Barney Frank Explains How America’s Libertarian Nature Is Helping Legalize Gay Marriage, Marijuana - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "He describes the dilemma of those in favor of the bans as struggling to come up with reasons why it should be a legal or government issue. He notes that America's "basic libertarianism" makes it difficult to convince people to ban something just because you think it's morally wrong. They have to show it has real negative consequences that affect other people. Because prohibitions had been hammered through earlier, though, it was impossible to disprove claims that gay marriage and marijuana use caused actual harms."
Fantastic interview. Anthony Bourdain's Life Advice - MensJournal.com: "What’s the one adventure, journey trip, adventure that most changed your life, like before you were famous I would guess. My first trip to Japan, a couple of years before Kitchen Confidential, was absolutely life changing. It was like my first acid trip. It was that mind-expanding and climatic. I came back thinking about everything in a completely different way. I went there thinking that there were a certain amount of primary colors. I came back knowing in fact that there were 10 or 12 more. It made me want to do things. It showed me that there was so much more in the world than I had any idea— there was so much to learn and that there was so much stuff out there. It just gave me an appetite and drive. Where I was, was suddenly not enough. Whatever happened to me in Tokyo, I wanted more...
What’s the best advice you ever received from anyone and who gave it and when? Show up on time. I learned this from the mentor who I call Bigfoot in Kitchen Confidential. If you didn’t show up 15 minutes exactly before your shift, if you were 13 minutes early, you lost the shift, you were sent home. The second time you were fired. It is the basis of everything. I make all my major decisions on other people based on that. Give the people that you work with or deal with or have relationships with the respect to show up at the time you said you were going to. And by that I mean, every day, always and forever. Always be on time. It is a simple demonstration of discipline, good work habits and most importantly respect for other people. As an employee, it was a hugely important expression of respect and as an employer, I quickly came to understand that there are two types of people in this world: There are the type of people who are going to live up to what they said they were going to do yesterday and then there are people who are full of shit. And that’s all you really need to know. If you can’t be bothered to show up, why should anybody show up. It’s just the end of the fucking world...
I was offered a project years ago. It would have been spectacularly franchise profitable. And I went in with my partners and we met with someone who’s very, very good at this business and would have no doubt made up spectacularly wealthy. We all emerged from the meeting and looked at each other, and I said, “Look, do you want to answer, when the phone rings, do you want to pick it up and have that guy on the other end? Do you want that person in your life? We’ll all be fucking miserable. I don’t want to go on that ride. I want to keep the assholes in my life to an absolute minimum, if not zero.” That’s worth real, real money — to not have assholes in your life...
I have an operating principle that I am perfectly willing, if not eager to believe that I’m completely wrong about everything. I have a tattoo on my arm, that says, in ancient Greek, “I am certain of nothing.” I think that’s a good operating principle. I love showing up to a place thinking it’s going to be one way and having all sorts of stupid preconceptions or prejudices and then in even a painful and embarrassing way being proved wrong. I like that. If you can get a little smarter about the world every day, it’s a win. I just came back from Iran, and perfect example. I went in thinking all sorts of things and man, I had every expectation, everything I thought I knew, or suspected turned up-side-down...
How should a man handle regret? And what’s your biggest regret? Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it. I’ve disappointed and hurt people in my life and that’s just something I’m going to have to live with. If you made the basic decision that even in spite of your crimes, you are worth persevering, that it’s worth trying to get good things for yourself, even though you might not deserve them, then you, you eat that guilt and you live with it. And you own it. You own it for life. "
Awesome potential here. Warner Bros. is making a Suicide Squad movie - Batman News: "Variety reporting that Warner Bros. wants David Ayer to direct a Suicide Squad movie. Ayer is a writer/director who has worked on movies like The Fast and the Furious, Training Day, Sabotage and the upcoming Brad Pitt movie Fury. Despite Ayer’s writing credits, Justin Marks is reportedly working on the script. If you aren’t familiar, Variety has a summary of the Suicide Squad: The original comic series focused on a team of supervillains who were given a second chance by the government for redemption. The catch is that the mission they are sent on will likely end up killing all of them... The Suicide Squad comic was relaunched this month, with Harley Quinn, Deathstroke, Deadshot, Black Manta, and Joker’s Daughter making up the team. Suicide Squad joins Justice League, Aquaman, and Shazam as upcoming DC Comics movies."
"Would you let me date your daughter?"
Government self-interest corrupted a crime-fighting tool into an evil - The Washington Post via Asset Forfeiture Laws 'Evil' and 'Unreformable,' Say Former Justice Department Officials - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Last week The Washington Post ran a series of in-depth articles on the problems with civil asset forfeiture. Today, two former justice department officials weighed in on the issue, calling for the abolition of the program they helped create. John Yoder and Brad Cates were directors of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office, with a combined tenure running from 1983 to 1989. As they explain, the program started off with good intentions, but has turned to be a cure worse than the disease: Asset forfeiture was conceived as a way to cut into the profit motive that fuelled rampant drug trafficking by cartels and other criminal enterprises, in order to fight the social evils of drug dealing and abuse. Over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits...
Can asset forfeiture be reformed? Yoder and Cates don’t think so: The Asset Forfeiture Reform Act was enacted in 2000 to rein in abuses, but virtually nothing has changed. This is because civil forfeiture is fundamentally at odds with our judicial system and notions of fairness. It is unreformable...
Despite its popularity amongst law enforcement, civil asset forfeiture clearly violates key principles of the U.S. legal system. It reverses the burden of proof, and violates the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. This opposition from former government officials who helped implement it is a testament to the harm it causes. It’s just a shame that their opposition comes 20 years after their role in its implementation."
Thailand, you're doing it wrong. Backpacker Murders: Thai Prime Minster Says Women In Bikinis Aren't Safe - Unless They Are Ugly: "Thailand's prime minister has made the astounding claim that his country may not be safe for female tourists who wear bikinis, "unless they are not beautiful". His comments come in the wake of the horrific killings of young Britons Hannah Witheridge and David Miller, who were found semi-naked on a Thai beach on Monday. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said that tourists, particularly women in bikinis, were mistaken if they thought Thailand was safe because it was beautiful...
He said: "There are always problems with tourist safety. They think our country is beautiful and is safe so they can do whatever they want, they can wear bikinis and walk everywhere. But "can they be safe in bikinis... unless they are not beautiful?" he added. The Prime Minister, who seized power in May 2014 in a military coup against the government, made the comments in a live televised speech on Wednesday."
America, still uninformed. Morning links: U.S. violent crime rate continues to fall - The Washington Post: "The U.S. violent crime rate continues to drop. But most Americans continue to think that crime is getting worse."
Progress. Federal appeals court: Stop using SWAT-style raids for regulatory inspections - The Washington Post: "On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued a ruling on the sort of issue you’d hope a federal appeals court would never need to rule on — whether the government should be allowed to use SWAT-style tactics to perform regulatory inspections. At issue were a series of police raids on barbershops around the city of Orlando. The raids were basically fishing operations for drug crimes and to recruit confidential informants. All of the raided shops were black- or Hispanic-owned. The problem is that, because they were fishing expeditions, the police didn’t have enough evidence to obtain a warrant. Instead, the police asked an occupational license office to send along an inspector. Voila! These were no longer drug raids. For the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, they were now officially licensure inspections that just happened to include armored cops storming the businesses as if they were harboring an ISIS sleeper cell."
The Heart of the Matter: Policies Don't Just Have Benefits. They Also Have Costs: "When people are evaluating a policy sanely, they instinctively know to weigh the benefits *and* the costs. Which is how you can identify the policies some people are so attached to they value them for their own sake. Drug prohibition is one; war is another. How can you know? Watch for people discussing those policies as though they offer only benefits and involve no costs. For example, you'll see a huge amount of the "no costs, only benefits" tendency now with regard to war with ISIS. To me, it's really a question of applying common sense, imagination, and our understanding of human nature to try to divine what makes sense. Seeing how the attacks of 9/11 incited America into an orgy of retaliation that continues to this day, I surmise that being bombed causes humans to crave revenge. Then I try to imagine what it's like to be Iraqi, for example, and to have my country invaded and occupied by foreigners who kill over 100,000 of my innocent countrymen and turn another four million into refugees (out of a population of about 33 million)... and what it must be like to live under the shadow of flying robots that have killed thousands of my innocent co-religionists... and I think, "Well, if these people are anything like Americans and not instead innately wired for pacifism, they now probably crave revenge for what we're doing to them as much as we craved revenge following 9/11. And look what that caused...
I'm inclined to believe that with the risk of dying in a terror attack anytime in this century lower than that of drowning in a bathtub, we could probably handle The Very Scary Terrorists in a way that didn't end the lives of something like six thousand American military personnel; that didn't burn, blind, maim, cripple, and brain damage tens of thousands of others; that didn't kill tens of thousands of innocent foreigners (that's a lot of "collateral damage" for a policy to have to justify, no?); that didn't add $3 trillion to the national debt and siphon off money that could have been invested at home to blow it up over seas; that didn't lead to the rise of ISIS; and that didn't embody so much of what James Madison warned of when he said: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war, is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other." and "The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." and "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.""
Schneier on Security: Fake Cell Phone Towers Across the US: "A couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran a story about fake cell phone towers in politically interesting places around Washington DC. In both cases, researchers used by security software that's part of CryptoPhone from the German company GSMK. And in both cases, we don't know who is running these fake cell phone towers. Is it the US government? A foreign government? Multiple foreign governments? Criminals? This is the problem with building an infrastructure of surveillance: you can't regulate who gets to use it. The FBI has been protecting Stingray like its an enormous secret, but it's not a secret anymore. We are all vulnerable to everyone because the NSA wanted us to be vulnerable to them. We have one infrastructure. We can't choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don't. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy. We can be secure from everyone, or vulnerable to anyone. And I'm tired of us choosing surveillance over security."
RAWIllumination.net: "Wilson: At one point I was calling myself an Anarchist, an Atheist, and a Witch. Then when I reached my 40's I softened that. I started to describe myself as a libertarian, a pantheist, and a neopagan. And since then I moved on to a decentralist, a pragmatist, and a proponent of maybe logic…. "
The Navy Routinely Spies on Citizens Then Helps the Police Prosecute Them | Motherboard: "In this specific case, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service agent in George scanned the computers of every civilian in Washington state who happened to be using the decentralized Gnutella peer-to-peer network, looking for child pornography. The agent, Steve Logan, found child porn on a computer owned by a man named Michael Dreyer. Logan then passed his evidence on to local law enforcement, who arrested and eventually convicted Dreyer, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled that this was a massive overstep of military authority, a disturbing trend, and a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that prohibits the military from conducting investigations on civilians.
The government argued that it conducted the surveillance on the off chance that it caught a military member violating the law and suggested that it has this authority in any state with a military base...
This case, Judge Marsha Berzon argued, demonstrates that that's clearly not the case. "The government's position that the military may monitor and search all computers in a state even though it has no reason to believe that the computer's owner has a military affiliation would render the PCA's restrictions entirely meaningless," she wrote. "The record here demonstrates that Agent Logan and other NCIS agents routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate the restrictions on military enforcement of civilian law." The violation was so egregious that Berzon and her fellow judges argued that "the extraordinary nature of the surveillance demonstrates a need to deter future violations.""
"For democracy to be real you have to have... openness of information. People must be told the truth. Then they can vote and make decisions on the basis of facts."
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