The Immorality of voting...and more
A fundraiser for this site and for ifeminists: the audio of the 46-minute lecture "The Immorality of Voting" (mp3) given at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in February. The talk also covers practical and political reasons that underlie nonvoting. If you enjoy or benefit from the presentation, please make a paypal donation at the button on the upper left-hand corner of this site. Permission is not granted to reproduce any of the material in any manner; should you wish to do so, please contact wendy AT wendymcelroy DOT com. Similarly, should you wish to donate by mail, please email.
Thursday 03 July 2008
Happy 400th, Quebec City
Although it is on my list of places to visit, I have not yet been to Quebec City. It was 400 years ago today that "the first permanent non-native settlement in North America" was established. Happy birthday!
I don't like quoting the famous line from Henry VI, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." It is not because of my aversion to violence nor a general fondness for lawyers. Indeed, I like to think of Shakespeare as setting a trend for future generations of lawyer jokes...(The line is spoken in a comic relief scene by a villaneous character named Dick The Butcher.) I avoid the quote because I think it has been widely misinterpreted -- a victim of revisionist history written largely by lawyers themselves. Consider the revisionism offered by the book Thinking Like a Lawyer. Its author Kenneth J. Vandevelde claims that Shakespeare's real meaning was, "the surest way to chaos and tyranny even then was to remove the guardians of independent thinking." Accoridng to Vandevelde, those "guardians", of course, are lawyers.
NOT! To reach such a tortured interpretation, you'd have to ignore salient factors as the constant bashing of lawyers that runs through Shakespeare's plays. (For an accurate interpretation, click on the NOT! above.)
The quote came to mind this morning upon reading a news item entitled "For divorce lawyers, slump in economy can boost business" and a commentary on it written by Ned Holstein of the excellent Fathers and Families site. The commentary entitled "Guess Who's Not So Worried About the Economy?" opens, Skyrocketing food and gas prices…foreclosures and a credit crisis…small businesses struggling to hold onto paying customers…just some of the recession worries shared by millions of Americans. But perhaps not everyone — as reported in last week's Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly: "For divorce lawyers, slump in economy can boost business."
Ned does a fine job of analyzing the news item and leaves no need for my two cents worth. For example, Ned explains,
We've been hearing bad news about General Motors for months. Just Tuesday we learned that GM's sales were down 18% from the previous year. Yesterday I read this:
shares of General Motors (GM, news, msgs) shares slumped below $10 today -- a level not seen since 1954.
...GM closed down 15.1% to $9.98 after Merrill Lynch analyst John Murphy said the company might need to raise up to $15 billion in new capital to get through 2008 and 2009. The company insisted it had enough to cash to get through 2008 and could sell assets and make other moves in 2009.
Bankruptcy is "not impossible" if the U.S. auto market continues to slump, wrote Murphy, who has a good track record covering automobile companies. A GM bankruptcy would put all labor contracts at risk and take years to resolve and could cause problems for thousands of suppliers.
There's a real vote of confidence: they've got enough cash for the next six months, and they can sell assets and "make other moves" to stay afloat for twelve more. The punchline, however, is this:
Murphy cut GM to "underperform" from "buy"
Sales down, stock down, six months' cash left, flirting with bankruptcy, and that's "underperform"? (And last week GM was a "buy"?) What on earth does it take to get a "sell" rating from this guy?
Liberty Magazine's Tim Slagle deserves credit for seeing this one coming in time to hit the July issue (Reflections, p.12), and for doing the math. In the last week or two, do-gooders of every political persuasion have started bleating "bring back the 55 MPH speed limit" to save gasoline. No one stops to count how much this damnfool proposal costs the drivers. To quote Slagle:
The [Associated Press] article states that slowing a car from 70 to 60 miles per hour will give you a 2 to 3% gain in efficiency. That paltry benefit is precisely the reason Americans refuse to slow down. It is simple economics; if gas costs $3.33 a gallon, a 3% savings amounts to around a dime a gallon. If your car burns gas at a rate of three gallons an hour, [e.g., 60 mph at 20 mpg*] the 30 cents you save by driving 10 mph slower will take ten minutes out of your life. Very few people in America are willing to sell their time for three cents a minute.
Yet bureaucrats and busybodies have no compunction about demanding that every driver give up a slice of his time in the name of some vague public good. It's not enough that they can slow down -- and I'll bet that none of them currently do -- but everyone else must be forced to live their preferred lifestyle.
Here's an idea: leave the speed limit alone. Those that want to conserve gas can slow down. Those who think their time is worth more than $1.80 an hour -- or $2.20 an hour, at $4.08 a gallon -- can opt to drive faster and pay a bit more. That's freedom of choice.
__________ * In one of life's little ironies, those virtuous souls who own high-mileage automobiles will be compensated less for slowing down.
I rarely reprint in full news stories from the mainstream media but this one is compelling and requires no commentary. This, from the ABA Journal (July 1):
A drug possession trial in Los Angeles ended abruptly after dramatic courtroom developments. When a surprise videotape of the defendant's arrest was played in court Friday by the defense, it contradicted the testimony of two arresting police officers, who are now the focus of a new investigation.
On Monday, after prosecutors had a chance to review the videotape, which was taken by a surveillance camera at a nearby building, they acknowledged it was not consistent with the officers' sworn testimony, the Los Angeles Times reports. Superior Court Judge Monica Bachner then dismissed the cocaine possession case against Guillermo Alarcon Jr., 29, who works at a grocery store.
A police internal affairs investigation has now been launched against the two officers, who reportedly said in testimony that they chased Alarcon into an alley by his Hollywood apartment building and saw him throw away an object that turned out to be cocaine. However, the videotape shows it took a team of police more than 20 minutes to find the cocaine, which a defense lawyer says wasn't Alarcon's. Additionally, at one point an officer apparently tells another to "be creative" when writing the arrest report.
Deputy Public Defender Victor Acevedo, who represented Alarcon, said the case was "completely trumped up," apparently during courtroom comments to Bachner, according to the newspaper. "They have two officers who came into court and blatantly lied and planted evidence," he told the judge yesterday.
Many thanks to WolfmanMac for the following article (exclusive to this blog and ifeminists.net) which asks the question, "Do you really want men prosecuted for their thoughts? " (Note: the author invites your feedback, including requests to reprint, at tom911katATyahooDOTcom)
Lynch Mobs, Stones and Glass Houses
It has been observed that the primary difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the difference between justice and injustice, for the amount of justice we can expect on this earth is surely finite, while injustice continues to reach new lows. One can only hope that the public would begin to note the frequency with which such injustice is given its imprimatur under the guise of “protecting women and children.”
On June 10th of this year The Sacramento Bee reported on the arrest and prosecution of one of its own. Mr. Gilbert Chan, described as a “veteran reporter,” was off duty attending a cheerleading competition. There he “was caught by University of California, Davis, police on Feb. 3 while surreptitiously videotaping [the] …competition on campus.” As a result of the arrest, “Chan pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of invasion of privacy” as well as “to a felony charge of possession of child pornography. The tape focused on the buttocks and other parts of clothed cheerleaders. The cheerleaders were under 18.”
So, here we have a man who attended a competition that was, to all appearances, open to the public. There, cheerleaders cavorted about while clad in the costumes for which they are famous, in full and public view of all and sundry. Mr. Chan videotaped them, as presumably so did others in attendance. The elements of Mr. Chan’s “crime” appear to be two-fold – he was taping them “surreptitiously,” and focusing on their naughty parts as he did so.
Friend and decades-long libertarian Kent Hastings was assaulted last night while walking in a neighborhod in Southern California (his state of residence is Nevada). Kant's story -- related with typical anarchistic aplomb -- is reprinted in full and taken below from the commentary section of Wally Conger's blog Out Of Step. (FYI, Kent is a longterm associate of the now-deceased Samuel E. Konkin III, co-author with Brad Linaweaver of the alternate history novel Anarquia and the film editor/associate producer on J. Neil Schulman's movie Lady Magdalene's.)
Today, the featured addition to the archives is an article that asks, "Why do good men do nothing in the face of evil, especially when evil aggressively invades their lives?" It can be accessed by clicking on articles in the tool bar and, then, on non-political strategy in the drop down menu. Or...click here.
Excerpt: The question of why people passively obey government has haunted the history of political discourse. In 1552, Étienne de la Boétie addressed what he called the most important problem confronting freedom: people consent to their own enslavement. His analysis of 'why' resulted in the world's first book on non-violent resistance, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Modern historians ask the same question. During the mass arrests of Stalinist Russia, people reportedly slept in their clothing...not in order to flee more easily but in order to be fully dressed when seized. In Hitler's Europe, Jews reported on their own to deportation centers and to their deaths. Why?
Tim Starr circulated to me the following tribute to Vince Miller. A memorial will be planned in the coming weeks and, when particulars are solid, I will post the details. Until then, I will let Starr have the final words about Vince in this blog.
This is an amusing twist to the foofaraw about the Associated Press demanding that bloggers pay for quotes of as few as five words from AP articles. It seems that AP, in one of their articles, quoted twenty-two words from a TechCrunch blog. Without permission, and without payment. Michael Arrington, the author of those words, is sending a DMCA takedown demand to the AP, and also billing them $12.50 (the AP's own scale for 22 words).
A headline from the UK Daily Mail (06/30): Grandfather with 'For Sale' sign in car window given £100 fine for running street business. Victor Abrahams put a 'for sale' sign on his Ford Escort and, then, went about his daily life. Unhappily, he works and, so, parks his car in the town of Barnett where it is illegal to do business in a parking place, however legally parked a car may otherwise be. Abrahams has appealed the fine and will undoubtedly attempt to reason his way out of paying. As he stated to the press, "Why is the for-sale sign in my car window any different from a delivery van with the name and phone number of the company on the side? Or why is it different from a driving instructor's car that has the name and details of the driving school on the side? Surely if I'm offering goods for sale, so are they."
Alas, the man is appealing to government agents against whom reason is impotent. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “It is as useless to argue with those who have abandoned the use of reason as it is to administer medicine to the dead.” The government wants money and no argument, however valid, will stand between its grubbing fingers and a wallet.
There is a lesson here. In the most literal sense of the words, Abrahams (and the rest of us) should never do business in the streets; more generally stated, never do business in a more public manner than is absolutely necessary. Being public about your economic transactions is akin to staggering into a bar with $100 bills bulging out of your pockets; the government thugs, no less than the barroom ones, will mark you as an easy target. Government everywhere and on all levels are looking for ways to roll you like a hapless drunk, which means it is time for us all to sober up and be more careful.
What constitutes 'being sober' in this context? -- Being private. (For more info on preserving your privacy, click on links in the tool bar and scroll down to the category "Civil Liberties." Eventually, there'll be a drop down menu for the categories...but the section is a project in process)
Ask yourself: how can I make my transactions -- even just one transaction -- more private? Some of the options are... Use cash as much as possible. Refuse to fill in blanks on forms, pleading a fear of identity theft. Use social networks to advertise rather than newspapers. Go through an anonymizer when doing online business. Use anonymous debit cards rather than a credit card. Never answer financial questions over the phone. For that matter, never answer financial questions. Barter when possible. Don't give the appearance of wealth or brag. Don't be that drunk in the bar.
H. Rearden posted this interesting item to our forum, about Mesa, AZ police complaining that Wal-Mart is relying on them too much to combat shoplifting. There are several interesting responses on the forum thread, but this is what struck me:
Mesa police are using the equivalent of two full-time officers to answer shoplifting calls at Mesa Wal-Marts, but efforts to help the big-box retailer curtail theft have largely been pushed aside.
Thefts at Wal-Mart's seven Supercenters rose 89 percent from 2006 to 2007, police records show. Police estimate thefts will rise 117 percent this year if the January-through-May numbers continue at their current pace.
Police were called to Mesa Wal-Marts on 376 shoplifting thefts in 2007, ...
Let's take the cops at their word. They estimate shoplifting calls at the rate of 816 per year (376 * 2.17) in 2008. A standard "man-year" is 2000 hours. Times two cops, is 4000 man-hours. They're saying it takes five hours for a cop to respond to a shoplifting call? That in an entire work day, a cop only has time to respond to one and one-half shoplifting calls?
Wendy has written frequently about stocking one's pantry as a commodities investment that anyone can afford. And now would appear to be the time, according to Jim Rogers (as reported by Bloomberg):
Investors should avoid the dollar and buy commodities, which is the "best investment" for this year, said Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings.
Avoid the dollar "at all costs," Rogers said at the opening of an investment club in Shanghai today. "Agricultural prices have much higher to go over the next decade. We have a shortage of everything including seeds."
But there is yet another reason, if you read the warning of James Howard Kunstler in The Daily Reckoning:
Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of U.S. truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it's also possible that, at some point, they'll mount a Night-of-the-Living-Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on "the system" that has brought them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any of its supermarkets.
One of the Red Cross activities for which I am training is teaching "Personal Emergency Preparedness." When a disaster hits, you can expect to be on your own resources for 72 hours...which means, among other things, you need three days' worth of food and water on hand. But an economic upheaval, like a strike, can last longer than three days. I wouldn't be comfortable with less than two weeks' food in the pantry. Stock up now; food isn't getting any cheaper.
Murray Rothbard on Economics -- a lecture, sort of
Some years ago, with the permission of Lew Rockwell, I edited some lectures on economics that Murray Rothbard had delivered in the '80s. The ultimate goal was to weave together enough material so that a new Rothbard book could be published. Alas, the project never got far off the starting block. I stumbled over a 'rough draft' of the edited material and thought it might be of interest to blog readers.
I'd rather take my chances with criminals than with the police. For one thing, criminals usually want your property, not control over your life.
Policemen will angrily assure me that they are the barrier between civilians and a world of random violence. This was a common theme in the flood of hate mail I received from policemen who responded to a column I wrote "Prevent Violence: Disarm the Police." (That article is appended to this one. See below in extended text.) Many officers provided the further assurance that - given my bad attitude - I had best not count on their assistance against a rapist. (Rape was the assault consistently mentioned, perhaps because the e-mails were all from men.) Well, years ago, I was raped and the police weren't there. So it will be difficult to tell the difference.
