In Latinam Veritas

Here's another great video from my former colleagues at Reason. The law enforcement guys are just too much.



One of the cops, professing an adolescent affinity for libertarianism, said 'As a younger man I used to say 'carpe diem'...Now, as a parent, I'm 'carpe kids.'

Indeed, cops are carpe'ing kids all over the place.

For those unfamiliar with the idiom or Latin, "carpe" means "seize."


bellum medicamenti delenda est (et carpe custodem fatuum )

EMP ICBMs and Other Bridges for Sale

I rarely delve into foreign policy on this blog, usually because it's not in my professional bailiwick (outside of the international scope of the drug war, at any rate), but sometimes something is so egregiously silly I have to say something. (That, and this is something loosely tied to the Cold War and Russia, both of which I do, in fact, know a bit about.)

A conservative IU alumna I follow on twitter led me to this #headdesk-worthy item over at Heritage's blog:

One particularly visceral threat is nuclear fissile material falling into the hands of non-state belligerents. The American public, however, is acutely aware of such a threat. The notion of a “dirty bomb” attack has been pounded into the nation’s collective consciousness by pop-culture hits such as the Fox television drama 24. What is less known, but equally disconcerting, is the danger posed by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

An electromagnetic pulse results from the sudden burst of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the detonation of a nuclear weapon. An EMP can also result from natural phenomena, such as a geomagnetic solar storm; however, our nation’s national security apparatus should be prepared to deal with the consequences of an enemy EMP attack.

If a nuclear weapon were to be detonated hundreds of miles into the atmosphere above the continental United States, the resulting electromagnetic pulse could destroy the nation’s electric grid and render impotent all elements of society that rely on electricity. In short order, many aspects of American society would be thrust into the early 19th century.

Now, I will grant, the science behind what EMP would do to U.S. infrastructure is legit, as far as I know. But the likelihood of manufacture and delivery is something entirely different. Most nations are just not capable of launching an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that could detonate a nuclear bomb in the U.S. atmosphere. Of the two non-NATO countries I can think of, neither is openly hostile (or dumb) enough to risk retaliatory annihilation, ruin the global economy, and bring the planet to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

The rest of the post reads like an ad for whatever defense contractors are responsible for missile defense.

The fact of the matter is, even though the nuclear club has added new members in recent decades, most don't have a reliable delivery mechanism capable of striking anything, much less the United States on the other side of the planet. I'm not saying they never will have that capacity, but it's a hefty financial investment just to step up to a pissing contest they have no intention of seeing through.

Given that Al Qaeda has (thankfully) had trouble getting chemistry sets to detonate in people's Fruit of the Looms, I don't think it's terribly responsible to think they're going to attain and deploy a nuclear missile with a technology only a few nations have ever been able to assemble...at the cost of countless billions of dollars in design, technology, assembly, transportation, and maintenance. Barring that will-never-happen scenario, there's no extant state or organization on the planet with the motive and means to launch an atmospheric nuclear strike against the United States.

Just because a presidential candidate with a Ph.D. says something that sounds all sciency on the Tee Vee doesn't mean it isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. It really, really is.

N.B.: This is not to say that neighbors of hostile nuclear club members have nothing to worry about via shorter range missiles--though I think those worries are often overstated--but not even the most hawkish arguments for protecting South Korea or Israel could feasibly include a 'missile shield' for the United States as any way germane.


bellum medicamenti delenda est

Quote of the Day

This made me snort:

Hanson glibly mentions former segregationist Republican Strom Thurmond's "wandering hands," which is a euphemism for "former white supremacist who fathered a black child out of wedlock and managed to keep it a secret until after his death."

That's Adam Serwer over at Mother Jones dismantling Victor Davis Hanson's screed about, inter way-too-much alia, how much it sucks to be Herman Cain. I think Adam may be a bit hard on Hanson for this quote, cuz I mean, "wandering hands" really is so much more economical for word count...

...and for glossing over what wretched human beings Thurmond and his ilk really were.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

"Made in the U.S.A." Is Not the Problem

I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing today on the oversight of the Department of Justice. The sole witness was Attorney General Eric Holder, who would be called upon to answer for "Operation Fast and Furious," a failed DOJ/ Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) program that was meant to snare cartels in gun trafficking. I tweeted the first part of the hearing, but I wanted to discuss an op-ed by two state attorneys general that Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) had put in the Congressional Record (courtesy of Emptywheel's @bmaz):

Congress and the media have understandably focused on the missteps of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the “Fast and Furious” sting operation that allowed suspected “straw buyers” to purchase weapons and transport them to Mexico in order to build cases against drug cartels.

However, the covert operation was terminated abruptly after its possible connection to the tragic death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was revealed. Unfortunately, most of the recent criticism about the operation seems to be serving as a means to attack Attorney General Eric Holder and destroy the ATF, rather than to hold those behind Fast and Furious accountable.

The focus should be on the real public safety problem underlying this controversy: keeping arms from the Mexican drug cartels and protecting the security of the United States. However, many of the roadblocks faced by ATF and the Department of Justice are not being built by international criminals, but by Congress. (Emphasis mine)

The piece goes on to explain the prolific violence in Mexico and that 95% of the guns recovered from Mexican drug violence 'can be traced to the United States.' This sounds troubling, but it's really smoke and mirrors.

As I've detailed in the past, drug violence in Mexico is indeed rampant and unspeakably brutal. People are kidnapped, murdered, often tortured, strung up from overpasses, disemboweled, and/or beheaded. Does it really matter whether the murderers bought their ropes and machetes from stores in Tuscon or Tijuana?

It's the murderers, stupid.

If we could magically keep American guns out of the hands of the cartels, people would start being gunned down with a greater percentage of AK-47s sold in other countries than AR-10s made and sold in America, but they would still be gunned down. The cartels have planes, boats, and more than enough money to get whatever they want through their expansive networks. Making it marginally more difficult to acquire weapons may be good policy insofar as we want better, more sensible gun laws in this country, but it's hardly the "real public safety problem" facing our law enforcement agencies and the public at large.

The cartels make astronomical profits from selling the drugs banned by the United States' global prohibition policy. That money gets them access to the entire planet and all its terrible weapons that make their line of work so bloody. Ramped up interdiction efforts just make drug dealing more dangerous, but also more lucrative, and thus more enticing. So, when you think about it, the real public safety problem is the one that enables and incentivizes the cartels to commit heinous crimes in the first place: the Drug War itself.

Arguing about where the cartels bought their guns is like arguing the make of the bus that just hit you: it's trivial, at best, and probably a sign you have brain damage.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

UPDATE: This isn't meant to be a dismissal of the ineptitude that plagued Operation Fast and Furious. This was a post about the underlying problems, not the highly questionable tactics employed in that operation.

Smokin' Joe Frazier, RIP

Because of other projects and responsibilities tomorrow, I'm not going to have the time to write up everything I wanted to say about Joe Frazier, who died tonight of liver cancer. However, I wanted to implore the people who may otherwise not pay attention to the coverage about his life to pay attention to his relationship with Muhammad Ali.

I'm not sure I've ever written here about my deep affinity for The Greatest, but suffice it to say that there was not an athlete I admired more than Muhammad Ali--even though all of his meaningful fights happened before I was born. But Joe Frazier's legacy will always be told in tandem with his professional and, more to the point here, personal fights with Ali. And despite my profound admiration for Ali as a fighter and as a man, Ali's treatment of Frazier was utterly disgraceful.

Ali was a young, brash, anti-authoritarian man of great pride and braggadocio. Ultimately, I think his overabundance of confidence was one of his greatest strengths--of which there were many. But he went too far with Frazier--humiliating him and calling him a Tom and Gorilla, among many other awful things. I understand that Ali was trying to get into Frazier's head, but whatever line there is between trash talk and humiliation, Ali crossed it repeatedly with the exuberance and glee of a bully.

Frazier took it--and took it to Ali.

Their relationship was important to note because, much more than it was with Sonny Liston, the Ali-Frazier feud was used as a metaphor to describe the social turmoil among blacks emerging from the Civil Rights Era: was our identity to be one of patriotism and patience (Frazier)? Or was it to be of proud, unyielding defiance of authority (Ali)?  Of course, we all forge our own identities as individuals, and fittingly, these two men surpassed the narrative arcs assigned to them to become the more complicated sports icons and historical figures we acknowledge today.

In time, Ali apologized for what he said and did over the course of their intertwined careers. I read recently that Joe had publicly forgiven him--which is a testament to the kind of man Joe Frazier was. No man should take the verbal abuse and humiliation he took from Ali--and Joe Frazier was so much the better man for that forgiveness.

Smokin' Joe Frazier, RIP.

UPDATE: A few people flagged an article on Twitter. Following the Thrilla in Manila, this was filed on deadline at Sports Illustrated. This is what sports journalism should look like.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Government's Addiction

Charlie Savage reports that the DEA is ramping up its militarization efforts around Latin America:

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.


“You have got to have special skills and equipment to be able to operate effectively and safely in environments like this,” said Michael A. Braun, a former head of operations for the drug agency who helped design the program. “The D.E.A. is working shoulder-to-shoulder in harm’s way with host-nation counterparts.”

 The DEA has hit-teams now. What could possibly go wrong?

“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved,” [University of Miami professor Bruce Bagley] said. “If an American is killed, the administration and the D.E.A. could get mired in Congressional oversight hearings. Taking out kingpins could fragment the organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t exist in Central America.”(emphasis mine)

In short, the Obama administration's answer to the Drug War is to get more violent and put more agents in harm's way, the benefit of which will be...more violence. It's not like this hasn't been tried before:

The FAST program is similar to a D.E.A. operation in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which drug enforcement agents received military training and entered into partnerships with local forces in places like Peru and Bolivia, targeting smuggling airstrips and jungle labs.


The Reagan-era initiative, though, drew criticism from agency supervisors who disliked the disruption of supplying agents for temporary rotations, and questioned whether its benefits outweighed the risks and cost. The Clinton administration was moving to shut down the operation when five agents died in a plane crash in Peru in 1994, sealing its fate.

Best case scenario: country A sees a wave of US-backed military raids and violence. This country restores its "capable institutions" and  after countless firefights with law enforcement and one another, leaving scores of innocents dead, the resident drug operation finds more fertile ground to operate in country B, which lacks similar capable institutions. America still gets its drugs and the bloody fight continues in a new country. This predictable and oft-repeated result is called the "balloon effect."

Like a gambler at a casino who just doesn't know when to quit, the United States continues to double-down on its hopeless efforts to use violence to solve its 'drug problem.' Any objective observer of the situation can clearly see its futility and the consequences of pursuing this course of action. Yet the gambler continues, thinking this time it's gonna work. Any short term gains are completely illusory, but they are used to justify even more of the same.

It's time we start thinking about an intervention.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Other 1%

I have been, at best, ambivalent about Occupy Wall Street and its various iterations around the country and Western world. I certainly understand that they are having a hard time in life right now and have legitimate grievances against a system that is clearly unfair. That said,

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I'm very much on board with Matt Welch's piece at H&R the other day. (I'm not sure Alex Pareene's take is any more accurate in describing what #OWS is about than the litany of other "concrete ideas," but it's as good as any.):

Who are these wise men, and what are these rules, these promises, this ticket to class mobility, or at least a secure career, this singular notion of the one "right" way to do things? At the risk of going all "Generation X is sick of your bullshit" here, count me as one Gen Xer who does not recognize the world that Alex Pareene and the Salon staff (many of whom are even older than me!) have sketched out here.


Cradle-to-grave employment (at least outside the public sector) has been dead since at least the end of the Cold War. Undergraduate degrees in English and Film and Sociology and Philosophy (and a thousand other subjects) have had debatable workplace utility for as long as I've been alive. There have even been previous housing bubbles and busts in Alex Pareene's lifetime.

I don't recall anything like the promises so cruelly unkept in Salon's list. I do remember my father warning me that an engineering degree would be much more useful in the workplace than English, to which I uttered a phrase available to 18-year-olds everywhere: Thanks, Dad; not your call. Ditto for the legions of well-meaning adults urging me to finish my undergraduate degree, to sign up for the Selective Service, and even (when I finally attained a decent living in the second half of my 30s) to pay a mortgage instead of paying rent. One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.

Matt's rant, at the bottom of it, is about the "poor me" complex that infects #OWS at the core. I've heard varying defenses of them and their plight, but let's be real: nearly more than 90% of the protesters have been to college. A majority are under 34, white, and presumably able-bodied. (How many sick people do you know can sit out in the elements for days on end?) That they, of all people, have it bad is notable, but hardly compelling enough for me to break out my not-exactly-full wallet and call the telethon phone bank. Indeed, these are nearly the last demographic ON THE PLANET that most people would feel sorry for. (The last group would be the so-called 1% at which this youthful bedraggled horde is aiming their incoherent angst.) It's not that they have it easy--but some perspective would be nice.

There is a 1% that is getting ignored in all of this please-pay-off-my-art-school-loans self-pity: the 1 in 100 Americans currently incarcerated in our own country. Indeed, they're only getting attention now because apparently the NYPD is allegedly directing the recently released down to Zuccotti Park because of the free grub and/or to stir up trouble. And if it's true, I don't condone such action, but the resentment of the #OWS is telling: "We are the 99%" is a catchy little slogan, but it's not true.

When I think of the people in our society who need the most help, I think of the mentally ill, the homeless, the illiterate and uneducated, the multi-generationally impoverished, and the victims of our criminal justice system--not coincidentally, a system that overwhelmingly picks on these very same groups. (In fairness, it has been noted that #OWS has begun to incorporate some of the needs of the homeless whom they've taken among their ranks into their nebulous demands, but given their proximity to one another, one would hope so.) If it's hard for a college grad or drop-out to get a job, how hard do you suppose it is for an uneducated ex-con? One in 31 Americans is at some point within the correctional system--incarcerated, on probation, or paroled--and a conviction is an easy way for Human Resources manager to automatically thin the application pile in a time of high unemployment. They don't have the time or inclination to inquire the circumstances about the crime--let alone whether the "crime" was itself just. If these issues have been brought up by #OWS, they haven't been brought to the fore either by their detractors or supporters.

In fact, like the Tea Party and its relationship to/co-opting by the conservative base before it, most of the "concrete ideas" are Progressive talking points or Democratic politicking. And, given that an election year is coming up and that guy down on 1600 Pennsylvania is relying on young, relatively affluent, educated Progs to help him win reelection, it should have been no surprise whatever that he threw a bone to one of the consistent "demands" of #OWS: college loan debt assistance.

Stepping out of the libertarian shell for a moment here, it doesn't matter what I think about the program in a vacuum: in times like this, the people who need help the most are being overshadowed because they either don't or can't vote--thanks felony disfranchisement!--or they can't give money to that end. The purported voice of the 99% is the voice of the disaffected middle class, which may be a lot, but certainly not 99%. For all their talk about unity and The People and other fairy tale claptrap, it's just more people with their hands out:  young, privileged, educated people who have it a lot better than people who need it more. 

At this point, they're just like any other special interest or lobby: they're just not as well dressed. But the Dems, the unions and the Left are paying attention and they thank #OWS for their support.

bellum medicamenti delenda est