I pay my taxes to the company store

In the States, you may be paying taxes direct to your employer.

Reuters: Taxed by the boss

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.

At first sight, this seems awfully familiar to any student of medieval history; it's tax farming. The rationale this time is that this is a way to pay subsidies to companies directly. It's still tax farming.

Any discussion of something like this inevitably degenerates into the usual leftist claptrap of public=good and private=bad. That totally obfuscates the real problem with arrangements like these, which effectively combine the worst of private and public: the lack of public oversight inherent in a private organization and the coercive power of a public one.

Kony, Jenna Talackova and Trayvon Martin

What does an Internet campaign to stop an African warlord have in common with a trans woman barred from a beauty contest and a black teenager murdered in cold blood by a vigilante? Simple: they're all symptoms of what may be our biggest problem as a society and a culture.

In each case, we react when presented with an individual example of injustice, but ignore the wider context. We enthusiastically share the Kony video, but does anyone care why people like him can run riot in Africa? Probably the single biggest reason is the poverty of most of the continent, which leaves governments powerless. One of the chief causes of that poverty is the agricultural policy of us, the world's developed nations. The majority of Africans are farmers, but we won't let them export their surplus to us. Instead, we subsidize farmers in the West to over-produce food, which we then dump on the world market, driving African subsistence farmers deeper into poverty. Is this even mentioned in, say, discussions on agricultural policy in the West? Nope. Indeed, most of the people I saw going on about Kony think that buying domestically grown produce and "supporting our farmers" is virtuous.

It's heartening that the Trayvon case has stirred up such an outcry. But most of the questions being asked are secondary or irrelevant. The real question isn't stand your ground laws or whether the shooter should have been arrested. The question is: how have you managed to create an environment where a suburban vigilante makes thousands of 911 calls solely to report black men in his neighborhood, shoots one of them for no reason, and not only avoids arrest but has his story unquestioningly believed by the police, who publicly defend him? The question isn't if a particular law or an individual police officer of department is at fault, or even the moronic question of whether the vigilante in question was a racist. It's how incredibly racist your society has to be for this whole sequence of events to unfold at all.

How does Jenna Talackova tie into this? As empirical proof. I offer you this tweet from the formidable Natalie Reed: "Miss Universe Canada petition got 20,000 signatures, Bill C-279 petition only 280. I really, really, really, REALLY hate humanity right now." Bill C-279 is a trans rights bill that you can read about here. So about a hundred times more people support trans rights than... support trans rights. Again, people think that a given individual shouldn't be mistreated because she's a trans woman, but they won't support a bill to end that mistreatment.

Part of the problem is psychological. As my co-blogger put it: "our brains can't multiply". We can, if we choose,empathize with a single individual, but we're really bad at empathy with a group. But it's more than that. The same reaction comes up all the time, in just about every political discussion; the copyright system, police brutality (especially the American practice of senseless SWAT raids and wholesale murdering of dogs), racism, corruption. Confronted with an individual example, people will decry and condemn it, but balk at any suggestion that there could possibly be a wider, even structural, problem. It goes far beyond sensible caution of sweeping political reforms; it's a wholesale denial of the very possibility that we might live in a society where systemic injustice happens.

In my opinion, it's simply a psychological defense mechanism that protects people from having to ask themselves difficult questions about the world they live in. It's hard to think about big political questions. Much easier to live in a fairy-tale world where society is fundamentally good and sound, and all problems are caused by evil individuals. Makes for better Hollywood movies, too. The problem is that it also leads people to passively condone, or even actively support, policies and structures that directly harm the people that they claim to sympathize with.

Iran and the bomb

Let's start with an excerpt from The Economist, on a possible air attack on the Iranian nuclear program:

Attacking Iran: Up in the air

But even if things went off without a hitch Iran would retain the capacity to repair and reconstitute its programme. Unless Israel was prepared to target the programme’s technical leadership in civilian research centres and universities the substantial nuclear know-how that Iran has gained over the past decades would remain largely intact. So would its network of hardware suppliers. Furthermore, if Iran is not already planning to leave the NPT such an attack would give it ample excuse to do so, taking its entire programme underground and focusing it on making bombs as soon as possible, rather than building up a threshold capability. Even a successful Israeli strike might thus delay Iran’s progress by only three or four years, while strengthening its resolve.

In other words, an air attack simply will not prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

From the print edition:

Proponents of an attack argue that military humiliation would finish the regime off. But it is as likely to rally Iranians around their leaders.

In my opinion also, the best possible thing that can happen to a paranoid xenophobic regime like Iran or North Korea is a limited attack on it. Think about it: the government chiefly legitimizes itself by creating a worldview where their state is under constant attack from a hostile surrounding world. It's totalitarianism 101. An attack on Iran would basically tell the population that the bearded crazies ranting about how the Great Satan America is going to attack them any minute now were right all along. In an article I link to later, Iran's opposition "Green movement" is quoted as saying that a US/Israeli attack is the worst possible thing that could happen to reform in Iran. There can be little doubt that they're right.

As an article in the Washington Monthly strongly argues, the whole notion of a nuclear-armed Iran as a horrible disaster for the whole world doesn't seem to be grounded in any actual strategic scenarios. On the contrary, Iran only seems to want a nuclear capability to deter the US and Israel. Not that any clear case for the air strikes is being made, either; the USAF chief of staff recently wondered what the objective of an air campaign might be, in fairly skeptical terms.

It should be remembered that Iran constantly faces an aggressive near neighbor with a considerable nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal and a propensity to invade nearby countries: Israel. Iran is also one of the rare nations that has had weapons of mass destruction used against it in the not-so-distant past; the conventional carnage of the Iran-Iraq war was horrifying enough, but Iraqi atrocities like the Halabja attack added an element of pure horror to the war. Iranian leaders are unlikely to have forgotten that the Iraqi chemical arsenal was provided by the very countries that are now so stridently opposed to Iran's nuclear program, or that the US helped silence reports of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian civilians.

Iran can also hardly be expected to forget that those same Western powers have for decades tacitly accepted Israel's nuclear arsenal, even keeping quiet when Israel actively participated in the apartheid-era South African nuclear program. From Iran's point of view, the West's position seems to be that while Western allies are allowed to use weapons of mass destruction against Iran, and countries like Israel and apartheid South Africa can develop a nuclear capacity, Iran can't. It's a policy that's hard to justify to its victims.

An attack on Iran would be militarily risky, wouldn't stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and would seem to have no positive consequences whatsoever for the security and stability of the Middle East. And that's exactly why Israel is so likely to carry it out.

The basic strategy of Israel since its founding has been the strategy of the "iron wall", best described by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book of the same name. In short, throughout its existence Israel has deliberately maintained a high state of tension with its neighbors. Most of the time, little active effort has been required, but when it has, Israel has resorted to terrorism and provocations, and as a last resort, invaded its neighbors. This strategy of tension serves to keep Israeli domestic policies in line; with the constant threat of an external enemy, criticism of the powers that be can be stamped out as treason, and any external criticism dismissed as anti-Semitism. Israel's entire foreign policy rests on its image as a peace-loving victim of its innately evil neighbors; without that image the world would be too free to take a long, hard look at the way the Palestinians are being treated, and at other disagreeable aspects of Israel. The only lasting peace Israel can conceive of is one that it dictates.

This policy was last prominently seen in action in the criminal Israeli raid on the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. From a strategic point of view, the way Israel handled the situation was a disaster: nothing in the relief mission to Gaza was of sufficient importance to justify such a brutal attack, let alone the international outcry that followed - unless creating that outcry was one of the strategic aims of the operation: to once again "prove" to the Israeli people and their government's supporters abroad how the world is in league against poor, misunderstood Israel. The same motive has informed Israel's "settlement" program, which is deliberately designed to, among other things, sabotage the Palestinian peace process. It last accomplished this function when it was used to destroy the high-profile peace negotiations started by an astonishingly naive Obama administration.

An escalation of tension in the Middle East would be in Israel's interests as part of its continuing strategy of tension with the Muslim world. For that reason, they may very well present the US with a fait accompli in the form of an unilateral strike on Iran before the next presidential election. Because the topic of Israel simply cannot be addressed rationally in US politics, it would be electoral suicide for the Obama administration to not support an Israeli attack, no matter how counter-productive it would be from the point of view of US strategy. As long as US politicians continue to pretend that the United States and Israel have the same strategic goals, US Middle Eastern policy will be at the mercy of Israel's military adventurism. When this combines with the fact that US public discourse on Iran is completely detached from reality, Israel's design stands a good chance of succeeding.

In the long run, an Iranian nuclear capacity would probably stabilize the Middle East by making Iran more secure from intervention. The same thing happened with both the Soviet Union and China, even though hawks in the West prophesied disaster at the time. In its political history so far, the Islamic Republic of Iran had shown itself to be a largely rational state actor. So far, nuclear weapons in Muslim hands haven't led to a global or even local apocalypse. Treating Iran as a collection of genocidal lunatics to be cowed by a surgical use of American military power is repeating the same hubris that led to decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with potentially far worse results. In fact, the one thing that could be relied on to push Iran's leaders toward unreasoning radicalism would be a brutal US-Israeli attack. And that may well be exactly what Israel's political leadership wants.

If the aim is stability and consequently security in the Middle East, it seems to this blogger that the best way to achieve it in the current situation would be through mutual deterrence, as pioneered and perfected between the superpowers in the Cold War. Erect the paraphernalia of Mutually Assured Destruction anew in the Middle East: mutual and third-party verification of weapons, arms control treaties, a telephone hot line, the lot. There should still be plenty of Cold War know-how around. Such an arrangement would represent an equitable solution that addresses both parties' need for security and the rest of the world's interest in a peaceful oil-producing region. Included in the negotiations would be Iran's support for terrorist groups like the Hezbollah, and Israel's assassination campaign against the Italian nuclear program.

In the real world, this will never happen, because the West seems to be unable to exert the kind of diplomatic pressure on Israel that would bring it to the negotiation table and actually agree to a solution. Even acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons seems to be an insuperable obstacle, let alone bringing them up for negotiations.

Another option would be for the United States to extend some kind of security guarantee to Iran; essentially a "non-invasion" promise similar to the one made to the Soviets on Cuba. This, too, seems impossible. President Kennedy could do it, President McCain might have; President Obama simply can't. Even if he somehow found the foreign policy willingness and ability that his administration has so conspicuously lacked, letting the right go berserk over "appearing islamofascism" could decide the election.

Once again, the most likely outcome is that stability in the Middle East will remain as elusive as ever; not because of any inherent characteristics of the region and its inhabitants, but as a consequence of the West's continuing insistence on treating Israel's interests as identical to theirs. As long as this dangerous illusion persists, the West's policy will remain essentially counter-productive to any lasting peace in the region.

It's almost inconceivable that the US, still embroiled in two wars (despite Obama's cold war-esque "withdrawals"), is contemplating intervention in Iran and even Syria to boot. Unless cooler heads prevail, the ongoing Middle Eastern entanglement (1990-?) and concurrent "war on drugs/terror/civil liberties" will become a national trauma to dwarf Vietnam, with far worse consequences for the stability of the whole world.

Black History Month!

In the States, February is Black History Month, a month dedicated to, well, black history. The actor Morgan Freeman once asked why his people's history was being relegated to one month; I'm afraid that the answer is that without this month, his people's history would be relegated completely. It's depressing how history still tends to mean the history of white European men, with all other history hidden away in specialist subjects.

I'm not really qualified to comment on the politics of Black History Month, however. As long as it's around, though, it's about time I did my share. Here it is.

**

The first African-American playmate ever was Miss March 1965 Jennifer Jackson.

The second African-American playmate and first black woman on the cover of Playboy: Miss October 1969 Jean Bell.

Here's the cover, with the naughty bits blacked out:

The first black woman to have a cover all to herself was the late Darine Stern, in October 1971, and it's one of the best covers ever.

The first black Playmate of the Year was the utterly gorgeous Reneé Tenison, who was Playmate of the Year in 1990, seen here with her identical twin sister. No, really.

The first African-born Playmate was Miss March 2008 Ida Ljungqvist, who went on to become Playmate of the Year 2009.

**

There have been plenty of other smoking hot black Playmates over the years. Here's a few.

Miss June 1975 Azizi Johari:

Miss January 2002 Nicole Narain:

And Miss September 2007 Patrice Hollis:

Finally, it's only appropriate that Miss February 2012 is the beautiful Leola Bell:

**

And that's my contribution. They're all beautiful. Thank you, Playboy!

SOPA and all that: the view from Finland

Yeah, I'm not blacked out because I'm lazy. But I'm delighted that so many websites, from Wikipedia on down, are protesting the idiotic legislation proposed in the US. US laws on copyright and the Internet make a huge difference for the rest of the world as well, especially since if the US passes a law like this, European legislators will inevitably use that as momentum to pass similar ones here, if they're not directly pressured into it by the States.

We in Finland should be especially wary, as we've had some nightmarish experiences with Internet censorship before. One of the first posts I made in this blog was a very poorly written rant on the Finnish "child pornography" censorship bill, which permitted the Finnish state police to set up a secret blacklist of foreign child pornography sites that ISPs would be voluntarily forced to block access to. Shortly after the list was launched, a Finnish website criticizing this was put on the list, in blatant violation of the law. After years in court and endless obfuscation by the Finnish police, the Finnish justice system decided that it had, in fact, been wrong to censor a Finnish page containing no child pornography under a law that allows censoring foreign-based child pornography websites. However, none of the police officers responsible could be reprimanded in any way, as they can't be expected to understand the laws they enforce. I'm not making that up.

So the previous time Finland tried a censorship blacklist, it took literally days to expand beyond its original purpose into censoring criticism of the police and government. In the same decade, in a country where smashing a disabled person's head into the wall while raping them doesn't get you a prison sentence, creating parody blogs does. Last year, the Finnish police requested a law banning "approving" discussions of child pornography, and of course, we now have Internet censorship again with the Pirate Bay ban. So in effect, Finland already has SOPA.

By the way, if you criticize any of this, the MPAA thinks you're a corporate pawn.

In the middle of all this, it would be good to remember that I'm writing this blog post on Blogger, and because of Sweden's FRA law, the Swedish military can read this as it's written, along with my personal e-mails and everything else I do online. Lately, some US jurisdictions have started shutting down cellphone services to hinder demonstrations, and similar moves are mooted in the UK.

The defining struggle of our time is between a "total state", bent on using information technology to monitor and regulate everything we do, and between a civil society that paradoxically uses that same technology to create new forms of communication that constantly elude those controls. Put simply, I believe that in the long run, our alternatives are an Orwellian surveillance state or a free information society. Will information technology be used to repress us or liberate us? That's what this is about, and it's the most important political struggle of our age.

2011 in review

Another year gone by. What did we get up to in 2011?

* We did our best to promote Goblin Camp, with a let's play kind of thing and a bunch of other posts. The game is still a going concern, and although there hasn't been an update for a while, I'm assured there will be. Eventually. Back in February, I put together really epic camp. The website is here; if you haven't tried it, do.

* There was an election in Finland, that led to no noticeable changes in Finnish politics. We have some really good-looking athletes, though.

* They killed 'Usāmah; I was skeptical about that being the death-blow to terrorism. Sadly, terrorism took a different turn shortly thereafter with the senseless attacks in Norway, the background to which we discussed. Steve Jobs also passed away, and we felt that his eulogies went too far.

* Throughout the year, we were alarmed by the police, as despite the death of "Osama", new threats to our precious bodily fluids continued to emerge. To combat these, we got everything from American police UAVs and the German police going all Gestapo on the German Pirate Party to the Finnish police hacking your phone. I also lost faith in Radley Balko, of The Agitator, for hithcing up with the Kremlin's propaganda machine, and my post on the topic inspired a TV show host to discuss my underwear.

* There was a lot of Minecraft. At the beginning of the year, I was still hanging around Epic Island, and we were impressed by music. We also weighed in on the Mojang - Zenimax legal battle.

* Apart from Minecraft, we liked Harms Way, but were disappointed by Mass Effect 2 being a sexist white supremacist game and by EA's various antics. The future looked bleak. In other media, we liked Detroit 1-8-7 and Sucker Punch, as well as the fantastic Robot.

* We all enjoyed some excellent music!

* Some memes were participated in, and scientology was addressed. We also started a series of posts on the Bible.

* There was, of course, a lot of hockey. At the very beginning of the year, the wrong guy was made MVP of the World Juniors, and later on Winnipeg got an NHL team. Sadly, our favorite NHL player called it quits. However, there were the world champs. In my preview, I had a good feeling about Team Finland, and even though Mats Sundin assured us it was impossible, Finland actually won. We were a little disappointed by the overblown coverage given to one particular goal, though.

Sadly, in the words of Jonathan Toews, the summer of 2011 was the worst ever for hockey. Not only did three NHL players pass away during the summer, but the plane carrying the KHL's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team crashed, killing the whole team. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a series of stories on Derek Boogaard, an NHL enforcer who died last summer. I highly recommend reading them.

**

Maybe that's a bit of a sad note to end this post on, but as the new year comes around, it won't hurt to take a moment to remember those who aren't around to see it happen. Having said that, though, I'd like to thank everyone who read this sorry excuse for a blag over the past year, and wish you all a happy new year! See you in 2012.

Happy Yule!

Four years ago, I started this blog with a post titled There's no such thing as Christmas, and I'm here to remind everyone, once again, to stop trying to put your Christ into our pagan winter solstice festival. There's no such thing as Jesus, either, because he's made up and never lived. If you want to celebrate a made-up character, go right ahead, but don't act like you own the winter solstice. It and the celebration that goes with it was around before any current religion, and will be around when they've been consigned to the rubbish heap of history where they belong.

Speaking of history, by the way, here's some. Enjoy.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Read more on Wikipedia, if you're interested. Happy Yule, everybody!

The future of manned aircraft

This past summer, the Economist decried the expense of the F-35, and chided the American military for spending too much money on what would be "the last manned fighter". I'm willing to stick my neck out on this and say that they're wrong. There will still be at least one generation of manned fighters.

The Economist is wrong because they underestimate two important factors, of which the most important is sheer bureaucratic inertia. In practically all western air forces, the career path of high-ranking officers is that of a fighter pilot. Decades of propaganda and bureaucratic infighting have established the fighter pilot as one of the celebrated heroes of the modern military, and the core identity of the air force. That won't be given up easily. The move to unmanned aircraft would mean that bold, gutsy and manly fighter pilots will be replaced by guys with Playstation controllers, and even if the latter are more effective in combat, they're just not cricket. In Top Gun 2020, the young fighter jocks won't barge their way into a bar, drink like mad and wow the girls with their rendition of Great Balls of Fire on the piano; they'll sit in the corner, order some apple juice and turn up the J-Pop.

Bureaucratic inertia is made even worse by the fact that air forces the world over are still, to some extent, young services fighting to establish themselves. Go back 50 years and witness the intense fighting on both sides of the Atlantic: in the States, over whether the army is allowed to operate fixed-wing aircraft or not, and in the UK over who controls naval aviation. That may seem like a long time ago, but in both countries, there is a level at which air forces still perceive themselves as younger and less secure services than the other two. Unmanned aircraft question the very existence of a separate air force: if, after all, you're just going to fly drones, then the army already has people doing just that. Why would they need a special service of their own? The navy could easily ditch naval aviation in favor of NCOs flying drones off their ships. It's not just the pilots that will go, after all, but nearly all of the support staff and facilities will be rendered irrelevant. The massive fixed airbases that were such a huge liability in the cold war will finally meet their end.

It's a well-established fact of defense policy that the armed services will, in the pursuit of administrative goals and inter-service rivalries, make inefficient decisions. What makes this even worse is the lack of a real military-technological rivalry to drive development forward. Unlike in the cold war, the US doesn't have a real technological challenger. The Russians can still produce very good aircraft, but nothing with which to really challenge the F-22 and F-35 in terms of pure technology. In its current decrepit state, Russia is still years away from being able to mount any kind of challenge to US air superiority, and China is much further away.

Remember that in the cold war, Western fighter development was basically driven by intelligence panics. A new Soviet prototype would show up on the runway at Ramenskoye and be spotted by a US reconnaisance satellite; then the intelligence guys would try to figure out what characteristics it had. Because of the difficulty of getting solid intelligence out of the Soviet Union, this was mostly guesswork, and regularly led to incredible overestimates of Soviet capabilities. The actual characteristics of a plane like the Su-24 Fencer had almost nothing to do with the intelligence projections, but because all they had to go on were the more-or-less informed guesses of their intelligence, Western aircraft were produced to face a much more powerful threat than the real one. For instance, the F-15 Eagle, which some people consider the greatest air superiority fighter of the 20th century, was essentially created to meet and defeat what the West imagined the MiG-25 Foxbat to be. The MiG-25 was seen at a runway somewhere, and the intel guys panicked. "It's got swing wings and two engines OH MY GOD IT CAN DO MACH FOUR AND HAS MISSILES THE SIZE OF MY HOUSE!" The actual aircraft was, well, different, but the threat of the imagined MiG-25 drove the US to create the F-15. There's nothing like the Ramenskoye panics driving aircraft design now.

This combination of a lack of research impetus and real air threat simply means that the Americans can be quite content with a substandard jack-of-all-trades, master-of-fuck-all aircraft like the F-35, and even inflict it on unsuspecting allies at a gigantic price. Even if drones would be cheaper and more effective, the West can settle for the far more expensive and ineffective manned aircraft, because they're good enough. It also, in all likelihood, means that since a new generation of pilots will be trained up on the F-35, they will fight just as hard against the inevitable as their predecessors did, and will probably manage to secure a next generation of manned aircraft for themselves. After all, think of all the jobs that would be lost.

As a side note, maybe this could restart the US space program. After all, the air force will need something to do.

In summary, assuming, say, the US Air Force will switch to unmanned aircraft in the near future assumes a level of rational decision-making that is totally alien to any peacetime military establishment. As a piece of military hardware, the manned aircraft will far outlive its usefulness. As the Economist put it in a more recent piece, the pilot in the cockpit may be an endangered species, but he's surrounded by a gigantic bureaucracy dedicated to his preservation.

**

And besides, the drones will just get taken over by Skynet anyway.

Beverly LaHaye and lesbians

I'm reading Michael Lienesch's Redeeming America, an excellent book about the Christian right in the United States.

It features several quotes from Beverly LaHaye, a Christian conservative activist and wife of Tim LaHaye, co-author of the dispensationalist book series Left Behind. They've both written several self-help guides for Christian couples, covering everything from child raising to sex positions, all in a very Christian way, of course. Here are some of her thoughts:

Thus Beverly LaHaye goes on to warn single women about the attractions of lesbianism: "Beware of an improper physical attachment between you and your roommates. Sad to say, this sometimes happens in today's world, especially if one is lonely, overly affectionate, and lacks a sense of security." In fact, there is a presumption that single women are often lesbians.

Lienesch 1993, p. 71

When I read that, I hear the actress who played Sister Miriam in Alpha Centauri reading it out loud in my head. That would be a fantastic introduction for a porno.

"Lesbianism lurks in the colonies as it lurked in the sororities of yesteryear. But it was never the sororities that were evil."

- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "A Blessed Struggle"

There's more, too. Not only is Beverly LaHaye deeply concerned about young women being drawn to the attractions of lesbianism, but she also pays close attention to young girls' breasts:

Beverly LaHaye is particularly interested in alerting teenage girls to their own seductiveness. She writes reprovingly:

I have seen lovely girls conduct themselves in such a manner that they turn fellows on and cause them to have problems with lust and evil thoughts. One charming lady was walking out of church with her hand in her date's arm and was very carelessly allowing her breast to rub against the boy.

It's good that the Christian Conservative movement has someone who lectures young women on the attractions of lesbianism, while keeping a firm eye on their unruly bosoms.

Steven Seagal - chicken chaser

Back in March, we got this awesome headline:



Daily Mail: The cockfighting raid on a small farm that required a SWAT team, bomb robot, armoured vehicles, film crew... and Steven Seagal

This Arizona sheriff was only investigating a cockfighting ring on a small farm.



But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was joined on a search warrant by a SWAT team, a bomb robot, two armoured vehicles, an action movie star and a film crew.



Jesus Llovera, 42, was arrested for cockfighting after the operation involving Steven Seagal, 58, who drove a tank onto the property as he shot a reality television show.

Shit, even Orwell didn't see this one coming. Combining the militarization of the police with reality TV is a marriage made in hell, and very appropriately officiated by the infamous Sheriff Joe.



Now Seagal is facing legal action over the raid, because they're also taking part in the War on Dogs.



TMZ: Legal Threats Over Deadly COCKFIGHT RAID

Jesus claims his 11-month old puppy was shot and killed during the raid -- and his home sustained "substantial damage." He also claims the cops killed more than 100 roosters that belonged to him.



The notice of claim is the first step towards a lawsuit -- and Jesus' lawyer tells us his client is demanding $100,000 for the damage and he wants Seagal to issue a "formal written apology" to his children "for the death of their 11-month old puppy, a beloved family pet."

As the Onion's AV Club explained:

Shortly after the incident, Seagal explained that the raid on suspect Jesus Llovera—which involved a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department team in full riot gear swarming his family’s home, as Steven Seagal crashed through his gates in a tank—all came about because, as Seagal said to a local TV station, “Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves.” So in order to prevent said animal cruelty, Seagal and his team apparently “euthanized” the more than 100 roosters it found on Llovera’s property and, according to a just-filed claim from Llovera, also shot and killed his 11-month-old puppy.

Seagal's really taken the ideology of the American police state to heart. It became necessary to shoot the animals to save them.

Here’s hoping that Steven Seagal, puppy-killer, never meets Steven Seagal, guy from Out For Justice, because that dude would be pissed.

Only in SWAT nation.

Ron Paul and the media

First of all, watch this video.



For the best commentary I've yet seen on why that happens, read this text from one of the Economist's bloggers.

I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand.

Over the last decade, I've been more and more disturbed by the direction politics is taking on both sides of the Atlantic. All our polities seem to be less and less willing to engage in any debate on real issues, and instead all major political parties and the media seem dedicated to confining political debates to symbolic non-issues. A perfect Finnish example is the current fixation on immigration policies, which, frankly, are the least of our problems right now. But none of the big systemic problems with the Finnish economy are even mentioned in the media, or were the subject of any real discussion during the parliamentary elections. Instead, candidates tilted at windmills of their choosing, which gave an impression of politics without any actual content.



Pretty much the same thing is happening in the US, where Ron Paul seems to be one of the only candidates who even brings up real political issues. And for that, he gets resoundingly ignored by the media.



Our representative democracies are mostly shams. The whole representative political system is a theater, constructed to deceive us into thinking that we have some input into the political decision-making process that goes on in our countries. In the meanwhile, the real political elite, which in Finland consists of the party bosses, senior civil servants and others, make the real political decisions, which includes deciding what non-issues the plebes will be allowed to "debate". Real issues will be kept off the media radar.



It'll be interesting to see what non-issues the coming US presidential election will be fought over. Rest assured that no big questions on America's future will be addressed, because that way lies the kind of treatment Ron Paul gets.



**



As a postscript, I add a word of caution, in the form of a New York Times op-ed, to anyone who thinks the Tea Party is a positive force in US politics.

And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.



So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.



More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

You know, if the fact that Bachmann seems to be nuts didn't tip you off.

Wireless panic

I'd write about the moral panic taking over Britain's pundits, but I don't have to, because the Economist already did, brilliantly.



What I will make a note of, however, is the disturbing notion that public disorder gives Western countries an excuse to crack down on social networks and mobile communications. British PM David Cameron called for stopping "suspected rioters spreading online messages". As Canada's CBC News put it in a very disjointed article:

When social media helped protesters organize and overthrow corrupt regimes in the Arab world earlier this year, while also providing citizen journalism when mainstream media was shut out, it was lauded as a tool of democracy.



However, when the same methods are used in a scenario like Britain, they are seen as disturbing, says Megan Boler, a media studies professor in Toronto.

More to the point, when social media are used for dissent in the West, we want to censor them, and worse. In an astonishing decision, two UK men were given four-year prison terms for inciting violence via the social media, even though it couldn't actually be proved that anything they posted had had any effect on anyone (CNN).



Social media censorship is already upon us, however. Remember a while back when I wrote about San Francisco's BART police shooting a man? They recently did it again, and when people gathered to protest, BART shut down cell phone service at their stations.



So when the Egyptian government, or the Iranians, censor Twitter to stop popular protests against the regime, we abhor it as horrible censorship and a human rights violation. When California or the UK does it, we, um.



Although to be fair, this double standard is a bit more complicated than that. After all, when Iran blocks Internet use, they're mostly doing it using technology we sold them.



Having said that, it's all still a little ironic.

Police brutality, part IIIa: Introduction to SWAT nation

I've been moving house, so one day I found myself browsing through my back issues of Playboy, mostly to read Bobby London's Dirty Duck comic strips. As I was doing that, though, I ran into a Forum piece in the November 2006 issue by Radley Balko called Unreasonable Searches and Seizures. (for a cautionary note on Radley Balko, see here)

The Playboy article is a simple one-page thing with six examples of SWAT raids gone wrong. The real issue, of course, isn't just that sometimes raids go wrong, but the whole spectacle of police militarization in the US.

I first encountered this subject in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine back in 1999. Funnily enough, you can read the story in question online here, because when FOX News asked Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to explain his motivations for his attack, that article was one of the things he sent them. The article, by Wayne Laugesen, is called "The Thin Blurry Line: When Cops and Soldiers Are One-and-the-Same".

"Since the late '80s we've been seeing the militarization of police, and the policization of military," says Peter Kraska, a professor of police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who has studied the militarization of police for more than a decade. "These are converging forces. Soldiers are told to be cops, both domestically and on foreign soil, and cops are becoming more like soldiers, working in elite SWAT-style units."

In 2006, the aforementioned Radley Balko wrote a paper for the CATO Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. To start with, I'll be quoting heavily from those two sources to give you a brief summary of what's going on in SWAT nation. Here's Laugensen:

Kraska says his research has found that in small town America - towns of 25,000-50,000 - two of every 10 policemen serve on a department paramilitary unit. Throughout America, 11% of police departments have armored personnel carriers. Of all the country's elite paramilitary police units, 20% are used for routine patrol work, and 85% of their calls are to carry out no-knock warrants for drug raids. In 1986, the nation had 3,000 deployments of paramilitary police units. In 1996, it rose to 30,000.

A tenfold increase in paramilitary police deployments. Why? Here's a chilling quote from Balko's paper:

“They [police officers] made a mistake. There’s no one to blame for a mistake. The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a war.”

—Hallandale, Florida, attorney Richard Kane, after police officers conducted a late night drug raid on the home of Edwin and Catherine Bernhardt. Police broke into the couple’s home and threw Catherine Bernhardt to the floor at gunpoint. Edwin Bernhardt, who had come down from his bedroom in the nude after hearing the commotion, was also subdued and handcuffed at gunpoint. Police forced him to wear a pair of his wife’s underwear, then took him to the police station, where he spent several hours in jail. Police later discovered they had raided the wrong address.

The war he's referring to is, of course, the war on drugs. Wayne Laugensen explains:

"The collapse of the Soviet Union has, unfortunately, led many military officials to seek out a new enemy to justify continued funding," writes David Kopel, a New York University law professor and author of No More Wacos. "The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) admits that it is no longer capable of protecting Americans from incoming nuclear missiles. Yet NORAD enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, as part of a $1.8 billion systems upgrade, having convinced congress to assign NORAD the mission of tracking planes and ships that might be carrying drugs."

In addition, the federal government has been especially keen to promote the militarization of the police. Balko:

In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of equipment and technology to state and local police. The same year, Congress created a “reutilization program” to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies.

(...)

By the late 1990s, the various laws, orders, and directives softening Posse Comitatus had added a significant military component to state and local police forces. Between just 1995 and 1997, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across the country.

(...)

A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.”

One of the reasons given for this militarization, and enthusiastically peddled by Hollywood, is the spectre of heavily armed criminals. Radley Balko debunked that:

Moreover, there's simply not much evidence that criminals are arming themselves with heavy weaponry. In a paper by David Kopel and Eric Morgan published by the Independence Institute in 1991, about a decade into the militarization of civilian policing that began in 1980, the authors point to a number of statistics showing that high-powered weapons, which are often cumbersome and difficult to conceal, simply aren't favored by criminals, including drug peddlers. The authors surveyed dozens of cities and found that, in general, less than 1 percent of weapons seized by police fit the definition of an “assault weapon.” Nationally, they found that fewer than 4 percent of homicides across the United States involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than one-eighth of 1 percent involved weapons of military caliber. Even fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called “assault” weapons. The proportion of police fatalities caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained relatively constant through- out the 1980s. It was during the 1980s that SWAT teams first began to proliferate.

Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. The examiners in Dade County, Florida—home to Miami— for example, found that contrary to the Miami Vice depiction of the South Florida drug trade in the 1980s, the use of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in Miami was in decline throughout the decade.

Despite this, more and more military-grade weapons and equipment are being channeled to police forces around the United States. The latest threat invented to justify it is the heavily armed illegal immigrant. When I wrote about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's antics earlier, I encountered this piece of reporting:

Arizona Republic: Joe Arpaio launches 16th immigration sweep in desert

In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.

Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.

"I am trying to send a message to Mexico," he said. "We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back."

The 7-year-old gun has not yet been used, Arpaio said. "It is more for defense." Nor have any of his deputies yet been harmed in a border scuffle.

"We have been very lucky," he said.

The sheriff said criminals smuggling drugs and immigrants across the border are now carrying AK-47s along the swath of desert that is seldom patrolled. The Barry M. Goldwater Range is used for shooting and cannot be patrolled without permission from the United States Air Force. That gives smugglers an easy path for entry, Arpaio said.

This is classic law enforcement logic: there's supposedly a heavily armed enemy out there who puts the officers at risk, necessitating military-grade hardware and civil rights violations. The fact that the AK-toting illegal immigrants seem to be a myth, as evidenced by, among other things, the lack of shootouts with heavily armed immigrants in Sheriff Joe's neck of the woods, is irrelevant. What matters is that the police need bigger guns. Balko:

With all of this funding and free or discounted equipment and training from the federal government, police departments across the country needed something to do with it. So they formed SWAT teams — thousands of them. SWAT teams have since multiplied and spread across the country at a furious clip.

It's no joke, too. I earlier wrote about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's SWAT team. Just recently, a SWAT team raided a house at the behest of a department of education investigating white-collar crime.

In this part of the world, it used to be a running joke how every single Russian government agency sprouted a SWAT team equivalent around the turn of the millennium. Now the same seems to be true of the US.

What's wrong with it? Balko:

The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

That's no exaggeration. Here's a few of the examples Balko provided for the Playboy piece I mentioned earlier:

- Anthony Diotaiuto, a 23-year-old student, was killed by a SWAT team making a "no-knock" raid on his house. They knocked down his door, without declaring themselves to be the police, and when the justifiably alarmed Diotaiuto went for his gun to defend himself, the police shot him.

- Cheryl Lynn Noel, a 44-year-old woman, was shot to death in her bed by a SWAT officer in 2005. After finding marijuana seeds in the family's trash can, the Baltimore police department sent a SWAT team to raid her house in the middle of the night. The team broke down the door, threw stun grenades inside and stormed up to the bedroom, where they found Noel holding a handgun. The police officers immediately shot her. Full details here.

- Cory Maye, sentenced to death for shooting a police officer who entered his apartment on a no-knock raid. Maye had no idea the man he shot was a police officer. Read the Reason piece here.

This is the most terrifying aspect of this era of SWAT teams. The police may come by information that leads them to seek a search warrant on your house or a nearby house, or an arrest warrant on you or one of your neighbors. This information may well come from a paid informer, who may have a grudge against someone or just plain lie. It's now becoming increasingly common for the warrant to be carried out by a SWAT team breaking into either the target house or one near it; wrong-door raids happen far too often.

If you do find your door being broken down by a SWAT team, you're very unlikely to be able to tell that it is, in fact, the police who are coming at you, and not, for instance, home invaders. In the United States, it's considered legitimate to own a firearm for home defense, and the country has seen some spectacular home invasion cases. However, should you exercise this right to home defense, and it's the police coming in through your door and not a criminal, they will shoot you and face no consequences for doing so. Not that being unarmed will protect you, as SWAT teams regularly kill unarmed people as well, whether because they think they're armed or by accidentally discharging their weapon.

To sum up, it's entirely legal, and considered totally legitimate, for US law enforcement agencies to maintain heavily armed paramilitary units which regularly assault the homes of private citizens and kill and maim some of them. In the Soviet Union, people lived in dread of the midnight knock on the door: it would mean the secret police were coming to arrest them. In the United States, on the other hand, the police don't knock, and they'll shoot.

The fact that this kind of activity is considered normal policing is just terrifying. On principle, the idea that police officers can invade your home without announcing themselves, kill your pets and possibly kill you, based on nothing more than vague circumstantial evidence that you might be guilty of anything ranging from failing to appear in court to a misdemeanor, is unthinkable. Yet it's true.

This is another case of the basic problem of police misconduct: the majority of the population believes that the police only ever do bad things to criminals, and that criminals, by being criminals, deserve it. The problem with this is that there are criminals and there are criminals: the majority of SWAT team raids target unarmed people without serious criminal backgrounds, guilty of non-violent crimes like possession of small amounts of marijuana. Worse, it ignores the fact that there are wrong-door raids where the police attack the wrong house or apartment, and raids based on false information. And in both those cases, the police shoot, tase and beat first and ask questions later.

The reasoning given for all this is, most commonly, the safety of the officers. For these SWAT teams, that comes before the safety of the citizens they're supposed to be protecting. That isn't right. US law enforcement is treating the citizens of the United States like the inhabitants of an occupied country.

Reading the Laugesen article from 1999 is especially scary now, in 2011, when it's gotten even worse than he imagined.

The international drug war

On the one hand, Connecticut, USA:

BI: Connecticut Decriminalizes Marijuana Possession

Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut is expected to sign a bill passed by the state House of Representatives last night decriminalizing the possession of marijuana in limited quantities.

Wrapping up what the New York Times today called the state's "most activist, liberal legislative session in memory," the House voted 90 to 57 in favor of SB 1014, which would punish possession of a half-ounce or less with fines, rather than criminal charges.

First-time offenders would be hit with a $150 ticket; repeat offenders would get at least $200 but a maximum of $500 per offense.

According to the Hartford Courant, supporters hope the bill will save taxpayers money and provide "fairer treatment of those caught with small amounts of the substance."

Connecticut's non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis estimates the bill will save the state nearly $1 million and net upwards of $600,000 in new fines.

Connecticut joins the 13 other states in the U.S. - including two of its neighbors, New York and Massachusetts - that have already decriminalized the possession of marijuana in limited amounts.

That's not exactly legalizing it, but it seems to be about as close as they can get. And sign it the governor did, saying:

“Final approval of this legislation accepts the reality that the current law does more harm than good – both in the impact it has on people’s lives and the burden it places on police, prosecutors and probation officers of the criminal justice system. Let me make it clear - we are not legalizing the use of marijuana. In modifying this law, we are recognizing that the punishment should fit the crime, and acknowledging the effects of its application. There is no question that the state’s criminal justice resources could be more effectively utilized for convicting, incarcerating and supervising violent and more serious offenders."

What I especially like is the recognition that putting people in prison for smoking pot is ridiculous.

And on that note, the other hand: Russia.

Guardian: Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'

Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

(...)

The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".

Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."

While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.

The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.

Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany (addicts) a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."

I mean, there's a solution to the "problem" of prison luxury: send them to the Gulag!

Here's one direct consequence of their war on drugs:

Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

You'd really think that if they're so concerned with popular health in Russia, they might consider an AIDS epidemic to be somewhat more dangerous than people smoking pot. And because it's technically impossible to write about politics in Russia without doing the joke, here's the setup:

Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.

And here's the joke:

In Russia, the pot smokes you.

Criminal insanity, online and off

First, a piece of madness I must have missed when it hit the news and just happened to run into.

NY Daily News: Florida mom Alexandra Tobias pleads guilty to murdering baby for crying during her FarmVille game

A Florida woman admitted shaking her 3-month-old baby to death after the little boy's crying distracted her from playing a wildly popular Facebook game.

Alexandra Tobias, 22, told cops she was playing FarmVille and her baby, Dylan Lee Edmondson, wouldn't stop crying.

According to the Florida Times-Union, she confessed to shaking the baby, smoking a cigarette to calm down and then shaking the baby again. The baby may have hit his head during the January incident.

Tobias pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

She later got a 50-year sentence. And here I thought FarmVille was bad for you before I knew about this.

**

Here's another example of criminal insanity:

FOX Chicago: Teen Charged with Murder in Police-Involved Shooting, Armed Robbery Case

Ross was charged Thursday evening with murder and armed robbery with a firearm, police News Affairs Officer Robert Perez said.
The incident unfolded about 8 p.m. Wednesday when two police sergeants were stopped by a person saying two people had just committed a robbery near East 70th Street and South Cregier Avenue.

The sergeants saw two people matching the description and ordered them to stop, police said. One of the suspects, with a weapon in his hand, turned in the sergeant’s direction. The sergeant shot the suspect, identified by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office as 15-year-old Tatioun Williams.

Williams, of 1311 E. 69th St., was pronounced dead at 8:40 p.m. at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to the medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Thursday found he died from a gunshot wound to the back and ruled the death a homicide.

A weapon and proceeds from the robbery were recovered at the scene, police said.

No one else was injured, police said.

So two guys commit an armed robbery, and as they're escaping, the police shoot one of them. Therefore, the surviving criminal is charged with murder.

This is how the felony murder rule works: if one perpetrates a felony, and as a result someone is killed, the perpetrator is charged with the murder. Here, the result even means that if the police shoot your accomplice, you are charged with his murder.

Another example of this idea in action here:

NY Times: Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers

CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.

The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home.

Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter.

He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies.

In all seriousness, this is insane. As the New York Times article says, this law doesn't actually seem to have any deterrent effect, by comparison with jurisdictions that don't have it. Furthermore, it blurs the definition of murder; as the paper referenced by the New York Times points out, murder is defined by an intent to kill, except in this case, where you can be guilty of murder by lending your car to someone.

What makes it even more dangerous, in my opinion, is the simple precedent that a person who is in no way directly responsible for a crime, and who may even be totally unaware that it has occurred, can be charged with it. Imagine extending that idea to other crimes.

But most of all, it's completely unrealistic to postulate, even as a system of ethics, that everyone must take responsibility for all consequences of their actions. Responsibility for consequences needs to be within reason; if someone lends a homicidal friend a shotgun, I have no problem with them being held culpable, but lending someone a car doesn't seem to be strictly comparable.

Even crazier is the notion that when the police shoot your accomplice in the back, you're guilty of murder. Yes, I accept the idea that had you not been involved in the armed robbery in the first place, your friend wouldn't have been shot. But is this in any way a realistic standard of ethics? If people are going to be held criminally liable for the actions of others, where on earth do we draw the line? And doesn't this, in fact, give police a virtual blank check when pursuing a felony suspect, because any deaths that occur during the crime and subsequent pursuit will be blamed on the suspect, whether he had anything to do with them or not?

This touches on what I've been thinking about in general with regard to law lately. It seems to me that on the whole, our legislation is essentially random. I've been toying around with the idea of constructing a legal code not as a confusing jumble of separate laws but as a system of principles. Surely one of those principles should be that a person can only be held responsible for his own actions or inactions, not for the actions or inactions of others. In this case, both armed robbers should be responsible for themselves, and the cop who shot one of them responsible for the shooting. If the shooting is deemed justified, then it is, but under no stretch of the imagination should the police officer's decision to use lethal force be the other robber's responsibility.

I'll chalk this up as yet another odd aspect of an increasingly insane US justice system. Here's another example:

Wired: There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information.

The United States seems to be reaching the point where legistlation is classified to protect national security.

I'd comment, but I don't know how.

**

Here's some surveillance state news, too.

Nature: Terrorist 'pre-crime' detector field tested in United States

Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly 'sense' whether you are planning to commit a crime.

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person's gaze, to judge a subject's state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.

The tactic has drawn comparisons with the science-fiction concept of 'pre-crime', popularized by the film Minority Report, in which security services can detect someone's intention to commit a crime. Unlike the system in the film, FAST does not rely on a trio of human mutants who can see the future. But the programme has attracted copious criticism from researchers who question the science behind it (see Airport security: Intent to deceive?).

Do, in fact, see the linked article, which starts off with this:

In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.

Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.

George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.

It remains unclear what the officers found anomalous about George's behaviour, and why he was detained. The TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has declined to comment on his case because it is the subject of a federal lawsuit that was filed on George's behalf in February by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Again, I'm not sure how to comment on this. It's terrifying.

**

It seems fitting that just as my copy of The Gulag Archipelago arrived in the mail, I saw this news item:

Guardian: China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

In the Soviet Union, it was gold-mining on the Kolyma: in China, it's World of Warcraft. Surreal. However, they haven't abandoned their efforts at reforming the inmates:

He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

You can't make this stuff up. It only happens in real life.

Radley Balko and Russia Today

Chances are, you've seen activist Adam Kokesh and his buddies get arrested with unnecessary brutality at the Jefferson Memorial. If not, here's the video:

What you may not know is which channel this show runs on: Russia Today, nowadays known as RT. Described by the Guardian as "the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire", RT is a TV channel funded almost entirely by the Russian government. In that same Guardian story, their then-editor-in-chief explains:

"I don't believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position."

And they do. Here's the Independent on the topic:

Russia Today, an English language service, was set up in 2005 to present a perspective from Vladimir Putin’s government as a counterbalance to Western global news organisations such as CNN and the BBC. Its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claims that the Russian state “doesn’t at all” interfere with the output of the network’s journalists.

But Shaun Walker, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, disputes this. “It is untrue that the channel’s journalists are able to report on what they want to without editorial influence; while as time has gone on there have been more features on “negative” aspects of Russia, there is still a total absence of any voices criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev,” he says. “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a “New Cold War” headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted “GENOCIDE” across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”

Indeed, one of their reporters resigned during the war in Georgia. Here's the Guardian:

Russians appear to be getting only one side of the story of the conflict in Georgia. According to a Moscow Times article, Russian television is showing the misery left by the Georgian assault in South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia's bombing of Georgia.

After William Dunbar, a correspondent for the English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report on Saturday, his scheduled reports later that day were cancelled by the station. He said: "I felt that I had no choice but to resign."

He added: "I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were cancelled. The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn't conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn't let me report it."

Of course, everyone knows how committed Russia is to the freedom of the press. The first Guardian article I quoted? Its author has since been expelled from Russia for no stated reason.

The idea for founding the channel seems to have come from former minister and Putin aide Mikhail Lesin, who wanted the channel to "polish Russia's international image". And they do, but not only by presenting Russian propaganda: part of their agenda is also to criticize Western countries.

For example, here's an RT reporter waxing lyrical over protests at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh:

RT: Who does this government consider an enemy?

The students were cornered, beaten, tear gassed, thrown to the floor and arrested – all for gathering inside a public park to express their political opinions.

This scene did not happen in a Third World country in the midst of a revolution. It occurred in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.

Of course, that very same year, a Gay Pride rally was held in Moscow. The rally was banned, and Moscow police had threatened the activists with "tough measures". When it went on anyway, police immediately arrested everyone present with "needless violence". Of course, that was better than some previous years when the police stood aside and let skinheads beat up the protesters.

You won't find any of this on RT: no reporters bemoaning the plight of the gay rights activists, let alone getting in amongst the demonstrators and writing harrowing first-person exposes of their arrest. No, on RT "Police disperse gay pride parade", without a hint of violence or impropriety. The channel unquestioningly accepts the official explanation for banning the marches, and under the sub-heading "A fight for gay rights or a farce?", goes on to lambast one of the organizers as a bully and a propagandist. Russia's embattled opposition gets similarly short shrift from RT, with no horror stories of police brutality.

Another topic that drew RT's ire is America's prison system. By contrast, read this Wikileaks cable or Amnesty International's report on Russia for some idea of what goes on over there; a topic you won't find any RT coverage on.

Finnish readers may be amused by the fact that notorious Finnish lunatic Johan Backman is a respected source for RT, quoted in stories like this one, which makes some hilariously over-the-top claims, including that in Finland, it's a crime to "criticize a legally operating organization". Their paraphrasing of what both Molari and Backman have said is also somewhat tenuously connected to reality. Molari and Backman are both rather well-known in Finland as extremists, and especially Backman is given fairly wide publicity in Russia because of his willingness to distort and exaggerate events in Finland in accordance with the Kremlin's propaganda line that Finland mistreats its Russian minority. That his views should be uncritically repeated by Russia Today speaks to the channel's ideology.

**

So a TV channel funded by the Russian government isn't exactly delivering objective journalism. Big surprise. It does raise some interesting questions, though, and to introduce them I'll promote a blog called The Agitator, by Radley Balko, a journalist and libertarian. I have great respect for the man as a chronicler of what I consider America's gradual evolution into a police state. His paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I read his blog regularly.

This May, Radley went on vacation and left us with a collection of guest bloggers. Most of them did well, even if it was a little odd when one of them felt that if we only divided ourselves into competing factions that identify themselves by differently colored uniforms, the world would be a better place. I thought we were already doing that. Another guest gleefully insulted a 17-year-old boy and expressed the fond hope that he would be assaulted in prison. These are just a couple of things that rankled me, though, and overall it was fine.

One of his guest bloggers, however, was RT's own Alyona Minkovski. Here's a clip from her show, which runs on RT:

As it happens, Radley's appeared on RT himself. As he explained, he went on RT "because they asked".

Now, I have a problem with this.

**

First of all, let me make absolutely clear that police brutality and the wholesale trampling of civil rights in America is reaching scary levels. Things like this, this and this are appalling, and so is the fact that the police will arrest you for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. The fact that police brutality and abuse is much worse in Russia is no excuse for the Americans or anyone else.

My problem is RT and the nature of their coverage. It's pretty obvious that they use a whole different yardstick for events in the US and in Russia, and much of their reporting consists of regurgitated Kremlin propaganda. They do go to some lengths to disguise this as critical journalism, but it's fairly obvious that when it comes to Russian interests, propaganda takes over. So when someone like Radley Balko attaches themselves to a channel like this, by appearing on it and hosting one of its reporters on his blog, I have a real problem with it, because he's lending his credibility to a Russian state propaganda operation.

I fully understand that there are economic incentives, direct or indirect, as well as the obvious political ones, for publicizing one's cause as widely as possible. In this particular case, though, that publicity comes with giving good press to the Russian state's propaganda machine; in other words, helping the Kremlin project a totally false image of Russia to the world. It also raises troubling questions about Mr. Balko's ethics as a journalist, in that he's willing to attach himself and his name to a government propaganda operation, seemingly without second thoughts.

In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.

To take just one example, Radley linked to the same Huffington Post piece I did above, on their questionable way of reporting an incident of police brutality in Washington, D.C. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it when RT glosses over Russian police brutality, though. In my books, that's hypocrisy.

Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.

It's a funny sort of libertarianism where you co-operate with one of the most repressive regimes in the world. I don't much care for it.

**

Last year, the Economist ran a piece on police brutality in Russia.

Cops for hire: Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy

THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.

Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.

American police brutality is alarming enough that I can't say it's nothing compared to what they do in Russia. Both countries' police forces at times terrorize their inhabitants like an occupying army. But having been to both countries, I'd still rather get arrested by American cops than Russian ones. Hell, I'd rather be raided by the Pima county SWAT team than by OMON. If American SWAT teams sometimes remind us of storm troopers, their Russian counterparts pretty much are the SS.

And one of the foremost critics of police brutality in America co-operates with their PR department.