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.

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?

Over the past month or so my thoughts have returned to good 'ol market anarchist theory. I've come up with some problems I think I have with what many people seem to accept as irrefutable, commonsense truth. They may or may not be valid, and I fully expect to be flamed. If I'm not, I'll actually be disappointed. Here we go!

The "ideal" of putting law on the market.

Market anarchists are thrilled by the idea of putting law on the market. It is thought that by doing so, the only "law" that will be enforced is the NAP. But it's obvious that even the most optimistic market anarchist must concede the the laws that are enforced will be at the whim of its consumers. Look around you. See all those dumbasses walking around? They're consumers. If you live in Iran, I'm pretty sure those PDAs will be stoning Jews and requiring that women be modest. Will there be more of a tendency towards liberty? Of course. But that doesn't insure anything. The liberty minded proponents of the US Constitution figured that it would ensure liberty, because the people would not tolerate it being violated. Wankers.

Then you have Bob Murphy's land of insurance company tyranny, which makes me want to vomit. It includes gun control and other oppressive regulations. You know what the bad part is? His logic makes sense. Think of what a pain in the ass it is to deal with insurance companies now. Just imagine the hellish conditions of a land where they are king. Everyone's going to be drowning in paperwork.

Problems of geography, population, and the cost of defense.

When many people discuss all these PDAs running around, they often don't consider basic geography. In market anarchy we seem to not only be unshackled from the state, but inconveniences like space and time.

Consider a man living in Los Angeles. He can't suscribe to just any PDA, only one that can actually enforce the law in his area. This limits his options severely. Defense isn't like a soft drink, you can't produce it in China and have it shipped everywhere in the world. Now, how many options will he have? I'm not really of even a ballpark figure of how much a PDA might cost. Somebody should figure that out. If it's very high, the concept is in trouble. The situation gets more difficult if you end up in an area with a much smaller, spread-out population. Such an area might not be able to afford a PDA at all. Which you might agree is actually a good thing, after you read the next section.

The protection rackets collude.

"Private Defense Agency" is a clunky euphemism for what is nothing more than a gang promising you protection. Perhaps it's one exposed to market forces, but can these really solve every problem? Perhaps they will even create negative results? They certainly seem to have, because we've got powerful states sewing chaos just about everywhere. These muscular, powerful PDAs are going to want customers. My first prediction is that they would make subscription to a PDA compulsory if you want to actually be considered in the private courts of law. Remember who these courts are ultimately beholden to: the gangs, and their customers. To prevent me from telling them to fuck off and saying I'm a subscriber to "Paul Charnetzki Defense Inc." they'd probably write themselves up a list of "approved" PDAs. This would broaden their customer base, and the stronger PDAs could use the list to limit competition. If smaller PDAs and individuals resisted they would be shot, with the sign off of these excellent market courts. Here we are on the road back to the state.

Collectivism and ideology.

Market anarchists also like to ignore the role of collectivism and ideology in the world. Everyone is a collectivist, and has their own views, which are shaped by their upbringing, personal thoughts, whatever. They are not numbers but individuals which may suscribe to a wide variety of viewpoints. Though anarchists reject the state, I doubt many of them are pure individualists who don't identify with anything larger than themselves. Perhaps you're a fan of a sports team, identify with your race or nationality, or are proud of your home town. Perhaps your collective identity of choice is anarchists themselves. Anarchists love collectivist thinking when the state is involved, just check out this thread.

Perhaps we could assume that if market anarchy came in to existence, a large majority of the population would agree with anarchist views. But this would hardly remain static forever. People are going to come up with religions and philosophies to follow. This will surely affect PDAs in that it might lead to war. There is nothing to stop PDAs from cheerfully participating in ethnic cleansings, collectization of industry, etc. If one group gets very large and powerful, there's no reason for them not to decide to wipe everybody else off the map. Collectivist attitudes also lead people to want a single authority for their particular group. Imagine the Catholics instituting competing Churches in order to insure the best service and adherence to doctrine.

Even if all these criticisms are valid, I'm not sure that it totally destroys market anarchism. The chief goal of market anarchism is to create a system in which it is extremely difficult for a state to take power. Some of my criticisms were aimed at the viability or desirability of PDAs as they are usually conceived. It is possible that I am just attacking an extremely poor business plan that will never be carried out. Ultimately, we cannot know what will happen until we come face to face with it in the real world. This is what makes countries like Somalia so interesting.

However, I do think that the role of ideology and an impulse towards a collective identity cannot be ignored. I think that market anarchism would be more likely to take the shape of the "philes" in Neal Stephensons novel The Diamond Age: a world of autonomous city states that are less tied to a specific piece of geography, and all agree to a certain code of conduct which would be similar to the NAP. Many would have an ethnic, political, philosophical identity, or may be devoid of any ideology except simple protection. Secondly, I think that market anarchists tend to just dash off dogma to present a more rosy picture of what they're proposing than actually makes logical sense. The state has been the status quo for quite some time, and the burden of proof is far, far shifted towards anarchists.

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.

"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!