Month: January 2014

Reason Managing Editor Katherine
Mangu-Ward discusses the NSA spying through Angry Birds
and other apps on Fox News’ Your
World with Cavuto.

Airdate: January 28, 2013

About 3 minutes.

Two St. Louis county police
officers who were assigned to the detail of County Executive
Charles Dooley have had their access to a criminal database
suspended while an investigation over whether they were running
unauthorized background checks,
according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The officers
are specifically accused of running such a check on a former
candidate for the police board, a body that’s theoretically
supposed to supervise officers. The Dispatch
reports:

Questions first arose in October when Dooley’s chief of
staff, Garry Earls, announced to the county council that a criminal
background check into former police board candidate David Spence
had come back clean, County Chief Tim Fitch said.

Fitch said he had questioned how the county administration would
know that information because he didn’t believe it was his
officers’ place to run the checks.

“I thought it was inappropriate because we answer to police board
members and we should not be doing any background checks on our own
supervisors,” he said.

Further investigation revealed that at least one of the two
officers assigned to Dooley’s detail had run Spence’s name
unbeknownst to Fitch, he said.

“That’s when we asked ourselves, ‘Who else is he running?’ ” Fitch
said.

Fitch insisted he’s not claiming the elected official Dooley did
anything wrong, and that the investigation is focused on whether
the two officers did. He said, however, that he was also interested
in who may have asked them to run the checks (Dooley? duh?).
 As part of Dooley’s detail, they were stationed in the office
of the county executive. Access to the criminal database was meant
to assess threats against the county executive, and Fitch noted
that all searches are only illegal if done for “criminal justice
purposes.”

File this one as just one more reason you should be worried
about expansive government databases even if you
think you have nothing to hide.

• Two Norwegian politicians have
  nominated Edward Snowden for the
  2014 Nobel Peace Prize. They should ask to transfer over the
  one they gave to President Barack Obama.
• The cold weather has turned Atlanta into an
  apocalyptic landscape about which several comparisons to
  The Walking Dead have been made.
• The Supreme Court ordered a temporary
  stay of the execution of a Missouri man. Opponents are pointing
  to the state’s lack of transparency about the drugs they’re using
  to execute prisoners as a problem.
• The House has passed the
  $1 trillion farm bill. It cuts food stamps slightly and one
  farm subsidy but expands the crop insurance program.
• Egypt will be putting 20 Al Jazeera journalists, including
  
  four foreign reporters, on trial for aiding members of the
  now-banned Muslim Brotherhood as Al Jazeera correspondents.
• A White House petition demanding the
  deportation of Justin Bieber has reached the threshold of
  100,000 to garner a response. I was going to suggest that 100,000
  folks should prepare for disappointment, but given the Obama
  administration’s reputation for deporting people, they may get what
  they want.

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Jesse
Walker reviews Torre David: Informal Vertical
Communities, a book about a never-completed skyscraper in
Venezuela. After a banking crisis crippled the nation’s economy,
the government got title to the tower and let it stagnate. Then
squatters took over and transformed it. The result, writes Walker,
was a complex and fascinating place: not just a symbol of poverty,
but a symbol of the self-organized activity that offers a way out
of poverty.

View this article.

The Health Department of
Madison County, Illinois on Sunday shut down a baking operation run
by an 11-year-old girl.

Chloe Stirling may be young, but she’s already developed serious
culinary and small business skills. She began an enterprise, called
“Hey, Cupcake!,” out of her family’s kitchen two years ago.
According to the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, the sixth grader earns around $200 a month
selling her baked goods. Stirling hopes to use her income to
one day open her own bakery. Her mother, Heather, also offered to
match the money Stirling makes to buy a car when she turns
16. Additionally, “she has donated many to charitable events,
including a fundraiser for a student with cancer and, most
recently, taking some to residents at a senior care center,”

writes the Belleville News-Democrat.

The desserts didn’t sit well with the local government, though.
The health department called Stirling’s parents and demanded that
the girl cease operations, because she was violating
the Illinois
State Food Service Code. Stirling lacked the necessary permit
and the kitchen wasn’t properly licensed.

“The guy told me I either had to buy her a bakery or put in a
second kitchen (in the house),” Stirling’s mother
said.

How did the sleuths at the health department discover this
renegade baker? She was on the
front page of the local news. The News-Democrat
wanted to highlight Stirling’s entrepreneurship, so they wrote a
feature about her.

Health Promotion Manager Amy Yeager told the
Post-Dispatch, “The rules are the rules. It’s for the
protection of the public health. The guidelines apply to everyone.”
When asked whether it was worth the potential poor public
relations, she said, “People will react how they choose to react.
But it is our job.”

The sixth grade scofflaw doesn’t blame the department for
finally catching up with her code-violating behavior. She told

KSDK, “Well, I think it’s just the rules are rules and they
kind of need to be followed. I really don’t blame the health
department because it’s not really their fault.”

This isn’t the first time law enforcement has tackled little
criminals. Reason has covered
numerous
regulation-dodging lemonade runners,
one of which had cancer,
and even a zucchini
black marketeer. 

The Health Department of
Madison County, Illinois on Sunday shut down a baking operation run
by an 11-year-old girl.

Chloe Stirling may be young, but she’s already developed serious
culinary and small business skills. She began an enterprise, called
“Hey, Cupcake!,” out of her family’s kitchen two years ago.
According to the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, the sixth grader earns around $200 a month
selling her baked goods. Stirling hopes to use her income to
one day open her own bakery. Her mother, Heather, also offered to
match the money Stirling makes to buy a car when she turns
16. Additionally, “she has donated many to charitable events,
including a fundraiser for a student with cancer and, most
recently, taking some to residents at a senior care center,”

writes the Belleville News-Democrat.

The desserts didn’t sit well with the local government, though.
The health department called Stirling’s parents and demanded that
the girl cease operations, because she was violating
the Illinois
State Food Service Code. Stirling lacked the necessary permit
and the kitchen wasn’t properly licensed.

“The guy told me I either had to buy her a bakery or put in a
second kitchen (in the house),” Stirling’s mother
said.

How did the sleuths at the health department discover this
renegade baker? She was on the
front page of the local news. The News-Democrat
wanted to highlight Stirling’s entrepreneurship, so they wrote a
feature about her.

Health Promotion Manager Amy Yeager told the
Post-Dispatch, “The rules are the rules. It’s for the
protection of the public health. The guidelines apply to everyone.”
When asked whether it was worth the potential poor public
relations, she said, “People will react how they choose to react.
But it is our job.”

The sixth grade scofflaw doesn’t blame the department for
finally catching up with her code-violating behavior. She told

KSDK, “Well, I think it’s just the rules are rules and they
kind of need to be followed. I really don’t blame the health
department because it’s not really their fault.”

This isn’t the first time law enforcement has tackled little
criminals. Reason has covered
numerous
regulation-dodging lemonade runners,
one of which had cancer,
and even a zucchini
black marketeer. 

All hail Chimera Incorporated!
What, you think that corporation name sounds sinister? What kind of
American are you, anyway? No, Chimera Incorporated is bringing us
“The Kronies,” the awesome super-powered team that keeps this
country big and strong through the tools of crony capitalism. Save
us from those selfish entrepreneurs who want the unpredictable
“market” to decide who the winners are. Why should the market get
to decide when we’ve got all this influence?

Here’s an introduction to The Kronies:

I defy you to find a better way to reach Gen Xers who distrust
the government (by which I mean, “Gen Xers”) than a parody of
terrible Saturday morning cartoons from 30 years ago. The site for
the Kronies is here, featuring
descriptions of their “heroes” and their abilities to direct
government spending their way with powers like mandates and
boondoggles. Right now they represent the ethanol industry, big
banks, big labor, and the military-industrial complex, led by “Big
G,” the manifestation of the bipartisan nature (his costume is
equally split between red and blue) of government crony spending.
The site promises a shop coming soon, and we can only hope they
follow through.

Glenn Beck and The Blaze tracked down the mastermind of the
site, John Papola, CEO of Austin-based production company Emergent
Order. Beck
interviewed Papola about the bipartisanship nature of crony
capitalism and the business culture that makes it so hard to fight.
In short, the more powerful the government, the greater the
incentive for crony capitalism.

“I really believe that it’s fundamentally the unique nature of
government as a monopoly that gives rise to these things,” he told
Beck. “Whether you’re General Motors or General Electric or — you
name the big corporation — and you have a fiduciary duty to go
after the maximum profit, and you have the opportunity to use
legislation to help do that or help keep your competitors at bay,
you’re gonna do it. The incentives are so perverse that it’s not
even a matter of morality after a certain point, because if your
competitors are doing it, are you going to fire your people to be
the nice guy, because you let the other guy take the subsidies and
rig the rules against you?”

I’m crossing my fingers for a video game in the future. As it’s
a licensed intellectual property, it must be a very, very bad video
game that costs too much, as is typically the case.