Restraining order doesn’t, film at eleven

Scott Young, presently the mayor of Port Coquitlam (a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of Vancouver), is an asshole.

• Port Coquitlam mayor pleads guilty to assault (CBC.ca)

The mayor made headlines last year when he spent Easter weekend in jail after he broke into the garage of his ex-girlfriend Colleen Preston and assaulted her and her friend Glen Shaw. He also breached an undertaking he signed earlier that year promising to stay away from Preston.

It’s curious that the above article spends roughly as much time talking about Young’s “breach of undertaking” and court-ordered abstemiousness as it does about his beating the hell out of two people. This reveals a worrying mindset: it’s as though the author believes that someone who’s perfectly willing to break our laws against assault should be expected to respect something like a restraining order; that a violent drunk can be made into a gentle tea-totaler simply by judicial fiat. I cannot wrap my head around this mentality.

I’d write something scathing and witty about the utility (or lack thereof) of restraining orders, probably referring once again to Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, but LawDog has already done a masterful job:

• Meditations on paper armour (The LawDog Files)

Well worth reading.

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 4

Looks like we’re about a day early. Well, I keep hearing that change is good.

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Most of us discovered in prepubescence that a dirty enough imagination can find sex (or poop jokes) in anything. Most of us, however, are past that stage — there’s enough real innuendo out there that we don’t need to fabricate awkward ersatz innuendo from whatever comes along, be it writing utensils (phallic, I suppose), water bottles (there’s a tit joke in there if you’ve entirely abandoned your dignity), or Starbucks logos.

Wait, what?

• Group finds Starbucks logo too hot to handle (Twin Cities Star-Tribune)

A Christian group based in San Diego found grounds for outrage over the new retro-style logo for Starbucks Coffee.

The Resistance says the new image “has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,” Mark Dice, founder of the group, said in a news release. “Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks.”

Here, for posterity, is the offending logo:

(Credit: Armstrong Photo; copyright probably held by the Star-Tribune.)

I can imagine that members of a Christian-whackjob group “advancing various conspiracy theories” don’t spend as much time surfing Internet porn as the rest of us — or at least are very insecure about it, and won’t admit to same. I can also imagine that they hold the science of biology in somewhat low regard. But neither is an excuse: that’s a fuckin’ mermaid, you dumbasses! Those aren’t legs spread wide and inviting. No girl bits in the middle. T’aint smut! You’d find more erotic material in a careful reading of Genesis.

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Moving on: it seems that fat Brits are responsible for rising food prices, global warming, and Inkscape’s apparent inability properly to embed fonts in PDF documents:

• Obese blamed for the world’s ills (The Beeb)

(What, you don’t think that PDF font embedding is one of the greatest issues facing humanity? You’ve obviously never submitted a paper to an ACM conference.)

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated the obese consume 18% more calories than average.

They are also responsible for using more fuel, which has an environmental impact and drives up food prices as transport and agriculture both use oil.

The result is that the poor struggle to afford food and greenhouse gas emissions rise, the Lancet reported.

Spiffy. This research frightens me — or perhaps it’s just ludicrously bad science reporting.

We begin with the (false) assumption that all calories are created equal:

The team found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 to maintain daily activities – a fifth more than normal.

Apparently fat people don’t have metabolisms like the rest of us — they just burn calories at a constant rate, converting carbs, fat, protein, and roughage into heat and adipose tissue at a constant rate unfettered by their endocrine or digestive systems.

First of all the increasing demand for food, drives up production. This means that agricultural processes are using more oil to meet demand, which contributes to the rising cost of fuel. The cost of fuel is then passed on in the cost of food, making it more difficult for poorer areas to afford it.

(I give up: I can’t keep quoting single-sentence paragraphs three and four at a time.)

Hang on. So increased demand drives up production, rather than increasing prices? And increased supply increases prices? The food market doesn’t have a price curve, and the oil market doesn’t have a supplycurve? That ain’t how it works — at least, not in a free market.

I call bullshit.

Perhaps, instead, supply was artificially inflated by government handouts (yes, folks, this is another farm subsidies rant). Having nothing much to do with a shit-ton of corn in the pre-ethanol-hype age, food companies turned it into Twinkies and high-fructose corn syrup and the like: foods rich in simple carbs (which cause blood-glucose spikes, and promote liponeogenesis) available at artificially low prices. Then people ate them.

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We’ll stay in the UK for the next chunk of idiocy.

• ‘Big Brother’ database for phones and e-mails (Times Online)

A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials. The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.

The problem isn’t that government thugs — er, I mean, security forces — aren’t getting enough data: it’s that they can’t find the right data among thousands of times more completely innocuous records. Even Scotland Yard’s chief of surveillance admits that those cops — er, plods — tasked to identify threats in the vast take of existing domestic espionage can’t do it. More information — and more information overload — is not the answer.

(Unless, of course, you want to stalk your ex-girlfriend. In that case, it works fine!)

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And now we’ll stay with security theatre.

• Airlines profiting from TSA rules (Schneier on Security)

Before 9/11, airlines and security personnel — and I use the term “security personnel” loosely — might have let a nickname or even a maiden name on a ticket slide. No longer. If you have the wrong name on your ticket, you’re probably grounded. And there are two reasons for this: security and greed.

The Transportation Security Administration wants to be sure the same person who bought the ticket, and who was screened, is boarding the plane. But when there’s an inexact match, the airline can either charge a $100 “change” fee or force you to buy a new ticket. In an industry where every dollar counts, the exact-name rule is the government’s gift to cash-starved air carriers.

Funny how every time the government takes more power, large corporations seem to be in the best position to profit.

(And whose brilliant incompetence led to names on tickets being used for ID? Every comp-sci undergrad has that propensity beaten out of them within the first two weeks of an introductory databases course.)

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Right-wing nutjob of the week: Patrick J. Buchanan

(Yeah, we can probably make this a regular feature.)

• Bush Plays the Hitler Card (Human Events)

(Hat tip: Below The Beltway)

German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson’s 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.

Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.

So, let me get this straight: Hitler wanted Poland as an ally against Stalin. Therefore, Hitler allied with Stalin against the Poles? How does someone who comes up with this baffling bullshit manage to tie his shoes in the morning?

But wait, there’s more!

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

Yeah. The Soviets weren’t responsible for the Katyn massacre. The Nazis weren’t responsible for the above-mentioned concentration camps. It was those damnably proud Poles who refused to hand over Danzig. Of course.

Given that Buchanan is, in his fumbling way, trying to endorse a policy of negotiation (he praises Chamberlain for giving away Czechoslovakia and “averting war”), I’d be tempted to suspect that this is simply a crude attempt to sabotage Senator Obama’s foreign-policy claims. But really: who the fuck is going to take Buchanan seriously?

TransLink customers petition for more “security”

This makes me uneasy:

• Riders petition for more security at SkyTrain stations (CBC.ca)

(Note the difference in terminology between the CBC’s title and mine: We pay for it; therefore, we are customers. Let’s not make believe that the government is doing us a favour by providing public transit. It comes out of our own pockets.)

Here’s the gist of the thing:

Hundreds of SkyTrain riders signed a petition on Monday calling on TransLink to increase patrols, beef up security cameras and improve lighting at stations.

This is of course in response to a number of well-publicized assaults around SkyTrain stations — particularly Nanaimo station, where they circulated the petition — in the past year or so.

It seems like a reasonable demand. After all, the grand Canadian myth is that the government will take care of us — thus the Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance, single-payer health care, and (in particular, in this context) strict laws against self-defence and a high-powered police presence. TransLink has gone so far as to provide its own police force. Surely, if they claim that they’ll keep us safe, we ought to insist that they do so… right?

Well, there lies the problem.

The only person who can keep you safe is you.

It is foolish to expect someone else — particularly someone who’s merely doing s/h/its job — to care more about whether you live or die than you do yourself. It is, however, what we’ve been told and conditioned to expect. And — here’s the thing — TransLink does a fantastic job trying to achieve this impossible goal.

I see far more of TransLink’s cops than I do — or ever have — of any other police force, ever. Granted, they have a smaller beat to patrol, but the point stands. The fact that Transit cops aren’t likely to be around when you need them says far, far more about the nature of civilian law enforcement than it does about transit cops.

SkyTrain stations make juicy targets not because transit cops are few and far between, but because they’re high-traffic areas — there are simply far more potential victims walking through SkyTrain stations than there are along your average sidewalk. (Many SkyTrain stations include ATMs, which only makes things worse.) As we’ve discussed, muggers are able simply to wait until the transit cops leave, then pick a distracted victim (perhaps one who has just visited an ATM) and go to town.  Doubling the number of transit cops may ameliorate the situation, but it won’t solve the problem — and one can’t simply double the number of officers in a police force; there must still be standards for law enforcement personnel.  Eventually, the pool of qualified applicants dries up, and all the budget in the world won’t change that.

Doubling the number of “security” cameras seems like a reasonable idea, until one recalls that surveillance cameras are simply incapable of preventing crime: the only people who know that you’re in danger are on the other end of that camera.  They may not be paying attention; and if they are, what are they going to do about it?  If no transit cops are in the area, none will be able to reach you in time to help you, no matter how adroitly they can be directed via CCTV.

Improving lighting in and around SkyTrain stations is a damn good idea; it has been shown to work very well; and I entirely endorse it.  The only problem is that TransLink is already doing it. I suppose we can see this part of the petition as a vote of confidence.

In short, TransLink is probably doing the best it can to keep its customers safe.  It’s inadequate to the task, and it always will be.  No-one can keep you safe but you.

Toronto Star discovers American microbrew

Popular Canadian myth holds that American beer is shamefully weak (that is, universally low in alcohol content) and tastes like water. I have made a partial rebuttal, but of course it’s only useful to those who read my blog.

One would expect, however, that the Toronto Star has a rather larger readership:

• Is American beer any good?

Yes. Yes, it is.

“U.S. craft beer is probably the most diverse and interesting brewing scene in the world,” beer aficionado Cass Enright said at a recent dinner in Toronto at the Academy of Spherical Arts to celebrate the Ontario launch of Southern Tier Brewing’s India Pale Ale.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. beer scene has exploded. In 1978, there were just 42 breweries across the U.S. In 2007, there were 1,449.

“You can find just about anything being made. They’ve taken the best of every kind of style and put their own twist on it,” says Enright, founder of bartowel.com, a site for local beer connoisseurs.

Sure, American breweries put out thin fizzy yellow beer like Budweiser and Coors Light, but then Canadian breweries put out thin fizzy yellow beer entirely indistinguishable from Budweiser (Molson Canadian) and Coors Light (Labatt Blue Light). American breweries also put out spectacular beers like Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout and Dreadnaught India Pale Ale; I have yet to come across a Canadian beer that can compete with either.

About this whole “appeasement” thing.

As most of you who’re into politics surely know, Bush 43 went to Israel for their 60th anniversary of not being shot at by anti-Semitic factions in Europe and took some jabs at Senator Obama in which he equated a willingness to chat with, say, Iran with 1930s-style appeasement. Now, you’d expect the clever Left to reply with a passel of (ridiculously obvious and) devastatingly clever arguments that chatting with your enemy is not equivalent to giving them the Sudetenland. You would, for the most part, be right. But Daily Kos, as is its wont, bucks the trend:

• Who was Neville Chamberlain? (Cartoon Messiah)

I am not repeat not making this shit up.

We are told here that Neville Chamberlain is only bad in the context of European history seen from the American perspective:

Europe, wracked by the Depression, was in poor shape to meet the challenges posed by Stalin and Hitler. The Western Powers were absorbed with their own affairs. The USA was absent. The states of East Central Europe were weak and divided. At the very time that the idea of collective security was mooted, Europe’s attention was diverted by the Civil War in Spain. – Norman Davies, “Europe – a History”

(There’s that bloody context thing again. That bloody nuance thing (it’s a French word, isn’t it?). Real (republican) men don’t fiddle about with such nonsense! Even the word context sounds somewhat effete and European!)

And where-o-where did that Depression originate? Much as the current financial crisis, it originated on Wall Street. We learn about the Great Depression, and about the Okies and the Dustbowl. We often forget that it was runaway inflation that allowed a certain A. Schickelgruber to come to power. In Germany, it got to the point that people were taking wheelbarrows when they went shopping. Not to put their groceries in, mind you, but to carry their money with them, so devalued had the D-Mark become!

It was indeed runaway inflation — in part — that allowed Mr. Schickelgruber to come to power. But blaming that runaway inflation upon Wall Street before the United States had become an international financial superpower is somewhat implausible. The 1930s was after all a renaissance of American isolationism — which had a grave effect upon our military preparedness. (Any student beyond utter indifference of the North African campaigns can figure this out within thirty seconds of reading the usual textbooks.)

Yes: Hitler rose to power on the basis of the Great Depression’s effect upon the Weimar Republic. He also rose to power upon the myth that Germany was defeated from within by… well, whatever group you wish to name: Communists, Jews, Gays, or 9-11 Conspiracy Theorists (I kid, I kid!). That ain’t the fuckin’ point.

But Mr. C. Messiah has other points in store:

But who was Neville Chambelain?

ALONE. That is the title of the chapter that discusses World War II from the British perspective in Roy Strong’s The Story of Britain – A People’s History. The rest of Europe had fallen into Axis darkness, or remained neutral, and the USA was in the grips of isolationism.

Right. Britain — ALONE! Oh no! Alone, across the Channel, with only the biggest fucking navy in Western Europe to defend itself from the eee-ville Axis invaders! Let’s not forget the fact that the Kaiser’s Kriegsmarine was mostly scuttled at Scapa Flow or procured by the United States for Billy Bishop to bomb into coral-reef substrate, while the Royal Navy maintained its power to kick ridiculous ass.

Okay, some of you are going to call me out here: “But, but, the Bismarck beat the shit out of Hood!” Yeah, that’s what happens when you put battlecruisers, which are armoured against eight-inch guns, against battleships. Don’t do it. You’ll note that the carrier Ark Royal and the battleships King George V and Rodney — all of which were properly equipped to fuck with capital ships, which battlecruisers most certainly weren’t — put the Bismarck permanently underwater.

Some of the rest of you — those of you who have even a modicum of competence in naval history, that is — are going to call me out on the loss of the Prince of Wales oder etwas in 1941. Sure, fine; but the Japanese managed to sink two unsupported capital ships way the fuck away from Britain with a shit-ton of air support geared towards naval combat, whereas the Germans had to deal with the whole rest of the Royal Fucking Navy with a bunch of warplanes geared toward land-based close-air-support and strategic bombing. No contest; the Brits pwned.

Right. The point is, thanks to the Washington Naval Treaty (and the fact that the Germans for the most part had no choice but to abide by it), Germany wasn’t a threat to Britain in the 1930s. One simply can’t get across the Channel or the North Sea with a few dozen battleships’ 15-inch gun batteries saying “no, get your ass back to Kiel”.

Consider, also, the Battle of Britain. Yes, the Nazis sent a shit-ton of bombers against British land targets. Bully for them. Sending high-altitude bombers against ships — in that era — was about as effective as shooting a .22 pistol at mosquitoes, as the Americans demonstrated in their B-17 sorties at Midway. (It took carrier-based dive-bombers — and a rather unusual set of coincidences — to kill four Japanese carriers at Midway. Those circumstances would have been very unlikely in the event of a German amphibious invasion of Britain.)

No, there’s no comparison between the present propensity of North American statesfuckers to chat with Iranian statesfuckers and Chamberlain’s record of giving up the game to the Nazis. And while we’re on the subject: what’s up with this bit:

Poland, which nobly fought against the Panzern of Nazi Germany with Cavalry

Good job, you racist douche, you’ve fallen into the sophomoric trap of stupid Polish jokes. The whole “Polish cavalry vs. Panzers” bit is merely German propaganda, endeavouring to show the innate superiority of the Master Race over those damn idiotic Slavs. (Of course, these are the same even-handed folk who jumped around pointing their fingers and yelling “faggot! faggot!” when Larry Craig got busted for trying to get his rocks off. What else would you expect?)

You know, I could swear that Daily Kos is run by Republicans trying to make “the Left” look bad. What the fuck is wrong with these so-called people?

To protect and serve, vol. 3

Because nothing says “protect and serve” like bludgeoning an unoffending pedestrian into the pavement from behind:

I think I’ll not go to Britain this summer.

Credit: http://usera.imagecave.com/lothianblue/gmp1.bmp.jpg

CA supreme court rules gay marriage ban unconstitutional

Predictably, the totality of conservative douchebaggery have taken to the internet in protest. Perhaps social conservatives see their own marriages as so frail and precarious that the mere legal possibility of two men (or two women) calling their committed long-term relationship a “marriage” would drive them to, I dunno, proposition underage teenagers over the internet or hot-foot it to the nearest house of prostitution.

I won’t bother to rebut their arguments, as it seems that the rest of the internet has done it for me. I’ll just link to the highlights:

• Those Crazy Conservative Activists Again (Barry Eisler)

Eisler draws a compelling parallel between the gay marriage and school integration. If you think that gays should be satisfied with “civil unions”, he argues, you have no grounds to complain about “separate but equal” treatment for blacks.

If the point above doesn’t make sense to you, think of how the Supreme Court Justices in Brown v Board of Education overturned the “separate but equal” segregated educational framework that had been enacted with popular backing by the duly elected representatives of so many southern states. If you want to argue that courts shouldn’t as a matter of principal overturn laws they find violative of their constitutions, you should be prepared to argue that the Brown court, too, exceeded its authority.

In fact, anyone who wants to argue that gay marriage should be left to individual states (and remember, the California ruling was by a state court, pursuant to a state constitution, and binding only in California), you should be prepared to argue too that Brown was wrongly decided — that “separate but equal” education did not violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws and should have been a matter for individual states to decide for themselves. I don’t see how you can rationally argue that “separate but equal” education was unconstitutional and was rightly struck down by a court as such, but that “separate but equal” marriage (or no gay marriage at all) is constitutional and should be left to states to decide.

You might have surmised by now that I’m not impressed by the notion that gays should be able to form “civil unions” equivalent in all ways but name to marriage (this was key to the California court’s finding — that there is, after all, a great deal in a name). I’d be equally impressed by the notion that blacks should be permitted to attend institutions of higher education as long as the institutions they were permitted to attend were not called “colleges” or “universities.”

Next, Glenn Greenwald makes a brutal legal-based assault on the howling you hear about “activist judges overruling the demonstrated will of the people”:

• California’s marriage ruling — what it means and what it doesn’t mean (Glenn Greenwald)

Equally misinformed will be anyone arguing that this is some sort of an example of judges “overriding” the democratic will of the people. The people of California, through their representatives in the State legislature, twice approved a bill to provide for the inclusion of same-sex couples in their “marriage” laws, but both times, the bill was vetoed by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said when he vetoed it that he believed “it is up to the state Supreme Court” to decide the issue.

Polls have found substantial support for gay marriage in California, with dramatic trends toward favoring gay marriage. While there was a referendum passed in 2000 limiting marriage only to opposite-sex couples, five years later (in 2005), California’s state legislature became the first in the country to enact a same-sex marriage law without a court order compelling them to do so. Thus, even leaving aside constitutional guarantees (which, in a constitutional republic, trump public opinion), today’s ruling is consistent with that state’s democratic processes and public opinion, not a subversion of it.

So the Governator passed the buck to the state Supreme Court, and the state Supreme Court made its ruling. Seems pretty clear to me.

What isn’t clear to me is what business the government has in marriage in the first place. The most common argument against gay marriage goes something like this:

“Marriage is a holy sacrament, a union of a man and a woman before God, and [blah blah blah]“

I have no problem with that. It’s an argument defined entirely within a religious context, and as far as I’m concerned you can believe whatever you damn well please. However, since this is an entirely religious argument, it is utterly irrelevant to government. If your church wants to restrict marriage to straight couples, or to left-handed couples, or to bald men and Golden Retrievers, go nuts: do whatever makes you happy in the eyes of your god(s). These purely religious designations should have no force of law.

Oops, there’s the dog thing again. Another common argument against gay marriage is that it’s a slippery slope — if we legalize gay marriage, sooner or later we’ll legalize bestiality and child abuse.

Well, no. We have other laws against that. Sex without consent — and neither kids nor dogs can consent to sex — is rape, which is of course illegal. Creepy middle-aged men may have been “married” to early teenagers in West Texas, but the former fucking the latter is still rape (and the former beating the latter is still assault), no matter what their religion has to say about it.  Once again, this is a consequence of “marriage” properly being an entirely religious concept, and having no legal force.  (Corollary: when “marriage” does have legal force, it implicitly condones this sort of coercive paedophilia.)

Of course, marriage does have a legal meaning entirely divorced (heh heh) from its religious meaning, and that has to do with employment benefits (spousal health coverage, &c.), divorce proceedings, and the like.  This is a false abstraction, however: it’s not about two people being married, it’s about two people being interdependent.  It’s a financial and social relationship, not a religious one.  There’s no reason why the legal, secular component of marriage can’t be covered by contract law without all the baggage of the term.

Perhaps we should privatize marriage.

CRTC wants in on internet, cellphone regulation

Dear government agency,

Keep your filthy hands off of the internet.

Love,
–Matt

• Broadcast rules on internet, cellphones under review (CBC.ca)