Psychopolitik 2.0

Via Gizmodo, we have yet another example of just how much that shiny badge goes to ones head.  The headline just about says everything: Police sodomize man with Taser

There’s audio at the site too.  From the sounds of it, the thug who did this finds difficulty breathing in moments of severe stress (i.e.: while being detained by scream-prone people in matching uniforms with weapons) to be a slight against his position.  Brings new meaning to the old cliche phrase “I’d rather be shot”, doesn’t it?

Listen to the audio.  Notice how the man being tortured is blurting out “I’ll be good, I’ll be good!” in a tone more suggestive of an abused child trying to ward off being burnt with lit cigarettes again as opposed to an adult.  This reverting to parent/child roles is no coincidence.

I was going to point out the shitty taste in beer displayed at the much yakked about meeting at the White House, but Tom Knapp beat me to it, and I largely agree.  Only point of divergence I have is over Blue Moon — I personally find most wheat beers bland by default, to the point where it’s not bad taste but no taste.  As a result, I’d say the addition of orange in the brewing process actually improves it.  I’d never order it when I’m buying though, since my tastes lean heavily towards darker beers, but at least it has SOME flavor.  If by some fluke I ended up somewhere that only had wheat beers, & I was just plain fiendin’ for a brew, I’d get Boulevard Lunar, which is (surprise!) a darker variety wheat beer.

On that note: if each participant in that gathering/photo-op instead had a bottle of the limited run Boulevard Imperial Stout it would’ve ended up a lot more interesting.  That stuff is delicious, and has the added bonus of getting you pretty damn snockered for beer.

Obama, literally a moment ago: “I know it didn’t seem fair to bailout the banks, but it headed off a depression.  Besides, we’re being paid back plus interest!”

Um…no.  The government is getting money back, not the people they got it from to give to the banks.  Let’s see how well they’d take it if I made a withdrawal by force, with the promise “Oh, I’ll pay it back, plus interest even!”…

Re: the housing market, Dear Leader again: “Home prices are going up for the first time in years”

And that’s good HOW?  Making it harder for people to get one?  Doesn’t that contradict all the crap that the government has been doing trying to goose the market?

Sign of aging: you dig out albums you thought were classics when they first came out, only to play them and now decide that they suck.

I just did that.  Planned on ripping some CDs, ended up questioning the idea on half of them.

Digby, while talking about the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates & its larger implications:

Now, on a practical, day to day level, it’s hard to argue that being argumentative with a cop isn’t* a dangerous thing. They have guns. They can arrest you and can cost you your freedom if they want to do it badly enough. They can often get away with doing violence on you and suffer no consequences. You are taking a risk if you provoke someone with that kind of power, no doubt about it.

Indeed, it is very little different than exercising your right of free speech to tell a gang of armed thugs to go fuck themselves. It’s legal, but it’s not very smart. But that’s the problem isn’t it? We shouldn’t have to make the same calculations about how to behave with police as we would with armed criminals. The police are supposed to be the good guys who follow the rules and the law and don’t expect innocent citizens to bow to their brute power the same way that a street gang would do. The police are not supposed wield what is essentially brute force on the entire population.

Um…you sure about that?  If approaching the rest of the population in a manner akin to an occupying army ISN’T their functional point to being, then it begs the question of how they got so damn good at doing so, and why they so openly embrace the idea.  There’s a reason why mercenary companies like The War Profiteers Formerly Known As Blackwater accept ex-cops right alongside ex-soldiers, y’know…

(* - Since it wouldn’t fit what followed, I’m assuming the use of “is” in the original statement is a typo until further notice)

Ryan Grimm, author of “This is your country on drugs”, in reference to John Walters crowing about an increase in the price of cocaine (all emphasis mine):

It’s far from clear what caused the brief price hike in 2007. Walters unsurprisingly credited enforcement and interdiction efforts. But it’s unlikely the ONDCP and DEA really had the cocaine cartels in retreat. The more plausible explanation is that cocaine producers were targeting more lucrative markets. The rise of the euro and the concomitant decline of the dollar have made it less profitable to sell cocaine to Americans.

“The euro has replaced the dollar in the Western Hemisphere as the currency of choice among these traffickers, which is an extraordinary shift,” Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, told an antinarcotics conference in Spain in April 2007. “As cocaine use has declined in the U.S. dramatically, in the European market it has risen.”

Officials at the Spain conference said a kilogram of coke that would fetch $30,000 in the United States was worth $50,000 in Europe—and the dollar has fallen further against the euro since then. On April 1, 2007, a dollar was worth about 0.74 euro; a year later, it was worth only 0.63 euro; it’s now at about 0.7. Because of this price differential, it is theoretically profitable to smuggle cocaine out of the United States. Buried in its 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment, the Department of Justice cited the currency exchange rate as one possible explanation for decreased imports. The “declining value of the U.S. dollar provides a financial incentive for drug traffickers to sell cocaine in foreign markets where the wholesale price of cocaine is already much higher than in the United States,” the report said.

Size matters too. The euro is denominated in notes of 200 and 500, making transportation of large sums of money much easier, given that the biggest American note is worth only about 70 euros. When you’re moving hundreds of millions of dollars, that represents a real convenience.

No surprise here.  If the fluctuations of currency affect the price of our legal addictions — oil and debt — obviously they affect the price of the illegal ones.  I doubt Project Pat pays much attention to global monetary issues though, so I wouldn’t bet on him rhyming about sniffing coke through a rolled up €200 any time soon.

Recently, the Motorhome Diaries crew planned on crossing the imaginary line between what are known as “Vermont” and “Quebec”.  Some agents of the Canadian government, having found out about the ridiculous “Respect my authoritah!” moment in Mississippi they were subjected to, decided as an expression of their sense that no one should be subjected to such harassment to greet them at the border with open arms & a case of Moosehead Ale.

Heh…obviously I’m kidding.

Actually, they decided that letting a couple libertarians in would be an intolerable risk to the security of their country.  Instead, the authorities confiscated & destroyed their video of the trip, spewed some crap about looking for pornography (WTF, since when was porn illegal in Canada?) & “heinous propaganda”, looted their vehicle, held their computers as evidence, and sent them back the other way as if they’d bounced off a force field.

Well congratulations, Canada.  You’ve successfully flexed your muscle to protect your people from two Yanks in an RV.  Hopefully the mounties didn’t splooge themselves too hard as the motorhome crossed back onto U.S. soil…

Update: The MHD crew has a blow-by-blow of this up on their website now.  Among the interesting revelations about the behavior of Canadian border patrol: the searching included particularly aggressive and groin-centric patdowns.

Found this amusing:

And here we thought paying for sex was a no-no, especially for scandal-wary Members of Congress. But Rep. Steve Buyer thinks people who engage in the act (specifically, the kind that takes place sans protection) should have to pony up.

The Indiana Republican floated his unlikely cash-for-sex proposal Thursday during the markup of the health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee. Under the plan Buyer posited, those who engage in risky behavior, like smoking, not exercising and (ding, ding!) having unprotected sex, should have to pay a premium for their health care. After all, the reasoning goes, those people are more likely to incur higher health care costs than cigarette-eschewing, condom-wearing gym bunnies.

“Someone who smokes, drinks, participates in bad conduct and behavior, unprotected sex, maybe bad things happen to them, maybe they should pay higher premiums,” he mused. “That is a radical thought, isn’t it?”

I thought their constituency was generally anti-condoms?

For obvious reason, I agree with the sentiment here that people should not be forced to buy health insurance if they don’t want it.  However, I have a quibble with one part:

The federal government perverts costs with its Medicare and Medicaid programs: Recipients of this largess have no incentive to save money since someone else pays their bills.

In fact, the incentives run the opposite way as patients demand more procedures and tests while magnifying problems I resolve out of my medicine cabinet into emergency-room runs. Doctors who get away with charging Medicare hundreds for diagnosing Grandpa’s indigestion would charge me the same.

I’m just gonna say it: where are these people who willingly go to the emergency room for obviously minor issues?

Shorter IOZ, re: Nick & Matt’s revisionism of the Clinton years: “Those blue dresses make both you bitches look fat”.

No surprise the article was disjointed like that.  Mainstream media isn’t going to publish a real libertarian critique on economic policy, because it’d indict the entire system as a fraud.  Nope, its either make undeserved concessions to the alleged wisdom of somebody among Red vs Blue or get dismissed as a total kook.  The day I see, for example, a Kevin Carson op-ed in a big paper will be the day pigs fly, time runs backwards, and the sky rains Samuel Adams cream stout.