Nobody's Business

Rants From a Small Island

What, you're still here? Sucker for punishment, are you? Have you been quietly checking out this space daily, only to be met with crushing disappointment to find that that it seems deader than Tina Brown's TV career?

But let me drop the joshing and say that I'm touched. Seriously. Thanks for coming back. And my apologies. Resuming this blog has taken a little longer than I figured because of what Direcway, my new broadband service provider, calls technical difficulties, but which I now prefer to refer to as "you'd-better-finally-get-your-
fancy-satellite-system-in-working-order-or-I'm-going-to-rip-
someone's-nuts-off".

Granted, there's something geekily pleasing about knowing that my words now pierce outer space, traveling to some extraterrestrial communication apparatus that circles the globe and rains my nuggets of wisdom back down on the masses, like manna from heaven. The drawback is that so far, my brand spanking new dish can't find the frickin' satellite half the time. Sometimes I have service, and sometimes I don't. It's hit and miss, and entirely unpredictable.

Yes, there's a price to pay for moving to a beautiful island off the Atlantic coast, and this is it: to Verizon and Adelphia and other service providers, I don't exist. They apparently don't want my money. So even though I now live only a few miles from a premier resort in the Northeast, and even though my fancy-schmancy new house is right on one the island's main thoroughfares, and even though I can see the power and data cables strung from poles that are no more than thirty feet from my front door, and even though my new state talks a lot about promoting entrepreneurialism, there's no terrestrial broadband access for me and the other people in my community. Hell, get this: we don't even get voice mail service here. Verizon's too fat, cheap and lazy to hook us up with what was a novelty twenty years ago but pretty much a business necessity today.

On the plus side, I have water and mountain views from where I'm typing this, so when the blood pressure rises a bit too fast, a look out the window tempers my temper, as it were. Or I can take a walk out back, tiptoeing through the tulips lupines that cover a vast field, and almost as far as the eye stretches it's <maniacal cackle> mine, all mine </maniacal cackle>.

So, I'll get through this. And — silver lining — if some days I'm just too lazy to blog, I can always, plausibly, blame it on Direcway.

I'm Taking a Break From Blogging

No worries. No need to rock yourself back and forth while moaning "it isn't true." I'm moving, is all. To another house, in another state. I'm only suspending my blogging activities until I'm all settled in and all hooked up. Wish me luck, and check back in ten day to two weeks from now.

Meanwhile, for your daily fix of wild rantings common sense, go here or here or here. You'll be in good hands.

Polly's Not A Cracker

Words of wisdom from Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian, regarding Britain's odious new anti-blasphemy bill:

This bill is not "closing a loophole" as Labour claims, but marches right into dangerous new terrain. Here is an example: it is now illegal to describe an ethnic group as feeble-minded. But under this law I couldn't call Christian believers similarly intellectually challenged without risk of prosecution. This crystallises the difference between racial and religious abuse. Race is something people cannot choose and it defines nothing about them as people. But beliefs are what people choose to identify with: in the rough and tumble of argument to call people stupid for their beliefs is legitimate (if perhaps unwise), but to brand them stupid on account of their race is a mortal insult. The two cannot be blurred into one — which is why the word Islamophobia is nonsense. And now the Vatican wants the UN to include Christianophobia in its monitoring of discriminations.

What, exactly, is the crime that this bill's supposed to solve? Do people of faith really want to present themselves as mewling crybabies who deserve special protection against having their feelings hurt? Why are so-called adults worse at practicing the old sticks-and-stones adage than pretty much any sensible sixth-grader? More to the point, if you're a true believer, who could ever damage your faith?

If Muhammed is your guy, and you're secure in the knowledge that he has given you an inviolable roadmap to living a moral life, why would you care if some ass-hat thinks your beloved prophet was a bloodthirsty pedophile? Or suppose you've turned over your life to Jesus Christ Your Savior — does it really not occur that you that if Jesus readily forgave the men who drove iron spikes through his hands and feet, you should be able to deal with the terrible inconvenience of hearing a Christianity joke from time to time?

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P.S.  Good discussion, as usual, at Harry's Place. I particularly like this sentiment from David Bruno, who neatly sums up my own feelings about laws that punish so-called hate crimes:

I would hate to see a law introduced to prevent people from expressing 'homophobic' sentiments. Why? Because it would prevent freedom of speech. It would also create other aggrieved people who would rightly state that their own concerns could not be legally expressed. It might seem superficially that such a law would protect homosexuals from discrimination, but in reality it would not. It would drive the problem underground. It would make resentments fester. It would make extremists with more dangerous axes to grind seem more reasonable when compared to the out-of-touch PC fantasists who drafted the law. In other words, such a law would be unnecessary and may even increase prejudice and ill feeling towards people who should be treated as adults, not as a special group needing special protection.

My own view is that rather than introduce a whole set of laws aimed at protecting all sorts of 'vulnerable minorities,' it is time to repeal all such laws, and to rely solely on incitement-to-violence laws which prosecute actions and statements whose specific goal is to effect violence against an individual or group of people. We already have these.

We Want You Big Brother!

Emboldened by its pyrrhic election victory last month, Tony Blair's Labour Party steps up its barrage of assaults on liberty. Here's a quick but depressing roundup.

• If you're sixteen or seventeen years old, don't try to buy Mom a nice set of steak knives:

The government today unveiled its centrepiece legislation to combat gun, knife and alcohol-fuelled crime in Britain. The measures — trumpeted in Labour's election manifesto and receiving a cautious welcome from the opposition parties — will see a ban on the sale of replica guns, a rise in the age permitted to buy knives, and new 'alcohol disorder zones.'

• If you're under sixteen, you're now also subject to curfews randomly imposed by the police — no more walking home from a movie after 9 p.m. on a balmy summer night.

Under this power, a senior police officer designates an area for a curfew and this is endorsed by the local authority. Once such an order is in place, the police have the power to remove any unaccompanied person reasonably believed to be under 16 if they are in the area after 9pm. There are hundreds of these designations in place all over the country. Crucially, the power to remove doesn't require any bad behaviour on the part of the young person.

• The long-feared Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill has arrived, Labour's special gift to Muslims:

The home secretary, Charles Clarke, will today publish a controversial bill banning incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, which opponents believe will outlaw religious jokes and curtail free speech. The racial and religious hatred bill will extend current offences on incitement to racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act to cover the stirring up of hatred against people of any religious faith. The offence will carry a maximum seven-year jail sentence.

• And, to enable a new toll-road scheme, all vehicles in the U.K. will soon be monitored by satellite 24/7:

British motorists face paying a new charge for every mile they drive in a revolutionary scheme to be introduced within two years. Drivers will pay according to when and how far they travel throughout the country's road network under proposals being developed by the Government. Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Transport, revealed that pilot areas will be selected in just 24 months' time as he made clear his determination to press ahead with a national road pricing scheme. Each of Britain's 24 million vehicles would be tracked by satellite if a variable "pay-as-you-drive" charge replaces the current road tax.

There's clearly a pattern here, one that builds on a long string of Blair-era civil-liberties attacks that include the constables coming after you if you're too fat, if you dare carry a penknife in your briefcase, or if you display an innocuous sign that the neighbors don't happen to like.

Scarily enough, George Orwell's enduring bestseller is beginning to look less and less like fiction.

What the Vagina Monologues Don't Tell You

In South Africa, one Sonette Ehlers has developed an anti-rape apparatus.

The patented device looks and is worn like a tampon, but it is hollow and attaches itself with tiny hooks to a man's penis during penetration. ... He will have to be put under anaesthetic to have it removed.

It's a new twist on a recent Swedish invention. Best of luck to the ladies who go this route to protect themselves. Better hope that your attacker doesn't get creative in his choice of orifices if "regular" intercourse is now a threat to his, um, love pump (courtesy Spinal Tap).

Are you sure you wouldn't prefer taking some cues from the lovely Uma Thurman?

Supreme Court Defiles Peter McWilliams' Corpse

A good man named Peter McWilliams, a casualty of the Drug War, unwittingly gave this blog its name, thanks to his eye-opening book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do; The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country. I had planned to run my commemoration of Peter next week, on the fifth anniversary of his death.

But I won't wait. I can't. I want to talk about Peter today, right now, urgently, with love and anger duking it out in my chest. Love for a man who, though we never even met, helped teach me the meaning of personal responsibility and freedom. And deep, hot anger because the Supreme Court has just affirmed that pot is always a fearsome thing, and that it's somehow defensible to let people like Peter — people with AIDS, cancer, scoliosis, brain tumors, chronic nausea, and various other ailments — waste away in agony, rather than allow them the relief that medical marijuana brings.

I wrote the commentary below shortly after Peter's death, and I ran it in the magazine of which I was then the Editor — Advertising Age's Creativity. I'm publishing it again in this spot, unchanged. I'll do it next year, too, and the year after that, and so on, in honor of a smart, creative, caring, funny, decent man who was literally hounded to death once a callous, Kafkaesque justice system sunk its claws into him.

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The Ad That Killed Its Maker

by Rogier van Bakel

When Peter McWilliams took out an ad, it killed him. Literally.

The ad, an open letter to the movie community, ran in Daily Variety in December 1997. "Where is Hollywood’s answer ... to the ten million marijuana arrests since 1972?" Peter asked. "Where is the Gentleman’s Agreement or To Kill a Mockingbird or Platoon dramatizing the insane cruelty of the War on Drugs?" He also blasted Drug Enforcement Administration officials as "arrogant" and "selfrighteous."

It wasn’t unfamiliar territory for Peter. In 1993, he’d published an unputdownable, thought-provoking tome called Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do — the Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country (updated in 1996, and available for free here, in electronic form). The book, which made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, documented U.S. politicians’ attempts to legislate what people may and may not see, read, and ingest. Peter launched a particularly formidable argument against drug prohibition.

In 1996, when AIDS and cancer entered his life, he became an advocate for medical marijuana, testifying before the National Academy of Sciences and giving numerous media interviews. "As a recent cancer, chemotherapy, and radiation survivor who uses medicinal marijuana to keep down the anti-AIDS drugs that are keeping me alive," Peter wrote in the Variety ad, "I can personally attest to marijuana’s anti-nausea effect."

Exactly seventeen days after the ad ran, the government responded the only way it knows how: with a full-scale raid. Eight DEA agents, guns drawn, stormed Peter’s house in Laurel Canyon, California, and confiscated his computer, his backup drives, and various research materials. Peter readily admitted to growing some marijuana for his own medical use, "in the time-honored tradition of Washington, Jefferson, and Timothy Leary."

The feds had no arrest warrant at the time of the raid, but they finally came for him in July of 1998. The indictment against Peter made much of the fact that as the publisher of Prelude Press, his own publishing company where he employed eighteen people, Peter had given an advance to an author for a book on medical marijuana. That writer, a fellow medical-marijuana patient, used a portion of the money to grow his own medicine. The feds saw Prelude Press as the source of the funds the man had used to finance his little crop. So they treated Peter like a drug kingpin.

It’s an interesting piece of logic. If a Microsoft engineer uses some of his salary to visit a prostitute, should Bill Gates be arrested on federal pandering charges?

More importantly, did Peter really break the law? Depends on whom you ask. California explicitly allows the use of medical marijuana under Proposition 215, which voters passed into California constitutional law in 1996. The federal government, however, does not recognize a state's right to adopt its own drug legislation. So what Peter did was perfectly legal in his own state; it just didn’t sit well with some drugfighting hard-liners three thousand miles away in Washington D.C., who decided to dispatch an assault team to an increasingly frail AIDS and cancer patient.

One of the conditions of Peter's bail was a weekly urine test. Were he to test positive for illicit drugs, he'd return to jail, pending his trial. Besides, his mother (in her seventies) had put up her house as collateral for the bond. The feds could seize her home and evict her if Peter violated his bail terms. So Peter was forced to be sick as a dog on most days — much sicker than he would have been if he'd been allowed to smoke marijuana, a plant whose medical benefits are well-documented. Now frequently unable to hold down down his medication, Peter grew weaker and became wheelchair-bound.

Last month, when he was at home, taking a bath, the nausea overcame him once more. He choked to death on his own vomit. He was 50 years old. He died because the government wouldn't let him have a toke. Viewed another way, he died because he had the temerity to run that ad.

The prosecutors commented they were "saddened" by Peter’s death.

No doubt, so are the smart, well-meaning creatives on Madison Avenue who make ad campaigns for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, propagating a War on Drugs that is making more casualties by the day.

[© Crain Communications and Rogier van Bakel, 2000. Originally published in Advertising Age's Creativity.]

Nanny Forces Healthy Food on Readers

The Twin Cities-based Star Tribune has an ombudswoman, a.k.a. the readers' representative, whose thankless task it is to deal with irate subscribers. The problem with Kate Parry — and quite a few of her ombudsing colleagues at other news organizations — is that she feels obligated to take every whinge and niggle seriously, including ones submitted anonymously. I feel bad for her. Columnists and even reporters have a certain amount of leeway in telling unreasonably grousing readers to buzz off, politely or not. (Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times does it rather memorably.) Parry's understanding of her job, on the other hand, is that she must be always eager to please, the way a dog will heel obediently — and nervously — at the command of an ill-tempered master.

Here's a perfect example — one that says a lot about the groveling, asinine way too many of publishing's ombudscritters do their jobs.

Parry gets an anonymous voice message from a reader bitching about the food section's recipes. Too many deserts, too many calories, the caller charges, and adds that a headline over a recent food column should have been "The Star Tribune supports obesity." Parry, in her printed reply, makes it clear — twice — that most readers of the cooking section prefer to make high-calorie foods. For instance, when the newspaper, in an experiment, ran only recipes for "healthy" foods for a while,

...readers demanded the return of the unhealthy recipes because that's what they were actually cooking.

To her credit, Parry also points out that, like it or not, it's precisely

those tasty, fat-laden favorites that have made Taste [the food section] so popular.

Thus it seems that her reply to the complaining reader can only be something along the lines of "Sorry you feel that way, ma'am — can't help you." Instead, Parry illogically goes into jabbering doormat mode:

I decided that reader's headline idea on obesity hadn't gone far enough, that perhaps, "Star Tribune cooks up deadly, but tasty, food for readers" would be more accurate. I think Taste can do a better job of serving readers ... How about a 50-50 split on those recipes? Sometimes newspapers need to help readers confront unpleasant truths. Here's one: We're getting fatter, it's not good for us and the recipes in Taste, delicious as they are, contribute to that problem.

Wow. I won't even go into the fact that fatty foods, in moderation, are not inherently unhealthy, of course; that the "deadly" consequences of being overweight have been grossly overstated; and that, regardless, adults surely can make up their own minds about what they eat, even if that means trading longevity for pleasure. Let's just focus on the sad state of today's news business for a second. To wit: One anonymous complaint by some sour-pussed nanny, and the reader's representative springs into action, strongly advocating an overhaul of the popular, national-award-winning food section — a change that goes diametrically against what readers have already told the paper they want.

It's one thing to give your customers a chance to vent. It's quite another to publicly wear a "please kick me" sign and turn yourself into a cowering wuss at the first sign of a reader's displeasure. [via MediaNews]

Lightweight Politicians Want Lightweight Books

California's intrepid lawmakers want to do away with big textbooks in schools. In fact, the (mostly Democratic) legislators have forbidden the state's school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages.

Writes the Sacramento Bee [free subscription required]:

The bill, believed to be the first of its kind nationwide, was hailed by supporters as a way to revolutionize education.

Yes, it's quite the achievement — at least on a par with, let's say, rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

Over the last thirty years, California has gone from shining educational example to embarrassing underachiever.
•  Its teaching standards are much lower than those elsewhere, with less than half of all local school districts requiring teachers to get full standard certification in the subjects they teach (the national average is well over 80 percent).
• Among all states, California is a dismal number 49 when it comes to controlling class size.
• Its kids rank number 48 in academic performance, with only Louisiana and Mississippi producing bigger failures. (This is true even when you control for the state's great numbers of migrant and minority students. Speaking of which: Only one in five black and Latino pupils in L.A. score proficient or better on their English and math SATs, versus three in five white and Asian kids. See here.)

So the best way for lawmakers to address the crisis is, um, let's see...to impose an arbitrary 200-page textbook limit, whose only likely effect will be to force publishers to split existing works into multiple volumes. Such genius!

What will Sacramento's next contribution to the education system be? Hard to say, but my money's on a series of debates about whether to provide schools with generic toilet paper or Charmin triple-ply. [thanks, Martin]

Caution! Laughter and Fantasy Ahead!

Ken Masugi of the rightwing Claremont Institute weighs in on Human Events Online's list of Most Dangerous Books (I blogged about that precious document here). Masugi writes,

If I had a criticism of the list, it is the omission of fiction writers (and of historian Charles Beard). Was George Bernard Shaw such a dangerous one? James Joyce? Laughter and fantasy can contribute to a decline in our character.

Yeah. To say nothing of such character-sapping miscreants as, for instance, Dave Barry, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, and Walt Disney. You don't suppose there's a laughter-and-fantasy-lovin' liberal conspiracy afoot, do you? 'Cause I'm sure that wouldn't surprise Ken in the least.

Dutch Town Bans Swearing, Again

Excuse me, but WTF?

[The town of] Staphorst, in the so-called Dutch "bible belt" of eastern towns where religion holds sway, approved a ban on swearing by 13-4 council votes.

To me, people who use an occasional, well-placed curse word are a lot less objectionable than the pious assholes who never know when to take fucking no for an answer. So to the dickwads who make up the Staphorst council I'd like to say, Holland is not a theocracy — deal with it or move elsewhere. You tried this very same shit two decades ago and the Dutch courts struck it down then on free-speech grounds. What part of NO don't you understand, the N or the O?