Back in business at the main site

Jon managed to fix the database problem underlying the outage at Quotulatiousness, so I'm switching back there until the next time I need to use the backup here (it has been handy to have an alternate venue, I must admit).

" . . . no defendant has ever won"

Mark Steyn talks to Hugh Hewitt about the travesty that is the Canadian Human Rights process:

HH: Thank you. I’ve got to start, I want to talk politics with you, but I’ve got to start first to alert the audience. I thought it was a joke, these Muslim radicals bringing complaints against you in Canada. But I’m close to boycotting Canada, because their Human Rights Commission hasn’t thrown this stuff out in the back with the trash.

MS: Well, the Human Rights Commission up there is, you know, almost the textbook definition of a kangaroo court, in the sense that of the complaints that have been brought under this section, since it was introduced almost thirty years ago now, no defendant has ever won.

HH: Oh.

MS: So I may buck the odds, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

HH: Well, tell people what the process is, what you’re accused of, and I assume this is a pain in the neck.

MS: Well, it is a pain in the neck. It also has, you know, serious implications, I think, because the Muslim lobby groups have had quite good luck using courts outside the U.S. to block particular books and other ideas that they’re not partial to. And eventually, that does ripple through to New York publishers and so on who don’t want to take a flyer on a book if you won’t be able to sell it in Canada, or get an overseas sale. So it does have implications. But what this is, basically, is a special commission that’s set up, it’s like, think of the most politically correct professors at Berkeley, put them on a commission. The plaintiff, the guys who make the complaints, their legal expenses are paid for by the Canadian taxpayer. The defense has to fund his or her own…essentially, there’s no rules of due process or evidence. And you know, they levy things that would be extraordinary. A woman posted some content on a Christian website in the United States, she’s opposed to homosexuality, she quotes some relevant Biblical passages. The Human Rights Commission banned her from ever publishing in any public forum again those Biblical passages for life, even though they were published on a U.S. website. And if she breaches that order, she’ll go to jail.

I knew the situation was bad, but I had no idea it was as dire as this . . . no defendant has ever won? Yeee-ikes!

QotD: Tancredo outsourced

Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlán Calderón, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown Peril for just $3 an hour plus room and board.

Jesse Walker, "Votes Americans Won't Cast", Hit and Run, 2007-12-20

Is your child becoming a hacker?

James Bond versus Jason Bourne

In yesterday's post at Whatever, John Scalzi posts some interesting ruminations by David Louis Edelman about (of all things) the various Bourne movies (based on the Ludlum books:

Here are a few things that every American knows.

* The world is a vile and dangerous place.
* America is blindly and irrationally hated by just about everybody outside of our borders.
* If we left our security up to the peaceniks, bureaucrats, and Boy Scouts we elect to national office, the United States would be a smoldering ruin in a matter of months.
* Therefore it’s necessary that we fund a zillion intelligence agencies and black ops teams who routinely conduct secret assassinations in the name of defending our country.
* Nevertheless, despite our massive economic and military power, the United States is drastically outnumbered and constantly on the verge of apocalypse.

At least, these are the assumptions behind just about every spy thriller ever made. Now I find myself wondering: When the hell did these assumptions become so ingrained in our psyche? When did we blithely start accepting this worldview? Who says the United States should behave this way — and, for that matter, when did we all decide that the United States actually does behave this way? What the fuck happened to my country?

[. . .]

But even more interesting than the contrast of weapons is the contrast of attitudes towards government. James Bond is, in many ways, a manifestation of how the British would like to see themselves: debonair and worldly; as technologically adept as the Americans, without sacrificing class and gentility; dangerous when crossed. In the world of James Bond, the British government might be stodgy, but its heart is in the right place.

Jason Bourne, on the other hand, is a maverick who was once broken by his own government and is now on the run from it. In the world of Jason Bourne, the United States government is composed of equal parts corrupt slimeball and impotent douchebag, with a small contingent of do-gooders skulking around the fringes.

QotD: The vicious circle

Women have limited roles in sf (print and media) because:

(a.) That’s what audiences want.
(b.) Women aren’t as interesting as men.
(c.) Artists are products of their culture, and have difficulty thinking outside the box.
(d.) Men are doing it on purpose to keep women oppressed.
(e.) The genre is traditionally male-dominated, and its conventions and tropes leave very little room for telling women’s stories.
(f.) SF is always social allegory, and this trend is an accurate reflection of reality.

All of these answers are wrong.

Some are less wrong than others; b. and d. are both pernicious nonsense; f. is a cop-out, as is a.; c. and e. are partially true, but ignore the work already being done, by both artists and audience members of all genders, to change that.

You’ll also notice that cause and effect are hopelessly jumbled. Individual artistic expressions cannot be separated from the culture at large; artists are influenced by culture, and the culture is in turn influenced by artists. It’s complicated and messy, and it’s impossible, past a certain point, to disentangle the synergistic feedback loop between artists and their culture. Again, generalizations just get you in trouble.

Sarah Monette, "A Month of Writers, Day Sixteen: Sarah Monette", Whatever, 2007-12-20

You're not alone, Jon!

There are other folks who have their doubts about Ron Paul. Perry de Havilland is also wondering whether a Paul presidency would be a good thing:

I am a hawk, no doubt about it. If I am going to be taxed by the state, I would much rather my hard earned money be spent dropping bombs on the lackeys of Slobodan Milosevic (Bill Clinton's finest hour, without a doubt) and Saddam Hussain, than on corrosive domestic 'entitlements' and ever more kleptocratic regulatory statism.

So then along comes Ron Paul, the first US presidential candidate since Ronald Regan with any notion whatsoever that the state is way way way too big. Moreover here comes a person who thinks the only way liberty can be preserved is to take a radical axe to Leviathan's tentacles and re-establish constitutional limited government. Cool. Very cool, in fact. So do I really really like Ron Paul? Well I like him but less than you might think as some of his remarks are borderline delusional 'troofer' stuff and that does him no credit at all. Is he actually going to win? Probably not but that is not what this article is about (commenters please note). Do I even want him to win? Well that is what this article is about.

He wants a return to constitutional limited government. What's not to like about that? But then my eye falls on that picture of Murray Rothbard in Ron Paul's office. I am not a fan of Rothbard even though there is indeed much good stuff in The Ethics of Liberty. Although I think he was correct about a great many things, I also think he was often as intellectually dishonest as Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky and perfectly fits Adriana Lukas' definition of a barking moonbat: "someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency". For Rothbard to have argued that the cold war was a delusion and that the Soviet Union was not really a clear and present danger is so preposterous on so many levels that I am not even going to elaborate why. If you can not figure out that one yourself then this article is not addressed to you. In fact, please stop reading and get lost.

More positive reviews for Ron Paul

I have to admit that this article was custom-tailored to get my attention. Not only is it a positive article on Ron Paul, but it opens with an ultra-libertarian quote from P.J. O'Rourke:

"Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class."

— P.J. O’Rourke

As evidenced by the wild success of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, Americans have become Libertarians, even though they don’t seem to know it yet. Hardened views on the left and the right dominate the political scene in Washington D. C., with efficient and competent management of government the casualty of an ideological war between the two dominant parties. We have become a red state/blue state country, with elections angrily won 51 percent to 49 percent.

Little noticed in the increasingly shrill red versus blue sniping, however, is the emergence of a purplish centrism. The purple centrists who will shape future elections are we Libertarians, who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate. We believe in personal responsibility and minimal government. We do not meddle when the issues — be they Iraq, your bedroom or your religious beliefs — are not our business. In short, we say: Smoke all the crack you want, or go motorcycling without a helmet; just don’t expect me to pay for your rehab.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a thoughtful attempt to claim the broad center in the middle of the red/blue political bickering that passes for political discourse today. And if there has been a real surprise in the GOP race, it has been the strength of the independent-thinking OB/GYN doctor from Texas. His Web site gets many visits, and not because men think they might see naked women on it.

Celebrating the very worst in bad writing, 2007 edition

At least bad writing can have a purpose: the very "best" of it gets rewarded in the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

Miss Cardinal mused over the singularly decadent manner in which Master Hammond consumed the steak and kidney pie and was reminded of the practices of certain cannibalistic tribes with whom she had lived during her travels in Borneo, not New Guinea, although New Guinea is certainly nice this time of year, despite the fact steak and kidney pie is rarely served there, at least not the kind made from sheep or cows.
Brad R. Frazer
Boise, ID

Agent 53986262.9 was strapped precariously to a giant Chinese firework, the fuse slowly shortening like a noodle getting slurped into someone's pursed lips, and although he knew he was running out of time and still had no plan for escape, all he could think of was the song about the Muffin Man and how the word "polyurethane" made it sound like the material was made out of multiple urethras.
Allison Kelly
Great Falls, VA

Much, much more brain-curdling "goodness" at the link.

Extra-geeky gifts

PC World offers some suggestions for the mega-geeks in your life, including this (kinda cool) wearable:

4. Wi-Fi on the Fly
Wi-Fi Detector T-shirt
Wonder which of your neighbors has Wi-Fi? Forget wardriving. Put on Think Geek's stylish black Wi-Fi Detector T-shirt ($30), and you can warwalk. Electric blue bars on the front light up when you encounter a wireless network; the more bars that light, the stronger the signal. (But it won't tell you whether the network is secure--sorry.) When it's laundry time, you can remove the detector, which draws power from three AAA batteries housed in a compartment that slips into an interior pocket. Wow your friends, impress your neighbors, and convince your spouse that marrying you really was a terrible mistake.

Still no improvement at the main blog

All the MovableType interface can tell me is that [This post no longer exists] for each and every post I've ever made there. This is not a hopeful sign that things can be easily rectified.

Er, ooops?

While trying to post something earlier this evening, over on the main blog, I hit a snag: it looks like the ID numbers contain at least one duplicate, which means I can't post anything until we can resolve the issue.

I hope to be back online at the main site soon, but I may have lost a lot of recent posts (currently, the Movable Type interface says I've never posted anything on the blog . . . which doesn't augur well).

Template issues on main blog

Yes, I know . . . you can't read the main blog when you try to view it in IE or Opera (and possibly other browsers). I don't know what happened: I made a change to one of the archive templates, but it should not have had any influence on the main page of the blog. I don't know how to fix it yet, because I don't know why it broke in the first place.

The politics of data manipulation

Ken Holder points us to this little gem of a discovery:

Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record

An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action [. . .] this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. [. . .] While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

Links in the original article. Emphasis mine.

QotD: Operation Keelhaul

I remember [when I lost faith in government] quite clearly. It was the summer of 1972 (I could probably find the month and day if I did some shovelling). I had already been a libertarian for ten years, but still thought minimal government was the only choice. Then I attended a seminar in Wichita, conducted by Robert LeFevre and underwritten by the Love Box Company and the local Seven-Up bottlers every year.

Bob maintained that "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure", and as evidence, he presented, among other things, Operation Keelhaul. (Warning: the Wikipedia entry on this travesty is woefully inadequate.) Bob said that a drunken FDR and his equally drunken buddy Winston Churchill—deliberately kept that way by Stalin—had agreed at the Yalta conference to use their troops to round up everybody in western Europe who'd found the war a handy way to refugee the hell out of Russia.

The story is also told in George N. Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia.

Also rounded up were Russian expatriates who had left before, during, and after World War I, and others, their children, maybe, who had never even seen Russia. The Wiki piece emphasizes Austria as the place this was done. Bob talked about France and I have since met the son of a US Army officer who helped carry the program out there. He died feeling ashamed of having obeyed those orders.

They were all put in the same kind of cattle cars that had taken Jews to the concentration camps, shipped back to the Motherland (couple of syllables missing in that term, I think), and shot to death within hours. Estimates of their number vary. The governments involved will admit to a couple hundred thousand. A couple hundred thousand! Bob, who was in Europe at the time, said it was more like two million.

That was it for me and government. Any government, all government. And it's why I don't give a rusty fuck, to quote Rod Steiger, what we replace it with. Especially given the events of the past six years, what could be worse?

L. Neil Smith, "Letter from L. Neil Smith", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-12

Main site offline again

I don't know what's going on, but the main site is currently showing a blank page. I'll try to get in touch with my virtual landlord and see if it's fixable. Stay tuned.

Static web site down

Clive just informed me that the server hosting my static web site is down, and will probably be down for a couple of days. I'll let you know when it'll be back in service (once Clive lets me know, of course).

(Cross-posted to the main blog)

Service restored at main site

Jon just sent me an email that we're live again back at Quotulatiousness. I hope that I won't need to use this backup too often, although it's been handy to have somewhere to post items while the main blog has been offline.

Sounding off Royally

Doug Mataconis isn't happy that some woman called "Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor-Mountbatten will be visiting the free and independent United States of America". Apparently, visits from certain foreign heads of state (like the Queen of Canada) are more irritating than others:

Okay, let’s get this straight people.

We won the Revolutionary War.

We owe no alliegience to the British Throne.

When it comes to the British Royal Family (to the exent you can call the Buckingham Place rendition of “Married With Children” a family) we owe them nothing.

No respect.

Nothing.

Okay, to be fair, Doug is actually objecting to the somewhat ridiculous lengths to which some Americans go to honour royalty. Respect for a visiting monarch is fine, but it's perhaps going too far to treat them like Hollywood actors . . . (tongue very firmly in cheek).

Still all quiet back at the ranch

No change to the status over at bolditalic.com, we're still offline with no official prognosis for return to normal.

Footage of NASA's bad-luck train

NASA is having a heck of a time getting a set of solid rocket boosters from Utah to Florida, as detailed in this CNN story.

H/T to "John the Mc".

More on the militarization of local police forces

Radley Balko provides more background on the increasing use of military equipment and tactics by civilian police forces:

The Pentagon giveaway program began in the late 1980s, and is almost certainly responsible for the dramatic rise in the number of SWAT teams across the country, which led to the 1500 percent increase in the number of total deployments over the last 25 years, and to the increasing use of paramilitary tactics for nonviolent crimes. Many criminal justice experts say the program, along with the fact that SWAT teams and narcotics officers are often trained by former members of elite military groups like the Army Rangers or Navy Seals is responsible for the "cowboy" mentality that pervades many SWAT and narcotics units.

It isn't hard to see why. Outfit domestic police officers in military clothing, arm them with military gear, train them in military tactics taught by ex-military personnel, then tell them they're fighting a "war" on drugs, and we shouldn't be the least bit surprised when they treat city streets like battlefields, drug offenders like enemy combatants, and victims like Katherine Johnston and Isaac Singletary as mere casualties of war. Posse Comitatus isn't some quaint relic from the Civil War era. It shows a clear understanding between the two institutions' missions. One is charged with protecting our rights. The other is charged with annihilating an enemy. It's probably a good idea not to get them confused, no?

QotD: Allergies

It's allergy season — but you knew that, if you have them. Your lovely spring days are spent fighting an Invisible Misery Cloud that makes your head leak. If you don't have allergies, you don't care, and you've already stopped reading, so we can talk about you now that you're gone. Has he gained weight? Maybe it's just those shoes that make him look fat. And that tie! Jeez. Last time I saw something like that, it had been run over on 35W by a semi. Anyway: I don't have allergies, but I live with someone who is allergic to the world every spring, and it's horrible. She uses eyedrops to combat the pollen, and from her expression they're composed of Drano and lemon juice. Then there are the drugs; make you feel like your head is filled with confused bees. It's hard to see her suffer, so I don't spend a lot of time at home in the spring.

James Lileks, "Allergic to Meteors", Star Tribune, 2007-05-01

Main site still down

No change over at the main site yet. I'll keep you posted as I find out myself.

Latest news from Featherstone

The most recent newsletter from Featherstone includes:

THE F'ING WINERY TOUR
Join Featherstone, Flat Rock and Fielding (all the F'ing wineries) for a weekend full of phenomenally fun winery tours, filled with fantastic, flavourful, wines paired with fabulous finger-licking good food bites. Tour dates: May 5 & 6 from 11-5 pm daily. Passports can be purchased for $10.00 each and include:
- chance to enter a draw for an f'ing good prize
- complementary tasting of two fantastic wines at each winery, served with a funky twist.
Featherstone's f'ing food pairing will be focaccia topped with Upper Canada Triple Crème Brie and sun dried tomato pesto.

They're also releasing their first-ever Sauvignon Blanc:

The newly released 2006 Featherstone Sauvignon Blanc VQA has lots of tropical fruit flavours with the typical grassy notes: it is zesty, refreshing and incredibly drinkable. As wine writer Gord Stimmel says: "My top scoring wines do confirm excellence again in our local wineries. I'd like to share my winners with you … Featherstone 2006 Sauvignon Blanc shows the typical straw/grassy nose, with an exotic touch of kiwi, leading into flavours of zesty lime and lemon, with a crisp finish."

It's a summer's day in a glass, full of vitality and spirit. Enjoy slightly chilled with a patio lunch, as pre-dinner sipping or with seafood appetizers.

More on the Johnston case

Radley Balko comes out with both guns blazing:

While an innocent, elderly woman lay bleeding, handcuffed, and dying on the floor of her own home due to their malfeasance, these animals went about planting drugs to implicate her, and concocting a story to save their own hides. Every case these officers ever worked on needs to be reopened. And that's just getting started. A police department that could produce these three dirty cops, and allow them to operate, is a department that has almost certainly produced many more. It would be awfully coincidental if the only three bad drug cops at APD all happened to be working together this particular night, and happened to get caught on this particular raid.

Johnston's murder should also be a wake-up call for those who instinctively believe initial police accounts of what happened during one of these raids. I suspect that if Kathryn Johnston had been a 22-year old innocent man instead of an 88 (or 92, depending on who's reporting)-year old innocent woman, we may still not know exactly what happened in that house.

Original post here.

Draft reactions

Vikings War Cry has a summary of what the experts have been saying about the players the Vikings drafted on the weekend. Overall, they seem to think that Minnesota got some good quality players for their picks, although several feel that the Vikings should have taken a quarterback in the first couple of rounds.

The Star Tribune's Kevin Seifert sums up the draft.

Nostalgic for the future?

Remember those personal flying cars from the "what will you be driving in the year 2000" articles and the Moon vacations we were all supposed to be taking by now? Paleo-Future wants to exorcise those thoughts for you.

H/T to William A. Wenrich for the link.

Blog situation still unchanged

Jon is reporting that the bandwidth issues still haven't cleared up: even with the blog shut down, there's more than 20Mb/day of traffic. No idea if the old site will be back soon.

It will come as no surprise . . .

. . . that the main site is still offline.

Toronto FC still looking for first goal of season

Toronto's newest professional sports team, Toronto FC, is both winless and goal-less after four outings, including last night's 0-1 loss to Kansas City:

A chilly afternoon didn't stop the crowd of 20,158 from welcoming first-class professional soccer to Toronto. The raucous, largely red-clad fans chanted and cheered from the opening whistle to the last, and their club gave them much to celebrate in the early going.

After starting their MLS tenure with three road games, Toronto FC clearly seemed energized by the BMO Field atmosphere and responded with the strongest first half of their brief history. Toronto had three shots on goal to Kansas City's one in the half and dominated the pace of play. It was a far cry from the club's showing in the first half of Wednesday's 3-0 loss at K.C., when the Wizards outshot TFC 9-2.

The first real chance for either squad came in the 10th minute, when some sloppy clearing from the Kansas City defense led to Toronto forward Maurice Edu carrying the ball into the K.C. penalty area. Edu managed to separate himself from his defender, but his hard shot sailed wide right of the net.

The first goal in TFC history was nearly an own goal. An innocuous-looking corner kick in the 14th minute from Toronto's Kevin Goldthwaite was caught, but then dropped by Wizards 'keeper Kevin Hartman. But he managed to grab the ball just before it rolled over the goal line and gave Toronto an unusual debut on the MLS scoresheets.

My kind of science class

H/T again to Roger Henry.

An alternate source of maps

R.J. Henry, through diligent espionage efforts, has found a source of Soviet-era maps, including London, Dublin, Manchester, and Newcastle. Roger writes:

Which makes you wonder what their maps of the US of A looked like. Still, it worked both ways. Working in Moscow in 1980, the only street map of the city came from the US embassy and was obviously prepared from high altitude pictures or, maybe, satellite pics. Even the Russians used it as the attitude of the authorities in those days was "If you don't know where you are/going then you shouldn't be here".

Fiction reader's life-cycle

The Seven Stages of Falling In Love With an Author. Addicted readers will get this one, immediately.

H/T to Laura Gallagher.

Main site still down

This is beginning to be a regularly scheduled post . . . the main site is still out of service.

With the 7th pick, the Vikings draft . . .

. . . Oklahoma running back Adrian Peterson. Access Vikings has the details:

The Vikings had their pick between Peterson and Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn and they elected to go with the running back.

UPDATE 3: Just got some more Peterson quotes from an interview he did in New York. Asked about sharing time with Chester Taylor, Peterson said: “I think that will help me a lot playing with a guy like Chester. Just learning the ins and outs and some guidance. You know , you’re never too good to not have advice from other guys. I look forward to that. It’s a team that when I visited, they emphasized that they love to run the ball. I’m just ready to help them and be a big contributor.” Peterson said he would be flying to the Twin Cities today and he should meet the local media on Sunday morning.

UPDATE 2: Peterson just did a conference call with the Twin Cities media. He said he would not need surgery on his collarbone and that he feels good, “really good,” right now. Peterson also said he is working on running lower to the ground to avoid taking a pounding.

From what little I've heard, this sounds like a good pick: the other top choice in that slot was quarterback Brady Quinn, and drafting another QB would have been the next best thing to saying that the Tarvaris Jackson experiment is already a bust.

Chris Taylor hob-nobs with the brass

Chris Taylor reports on the Rev. John Weir Foote, VC, CD Memorial Luncheon.

A different kind of photoblog

This isn't your father's photoblog . . . it's more like your great-grandfather's photoblog.

H/T to Christian Tucker.

Main site still down

Well, the main site is still not responding (unless you count a 404 as a response), so Jon is still doing whatever maintenance may be necessary over at bolditalic.com.

QotD: Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the CanLit equivalent of a Waterford crystal chalice filled to the brim with cod-liver oil. No matter how impressive the appearance, you only go near it because it’s supposed to be good for you.

Victor Wong, "Margaret Liver-Oil Harps About Harper — So What?", Phantom Observer, 2007-04-24

Recent military honours

John Donovan has a great post up about the most recent set of military medals awarded by the Governor-General:

Aside from my habit of honoring our allies, what's my point, in that it says something about the Canadian Forces? In this group of honorees at least, there is only one officer. Suggesting that not only are Canadian forces doing good combat planning, that doesn't require the officer leaders on the ground in the fight to do extraordinary things to retrieve a situation, they also are not just patting each other on the back a lot. Nor is there an indication of there being that kind of officer the soldiers dislike - the Glory Hound.

The honors are going to the group most involved in direct combat at the personal level, where ordinary operations can require extraordinary effort: the part of the junior participants and their direct leaders, the non-commissioned officers.

Excellent point, and thanks for bringing this to the attention of our American friends.

Police "culture of corruption" in Atlanta

Radley Balko has the details on a plea bargain agreed by a pair of Atlanta police officers in their trial for the killing of Kathryn Johnston:

We now know that Kathryn Johnston fired only a single bullet, through the door as police were trying to break in. They responded with a storm of bullets, which apparently both wounded Johnston and the officers themselves. When they realized their fatal error, they planted cocaine and marijuana in the woman's home. They then pressured an uninvolved informant to testify to having made controlled buys at Johnston's home to cover their tracks.

The New York Times is now reporting that the officers have told federal investigators that their behavior was not out of the ordinary. That corruption, planting evidence, and giving false testimony are routine at APD. That's not surprising. The only way these officers could think they'd get away with all of this is if they were operating within a system that routinely allows for—or even encourages—such behavior. APD's focus on arrest numbers and professional rewards for the big bust apparently incentivized such short cuts.

It's also important to remember that it's possible we wouldn't know any of this were it not for the uncooperative informant who admirably refused to help the cops cover their asses. Had he gone along with the plan, much of the public may well still think Kathryn Johnston was a geriatric dope pusher, and that her death was unfortunate, but a justifiable use of force by the raiding police. The failure here is not just with these three police officers. It's with their supervisors who failed to provide adequate oversight. It's with the prosecutors who failed to ask the right questions. And it's with the judges who, according to an investigation by the Atlanta Journal, routinely signed off on these types of warrants with no scrutiny at all.

The key part of the "War on Drugs" is the need for police officers to violate the spirit of the law in order to develop cases to the letter of the law. Entrapment, far from being a rare and shameful tactic, becomes daily practice. Once you're committed to breaking some laws to enforce other laws, you're greasing the skids for a plummet down the moral hill to where police officers (and their supervisors and the courts) end up with a brutal rule of the jungle, where cops are only the largest gang on the streets.

Nick Gillespie on Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

Reason's Nick Gillespie will be appearing on one of my favourite TV shows (that I have to wait until it's available on DVD to see . . .) Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

Update, 1 May: You can watch the show (in three chunks) from this page at Hit and Run.

I don't know nothing about draftin' no college football players!

As I mentioned last year (and probably each previous NFL draft weekend, now that I think about it), I don't follow college football, so I have absolutely no idea about who the Vikings should draft tomorrow with their draft picks. They could get the "Steal of the Draft" (TM), and I'd be no happier or sadder than I am today . . . until the newly drafted players actually start playing the game in Vikings uniforms, they could well be stand-ins from central casting. Come to think of it, that's who the Vikings drafted last year, wasn't it?

If you're at all interested, the Minneapolis Star Tribune sports writers will be live-blogging the draft at http://www.startribune.com/blogs/vikings/.

Sorry for the outage at the main site

This is a temporary backup for my main blog, Quotulatiousness. If you're reading this, then the main blog is down (temporarily, I hope).

My virtual landlord is having bandwidth issues, which has forced him to shut down the biggest bandwidth hog on his site: my blog.