Jeremiah Johnson could live with his guns and his fit wife, right?

Sounds as good as Texas to me.

New York Post headline: “MAN CLUBS WIFE TO DEATH WITH DUMBBELL“

Apparently, a man beat his estranged wife to death with a five pound dumbbell.

A five pound dumbell? We’ve got dumbbells six times as deadly here in la casa de Heather, but I didn’t want to call the perp nor the victim a wuss. Instead, I wanted to point out the New York angle. The husband tried to kill himself after the murder, and failed.

Did his neighbors characterize him as a quiet man, the last sort of fellow who would do this sort of thing? Not in New York:

“He tried to kill himself, but he didn’t try hard enough,” said neighbor Ralph Watson. “He was a punk son of a gun for hitting her in the head like that, and if he really wanted to kill himself, he should have jumped in front of a train.”

Neil Steinberg, of the Chicago Sun-Times, on Mars:

Myself, I’d ask, “How come nobody applies the same logic to Kennedy? Nobody says, ‘Oh sure, Kennedy committed us to go to the moon and then he up and died and left the hard work to others.”’

He also manages to spank NPR, too. Read it. You will like it.

Spoons links to this column by Radley “The Agitator” Balko. It’s about the deficit and the mighty vote-pandering going on, wherein our current politicians pass out entitlements like Tic Tacs to woo aging voters. As a member of the Libertarian wing of the Republican party, or perhaps the sane fringe of the Libertarian Party, I agreed with the sentiment until I hit this point, buried in the lead of Balko’s column:

A few of us had our taxes cut, but that hardly matters when government keeps spending the way it is. Sooner or later, the waiter will come by with the check, and it’s those of us under 30 who will be reaching for our wallets.

Under 30? You mean, I, being of the distinguished and learned age of 31 and 10.75/12, won’t be on the hook?

Heck’s pecs, politicos, pander to me, too. I want guaranteed Federally-subsidized Guinness, and a pizza a week, and could do with a couple of new t-shirts. What, do you want the poor elderly IT professionals to freeze? You heartless kids are ungrateful for all that Generation X has given you.

Don’t trust anyone over 30.

Let’s see. New York’s banned guns. They’ve tried to ban toy guns. And it’s still not enough to stop criminals:

Dan Looney, a chief prosecutor with Nassau County, said that each time Trantel pulled off a heist, he handed the tellers a note saying he had a gun.

“He produced a robbery demand note detailing the threat of using a firearm and thereby placing the tellers in fear of injury from the use of the weapon,” Looney said.

Authorities do not know “whether, in fact, he had a loaded gun,” and no weapon was recovered, Looney said. The prosecutor declined to comment on a motive in the case.

Criminals are committing crimes and frightening innocent people with just the word gun. Therefore, in the interest of public safety, we should strike it from our language and make it a felony to use or write the word gun.

Of course, since criminals can convey the meaning with synonyms, such as pistol, rifle, niner, firearm, and so on, so of course, they’ll have to go, too.

And since they can, at least some of them can, convey the proper image through metaphors, such as hand-held volcano that erupts leaden lava, we’ll have to banish the entire concept of personal projectile weapons. Maybe taking it back to slingshots and atl-atls is a little much, but it’s for The Children somehow, so we must!

Report to public reeducation camps immediately.

So the Recording Industry Association of America is dressing up like law enforcement officials and conducting raids. This, my friends, cannot stand.

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black “raid” vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read “RIAA” instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets.

. . .

“They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs,” he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV — Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.

The RIAA acknowledges it all — except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they’re actual law enforcement, that’s a mistake.

Oh, ramsexcrement. The RIAA is playing cops, although it’s using real ex-cops to do so. Win/win. Ex-cops get to pretend like they still have some sort of power–and don’t you believe for a moment they lack an attitude–and the RIAA gets to harrass citizens.

Meanwhile, our country steps slightly toward that dystopian future where corporations have their own cops out there enforcing the laws and shooting them up with bad guys. These guys with RIAA stitched onto their backs aren’t ED-209, but if this travesty is left unchecked, soon the Business Software Alliance, the Mystery Writers of America, and every other person whose copyright might be infringed will be fielding their own set of jackbooted thugs to menace and harrass society. So who loses?

• The citizens, of course, because its our right to be freed from persecution, and let’s face it, the RIAA’s persecuting and not prosecuting when its minions “raid”.
• True law enforcement loses because the weight of its actions are diluted by the other thugz and playaz conducting their own raids. If a citizen’s got a bunch of surly looking men with dark vests bearing an acronym ending in A standing on his property and acting menacing, he’s got to wonder if they’re surly looking men with dark vests bearing an acronym ending in A who are illegal trespassers whom he can shoot or if they’re surly looking men with dark vests bearing an acronym ending in A bearing legal warrants. Does law enforcement win whenever it puts someone who guesses wrong into the ground? Hardly.

It’s encouraging to see that the law might not take too lightly anyone antitrusting its monopoly on power:

But if an anti-piracy team crossed the line between looking like cops and implying or telling vendors that they are cops, the Los Angeles Police Department would take a pretty dim view, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee.

I hope we see it loudly and soon. The RIAA, with all its subpoenas and lawsuits and whatnot has crossed the final line by adding physical intimidation and blatant deception to its playlist.

(Link seen on /. or Techdirt or both.)

What liberal media? The Associated Press, as reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch works both pro and anti-war viewpoints into this headline/subheadline combo:

Shells reportedly carrying blister agent are uncovered in Iraq
Six die when Iraqi policemen, British clash with demonstrators

I envy the news service’s flexibility. Cannot find an anti-war sentiment in a single incident? No problem! Just mash two completely separate instances together so you can create the proper “balanced” story. Yo ga, girl!

On the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, marginalized by the two columns of Rams’ agony, we have a hard-hitting story entitled “Pipeline for antibiotics is running dry“. Lead:

Major pharmaceutical companies have abandoned or scaled back research and development of drugs that kill bacteria in favor of anti-viral drugs, such as those to combat HIV, and medicines for chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

Journalists see a lot of dots in the industry, from the drug reimportation ideas to the lawsuits to force legalized patent infringement for the generic drug producers to the lack of new drugs in development. All are Bad Things for the Proletariat, which undoubtedly the continued Marxist evolution state can better handle, but the journalists don’t have the time, foresight, patience, or perhaps open minds to realize that the first two lead to the latter, and to ensure that pharmaceutical companies can occasionally profit from the great financial risks they undertake would ensure a steady stream of new, innovative drugs.

Oops, I said profit with an F instead of a PH, didn’t I? Well, that’s not to be allowed. Perhaps the State could better run innovation with the same élan demonstrated by the nationalized shipping and passenger transportation companies.

Local or state politicians often like to make an argument like this one regarding getting “their slice of the pie”:

Officials in Killington want the town to secede from Vermont and join the neighboring state because of a dispute over taxes. They say the town’s restaurants, inns and other businesses rake in ten (m) million dollars a year for the state — but gets just a (m) million dollars of state aid in return.

You often hear that, whether it’s California griping about not getting one dollar of federal tax grants and goodies for every dollar they ship to Washington or little towns like this one griping about its high tax revenues not returning one for one. Are these politicos stupid, or cynically trying to drum up votes with this idiocy?

In case it’s the former, I offer the following explanation to our municipal or state leaders:

I told you a hunnert times, Lennie, when the bigger brother takes that money, it takes its taste, its viggorish from the top, and whatever he’s got left after paying off his string of highly-paid thinkers, legislators, and hangers-on and then pays down what he owns on all dem buildings and motorcars they go tooling around in, whatever he’s got left he splits among his friends and then littler big brother. Den he can put it towards a stake in a ranch, or he can blow it in a cathouse or pool room or on whiskey, or maybe all three which is a popular choice for govenment.

I suspect they’re just cynical, though, in which case I offer them a hearty Hi-ho, STFU. I know you’re all about shifting wealth from the private sector, where it was created, to the public sector, where you and your cronies can spend it lavishly, but it’s a real rock in my Reeboks to watch you public sector ticks argue about who gets to suck from the neck and who has to suck from the leg artery. I don’t turn on the nature channel to watch the jackals rip apart gazelles, and I don’t care to watch you guys fight over the spoils, either.

So get over the fact that Mississippi and Wyoming aren’t going to subsidize your schools, and maybe, you know, stop spending money profligately and maybe you could squeak by on whatever annual millions you can skim from the top while the citizenry makes do with green-capped milk.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

Donald Sensing’s eyes have opened to some of the depravity and hardship suffered by the American poor. The real question is, “Is Barbara Ehrenreich listening?”

Probably not; she’s probably enjoying an indiscretion that will keep her from getting any job that requires a drug test.

However, I have a hot tip for her next book:

Half the families in the country earn less than the average household income!

Quick, redistribute the wealth until we’re all above average! Vote for Dean Howard!

In New York, compare and contrast:

• Giuliani time, with the Broken Windows theory of policing, wherein police crackdown on nuisance offenses to improve the quality of life.
• Bloomberg time, which apparently features the Flat Broken theory of policing, wherein police write tickets for as many offenses as they can to help the city can balance its finances as taxpayers flee for less strident regimes.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis area police have a new gizmo to use on motorists:

More St. Louis-area police officers are carrying extra gadgets this holiday season to help them catch drunks on the road.

Several police departments in Missouri and Illinois have acquired the new technology during the past year. It is geared for traffic enforcement and could be key in the campaign to halt drunken driving during the holidays.

In the past six months, St. Louis County police bought portable breath testers for each precinct station.

Now officers in the field can easily test a driver who might straddle the line between sober and illegally drunk, police said. Results from the tests are not admissible in court, but officers can use the test as probable cause to arrest a driver then test him or her on a more sophisticated machine at the jail.

That’s right, fellows. They’ve got a new divining rod that, if it twitches right, indicates you might be in violation of the law. Enough to arrest you and drag you downtorn or to Clayton. For violating a law that’s sliding slipperily but certainly to the point where wearing an alcohol-based cologne will make you legally intoxicated. Why do the police think this new gizmo is important?

“Some professional drunks can fool you,” said Maj. Timothy Fitch, commander of the St. Louis County police patrol division. “Even if they can pass the field sobriety tests, they can’t pass this.”

Got that? People who are “professional drunks” can pass field sobriety tests–by not behaving in such a manner as to indicate the alcohol has affected them! Could it be that they’re perhaps not driving badly either?

What, you think I am making this up and it will only be applied to people who drive forty miles an hour in reverse on the shoulder on the wrong side of the highway? Wrong.

Departments expect these gadgets will come in handy during roadside safety checks and extra patrols scheduled for the New Year’s holiday. [Emphasis mine.]

Roadside safety check? Buddy, that means the sobriety checkpoints the police set up on the roads wherein all vehicles get screened. So whatever false positives this thing provides, complete with paddy wagon ride and booking, that means you Mormons are eligible, too.

A pile of cash and another nick in our liberty, for what? Here’s the numbers, in a metropolitan area of up to three million people (depending upon the counties you include):

Officers gave DWI violations to 713 drivers through November last year. They arrested 922 in the same time period this year.

That’s almost three arrests per day. In a population of three million. Obviously the profession of drunkeness does not pay well, or most professional drunks are telecommuters. What’s the life savings?

Last year, Missouri lost 525 people in alcohol-related crashes.

Fewer than two per day, and I would wager that many of those deaths were self-inflicted.

Individually, drunk driving deaths are tragedies, particularly the non-drunk victims. However, I do dispute that all the effort and ever-tightening legislative and law-enforcement nooses drawn around the problem probably have entered the diminishing returns effort. And it’s more than the returns that diminish; it’s our very freedom, Chester.

Now have a Guinness, and walk home, for crying out loud. A little cool air will clear your head, and you could use the exercise.

So I am reading the Samizdata post on the Beagle 2 Martian lander, and I read about how Mars is going to be crawling with landers in the coming months with the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit in January. Beagle 2, for those of you who don’t know’t, is a European probe, and Spirit and Opportunity are American landers. So I look at the artist rendition and I think of a bunch of robots tooling around on the planet of Mars, and immediately I think:

Wouldn’t it be cool if, at the end of their lifecycles, the landers fought it out like Battlebots?

And then I think I am onto something. I mean, think of the possible commercial possibilities that could underwrite part of the cost of the voyage! A pay-per-view spectacular, wherein the robots duke it out in a hostile environment on another world? Dudes, I’d order my first pay-per-view event to see it! Maybe a couple of corporate logos slapped onto the landers, a special camera lander to transmit live video, and bam! You’ve got enough capital to lift the things at more than seven miles per second, werd.

Picture it. After NASA and the European Space Agency have had their time with the landers, accumulating and transmitting data back to home base, imagine the two rovers rearing up and exposing whirring blades, great spikes and drills, and articulate claws to rend the other into space junk. Because ultimately, that’s what they are, junk and refuse and detritus from our exploration. At least we could have some fun with it.

Picture the Beagle 2 and Spirit going at it on the red sands of Mars. Imagine a couple of landers doing battle on the ice of Europa, among the volcanoes of Io, or the hazy surface of Venus. I’d buy the DVDs, dammit.

So get to it, guys. Who needs the X-Prize when you can have the Solar Battlebot Championship Tour? Am I onto something, or just on something here?