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Alex
Pareene is doing his annual hack list at
Salon, and the conceit this year is that he writes each
entry in the hack’s own voice. This means, among other things,
that he has posted a Thomas
Friedman parody.

This raises the issue: Does the world need another Thomas
Friedman parody? At this point literally every single Thomas
Friedman column is itself a self-parody, and if that doesn’t
exhaust your appetite there’s a website that generates still more
parodies automatically.
It is possible that Friedman himself uses that site to create a
column when he’s feeling rushed, which would explain how
this managed to make it into the paper.

But Pareene took an extra step by asking: You know how
people love to complain about how awful Thomas Friedman is? What
would their complaints sound like if they were written by Thomas
Friedman? Here is what he came up with:

When I was in Singapore, I talked to hundreds of Asian
college students, business people and diplomats, and while none of
them said this to me, exactly, it’s basically my thesis and

so I’m going to put it in quotation marks as a sort of
“distillation” of things I probably was told by people: “Is
everything going all right over there in America? How could the
people who gave us Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, H.P. and Google
also have so many people, many of them in positions of authority,
who take a clown like Thomas Friedman seriously? Most of his
columns are just
nonsensical buzzwords he’s been repeating for literally 10
years and his foreign policy analysis is usually either
incredibly facile or actively offensive to Arabs and Muslims. It’s
actually terrifying how influential he is. Like it legitimately
makes me despair of anything improving anywhere in the world for
anyone but the super-rich. Also there is probably some Times rule
about not putting ‘distilled’ quotes in quotation marks,
right?”

When I heard that—or rather when I didn’t hear it but when I wrote
it, just now—I thought “we’re
gonna need a bigger boat.” And that boat better have
Wi-Fi.

Friedman-bashing aficionados can read the rest here.

Central American countries have
been badly misruled by oligarchs for most of their
post-independence histories. The result is that Nicaragua,
Guatemala, and Honduras are the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th
poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. The one exception
in the region has been Costa Rica where democracy and the rule of
law have generally prevailed. The country famously abolished its
military back in the 1940s.

Unfortunately, in recent years, corrupt politicians have
undermined the trust of Ticos* in their government. This has
provided an opportunity for a rising libertarian political movement
and, less fortunately, an opportunity for politicians advocating
socialism.

The
Tico Times is reporting that a group of prominent
economists have broken from the country’s conservative party to
endorse the Libertarian Movement’s presidential candidate Otto
Guevara in the current election:

A former president of Costa Rica’s Central Bank and previous
PUSC supporter, Jorge Guardia, attacked one of the rising
opposition candidates.

“The country faces an urgent political dilemma,” Guardia said at
a Tuesday press conference. “There exists the risk that José María
Villalta, of the socialist Broad Front Party, could win the
February presidential elections.”

Guardia praised the Libertarian Movement presidential nominee as
having the only economic plan to solve Costa Rica’s woes, such as
its
8.9 percent unemployment rate.

The Tico Times further reported:

Guevara thanked his new-found supporters and used the
opportunity to slam his top opponents.

“The choice is between three,” Guevara said. “Socialism on one
side, a continuation of impoverishment, or a change to strengthen
the economy.”

In 2010, Guevara received
21 percent of the vote and his party gained 10 of the 57 seats
in the Chamber of Deputies. Here’s hoping that Ticos make the right
choice on February 2.

*Costa Ricans are called Ticos because they tend to
pronounce dimunitives like momentito as momentico. I had the
pleasure of working as reporter for the Tico Times back in the
1990s.

H/T Kevin Fleming.

U.K.-based
Sky News has released a video of a brigade of British jihadists
fighting in Syria. According to the interviewed jihadists, private
funds from the U.K. are the largest source of funding for jihadist
fighters, and hundreds of fighters from Britain have traveled to
Syria to fight against Assad.

In the video, the British jihadists claim that they only intend
to fight Assad and have no plans of returning to the U.K. to wage
jihad. They also reject being labeled as terrorists.

Earlier this month, European security officials said that the

number of Europeans fighting in Syria against Assad was
increasing.

That the British jihadists in the video claim that they have no
interest in waging jihad in the U.K. is unlikely to reassure
British authorities, who have already
arrested
men who have returned to the U.K. from Syria.

It shouldn’t be surprising if there is increased coverage of the
number of foreigners fighting with Islamic groups within Assad’s
opposition if the Western-backed Free Syrian Army continues to

lose ground
to the Islamic Front, a group that welcomes foreign fighters
and despite its unpleasant goal (the establishment of an
Islamic state in Syria) is becoming more important to the

Obama administration’s pursuit of a diplomatic solution to the
Syrian civil war. According to The Daily Beast’s Jamie
Dettmer, the Islamic Front has fought with jihadists
before.  

Although American diplomats were willing to talk to the Islamic
Front, it was reported today that the Islamic Front
refused to talk to U.S. representatives.

To give an idea of the sort of people involved with the Islamic
Front, here are some of the thoughts of the Islamic Front’s
military chief, as reported by
Foreign Policy:

Zahran Alloush, the Islamic Front’s military chief, has
demonized Syria’s Alawite minority and called for them to be
cleansed from Damascus. As he put it in a recent video: “The
jihadists will wash the filth of the rafida [a slur used to
describe Shia] from Greater Syria, they will wash it forever, if
Allah wills it.”

More from Reason.com on Syria here. 

Pretty much everyone concerned
with climate change issues agrees that temperatures are rising and
snow is melting. But what is causing the planet to warm
up? The United Nations’ computer climate models are supposed
to give policy makers reliable data regarding future trends in
man-made global warming. But they’ve failed to predict a flat
15-year period. Ronald Bailey argues that their latest report does
not inspire the kind of confidence that could justify a
trillion-dollar climate policy bet.

View this article.

Officials in the nation’s capital seem to believe that not
enough gun-owning city residents have told them to get stuffed;
they want already registered gun owners to register again, and
again, every couple of years. It’s an effort guaranteed to turn
some of the compliant into instant criminals, and to guarantee that
nobody will ever have a handle on just who is armed.

The new rule hasn’t yet been added to the online repository of
D.C. Municipal Regulations, but you can read
it in its proposed form along with a handy summary. The key
passage says:

2326.1 Pursuant to § 207a of the Act, a registration certificate
shall expire three (3) years after the date of issuance, unless
renewed in accordance with the Act and this section or otherwise
stated in law or regulation.

According to the Metropolitan Police
Department, “30,000 firearm registrations would be subject to
the renewal requirement,” with each registrant subject to a
three-month grace period during each re-registration period. “A
registrant would be required to appear in person at MPD
headquarters; submit fingerprints; confirm possession of the
previously-registered firearm, home address, and continued
compliance with the Act’s registration requirements.”

The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro
comments, “Of the 50,000 or however many people there are, at
least one person won’t comply. Not willfully but because they
haven’t heard about the new law and all of a sudden they’ll be in
technical violation of the law which has serious penalties.”

Another problem is that renewed registration turns the process
into more of a revokable permitting scheme than actual
registration. In the wake of Heller,
D.C. probably can’t get away with arbitrarily capping or reducing
the number of legal guns it will allow, as New York City has,
repeatedly (with the result that
those with political connections or cash to spare are favored).
But it can make the process such a hassle that people don’t bother
complying—which is
already par for the course with less-restrictive
laws.

It’s hard to think of a justification for the law, other than
outright harassment. Either gun owners register when they enter the
District, or they don’t (and reducing the hassle factor would
encourage at least some degree of compliance). And why should D.C.
officials care if owners move on and are no longer residents? Few
jurisdictions make much effort to track gun owners leaving
their turf.

Years ago, just for the hell of it, I tried to follow the New
York City Police Department’s procedure for giving up a
registration on my one legal gun when I happily left that
dump swell town
in the rearview mirror. The officer on the phone was so flummoxed
by the idea that I’d moved somewhere that required neither
licensing nor registration that I finally told her to fuck herself
and hung up (despite my mild-mannered demeanor in print, I have a
short temper with officialdom). If Bloomberg’s minions can make
their peace with aging registration records, D.C. could possibly
manage, too.

Then again, D.C.’s new registration law may be a misfired
attempt to really nail down how prevalent gun ownership really is.
There’s something of a mantra making the rounds in gun-hating
circles that firearms ownership is on the decline and so the whole
“problem” will eventually go away as it fades from the culture.

But that claim is based on self-reporting,
as pollsters call people to ask them if they own politically
controversial items that many politicians want to severely restrict
or outlaw. The percentage of self-reported gun ownership has
blipped up and down over the years, but generally settled from 50
percent to 37 percent from 1960 to now.

That number has settled even as support for gun restrictions has
dropped in
Reason-Rupe polling,
AP polling, and Gallup
polling. Those self-reported numbers have settled even as
market observers expect 2013 to end as a
record year for gun sales, adding to the estimated
270,000,000 or so guns already in American hands. Those numbers
have settled even though firearms are incredibly durable, and guns
sold decades ago are likely to be remain serviceable, even as they
gain new neighbors on the wall or in the gun safe from those record
sales (I own a Marlin lever-action rifle manufactured in 1900 that
still shoots perfectly). Or maybe those neighboring guns are quite
a distance away, since many recent gun buyers have been
first-timers.

I’ve written before about the
long and consistent history of abject failure enjoyed by gun
registration laws. Attempts to get Americans, Canadians,
French, Germans, and everybody else to register their boomsticks
with government officials always result in more defiance than
compliance—probably because governments repeatedly misuse the
information. Chances are that the widely accepted decline in gun
ownership reflects a similar unwillingness to surrender sensitive
information about a highly politicized issue.

By making the hurdle to compliance with its gun regulations
higher and more annoying, and threatening even technical violators
with fines and criminal charges, Washington, D.C. officials
guarantee that the gap will only widen between what they think they
think they know and reality.