My apologies to the commenters whose comments I deleted today while trying to clean out comment spam. I’ll be installing the latest version of WordPress over the weekend, and I’m assured that that will deal with most of the comment spam problems without deleting legitimate comments!

Once again, the nanny state is targeting the video game industry.

Games featuring graphic scenes of cannibalism, “F.E.A.R.” and “Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse,” were among the 12 “games to avoid” listed Tuesday by the National Institute on Media and the Family.

“It’s something we’ve never seen before,” said institute president David Walsh, warning that today’s games are “more extreme” and more easily available to underage kids than ever before.

In “Stubbs the Zombie,” the lead character eats the brains of humans as blood splatters across the screen.

“It’s just the worst kind of message to kids,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who joined institute officials at a press conference announcing the group’s 10th annual video game report card. “They can be dangerous to your children’s health.”

I would like to add a slight bit of rational thought into this debate. If the complaint is that children are buying games whose ratings are inappropriate to their ages, doesn’t the blame fall to the retailers? Why drag the game makers into it? When Mom & Pop’s Video Store rents South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut to a 13-year-old, Viacom doesn’t deserve to be blamed (unless Viacom owns Mom & Pop’s, but let’s assume they don’t). Some states have tried to remedy the situation by making it illegal for stores to sell and rent violent games to children. They had serious problems with their vagueness (They couldn’t come up with better language than “violent games”? How violent is too violent? Is jumping on sentient mushrooms and hurling fireballs at turtles violent?), but at least these attempts put the blame where it belongs: the retailers who are physically handing these games to the kids.

“From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”
– Sir Winston Churchill

So anyway, this woman was forcibly detained by the police and issued two tickets. Because she was later for work, she ended up losing her job. And now prosecutors are considering filing more charges. Her crime?

Refusing to show her ID.

[Deborah] Davis said she commuted daily from her home in Arvada to her job at a small business in Lakewood, taking an RTD bus south on Kipling Street each morning from the recreation center in Wheat Ridge, where she left her car. She said the bus always passed through the Federal Center and some people got off there.

Guards at the Federal Center gate always boarded the bus and asked to see all passengers’ identification, she said.

She said the guards just looked at the IDs and did not record them or compare them with any lists.

When she refused to show her ID, she said, officers with the Federal Protective Service removed her from the bus, handcuffed her, put her in the back of a patrol car and took her to a federal police station within the Federal Center, where she waited while officers conferred. She was subsequently given two tickets and released.

[...]

Rusnok said the federal officers in Colorado told him the policy of checking the IDs of bus passengers and others entering the Federal Center began shortly after the April 1995 terrorist bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

“It’s one of the multiple forms of security,” Rusnok said. “The identification is one means of making sure that, whoever comes on base, that you know that they are who they say they are.

The article isn’t clear as to why a bus passenger would have to show her ID, except that the police did it anytime the Federal Government is on heightened alert. But what’s the point, anyway? How is checking the ID of bus passengers who aren’t going to even get off do anything to protect security. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

My hat’s off to Deborah Davis. Hopefully she’ll find a new job and avoid charges.

I just found out from one of our faithful readers that the TV show Nowhere Man, which is one of the best cancelled TV shows ever will be released in its entirety on DVD. According to Amazon, the show will be released on December 27. Mark your calendars and save some Xmas cash to get it!

“I hear stories from the chamber
How Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger
Died upon the cross
And might I say it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade
Or at least that’s what I’m told”
– from “The Mercy Seat” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

NPR is reporting on a court case brewing in New York City over the right to dance.

“In New York City, you know, the cultural capital of the world, there’s a law that forbids them to dance!”
Serge Becker owns Joe’s Pub. On more than one occasion, he’s been ticketed and fined thousands of dollars for allowing patrons to, as it were, shake their groove thing. He says he’s sometimes unaware a violation has even occurred until he a summons shows up in the mail.
“And on the summons, it actually describes what they witnessed; and what they witnessed is like, whatever, four people moving rhythmically to music! This is how they describe it! Outrageous!”
The problem for Becker, and other owners who’d like to allow dancing, is that they don’t have a city-issued ‘Cabaret license’. The rule dates back to 1926, when New York’s Committee on Local Laws decried jazz clubs and the behavior of their ‘wild strangers and foolish natives’. The result was a strict zoning code banishing dance to non-residential areas only: which pretty much means a dock over the Hudson River if you’re talking about Manhattan.

Of course, if we looked at issues like these less from a Constitutional rights’ perspective and more from a limited powers of government perspective, we wouldn’t have to create seeming absurdities like “the constitutional right to dance”. But somehow I don’t think the statists (progressive and regressive alike) would be too fond of that idea.

I don’t often get to flex my awesome math geek skills in a legal context (one of my B.S. degrees is in Mathematics), but this story reminded me of some “taxi cab geometry” problem I worked on as an undergrad.

The question before the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, was whether a man named James Robbins was guilty of selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school - which carries a longer sentence - when he was arrested in March 2002 on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 40th Street in Manhattan and charged with selling drugs to an undercover police officer.
The nearest school, Holy Cross, is on 43rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. How to measure? On foot, Mr. Robbins’s lawyers argued, the school is more than 1,000 feet away from the site of the arrest, because the shortest route is blocked by buildings. But as the crow flies, the authorities said, it is less than 1,000 feet away.
Law enforcement officials calculated the straight-line distance using the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2)[ed: sic] measuring the distance up Eighth Avenue (764 feet) as one side of a right triangle, and the distance to the church along 43rd Street (490 feet) as another, to find that the length of the hypotenuse was - 907.63 feet.
Lawyers for Mr. Robbins argued that the distance should be measured as a person would walk it because “crows do not sell drugs.” But in a unanimous ruling, the seven-member Court of Appeals upheld his conviction and held that the distance in such cases should be measured as the crow flies.

If I were on that panel of judges (maybe someday…) I would have had to file a dissent to this one. The statute’s text clearly makes an exemption for sales that occur in place within the 1000-foot rule that are not “accessible to the public”, like a private home. It doesnt make any sense to allow the police to measure through a place exempt from this rule. But I guess that’s just the textualist in me.

The Court’s opinion is also rife with half-thought out justifications for the Pythagorean rule. For example the opinion states in part that “if the pedestrian method of measurement were used, a drug dealer could take deliberate steps to evade the reach of the statute by putting up obstructions to render the footpath to a nearby school beyond the 1000-foot limit”. First off, the “obstructions” in this case were privately owned buildings. It’s rather hard to set those things up at will simply to evade some 1000-foot walking rule. At a minimum you’d need a small construction crew and some surveyors. But under the Pythagorean rule, couldn’t the same dealer use Google Maps or an atlas and a compass to map out “safe zones” within his or her city?

I understand the reasoning of the decision, and I would classify the rationale behind this appeal as “novel”. But I think the opinion tries too hard to demonize an equally valid interpretation of the statute.

(hat-tip to the Volokh Conspiracy)

“I hope one day I can clone another Dick Cheney. Then I won’t have to do anything.”
– George W. Bush

“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.”
– Ayn Rand