Archive for April, 2007
Lew Rockwell kicks ass
So this is interesting:
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Companies Should Be Allowed To Break Law if Helping Government (Threat Level)
Essentially, the USCoC doesn’t want companies to be prosecuted for privacy violations if those privacy violations were done in the name of (that’s right!) homeland security. Here’s how they put it:
The advent of a judicially weakened state secrets privilege would force such companies and industries, which represent a broad cross section of the American business community, to weight their sense of patriotic duty against the heavy costs and burdens of being subjected to potential, highly publicized, politically volatile litigation, as well as potential liability, merely for acting, as they have in the past, as good corporate citizens by providing national security assistance to the Government when called upon to do so.
You have to wonder what “patriotism” means to these people. Last I checked, it meant “love of country”, not “love of government” — that’s more along the lines of “authoritarianism”. Fucking over your fellow citizens at the behest of their government is patriotically dubious at best.
More drivel from the USCoC:
Erosion of the state secrets privilege also could create more subtle, but very real, potential physical or financial dangers for cooperating companies and industries. For example, if despite the Government’s assertion of the state secrets privilege it were revealed in litigation that a particular corporate defendant is engaged in assisting the United State in an anti-terrorism program, that company’s facilities and personnel could be targeted by terrorists.
Come the fuck on. Does anyone actually fall for this shit any more? “Eat all your broccoli, Timmy, or the terrorists will get you!”
I’m also disappointed by the spin this is getting: the outrage against corporations breaking the law (instead of, say, against corporations passing out private data to any Three-Letter Agency that comes along). Breaking the law is not by itself immoral, and putting a thing into law does not by itself make that thing just. (For example, suppose that the law mandated sacrificing one’s first-born child.) The problem here isn’t that supposedly patriotic corporations have broken the law: the problem is that they violated the privacy of their customers. The law here is a procedural detail, not a matter of morality.
Beers of Vancouver, vol. 6
We’re back!
Holsten Festbock is back up to $2.25 (still an outstanding bargain, and an excellent beer), but there are others in that price range to tempt me. One of them is Faxe Strong: an 8% beer in a very “strong”-looking package: black can, gold and red highlights, grim bearded Viking mascot. All it needs is some skulls and “tribal” knots to max out the “beer for badasses” marketing angle.
Does it measure up? Well, 0.5L of 8% beer for $2.25 is a lot of drunk for your dollar, so if that’s all you’re after, it’s a big win. Otherwise: packaging notwithstanding, this is a meek beer. It pours to a pleasant amber colour, without much in the way of carbonation, but it’s nowhere near as thick and sweet as you’d expect from such a strong beer. The sweet aftertaste shuffles around for a few seconds, then leaves in a hurry. It’s neither malty nor hoppy, and comes across as neither an ale nor a lager. It’s — barely — interesting enough to qualify as a decent beer, but with things like Festbock and Maudite on the shelves there’s really no good reason to buy it.
Here’s what Royal Unibrew (no, not Unibroue) has to say about Faxe Strong:
Faxe Strong is a characterful beer with 8 % alcohol.
The taste is an extraordinary experience. This beer got more bite and taste than a traditional Lager. But still it’s an easily drinkable beer with a very light colour and a light but characteristic taste.
(Two marks off for abuse of the English language — I’d have deducted three if they hadn’t spelled “colour” properly.)
This blurb — and the over-the-top packaging — supports my theory that advertisers lie about the worst features of their products rather than promoting the best features. Faxe Strong’s best feature is that it’s, well, strong. Its worst feature is that it’s profoundly unremarkable: it lacks character; its taste is utterly ordinary, certainly below average for a European lager; it has no distinguishing characteristics. (Why Royal Unibrew felt the need to lie about the beer’s colour is beyond me. Pilsner Urquell has a very light colour. Faxe Strong does not.)
It’s worth knowing about Faxe Strong on the off-chance that it’s the best beer available at a poorly-stocked liquor store, but this stuff isn’t going to give Holsten Festbock any competition.
The scourge of… knockoff fonts?
You expected another outraged libertarian rant, didn’t you? Not just yet. These from Mark Simonson Studio:
That is all.
So it turns out (O shock, O horror!) that unhealthy processed foods are cheaper than their more salubrious counterparts because they’re made from subsidized crops:
- You Are What You Grow (New York Times)
- Carrying a few extra around the gut area? Blame Congress! (The Liberty Papers)
I love it when two of my interests — in this case, eating well and ranting about government idiocy — come together. Of course, Testosterone Nation (and similar communities) have been saying this for years now:
- Corn-Fed Blubber (Testosterone Nation)
Then again, the physical-culturists have been ahead of the game on a number of other “recent” discoveries (weight training for sports, low-carb diets for fat loss, &c.), so we shouldn’t be terribly shocked.
And, naturally, when the government spends your money to create a problem, it will surely spend your money to address that problem. (Not nearly as much money, of course — after all, if you didn’t have massive social problems, why would you need a government?) For example:
- Funding for Obesity Research (Obesity In America)
Twenty-five billion dollars of subsidized wheat, corn, and soy — and roughly one-fiftieth of that amount in obesity research money. Yeah, that sounds about right.
(But at least farm subsidies help small farms stay afloat and fend off the eee-ville menacing agricorps, right? Not so much, no.)
Generating revenue
Adding insult to injury:
- British Police Breaking Social Contract (The Liberty Papers)
That’s some rather strong language. Here’s the original article:
- Car theft victims pay police £105 to investigate (Times Online)
The title pretty much says it all.
Funny how the Brits seem so eager to curb anti-social behaviour because it makes people feel safe, but seem so reluctant to curb criminal behaviour, which might actually make people safer (in a broad, statistical sense, of course).
Fuck you, world, fuck ->you<-
Well, so much for optimism.
Before we mire ourselves in the Story of the Day, let’s at least pay attention to the local atrocities:
Now that there is fucking classy.
Calling the incident “disturbing and unacceptable,” Supt. Ward Clapham, the RCMP officer in command of the Richmond detachment, said it was an “extremely serious criminal act.”
That’s nice. It seems like every local atrocity gets the “extremely serious” treatment. Let’s check a different act of horrifying violence:
Is this one “extremely serious”?
“This was a cowardly attack against a 56-year-old female, and I’ve instructed my detectives to pull out all stops in order to capture the suspects responsible for this attack,” said Vancouver police Insp. Tom McCluskie of the Major Crime Unit.
Pretty much, yeah. Once again, though, we discover that those goddamn security cameras have been lax in their duties:
Police say they hope to get some clues about the two attackers from surveillance cameras at the SkyTrain station.
So there were surveillance cameras present that did not protect this poor woman? How dare they shirk their duties! Fuckin’ cameras. If only they’d prevent crime, like they’re supposed to, nobody would get assaulted at SkyTrain stations! Damn slacker cameras.
And now, while I’m on the subject of assaults upon human decency, let’s have a look at the Virginia Tech shootings.
Well, score another victory for gun control:
- Gun bill gets shot down by panel (Roankoke.com)
Hmm. So, VA Tech recently forbid its students and staff from carrying (legally or otherwise) on campus. That worked well! (Maybe they didn’t have enough cameras at VA Tech.)
Lest we forget that there are religious — you know, I’m at a loss for invective here; I can’t think of a sufficiently offensive term — out there, we have the ever-beloved Westboro Baptist Church vomiting forth their invective:
- Sick Pricks to Protest VT Funerals (The Liberty Papers)
Where’s Simo Hayha when you need him? Counter-protesting these wastes of skin with a Mosin-Nagant seems like a good idea to me.
Finally, there seems to be some bitching back and forth about whether some of the students at VT should have defended themselves, or their classmates:
- Our Domestic 101st Fighting Keyboarders (dailykos.com)
Three cheers for generalizations! I’m not really sure what’s being argued here. It seems to me that some people think the VT students should have made more of an effort to stop themselves and their compatriots from getting shot, and that others think that nobody should be obliged to risk his or her life for a random stranger.
Both of these points have merit.
On the one hand, I’m not about to risk my life for a bunch of people who don’t give two shits about me, and about whom I give no shits at all. On the other hand, I’d give my life for my loved ones without a second thought, and if I’m threatened, I’ll do whatever it takes to get home with the same number of holes with which I left. I can’t imagine risking my life for that asshole in the back row who plays his iPod too goddamn loud all class, but at the same time I can’t imagine placidly waiting to get shot.
I imagine, though, that most of the students at Virginia Tech never imagined that someone would ever want to shoot at them, and had to make that decision in an instant, on the spot. I can’t blame them for not being able to decide instantly whether or not to resist.
With what wonders shall the universe grace us tomorrow? I can’t fucking wait.
Life is getting better
How about some optimism for a change?
That’s right: it turns out that society is not getting nastier, more brutish, and shorter-lived — quite the opposite. Despite (or perhaps because of…?) the advance of the internet, devil music, secularism, casual sex, individual liberty, and evil black rifles:
Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.
Pinker’s paper is well-written and pleasant to read. It also asks the deceptively obvious question: what are we doing right?
But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.
(Emphasis added.)
This is exactly where the notion of building a theory to explain and predict the world trumps feel-good mysticism. If we get this one right, we can — honest to balls — make the world a genuinely better place. If we retreat to dubious moralization or simple-minded explanations unsupported by data, we will proceed more slowly, and more people will die.
Kind of makes you want to raise money for the social sciences, doesn’t it?
