Positive Liberty

Speaking of promising political careers, I give you 13 year old Ralph Hardy who ordered a duplicate credit card on his father’s account and used it for a $30,000 spree with friends that ended in a Texas hotel room with $1,000 hookers playing Halo on XBox.

What separates Ralph and his friends from your run-of-the-mill juvenile thieves, you ask? When the prostitutes balked because he and his friends seemed so young, the boys told the women they were “people of restricted growth” and that refusing them would be illegal discrimination against the disabled!

I am in awe.

Via the Washington Post food section:

A lunch of found food includes sauteed morels on toast, steamed garlic mustard greens and fiddlehead ferns. Katie Letcher Lyle is a regular and enthusiastic forager in her home territory of Lexington, Va.

You find that toast in an alley somewhere, dust it off, it’s as good as new…

Civil asset forfeiture, meet copyright enforcement.

Because, you know, asset forfeiture just works so well in stopping illegal drugs. Here’s the text of the bill.

Yikes.

As a fan of professional football and college basketball, I pay scant attention to the NBA even when my hometown Washington Wizards make it to the playoffs. I missed, therefore, a bit of good natured sports rivalry wherein some enterprising D.C. Papa John’s pizza franchisee made up some T shirts calling Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James a “crybaby.” Frankly, it would take more than a free T shirt to get me to eat a Papa John’s pizza (or any other franchise pizza, for that matter) but apparently Cleveland’s Papa John’s shops have responded, offering local fans a pie for a mere 23 cents in “homage to James’ jersey number.” A pretty good deal, huh?

Alas, those pesky laws of supply and demand and something about price elasticity struck with 90 minute or longer lines quickly forming. “In suburban Cleveland, people stood wrapped in blankets outside a store in Westlake and the line was two blocks long in University Heights.” But, hey, it isn’t like a person’s time is valuable, too, is it?

Here’s a fascinating exchange between Kerry Howley and Timothy Sandefur regarding the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (noted previously here and here). I should add that subsequent details about police and court procedure both before and after the raid on the FLDS compound have been very troubling to me, making me doubt my previous, uncomplicated endorsement of the state’s actions.

However, being troubled by both the state and the FLDS does not make one any less a radical for individualism. It’s perfectly conceivable that giving more control to either one means that individualism loses. Highly controlling environments like the FLDS may indeed approach the status of a government, Howley argues, and I’m certainly prepared to think of them this way. But then, there’s an actual government on the scene, too, and it’s worth worrying about that as well.

I’ve also long thought that libertarianism is the most humane way to view adults in society, but that it breaks down when applied to children. This need not be a problem with libertarianism in itself, but only an admission that all great explanatory models have their limits. One simply can’t presume that a child has the autonomy or independent decisionmaking skills necessary to act as an agent of her own self-interest. This is what libertarianism demands of adults, and I believe that virtually all adults can do it, even if many adults aren’t willing to, and even if many others are convinced that they can run other people’s lives just a little bit better. The adults who want to run things they shouldn’t are the more profound or radical challenges to libertarianism; for libertarians, deciding the status of children will always be at best a question of where to draw the borders, not a challenge to the fundamentals.

I don’t have much of a problem, then, in saying that children have a limited set of positive rights — that is, of social obligations that adults need to provide to them, for a limited time, until they reach adulthood. A newborn baby can’t feed itself, after all, and from that point forward children in some sense must have positive rights, otherwise we would simply be bringing them into the world to let them die — an absurdity.

It’s not at all ridiculous to think that children also have to be taught how to use their rationality. They must be taught to speak and to read, at the bare minimum. These things aren’t automatic, and so much less are highly abstract concepts like freedom, justice, or the rule of law.

I am well aware that there is some paradox involved in an authority figure teaching a child to value independence and even to question authority figures. But this kind of teaching is clearly not impossible. Clearly some societies have done a good job of this kind of teaching, while many others have taught near-total submission to authority. To keep the freedoms that we have, it is important that our children learn the values of liberty — among them being able to question received social conventions.

Worth noting: Much of the best children’s and young-adult literature does this very well. Consider “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Horton Hears a Who!” and (though not all) of Robert Heinlein’s young-adult fiction. This is not to say of course that the FLDS is out there teaching their kids — as I will — to think for themselves. It’s only to note that the love of liberty isn’t mystically acquired out of the ether.

Update: Howley responds, reminding readers of the other side of intensively polygynous marriage — the discarded boys. If you don’t throw them out by the dozen, the math just doesn’t add up. She quotes from this AP story:

Damned by his religion, denied by his family and left with nowhere else to go, the teenager slept in a cold tool shed just steps from a company owned by his relatives.

They went home at night to warm, cozy beds while Tom Sam Steed stole bread, cereal and nutrition bars from a gas station just to survive. He tried, several times, to kill himself, convinced that he was worth nothing.

His salvation came when he got a job cleaning carpets and finally left the control of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its leader, Warren Jeffs.

Former members describe a religion that thrives on domination. Every detail of their life was scripted—from plural marriages to what they could wear, who they could associate with and what job they could have. In the last 4 1/2 years, more than 400 teenage boys have been excommunicated, many for seemingly minor infractions such as watching a movie or talking to a girl.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

I hope this doesn’t sound sexist, but our society would never tolerate this being done to girls. And I hope this doesn’t sound like overly facile atheism, but our society likewise would never tolerate this if the agent were a business rather than a religion.

Guitar connoisseur Billy Beck inspires this post where he leaves a comment discussing his past work with the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. Most of us have never been so lucky. Vaughn was a blues guitar virtuoso. He wasn’t one of those shredders who played scale like licks and patterns until he was faster than anyone else, but his playing could be just as challenging and virtuostic. Many of the electric guitar virtuosos play relatively thin gauge strings, much easier on your tendons than acoustic guitar strings; many of them can’t razzle or dazzle playing acoustic. Some fusion guitarists like John McLaughlin, Al Dimeola and Steve Morse have outstanding acoustic chops as well. Vaughn apparently played with really heavy gauge electric strings (for the tone), very muscular. His physical power over the instrument shows in this 12 string acoustic version of Pride and Joy. And be sure to check out this one as well.

Letting their freak flags fly in the most mainstream of Mainstream Media, Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (which one is Felix and which is Oscar?) grace the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with a paean to Dallas. No, not the next door neighbor of the NFL’s soon-to-be Arlington Cowboys, but the execrable prime time soap opera that premiered 30 years ago and, as Gillespie and Welch would have it, helped the West win the Cold War and, alas, abetted the political ascension of George W. Bush. Every silver lining must have its cloud, I suppose.

Dallas’s contribution to the decline of both communism and presidential “couthness” aside, one point Gillespie and Welch failed to mention was how much the Ewing’s iconic Southfork Ranch was and still is a Potemkin Village. The ‘Mansion’ at Southfork Ranch is in fact a 4800 sq. ft. house with a 960 sq. ft. enclosed garage. Hardly a hovel but frankly smallish by comparison with some nearby Plano, TX neighborhoods and positively snug compared to the actual Dallas’s ostentatious Preston Hollow neighborhood.

Southfork serves today as a conference center and tourist attraction. I admit to not having made the trek, myself; but my wife has been to several events there and, at the risk of putting words in her mouth, described the facility as surprisingly small and unimpressive. Then again, having been chauffeured through a part of rural Russia a few years ago where our driver pulled over to negotiate at length, unsuccessfully as it turned out, with a roadside truck stand selling cabbage, what impresses is very much in the eye of the beholder. Dallas may have been, as Texans are wont to say, all hat and no cattle, but at least it showed the rest of the world what it was like to live in America always having more than enough cabbage.

Via Eyeteeth, well on its way to becoming my favorite midsized blog:

CNN has launched a new feature that allows online readers to get t-shirts made from headlines. Just click on the icon beside certain headlines to order. But I noted yesterday that not all heads could be printed off and sold. Was it a matter of taste? Apparently not. While, appropriately, one couldn’t make a t-shirt from yesterday’s sad headline about the Coast Guard finding the bodies of 20 Haitians floating near the Bahamas, one could make one bearing news of a local tragedy, the Belle Plaines man who accidentally shot and killed his son while hunting. (Shirts can only be purchased as long as headlines are in the front page “latest news” section; these two stories are not any longer.) A more likely reason is that perhaps only CNN’s proprietary stories, as opposed to wire pieces, can be made into tees.

This is a real pity. Other recent headlines in the “Latest News” category include…

National Snoring Week
All Hail the King of Comedy Kung Fu
Cops: Gangster video stars gun-waving granny

…and my personal favorite…

One Word to Describe Your Mom

None, alas, are t-shirtable, or I’d be placing some orders. Wouldn’t want to document the decline and fall of the American intellect, now would we?

The Alabama homebrewer visited by ABC agents has given up the hobby, a local beer activism bulletin board reports:

Scott [Oberman] met with the agent and was told that there was a complaint filed in Montgomery. He was given a copy of the Alabama code and that was pretty much the end of it. However, he has decided to give up homebrewing until such time as it is legal. Now that he is on the radar, he has too much to lose if they decide to make another visit.

It’s enough to make a northerner want to travel down south (not necessarily on a bus), set up some brewing equipment, and systematically break the law.

A commenter named hupur inspired this. He commented on a post featuring Gary Moore’s cover of Roy Buchanan’s “The Messiah Will Come Again.” Reading their opinions in the comments, I don’t get the how Sandefur, Brayton and Matt Kuznicki don’t “get” Gary Moore’s authentic bluesiness.

Well here is another try. The following is a truly beautiful song Gary Moore did with the late Phil Lynott while they were in Thin Lizzy - “Parisienne Walkways.” This was taken from Moore’s solo tour after Thin Lizzy disbanded and shortly before Lynott died (this may be one of Lynott’s last recorded performances). Moore’s playing/phrasing is obviously inspired by Buchanan here as well.

None of the experts were sure if there is a large market of early adopters who want to eat test tube meat for environmental, health or ethical reasons.

For all the talk of high-tech meat production, attendees of the first In-Vitro Meat Symposium didn’t put their stomachs where their mouths were. Instead of sampling early versions of in vitro meat, they stuck to local fare.

I’ll be an early adopter because it would just be really cool. Besides, I could tell my grandkids “You bet I ate it! I ate it the first day I could. I wasn’t afraid at all!” And then they would smile over plates of cultured filet mignon with truffles, and they’d wonder at the strange, primitive world I grew up in, and at how very progressive I still was, even despite being 132 years old.

I’d light a bioengineered cigar — cancer having been cured half a century ago — and tell them a story about how gross it was to drive by an animal processing plant back in the old days, and how uneasy we all felt about the fate of the poor animals. The great-great-grandkids would ask to see our digital photos of one of the first same-sex marriages ever performed, and Scott and I would tell all the old stories again, about how we wondered if the world had been suddenly populated by lunatics when dozens of people were seen talking to themselves on the first “hands-free” cell phones. (The great-great-grands meanwhile passing one another retrieved video clips of the old days via telepathy.)

I may not believe in the singularity. I don’t have much religion at all. But the future is going to be one very cool place.

As noted about four years ago in this space, it’s illegal to brew your own beer in Alabama and Utah (it’s legal nearly everywhere else). Back then I kinda scoffed at the prohibition, noting that home brewing is nearly impossible for the cops to detect. But it turns out people are actually getting busted for it:

Today when I got home from work, there was a handwritten note stuck to my mailbox from an actual Alabama ABC Agent. Let me back up a bit for those who do not know me. My name is Scott Oberman. Some of you may have seen my pic and read the article in the LA Times or other media. I agreed to allow an LA Times reporter into my home to attend our homebrew club meeting. This was at the request (not directly) of FTH [Free The Hops, an Alabama pro-brewing group] folks in hopes that we had something going on while she was in town. I gladly agreed to this thinking it would be great publicity for FTH and the homebrewing legalization efforts. I am a member of the Rocket City Brewers in the HSV area. I have been homebrewing for 11 years. I am a hardcore homebrewer. The note said:

“To the Oberman’s,
Please call me at

***-***-**** (these are the actual #’s in case you’d like to verify)
***-***-****

Sorry I don’t have a card to leave you.

Agent **** ***** (not positive of last name spelling)
Alabama ABC Board
************************
Huntsville, AL 35806″

At first I figured one of my brewing buds sure went a long way just to mess with me. I called the number just in case. It was legit. I was told by the agent that the Mongomery office instructed him to pay me a visit and ensure that I was fully aware of the AL code concerning making beer in the home. He asked if he could come over to talk to me. I asked if there was a website that I could download from and save him a trip. He said that he had to have me sign for the information to verify I received it. I asked if I could just come to his office and meet him and sign for it there and he agreed. I will try to get a better feel for the direction this is leading, but I am not feeling good about it. My situation is extra shaky because I am divorced and have joint custody of my 11 year old daughter. I also have a job with the DoD that requires a security clearance. I stand to lose nearly everything if the State decides to make an example of me. You may think I was a dumbass for allowing my name, etc to be published in the article. I did not know the article was going to have full names printed nor did I know the tone it would be presented in. I did not get to read it before it was printed. I should have asked. At this point, I am very close to the decision to completely give up the best hobby in the world until such time that it is no longer illegal here in AL. This is a decision that I have not taken lightly, but my family has to come first. This is the real thingThis is a sad day for homebrewing. I urge you all to do whatever you can to get this thru the 2008 legislation. Your voices CAN be heard and CAN make a difference.

“Sorry I don’t have a card to leave you.” Now that’s classy.

Keep in mind that home brewing is legal in almost all other jurisdictions, provided that you neither sell nor distill your product. Making your own beer and wine has been legal at the federal level since 1978, and the few remaining anti-brewing laws are mostly unenforceable, since one can’t practically criminalize common plants like barley, hops, and cann… oh wait, wrong blog post.

Okay, I’ll stop joking now. This is serious:

Seventy-five years after Prohibition, beer aficionados in Alabama are fighting for the right to brew and chug as they please. That’s raised the ire of Southern Baptists, who frown on alcohol in any form. As they jockey for advantage in the Legislature, one side quotes Scripture. The other cites BeerAdvocate.com. One talks morality. The other, malt.

Though this may seem like an only-in-the-Bible-Belt brawl, booze-related debates have flared recently in a number of states.

In Virginia, for instance, sangria was the talk of the statehouse after a Spanish restaurant was cited for illegally mixing brandy with wine, in violation of a 1930s-era statute. Idaho lawmakers may soon amend the criminal code to permit vodka sales on election days. And in Colorado, lawmakers have considered rescinding a law that bans supermarkets (but not liquor stores) from selling wine with more than 3.2% alcohol content.

Here in Alabama, home-brewing beer has long been a Class A misdemeanor, with a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. It’s another Class A misdemeanor to sell or distribute any beer with more than 6% alcohol content. That puts off-limits 85 of the 100 top-rated beers in the world, as ranked by BeerAdvocate.com. “They think everyone down here is a bunch of damn rednecks and all we drink is Budweiser,” grumbles Tipton, 48.

Let’s run down some objections:

–The Bible says you shouldn’t drink alcohol.

I’d like to see chapter and verse on that one, and then I’d like to know what gives with that wedding at Cana. Then I’d like to know why teetotaling is a matter of civil law rather than private religious morality. And finally, I know the Bible says you shouldn’t swear, and yet our laws not only allow swearing but in fact encourage it, and the religious right never says a peep about that. Anyone wanting to go this route sure has a lot of explaining to do.

–It’s not as good as commercial beers anyway.

First, I invite you to try some of mine. I’ll set up a blind taste test between any of my beers and a can of Natural Light. Just to make it objective, I’ll invite some professional beer judges (I know a few).

And second — wait just a minute here. Since when is the state a guardian of good taste?

–It could be dangerous to your health.

Yes, I’ll admit that home brewers sometimes make beers that don’t taste too good, though this is surprisingly rare. Of the ten best beers I’ve ever had, I’d guess fully half of them were homebrews. But it’s completely impossible to make a toxic homebrew unless you use leaded equipment or toxic ingredients; both are easily avoided just by using food-grade equipment and sticking to the traditional recipes, and by adding only things that you’d ordinarily be eating anyway. (Bacteria in meat can kill you, but in beer it just makes the brew taste yucky.) The right approach here is not to prohibit the activity, but simply to use common sense while doing it. Banning homebrew for fear of poisoning would be like banning cycling for fear of accidents.

Irony bonus: As I noted in my earlier post, the jurisdiction most known for lead poisoning by way of alcohol is — you guessed it — Alabama. Prohibition, and not alcohol, is generally to blame for the rare stories you hear about toxic brews.

–You don’t really need to brew at home.

Well, yeah. But you don’t really need to read that book. You don’t really need to watch that film. You don’t really need to write poetry, or to take photographs, to perform that play, or even to text your friends on a cell phone. Some cigars are ok, and some you don’t really need. And, whatever you may think, you don’t actually need to smoke in public, even if you and every other person around you is willing.

The number of activities that could be prohibited is infinite. The burden of proof still rests on whoever wants to prohibit any particular one of them, and the standard must be set very high if we are to live as free people at all.

You’ve probably already seen the YouTube videos. If not, Julian Sanchez is the source to start with:

…a friend—whose name I’ll omit for the moment — just got arrested at a little dance party some libertarians were holding at the Jefferson Memorial (which, apparently, is open to the public 24/7). I’m not entirely clear on what the charge could have been — I wasn’t aware dancing at a public monument was prohibited by any statute — but given that my friend’s immediate social circle is largely composed of journalists, bloggers, and constitutional lawyers who sue the government for fun, I predict hilarity. The purpose of the dance party, ironically, was to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.

Yes, yes. And they captured the arrest on video, too. The participants were all wearing iPods, so noise wasn’t a factor. Reports have it that — am I allowed to mention her name yet? — was sober when she was arrested, too.

It’s a little late for this year’s, but let me suggest nominating the incident for next year’s Muzzle Awards. Via Eyeteeth, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression brings us this year’s winners. The current crop isn’t bad as outrages go, but I have to say that it would be hard to beat the irony factor of being arrested at the Jefferson Memorial.

This piece from The New Yorker discusses the secret lives of elevators — and the horrifying ordeal of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in one of them. There’s even a video that brought sweat to my palms. But a finely turned sentence is still the best reason to read:

Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

A great comment from this PL post that was recently featured at Stumbleupon:

Please show me any country that has won the war on drugs. All governments owe a huge apology to their own citizens having put the distribution of illegal drugs in the hands of indiscriminate dealers.

Heck, I’d just like to see a reasonable set of victory conditions, let alone a country that has actually attained them. I mean really — what would victory look like? The desire to alter one’s consciousness is ancient and universal, and the ability to do it isn’t going away anytime soon. Chemistry isn’t about to surrender. Short of dismantling the entire modern chemical and agricultural industries, there just isn’t any way to stop people from occasionally diverting of some of their products to recreational use.

It’s startling, when you think about it, that conservatives of all people tend to be the “toughest” on drugs. One would think that they would be the readiest to admit human nature for what it is and seek to accommodate it as it is, rather than forcing it violently into a pattern that it can never fit. There will never be a New Drug-Free Man any more than there ever could have been a New Socialist Man.

Speaking of which, if we were simply to distribute cocaine and heroin through dealers who could trade openly and therefore settle their disputes in court — rather than through violence — that in itself would be a big improvement over what we have now. And this is to say nothing of the advances in overdose and disease prevention, the jails emptied of nonviolent users, the families reunited, and the interrupted lives begun again.