Population: One

Eugene Volokh goes over the differences between Iraq and North Korea. He’s right, as far as he goes — but now let’s ask the next question.

“If we can live with North Korea possessing and actively making nuclear weapons, why can’t we live with the possibility that Iraq may get nuclear weapons?”

Or, put differently: assuming inspections fail, and assuming it’s impossible to stand between Saddam and nukes, what makes that world more dangerous than the one we live in? And please. Don’t tell me Saddam is more loony than Kim Jong-il.

As the blogosphere gears up for the Blix report to the UN, Howard Bashman soldiers along talking about legal matters. His post on yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions is so good I felt like linking to it. It ought also to be of particular interest to Californians and Alaskans, since two of the cases decided relate to California’s three strikes law and one of them is about the Alaska sex offenders registry.

Remember, folks, if you’ve previously served jail time for theft, then in California the prosecuter can convert petty theft (a theft of under $400 worth of goods) into a felony. This combines elegantly but unfortunately with the three strikes law. You too can earn life in prison for stealing $150 worth of children’s videotapes, if you have prior offenses.

So Charlie Daniels is explaining life to the Hollywood types. Yeah, well. I don’t know about all these people who keep saying “and you risked lives!”

I grew up, for some of my childhood, in the small state of New Hampshire. I think it had more of an effect on me than I realized at the time: ten solid years of looking at the damned license plates, see.

“Live free or die.”

Four words. Four deeply meaningful, deeply felt words.

I’m so tired of people who tell me that I have to give up my freedom in order to save lives. Sean Penn may be an asshole — I think there are other celebs who would have been a better choice, particularly if you look at what Sean Penn actually said — but that’s really beside the point. He’s got the right to free speech: to freedom. Calling him a traitor because he exercises that right in a way Charlie Daniels doesn’t like?

I’ll tell you what. I call that cowardly. I call that running scared. I call that giving up on freedom.

The second you cross the line from “I disagree” to “You shouldn’t say that,” you’re crossing the line from supporting free speech to opposing free speech. And I think that’s a lousy idea. Charlie Daniels crossed the line. Does it make him a traitor? No. Does he have the right to say what he did? You bet.

But by saying it he reveals himself as a pathetic individual and a coward. He’s so scared of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the like that he’s willing to give up the fundamental freedoms that made this country great, and he’s hiding his fear behind the red white and blue. In my book, that makes him a sad, sorry little man.

The DoD kicked out a press release today about Iraq’s oil. About what you’d expect no matter what you believe: promises to preserve the oil for Iraq, warnings that Saddam may intend to destroy the oil, ecological warnings, etc. I found this quote interesting, though:

“Oil is a natural resource of Iraq that provides commerce, income for education and other needs, and infrastructure. The department considers destruction of that resource as an act of terrorism.”

That’s bullshit. Destroying strategic reserves, even in a scorched earth strategy, is not an act of terrorism. It’s a wartime strategy. It’s saying “You can conquer this land, but you will not profit from it.” It’s the kind of thing that’s considered noble resistance when it’s your side doing it — a last act of defiance. Terrorism? Hardly.

Hey, let’s do that thing I see the hip kids doing where I stuff a bunch of links into one post!

The Crossgates Mall, quite appropriately, has dropped the charges against Stephen Downs.

Steven Kaye, in comments, pointed me at Eurasianet. Looks like a really good source of info on Turkey and other Eurasian states. (Hey, Steven’s looking for players for an 1890s CoC game. Or, anyhow, was in 1999. Hm.)

It’s easy to forget that Roger Ebert is an intelligent, thoughtful, well-spoken guy. He’s the fat guy who does movie reviews on TV. Read this and admire his pinpoint distinction between vertical and horizontal prayer.

This is post number 500. The most common search leading people to my site is “meaning of population”. Um… it’s not that tough a concept, really. I’ve had 32,637 visitors in the last six months and I love you all the same, damn it.

The Smoking Gun has the police report about that guy who was arrested for wearing a peace T-shirt and refusing to leave the mall he was in. The police report implies that Mr. Downs was causing a disturbance.

As the right wing rushes to link to the police report, I just thought I’d point out that it’s not actually very conclusive. The first statement is from a store detective got a complaint about a verbal dispute; the complaint didn’t include any details about who started it. The store detective didn’t investigate. He just went back and called mall security to warn them about the dangerous T-shirt wearers. Yeah, that’s a balanced response.

The second statement, from a mall security guy, spends half the page describing the problem shirts in detail before getting to the real issue — Mr. Downs and his son were stopping people. Mind you, the security guy was predisposed to blame Mr. Downs, since the store detective reported the guys in T-shirts rather than the verbal dispute. Kind of like a game of telephone, huh?

Without bothering to investigate the situation, he promptly told the pair to remove their shirts and stop bothering people. OK, let’s do a hypothetical. Let’s say that Mr. Downs was wearing an American eagle on his T-shirt, with a ‘Nuke Saddam’ slogan. Let’s say he was stopping people in the mall.

Think there’s a chance in hell the security guy would have focused on the T-shirt? Nah, me either.

The statement isn’t detailed enough to figure out what Mr. Downs said at that point, other than that he refused. Refused to take off the T-shirt? Refused to quit stopping people? I dunno. For a security guard who was capable of remembering and detailing exactly what the T-shirts said, he got pretty damned vague here.

Finally, despite the police claim on the first page of the report, neither the store detective or the security guard reported complaints that Mr. Downs was stopping other shoppers. The security guard reported that he saw Mr. Downs stopping other shoppers. I’d think you’d want to get the actual complaints in the report, since the justification in this case is that Mr. Downs was bothering people. In fact, shouldn’t there be statements from some of the people he was bothering?

It’s flimsy. It does sound like Mr. Downs was being a bit of a jerk, but it also sounds like the mall was damned quick to rush to a decision.