Armin Meiwes, the weird German guy who shared a meal of pan-fried penis with its donor and then with the consent of the latter butchered and ate him, has been sentenced to life in prison. The government originally conceded that he didn't murder anyone and sent him to prison for 8 years. On appeal, the judge, disgusted by the case, decided the sentence was too lenient and has now found Meiwes guilty of murder, even though the maximum sentence for "killing on demand" is five years.

It would be hard to argue that Meiwes is a fine man to have as a neighbor and isn't a generally creepy freak all around, but certainly based on his statements and background -- he never hurt anyone before, and he never would have without consent -- he is not a threat to society. Considering we're talking about Europe, if he had simply shot a man on the street in cold blood he'd still probably only get around 20 years in prison. Something about cutting someone up and eating him makes Meiwes more offensive to the German state than a real murderer. Meiwes will go to prison for the rest of his life because he made the judge go "ewwwwwwwwwww." How's that for rule of law? Law is and always has been a completely arbitrary farce molded by the whims and tastes of the powerful.

I say free the weirdo -- he committed no crime. And then force the judge to watch something offensive to his religion as "sensitivity training."

I get so much shit for my views on the troops, but one cannot ignore the menace that masses of returning troops present to civilized society. There are plenty of stories of Iraq vets coming home and killing their wives, each other, robbing and raping -- and the war is still going on. It's not just Iraqis and Americans who are suffering at the hands of these animals, as they are also stationed all around the world in US bases. From Tuesday's Washington Post:

A U.S. soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy was given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others.

According to an Italian court document obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, James Michael Brown, a 27-year-old paratrooper from Oregon stationed in northern Italy, was sentenced to five years and eight months for rape in February 2004.

Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian resident in the town of Vicenza. He raped her vaginally and anally and left her to wander the streets naked in search of help.

The crime would have earned him an eight-year sentence, but the judges reduced the penalty due to the "extenuating circumstances" of the psychological effects of Brown's year of service in Iraq, the document said.

He beat her and raped her in every orifice she had and then dumped her to wander the streets of Italy, a black woman, completely naked. I understand the reason to feel sorry...possibly...for this disgusting creature, probably some kind of borderline-inbred piece of trailer trash shoved into the military by the lethal combination of patriotism and a sharp recruiter, but I certainly don't see a reason to return him to the streets. If he can't be remanded into a psychiatric ward for the rest of his life, I plead to the Italian authorities, on the basis of the acute danger this person poses to the innocent inhabitants of this world, to summarily execute James Michael Brown. Thank you.

As the news emerges that the past week's death toll is actually three times what the US and so-called Iraqi government originally claimed -- that's over 1300 people -- another 41 people and 3 US troops are blown to smithereens today. I have noticed a trend. As time goes on, I see more articles citing "experts" who bemoan Iraq's slide in "anarchy."

Doomsayers long have warned that Iraq was turning into a failed state like Somalia or Taliban-era Afghanistan, a regional black hole. It's far too early to write Iraq off as a quagmire, but the threat of contagious instability looms large.

Mark Sedra, a researcher specializing in rebuilding post-conflict countries at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, a German think tank[, says] "Now the main goal is just creating a state that controls instability and contains the high levels of violence that prevail at the moment and prevents that violence from spilling over into neighboring states or destabilizing the region."

[Just a note to mention that Afghanistan wasn't a failed state until the US made it fail -- ask any woman forced to put on a burqa any time she needed to buy a chicken.]

"All of this is creating great, great decentralization and a failure to provide services," said Phebe Marr, an Iraq specialist at the United States Institute for Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Will Iraq's increasing violence, fed by obviously intentional acts of sabotage, spread into the more rural areas of iraq and then into neighboring Syria and Iran? I guess Dick and Condi might hope so, but to me it doesn't seem likely, since this violence is based on some very local rivalries that go beyond mere Sunni and Shi'ite. But the interesting part of the analyses is that they all seem to fix on an expectation that current trends will bring Iraq into anarchy -- or that Iraq already is in anarchy.

Look in the pockets of Iraqis whose jobs take them around Baghdad every day and you are likely to find a clutch of passes and identity cards, one for every police, military or militia checkpoint they may run into.

"This one is says I'm Badr, this one I show to police, and I have the American press pass and my ordinary ID. I applied for a Mehdi Army pass on Friday but it hasn't arrived yet," said one Iraqi driver working for a foreign media organisation.

Anyone notice anything rather...Hoppean about this situation?

The sheer proliferation of armed groups -- some official, some unofficial and some that operate in the murky middle ground -- underscores the lawlessness of Iraq, where neither U.S. forces who invaded in 2003 nor the Iraqi armed forces they trained have been able to impose their authority on the whole country.

I think it rather underscores an overdose of law in Iraq. Even so, it is obvious that the people who are supposed to be the state in Iraq -- the US forces and their Iraqi quislings -- are simply not. They have no authority except where they actually outnumber everyone else, like in Baghdad's Green Zone. That's less control than the mob has in New York. Iraqis see them as just another militia/ministate for which they need to carry just another ID. The curfew put in place after the first day of attacks, despite reports saying they kept violence down, had nearly no effect.

It is perfectly clear that no bunch of former exiles posing as a state is going to rein in the violence that beseiges Iraqis daily. Iraqis will have to realize this and finally begin to do something more about it than merely carrying a weapon. Lone guns can't hold back an army of fanatics who are trying to ignite a civil war. Iraqis are going to have to create their own associations and organizations to provide security and services and banish the warlords and militants. They will have to create anarchy to banish the chaos. We'll see if the market will push them along the way.

A mere two months after taking a courageous stand in favor of a minimum wage hike for other people's workers along with their own, Wal-Mart workers have taken a courageous stand in favor of irony: an Oakland, California jury yesterday found Wal-Mart liable for $172 million in compensatory and punitive damages for not providing their workers with state-mandated lunch breaks.

The issue is multi-layered for the private sector proponent: on the surface, it looks like yet another case of a state regulation clashing with market efficiency. Complicating the matter: Wal-mart, even as corporations go, are perfect bastards, from their estimated $1.5 billion in subsidies and property tax abatements to their preference for factories in union-prohibitive countries and notorious eminent domain abuse. Wal-Mart's libertarian apologists have their hands full defending their precious corporation as a business proper when the company behaves as though they'd prefer hefty regulation over light. The rest of us are left to ponder whether to just throw up our hands and write off the whole matter as a case of roundabout just desserts.

The only reason I go to the Washington Times is for work, I wouldn't touch that moonie rag otherwise. The mark of a good right-wing nutball crackpot website is the slightly fuzzy, poorly-designed ads for sites about using your own body weight to get in shape, sites that teach you unconventional self-defense techniques even weirder than Krav Maga, and sites that sell all kind of coins as long as they're gold. One of these ads recently was for Stand Up For Steel, a coalition of various steel unions pushing for the government to subsidize their vocations by forcing the rest of us to buy the ridiculously expensive product they produce when we can get it dirt cheap from China and elsewhere.

What is it about unions that make them so untouchable? Why are they allowed to constantly threaten and impoverish us with violence and protectionism? This supposedly capitalist country is held in thrall by these dirtbags who are too lazy to educate themselves in something useful, a service people actually want them to perform instead of one people are forced to pay them to perform. Why don't they abandon America's Butthole and move to more vibrant places like China or India? After all, their ancestors moved to the US from Europe. I know a lot of people want to believe it but the United States is not the end of history. If toiling in filth is their raison d'être, let the comfy workers ship their F-350s to Asia and get a job there. They can bang on all the steel they want for $1.50 a day.

Something tells me that if the US cast off that filthy frozen pit called Michigan, all our problems would be solved. Send the rest of the Rust Belt with it into economic oblivion. Fuck it, flush the Flyover down the toilet altogether. The coasts are the regions that run this show. Let the middle of the country join Angola in an economic union, they have just about the same GDP.

In my youth there were these things called LPs, big, ugly and made of vinyl. They (normally) included the song lyrics so that we'd be able to figure out what the hell Bob Dylan was singing. In the digital age more and more of us buy our music via download, whether from Apple, Rhapsody, Napster, or any other internet based content distribution system, those lyric sheets are no longer available. A young software developer saw a need, and tried to meet it. He created a software plug-in for iTunes, called PearLyrics, that would search available internet lyrics databases to bring users the lyrics for their downloaded songs. Simple, no? Indeed, he was not unique, Apple's latest OS has a plug-in architecture called Dashboard, a way of launching applets (called Widgets) quickly, and many developers had created Widgets that served the same purpose. PearLyrics, however, was the most popular.

However, the Music Publishers Association has decided that buying a song doesn't entitle you to know what the hell the singers are saying. Because they've been issuing cease & desist orders to one and all. Now, as these plug-in applications do nothing more than search websites for available data, they could indeed win in court. However, because the people that wrote these mini-applications are all small fries, their resources are not equal to the sort of fight that they would face to defy the MPA. This is the official statement of Pearworks concerning the end of their program, and why. More disturbing still is the hard-on that the MPA seems to have for websites that serve up lyrics, for reference this quote from Lauren Keiser of the MPA sums up the attitude of the armed banditi, ""throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective". Really? Jail time for guessing what singers are singing?

So, next up for the MPA is the closing of internet lyrics sites, and jailing their owners. And the US government will be complicit in jailing its citizens to protect the corporate profits of music publishers. Just as it already jails people to ensure the corporate profits of large software developers, record companies and movie distributors. There isn't even any debate by the denizens of state whether or not lyrics websites actually do impact the corporate profits of music publishers. Have any of you that aren't musicians ever bought a lyrics book for an album? Professional musicians may need accurate lyrics and tablature, but does anyone else? In fact, this whole enterprise looks more like an attempt by corporate America to use government to create new customers by fiat.

An English academic (whose abstract I do not have handy, and if anyone knows his name, please email me) observed that people tolerated copyright because it was not overly oppressive, but that once it became oppressive they would turn against it. Unfortunately that has not been the case, while protest has risen on the anarchist fringe, the progressive fringe, and the academic fringe, there has been no united opposition to the ruthless extension and criminalization of intellectual property laws in the U.S. Like a slow boiled frog Americans simply accept the Sovietization of their society. America, ain't it great to live in the land of the free?

I don't know if this guy is a libertarian or just a civil libertarian, but this article gets an eye-roll score of at least 6. Much of what he's doing I agree with, such as not wanting to give his SSN to the DMV to get a license to drive (the article doesn't mention whether he thinks needing a license to drive on streets he ostensibly owns is also ridiculous). Not that I refuse to do this out of protest, how ridiculous, but I certainly would like to not have to.

The part that gets me is that he won't fly because he objects to having to identify himself to airlines. One airline even offered to let him fly without showing ID if he would submit to more stringent searches. He rejected that offer. He's complaining that the government is requiring airlines to check passenger IDs. But, how in the hell is a service provider supposed to know who you are without some sort of proof of identity? You could smack some dude over the head outside the airport and take his tickets to Paris. Whether this guy is a libertarian or not, surely he should realize that even without any state at all -- hell, maybe even more so -- you'd still need to prove your identity, whether with a photo ID or some sort of PIN (or both), to be able to use certain services like banks and airlines.

Also, the objection to being at least lightly screened for things such as guns and bombs before getting on a plane is pretty goofy. I certainly think the search procedures at the airport are pretty ridiculous, but it's the procedures that are stupid, not the searches themselves. I'm not the kind that likes to take any decent risks of being blown up in mid-air. Wild, huh?

He should stick to blowing his fortune on more worthwhile things like licensing requirements, not proving who you are to be able to use a ticket with your name on it.

PS: Sweet quote:

"I'm a millionaire," Gilmore said. "I can do whatever the fuck I want, right? Why should I run around without an ID? Because no one else was paying attention to that and letting our liberties slip down the drain. I figured it was worth some amount of money and some amount of personal sacrifice to keep a free society."

According to a weepy article in today's Washington Times, migrant women are frequently being raped as they attempt to cross the border between Mexico and the US, sometimes by the very men they have paid to protect them on their journey.

"The women, according to U.S. law-enforcement authorities, have no realistic recourse, because they are foreigners seeking to enter the United States illegally. Separated from other illegals just south of the border, the smugglers take them into the desert where they are raped or sodomized.

"U.S. authorities said some Mexican border police have taken part in the violence, often targeting migrants headed to the United States from Central and South America.

"The rapes are part of what the U.S. Border Patrol said is a growing pattern of violence on the U.S.-Mexico border from California to Texas, including a rising number of assaults and robberies of illegals and a dramatic increase in attacks on Border Patrol agents and other law-enforcement personnel along the 1,940-mile border.

"The incidents of violence and the intensity of the attacks, the authorities said, continue despite an ongoing and expensive effort by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the September 11 attacks to gain "operational control" of the border.

"Alien and drug smugglers -- many armed with automatic weapons, global-positioning units and night-vision scopes -- have become increasingly aggressive in protecting their illicit cargoes, the authorities said, adding that attacks on Border Patrol agents have risen fivefold in the past year."

This is the fault of
--the papist job-stealing wetbacks who are breaking our laws by entering our holy country
--the immoral people-traffickers who profiteer at the expense of these migrants
--the evil drug-smugglers who want to poison American babies and take over the country with their wacky tobacky

It is not the fault of
--the stupid laws that make it illegal for Mexicans to come to America as the market demands
--the existence of the border and the mafia that patrols it
--the illegality of the consumption and sale of certain substances and the militarization of the enforcement of such

In seriousness, the one thing the idiot anti-immigrationists and I agree on is that this is heavily the fault of the hideous states below the Rio Grande. But then, 3/4 are like that due in large part to US intervention over the last century. Really, I think the reason so many people blame America is that it's just so damn easy.

This country is so sick it's disgusting. Idiot trailer trash is considered heroic for slaughtering Iraqi civilians in blind obedience to the State, but a peaceful suburban mom who had too much fun with kids is a criminal deserving of 30 years in prison. In America and much of the world, this woman is a predatory monster. She is guilty of supervising kids as they do the drugs and alcohol they would have likely done anyhow, and having sex with them, sex they would also likely be having anyhow. The crime, you see, is that she is older than them. And that the law says they are too young to drink. And that everyone is too young to use drugs.

God Bless Duhmerica!

Some islands in the immediate vicinity of the shores of Helsinki are public parks that have nude beaches. These beaches are divided into male and female sections. The rules concerning behaviour on public beaches are obviously set by some municipal bureaucrat.

As an anarcho-capitalist, I advocate the abolition of the public sector and the privatisation of each and every square metre of land on earth. But as long as there are e.g. parks in municipal ownership, I think the municipal government has a moral obligation to maintain law and order in these public spaces. This means not only that obvious crimes such as murder, rape, assault and robbery ought to be punished, but also that some steps ought to be taken to reduce the likelihood of these crimes occuring, and that the cleanliness and overall comfortableness of public spaces ought to be maintained, lest they deteriorate to an uncivilised state of Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all.

In the context of the nude beaches I mentioned, it makes sense to designate a part of the beach for women only, in order to protect naked female swimmers from rapists, voyeurists and exhibitionist masturbators. Some individual male might protest: "I'm not a rapist, I won't harass anybody even if there are one hundred naked women on the beach and I'm the only man." But the statistical probability of naked women swimmers getting raped or at least harassed obviously increases enormously if men are allowed on the beach. Libertarian babbling about victimless crimes and individual responsibility is a very naïve argument against this simple fact. In an anarcho-capitalistic world, which is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls the natural order, there would be no "right of a man to go to a beach full of naked women" because every square metre of land would be privately owned, and the owner of a beach would have the right to say who gets to enter the beach and on what conditions.

As long as public parks, streets, squares etc. exist, I think the norms of acceptable behaviour in these public spaces should reflect, as closely as possible, the norms that would be enforced by private owners if these spaces were indeed private property. It is in the legitimate interests of normal, honest people to prohibit or at least restrict the kind of behaviour that is very likely to lead to considerable negative externalities.

This means e.g. that people have a legitimate reason to want some kind of traffic rules to be enforced on public streets and roads because reckless driving such as ludicrously high speed or driving under the influence of alcohol is likely to cause traffic accidents that kill or maim not only the reckless driver himself, but also innocent people who drove safely and who can't be blamed for the accident. It can't be right to expose people to unnecessary risks that they don't want to take. It's much cheaper and easier to enforce a speed limit such as 40 km/h on the streets of residential neighbourhoods and shopping districts and 100 km/h on motorways than to allow every idiot to drive 200 km/h and kill children crossing the street on their way to kindergarten.

If all streets and roads were privately owned, honest people wouldn't buy houses in neighbourhoods where the streets didn't have speed limits. The market provides what the consumers want. The consumers of streets and roads, i.e. drivers, bikers and pedestrians, don't want to die in accidents caused by reckless drivers. There is no demand for streets and roads without speed limits, at least not in residential neighbourhoods.

If the state steals your money (this is called "taxation") and then spends it on public services, you get at least some value for your money if these services are useful to you. Ideally, you should get the same services you would have bought in the free market if your money hadn't been stolen and you could have spent it in the way you see fit. This is obviously not exactly possible, but you get the idea. If you are forced to pay taxes to maintain public streets and roads, you should at least get the kind of streets and roads that you would otherwise have paid for in the form of road tolls or maintainance fees of streets in gated communities.

As long as you pay for municipal streets anyway in the form of taxes, you have a legitimate interest to demand that the municipal police enforce sensible traffic rules such as speed limits because you don't want to die. The municipal government has no right to first make you pay for the streets and then expose you to the risk of being killed by reckless drivers.

In the same way, if the municipal government establishes a nude beach in a public park, it should somehow guarantee law and order on that beach. If the beach were privately owned, most women, or families with children, wouldn't go there unless there were separate sections on the beach for men and women. Being forced to pay for a beach that you never use is much worse than paying for some services that you actually use and enjoy.

Libertarians who say that the rules concerning behaviour in public places are obviously set by bureaucrats and therefore are not morally binding because "I never signed a contract where I agreed to those rules" are infantile rebels who don't understand the importance of civilised conduct. Just because the government is an illegitimate institution, it doesn't mean that you can behave like a barbarian in public places because there is no private owner who would have a moral right to set the rules of behaviour in those places.

This is relevant also to the civil war that has been going on in France during the last couple of weeks.

African immigrants, both Arab and black, have burned thousands of cars, smashed store windows, looted merchandise from the stores, set dozens of entire buildings (railway stations, schools, libraries, police stations, supermarkets, gyms, warehouses etc. etc.) on fire with Molotov cocktails, thrown stones at dozens of firemen who tried to extinguish the fires and shot at policemen. Over 100 policemen have been hospitalised.

Infantile, irresponsible "libertarians" rejoice at the news because they see "the state" as their enemy and are glad to see policemen injured or killed as "agents" of the state. This is obviously wrong because the killing or maiming of policemen who are trying to protect private property from looters and arsonists will not liberate anyone from the grip of "the state", but will leave honest people at the mercy of barbarian criminals. The infantile "libertarians" who cheer these rioters are objectively on the side of the robbers, rapists, arsonists and murderers and against human life, individual liberty and private property.

Some of these teenage rebel "libertarians" might point out that even if the Africans have committed crimes against innocent people and their property by setting cars and houses on fire etc., the reactions of "the state", such as curfews in the riot-plagued areas between midnight and 6 am, are "repressive" and "unnecessary". These libertarians are mistaken as well.

As I mentioned, my moral theory concerning proper conduct in public spaces is that the norms of acceptable behaviour in public parks, streets, squares etc. should reflect the norms that would be enforced by private owners if these spaces were private property. An owner of a gated community or an entire privately owned town (e.g. Celebration, Florida) could and certainly would impose a nightly curfew if there had been as severe riots in the town as there have been in Paris and over 100 other French cities during the last two weeks. Therefore I see the curfews in French cities as legitimate and necessary measures.

Saying "I didn't participate in the riots, so I should be free to hang around on the street at 3 am if I feel like it" is exactly like saying, "I'm not a rapist, so I should be allowed to go to the female section of the nude beach even though I'm a man." Just like the presence of men on the nude beach increases the probability of naked women swimmers getting raped or at least harassed, also the presence of thousands of Africans on the streets of Paris in the middle of the night increases the probability of cars and houses getting burned, shops getting looted etc. The nightly curfews during the current civil war in France make at least as much sense as speed limits on streets. They are a cheap and efficient way of preventing unnecessary risks. Normal, honest people are not opposed to this. Nobody has a legitimate interest in allowing thousands of angry Africans to roam free on the streets of Paris in the middle of the night.

Recently, the French government has decided to expel those convicted rioters who weren't French citizens. By Wednesday, November 10, almost 1,500 rioters had been arrested, of whom 229 have been sentenced to jail terms; of the convicted felons, 120 were foreign citizens who are now going to be expelled back to their respective countries of origin.

Some libertarians would say this is horrible discrimination, nationalism, statism, racism etc. etc. ad infinitum. I wouldn't. I think it's a very good idea to expel foreigners who commit serious crimes. It's not only morally acceptable, I think it's morally necessary.

In a natural order, every square metre of land would be privately owned, and the owner of a street, city block, square, park, beach, forest, farm or other area would have the right to say who gets to enter the area and on what conditions. No private real estate owner would allow rioters and other criminals to remain on his property.

Alas, currently there is a public sector that owns parks, streets, squares and other public spaces. It would be politically impossible and economically and technically very difficult to privatise all these public spaces overnight. In the short run, the public ownership of streets, squares, parks etc. is a given. The public sector has stolen your money and spent it on building a street network, among other things. It would be adding insult to injury to first force you to pay for a street network, then force you to use it (because the public street network has a de facto monopoly, thanks to zoning laws that strictly limit the construction of private streets) and THEN unleash a barbarian horde on the streets to attack you and your property. It would be like locking you in a zoo cage and then letting angry, hungry lions in. The morally proper thing for a third party to do in that situation would not be to leave you in the cage to fend for yourself, but to shoot the lions or at least drive them out of the cage in order to save you.

In the context of the current civil war in France, the right thing to do is not to leave innocent people at the mercy of the rioting scum, but to expel that scum from France.

Allowing those barbarians to remain on the streets of French cities, vandalising innocent people's property with impunity, is something that no private owner of those streets and neighbourhoods would ever do. Therefore, by allowing the scum to stay, the state would objectively be committing a crime against the legitimate interests of honest people. Forcing innocent people to constantly live in fear, surrounded by subhuman monsters, would be like forcing a raped woman to live in the same jail cell with her rapist. This forced integration of criminals and their victims must stop. Private real estate owners expel criminals from their property. One step toward the natural order of things, a.k.a. anarcho-capitalism, would be to treat public spaces like the streets of French cities as if they already were private property, and to do exactly what a private owner would do: sweep away the trash.