BACK IN 2004, I ran an email on incompetence at the CPA. Here’s more evidence for that proposition, from the same time frame.
Archive for 2007
May 18, 2007
GET YOUR PHOTOS STOLEN, COMPLAIN ABOUT IT, and have your complaint censored by Yahoo! Nice.
SECRETS OF GETTING RICH: “Staying married, not getting divorced, thinking about savings.”
Who knew it was so easy?
The “Hate Crimes” bill currently moving through Congress involves an unwise, and arguably unconstitutional expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction. But even at the state or local level, hate crimes are a bad idea. The whole debate of whether homosexuals should be included in hate crimes statutes is but one example of how hate crimes statutes undermine the principle of equal protection of the laws, by encouraging fights over whether some groups are or are not deserving of unequal, special protection.
The best argument for hate crimes laws is that a hate crime causes more harm than an ordinary crime, because it causes many other people to fear being victimized. This is true for some hate crimes (e.g., public vandalism of a synagogue), but certainly not all of them (e.g., a dispute between neighbors in which an epithet is used). Moreover, there are plenty of ordinary crimes (such as highly-publicized serial attacks on random victims), which also cause fear in many people besides the immediate victims. I suggest that judicial sentencing discretion allows for appropriate punishment for crimes which have unusually large secondary impacts.
As long as hate crimes statutes stay on the books, every hate crime statute should include a provision providing for extra punishment for hate crime hoaxes. (Above the level of punishment for ordinary hoaxes about non-existent crimes.) Just as a hate crime may cause heightened community fear, so does a hate crime hoax.
He has further thoughts here.
J.D. JOHANNES POSTS A REPORT FROM BAGHDAD, with pictures and lots of interesting information. It’s a must-read, but here’s an excerpt:
Is there hope for Baghdad? Yes. The additional U.S. forces from the surge are already showing limited signs of success. They are not the signs quantified by London or D.C. think tanks.
Every Battalion Commander I talked with gave me the same metrics to measure success–Commerce, people returning to their homes, essential services, kids playing soccer in fields they haven’t played on in 2 years, professionalization of the police and security services.
Those are things that do not fit well in an index and things a person can only see on the ground by going back to the same areas of operation every few months.
Which is why I will be back in Dora and West Rasheed in a few months.
Really, read the whole thing.
FIJI’S MILITARY GOVERNMENT cracks down on political blogs.
WELL, NO: “This is not to say that J. K. Rowling is a plagiarist.”
GREEN ISN’T CLEAN: How the government ruined washing machines. Though we have a “high efficiency” machine that cleans very well — but it wasn’t cheap.
MORE UNHAPPINESS ON IMMIGRATION: What’s interesting to me is that — with the exception of Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore — I’m not hearing a lot of pro-immigration support for this bill.
A HYDROGEN-POWERED CAR with water in the tank? I’m skeptical of this claim, though I’d like it to be true.
MAKING THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP LOOK LAME: The latest Corn & Miniter Show is up!
TOWARD A CULTURE OF self-defense. Better than a culture of passivity.
ANOTHER EMAIL FROM MICHAEL YON:
I cannot believe my eyes and ears in Anbar. Very quiet where I am. Did a foot patrol today with Iraqi Army and a couple of Marines. Local population was friendly. Have not heard a shot fired in anger in days. (Whereas before the sounds of war were nearly always in the air.)
Sounds good to me.
I’VE HAD POSTS ON DISASTER PREPAREDNESS BEFORE, but here’s a whole list on how to survive a nuclear war
ADVICE ON WHAT MEN LIKE, from Ann Althouse.
A LOOK AT THE LATEST BUDGET FICTION in Washington:
Under their “Pay-Go†rules, congressional Democrats promised not to raise spending unless there was specific federal revenue available to pay for it. The Reserve Fund is their way of guaranteeing a funding increase when — wink, wink — at a later date they will have found the needed revenues. Call it the “Spend Now, Maybe Pay Later†approach to federal budgeting.
Today’s congressional Democrats aren’t unique in using a sleight of hand like the Reserve Fund to mask the fact they are spending more of our hard-earned tax dollars on another of their favored special interests.
When the Republicans were in the majority, they used fictions like counting projected budget savings in future years to make this year’s budget appear to be balanced or at least getting closer to being balanced.
The problem is that like all lies, Washington’s spending fictions are meant to obscure the truth about irresponsible budgets, bureaucratic waste, fraud and rampant conflicts of interest.
Meet the new boss, yada yada.
USING BLOGS for political test marketing.
THE BRITISH ARMY: Defeated by a press release. This kind of thing really can’t be allowed to continue.
And read this, too.
And these comments by Noah Pollak. Pattern?
AS I WATCH THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, I’m reminded of Robert Conquest’s third law: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
MEGAN MCARDLE’S SITE IS DOWN, and she’s blogging here temporarily.
BLOGGER THREATENED over Islamberg. I think the authorities need to look into this.
WOLFOWITZ, sans horns.
IN THE MAIL: Bryan Caplan’s new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
I’ll just note that voter irrationality can have its upsides as well as downsides.
MORE ON CARBON OFFSETS: I used to think they were dumb, until I got 100,000 lbs. of CO2 offsets at a very reasonable price. Now I party with petrochemicals like it’s 1999!
A PACK, NOT A HERD: “Law officers have praised a bank customer who pulled his gun and helped deputies capture a gunman who opened fire during a robbery of a Wachovia branch, killing two tellers and wounding two.”
Nice to see the praise from law enforcement, too. Sometimes professional jealousy gets in the way of that sort of thing.