Market Anarchist Blogs

• anarchist action figures. orgtheory.net (2010-07-28). The kids are alright. (Linked Wednesday 2010-07-28.)

• University Website. xkcd.com (2010-07-29). (Linked Friday 2010-07-30.)

• feministhulk: HULK FIND COMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION. RESULT: HULK HAVE VERY DIVERSE PORTFOLIO OF SMASH. Twitter / feministhulk (2010-07-30). Feminist Hulk has a thick conception of liberation. (Linked Friday 2010-07-30.)

• Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet. Aza Raskin, Aza on Design (2010-07-23). The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years. We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post. It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens... (Linked Friday 2010-07-30.)

• Saving Our History Books For The Singularity. rechelon, Human Iterations (2010-07-26). Some noble soul has labored to put the two most important history books on Individualist Anarchism’s first wave in America online — and in very accessible condition.   Anyway, I felt I had to pause in my projects and distractions to let you know.  This is the shit. Eunice Minette Schuster’s... (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• What does it mean to love your enemies? Ryan, The Peaceable Kingdom (2010-07-26). A question many Christians aren’t really asking. This moving video lays it out very simply. It is not wide-eyed optimism in the sense that it doesn’t portray automatic world peace and love in the face of violence. It means that to truly love your enemies you might have to receive... (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• A squealing leftie writes. chris dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling (2010-07-23). Tim says something that puzzles me:Human beings really are status seeking beings. The method of ranking it, enforcing it, discovering it, may change, but that there will be a social hierarchy is a given. And that’s the bit that our squealing lefties seem to forget….Simply because we are human beings... (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• Three from Vienna. Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-07-27). Including an excellent anthology from my teacher Kelly Jolley, also including essays by my other teacher Roderick Long; and a Tractarian musical number. About the latter, all I can say is that he would have been better off trying to whistle it. (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• Trail of Tears 2010. der Blaustrumpf (2010-07-27). Deportation is ethnic cleansing. Nothing more, nothing less. (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• Remember Furkan Dogan. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-07-27). Furkan Dogan was the 19-year-old American fatally shot five times by Israeli commandos aboard the Mavi Marmara headed for Gaza -- without a peep from the Obama administration, which has time to get involved with everything else happening in the world. Dogan was a bright young man with a promising... (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• Wikileaks releases classified Afghanistan war logs: "largest intelligence leak in history" Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing (2010-07-25). An archive of classified U.S. military logs spanning six years, more than 91,000 documents, and 200,000 pages, was today made available by WikiLeaks. The papers show a picture of the war in Afghanistan that is far more grim, and far less hopeful, than previously portrayed. The New York Times, London's... (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• Guadec Day 2: In pursuit of critical mass. Ivanka Majic, Canonical Design (2010-07-27). Today I was reminded of this quote by Jane Goodall: If everyone could think a little bit about small choices they make every day: What do you eat, does it result in animal cruelty? What do you wear, how was it made, does it damage the environment? When people start... (Linked Tuesday 2010-07-27.)

• Raucous Radio. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-07-20). If you haven’t tuned into Thinking Liberty, you’re missing a live anarcho-podcast that keeps getting better and better. In May we moved to a new location with our own equipment, and the quality of the production improved dramatically. The improvement in production quality made us more enthusiastic and confident in... (Linked Thursday 2010-07-22.)

• The Vault of Legislators. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-07-22). Bryan Alexander describes one gothic remnant of the Cold War: a set of underground chambers that were supposed to serve as "an emergency shelter for the entire United States Congress, a hideout and bolt hole in case of nuclear war, hidden away beneath a benign-looking hotel." Built in 1958, the... (Linked Thursday 2010-07-22.)

• More protection for military faculty, or less? Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications @ Duke (2010-07-20). Section 105 of the U.S. Copyright Law tells us that there can be no copyright in works of the federal government.  Almost uniquely among the nations of the world, the US government does not get to exclude others (including taxpayers) from using works created by government employees as part of... (Linked Thursday 2010-07-22.)

• Crowdsourcing Curation: The Social Graph as Gatekeeper. Eric Reasons, Eric Reasons (2010-07-20). I've written before about the compromise we tacitly agree to when amateurs take over the roles formerly held by professionsals. The Internet promotes this takeover by lowering the cost of production and transmission to near zero for nearly every user, for everything from words (blogs) to pictures (Flickr) to video... (Linked Thursday 2010-07-22.)

• Libertarianism on the Road. Matthew Yglesias (2010-07-22). Vulgar libertarianism is making yourself into a Toole of state capitalism. (Via Kevin Carson.) (Linked Thursday 2010-07-22.)

• Internet Archive sets goal to digitize more books - Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. "library" - Google News (2010-07-20). Internet Archive sets goal to digitize more booksRochester Democrat and ChronicleBrewster Kahle, a digital librarian and founder of a virtual library called the Internet Archive, www.archive.org, has launched a campaign to double the ...Google preps projects to test digital librarySalt Lake Tribuneall 8 news articles » (Linked Thursday 2010-07-22.)

fightfortruth and I distributed about 270 brochures to potential jurors and some county employees. It seemed to be a light jury pool today. Otherwise, we could have reached more people.

We passed out a different brochure [PDF] this time, “A Primer for Prospective Jurors.” We think it is more professional looking in addition to providing some useful tips on answering private questions during voir dire.

Some of the common questions about jury nullification are also addressed in the brochure. For example, “Once on a jury, must I use the law as given by the judge, even if I think it’s a bad law, or wrongly applied?” There are also historic examples of jury nullification being used to right a wrong, like the trial of William Penn.

We will set another event for next month. I know I said this last time, but I will make time for a training session sometime for any newcomers who like to attend FIJA events in the future.

Officer Bryan Yant,
Liar and Killer

In four transactions over five weeks, an undercover detective bought $840 in marijuana from Trevon Cole, according to a search warrant affidavit unsealed Friday.

Those drug deals — which totaled 1.8 ounces of marijuana — led to a late-night police raid on Cole’s East Bonanza Road apartment June 11, where the 21-year-old was shot and killed by Las Vegas police detective Bryan Yant.

According to the affidavit, which was unsealed after an attorney for Cole’s family filed a court motion, an undercover detective first made contact with a suspect known as “Big,” later identified as Cole, on April 28.

Cole and the detective met in the area of Desert Inn and Fort Apache roads, where 4.1 grams of marijuana changed hands for $60.

The affidavit said the detective and Cole met again on May 19 near Cole’s apartment complex, where the detective bought 21.5 grams of marijuana, paying Cole $380.

The detective again contacted Cole on May 26 and June 3, looking to buy almost $400 in marijuana. Cole did not have enough marijuana in May and said he needed to contact his supplier, the affidavit said.

In June, Cole sold $400 worth of marijuana — 27.2 grams — to the detective.

In the affidavit, Yant wrote that police considered it likely that the raid would turn up more drugs, scales, bags and elaborate records such as “owe” sheets related to narcotic sales.

Yant also wrote that Cole had a lengthy criminal history for drug trafficking in both Houston and Los Angeles, and would have firearms to protect his drugs and money. A night raid would be preferable, Yant wrote, to ensure the safety of children and other residents in the complex. [! —ed.]

Except.

There was no criminal history. That was a lie.

Andre Lagomarsino, the attorney representing Cole’s fiancee and family, said there were several errors in the affidavit — that Cole had no criminal history

There was no undercover buy on May 19 — at least, not from Trevon Cole. He wasn’t even in the state. That was a lie, too.

[Cole] was actually out of state on May 19, when police claimed to have bought marijuana from him.

The family told the attorney that Cole was in Los Angeles for his fiancee’s baby shower. Family picked him up at an L.A. bus station on May 14, and the couple returned to Las Vegas on May 20, he said.

There were no owe sheets. And there were no weapons.

According to the search warrant return, officers seized an undisclosed amount of marijuana, digital scales and $702 in cash, but found no transaction records or weapons.

So with this pack of lies in hand, in the interest of the safety of children and other residents, Officer Bryan Yant led a team of camouflaged, masked men to storm Trevon Cole and Sequioa Pearce’s apartment. They smashed in the windows, broke down the door, and came rushing into the apartment in the dead of night, heavily armed and screaming for immediate surrender. They surrounded Trevon Cole in his own bathroom, and, while he was getting down and raising his hands above his head, shot him in the face with an AR-15 assault rifle for a furtive motion that nobody but the Gangsters in Blue ever saw.

See also:

• GT 2010-07-16: Officer-Involved

From the West Australian government’s police force comes this story of a team of government cops using tasers to haze and punish other cops. Because there’s nothing like hazing to reinforce a culture of hypermasculine violence, and nothing like electrical torture to brutalize your victims into unit cohesion:

Two senior West Australian police officers have been stood down and two others sidelined amid allegations they Tasered junior officers as part of an initiation ritual at the Rockingham Police Station south of Perth. […]

It’s understood the unlawful practice had become part of subculture within a team of uniformed officers at the Rockingham Police Station. Tasers were being used as a punishment or initiation ritual. Officers, some of them senior, were drive stunning other staff with the guns delivering a shock without deploying the probes.

It’s believed there were multiple victims, some of them female officers, over a number of months.

—Sue Short, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2010-07-14): Police investigate reports of taser initiation ritual

Russell Armstrong, a rep from the pigs’ union, has this to say:

We’re disappointed that it’s happened, it’s an isolated incident, but we are supporting the officers and we are cooperating with internal investigators.

After all, nothing says isolated incident like multiple victims and part of a subculture within a team of uniformed officers. Anyway, while the Incident is being Internally Investigated, Armstrong wants you to know that, when an investigation uncovers a gang of abusive government cops who get their jollies by torturing victims with high-voltate, paralyzingly painful electric shocks, he would certainly hope that [the Police Commissioner] doesn’t sack any police officer over this incident.

See also:

• GT 2007-11-20: Ho ho.

• Officers William Mosher, Joshua Stark, and Thomas Mendiola. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Last weekend, at the Costco in Summerlin, Erik Scott got into an argument with some workers at the store. A Costco employee noticed that he was carrying a handgun in his waistband, so they freaked out and called the cops, then evacuated the store. Three Las Vegas Metro police officers — William Mosher, Joshua Stark, and Thomas Mendiola — rolled up and waited outside the store. When they saw Scott walking out of the store, they came up behind him and grabbed him on the shoulder and screamed at him to get down. He turned around and obeyed less than instantaneously, so the cops opened fire and stone cold gunned him down in the parking lot. The cops claimed that before they lit him up with 7 shots, Scott had reached for his gun in his waistband. Then, later, they claimed that he refused orders [sic] and instead withdrew a handgun and pointed at them.. Most of the witnesses, including a friend who was standing right next to Scott when the police gunned him down, say that he never did. A few witnesses differ — they say they did see him take out his gun but that he never pointed it at the cops. Metro said that Scott was ripping merchandise apart, kind of going berserk, and that they had received numerous 911 calls for his erratic behavior and reporting he was carrying a gun. Turns out that what actually happened is that another customer saw Scott opening up a box of aluminum water bottles putting some in his cart and some on the floor, in order to find out how many would fit in his cooler; when store security tried to confront him about it, Scott’s voice got elevated. A number of later 911 calls, provoked by the store’s panicky evacuation, recorded parts of the cop’s confrontation with Scott; the police have refused to release the 911 tapes. The Costco has surveillance cameras on the parking lot; the police took the tapes, but claim that they haven’t looked at them yet because of technical issues. The investigation of this police shooting by Las Vegas Metro is, of course, being handled by more police from Las Vegas Metro. There will almost certainly never be any kind of public trial; a coroner’s inquest hasn’t been scheduled, but will probably happen sometime in September. (There has been only 1 Clark County coroner’s inquest in 34 years that ever found any Metro police shooting to be neither justified nor excusable.) Meanwhile, the three cops who gunned down Erik Scott have been given a paid vacation from their jobs. The local newsmedia has been all over this story, mainly because Scott shops in Summerlin and used to be a tank commander in the United States government’s Army. Bill Scott, Erik’s father, has said that he hopes this case will draw attention to how many people Metro has gunned down: There are a lot of people who have been killed in Las Vegas, a lot of them by the police. They didn’t have a voice. This time, quote me: they killed the wrong guy.

• Officer Bryan Yant. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. For example, one of the people who has been killed in Las Vegas was Trevon Cole, an unarmed man who police shot in the face with an AR-15 assault rifle in the bathroom of his own apartment, while his 9-months-pregnant fiancee, Sequioa Pearce, was forced to get on the ground and watch. Metro was in his apartment because they had forced their way in in an extremely violent late-night raid to serve a drug search warrant. (Trevon Cole was violently seized and killed because he allegedly might have sold marijuana to an undercover narc, a crime which posed no threat at all to any identifiable victim’s rights.) So late at night while Pearce and Cole were relaxing in bed, a gang of police wearing camouflage and masks smashed in their windows and broke down their door, blitzed into the room holding assault rifles on their terrified victims. Trevon Cole was surrounded by a gang of heavily armed, masked men, was obeying their commands to get down, and had put his hands up in the air, but Yant decided he’d seen a furtive movement, so he stone cold shot Trevon Cole in the face at close range in front of his terrified fiancee. Officer Bryan Yant had already gunned down two other people in his career before he showed up to shoot an unarmed man in the face; An inquest jury into Yant’s 2002 fatal shooting found the officer justified in his actions despite a serious discrepancy between his story and evidence at the scene. The shooting will be considered by another Clark County Coroner’s Inquest on August 20. In the meantime, Bryan Yant, who is being investigated to determine whether or not he murdered an unarmed man, is being given a paid vacation from his government job. Meanwhile, his buddies on the force decided to show up at Sequoia Pearce’s mother’s house in order to mau-mau the only surviving witness and toss the house looking for guns and ammo that aren’t there.

• Officer Luis Norris. Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Another cop working for the local government in Las Vegas opened fire on an unarmed man this past Tuesday, for the crime of taking a shortcut through a residential neighborhood while the cop was Investigatin’. The man appeared on the wall while the cop was talking to a local homeowner about a possible prowler. Of course, all kinds of people live in a residential neighborhood (by definition), and all kinds of people pass through, so a civilized person might take this as a reason to shout What are you doing here? but Officer Luis Norris was packing heat and startled so he whipped out his gun and opened fire on this innocent man, who was not the prowler, was unarmed, had committed no crime, and posed no threat to anything other than the cop’s composure and poise. Thankfully, Officer Luis Norris is a bad shot: he missed the man he was trying to gun down in a moment of irrational panic, so his intended target lived through the night long enough for Authorities to later determine he was not a threat. Since Luis Norris just recklessly endangered the life of an innocent man, but didn’t kill him in the process, there will not even be a coroner’s inquest. Instead, Officer Luis Norris’s has been given a paid vacation from his government job, and eventually, his actions will be reviewed by the department’s use of force board, which may hit him with such serious consequences as a written reprimand or even firing him from his job. In case you were wondering, the process is not open to the public.

Las Vegas Metro is full of heavily-armed, twitchy, terrified cops who are easily startled and ready to open fire on helpless or harmless people at even the most furtive motion. Whether you’re resting in bed with your fiancee on Eastern and Bonanza, or going shopping with your fiancee in Summerlin to celebrate your new life together, or just talking a quiet walk through the neighborhood out at Desert Inn and Sandhill, there is a heavily armed force, patrolling 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, constantly ready to come down on you and gun you down at even a moment’s hesitation to obey their bellowed commands, or the slightest twitch that they don’t understand, or just for startling them. If they shoot at you, or even if they kill you, they will almost certainly never be held accountable for their actions; the worst that’s likely to happen is that they might lose their job, and what’s more likely is that they will be put back onto the streets to continue a long and storied career of killing unarmed people. We are told that we need this heavily armed, omnipresent, domineering, hyperviolent, completely unaccountable paramilitary occupation force constantly in our lives and at our throats in order to stop our community from being overrun by small-time possible neighborhood prowlers, by erratic men who take aluminum water bottles out of their boxes at Costco, and from black men who might maybe be willing to sell a bit of pot to willing customers. We are told that we need this heavily armed, omnipresent, domineering, hyperviolent, completely unaccountable paramilitary occupation force in order to keep us safe. But who will keep us safe from them?

Support your local CopWatch.

See also:

• The Police Beat: Officer J. Smith, Las Vegas Metro, Las Vegas, Nevada
• The Police Beat: Shot in the back
• The Metro Police Beat

• How we subsidize fossil fuels. Boing Boing (2010-07-15). The author is mistaken toward the end: all subsidies are evil. But the chart is useful. (Linked Thursday 2010-07-15.)

• The doom of the telecomms carriers. Armed and Dangerous (2010-07-15). Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont'd.) (Linked Thursday 2010-07-15.)

• How We Got So Sprawly. myglesias, Matthew Yglesias (2010-07-15). From Alyssa Katz’s excellent profile of the people in the Obama administration working to shift policy away from its anti-urban bias: New measures to reverse the march of spraw may be too little, too late. It took seven decades and trillions in federal investment to create the sprawl that the... (Linked Friday 2010-07-16.)

• one thing i notice about statists, whether liberals or. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-06-29). one thing i notice about statists, whether liberals or conservatives: i.e. everybody. they give an argument. i blow it up, twice for good measure. then they give another, perhaps totally incompatible with the first. i vaporize it. then another. then, remarkably, back to the first as though nothing ever happened.... (Linked Friday 2010-07-16.)

• on the other hand, "politicizing" science is inevitable, and. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-07-11). on the other hand, "politicizing" science is inevitable, and obviously actual science does not directly draw policy conclusions. you sort of get the vague feeling that we could actually be ruled by scientifically discovered facts, or by dudes down in a laboratory somewhere. but ask yourself whether that makes any... (Linked Friday 2010-07-16.)

This is an accurate illustration of an important point in the defense of free culture against Intellectual Monopoly.

It is also deeply disturbing.

Show it to anybody who needs some basic orientation in anti-monopoly arguments against IP. But only if you also want to creep them the hell out in the process.

(Via Kent Hastings 2010-07-15.)

(Via Cerpn @ Google Reader.)

Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

At least, that’s what Kansas News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones.

And officials are taking it seriously.

Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman Mark Woodward told News 9.

I-dosing involves donning headphones and listening to “music” — largely a droning noise — which the sites peddling the sounds promise will get you high. Teens are listening to such tracks as “Gates of Hades,” which is available on YouTube gratis (yes, the first one is always free).

Those who want to get addicted to the drugs can purchase tracks that will purportedly bring about the same effects of marijuana, cocaine, opium and peyote. While street drugs rarely come with instruction manuals, potential digital drug users are advised to buy a 40-page guide so that they learn how to properly get high on MP3s.

Oklahoma’s Mustang Public School district isn’t taking the threat lightly, and sent out a letter to parents warning them of the new craze. The educators have gone so far as to ban iPods at school, in hopes of preventing honor students from becoming cyber-drug fiends, News 9 reports.

—Ryan Singel, Threat Level (2010-07-14): Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High

So no, in case you were wondering, there is no bottom to this cognitive barrel: absolutely no drug panic so flimsily contrived that narcocratic Officials won’t use it as an opportunity to issue breathless press statements pleading for greater social control, or so obviously manufactured and transparently idiotic that the responsible gatekeepers of the newsmedia won’t gravely report about the Alarming New Trend, the worried reactions of Concerned Parents & Teachers, and the pressing need for Officials and Concerned Parents to be even more proactive in freaking the hell out, obsessively spying on their sons’ and daughters’ pastimes, taking away teenagers’ possessions, and controlling teenagers’ behavior. It’s not just that you don’t need to demonstrate that anybody is suffering, or even could possibly suffer, any kind of physical harm. The drug scare doesn’t need to involve any actual drugs; apparently it doesn’t even need to involve a physical substance. Or anything but the most tangential connection to basic facts of human physiology. A drug scare story without any drugs nicely distils the one really important feature of every drug scare story: all that you need to work up an adult panic is to find enough teenagers in one place (one or two on YouTube will do) who are trying to convince themselves that they’re having a good time without an adult’s prior approval — if some teenager somewhere is experiencing pleasure, never mind the cause, that alone is reason enough to call the narcs and issue yet another story leading off As if parents of teenagers don’t have enough to worry about…

So here, we find a whole gang of Responsible Adults holding positions of community authority — professional narcs, journalists, teachers and parents — all of them freaking the hell out because some teenagers somewhere might be trying to convince themselves that they’re having a good time listening to MP3s of binaural beat meditation music. A new craze? Sure, evidently there is a craze going on here. But who is it that’s acting crazed?

The politics of fear are the most dangerous mind-altering substance on the market.