Sen. Leahy's COICA bill to permit blacklisting and seizure of domains is progressing through the Judiciary Committee. It has 18 cosponsors. Most of them are "the usual suspects" types, Senators who don't care about whether the legislation they support is Constitutional, as long as it makes them feel good. I still think this is a violation of their oath of office. Constitutionality should be the first filter. I am disappointed to see Inhofe on the list, as I thought he had more sense than that. Sen. Ron Wyden has vowed to block a vote at least until 2011. So that's good.
But in the meantime, DHS is "seizing internet domains left and right." As Don Surber says, they are "protecting rappers instead of the border." By what authority do they do this, I wonder. If this can be done as an executive function, without the need for Congress to pass legislation, then COICA is superfluous. Or else it's the way the administration wants to handle other issues as well, that is, by executive fiat. I'm thinking of using the EPA's regulatory powers to declare CO2 a pollutant and regulate it without any legislative authority. That "government of laws" business sounds nice, but it gets in the way sometimes. Pesky laws!
It’s an outrage. To begin with, there’s the bizarre spectacle of the Department of Homeland Security – which, last I looked, had some important issues before it that actually relate to “homeland security” — expending time and resources to protect purely private interests (of. e.g., the Louis Vuitton handbag manufacturers and Warner Brothers’ Records). And the operation perfectly illustrates the objections we raised in the COICA Letter: 80 websites — many of them operating overseas — have now been prevented from speaking to US citizens even though the website operators, whose domains were seized, had no notice or opportunity to respond to the charges against them (and to argue, for instance, that they are NOT infringing copyrights or trademarks), no adversary hearing, and certainly no adjudication before a neutral, that anything unlawful is going on at these sites, only an affidavit to that effect submitted by the ICE.
It is common knowledge that there are no debtors' prisons in the United States. Wikipedia says "In 1833 the United States abolished Federal imprisonment for unpaid debts, and most states outlawed the practice around the same time."
But it would be reckless to conclude from this knowledge that one need not worry about being jailed or imprisoned as a consequence of not paying the bills. At Making Light, commenter Magenta Griffith points to an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "In jail for being in debt." It recounts a number of recent cases in which debtors have found themselves behind bars.
The amounts can be small. $35 is the amount in one case.
A sidebar asks "Is jailing debtors the same as debtors jail?" Not quite. The trick is that the collector has obtained a court order. Failure to appear in court is the offense for which the debtor is jailed. The sidebar explains,
"We have created a de facto debtors prison system in the United States that is largely unconstitutional," said Judith Fox, a law professor at Notre Dame Law School. "In some parts of the country, people are so fearful of arrest they are scrambling to pay money they might not even owe."
In states such as Indiana and Illinois, people are being locked up for not making court-ordered payments. Known as "pay or stay," it can mean days in jail and multiple arrests for the same debt. Some legal experts say the practice is unconstitutional because the arrest is directly linked to the failure to pay a debt.
In Minnesota, the issue is less clear because warrants to arrest debtors are issued for disobeying court orders, such as not filling out a financial disclosure form and missing a required hearing, not for failure to pay debt. So long as someone fulfills the court order, they can avoid incarceration.
All too often, debtors are not aware that a court date has been set or a warrant issued.
An article at Walletpop about the Star-Tribune piece received 100 comments, some of them substantive.
The NY Times had an editorial about the practice last year.
Albert Gonzales and Shadowcrew stole millions of credit and debit card numbers, intercepted millions of transactions, and saw "profits in the millions of dollars." James Verini has the story: The Great Cyberheist. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.
#1 The state of Texas now requires every new computer repair technician to obtain a private investigator’s license. In order to receive a private investigator’s license, an individual must either have a degree in criminal justice or must complete a three year apprenticeship with a licensed private investigator. If you are a computer repair technician that violates this law, or if you are a regular citizen that has a computer repaired by someone not in compliance with the law, you can be fined up to $4,000 and you can be put in jail for a year.
#2 The city of Philadelphia now requires all bloggers to purchase a $300 business privilege license. The city even went after one poor woman who had earned only $11 from her blog over the past two years.
#8 A U.S. District Court judge slapped a 500 dollar fine on Massachusetts fisherman Robert J. Eldridge for untangling a giant whale from his nets and setting it free. So what was his crime? Well, according to the court, Eldridge was supposed to call state authorities and wait for them do it.
Go over there for the rest, an Institute for Justice video, and some discussion of opportunity cost. If the government were serious about stimulating the economy, much of the current regulatory regime, at all levels from Federal to local, could be yanked out by the roots.
It was not going to work without coercion in the form of cap-and-trade. If Al Gore and the rest have let it go, then it looks like the lame-duck session of Congress will not be trying for cap-and-trade.
What Ed Barnes has to say. Here's another take from the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. CCX's parent company runs carbon exchanges in other countries, which are not closing. So is this a victory for American exceptionalism? Wouldn't that be nice.
Daniel Henninger mentions Calvin Coolidge, the Form 1099 expansion, cap-and-trade, the EPA, public sector unions, and some other things that have been on my mind, in a look at the Democrats' anti-business attitude and activities.
“Can you govern yourself, or do you need a Federal Czar to govern your life for you?”
That question should be asked of every interested person who might vote in the next few elections. Everyone.
“Can you find a doctor, a light-bulb, or control the flow of your toilet, or should one of our Federal Czars take that decision out of your hands?”
When framed in this fashion, the answers to these questions probably have a 75-25 pro-freedom response rate, even in today’s electorate.
Behrend goes on to say that advocates of smaller government should frame the debate to emphasize self-government. Maybe if Tea Partiers can persuade establishment Republicans to join them in the message that Americans do not need to be closely supervised every minute, some inroads can be made against the forces of the nanny state.
I hope he is onto something with this. What we keep hearing from government is that we are too damn stupid to come in out of the rain.
Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility … Virtually the entire superstructure of today's legislative branch is designed to minimize clarity, and hence accountability.The survival instincts of politicians involve the avoidance of taking stands, and Republican politicians aren't immune from them any more than Democrats are. Republicans just have more to worry about in terms of Tea Party primary challengers.
To use Codevilla's terms, the Country Class is trying to get some power back from the Ruling Class. Many establishment Republicans view themselves as part of the Ruling Class, and those need to be challenged right along with the Democrats.
After the election, Professor Althouse offers a blessing for the years to come:
Let's hope last night's revolution was a revolution toward reality, away from government, and a return to belief in what individual human beings can do on their own, without magical dreams about government.
The prestigious collection of hundreds of years of weather observations, historical books and meteorological instruments from the Collegio Romano in Rome is at risk of being dispersed for good. Please sign the appeal to prevent such a disaster: http://www.petizionionline.it/petizione/salviamo-losservatorio-meteorologico-di-roma/2200 (in the signature section: “Nome”=First name; “Cognome”=Family name; “richiesto”=Mandatory field)
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A few days ago I have received the following letter via e-mail (translated and adapted in English from the original in Italian):
Dear friends,
It is with great sadness that I am forwarding the attached letter – press release by the staff at the Research Unit for Applied Meteorology and Climatology in Agriculture (in Italian: CRA-CMA), the direct descendant of the first Italian National Weather Station inaugurated in 1876 and headquartered at the Collegio Romano from 1879 (in an area previously occupied by the Meteorological Observatory built in 1782 by Abbot Giuseppe Calandrelli (the first to apply gravitational theory to cometary atmospheres)). I hope that those who have taken this decision will go back on it, at least reconsider this meteorological site, by declaring its historical importance for Italian meteorology. That would mean leaving untouched its Library, Historical Archives and the Museum of Ancient Meteorological and Seismographic Instruments, as well as the historic Calandrelli Observatory. The Library is at present unique in Italy, after the closure, in the 1990s, of the Air Force Weather Service Library.
How valuable is empirical evidence and long term data? The Collegio Romano is one of the few places in the world with multi-centennial meteorological and climate data series (228 years!) … Not many people in the world appreciate how important and rare those long temperature series and historic collections are.
If the warmingists were really interested in science, this would be a big deal. Al Gore has made enough on climate alarmism to buy the place, single-handed. It's just as well, though, since the alarmists have shown what they think of data. Data are to be extrapolated, adjusted, inferred, or deleted. The actual records can be so, uh, inconvenient. Look at New Zealand for a current case, if you're tired of Phil Jones.
Archie Bunker liked the wrong President. Of course he did. Archie was written that way.
America missed a bet when Coolidge decided not to run in 1928. He would have been reelected in a landslide. If he had been in office, and the 1929 crash came anyway, he would have been able to follow Harding's example in dealing with it. The 1920 depression was a short sharp shock, followed by the Roaring 20's.
Coolidge presided over an era of unprecedented prosperity. He (and Harding) cut taxes and spending radically. The budget in 1929 was half what it was in 1920 [p. 21 of this GPO pdf.] At the end of Wilson's Presidency, the top income tax rate was 77%. Coolidge was able to push it down to 25%. (Robert Novak says he was not such a budget-cutter, but does so by comparing Wilson's pre-war budget to Coolidge's last budget. In the same essay, Novak points out that Coolidge made use of the Laffer Curve before Arthur Laffer was born.)
He wrote his own speeches. Contrary to the "Silent Cal" cliché, he "made use of the new medium of radio and made radio history several times while President. He made himself available to reporters, giving 52o press conferences, meeting with reporters more regularly than any President before or since." [Wikipedia, from David Greenberg's Calvin Coolidge.]
Here's a speech from 1924 in a talkie made with Lee De Forest's pioneering sound process:
I like this speech well enough that I have transcribed it. A highlight:
I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
The full text is below.
Here is the text of his address at the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Shlaes and Joe Thorndike have been writing a blog devoted to Coolidge, Silent Cal. Thorndike's personal blog is thorndike dot com.
Some notes on De Forest's sound film process, Phonofilm, here, here, and here.
Full text of the speech in the movie above:
[The] country needs every ounce of its energy to restore itself. The costs of government are all assessed upon the people. This means that the farmer is doomed to provide a certain amount of money out of the sale of his produce, no matter how low the price, to pay his taxes. The manufacturer, the professional man, the clerk, must do the same from their income. The wage earner, often at a higher rate when compared with his earning, makes his contribution perhaps not directly but indirectly in the advanced cost of everything he buys. The expenses of the government reach everybody. Taxes take from everyone a part of his earnings, and force everyone to work for a certain part of his time for the government.
When we come to realize that the yearly expenses of the governments of this country reach the stupendous sum of about seven billion, five hundred million dollars, we get [garbled] hundred million dollars is needed by the national government, and the remainder by local governments. Such a sum is difficult to comprehend. It represents all the pay of five million wage earners receiving five dollars a day, working three hundred days in the year. If the government should add one hundred million dollars of expense, it would represent four days' more work of these wage earners.
These are some of the reasons why I want to cut down public expense. I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
These results are not fanciful. They are not imaginary. They are grimly actual and real, reaching into every household in the land. They take from each home annually an average of over three hundred dollars, and taxes must be paid. They are not a voluntary contribution, to be met out of surplus earnings. They are a stern necessity. They come first. It is only out of what is left, after they are paid, that the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter can be provided, and the comforts of home secured, or the yearnings of the soul for a broader and more abundant life gratified.
When the government effects a new economy, it grants everybody a life pension, with which to raise the standard of existence. It increases the value of everybody's property, raises the scale of everybody's wages. One of the greatest favors that can be bestowed upon the American people is economy in government.
Back in 2002, there was still a lot of talk about how the US should hurry up and ratify the Kyoto Protocol before New York sank beneath the waves, or something. I asked Megan McArdle* if it might have been "designed to be harmless to EU economies while handcuffing ours? So that the ratification really requires no changes on their parts?" She looked at the numbers, and agreed that
The European politicians who pushed it care less about absolute prosperity than relative prosperity. They're okay with hurting their economies if ours is hurt more.
But she was too kind to those European politicians.
The original impulse to take action had come from the German Physics Society, which in January 1986 published a “Warning of an Impending Climate Catastrophe.” Just over six months later, in August, the newsweekly Der Spiegel popularized the German physicists’ “warning” in a spectacular cover story headlined “The Climate Catastrophe.” The image on the cover of the magazine depicted Cologne’s historic cathedral surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean: a consequence of the melting of the polar ice caps, as was explained on the inside of the issue. Thus was the “global warming” scare born. In Germany, in 1986.
The whole protocol, or "framework convention," was carefully tailored to fit events in Europe. It's no coincidence that the base year for most countries in Kyoto was the year after the Berlin Wall fell.
Rosenthal raises a concern about the wisdom, and priorities, of our diplomats:
The real questions that Americans need to ask concern their own negotiators. How could they have permitted the United States to be boxed into such an obviously prejudicial corner, and why did neither they nor the Clinton administration as such do anything to expose the ruse?
The Senate at least saw through it, and refused to ratify, 95-0. Here's the actual Senate resolution (pdf). So the 95 "Yea" votes are votes against adopting the treaty.
The science has always been secondary to the politics.
The Kyoto Protocol is still out there, not dead yet. A few more Al Frankens in the Senate and it still might pass. Here's Franken in 2009:
We can start by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. One of the dumbest things that President Bush said -- and that's a high bar -- is that Kyoto would cripple the U.S. economy. I think the opposite is true.
Funny, Al. _________________________________ * I was using my real name on the Internet in those days. The Anglosphere Challenge was published in 2004, and it was shortly after that I grew tired of having to explain over and over again that I was not the author of that fine book, but someone else entirely.
It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.
A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events.
I guess I'd better start stockpiling light bulbs after all. (From Jerry Pournelle's mail.)
Not the robosigned mortgages causing such an uproar among the bankers, but "the 10 Most Ludicrous Musical Instruments Ever Conceived." All are described and presented with videos so that they can be seen and heard. All are unfamiliar to me, and for most of them, I'd just as soon they stay that way. There might be a future for the violimba in horror movie scores. The Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee, a keyboard "based on relativity," is intriguing and might actually have a future. Or it might be from the future.
… is the name of a blog devoted to, guess what? I read the whole thing and didn't even need an Alka-Seltzer afterwards. Recommended for anyone who has debated the merits of different brands of potato chips and cheese puffs, and, really, who hasn't?
The bill is S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, or COICA. (Full text.) It has 16 co-sponsors, including a few Republicans.
Internet advocates warn the legislation would open a door for a handful of people in the federal government to wantonly power off entire websites that may be operating legally under current law. Though senators suggest the bill would save jobs by cracking down on piracy, critics say it will hurt the economy by threatening fledgling companies whenever copyrighted material shows up on their sites. "If this bill had been law five or 10 years ago, there's a good chance that YouTube would no longer be around," Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told FoxNews.com.
Eckersley said the bill would mark a drastic departure from current law by allowing the government not just to strip copyrighted material off an offending website, but to order the shutdown of a domain name altogether.
Eighty-seven engineers who played a role in the creation of the Internet have sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee urging it to sideline the bill.
"If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure," they wrote. "All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill."
They can't keep their grubby paws off.
Leahy has been in office far too long. All the political crystal gazers seem to think that there's no chance he will lose this election. I'll be hoping for Len Britton to surprise them on election night. It's a shame that the Republican Party is not supporting its own candidate.
Update: David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy says that COICA is "a truly awful bill."
Everybody's seen this by now, right? The video produced by the environmental group 10:10.org with the red button and the people getting blown to bloody bits for being indifferent about this environmental action. Richard Curtis, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead, so on and so forth.
Nothing new about this. Paul (Sea Shepherd) Watson's call for ~6,000,000,000 deaths, as soon as possible please, is still on the Sea Shepherd website. James Hanson was calling for trials for AGW deniers, not so long ago. Paul Krugman used the expression, "traitors to the planet." The penalty for treason is death.
Lefties, "progressives," enviros, what have you, they don't see human beings. They see economic units, or classes, or elements of the dialectic. In connection with which, Andrea Harris wrote about "The people Obama doesn't see." She also has a piece about the 10:10 video.
In the fantasies of "environmentalists," somehow all those awful people just disappear, but the dreamers are spared to view the resulting Paradise. That will only work if the environmentalists supervise the slaughter themselves. In the 10:10 video, the fuzzy teddy bear mask slipped.
A few brave congress persons have introduced a bill to repeal the incandescent light bulb ban. Powerline:
Representatives Joe Barton, Michael Burgess, and Marsha Blackburn have just introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (or BULB). The legislation would repeal the de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb contained in Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
It's H.R. 6144, for those who care about that sort of thing.
There is some vaguely scientific sounding noise being made in certain quarters about health hazards of compact fluorescent bulbs. For some reason that I don't understand, most of it seems to be in the form of videos rather than articles. A number of these are assembled for your viewing pleasure at CFL Impact.
I find it offensive that the ban has no justification other than that incandescents are inefficient. That's a matter of one's perspective. A CFL is terribly inefficient, in fact downright ineffective, in an Easy-Bake oven. And since when has mere inefficiency been a reason for legislation to outlaw anything? If something is inefficient enough, people will stop buying it. Non-radial tires have just about disappeared, without ever being banned. For instance. Even though radials are more expensive. The better product naturally supplants the worse. Yet bias-ply tires are stillavailable, if you want them.
Now that there have been two failed attempts to repeal the 1099 madness in the health care bill, I do not have much hope for this first attempt to repeal another piece of lunacy. But hope springs eternal, I suppose. Hope for a change in direction. Yes, I'll have a cup of tea, thanks.
Everyone who gets elected thinks he or she is smart enough to run the system. In a free market, nobody runs the system. If somebody is running the system, it's not a free market. Doctor Zero at Hot Air:
Political control is what’s killing us. It is expressed in hundreds of ways: high tax rates with carefully tailored exceptions, massive bailouts, laws rigged to favor government-controlled industries, restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties. The Democrats have added thousands of pages of fabulously expensive legislation since Obama took office. Two messages echo through those pages: Obey and be rewarded. Resist and be punished.
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
The stone-carving shop in the video is the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island.
John will be showing some of his work at Imago Gallery in Warren, Rhode Island, starting today, August 27.
Update, Sept 29: John's son, Nick Benson, who has run the John Stevens Shop since John retired a decade or so ago, has been named a MacArthur Fellow. He speaks about it in this video.
… with a poet. I have mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins here before. For an appreciation, and another poem, go visit Sheila O'Malley. You won't regret it.
The link dump of an old grump. Posts may be folded, spindled, or mutilated, ad lib.
Pseudonymous only for disambiguation. Thanks for that word, Wikipedia. I am not, in what we laughingly refer to as "real life," a character in a 1933 novel. There was no Internet in 1933, silly!
That said: My email is Hector, a period, Owen, then an ampersat, then gmail.com.
