The Blog of Record

Some of them do look like they could do that:

When a gunman stormed a Simi Valley dental office last summer and shot Lydia Carranza in the chest, salvation may have come in the shape of her size-D breast implant.

That’s the theory at least of a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon who hopes to drum up support to defray the costs of Carranza’s reconstructive surgery.

“She’s just one lucky woman,” said Dr. Ashkan Ghavami, who says he will perform the surgery for next to nothing but has urged Carranza to tell her story in hopes of getting implant companies to donate the supplies.

Ghavami contends that the implant absorbed much of the bullet’s impact, limiting most of the damage to the breast itself.

“I saw the CT scan,” he said. “The bullet fragments were millimeters from her heart and her vital organs. Had she not had the implant, she might not be alive today.”

Like all cults, the global-warming religion attracts a certain kind of people:

A seven-month-old baby girl survived three days alone with a bullet in her chest beside the bodies of her parents and toddler brother.

Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.

Their son Francisco, two, died instantly after being hit in the back.

But their unnamed daughter cheated death after the bullet from her dad’s handgun missed her vital organs. . . .

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note discovered by police.

Click the image to enlarge.

From here.

In March, Italy will open the first prison designed exclusively for transgender inmates. Interesting tidbit: most of the 30 transgender criminals were convicted for prostitution or drug-related offences. Victimless crimes – if you don’t count the taxpayers, who are left with the bill for building the prisons and keeping the prisoners in.

Goel Ratzon, 60, is alleged to have kept the women and children as slaves in squalid apartments around Tel Aviv, and suspected of fathering children with some of his own daughters. How did he manage to get so many women? He picked Orthodox Jews and told them he was the messiah.

Must be a first:

Bernie Madoff, the godfather:

Inmate No. 61727-054 shares an unlocked cell at the medium-security prison at Butner Federal Correctional Complex with a younger man named Frank. He wears khaki prison garb and has been spotted walking on an outdoor track. He plays bocce, chess and checkers. He scrubs pots and pans in the prison kitchen.

The 71-year-old Mr. Madoff also is salvaging something that disappeared in the outside world the moment his fraud was exposed: respect. “To every con artist, he is the godfather, the don,” says an inmate interviewed earlier this week.

Another confesses to doing it on a fortnightly basis for over 25 years. Do they teach it in the seminaries?

Reverse race descrimination is not the only kind of government-promoted discrimination. From the book Fair Play by Steven E. Landsburg, via Dr. Mark J. Perry:

Let me illustrate with a stylized example economists love so much. Mary owns a vacant apartment; Joe is looking for a place to live. If Joe disapproves of Mary’s race or religion or lifestyle, he is free to shop elsewhere. But if Mary disapproves of Joe’s race or religion or certain aspects of his lifestyle, the law requires her to swallow her misgivings and rent the apartment to Joe.

Or: Bert wants to hire an office manager and Ernie wants to manage an office. The law allows Ernie to refuse any job for any reason. If he doesn’t like Albanians, he doesn’t have to work for one. Bert is held to a higher standard: If he lets it be known that no Albanians need apply, he’d better have a damned good lawyer.

These asymmetries grate against the most fundamental requirement of fairness–that people should be treated equally, in the sense that their rights and responsibilities should not change because of irrelevant external circumstances. Mary and Joe–or Bert and Ernie–are looking to enter two sides of one business relationship. Why should they have asymmetric duties under the antidiscrimination laws?

When the law is so glaringly asymmetric, one has to suspect that the legislature’s true agenda is not to combat discrimination on the basis of race, but to foster discrimination on the basis of social status. By holding employers and landlords to a higher standard than employees and tenants, the lawmakers reveal their underlying animus toward employers and landlords.

Whatever it takes to keep the class war going.

Judge: “He was not keen to eat the meat, he just was hungry”, so I’ll go easy on him:

Sergey Gavrilov secured reduced time in jail after confessing: ‘I did not like the meat very much. It was too fatty. But I was so hungry, I had to eat it.’

The 27-year-old was given a lenient prison sentence because the judge said he was starving and needed to eat after spending all his money on vodka and gambling machines.

The Russian man hit his mother Lyubov, 55, over the head with a brick and then strangled her with an electric cable following a row over her refusal to give him her pension money to spend on alcohol.

A court heard how he put her body on the balcony of the family flat near Samara, in southern Russia, and took her allowance before going on a two day drinking and gambling binge.

Returning to the flat, he soon ran out of food and started slicing meat from his mother’s body.  

‘She was frozen, like meat in the freezer,’ he told police.

He cooked soup and pasta with meat from his mother’s body over a period of more than a month, he said.   

The Russian criminal code dictates 15 years in jail for his crimes but the judge said he was reducing it slightly because Gavrilov – who previously served time in jail for robbery – pleaded guilty and ‘he was not keen to eat the meat, he just was hungry’.

Gavrilov was jailed for 14 years and three months.  

Psychiatric tests found the man was ‘normal’ mentally and fully aware of what he was doing.

I don’t know what is more remarkable – the judge’s reasoning or the fact that 15 years in jail is all one normally gets in Russia for killing his mother for her pension money and eating her.

How liberal is Europe? This will give you an idea:

In 2007, Abdelmalek Bayout admitted to stabbing and killing a man and received a sentenced of 9 years and 2 months. Last week, Nature reported that Pier Valerio Reinotti, an appeal court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout’s sentence by a year after finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression.

If it’s not his fault, why not just set him free? His genes made him do it. Are we supposed to be able to control our genes?

The bizarre world of antitrust:

It’s only in the bizarre world of antitrust that any price you charge can be considered illegal. If your price is lower than your competitors, you could be charged with being a “predator” for anti-competitive “predatory pricing.” If your price is “too high” you could be charged with anti-competitive monopoly pricing, “price gouging,” or “ticket scalping.” And if your price is the same as your competitors, you could be charged with collusion and anti-competitive price-fixing.

How convenient.

Another day, another reason to like France: A Paris court has convicted the cult of $$$cientology of fraud, fined it more than half a million euros and given suspended sentences to several of its leaders. The judge stopped short of banning the cult in France, which was the prosecution’s request, but he did cite its “obsession” with financial gain and its shady methods based on bringing members into a “state of subjection”.

For yesterday’s reason to like France, go here.

The recent high-profile Wall Street insider trading case is leading some experts to ask a legitimate question: just why is insider trading considered wrong?

Joseph Demarest Jr., head of the New York office of the FBI, said it was clear that “the $20 million in illicit profits come at the expense of the average public investor.”  But is this really true?  Do insiders really profit at the expense of the individual investor?  And just what is wrong with acting on so-called insider information?

To answer these questions we must first remember that public companies are owned by shareholders, and not by the government (the exception here may be General Motors (GM) and the many bailout banking bums). Because we still have at least a modicum of private property rights in this country, I argue that company owners (shareholders) should have the right to decide if corporate executives—and/or those with whom they choose to share information—should be permitted to trade on and/or disseminate this inside information.

Of course, opponents of liberty such as Mr. Demarest will argue that insider trading is somehow unfair because the information possessed by company executives or, in this case, the hedge fund managers in question, is not equally available to every Tom, Dick and Harry investor on Main Street.

But here I ask you to put your philosophic hat on and ask, “How this is unjust?”  Why does the average investor have an equal right to the knowledge possessed by individuals in the know?

In most cases, insiders are those who have either worked hard to achieve a particular standing in a company, or who have the capital resources to uncover specialized information about companies (as presumably the hedge funds in this case had).  Why should we punish these people because they have knowledge that others don’t?  I think this question of knowledge egalitarianism must first be addressed before we throw the book at insiders.

The real issue here, as I see it, is not whether the hedge fund operators violated insider trading laws.  From a legal standpoint, it is entirely possible they may well have.  But my issue is why is insider trading considered wrong?

I have yet to hear a strong case made for its prohibition that doesn’t rely on some kind of zero-sum game analysis of the equity markets.  Moreover, I have yet to hear any argument that would persuade me that an individual shouldn’t be allowed to dispose of, and/or disseminate information in his possession unless he has voluntarily agreed to do so via contractual consent (such as in the case of non-disclosure agreements).

The bottom line here is that laws against insider trading violate the rights of shareholders, i.e. company owners, to decide the manner in which they can dispose of their property.  I submit to you that insider trading laws are as wrong as so-called “victimless crimes.”  Both, in my opinion, are immoral legal categories, and I think both types of laws should be relegated to the scrapheap of bad ideas.

Some well-known economists and law scholars have supported the idea of legalizing insider trading because they believe it to be beneficial for all investors:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, “You want more insider trading, not less. You want to give the people most likely to have knowledge about deficiencies of the company an incentive to make the public aware of that.”

Dean emeritus Henry Manne of the George Mason University School of Law and the author of Insider Trading and the Stock Market, said in a radio interview that insider trading “helps to move the price of a share to its ‘correct level’” and trades made using privileged information provide an “actual reflection of what’s going on” with a particular stock.

And Donald Boudreaux of the Future of Freedom Foundation wrote, “Perhaps the greatest benefit of insider trading is that it causes equity prices to disclose all relevant information as quickly as possible.”

Insider trading is illegal because there is a government bureaucracy that kind of fights it. That, of course, means that it will stay illegal.

A bizarre court case in Australia involving woman – dog sex caught on camera, blackmail, and the woman forcing her 15-year-old daughter to have sex with the blackmailer in exchange for the photos:

A Queensland mother has admitted to begging and slapping her daughter when she refused to have sex with her then 32-year-old partner.

Giving evidence in court, the woman said her partner had threatened to release bestiality photos involving her if she did not get her 15-year-old daughter to sleep with him, the Townsville Bulletin reports.

The woman said that after a night of heavy drinking, the man had taken photographs of her having sex with his cattle dog Buster.

When he then blackmailed her she asked her daughter to have sex with him.

”She said ‘no’ straight up,” the Townsville Bulletin quoted the woman as saying.

In an attempt to recover the bestiality images in a swap, the mother then took photos of her daughter naked and gave them to the man.

But the man allegedly continued to demand sex with her daughter and the girl refused.

”It was something she didn’t want to do,” the woman said.

Desperate for the photos to remain a secret, the woman took her daughter to a local hotel and booked two rooms.

They had some dinner and alcohol before the man arrived and she left them alone together.

When the woman saw her daughter again she was upset and crying but told her nothing had happened.

Two weeks later, the pair was staying at the man’s house when he allegedly demanded sex from the daughter.

It seems from the rest of the story that the girl ended up being raped repeatedly.

I wonder if Mommy explained to her why exactly she wanted her to sleep with the man.

Oh no! What would all the liberals drive then?! Diesel Volkswagens?

Could the Prius and other Toyota hybrids be banned from the U.S.? It seems unthinkable, but that’s one possible ending to a patent investigation launched this week.

This case centers around Paice, a tiny Florida company that has patented a way to apply force to a car’s wheels from the electric motor or the internal combustion engine.

Paice thinks that Toyota is infringing on its technology, and is going after the automaker in court. The legal spat became much more serious for Toyota this week, when the U.S. International Trade Commission decided to investigate the matter.

The problem is that the ITC can stop any imports that infringe on U.S. patents. So in the worst-case scenario for Toyota, the commission could ban the hybrid Camry, third-generation Prius, Lexus HS250h sedan and Lexus RX450h SUV, according to Bloomberg. . . .

Paice won a 2005 patent suit against Toyota in federal court in Marshall, Tex. And you might snicker at that, because Marshall is notorious for granting all sorts of wacko patent cases. But still, the verdict was upheld on appeal, and a judge ordered Toyota to pay royalties to Paice based on car sales.

Now it looks like Paice wants a much bigger payoff, threatening to have Toyota’s hybrids banned by the same Marshall court.

Jokes aside, it would seem that patent law should have the effect of promoting technological development, not halting it. As it is, the rampant suing for patent infringement that’s going on is beginning to look like personal injury for geeks.

It is not clear from the story how many – if any – of the ex-soldiers behind bars are non-combat veterans:

The Government was under fire for failing to support British troops returning from war today after figures revealed nearly one in 10 prisoners is an Armed Forces veteran.

Shocking research by the probation officers’ union Napo shows some 8,500 former soldiers are currently in prison in England and Wales.

Another 12,000 have criminal convictions and are on the books of the Probation Service.

This means there are more than twice as many veterans in jail, on probation or on parole in the UK than the number of troops currently serving in Afghanistan.

Veterans in Scotland and Northern Ireland are not included, meaning the true figure is likely to be much higher. . . .

Domestic violence was by far the most likely conviction for a veteran, accounting for one in three cases. Other violent crimes accounted for around one in five convictions.

One in four said they had post-traumatic stress disorder, but many went undiagnosed. Others cited depression and behavioural problems.

The group who took part included veterans from the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although the sample was small, the figures give the best indication yet about the sheer scale of the struggle faced by ex-soldiers when they come home.

I have a high respect for British troops, who are fighting bravely in Afghanistan despite the scarce and primitive equipment their government grudgingly provides them with, but it could be that in Britain, the Armed Forces attract people who are more likely to have behavioural problems anyway. One in ten is a staggering proportion.

Why am I not surprised? Because it’s Chicago:

Four former members of a now-disbanded Chicago police unit admitted Friday to taking part in a brazen scheme in which they barged into homes and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from suspected drug dealers and others — once after withholding insulin from a diabetic man until he told them where to find the cash.

Apparently, this kind of police behavior doesn’t surprise anyone in Chicago, because guess what prison term they got?

Wait for it…

Six months.

It’s the Chicago way.

No hate crime here, move along: A group of 10-15 blacks in Buffalo, New York, brutally beat up a white boy for dating a black girl. His father wants it treated as a hate crime, but the police, he says, are spending too much time “trying to prove this crime wasn’t a hate crime instead of performing a solid investigation.”

Well, hate crime legislation wasn’t passed to charge blacks who beat up whites.