The Bloggess is simply hilarious. That’s why I’m a fanboi.

But because she’s simply hilarious, she gets huge traffic. And because she gets huge traffic, she gets huge amounts of blogspam — press release spam, let-us-advertise spam, etc. We get a little here, but nothing like that.

Part of what makes the Bloggess hilarious and awesome is that she has a lot of fun with them, as I’ve pointed out before.

But spammers and other forms of marketeers are, as a rule, an entitled bunch. They don’t like it when people make fun of them.

That’s how marketeers from a firm that is supposed to be in the business of media relations and marketing called the Bloggess a “fucking bitch” and told her, in effect, that she should be grateful to be spammed by them.

The outfit in question is called Brandlink Communications LLC. Their Twitter account describes them thusly:

BrandLink Communications. Builds brands with ROI strategies Leverages its relationships with media, influencers and talent to ensure a clients messag

The kids these days — they’re in such a hurry.

Anyway, Brandlink sent the Bloggess an unsolicited PR pitch, hoping that somebody might blog about a Kardashian wearing panty hose, which they view as newsworthy. From the email:

“The Kardashian’s once again show they are right on trend, and this is on (sic) Mommy’s are all going to want to follow.”

Global illiteracy is also a trend that is widely followed, though I do not believe that it is a paying client of Brandlink Communications per se.

Anyway, the Bloggess sent her standard whimsical reply: a picture of Wil Wheaton collating paper. It means “thanks for the thing I didn’t ask for; here’s something you didn’t ask for, albeit almost certainly a far cooler thing.

Some marketeers laugh this off, or engage in amusing banter with the Bloggess. Not this one. “Erica” of Branklink sent a snippy email threatening the Bloggess with the ULTIMATE MARKETEER SANCTION: they would stop sending the Bloggess things she didn’t ask for and didn’t want:

We’ll make note of this email in moving forward and remember if we have any advertising opportunities with any of our clients not to go through you.

How will the Bloggess know whether or not the Kardashians are wearing hose now?

But that wasn’t all. “Jose” — would that be VP Media Director Jose Martinez? — sent a “reply all” calling the Bloggess a “fucking bitch.” I haven’t been to media relations school, but I’m pretty sure they don’t recommend that. Perhaps the “reply all” was an accident — but it strikes me as just the sort of deliberate-accidental move you might make if you are a passive-aggressive douche who spams people about Kardashians for a living.

The Bloggess responded with an unusually serious email about how she fights PR spam. “Jose” replied. “Jose’s” reply is why I am writing about this — not because of the “fucking bitch” reply-all, which could be Jose having a bad day. “Jose’s” reply shows him swollen with typical marketeer/spammer entitlement, including the following:

I get it and I was out of line by saying that however you put way too much effort into your approach. A simple “I don’t cover this, no thanks” or “Please remove” would suffice. To go out of your way to be snarky and rude is a little inappropriate. Again, I should’ve been less harsh – but I also feel like your email was rude and unprofessional as well. We will do a better job to research who we are pitching but maybe you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough to be pitched at all instead of alienated PR firms and PR people – who are actually the livelihood of any journalists business.

Jose is freakishly entitled: he thinks people should be grateful to get his spam, and that people should, out of courtesy, simply politely decline or ask to be removed from the mailing list. Jose sees himself as participant in a polite conversation, not as the equivalent of a stranger deluging you with unwelcome, over-capitalized and oddly spelled screeds telling you how you can make your dick bigger. Jose is wrong. Jose is a classic loser in high-tech form: someone who makes his money sending insipid spam emails about uninteresting things done by vapid people to masses of people, 99.9% of whom don’t care and the other .1% of which only care because they are stupid.

Jose’s attitude is typical of his ilk. Remember when we made fun of SEO spammer Jamie Spottz, and he showed up in the commends to tell us we should be grateful like his other clients? Remember Spara Townson, the the marketeer who thinks that the comments to other people’s blogs are fair game for her shitty little advertisements? Remember serial spammer Bradley Johnson, who inspired a different marketeer to show up and call us assholes for not just deleting comment spam meekly and moving on? Spammers and other marketeers are entitled. I suspect they feel so entitled because they secretly know what they do is so loathsome. They don’t just feel entitled, under the First Amendment, to spam you — they feel entitled to be free of criticism and ridicule for doing it.

But they are not. People like this aren’t entitled to such polite deference. They aren’t entitled to the expectation that you will simply delete the email or unsubscribe, that you will refrain from telling them what you think of them if it amuses you. They are unwelcome intruders, annoying ten thousand people to get one sale. Fuck ‘em. Keep up the good work, Bloggess.

Also, on a pure marketing level — if you were the manager for a celebrity, or an event, or a product brand, and were shopping for a public relations and marketing firm, wouldn’t you want to know that this is what the people at Brandlink Communications think is good marketing?

Edited to add: On Twitter, Jose is saying that he was “defending” Wil Wheaton. That’s his story. That’s his crisis management. He gets paid to do that.

Dear R.,

You work in accounting for a large company. Today you sent an email to a vendor, saying that the IRS had rejected a 1099 submitted in connection with that vendor because the tax ID number was wrong, and asking them to fill out a W-9 and return it to you.

Apparently you are a Popehat reader, R., and had our page open at the time. By some mischance, the email was sent to ken at popehat dot com rather than the vendor, whose email address you had searched for.

When I received an email stating that a large company had paid money to us in 2010 and that the company just needed our tax information to file a 1099, I was somewhat skeptical. Nobody pays Popehat anything, R., because nobody at Popehat does anything. Right now, Patrick is sitting on the couch watching a “Mamma’s Family” rerun.

I’ve now satisfied myself through online methods that you were being truthful, and your email was an accident, not a scam. So in retrospect, R., when I sent back an email asking whether you really really meant to do this thing, this thing we have here, with me, and invited you to visit this link and peruse it, and suggested that I would be speaking with you real soon now, I recognize that my tone was brusque and my implications unpleasant, and that I may have caused some anxiety.

I’m sorry about that, R.. You take me as you find me on any given day.

Best wishes, and thank you for reading,

Ken

This saturday, from 2-5pm United States eastern time, I will return to the radio station I blogged about earlier for a short, free-form radio show.  Readers interested becoming listeners, in hearing my Lord Humungusesque voice, or simply a collection of rather unusual music strung together with a logic unique to me, are encouraged to listen live at 89.3 fm (if you live in a the Research Triangle area of North Carolina) or online by clicking here.

As mentioned in the earlier post, I will take requests, either by telephone (I announce the number frequently during the show), or here in comments.  For instance, a song from Marian Call’s new album will be played in the opening minutes of the show.  As a bonus, I won’t be as technically inept as I was last time (when I hadn’t played DJ for almost ten years), because I’ve done five shows in the past two months. Radio DJ’ing is not like riding a bike: you do forget, but I’ve knocked off the rust.

Request rules, since I wasn’t clear enough about them the first time:

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Baseball is the national sport, but for those with an extra 2 or 3 IQ points above the mean this is displaced by the even more fun activity of confusing cause and effect.

For example, we are told that “the labor movement is the people who brought you the 40 hour workweek”, but any objective review of facts shows us that as technology improved and the consumer surplus increased working people negotiated a goodly portion of this new surplus in the form of shorter working hours.

The labor movement – whether consciously or unconsciously – tried to position itself in front of a train that was already moving, and like a small kid marching in front of a parade, came to believe that all the bands, elephants and baton twirlers were following its lead.

(There is a tangential story here, about how the labor movement took a left off of main street onto Mao Zedong Blvd and then got ripshit that the bands, elephants and pretty girls didn’t “continue” to follow it, but that’s a post for some other time).

The 40 hour work week is not the only social movement driven by technology, broad social trends, and mass communication wherein cause and effect were reversed in the popular narrative.

Slavery was repealed in the West thanks to growing consumer surplus caused by technology, and growing awareness of the evils caused by cheap printing…( I argue that the former is far more important – it’s a lot easier to oppose slavery when you can buy clothes made cheap by the cotton gin than when you have to choose between “blood clothing” and not eating for a few weeks in order to buy a new outfit). Again, in the popular imagination, cause and effect are reversed, and Abe Lincoln’s invention of Total War (including mass enslavement of free men by the State, war crimes and atrocities) was the cause of emancipation, instead of uniquely bloody, bungled, and murderous implementation of a world wide technology-driven trend that managed to be peaceful and bloodless almost every place that the US Federal government was not involved.

And speaking of technology-driven emancipation, we arrive at the thesis statement for today’s rant: the end of gun control is not politically or culturally driven, but was a historical inevitability that was written into the book of destiny by 1810, when Joseph Jacquard started using punched cards to control weaving patterns on his looms and when the practice of chucking rotary cutters into lathe headstocks was adopted en masse at water powered factories in Western Massachusetts in response to British attempts to confiscate American civilian-owned firearms.

OK, if I’m going to do an impression of James Burke, let me do it right. Hold a moment while I put on a thick set of glasses and hammer myself in the mouth with a mallet. …and…MMFGH! .. Ah, yes, now I look more like a product of British government-run dentistry. < spits teeth ; makes appointment for follow-up care with NHS sometime in late 2017 >

So, how does weaving in France tie in to British seizure of civilian owned weapons, BITNET, and the Homebrew Computer Club, and lead us to the death of gun control in the 21st century?

People ascribe the invention of punched cards to Herman Hollerith in the late 1800s, but in fact they dated back 150 years earlier, where they were created as an easier-to-file version of the ancient concept of the tally stick (Pliny the Elder documents these before the birth of Christ, but it turns out that we can push the date back 20,000 years before that).

So we’ve got people recording data on punched cards in the early 1700s, and a few decades after that we’ve got Basile Bouchon using them to half-assedly control textile mills in France, and a few decades after that Jacquard drastically improved the mechanism.

(Hint: the end of the week quiz will cover this specific point, and in your response to the essay question you could do worse than to note the parallel between ‘using stored information to create physical items’ in 17-aught-mumble and 20-aught-mumble).

So, we’ve established that information can be amplified into a nearly finished product by clever arrangements of spinning bits, moving bits, and stationary bits.

Let’s take a quick digression into metal working.

Your average man on the street has a pretty good idea of how wood is worked: metal is harder than wood, therefore metal cuts wood.

…but how in heck is metal itself cut and worked? I’ve done a few small social experiments and it seems that, like the internals of a MRI machine and the operation of the Federal Reserve, these concepts are delegated strongly to a mental bin labeled “magic”, and or “Jewish currency manipulation / mysticism”. (This view is not 100 percent wrong).

Zaphod told us that the secret is to ‘bang the rocks together’, but Zaphod was a liberal arts major and probably should have stuck to opining on Womyn’s studies issues and pomme frittes upselling. The real secret is heat treating. Bring some steel up to temperatures that you can reach in your basement with an oxy cutting rig that you can buy for less than the cost of taking your wife to dinner and a show then plunge it into cold water, and you’ve got a nearly diamond-hard object where the carbon atoms have been do-si-doh-ed into proper body-centered cubic alignment…and then throw it in a $20 toaster oven from Target and you can relieve some of the internal stresses and create a cutting tool that can slice through regular steel…and
cut through aluminum like Tipper Gore through the 1st amendment.

The point of all of this being that working metal is not magic, and if more of us saw our dads building mufflers from scratch instead of building bird houses from scratch, the mental block on home-building stuff from metal in modestly equipped shops wouldn’t exist).

Advance the clock a century or two and move the Google Earth cursor a bit to the left and pretty soon we’ve got Wozniak and Jobs unloading the first breadboarded Apple computer out of the backseat of their car and taking it in to show their fellow geeks.

We all know the part where Gordon E. Moore descends from the catwalk over the stage supported by ropes held by a Greek chorus, waves his magic wand, and declares that the price of transistors will fall by half every 18 months.

(Little know fact: the Intel it-760 Quad Core has the processing power of 7.9 trillion punched cards, and can control six automated looms for every person on the planet.)

You see where we’re going here: information not only wants to be free – it wants to control machine tools.

So how much does it cost to start cutting metal at home, using all the power of Jacquard, Jobs, and Moore?

If you want to do it right it’s still not cheap.

…but if you’re willing to go small, crappy, and scrappy, the options are there.

If you’re content with laying down lines of extruded hot glue, the friends-and-family of the Bng-Bngers will sell you a device.

If you’re a bit more roll-your own, you can cobble together you’re own glue-extruding mess from instructions .

If glue is a bit too shoddy to build with and you want to turn work wood, people are rolling their own machines for about $1.5k.

If you want to take a step up to working metal, that’s about $2k…or closer to $1k if you already have an old box sitting around that you can install Ubuntu on. (Side note: How did it get so cheap to build machine tools? By taking the labor out of the process and using automated metalworking machines to build automated metalworking machines.

If you really want to carve big metal, you can pick up a 2-ton, full-sized Bridgeport milling machine with a J head off of Craigslist for less than most folks spend on cable TV over the course of a year and follow instructions on how to CNC-ify it.

So, we’ve established that

• technology and productivity drive social trends
• data-driven control of tools is nothing new
• working with metal is pretty easy with cheap tools
• off-the-shelf CNC tools are cheap and getting cheaper

There’s one step missing: proof that the average man on the street can actually use cheap CNC tools to build firearms.

Even with out a first amendment, samizdat would ensure that the data would be out there…but given that the legislature and the executive do have to respect our right to speak (even if it has to be reminded somewhat rudely by the courts and the people from time to time), it’s relatively easy to find folks to talk to about home CNC production of firearms.

And remember that thing about information wanting to be free? In our glorious jetcar-free, but peer-to-peer-laden future, collecting and swapping is no longer just for baseball cards; it’s also for plastic printing your own AR-15 magazines and lower receivers.

…or, if you prefer metal over plastic, download the plans for a a full AR-15 lower that you can crank out with your fresh-from-the-box $1k Sherline CNC milling machine and $15 worth of aluminum, then kit it out with $410 worth of barrel, shoulder stock, and such.

Due to forces of technology (CNC controlled machine tools, cheap computation, open source ethics, and social sharing of designs) gun control is utterly dead. It’s a corpse, staggering along, not yet aware that it’s been gut shot, it’s blood pressure has dropped to zero, and its brain (such as it is) is about to die the True Death.

Try to outlaw gun powder and we’ll move to railguns and big capacitors. Try to outlaw primers and we’ll see plans for electronic ignitions up on wikileaks by the end of the day.

Go back a step and outlaw the sparkplugs and the capacitors and …yeah, it’ll work as well as the restrictions on cold syrup have ENTIRELY shut down meth production.

Gun control will stagger on for a bit, but there’s no putting some genies back in their bottles, and home printed firearms are one of those genies.

One hundred years from now everyone from Chinese peasants to American bankers (or do I have that backwards?) will have all the firearms and ammo they want, in the same way that 15 year old have all the hot monkey sex pr0n they want today.

It’s called technology, and it’s the universal solvent.

In taste and disposition, we at Popehat are a diverse lot. For example, Ken is on record as an avid aficionado of opera. Patrick, a former college dj to whom the young’uns still turn in a pinch, is known for his enigmatic and challenging sets. After our comrade Ezra withdrew to his special place, Patrick took up the mantle and now offers sporadic and stochastic coverage of the audial scene. Yes, Patrick even covers symphonies and opera to placate Ken. As for me, I’m a fan of John Dowland and Yma Sumac and Radiohead and Ravi Shankar and Fred Astaire. Eclectic, we.

There must be some overlap among us, though we haven’t mapped it out. But this much we already know: we are all fans of Marian Call.  Even Ezra, peace be upon him, was a fan of Marian Call.

So my next post will be a deepish dive into Marian’s music or, more accurately, her poetry. And in a third post, perhaps we’ll have a secret toy surprise. But if you have no patience for close reading and texty-feely artgeek stuff — if you’re the Shut Up And Sing type – then this post right here is for you. Here’s the Executive Summary/tl;dr version of the Minimum You Oughtta Know™ before venturing forth:

• Marian Call is an independent folk-funky, heartfelt, humorous, jazzy, torchy, quirky singer-songwriter currently thriving in Anchorage, which is really just North-North-North Seattle and thus a super natural fit for a Washington girl with a strong sense of place.
• We at Popehat have a colossal (aggregate) IQ, and yet we’re pretty sure she could lap us.
• While majoring in choral composition at Stanford (the axe, the axe), Marian realized that her inner vector was driving or drawing her otherwhere. Recognizing that digital distribution had altered the fundamentals of the music industry, she decided to embrace a newly feasible unsigned, try-before-you-buy, pay-from-the-heart business model. Next thing you know, she’s crankin’ out compelling music and hoping to roll a hard six on her gamble that educated and motivated consumers of art will sustain the art(ists) they like (and thereby not let her starve).
• Marian Call is a word nerd, but has become the preeminent Geek Chanteuse to a wide and motley array of awkwardly obsessive acolytes. She’s more than this, of course, but clearly no less. Her saintly attributes include exotic percussion equipment (a rainstick, a manual typewriter named Madeleine, a tea can containing the cremated remains of Zippy, a story-laden family cat) and measured quantities of dark, malty beer. Her superpower is recognizing paradoxes or antinomies in human experience and distilling them to heart- and mind-moving simplicity without pretending to resolve them.
• Taking seriously the business of enjoying close communion with her fans, Marian successfully completed within the 2010 calendar year a seat of the pants, fan-semi-coordinated tour of all 50 states, several Canadian provinces, and a selection of realms in cyberspace.
• During and after her tour, she worked on her third fully-fledged production piece: Something Fierce. She released this double album into crit-space just a few days ago (fancy lyrics, plain lyrics, music). Give it a listen! If you enjoy it, give it a purchase! (Cool cuts: 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, etc!)
• If you are a MacArthur nominator, I would like to point out that Marian Call is just, verdant, and peaceful.
• ProTip: You can also still listen to/enjoy/buy her album Vanilla and her commissioned Firefly/Galactica album Got To Fly.

That’s the wakizashi; the katana comes next time.  Meanwhile, listen to Marian Call. She’ll sing for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIO8nI2C8Z8

As Derrick has shown, the Tea Party movement has upset the Republican Party establishment, ruthlessly Zerging their way through the 2010 primaries and elections into 2011.  Whether the Tea Party’s Zerg tactics have the stuff to match [DEM] in the 2012 Diamond League remains to be seen.

On paper, [DEM] would seem to have all the advantages: an energized clan base coming out of the 2008 general election, no primary opponents, and a wizard clan leader [OBM] who demonstrated his micro to flawless effect, easily defeating [HIL] and [MCN] to top the ladder.

But how have [OBM] and [DEM] spent the past three years since revolutionizing the way politics is played?  Have they neglected the essentials in favor of booming toward the end game?  That may well be.

Ask any veteran Starcraft player and he’ll tell you that it’s a different game at the top of the ladder.  You have to know not just the common strategies, but to be prepared, in advance, to adjust to patches and changes in game balance.  And in order to react, you need to have the funadmentals memorized to the point where they’re second nature.  This means balancing offense with defense where required.  And defense means towers at the base perimeter, else how are you going to survive that newbie Zerg rush as you boom to battlecruisers?

A solid Terran bunker defense

Before [OBM] came along, the [DEM] clan had been hurting.  They’d lost track of the fundamentals, which had been drummed into their heads by former clan leader [BIL], in favor of easily countered stunt attacks like those favored by ANSWER and Code Pink, or been distracted by what they should have seen were feints, like the time in 2004 when Swiftboat microed [DEM] into wasting the entire midgame chasing one Protoss Zealot half-way around the map.  By endgame Cheney had built a wave of High Templars, and it was no contest.

While [BIL] could be erratic in the endgame, his mastery of fundamentals, and of defense, enabled him to survive everything [GOP] threw at him.  Defense, in politics, means a strong economy.  So how is [OBM] set for 2012, compared to where [BIL] sat in 1996, the last time the [DEM] clan defended a Diamond League level tournament?

Not too pretty.

Where [BIL] enjoyed a sound economy, with a balanced budget and unemployment at or below 5%, in other words, a strong base ringed with towers and lots of resources gatherers at the close of the early game, [OBM] has squandered a good start in an attempt to boom straight to battlecruisers.  He passed an extravagant health care law that the country can’t afford while already engaged in two wars.  He pushed for a stimulus plan that was wildly unpopular, hoping that it would allow him to jumpstart his tech. He’s left his base wide open and undefended, and utterly neglected his economy.  Where [BIL] could afford to stunt around with Lewinsky in the endgame of a second term, [OBM] will be lucky to have an unemployment rate below 9% in 2012.

With no economy and no defenses, [DEM] is in serious trouble.  A fleet of six battlecruisers can annihilate a ground attack of twelve ultralisks, but they can’t kill zerglings any faster due to slow rate of fire.  And [GOP], amateur as they are, will be sweeping through the [DEM] base with dozens of zerglings.

Why has this happened?  It’s a dirty little secret that  [OBM], who demonstated pro-level micro and mastery of the fundamentals when we were all playing original Starcraft, didn’t get around to buying Starcraft 2 until September 2011.

He’s been fucking around with World of Warcraft instead.  And he’s an awful WoW player.

Naturally, as a member of a minority group, Obama gravitated to Horde. No pussy night elves or shit-eating gnomes, thank you very much.  He started strong too, leading a raid into Stormwind on a pvp server that killed the human king in 2008. This happened hours before Wrath came out, when the city was packed with veteran level 70 Alliance players trying to form or rejoin guilds or auction off herbs before the rush on Northrend.  He got a lot of recognition for it too, because the raid ganked so many old-timers who’d griefed Horde n00bs in the past, like John Kerry and Al Gore. He even earned a title for killing George W. Bush in record time.

But he hasn’t moved his game past that. While the raids these days are focusing on new content in Cataclysm, Obama is STILL hanging around in Orgrimmar, typing “/strtin raid 2 kill gwb – no n00bs!!! – checkin gearscore!” every thirty seconds, and getting no replies.  The Horde has killed GWB hundreds of times since 2008.  They’ve moved on to new content.

Maybe the most pathetic thing about Obama is that as he doesn’t realize the reason he gets so few replies in Orgrimmar is that lots of Horde have dropped out of the game. He’s convinced the reason is that he’s schooled the n00bs, like Kosguild, into silence, and Horde who aren’t srsly hardcore, like the Bluedogs of Thunder Bluff, onto carebear servers.

In fact, they’ve given up on WoW entirely, in no small part because they can’t enjoy the game with Obama shouting LOLNOOB! any time anyone says anything in /general, /pvp or even /trade. They won’t be playing mmos at all until the Diablo 3 beta ends, in November 2016.

Can Obama be bothered to stop bunny-hopping in the Orgrimmar auction house, and dust off what used to be ninja-level Starcraft skillz? [DEM] had better hope so, because they only have one other top-level player: [BIL] has retired and [HIL] has made it clear she’s waiting for Diablo 3.

The index of prior chapters is here.

Investigating a large-scale fraudulent enterprise can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Pretty soon you run out of low-hanging free fruit (as I’ve covered in prior chapters) and you have to start spending real time and money — paying to pull public documents not available online, contacting live witnesses and meeting with them, re-checking your work for missed opportunities, waiting for developments in cases, etc. We’re in that stage now. But rest assured the series will continue.

For now, an update, and a new variation on the theme.

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Now, before you go accusing me of advocating sexual assault, I want you to know that I’m just trying to make a point.

On Monday morning, Williams appeared on Fox News and referred to Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner’s June golf outing with Obama as one of the “biggest political mistakes ever” by the Ohio politician.

“It’s like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu,” the country singer said of the bipartisan golf game. The hosts of the conservative network’s “Fox & Friends” morning program seemed surprised by the comment, with co-anchor Gretchen Carlson asking Williams to clarify what he meant by the inflammatory statement, saying, “You used the name of one of the most-hated people in all the world to describe, I think, the president.”

Williams responded, “That’s true … but I’m telling you like it is.”

Today, after 24 hours of sober reflection, Williams clarified that he compared a friendly golf outing to the Holocaust  … to make a point.

Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme – but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me – how ludicrous that pairing was.  They’re polar opposites and it made no sense.  They don’t see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the President.

Every time the media brings up the tea party it’s painted as racist and extremists – but there’s never a backlash – no  outrage to those comparisons…  Working class people are hurting – and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job – it makes a whole lot of us angry.  Something has to change. The policies have to change.

Right about now you’re probably asking yourself, what was Hank’s point?

Was it that because the media suggest the Tea Party movement has extremists in its ranks, Tea Party friends like Hank might as well remove all doubt by comparing a President whose views would pass for moderate in France to the worst murderer in history?

No.  That can’t be it.

Maybe it was that American politics is just for show, a game played to keep the rubes entertained while behind the scenes evil men plot genocide at an exclusive golf course, just like the Wannsee Conference.

No. It must be something else.

It could be that Hank was trying to tell us that being a rich celebrity, surrounded by fawning yes-men 24 hours a day,  means never having to take responsibility for saying whatever damned fool thing pops out of your corkhole, just like Mel Gibson.

Maybe best not bring up Mel Gibson.

Could it be that what Hank was saying is that American celebrity culture is just a modern form of idol worship, in which shallow airheads who haven’t got a real thought in their empty heads are held up as false gods with feet of clay?  That celebrities like Hank Williams, Jr. have less business spouting their idiot opinions on politics than an average auto mechanic?

It couldn’t be that.

But you can be sure that Hank had a point, and that the point will be made clear, just as long as we continue to buy Hank’s cds and download Hank’s songs.

Last month I wrote about how the University of Wisconsin-Stout (“UWS”) tore down Professor James Miller’s Firefly poster upon the silly pretext that it represented a threat, threatened him with arrest, then tore down another poster decrying fascism and threatened him over that poster as well. I also wrote about how UWS, once called out, simply doubled down, offering academic double-speak about “a campus climate in which everyone can feel welcome, safe and secure.”

Have UWS or its officials gotten smarter? No. No, they have not.

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Which of these quotations more nearly defines your world-view?

“You don’t have to live like a refugee.”

— Tom Petty

or

“Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”

— Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Please provide your opinion and discuss below.  All responses will be kept in confidence.  You are free to use a pseudonym.

Your response may well advance the cause of science.

Brussels: In swift reaction to an Italian court’s acquittal of Amanda Knox and Raffael Sollecito, convicted in a widely publicized 2009 case for the rape and murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher, the European Commission, sitting in emergency session, announced Directive 2011-4934, a sweeping series of measures intended to protect students in the European Union from violence.

The law, to be known as “Meredith’s Directive”, consists of 2,317 pages and so could not be fully studied as of this writing.  What is known is that the measure consists of generally non-controversial regulations which polling suggests to be popular among a European public surprised by the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito.  Surveys showed highest favor in the United Kingdom and Italy, whose citizens followed the Kercher case most closely.

“If this Directive will save one British child from meeting the fate of Meredith Kercher, it has fulfilled its purpose,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in a statement issued from Number 10 Downing Street.  ”By criminalizing possession of knives, scissors, and needles above two inches in length, we show that Britain and Europe stand side by side in our determination to protect children from the menace of stabbing weapons.”

European residents have sixty days to turn stabbing implements in to authorities under Meredith's Directive

Italian and British newspapers editorialized in favor of Meredith’s Directive: L’Osservatore Romano wrote in an unsigned editorial, “Only an imbecile could disfavor an edict so excellent, so manly, so redolent of the smell of spicy sea urchins, as Meredith’s Directive! It boggles the mind that some small few, no doubt Gypsies one and all, could weep and moan for the fate of a Criminal American Gangster Siren such as Knox, who massacred her loving friend. Henceforth all such foreign temptresses shall be interned, for their own protection, in guest hostels reserved for students of the arts of deception and lies!”

Artist's conception of a Foreign Guest Hostel to house non-European exchange students, and Roma, under Meredith's Directive

The Daily Mail, discussing a tax impost redistributing 95% of fees earned by privately retained defense attorneys to the new European Centre for Prevention of Stabbing, was more concise:

The Daily Mail, October 4, 2011

Passage of Meredith’s Directive was not assured.  Sources close to the Commission informed us of some resistance by the French, who were placated by assurance that the provision for mandatory “chemical castration” of accused rape suspects could be waived by judicial or Commission finding that the treatment would be “against principles of European harmony” in special cases.

Related complaints by Germany that the Directive’s Europe-wide prohibition on speech tending to suggest that accused murderers, or rapists, were innocent would burden that nation’s thriving ScheisserRapeUndNekrophiliaVideo industry were mitigated by an amendment specifically exempting makers and consumers of ScheisserRapeUndNekrophiliaVideos, and the provision of 650 million Euros for construction of the Karl Blumenfeld Institute for the Study of ScheisserRapeUndNekrophilaVideos, to be headquartered in Stuttgart.

Prior to press time we attempted to contact various European libertarian think tanks and non-governmental organizations for comment on Meredith’s Directive, but none could be found.

Fear not, America: in a world where so many wish you ill, the Transportation Security Administration is still vigilant against your greatest foe: Americans who have survived cancer.

Via Letters to my Country and Amy Alkon (who, you might recall, had her own recent run-in with the TSA), I encountered this rage-inducing story by Lori Dorn:

Yesterday I went through the imaging scanner at JFK Terminal 4 for my Virgin America flight to San Francisco. Evidently they found something, because after the scan, I was asked to step aside to have my breast area examined. I explained to the agent that I was a breast cancer patient and had a bilateral mastectomy in April and had tissue expanders put in to make way for reconstruction at a later date.

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information (pictured) and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a TSA Supervisor.

I’m sure the TSA will explain why it was necessary to grope a cancer patient in public, just as soon as their official blogger finishes bragging about how the TSA’s explosive detection technology helps them interdict smuggled fish.

This is, by far, not the first time we’ve heard that the TSA acts in an inhuman fashion to people with illnesses and disabilities. We’ve seen wanton treatment of people with urostomy and colostomy bags, the sick torment of the mentally disabled, and the demands that cancer survivors remove prosthetic breasts. Throughout, for the most part, the media remains the TSA’s compliant fluffers. So, though what happened to Lori Dorn is sick and infuriating, it is not new.

One of the questions I’ve been asking here is why do we let this happen? But there’s another apt question: these TSA agents are human beings, of a sort, so why do they act this way? Is there something about recruiting on pizza boxes that attracts a statistically unlikely cluster of sociopaths?

I think the answer is an old one and a simple one, congruent with one of the main themes seen on this blog: power corrupts. If you confer upon a man or woman the power to inflict tyrannies and indignities upon his or her fellow citizens, he or she will slowly grow to hate those fellow citizens, feel justified in mistreating them, and increasingly inflict the indignities with aggression and contempt.

Stanford University has offered two very apt studies, one old and one new. First, there’s Philip Zimbardo’s chilling and classic prison experiment, which illustrated how ordinary college students — people who on a more typical day would be thinking about weed and sex and avoiding work, people who were probably more countercultural than authoritarian — were transformed by being given even temporary power over others as mock prison guards. And now, more recently, a joint study by Stanford, USC, and Northwestern shows how petty power corrupts:

In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status,” the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.

The research, forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is “based on the notions that (a) low status is threatening and aversive, and (b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings.”

(Thanks to Greg Lukianoff for the pointer to that study.)

This study could have been written explicitly about the TSA. TSA agents are poorly paid, work in nasty conditions, and have little status. Yet they have, within their petty fiefdoms, tremendous power to humiliate and demean. And God, do they ever use it.

The fact that this is a recognized psychological phenomenon explains, but does not excuse, any more than it excuses police abuse and bureaucratic indifference. Nor does it excuse the leaders of the TSA and the Department of Homeland security, who have decreed a feckless facade of security theater that is calculated to lead to this result, all in the name of promoting unquestioning compliance.

What are you going to do? Are you going to retell these stories on social media and forums and blogs? Are you going to make it clear, when asked, that you don’t accept the security state’s excuses at face value? Are you going to write your representatives?

Are you going to stand up? Or is it really no big deal that a petty authority groped and humiliated a cancer survivor in public, purportedly for your safety?

Potentially, very.

Just ask Albin H. Gess of the Costa Mesa branch of the firm Snell & Wilmer. He’s making stupid and meritless censorious threats on behalf of Meghan McCain.

Continue Reading »

I LIED!

These soldiers are warriors for free speech and the American way.

Their response to a hateful bigot was to create a viral image that makes them world-famous* and gets them dates with hot chicks (or men if that’s how they roll).  Politicians, on the other hand, responded by enacting laws that allow cops to arrest legitimate funeral mourners on a pretext.

Via Chris Berez

*The last time I checked Technorati (as if anyone uses it since they borked the search functions) Popehat was the 347th most cited blog in the world.

Of course 9/11 was a tremendously important event in our nation’s history.

But our reaction to it is important as well. Such adversity can make us stronger, or it can make us weaker.

Some people seem to want to see 9/11 make us weaker. I’m not just talking about the people with a professional and political interest in making our liberties weaker. I’m talking about people who use 9/11 for the general wussification of our discourse.

Take, for instance, people who comment on the the Washington Post blog and complained because the paper ran a photo that had a building and a plane in the same frame.

Commenter Icemanchills said: “Do not like photo, and that should not require explaining. The plane in the background of the monument is insensitive and needlessly evocative of a horrible day in contemporary American history.”

I know that bullying is extremely unpopular right now, but don’t you think that America is a weaker place because no one is pushing Icemanchills down, stealing his lunch money, kicking sand in his face, and generally deterring him from breeding?

A nation full of people like Icemanchills is a nation full of people who agree that we ought to censor speech that doesn’t make weaklings feel welcome, safe and secure. A nation full of Icemanchills never accomplished anything, except possibly the growth of the freshwater-pearl and fainting-couch industry.

Edited to add: Is it perhaps irrationally curmudgeonly to make a point based on one comment on a paper’s blog? Maybe. Curmudgeonliness makes America great. Don’t make me go Google other examples, damn you. (Or, for that matter, cite the far more incendiary one I was thinking of.)