The rare wise move from the APD

Finally the Atlanta Police department cracks down on the idiotic critical mass rides.

After years of looking the other way, Atlanta police recently cracked down on a monthly bicycle ride through the city streets that includes blocking cars and flouting traffic laws.

At least 10 officers, eight on motorcycles and two in patrol cars, followed more than 300 bicyclists through downtown Atlanta, Little Five Points and Virginia-Highland on June 27 from about 6:30 to 8 p.m. Most of the bicyclists stopped for red lights they normally would have ignored. At least two bicyclists were ticketed for disobeying traffic laws.
...
Highsmith, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, said Critical Mass would not be the same if the bicyclists followed the rules.

"The little bit of disruptiveness and the civil disobedience is a part of raising awareness [about bicycles] in a more conspicuous way," he said.

The group wants both better infrastructure for bicycles, including bike racks and lanes, and to show drivers that they, too, can hop out of the car and onto a bike.

Now honestly, if the cyclists are lobbying for better infrastructure, how does NOT using the infrastructure that's already there help matters? Why should anyone pay for more bike lanes when the existing lanes aren't being used and the people agitating for them are as boorish as possible?

Not that many people will care about this, but it's been a pet peeve of mine for years...

Talking to the police

Watch this video - it's a lecture by a law professor and a detective, both of whom agree on practically everything, it's weird.

Saturday links

• Deputy dumps man out of wheelchair - man then gets ahold of courthouse videotape, it reaches the media, and now that deputy is charged.
• Danish media reprints controversial cartoons, and show far more courage than American media outlets.
• Drunken Orgies Tainted System says Florida prison boss.
• Police Chief accused of improper chats retires - this is interesting. The police department in question was famous for find people trying to entice minors. Relevant quote

  Lindsey said Murray used his city-owned computer to chat online with women during an ongoing investigation into local massage parlors used as fronts for prostitution.
  All the department's computers, except for one used for the continuing Internet child sexual predator sting operation, are monitored by a keystroke program.

  
  Why would the only machine in the department that produces intentional evidence NOT have the keylogger installed?
  

• Tax me more fund raises little revenue
• The law and economics of pirates
• An aerial photo of San Francisco in the age of Earthquakes
• Fake cops rob family - this will be a growing problem I fear.

Most of these factor info my coming law enforcement meldown/feedback mismatch post I'm going to write one of these days...

This is no ordinary Tuesday

My predictions are Obama and Huckabee here in GA. On a related note, I met my first Ron Paul door to door guy on Saturday, he seemed very nice. He gave me a bumper sticker too.

Before I go vote, here are some links that caught my eye:

• Barstool Economics
• Leading denominations by location
• Your tax dollars by at work - Atlanta cop and Duluth cop in shoot out
  

Monday night rapid fire

• A photographer in Seattle wins a lawsuit against police for eighty thousand. His offense? Taking pictures of police doing public work in a public place. I think law enforcement is heading for a meltdown that will leave everyone worse off, which will be the topic of a much longer post as soon as I get time.
• David Friedman with more on the Ron Paul affair, it's a good examination of self selection and rhetoric.
• David Friedman again with one of the best blog posts I've seen on religion in quite a while.
  

Sunday morning links

Sorry for the light blogging work, getting the condo ready for sale is taking up quite some time. Here are some links for everyone

• From the Agitator - Sheriff: SWAT Team Necessary Because Man Is a "Self-Proclaimed Constitutionalist"
• I'm feeling a strong urge to install this in my library
• This is interesting (new alt energy that could conceivably work)
  
• Why must the media not do their homework on plug in hybrids? If you're getting some some of the energy from gasoline, and some from the power grid, then miles per gallon is a bad measure of energy efficiency. Nonetheless, check out this CNN piece. FYI - CalCars has been doing this for years.
• Top Giuliani staffers go without pay, a lame thing to do.
  

It's been a light blogging week

But a heavy work week. For your reading pleasure, check out

• An NYPD detective commits perjury for no obvious reason, the matter seemed inconsequential. It's a bad omen for the current state of law enforcement.
• Check out this Ron Paul post, featuring the interesting line, "Rubble doesn't make trouble"
  

Scary quote of the day

From the AJC article Clayton may seek records on all renters

"This is not to say Big Brother is watching," he insisted. "It says Big Brother is helping."

It's not the most intrusive thing that could happen, but bear in mind that in the past 10 years we (the Atlanta Metro Area) have had

• 1 Mayor in jailed on corruption charges
  
• 1 political assassination of a sheriff
  
• 1 ex-sheriff convicted of said assassination, along with several deputies
• 1 police shooting of an 87 year old woman based on a perjured warrant
• The creation of a "Tupac Shakur Arts Center" funded by the taxpayers
• Cynthia McKinney's entire political career

And we should give the government more power?

Local drug war update

Today's newspaper brought mixed results. The Atlanta Police Department does seem to be cleaning itself up, indeed, much more than I expected. However, I haven't read anything about any sort of judicial accountability; they're the ones who approve the warrants, seemingly without even looking at them.

Rant Starts
Meanwhile, people like this guy send exactly the wrong message with his "How not to get busted" DVD series. The point of drug legalization is not to evade the law or get high, it's to live in a free society where people can make their own mistakes and take responsibility for them. Instead we revive the notion of demonic possession in the form of "addiction" which is a "disease", which is at the same time pitiful and criminal and a reason to treat us all like children in the hands of an all-knowing state.

The end result of protecting people from the consequences of their actions is to fill the world with fools, and that seems to be what we've done.
Rant Ends

Videotaping police

Radley Balco, in a column on FoxNews.com has an interesting and scary article video taping police at work. Basically there have been a string of incidents recently where people videotaping police at work (in uniform, in public, performing their duties) have been charged with crimes.

It's ridiculous. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for a private citizen in public view, which is why traffic cameras and the legion of private security cameras are legal (recording audio is considered different by the law). Why on earth would public servants (who are supposed to work for us mind you) be immune from this?

All this would change if we made all government agencies were funded from the public treasury and weren't self-supporting, but that's a topic for another time I suppose.

Rapid fire and random thoughts

• Interesting thoughts on the use of mercenaries to settle third world conflicts (Darfour, the Congo, etc) at Instapundit and Marginal Revolution. I'm a bit queasy about the idea myself, though it's probably worth trying.
• Congress asserts amazing immunities for itself. No-knock raids and tear gas are good enough for you and me though.
• Why do we believe anything sponsored by supposedly independent interest groups, in this case, an epidemic of girls going wild?
• A nice AJAX primer from Brainjar.
• Traffic Data in Windows Live Local.
• The current media created craze is the fight club. I think this article misses out on reasons why it is appealing to techies though. If you're a programmer, you're spending all day in your virtual world, and stepping into the ring is about as far away from that as you can get.
  

Never go to Baltimore

A couple is arrested for asking for directions. Really.

Via the Agitator

Quick round up

• The Simpson's intro - as done by real people.
  
• Spaceplanes
• It's not fascism because we don't call it fascism - the food police are now after soft drinks.
• Some clear thinking on the morning after pill.
• Evidently AT&T has a 1.9 trillion call database.
• Your tax dollars are paying auto workers not to work.
• An article on tracking public opinion on the internet. I will one day get my blogprophet project up and going.
  

This is scary

And will be making the rounds on the internet soon I would imagine.

HT: Marginal Revolution

Zing!

This why I like the Agitator
...

Former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes got it right when he said, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

The Holmes quote is popular with the anti-smoking crowd. But it's not quite accurate. The Ban the Ban folks always responded to it by saying that given that patronizing smoking bars is strictly voluntary, the proper analogy would be for you to run full speed into my closed fist, then complain when you walk away with a bloody nose.

Frankly, even that is probably giving them too much credit. Given the science on secondhand smoke, you'd have to run into my fist several dozen times per day for about 30 years before you'd even begin to see the first signs of a bloody nose. But of course, as soon as one person out of several thousand did get a bloody nose, you'd start agitating for laws calling for the arrest and imprisonment of people who stand around with close fists, lest some anti-smoking activist accidentally bump into one.

This article had me enraged for about an hour

Really, an hour. Here is money quote

Junk-food suit targets Nickelodeon, Kellogg

"But then they turn on Nickelodeon and see all those enticing junk-food ads," Carlson said. "Adding insult to injury, we enter the grocery store and see our beloved Nick characters plastered on all those junky snacks and cereals."

Carlson and another plaintiff, Andrew Leong of Brookline, Massachusetts, spoke at a news conference organized by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

They intend to sue Kellogg and Nickelodeon parent Viacom Inc. in state court in Massachusetts and served the required 30 days' notice on Wednesday.

"For over 30 years, public health advocates have urged companies to stop marketing junk food to children," said Susan Linn of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "Even as rates of childhood obesity have soared, neither Viacom nor Kellogg has listened."

It's as if this woman's children have their own money and do their own grocery shopping. Furthermore, I have it on good authority that children existing before television. Why not just take that away? Why aren't we calling in some sort of family services on people who can't control their kids?

And campaign for a commercial free childhood?

The pro-war libertarian quiz

The ever interesting reason magazine posted

The Pro-war Libertarian Quiz

How far are you willing to go to win the War on Terror?

These days I'm more for finishing Iraq favorably than pro-war, but I am strongly against just "declaring victory" or "strategic redeployment" without really changing anything.

Recently, here are my answers

1. Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?
   
   Nope. I think this is an impeachable offense too. The current case (supposedly) only monitored calls that crossed borders, which is legally a different matter, if I'm understanding things correctly.


2. Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?
   
   No. If caught on the battlefield I support stripping them of citizenship (by virtue of them being a foreign army and then treating them as one would a foreigner).


3. Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?
   
   Yes. This question doesn't belong here at all. This should be subject to warrants as well, but there are several situations where this could be the right thing to do.


4. Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?
   
   If they committed treason (using the standard definition that is unrelated to journalism) ,then yes. If not, then no. No to sedition laws. FYI - I consider freedom of the press to mean publishing, not protecting confidentiality of sources. They should be able to publish whatever they want, its the cover-ups and withholding information that I don't consider protected.
   


5. Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?
   
   Yes


6. Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?
   
   No. I guess this is really asking is if we should have super-cops or not.


7. Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?
   
   No. Absolutely not. Due process of law in all things.
   


8. Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?
   
   No. With a possible exception of keeping order in case of natural disasters.


9. Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?
   
   No.


10. Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?
    
    No. Anything classified should have an automatic sunset date commensurate to it's secrecy, but nothing should be indefinite.
    

8 out of 10.

This is weird and scary

Private industry eavesdropping

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official.

Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often.

And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company.

I've been wondering about this. I wonder how much the media does this as well. There has been very little coverage about cell phone privacy since Gingrich was recorded illegally several years ago. PGP encryption coverage has been curiously non-existent as well.

MARTA at it's finest

Subway Rider Busted for Selling a Token

Transit police handcuffed and cited a man who sold a $1.75 subway token to another rider who was having trouble with a token vending machine. Transit authority spokeswoman Jocelyn Baker said Friday that the officer "acted within the law" after he spotted Donald Pirone, 42, selling the token Nov. 30 inside the West End subway station

Instead of giving Pirone a warning, the officer decided to handcuff him and give him the misdemeanor citation under a 1992 state law that bars passengers from selling Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority tokens, she said.

via the Agitator.

By all impression Marta would seem to have more employees than riders, but this is just ridiculous.