All these stories do is fill me with impotent rage, but I can't stop reading or writing about them:

Interviewing the people in Tracy Ingle's life — his sisters, his foster brother, his friends — you hear one line often enough that it soon becomes a refrain: Tracy is no angel.

Though all express their love and admiration for him — a kind man; a man who can fix anything, they say — they tend to tell you the bad things about him first. A recovering alcoholic, Ingle had a couple of DWIs several years back. When the Arkansas Times spoke to him, he was on house arrest for a 5-year-old failure-to-appear warrant. A car accident in Maryland in 2002 left him with degenerative disk disease in his back and what his sisters said is an addiction to pain killers — though all of his pills are legally prescribed. Up until Christmas 2007, he had several roommates, many of whom had had recent run-ins with the law. Last year, he agreed to fix a stereo in a friend's Mustang — a car that turned out to be hot — and got arrested for receiving stolen merchandise. That case still hasn't shaken out.

No matter what Ingle or those he gave a temporary home to may have done, however, it's hard to imagine he deserved what he got Jan. 7. That night, the North Little Rock SWAT team stormed Ingle's house on a high-risk, “no-knock” search warrant. By the time all was said and done, Ingle had been shot five times — including one bullet that pulverized his femur and left his leg dangling from his body, connected only by a bloody mess of meat, skin and tendon.

According to an evidence list left at Ingle's house after the shooting, no suspected drugs or drug residue were recovered from the residence — only a digital scale, a notebook and a few plastic baggies, all of which Ingle's family members have identified as part of the junk they had collectively stored at the house.

It might seem strange, then, that Ingle currently stands accused of several serious felonies — including two counts of aggravated assault. While the North Little Rock police insist they got a dangerous criminal off the streets, Ingle and his family say the charges are all about appearances — and covering the police.

Here's a guy who is, at most, guilty of poor judgment, and for his trouble he's nearly shot to death, removed from the hospital by the cops (who provide him with substandard medical care, leading to infections in his wounds), and charged with "running a drug enterprise", even though no drugs were found in Ingle's home, and the equipment they seized belonged to his sister, who says she used the scale and baggies for a jewelry-making hobby.

Do these sound like the actions of a government intended to protect rights?  Whose rights are they protecting here?  Does anyone think for a moment this will somehow make our streets safer, will prevent even one person from obtaining illegal drugs?

Radley Balko has more here.  As is becoming typical for these cases, the police have clammed up—and even the judge in the case has slapped a gag order on the prosecutor, Ingle and whatever lawyer he ends up with (he currently can't afford to hire one).

And there's nothing you can do.  Spare me the false bravado: we are truly fucked when it comes to dealing with the unjust actions of the police.  Submit and you can still face jail time for whatever crimes the cops and DA can come up with, not to mention the damage to your home and trauma to yourself and your family.

But fighting back—to actually defend yourself and your loved ones from these power-mad thugs—will earn you a toe tag or possibly a trip to death row.

When private citizens are unable to defend themselves against the criminal actions of the police, and the cops themselves cannot be held accountable, how can anyone deny that this country has become a de facto police state?

Maybe the prospect of global food shortages doesn't spell catastrophe for everyone:

As prices for bread and rice soar, dictators are tottering.

Oddly, one of them is [Hugo] Chávez, who lost a constitutional referendum in December partly because of the combination of soaring food prices and shortages he has inflicted on Venezuela. Another is Robert Mugabe, who to his surprise lost a presidential election in Zimbabwe three weeks ago, though he has yet to admit it. According to the U.N. World Food Program, the government of North Korea faces another food crisis; bread prices explain in part why Pervez Musharraf lost control of Pakistan's government in February.

It's a painful way to bring down dictatorships, but in the long term it's not nearly as painful as allowing them to continue.

Then again, if your military-backed dictatorship has been placating the masses for decades by providing them with subsidized bread, you might think twice about wanting a free market to develop:

As global prices have soared in the past year, cheap bread has been disappearing from Egyptian shops, and free-market prices have risen 48 percent. The predictable result came on April 6, when workers at the country's largest textile factory, in the city of Mahalla el-Kubra, attempted to strike, only to be blocked by a massive deployment of security forces. Angry crowds took to the streets for two days. Schools and shops were burned, a huge billboard of President Hosni Mubarak was torn down and at least two people were killed when police opened fire.

Mubarak responded to the trouble the way the regime always has. His prime minister and a host of other officials rushed to the smoldering city to purchase peace. The textile workers were promised a month's bonus pay and new health-care facilities for their town. Mubarak ordered the army to begin baking and distributing more bread and lifted tariffs on some food imports. Meanwhile, his prosecutors brought charges against some 150 people blamed for the unrest.

As they say in the circus, the show must go on.

Another consequence of the food crisis: less resistance to biotech crops.

I don't know how I can write about this without wanting to break things, so I'll just post the story:

Ten-year-old Jayci Yaeger is dying of brain cancer, and has one final wish -- to have her father spend some time at her bedside before she dies.

She's in a Lincoln, Neb. hospice.

However, her father, Jason Yaeger, is in a federal minimum security prison in South Dakota, serving five-and-a-half years for a drug conviction. He has less than a year left in his sentence, and is set to be released to a halfway house in four months.

Jason and the Yaeger family have appealed many times to the warden for a 30-day supervised release, which could be allowed under "extraordinary circumstances." However, the family says these appeals have been denied, and the prison tells them the circumstances are not "extraordinary."

"She's very scared," Jayci's mother, Vonda Yaeger says, "and I think she's holding on for her father. She didn't do anything wrong. He was there for her when she was born. He should be there for her when she goes."

Jason, she says, was always a very good father to Jayci.

Just more collateral damage in the state's heroic war on drugs.  It's all worth it, right?

This is heroic:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

Right the fuck on.

[cross-posted to A Thousand Cuts]

Going forward, I shall refer to the day on which I prepare my family's tax return, which this year falls on January 30, as Fuck Milton Friedman Day.

Friedman, for all of his great contributions to economic theory and advocacy of the free market, was also instrumental in developing the Federal government's most efficient means of confiscating the income of Americans with a minimum of protest: the withholding tax.  Prior to the 1940s, citizens paid taxes in a lump sum every March.  The 1913 tax act, which was adopted following the ratification of the 16th Amendment, originally called for withholding as well, but taxpayers expressed great displeasure at money being taken out of their pay envelopes before they even received them.  The withholding provision was struck a few years later.

The problem with annual lump-sum payments is that it proved very difficult for the IRS to ensure it received all of the revenue that citizens were obligated to pay.  Furthermore, it hampered the government's ability to fund operations throughout the year.  Imagine getting just one paycheck every year, covering your entire annual salary.  You would likely budget your money very carefully to ensure it covered your expenses throughout the year.  On the other hand, it would also give you the opportunity to invest some of that money so it could earn interest until you needed it to pay later expenses. In retrospect, that's probably not a bad way for government to operate as well.

The Feds seemed to realize this, so to raise revenue during the year it sold "tax anticipation notes" to taxpayers to generate interest to help pay their tax bill the following year.  This allowed taxpayers to meet their tax liability using less money than if they paid out-of-pocket when the bill came due.

With the country's entrance into World War II, the government was faced with skyrocketing expenditures.  Congress adjusted the tax rates from a heavily progressive system that mostly impacted the rich into more moderate brackets that imposed obligations on nearly everyone.  Within three years following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the number of tax returns received by the IRS increased more than four-fold.  Had the lump-sum payments continued, the entire system would have collapsed under the effort of ensuring tax obligations were met with every return.  Withholding taxes at the source—by conscripting employers to serve as the government's revenue agents—was the most effective method to protect the government's revenue stream.  In 1942, Friedman, then working in the Treasury Department, devised a new withholding plan.  But the challenge of selling it to a public which had roundly rejected the previous scheme remained.

And like any good bureaucrats and politicians, they used the time-honored trick of snake-oil salesmen everywhere: they lied about it.

The key strategies used to obtain support for income tax withholding in 1943 all entailed political transaction-cost augmentation. Government officials artfully employed national defense language, tax-cost information, and promises of "tax forgiveness" to engineer support for a withholding system at root designed to enhance and protect government revenue for all times to come. The above-noted conflict between the government's actual objectives and its publicly promoted objectives formed only one part of a systematic pattern of transaction-cost manipulation . . .

Treasury officials repeatedly testified to Congress that such withholding of income taxes--current collection at the source--represented "no additional tax." On dozens of occasions, Treasury official Randolph Paul and other government spokesmen testified:

    This collection at the source mechanism is nothing but a mechanism for collection. It is not an additional tax. ... It merely speeds up the collection (U.S. House Hearings 1942, vol. 1: 100).

    It should be kept in mind that collection at the source does not in itself increase or decrease the tax liability of the taxpayer (U.S. House Hearings 1943: 11).

Given the expert witnesses' knowledge of present value, statements so seriously misleading to Congress and the public could not have been inadvertent.

Because it replaced interest-bearing notes with a pay-as-you-go system, the withholding tax did represent an additional tax on the public, by taking money before it even reached taxpayers' pockets to be used by the government.  Only when taxpayers filed their returns could they determine if they paid too little (and thus would have to send even more money to the IRS) or too much (and thus receive a refund, although the Treasury did initially suggest that interest be paid on any money returned).  And with future dollars worth less than the present value of the money taken by the government, taxpayers would lose even more each year.

The Treasury Department acknowledged all this in hearings before Congress, yet insisted that withholding would not only impose no additional tax burden, but was merely a convenience for patriotic Americans to meet their obligations and support the war effort.  And these same obfuscations were parroted by members of Congress during floor debates.  Oppose such a sensible scheme, and you allow the Huns and Japs to win.

Sixty-five years later the government still gets its loot via the withholding tax, and despite many proposals to eliminate or at least greatly simplify the process, it remains the single greatest enabler of an ever-expanding state.  As Murray Rothbard wrote about Friedman in 1971:

Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America.

Friedman did later express his regrets at helping bring about the withholding tax, as evidenced in this interview with reason's Brian Doherty in 1995:

It was a very interesting and very challenging intellectual task. I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it's a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941-43, all of us were concentrating on the war.

I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.

Yeah, me too.  And while I stand to repatriate a significant chunk of my income from the Leviathan State this year, when I click the File button in TurboTax I'll remember to honor the man who made it necessary in the first place: fuck you, Milton Friedman.

Anyone who still has the slightest inkling that Rudy Giuliani might be the answer for President needs to read this:

In March 2000, an undercover officer killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released Mr. Dorismond’s juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to remain sealed.

The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no “altar boy.” Actually, he was. (Mr. Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing.)

Given Jailiani's vendettas against people who crossed him in NYC, imagine what he could do with the power of the Federal executive.  Good thing his campaign is nearly on the rocks.

Fun Jailiani number of the day: the city paid at least $7 million during his tenure to settle civil rights lawsuits and pay retaliatory damages.

5. So if you don't want your kid to go to the hospital after taking a spill, and you're one of those weird "constitutionalist" cranks, expect the SWAT team to bust down your door, throw you and your wife to the floor, and take your kid at gunpoint to the hospital.

I'm not fucking kidding.

Authorities said they had reason to believe Shiflett mistreated his 11-year-old son, Jon, by failing to provide him proper medical care for a head injury. But Shiflett says his privacy and his rights were invaded, and that he has the right and the skill to treat his son himself. Shiflett, 62, said he served as a medic in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. . . .

Speaking about the incident from his home in the Apple Tree Park on Monday, Shiflett was very upset. Perhaps most offensive, Shiflett said, was that law enforcement didn't announce there was a warrant before breaking into his home south of New Castle.

"I would have let them in," he said. "It was traumatic to my children, and it's unnecessary."

His spouse, Tina, and his six of 10 kids who are still at home were shocked at the manner of entry. Tina said law enforcement, wearing masks, broke down their door with a battering ram and pointed guns in her children's faces.

"They didn't need to bash into my home and slam my kids to the floor," Tina said, adding later, "I think they get a kick out of this."

Yes, they do get a kick out of this, the sick fucks.  Cops are nothing more than common bullies, thugs with badges working for the stolen loot of the criminal state.  These are the people who "serve and protect" you.

And the sheriff's rationale for sending a SWAT team on what amounts to a welfare check?

The sheriff said . . . the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

So you can now expect the cops to treat you differently based on your political views, especially if they're considered radical or "dangerous".

Oh, and the guy's son?  He's fine; the doctor told him to take Tylenol and apply ice to the bruises.

I'm so fucking angry I'm shaking.  Especially since this happened in my state.  It could happen to anybody.  It could happen to you.

Christmas hangover linkage:

Bruce Sterling reports that angry motorists (or others) in Britain are finally fighting back against the surveillance state by torching speed cameras.  Can't wait for them to start shouting down the agents who admonish troublemakers via talking cameras.

Critics on the right and left have excoriated Ron Paul for not returning a $500 donation from Don Black, the head of the white nationalist group Stormfront, but not much mention has been made about who Mike Huckabee has been cozying up to:

Criticism from co-religionists stands apart from criticism by the Club for Growth, the Cato Institute and the Arkansas Eagle Forum of Huckabee's 10 big-government, high-tax years as governor. Because no Republican candidate since Pat Robertson in 1988 has depended so much on support from evangelicals, opposition by Huckabee's fellow Southern Baptists is significant.

Huckabee's base is reflected by sponsors of Tuesday's fundraising luncheon (requesting up to $4,600 a couple) at the Houston home of Steven Hotze, a leader in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement.

Uh-huh.  Just how "highly conservative" is Christian Reconstructionism?

The use of the death penalty would be greatly expanded, when the Hebrew Scriptures' laws are reapplied. People will be executed for adultery, blasphemy, heresy, homosexual behavior, idolatry, prostitution, evil sorcery (some translations say Witchcraft), etc. The Bible requires those found guilty of these "crimes" to be either stoned to death or burned alive. Reconstructionists are divided on the execution method to be used. . . .

The status of women would be reduced to almost that of a slave as described in the Hebrew Scriptures. A woman would initially be considered the property of her father; after marriage, she would be considered the property of her husband.

On the other hand, they also advocate abolishing income taxes, so it all balances out.

In Putin's Mother Russia, dissidents really are the craziest peoples:

A Russian opposition activist has been sent to a psychiatric hospital by authorities a day before a planned demonstration.

Artem Basyrov's detention is the latest in a series of incidents suggesting a punitive Soviet-era practice is being revived under president Vladimir Putin.

Mr Basyrov, 20, was ordered to be held at a hospital in the central region of Mari El on November 23, a day before planned demonstrations, said Alexander Averin of the opposition National Bolshevik Party.

So you have to convince the government you're not nuts before you can protest, but protesting against the government is clearly a sign of mental illness.  Joseph Heller had this pegged.

Meanwhile, resource-rich regions in Bolivia take issue with Evo Morales' "social justice" programs, and they're taking their ball and going home:

Tensions were rising in Bolivia on Saturday as members of the country's four highest natural gas-producing regions declared autonomy from the central government.

Thousands waved the Santa Cruz region's green-and-white flags in the streets as council members of the Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando districts made the public announcement.

The officials displayed a green-bound document containing a set of statutes paving the way to a permanent separation from the Bolivian government.

Council representatives vowed to legitimize the so-called autonomy statutes through a referendum that would legally separate the natural-gas rich districts from President Evo Morales' government.

The move also aims to separate the states from Bolivia's new constitution, which calls for, among other things, a heavier taxation on the four regions to help finance more social programs.

Morales, naturally, won't take this lying down.  And like his buddy Hugo Chávez, he blames the U. S. for the latest round of troublemakers.  More here.

The year before he was elected mayor, the NYPD made 720 arrests for marijuana misdemeanors. In the year 2000 under Rudy, that figure was 59,945.

From this piece by Bill Maher in Rolling Stone on the "Dickheads of the Year".

Radley Balko returns from Mississippi after visiting Cory Maye's family:

I don’t doubt that there are lots of convicted felons who struggle to stay parents to their kids from prison. But in Cory’s case, it’s particularly brutal. He’s in prison not because he was a poor father, or because he engaged in a life of crime that hurt or put his kids at risk. On the contrary. By all accounts he was loving, even doting father. He had no criminal record. Talk to Cory’s relatives, and they’ll tell you that their memories of him have him dressing his kids, bathing them, changing them, holding them, and brushing and braiding their hair. He cooked for them, and played with them. When construction jobs dried up and he couldn’t work, he became his daughter’s primary caretaker while Chanteal worked nights. He’s in prison precisely because he acted out of fear for his daughter’s safety. He thought someone was breaking into his home to harm the two of them. That that act has now put him in a position where he’s being slowly erased from his daughter’s life—from a jail cell where there’s little he can do about it—is a crushingly cruel twist of fate.

It's long, but please read the whole thing, if you care at all about the state of the country's criminal justice system.  Balko has also posted a slideshow of photos he took during his visit.

Fortunately for Maye his death sentence for killing Ron Jones was overturned, but he is still destined to rot in prison for the rest of his life:

He’s trying to settle in to his new surroundings. He’s now at Unit 32 at Parchman Penitentiary, the hardest-knock wing of one of the hardest-knock prisons in the country. It’s the highest-security wing in the prison, save for Death Row. Thought in terms of living conditions, it’s likely worse. Lately, Unit 32 has had problems with rioting. There have been three inmate murders in the last two years.

. . . This is Cory's home now.

. . .

You have one man taken from his family, in the prime of his life. You have another man, also taken from his family, now losing the prime of his life. You have a son taken from his mother and father. And you have a loving father being taken from his son and daughter.

Thank this war. The goddamned drug war. It is so incredibly senseless and stupid. And it’ll continue to claim and ruin lives, because too few politicians have the backbone to stand up and say after 30 years, $500 billion, a horrifyingly high prison population, and countless dead innocents, cops, kids, nonviolent offenders, decimated neighborhoods, wasted lives, corrupted cops, and eviscerations of the core freedoms this country was allegedly founded upon, the shit isn’t working. It’ll never work. It never has.

It has to stop.  However many lives you think are being saved by trying to keep drugs off the streets, it pales to the number that are being ruined every day by the state.

If you can read all of this and still think Cory Maye deserves to be in prison, that his children should be deprived of their father, that the circumstances which sealed both Maye's and Ron Jones' fates are a just way of dealing with society's ills, then I have no hope for you, or for the future of this country.

It's worse during the holidays. Christmas, New Year's, Halloween. That's when they really start knocking. Calling him out in the middle of the night. Showing up at his stoop in angry packs.

"Christopher," they wheeze through the front door, "Christopherrrrrr - we know you're in there ... "

Christopher Risdon is a 35-year-old sex offender who was busted for child porn. But Risdon doesn't live at this Tropicana Avenue apartment. Hasn't for years. So when the curious (if that's really all they are) come calling, they're now ringing the wrong doorbell. Despite what sex offender-tracking Web sites say, this apartment belongs to Harry Berlin, 71 years old, frail and, frankly, petrified.

"I'm a nervous wreck," he says, holding out his hands. They quake like palsy.

For nearly two years Berlin's address has been reported as Risdon's on a Nevada Web site. Two months ago it popped up again, this time on Metro Police's new sex offender watch Web site.

From this article in the Las Vegas Sun.  The Metro Police even admit that self-reporting by sex offenders on their whereabouts is unlikely to be 100% accurate.  But the potential of innocent residents being harassed based on inaccurate data, for which neither the police nor the state appear to take responsibility, is outweighed (once again) by the "greater good".

Even more outrageous was the hoop Mr. Berlin had to jump through in getting his address removed from the sex offender registry:

On Wednesday, two Metro detectives went to Berlin's apartment to verify that he is, in fact, not Christopher Risdon. They checked his ID and, satisfied he isn't the sex offender, asked Berlin to sign a waiver saying as much.

Berlin refused to sign. He was scared and didn't want to do anything without consulting with the ACLU first.

Barry Berlin, explaining Harry Berlin's decision, said, "My brother believes that in America you do not have to sign papers stating that you are not a sex offender just so that you can live in your own apartment without police interference."

But police were satisfied enough with what they found that Berlin's address has been taken off the Public Safety Department's and Metro's sex offender Web sites.

Lovely.  Welcome to the new America, Mr. Berlin, where you're a pervert until the police say otherwise.

Update: Here's a related post on a convicted rapist who was released after serving two decades in jail, and was stabbed to death by a neighbor 35 days later.  His alleged killer claimed he was protecting his son, who had been a victim of molestation, except the guy he killed hadn't attacked children.

Via CNET comes news of the disturbingly rushed passage of Yet Another Internet Porn Bill:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

Who voted for this?  Damn near everyone, except two Republicans: Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia and some other guy who happens to be running for President.  Yes, that's right: the Democrats, Defenders of Our Civil Liberties, rose up en masse and put their stamp of approval on this liberty-destroying garbage.

I'd love to tell you how the bill managed to escape committee, but—oh! that's right; it was never heard or voted upon in committee:

Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced October 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.

So now, if you run a coffee shop offering wi-fi access, or hell, even have an unsecured wireless network at home, you are potentially liable if little Johnny uses it to pass nekkid pictures of little Jill along to his friends.  But wait!  It's not just child porn:

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

On its face, the SAFE act doesn't look remotely enforceable or even capable of passing a Constitutional smell test.  But it's another example of the collectivist insanity to which the government has succumbed: there are Bad Guys out there doing horrible things to Our Children, and Something Must Be Done About It.  And just to be on the, uh, SAFE side, let's get rid of the harmless perverts who like to look at dirty pictures.

And if your local coffee shop or library decides to just stop offering Internet access instead of dealing with the headaches of compliance, well, it's for the children, right?  Anything to protect our children.

The Bill of Rights Under Bush: A Timeline

Not recommended reading if you're in a good mood and would like to remain that way.

Last blogger sent to Gitmo (link courtesy msginnyo), please turn out the lights.  I'd probably get waterboarded for my last five entries alone.  Granted, this only establishes a committee to explore methods by which "violent radicalization" may be identified and flushed out, so the only real cost of this bill might be another waste of your tax dollars.  But committees have annoying habits of making, you know, recommendations . . . which ultimately become law.

World's Hardest Easy Geometry Problem (via Coyote Blog).  Easy because it can be solved using elementary geometry.  Hard because it's . . . well, hard.  I haven't attempted it myself; maybe you have an hour or five to spend on this.

A massive five megabytes of hard disk storage, courtesy of IBM in 1956.  Although it wasn't quite megabytes (as data was stored as 7-bit and not 8-bit characters), and it wasn't exactly portable (the cabinet measured 5' x 6' and weighed more than a ton).  So quit yer bitchin' about your dinky 20GB iPod, k?

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Hint: this is someone who wants to be the next President of these here United States.  Even Hugo Chavez is capable of more subtlety.

At the height of apartheid in South Africa, 851 of every 100,000 black men in that country were behind bars. As of 2005 in the U.S., 4,419 of every 100,000 black men were.

From Balko in Hit & Run.  So 4.4% of the entire black male population in the U. S. is incarcerated, compared to 0.7% of the overall population.

Nah, I'm sure they all deserve to be there.

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

Pedro Guzman was jailed for a misdemeanor trespassing violation, then sent to Mexico in May, despite his mother's claims that he was born in Los Angeles.

Note that the LA County Sheriff's Department said they "obtained his signature for voluntary removal" even though Guzman's mother says he is mentally disabled.  And I love this bit:

Officials at the U.S. consulate in Tijuana say they have made calls to help search for Guzman and asked other consulates in Mexico if they have information.

"We are doing things to help that we are not obliged to do," said consulate spokeswoman Lorena Blanco.

Dear God, the fucking arrogance of bureaucrats.  They feel so put upon to be doing this frantic woman a favor by finding her son who shouldn't have been deported in the first place.  But we all feel safer, right?

An update on the War on People Who Look Like Terrorists:

There are 82 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared of terrorist suspicions by the U. S. government, but remain incarcerated indefinitely because their home countries won't take them back.  This constitutes about 20% of the total inmate population at Gitmo.  In some cases the U. S. won't deport the prisoners because they face political persecution, torture or death if they return home.  Enjoy the sick irony of that statement for a moment.

As Balko says, the U. S. won't grant them asylum, and for good reason.  If they didn't hate America before, they sure as fuck do now.

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

If you're planning on grilling a steak or brat in the Belgian region of Wallonia, you'll need to pay the tax man:

Experts said that between 50 and 100 grams of CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas, is emitted during barbequing. Beginning June 2007, residents of Wallonia will have to pay 20 euros for a grilling session.

I'm still not sure this isn't a belated April Fool's joke, especially after this revelation:

The local authorities plan to monitor compliance with the new tax legislation from helicopters, whose thermal sensors will detect burning grills.

Presumably the helicopters will be solar-powered, so as to not emit the same CO2 those evil barbecue grills spew.

Someone, please confirm this is a joke.