Granted, they never taze reasonable people. However, the argument Taser International makes is that these things save lives by incapacitating a violent criminal that the cops would have to kill otherwise. This argument is highly questionable in light of how tazers are actually used by law enforcement. They use it as a crutch whenever incapacitating someone would make their job easier, not as a replacement for lethal force. The point we have been trying to make all this time is that using tazers in this way increases the number of deaths that result from regular police work, because taers are more likely to cause death than the methods the peace officer would have had to use to resolve the situation. This is in turn compounded by some officers apparent inability to diffierentiate between a regular citizen and a genuine threat.
When the Chinese government was putting on a carefully orchistrated dog and pony show to the western media to try and convince us that all is well in Tibet, some brave monks busted in and began pleading with the assembled members of the press, not to believe the crap being fed to them. Aparently this was not so carefully orchistrated after all. The shame is on the Chinese for trying such an old trick.
I want to contrast this to Bjork, who recently ended a concert of hers in China with a call to free Tibet. This was entirely selfish. Her chanting to the audience will have no effect on whether Tibet will gain any sembelance of independence. There was not some person in that audience that will rise up and liberate the downtroden because of a subversive message whispered at the end of a concert. All Bjork did was mark everyone in the audience as a suspect. She got to leave China but now her fans may have to endure scrutiny as suspicious persons because of her self-indulgent outburst.
Unfortunately, due to the arcane nature of economic measurements and a desire on the part of the elite to remain elite, there is an entire market around attempting to provide answers to clients and predict near- and long-term economic phenomena. So, in an effort to help you from wanting to go spend money on overpriced financial services, here are some questions you may be asking, and some answers.
How much will this crisis cost the economy in the long term? According to JP Morgan Chase, the overall costs could be as much as $1.2 trillion.
How is the crisis being felt in other markets? Europe's economy is resilient against the contagion, thanks to the rising Euro and sound monetary policy of keeping interest rates stable, which, in turn, draws available capital into the Eurozone. Head of the European Central Bank President, Jean-Claude Trichet remains skeptical if the worst has yet to come. Canada's CIBC still is working through at least $25 billion in exposure to monoline insurers.
Is there more unwinding yet to happen in bad loans? The simplest way to answer this would be to say, "Yes." However, as details are still emerging about the prevalence of home equity loans, or other liens placed on homes in addition to the traditional first lien, mortgages, there is still a lot of red ink to be spilled.
Is the stock market going to be a viable investment anytime soon? Perhaps, but not for the next few years. In the cyclical nature of business, the stock market traditionally sours for a decade after a decade of strong trading. So if this trend continues, the market will probably not begin to make lasting gains until approximately 2012.
With increasingly visible protests against financial corporations receiving bailouts from the Federal Government, are there any other potential targets of popular discontent? As all politics are local, one need look no farther than the financing of your local Wal-Mart. Does your local community allow 'tax increment financing?'
The employment outlook is souring, but was there any good news in the latest batch of GDP data? Not really, almost every number on the page is down in comparison to the quarter before, with a very precipitous drop in government spending. Also of note, exports are declining at the same time as imports are decreasing, which is a reflection of real consumer spending. Also of note, the value of real residential fixed investments, that of houses and such, fell by 25.2%.
With all of the concerns about moral hazard, is there really a bad way to intervene in the marketplace? Yes, there is. For instance, pushing Fannie and Freddie into buying bad loans and then holding more capital in reserve against this new volume of bad loans. Businesses and executives that made bad decisions need to face the consequences of their decisions. The government has enough work to do to get its own house in order. I'm not alone in thinking that with this bailout will come a spiraling dollar.
Of course, the world never stops spinning, and police officers with Tasers will probably use them.
In North Carolina, a young man who had high hopes is brought low by a taser. Apparently, whatever outrage and horror that one should feel as a result of this is rendered moot by the fact that he had marijuana hidden in a sock, which police found in a search after the fact. This article provides more questions than answers, but hopefully now that the lawyer hired by the lad's mother has found a new key witness, we can know what officers were thinking.
An incident sure to draw fire from the legal department at Taser International, the death of an individual from Idaho, who died after being hit with a Taser, has been ruled a homicide. The family and freedom-lovers everywhere want answers.
Not satisfied in violating one amendment to the constitution, the police of Washington DC have started a door to door campaign asking, "Got any guns?" Aparently this has been happeing in Boston for some time now. My favorite part is how suprised they are to experience resistance.
I have often focused on how government failures contribute to Cleveland being a horrible place to live but I have overlooked how the awful people that live here do their own part every day to contribute to the horrid torments of this city.
Yesterday I saw two things that I never expected to see in my life, let alone in America. In the middle of the afternoon on a Monday I saw two school buses traveling down the road, packed full of kids, on fire. The kids weren't on fire the busses were. Well, now that I think of it the kids could have been on fire. I could not see inside the buses through the heavy, ten story tall, cloud of smoke shrouding the busses. I was stuck behind these busses for some time and they made no effor to pull over and remove the chidren from danger, or to put the fires out.
The second horrendus thing I saw yesterday: A person, I could not tell what gender, tossed a cat off an overpass into rush hour traffic on I-71.
In Cleveland, the housing market crash has mixed with joblessness to get the recession started off soon. This economic catastrophy has turned the desperation of poverty into a criminal desperation. In a city like Cleveland where the criminal population is a demographic measured by the census this increase once again causes Cleveland to win the trophy, the catastrophy. Copper pipe theft is a trade in Cleveland, one that a young boy can apprentice in with some of the more enterprizing members of the community. In the county which has been hardest hit by foreclosures there are many vacant houses lying about. Within hours of a house becoming unoccupied it is stripped of its metal siding, copper piping, appliances, and even the wire is ripped out of the house. Next, vagrants and drug dealers move in using these vacant buildings as their office so they don't have to ply their dangerous trade door to door. Eventually all the windows are broken out and ultimately the house will either be burned down or will become someone's urban tomb.
Yesterday during a presentation before the New York Port Authority, Ben Bernanke demonstrated his telepathic and psycho-economic skills to cause the stock market to rally briefly. It is unclear whether he used his powers of econotelepathy to manipulate the minds of JP Morgan execs to get them to pay a higher price for Bear Stearns, or if he caused traders in the black pits of Wall Street to interpret the offering favorably. Or if he simply moved the markets directly with his voodoo economics. When asked why the initial rally did not continue and keep the gains throughout the day, Bernanke replied with exhaustion, "I couldn't hold it."
Its been awhile since we linked to a tazer story but don't think that is because there have not been any. This little gem comes from one of our more violent states. The article has no indication about what happened making it difficult to ask our typical question. Consequently, I point out that this news outlet has chosen to make half of the short article about the crimes this man had previously committed. As if to say, don't worry, this only happens to bad people, he deserved to die, you are safer now, let your fear justify their violence.
This is what I was talking about in a previous post. This is what a law abiding person has to fear from a government that has too much information and no respect for boundries, rights, or freedom, in obtaining that information.
There are two issues going before the Supreme Court in the news today. The hearing challenging the Washington D.C. gun ban and a challenge to broadcast indecency regulation by Fox. Both of these cases have to do with the relationship of individual to one's government. And, in both of these cases freedom is being defended by right wing maniacs. The same maniacs who have been decidedly anti-freedom under the Bush administration.
It's difficult to defend freedom of speech when its offensive, and it's difficult to defend the right to have and use a lethal weapon without resorting to a slippery slope argument that evokes an opressive totalatarian 1984 regime.
Many of the Founding Fathers were philosophically libertarian. This philosophy describes the American way the individual relates to one's government. Power is vested in the government by the citizens and the purpose of the government is to preserve the rights of its citizens. This is the only way sovereignty can be legitimate. Under this philosophy, the rights delineated by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not granted by the document but ensured by it. Every human has these rights, it is the purpose of government to ensure the freedom to use these rights.
Freedom can be a scary thing. Its hard to trust strangers not to abuse their freedoms and infringe upon ours, but that is the freedom that each of us gives up to live within civilization. As long as no one infringes on your rights, you do not have the right to be offended.
The national debate over guns is often depicted as having one side that declares, possessing guns is an individual human right, and another side that declares that guns kill people. I do not see these as counterpoints to one another. Saying that a gun kills is like saying water is wet. A gun is a tool for killing and a pistol is a tool for killing other humans. The point is so obvious that it overlooks a fundamental difference in ideology that stems from the Western fear of death. We believe that death is bad and killing is wrong as if they are intrinsic universal truths. In an urban life, separated from the terrifying freedom of nature, and surrounded by a comforting layer of concrete and glass it is easy to believe, "my life does not cause death," but that is not true. It seems to me that this is the same kind of foolishness that leads to veganism. Though, as much as I believe it to be foolish, it is each person's right to choose when it is acceptable to kill. And in a society where our killing is done for us by others, it is difficult to stop. I can only accept that by being alive that my life necessarily causes death, one day I will die, and something will eat my body.
All this wheel of life shit is too philosophical for the debate at hand. The point is that sometimes, killing is necessary. Sometimes it is necessary to kill another human being. For instance, in self defense when that human is trying to rape you, kill you, or severely injure you it is acceptable to use lethal force to protect yourself. Libertarian philosophy supports this conclusion and our laws regulate its effect by apportioning guilt. If you accept these two points, that there are acceptable times to kill and one of those times is to protect your person, the only remaining debate is one of tool choice and the question of banning guns becomes one of reasonable regulation. Should weapon choice be limited, and in what way?
Meaningful hard data is difficult to come by since through studies have been done by either side of the issue and anecdotal evidence can be pointed to by either side. In my recent posts on this blog I have referenced some stories from the past year that tend to support the conclusion that gun regulation either does not work or is counterproductive. One story noted a significant decline in violent crime in Detroit, every year for the last ten years since the passing of Michigan's concealed carry law. In the tragic massacre at Virginia Tech, the killer had been declared to be a danger to himself or others. Existing gun control laws prohibited him from purchasing a gun but he was able to anyhow, either because of bureaucratic bungling by law enforcement or through the negligence of the shop owner. Even more recently a gun toting maniac shot up a convent and was stopped from killing more people by an armed member of the congregation that had the lawful right to carry and had been a police officer.
One last point about the Second Amendment. The founding fathers were radical revolutionaries who had just overthrown their government through a violent war. They knew this was only possible by having armed citizens who could be loosely organized into militia when there was a need for extra military force. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Such an audacious quote brings me to the topic of freedom of speech. You are not really using your freedom of speech unless someone is trying to take it away from you. The gurantee of this freedom exists not to protect mundane and polite speech, but offensive, shocking, profane, and challenging speech. This is why freedom of speech means you do not have the right to be offended.
Speech is impossible to regulate. Profane language is derived from emotion and is meant to convey that emotional content. The power is only marginally in the words but it really stems from the emotional content they are meant to convey and the power we invest in them. You might as well attempt to regulate anger and criminalize rage.
Even if one could make a list of say, seven words, that must never be spoken and if that regulation can actually have an effect on stamping out those words. Other words will be granted offensive power by being filled with the same emotional content and social stigma making the old words meaningless and silly. Language is fluid and meaning changes in relatively quick time even in regular words. "Humbug" used to be a profoundly profane word and is hardly used today.
Further, such regulation is inherently self-defeating. Labeling certain words as taboo only encourages their use for the purpose of shocking others. Thusly, restricting a words use as profane, only enshrines its profanity, and further empowers it to do harm.
I am certain that this was the goal of the performers who used these offensive words and caused Fox to be fined by the FCC. It seems ironic to me that Fox, the network that curtailed political speech and freedom of the press through social pressure and jingoism in the frantic run-up to the Iraq war where the MSM failed its duty to the entire world, is the one who is fighting for a small victory for free speech. Then again, if anyone is going to go to court over profanity, its going to be the network that brought you "Who wants to marry a millionaire?"
With Ben Bernanke's newfound affinity for nimble and flexible policy, the comparison to a cat almost seems natural. However, in an effort to help you better channel your inner cat here is some reading and food for thought.
First, usaspending.gov is a really awesome website for policy addicts out there with some dynamic ways of looking at the way that the U.S. Government spends its money, with much potential for fun and blogging. For instance, in 2007, the Federal government spent less on traditional state spending than in previous years. This continues, despite record federal deficits. As one would expect the crumbling value of the dollar is being reflected in exponentially increasing federal spending. Unfortunately, for us, the War in Iraq and the Global War on Terror are contributing, if not causing, this problem.
Here is a handy slide show from the GAO about how the government is spending its money. The numbers are pretty terrifying, especially considering that these numbers don't reflect the quicksilver economic reality that we are currently faced with, aka the increased transportation costs of gas prices going up by 25% on average. Remember when it was serious when gas reached $2 a gallon? Not to mention the fuel inefficient vehicles the military relies on aren't going to see less use in the near future. Unlike the GAO, we here at the Fringe Element feel that more constructive advice is necessary, if for nothing more than general principle. My recommendation would be to move towards an asset-based financial system, perhaps similar to Islamic banking practices, in an effort to provide some stability to the dollar to try to halt its historical slide to worthless.
What would happen if the government forced these big financial institutions to take responsibility for their own bad behavior, instead of forcing it on individual home owners? Its both a bit creepy and a bit reassuring when the Wall Street Journal is asking the same questions we have been for months. They reach the conclusion that presumably the fed reached with sober and rational thought. That it is against public policy to allow a pillar of the U.S. financial world to fall during a widespread crisis.
My problem with this whole thing is not so personal so long as I have a roof over my head and a steady job so I resort to moral philosophy. I see a great deal of hypocracy in the behavior of large financial institutions during this crisis. I assume that these white men in power over these companies are of a political bend that reacts negatively to the concept of welfare. Yet here we see one of the most gross examples of corporate welfare since the Cheney crafted energy bills. These institutions acted with a conscious disregard for the substantial risk in their investments or undertook efforts to conceal the risk. This is a violation of even the slim standards of corporate ethics. Even concealment is a thin excuse. I am no financial guru, but even I was aware of news articles by sober economists who saw the writing on the wall regarding the real estate bubble a year ago. Now these institutions are pushing the consequences of the risk they willingly, or negligently undertook, on home owners, and now on the tax payers because the government is afraid of what will happen. Rightly so. Still, it could be worse.
This is another example of the Bush administration being asleep at the switch. This administration frequently selects highly incompetent people for the highest offices in government based almost solely on their loyalty to the party or the specific individual that currently holds the office of the president, rather than to the people to whom they are supposed to be accountable. This is not to say I would rather have had more cumbersome regulation of the markets. But the markets will run off a cliff like a blind lemming if given the opportunity and I presume this administration allowed that to happen because of a pathalogical need to continue to claim the economy was doing well as whole sectors of the economy collapsed, one after the other, on their watch. Now, more regulation is guranteed. This regulation is going to be drafted by people with only a rudimentary understanding of what happened and are more conserned with elections. All industry has to do to avoid new, clumsy, onerous regulation is stop being both selfish and stupid at the same time.
With the weak Dollar, the times are right for the manufacturing sector to surge into action and save us. Tragically the long fall of the giant U.S. manufacturing sector, that supplied durable goods to the whole of the world for almost a century appears to be complete. The last nail driven in the coffin by Wal-Mart.
These two realities of market forces are both strong examples of the foolishness of faith in the market. The government releaving financial institutions of the moral hazard of the decisions they make and our pathalogical need to consume massive quantities of cheep, foreign-made, goods are illustrative of how even regulated capitalism encourages us to feed the monster that is killing us.
Jack Thompson is a lawyer in Florida who spends his time acting as an attention whore screaming about the gaming or pornography industries interchangably. Its easy to hate him, but I am compelled to feel sorry for someone who is obviously an extreme result of the psychological pathology of our society. Where we childishly glorify violence and adress sex with a bizarre characture, Thompson lashes out at attempts to profit from this communal tendancy. This man is a symptom of our collective social mental illness. Fortunately for the legal profession, he faces sanctions for his outlandish behavior. http://www.abajournal.com/news/lawyer_threatened_with_sanctions_after_putting_images_of_kangaroos_swastika/#When:08:10:00Z
The FBI abused its power under the Patriot Act? I'm schocked, schocked! Well maybe not that schocked.
Lastly, for anyone who is somehow so unaware that they may be compared to a cave dwelling hermit and in keeping with our mockery of hypocratical politicians; Elliot Spitzer.
MTS Systems, an advanced components engineering firm has plead guilty to helping sell components for weapons systems to two companies that are directly involved in the weapons components of the Indian government's nuclear program. As typical of the ramifications of the 14th Amendment, the corporation itself has been allowed to plead guilty to falsifying documents, as though it was an abstract organization that was pushing people to lie to avoid export licensing requirements. Apparently, the human element, though failed, is not to be held accountable.
The story is complicated by "Co-conspirator A," an unnamed diplomatic official in the Indian Mission in Washington, D.C. This official tie is involved through a Singaporean businessman, who is facing 5 years in jail as a result of his role in the twisted scandal. I'm sure there's a lesson about race and fairness to be found there, but is not integrally important to the story.
Sure, the U.S. counterintelligence is kind of a joke and many countries are always stealing our knowledge and intellectual property, but then again, how easy is it to keep an idea under lock and key? This will only further serve to strengthen opposition to the deal in the U.S., although that might not matter at this point.
As always, the world keeps spinning, and people will keep being people. So, by way of briefing, here are a few developments, like how a Recession is inevitable. Bush is optimistic.
Ben Franklins are increasingly worthless, compared to most foreign exchanges. The Dollar has gone below 100 yen for the first time in more than a decade, and keeps hitting new highs against our poor greenback. Inflation, though, reportedly didn't go up by very much in February, perhaps signifying a leveling out of prices, in the wake of consumer prices not properly reported in the Consumer Price Index. Any hope that inflation will be ameliorated by flattening or perhaps falling consumer demand is probably, at best, naive with oil on its march up to $125 a barrel. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have been thrown a lifeline by Fed chief Ben Bernanke, but should he have? Is it enough? $200 Billion is a lot of money to be financed by Treasuries, yet not very much compared to the size of the mortgage market. Speaking of which, is going into dire straits as the crisis is beginning to move into the more traditional branch of mortgages, those whom enjoy good credit histories. In truth, the Fed has now set a course to assume all risk to the global financial system from the mortgage crisis.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has announced new financial guidelines that are already market practice, which mostly center around risk assessment and the documentation required to receive a mortgage. Any notion of adjusting accounting requirements to allow banks to free up capital on their balance sheets, however, seems extremely misguided.
Fanning the entropy further, a pair of large financial institutions have collapsed in the wake of the problems in the financial sector. Bear Sterns, just after appointing a new head of East Asian operations, found its liquidity destroyed almost overnight. Thankfully for them, JP Morgan is riding in to the rescue. The Carlyle Group may come to the rescue of its stepchild, not-really subsidiary Carlyle Capital Corporation, as its assets have been seized. In a branding effort, David Rubenstein, Carlyle co-founder, wants to make sure that investors break even. This effort, like almost all of the efforts of the Fed and Treasury, are aimed at helping large banks and financial institutions recover their capital outlays lost as a result of inordinate risk assumption.
154,000, which is only a rough estimate. How many more veterans are just scraping by, living in the margins of our society? How many have been forced to impose upon the good natures of their family? How many of them are still battling demons from America's wars for empire?
There is a wide disparity in the quality of military service, as one might expect, almost correlated to the disparity of resources nations devote to their national defense. But, beyond the perceptions that the news media conveys, there is a further disparity within military ranks, between officer and enlisted. In professional military services, the enlisted soldier is treated with respect from his superiors and not commonly regarded as the piece of government property he or she is. In some countries, professional enlisted personnel serve as personal servants to the officer corps. In the worst examples, military service is little more than forced labor, where soldiers are beaten or worse, there is not much of an institutionalized retirement plan. Here, in the United States, we can take something of a moral high ground, compared to groups like the Interahamwe. Here, we grant our veterans education benefits and the like, if they are not rendered dysfunctional by wartime injury, such as amputation or post-traumatic stress disorder.
A look at the last hundred years of the wartime Presidents also reveals something of a trend. For instance, one of the key leaders in the foundation of the American Empire, Theodore Roosevelt, aside from the contempt he held for those not so blessed to be white, had never actually served in the military until the beginning of the war. Perhaps the reason he was not given the Congressional Medal of Honor until after his death was for having pushed into a military battle without having been ordered to do so. Just a thought.
Woodrow Wilson, who also brought us the Federal Reserve System, was an intellectual and academic, who also had never spent a day in a military uniform before leading the nation into WWI.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a corporate lawyer before entering public service, similar never served any kind of military service.
Harry S. Truman, who was a WWI Artillery Officer, also brought us nuclear warfare and the policy of containment. In addition to his role in the recognition of Israel and Pakistan, he laid the groundwork for the Cold War and tried to bring the whole of the Korean peninsula under Western influence.
Which brings us to W. I don't really feel as though I need to say too much about his military record.
In summation, the leaders and defenders of the Free World, those most rabid about the defense and expansion of the U.S.' national sovereignty, almost without exception have never picked up a gun at a range and thought about how to justify to himself seeing the form of another human being in his gunsights and pulling the trigger. After all, a warrior seeks to conserve his strength and continue living, and thus should fight as little as possible. Unfortunately, the toll of these wars is paid by those who fight, either draftees or volunteers, who often seem to be tragically discarded by those for whom they served.
For those who want a visual representation of America's War Dead, try this.
