One of his recent gigs involved playing someone from the last category: a distraught father who’s holed himself up in a house with his kids and threatening to kill them.  While I didn’t learn a lot of details, he apparently played his role so well that a frustrated cop ended up giving him a black eye.

I was struck by the irony of someone who volunteers to put himself in harm’s way by our Protectors and Servants (granted, he’s paid for it), when they will freely dish out the same punishment to any slob on the street unfortunate enough to find themselves in a cop’s crosshairs. It also disturbs me that whatever training the police take to deal with unstable individuals, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

I mean, if an actor can get clocked by the police during a simulated exercise, what does that bode for genuinely troubled people when the cops have access to their Tasers and sidearms? Unfortunately to ask is to answer.

(Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard)

Rodriguez has now expanded one of the trailers, for a film called Machete, into a full-length feature starring Danny Trejo, a fixture in many Rodriguez movies, including the family-friendly Spy Kids series in which Trejo also played a character named Machete.  I hope parents don’t confuse that Machete with this one, however, as the new “illegal” trailer makes clear (warning: NSFW language and violence).  In the new film, Machete is a former Federale and migrant laborer who drifts around Texas looking for work.  He is hired by a businessman (played by Jeff Fahey) to kill a corrupt senator who’s trying to kick all of the illegal immigrants out of the state.  But it’s all a setup; Machete is the patsy for a deeper conspiracy to whip up anti-immigration hysteria so that tough new laws can be passed without much protest.  Machete then goes on the signature Rodriguez rampage of killing bad guys and scoring with hot women.

The real fun may be in seeing this movie played out against an all-too-real backdrop of anti-illegal immigrant hysteria.  The senator in Machete, played by Robert DeNiro, uses rhetoric not much different from that heard by officials such as Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who warned of an epidemic of cop shootings by illegals after one of his deputies was wounded by suspected drug smugglers near the border.  No evidence of such an epidemic exists — only one cop in Arizona has been killed by an illegal immigrant since 2008 — but the amplification effect of non-stop media coverage lends credibility to Babeu’s histrionics.

Then there’s the condemnation of forcibly removing illegals from the country, and the rallying of immigrants by Machete’s compadres to fight back, echoing the political and cultural backlash against Arizona’s new legislation.  Even professional sports have gotten in on the act; the Phoenix Suns wore “Los Suns” jerseys on Wednesday to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and take a swipe at the immigration bill.

Whether Machete is just a Mexploitation flick using illegal immigration as a pretext for a gory revenge fantasy, or represents a deeper political statement by Rodriguez, won’t be known until the film is released in September.  Of course it can be both; politics and pop culture often make strange, not to mention lucrative, bedfellows.  Such is the wonder of American enterprise!

There may be some debate over what weapons this group of people were carrying, but there is no debate over what happened after U. S. helicopters opened up on them with 30mm cannon fire.  They then proceeded to shoot unarmed civilians, including children, trying to evacuate the wounded.  At least 12 people were killed and the two children wounded.

Perhaps most sickening were the comments on the radio after the engagement, urging one of the wounded, Reuters driver Sameed Chmagh, to pick up a weapon (if indeed that’s what he was doing) so he could be shot again, or that it was these people’s fault for “bringing their children into battle”, never mind that they weren’t looking for battle; the Army helicopters shot them without warning as they tried to assist the wounded.

Perhaps someone can explain how we’re any more free now, because I’m having difficulty seeing it.  In fact there’s no rational explanation for how these wars, or any wars, have ever helped us maintain our freedoms.  We seem to be less free now than at any point in the past 200 years, and it’s not because radical Muslims hate our wealth and decadent culture.  It’s because our rulers must continually find “enemies” to threaten us, from within and without, to maintain their authority.

These wars were started by the last regime, and this atrocity occurred on George W. Bush’s watch; yet Barack Obama has made no real effort to reduce American troop presence in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the latter case has even escalated military operations.  Yet Obama campaigned on promises to get troops out of Iraq and harshly criticized Bush’s handling of both wars.  The president has changed, the party has changed, but the regime has not.  Nor has the rhetoric to justify the continued prosecution of overseas conquest.

Republican wars, Democrat wars — it hardly matters anymore who is to blame for them.  They are now just imperial campaigns, with all the horrors and enormous cost in blood and treasure they entail.  But empires inevitably fall.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

You can’t trust the state, even when it appears no one else can save you.   And now survivors of the terrible earthquake in Haiti are learning the same, painful lesson:

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

These are not criminals — just people overwhelmed by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, looking for food, water and shelter.  When the Marines evacuated them, they were under the impression that they could join relatives already in the U. S., but instead they were immediately arrested and held for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — despite a current suspension of deportations to Haiti.  All of this, because they didn’t already have a piece of paper from the U. S. government granting them permission to come here.  And yet more immigrants have all but disappeared into ICE’s detention center network, with family unable to find them.  Some that were lucky enough to be freed were granted tourist visas, allowing them to stay for a short while, but not to work.

But even when their loved ones are put in cages for no reason by the government, people can’t seem to let go of their implicit trust of the state:

The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn.  Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

The cognitive dissonance of that paragraph is almost dazzling: an Obama supporter who doesn’t understand why the Obama-led government jailed his nephews.  Even with the boot on their neck, people still look to the state to save them.  Will they ever learn?

Never trust the state.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

I’m pleased to be part of this venture and plan to be active in contributing to it.  I also hope it will stimulate my muse so that I post more on this blog, which has lain dormant for far too long.  So please subscribe to both!  And look up The Libertarian Standard on Facebook and become a fan.

The penalty [for not carrying insurance as required by the new health care bill] is assessed through the Code and accounted for as an additional amount of Federal tax owed. However, it is not subject to the enforcement provisions of subtitle F of the Code. The use of liens and seizures otherwise authorized for collection of taxes does not apply to the collection of this penalty. Non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties under the Code and interest does not accrue for failure to pay such assessments in a timely manner.

So the IRS might gaze at you sternly and maybe wag a finger or two, but there’s nothing they can do at this point to collect the non-compliance penalty. Megan McArdle lays out the possible consequences:

It would mean that in practice the mandate would only apply to people who get tax refunds; otherwise, just write the IRS a check for everything except the mandate. And since you don’t have to get a tax refund–you can have your employer change your withholding–anyone who doesn’t want to pay it, wouldn’t have to.

But it’s not clear that this is what’s actually going to happen. If the IRS can reorder the priority of the tax dollars they take from you, then they can simply put any funds towards the mandate first. That way, if you attempt to go without insurance and then pay the IRS everything except the mandate penalty, you’ll end up with a tax liability the exact size of the mandate penalty . . . for which they can now garnish your wages, put tax liens on your house, and otherwise do all the nasty stuff that they are authorized to do under Subtitle F.

Naturally I’m all for not providing government revenue agents with more authority to steal money from me, although I suspect that the enforcement problem will be fixed sooner than later (the personal responsibility clause itself doesn’t begin until 2014).  But just imagine how much revenue the IRS would collect, if it could not threaten taxpayers with imprisonment.  It might just be enough to cover the printing costs on Obama’s health care bill.

In the meantime, to paraphrase Captain Barbossa, consider this rule more like…a guideline.

(Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard)

My youngest daughter was watching Ni Hao, Kai-Lan on Nick Jr. tonight, and in one episode Kai-Lan and her friends make hats to wear in a parade.  Rintoo (the tiger) has made a hat of flowers, twigs and pine cones, which Ho-Ho (the little monkey) copies almost exactly; the only difference is that Ho-Ho’s hat has two pine cones while Rintoo’s has three.  When Rintoo sees Ho-Ho’s hat, he yells at Ho-Ho to take the hat off, and then stomps off and says he doesn’t want to be in the parade anymore because he wanted his hat to be “special”, and that no one else should have a hat like it.
 
So Kai-Lan takes Rintoo to a bakery where Mr. Fluffy (the baker mouse) has baked a special cake for the parade, only to find out another friend has baked a cake just like it because she liked how it looked.  Rather than become angry, Mr. Fluffy is very happy that someone liked his cake so much that they wanted to copy it.  So Rintoo learns that there’s nothing wrong with Ho-Ho copying his hat.  In fact Rintoo thinks his hat is even more special because Ho-Ho wanted one just like it.  He even finds a third pine cone for Ho-Ho’s hat so they match exactly.
 
A gentle but effective lesson in how ideas can be shared without hurting anyone else.

159. Puppycide in Buffalo during a police raid that fails to turn up any drugs or make any arrests.

160. Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, no friend of fugitives, illegal immigrants or civil rights, spends an unknown amount of taxpayers’ money on production costs for a Fox reality show.  Then his boys arrest some people applauding a speech critical of Arpaio during a county supervisors meeting.  And Phoenix police raid the home of a blogger who’s been criticizing them.

161. I’m from the government, and I’m here to check out that funny noise under the hood: President Obama can’t save the banks or balance the budget, but he’s now backing your transmission.  More details about the warranty from those helpful folks at reason:

162. “One of liberty’s great benefactors”, Burt Blumert, chairman of the Mises Institute and a champion of many libertarian causes, passes away at the age of 80.

163. After a student is kicked in the groin, a Connecticut school bans all physical contact.  Because today’s hug could be tomorrow’s headlock.

164. Michigan woman charged for her son’s stay in juvie hall, then is sent to jail herself after she’s unable to pay.

165. More than half of California’s service stations face hefty fines or even closure for failing to install expensive vapor recovery nozzles on their pumps.  The CARB-mandated systems run about $11,000 per pump.

166. Congress seeks to give the FDA the power to regulate tobacco, while also limiting safer choices for people looking to cut back or quit.

167. Speaking of tobacco, remember Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000?  Well, he lied, unless you think only rich people smoke.  They don’t, at least not as much as the poor do, making the new cigarette tax increase highly regressive.

As a visitor I could only experience the awesome nanny state that is California in very limited doses.  It is unfathomable to me what it must be like to live there, let alone during a monumental economic crisis.

But it hits you as soon as you cross the border: just a mile or two in on I-80, you must stop at an Agricultural Inspection station and declare any organic material brought with you, such as fruits and vegetables or house plants.  Depending on their source, some products are banned entirely from entering California, ostensibly to protect the state’s agriculture from damaging pests, but more likely serving as a form of protectionism for the state’s farmers.  Not that we let it bother us; all we had were some apples we had bought for the trip, and we told the bored-looking inspector “no” when he asked us if we had any fruits or vegetables on board.  Civil disobedience!

Then there was the task of finding a supermarket near our hotel so I could pick up some milk and a few other items.  It should have been easy enough; there’s a Safeway almost literally around the corner from the hotel, but I drove past it twice without seeing it.  Why?  Because there were no visible signs near the road identifying the store.  It had a marquee sign on its façade, but the trees lining the boulevard obscured it.  That led me to notice that there were virtually no freestanding signs anywhere in the surrounding business areas.  Just a coincidence, or the inevitable result of burdensome regulations?  Whatever the case, it made a simple economic transaction more difficult than it should be.

(On the other hand, I have to say that California probably has the best-landscaped freeways in the country.)

These are mere nuisances for visitors, however.  My brother-in-law, who is executive chef at an Italian restaurant in San Mateo (and I can’t recommend the place highly enough–the food there is sublime; try the sanddabs if they’re available!), has to deal with far greater licensing and regulatory headaches.  Some of them his restaurant has been able to avoid because it’s been around for nearly 20 years and is exempt from some regulations, but if he had to start that same restaurant today, the cost of regulatory compliance would be nearly prohibitive.

And then there’s the higher-than-average taxes, the near-strangulation of the auto industry by agencies such as CARB, the implosion of the long-overvalued housing market. . . .

Yet there is a lot I like about California.  The cultural attractions are first-rate, even while recognizing many of them enjoy large tax subsidies (this is true just about everywhere, of course).  We especially enjoyed the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum, and the Asian Art Museum, with its incomparable collections of sculptures, paintings, metalwork and jewelry.

But what stood out most for me was the simple ability to walk into any grocery store (or even convenience stores, at least in Nevada) and pick up a bottle of wine or distilled spirits.  You can’t do this in Colorado.  The independent liquor store lobby has squashed every attempt to allow more options to consumers, because naturally they fear being undercut by the big stores.  Like California’s border inspection stations, this type of protectionism only helps specific classes while hurting everyone else.

So California, at least for now, falls into that “nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there” category.  It was good, relatively speaking, to return home and deal with the familiar nuisances of Colorado’s nanny-state laws rather than the unfamiliar rat’s nest of the Golden State.

(The Daily Cuts will return tonight!)

After a near-eight-month hiatus, I don’t think an extra week will make much of a difference.  See you next weekend!