Africa – Colony of the Non-Profit

This is probably the first of many entries about Africa because I think its history has some good lessons. Listening to Africa Today, I picked up on this story:

Biofuels companies from the U.K. to Brazil and China are buying up large swaths of Africa, causing deforestation and diverting land from food to fuel production, the environmental group Friends of the Earth said.

Across the continent almost 5 million hectares of land, an area bigger than the Netherlands, have been sold to cultivate crops for biofuels since 2006, Friends of the Earth’s Brussels- based European division said today in a 36-page study.

European companies including Portugal’s Galp Energia SGPS SA, the U.K.’s D1 Oils Plc and Sun Biofuels Ltd. and Agroils Srl of Italy joined firms from Canada and Israel in buying acreage to plant jatropha to make biofuels, the study said. The 27- nation European Union has set a goal of getting 10 percent of transport fuels from renewable sources by 2020.

“The EU’s mandatory target for increasing agrofuels is a clear driver to the land grabbing in Africa,” Friends of the Earth said. “There is a risk that agrofuels, and with them, Africa’s agricultural land and natural resources, will be exported abroad with minimal benefit for local communities and national economies.”

Governments including Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali have encouraged the purchases, which in some cases are made without the consent of local communities, or an environmental impact assessment, the group said. The report lists land sold in Angola, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

Sounds bad at first, but we should deconstruct the wording. The problem is apparently that some African governments are letting first-world-based companies buy land, which sounds too much like colonialism for FotE’s tastes. The implication is that the governments need to step in and prevent the land sales so that Africa can retain its independence.

There are major flaws with this argument:

• If the governments own the land, then they’re the ones selling the land already, so asking them to do otherwise is pointless.
• If the land is privately owned, the government would have to arbitrarily void a private contract. Does FotE advocate this? Not outright, but the implication is there.
• “African independence” = “FotE helps Africa figure out its priorities”. This sounds an awful lot like a stipulation ala Washington Consensus, which is basically market liberalization + democracy. Hence why it hasn’t worked.

All this makes it sound like NGOs are more concerned with taking Africa back to good ol’ days so it looks even less colonial than it does now. Here’s a general history of Africa circa 1950-1980:

After the independence of most African countries during the 1960s, newly formed African regimes assumed they could not easily claim a great victory over the Europeans if they continued to use the same system that those oppressors had designed, namely capitalism, since all imperial regimes had been mainly capitalist, even if their adherence to free markets was not absolute. Socialism was popular among African leaders because it represented a break from the imperial ruling tradition. Socialism seemed, to many, to be all that capitalism was not.

(I’m reminded of a man who knocked on my door during election season here in Emeryville last year, asking if I’d support a measure to block a private land transfer downtown. The land in question is where they’ll double the size of the only decent shopping center in the east bay north of Milpitas. I asked him why he thought I had the power to block a private contract, and he couldn’t answer me. I think he said something about “community”. If he’s worried about community, he should ask the kids who go to Bay Street, who based on my scientific measurements are roughly 158% of the Emeryville black population. I mention this because it’s another case where a white elite class thinks it has the answers for a struggling urban population, when it’s actually just going to make things worse.)

So people are concerned about Africa and its use of land. These people are mostly NGOs that receive donations for caring about stuff like that. I’ve transcribed the Africa Today podcast myself, so it might be slightly wrong. I recommend hearing the podcast yourself, which aired August 31, 2010:

Reporter: Is there a risk that biofuel crops may squeeze food crops off African farmlands? A new report by environmental group Friends of the Earth says it’s concerned by the amount of African farmland being used to grow biofuels. Plants like sugar cane, soybeans, — which can be processed to produce ethanol, a substitute for oil. Adrian Bebe is a campaigner with Friends of the Earth.

Adrian: Well what our research shows is that a huge area of land is being taken very quickly by mainly European companies to grow crops for biofuels, which are mainly used for export to Europe, and I think we raise many questions about whether this is in the interest of African communities, if it is going to help their development, if it is going to help them become more food-secure in the future.

Fortunately there’s a man in Ghana who shares my sentiment and casts doubt on the notion that the government should step in and void a private land transfer the way FotE would like:

Reporter: Is this another land grab in Africa?

Watang: I appreciate the work done by Adrian Bebe, I think it’s a very good thing they are doing. Trying to help Africa protect its land and itself. But I don’t think that is the case in Ghana. You know, land in Ghana is not owned by the government. So maybe an occasional land owner… a chief or elder who sells some land to a foreign company; that is not under the control of the government. But basically, nobody can get a vast tract of land in Ghana to produce bio-fuels for export. I don’t think the government itself will create that, but it may happen on a very small scale, but by and large, what we are seeing in Ghana is that we need bio-fuels for ourselves, and not to power foreign machines.

Reporter: You might be able to explain to us- We do know that there are tracts of land in the northern regions of Ghana that companies have gotten to [bio-fuels] for farming. What do you know? Can you tell us how they might need to access these lands?

Watang: I’m sure they might acquire the lands from local chiefs, and local family or clan elders, by setting off from the government. I don’t think the government will support large-scale production of bio-fuels for exports, no.

I gather from what Watang says that he and other intelligent farmers aren’t concerned about what Friends of the Earth think of Ghana. Apparently they know what they’re doing. Will that stop Friends of the Earth from being concerned? Probably not.  To FotE and do-good NGOs, Ghana and other African countries are now its clients, and these NGOs end up acting surprisingly like a previous service provider in Africa, one also opposed to private contracts.

Note that the Ghanaian government seems to be figuring it out without them. Here’s another African example of actual independence that world leaders and NGOs still can’t understand.

Painters

My parents are Progressives. They first assumed when I parted ways that I was a Conservative, but I’m not. They had never heard of my mental worm before:

I want my government run privately, like a company town. Profits are derived from real estate value, which means they would enforce laws to secure property rights and protect me from violence, creating maximum economic output. Do it like Iran, Singapore, Switzerland, or David Friedmanland, whatever. These company towns would probably not be democracies but rather LLCs, competing for customers like stores. If people don’t like it, they go to a different company town. Regimes that force you to stay don’t compete very well, nor do ones that murder you. Market mechanisms would ensure regimes would generally act in the interest of consumers. This would be a vast improvement over what we currently have in the world.

My desire to restrict violence and property theft, plus the willingness to allow police the use of retractable batons to enforce the lew, makes a reactionary out of me, or more modestly a formalist. “Reactionary” conjures the image of crazed men with guns and beards. I don’t know any of these guys, though we could probably get along over a couple cold ones.

It’s like feudalism, except the serfs have cars, the rulers have the LLC, and there’s internet now. So it’s actually nothing like feudalism.

If I were a Conservative my parents could come packing. Their debate lexicon is geared to that, the lowest common denominator being white people who share their genes who still think the earth is 82 years old. I can’t blame them. That’s as good as the debate gets on CNN and NPR. My parents have no idea what to do with me because CNN and NPR don’t know what to do with me.

Since they can’t peg me this makes debates with them less debate and more brain surgery, where I try to get to the bottom of what the hell they really do believe. It seems to be a lot of anti-things, like how Sarah Palin is stupid or how Reagan spent too much money. Bush jokes still go around at every meal. This is all fun, but as part of a philosophy these anti-things take up too much emotional energy for me. Ultimately I do get down to their basics and it’s damned frustrating: My parents want the same crap I want. Obviously we value the same stuff, like family, non-violence, order, and work ethic. But they believe in using the Progressive, centrally-planned method to seek these ends, and they’re always surprised that the outcome resembles Detroit.

We’re a family of painters, but they paint with a razor blade and have to convince themselves that a torn up canvas is a piece of art.

The cost of being different, and others

I was thinking about various costs this weekend, and I came up with a few. Everything I’m saying is purely speculation and deductive based on my personal, shallow experience. My opinions here are also wickedly harsh, and not very well articulated. You could say this is just a brain dump of what I thought about this weekend, and it’s not even 5% of that.

Speeding - Most people break the law on the freeway by going 5 miles over the posted limit. California law punishes 1 mile over the limit with the same penalty as 15 over. You might assume that people would either go the speed limit, or 15 over. Anywhere in between would be “inefficient” speeding. But police patrol imperfectly, and they seem unlikely to ticket someone for going 5 over. This is unwritten and purely customary in America.

- The efficient level of crime in this case is slightly above zero. People seem to weigh the value of time saved from that extra 5mph (in my case, it’s about 15 minutes saved time going from my home to my parents’ place, where I was going when I thought of this) plus the added danger of going 5 over, against the chance of being caught by police, coming up with a “market” speed of 75mph on I-5. There are market rates for all crimes, including murder, unfortunately.
- Younger people are either worse at assessing these costs or place a higher value on the thrill factor than older Americans, since they’re often the ones who travel 15 over.
- Rich people can more easily pay the speeding ticket than younger Americans and probably place more value on the time saved, so they also tend to go 15 over, which would save 45 minutes in my case. Not worth it to me, but if I have a Porsche, it probably is.

There must be some equation we use for assessing these costs whenever we see a posted speed limit. Maybe we can do this deductively. If the fine for driving 75 in a 70 is about $250 after traffic school and ticket fees, I want to drive 75 to save 15 minutes, and I believe my odds of being caught are 1% (almost zero), then perhaps I value speeding at $2.50. This sounds about right actually. If I go 85 mph, and the odds of being caught are 15% (from experience), then I value speeding at $37.50. What’s fascinating to me is I never thought about these costs; they seem to be either involuntary thoughts or learned through customs.

Being Overweight – I saw an overweight woman eating a salad, and I started wondering what costs someone has to incur in order to realize what they’re doing is not actually making them lose weight. Lettuce doesn’t make you fat, but the need for fuel usually means you eat some fuel source that you believe is healthy, and the recommended fuel by educational and media sources tends to be “complex” carbohydrates and polyunsaturated fats. Conventional wisdom also tells us to exercise to lose weight. But since animals tend to stop exerting once they find something that sustains them reproductively (being fit), finding a method outside of exercise that helps one lose weight would result in a dropping one’s gym membership overnight. Not all people are this way, but I assume most are. So I’d then assume that people go to the gym because nothing else works for them, or they’re bodybuilders.

At some point the cost of going to the gym becomes higher than the value of being fit, even though the price of being unfit is extremely high. Aside from health reasons, the social pressure to be fit is enormous, especially if you’re single and unintelligent. The cost of lowered reproductive ability is sky high for most men and is the reason for many crimes. So what is the cost of exercising 3 times a week for a half hour? It’s very low. You don’t need a gym membership, you can just run around outside. So it’s almost free, as long as you live between the tropics. But there’s also the cost of disappointing, lackluster results, which I think is the ultimate cost and is what makes people stop exercising. Deduction would tell me that exercise doesn’t burn fat for most people, and other methods should be favored.

Why is it then that people don’t try changing what they eat? It would seem worthwhile, after the gym membership fails, to try an entirely new eating style. But this rarely happens. They also tend to eat according to official food guidelines, which we learn through school and the news. This past weekend I couldn’t find much in my parents’ freezer that had fat, cholesterol, or added sugar. It was all low-fat, low-cholesterol, complex carb, fruity, veggy, diet, natural, organic, free range, fair trade, etc. When my mom, who’s an informed person, goes shopping, she only buys things that her information sources tell her to buy, those things being low-fat, low-sugar, no-cholest, polyunsat, etc. My parents have eaten like this for 20 years now, supposedly the “healthy” way, and they gain weight every year. Is it because they don’t work out? No: that experiment has already been done and failed. Restarting that experiment wouldn’t be worthwhile. Could it be that food information is incorrect? Why would it be incorrect, and what costs do we incur by rejecting it?

It turns out that rejecting conventional wisdom carries extremely high costs, both in the supermarket and, to an even greater extent, socially. On my way out of town I bought various cuts of grass-fed bison from Wimer ranch for, on average, $10/pound. That’s half what I’d pay in the Bay. All for what? An experiment? And there are good reasons why information would be wrong, but that’s a different blog post.

Being different - The thoughts on diet and exercise make me wonder what the costs are for being different. For me, it’s low. Either I place a higher value on being different than most, or my “strangeness” overhead is already low, since I’ve already been a strange person my whole life. So experimenting with a new, unpopular idea carries a lower price tag for me. I’m already off to a good start; my reactionary political perspective is in line with roughly 0.000001% of Facebook users (maybe 0.00001% to compensate for the fact that reactionism and Facebook tend not to align), my views on gender turns heads in the Castro, and the combination of the first two makes me very weird in even those groups. Experimenting with strange ideas costs me next to nothing, and that might be why experimenting with diet had a low cost for me, but a high cost for my parents, who despite their fun quirks are very normal people.

Making an information source reliable – Revipedia

Moldbug posted an idea in 2008 in response to the hype surrounding the Ron Paul campaign. Revipedia would basically be Wikipedia, except more reliable. Wikipedia isn’t reliable because its authors regularly cite University and NGO studies as “proofs”, when these studies are biased in favor of public policy and donors respectively. Here’s Moldbug:

You need to build a Web site that anyone with a screen and a mouse can click on, and get an accurate understanding of reality, including all the bits of history, government, economics, science and current events that Washcorp doesn’t want you to know. With a 5-minute overview for casual readers, and enough depth that a PhD with a standard Washcorp education will come away at least gritting his teeth.

You need to hire Steve Sailer and Michael Totten and Greg Cochran and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Steve McIntyre and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Razib Khan and Michael Yon and Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Or at least people who are at least as smart, at least as knowledgeable, and at least as expressive as the above.

You need to produce a coherent corpus of authoritative information, a la Diderot, not just a random jumble of essays. You need to crowdsource, but not without editorial control, so that Conquest’s Second Law does not do its thing. You need a place that anyone who speaks English can go to find out what is actually going on in the world, and update that knowledge every day. And above all, you need to be right. The task of replacing Washcorp’s pile of nonsense with some other pile of nonsense is simply not solvable.

And then you need to wait ten or twenty years. Because this stuff doesn’t happen overnight. Your accurate description of reality has to become more fashionable than the official “mainstream” truth. Fortunately, the latter is extremely boring, chock-full of pretentious cant and intentional obfuscation, and often transparently self-contradictory. But you also have to be more fashionable than all your “alternative” competitors (see under: Alex Jones), which is definitely nontrivial. Too bad. It has to be done.

The way to defeat a massarchy is to create and propagate a credible alternate reality that outcompetes the official information network. Fifteen years ago, the propagation part was almost impossible. Today it is trivial. All that’s left is the creation, and I bet it could be done in half Cato’s budget. Bored billionaires of Plainland, you have nothing to lose but your Washcorp. Why not give it a shot?

I like this idea a LOT, but I think there’s one problem: Revipedia’s interests. Any reader will think, “Gee, Revipedia sounds like a good idea, but what proof is there that it’s really truth?” I thought of one idea while brushing my teeth.

Anyone who steps into Revipedia’s office to apply for a job, purchases stock, becomes an editor, or is affiliated with Revipedia in any way has a bias about Revipedia. So, Revipedia adopts a policy where as soon as a new relationship is established Revipedia is the first to create a Revi entry on the person and fill it with as much truth, dirt, and ugly reality that it can possibly dig up. The person is free to dispute the claims, but Revipedia will not take sides on the issue. It can do this before any other news outlet even catches wind of the new relationship. This not only makes Revipedia totally trustworthy, but it incentivizes bad people to stay away.

This idea may also discourage funding, but the only funding that Revipedia needs will come from people who want to further the mission, which fails as soon as one person is treated differently. This makes Revipedia totally secure and reliable, which creates a good precedent for Revipedia: funding only comes when Revipedia is truthful.

I always say you need to make fun of yourself before anyone else does. It renders your opponents’ weapons useless and makes them an open target. So even if the idea doesn’t apply to Revipedia, it’s decent advice anyway.

Efficient Ideas Are Not Popular

Mark Grabowski says texting while driving should carry the same penalties as drunk driving because they have equivalent accident risks. He cites some studies and polls about how texting is even worse than drunk driving. But he is mixing up private information and public information, which are treated differently by the law.

Private information is information known only to the criminal, and public information is known by people around him. Intoxication is private information, even though it can be expressed publicly in swerving and colliding with road signs. But the state of intoxication while driving is known only to the driver, especially if he’s good at it. Texting is public because it’s visible, unless one can manage to text without looking. The difference between public and private information laws should be obvious: police can’t detect private information without seeing the side-effects of it. An officer can see someone texting, pull him over before he runs into a pedestrian, and write him a $150 ticket. Since police run the risk of catching drunk drivers too late in the act, the penalty is significantly higher.

A columnist doesn’t understand this difference any more than the average voter, which is why professional, well-paid lawmakers make better laws than popular opinion. Publicly elected lawmakers make bad laws because, just like columnists, their careers depend on their support of popular ideas, not efficient ones. Efficient ideas aren’t popular.

For more information on the economics of lawmaking, check out David Friedman’s Law’s Order. He’s just released it on his website for free.

Deducing Bias

PBS/Frontline’s College, Inc. believes it’s masterfully crafted an editorial that hacks away profit-based schooling with a snow shoe but accidentally opens its own achilles on the way to the washroom. PBS has a water-tight tactic where it makes very good arguments that nobody could disagree with. In this documentary, we get all these:

• Private universities pick up the excess demand for schooling.
• Private universities offer loans to students, and sometimes students can’t pay off these loans.
• If private universities breach contract, they should be sued.
• Private universities cannot operate without money.

If you replace “private” with “public” above, everything is still true. This is a good sign. PBS and I have some sort of theory on education that we can agree on. You’d think PBS has a winning formula here, but their documentaries start getting kind of snowy at the 20-minute mark. They introduce people who came upon hard times, corporate malfeasance, etc., all meant to stir up emotion but not enough to make much of an argument, which translates to junk food education. I’d expect these documentaries to pop up at 3am on Cable Access 27, but as we know, PBS is big.

So how could PBS make such a sad argument against private education and still retain its popularity? (If you watch the documentary and can’t decipher how PBS feels about private universities, please stop reading and don’t come back here. Things rarely get simpler than this.)

Induction into this is so convoluted and thick, with so much room for debate about where PBS gets its funding and who its donors are, that I don’t want to bother. Actually, I don’t need to. We’ll just deal a hard, twisting punch to the sternum: PBS opposes private universities because PBS depends on funding from donors who opposed private universities. You can deduce this by noting PBS’s CHSPE-level argument against private education and measuring how far this argument spreads. The further the spread, and the worse the argument, the more funding it requires from people who want to propagate that argument. Obviously these people have money, or else the documentary wouldn’t be featured on my XBOX.

The donors have one thing in common: they oppose private education’s lack of accreditation. Accreditation is what’s passed down from the civil servants so that universities will produce the correct type of students, primarily more civil servants. And we all know that once your civil service is really starting to grow, the best thing to do is keep growing it. Private schools that expand the private sector are no help in the mission, especially when they’re out-competing the public schools in every way. That’s when the civil service put the brakes on private universities to stay ahead, and PBS is one of many vehicles for that.

Bureaucracy Emerges

In my job I tinker with anarcho-capitalism, the idea that without government, private firms would enforce contracts through arbitration and provide defense like insurance. In theory, it should reward good choices and punish bad ones, which will produce better decision makers in the populace. The internet is almost government-free: enforcing gaming laws is a losing battle, adult content is always available to minors at no cost, and for years it was a good case for anarcho-capitalism. I was an anarcho-capitalist for some time, but a recent site hack is making me rethink that.

Recently Network Solutions, where my website is hosted, was hacked. They pulled the regular heist: hack server, change all ftp passwords, edit pages with malicious code that takes viewers to a page where they’ll download something unpleasant, sit back and watch the stats to see how many people are upset. Hacks never bothered me. We’re hit every year or so. You clean the code, patch the hole, restore your backup (your fault if you don’t have one), and get on with life without hassle. People like me with a decent understanding of coding and how to prevent most attacks enjoy this self-reliance, which is about the closest thing to anarcho-capitalism we’ll see outside of living in space. Knowing I can take care of myself in this hostile world makes me feel warm inside.

But this time, even after I cleaned my site, the ordeal wasn’t over. Google scans pages for malicious code, and if they find any, they don’t index your site. Goodbye 80% of searches. If Google doesn’t index your site, Firefox also blocks your site.  Goodbye 40% of remaining visitors. Our stats dropped off the face of the planet and would stay that way until Google approved our site. Even with the code removed, Google claimed that our site had a security loophole, which could only be fixed through Network Solutions. I had to go through NetSol, wait for them to fix their server, then apply for Google to check my website again so that it could be re-indexed on Google and accessible to Firefox users. This could be prevented if I had my own standalone server, but only the big guys with IT teams can handle that. Little guys go through a provider like NetSol or Go Daddy.

Private enforcement by Google in an attempt to protect its customers is an-cap in a nutshell. David Friedman makes similar arguments, as does Hans Hermann Hoppe for private defense and crime insurance. But when private firms own a market-share of customers that it protects by preventing their access to a place of business, you’re basically talking about governance.

Not that it’s bad governance. Once the code and security loopholes were actually fixed, my site was up in a day. Try getting that kind of turnaround with a builder’s permit. The wonders of profit-based governance! If NetSol had dragged its feet, it may have taken a month, but NetSol is profit-based too, so they had an interest in fixing the problem. DMV it is not, but it is governance, which comes with bureaucracy and red tape, and that’s not an-cap as I understand it. That this private form of bureaucracy emerged from internet anarchy, festering with malevolent Ukrainians and Nigerians, isn’t a case that an-cap is bad, but that it leads to a sort of patchwork of efficient, private governance owned by share-holders and run by well-paid CEOs. I’d be ecstatic if America were run this way.

Protesting Nerdiness

Some people from my stunt crew and I went to Comic-con this year, and apparently so did some evangelical protesters:

Are you attending the San Diego Comic Convention next week, or do you wish you could? Then your soul will burn in hell for all eternity — at least according to the batshit insane congregants of the Westboro Baptist Church. Led by Reverend Fred Phelps, the church will actually take the time to protest SDCC from 1:15 to 2pm on Thursday the 22nd. Why? I’ll let this quote from Phelps explain:

“Are you kidding?! If these people would spend even some of the energy that they spend on these comic books, reading the Bible, well no high hopes here. They have turned comic book characters into idols, and worship them they do! Isaiah 2:8 Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made: 9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not. It is time to put away the silly vanities and turn to God like you mean it. The destruction of this nation is imminent – so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.”

Phelps is known across the US for protesting burials for gay soldiers and AIDS victims, among other things. If a picket can gets them lots of press, they do it. The press exposure helps them raise funds, and events like this will probably bring even more members. Maybe this blog post I’m writing gives them exposure and could potentially net them some money, but since I don’t think religious groups like this are dangerous and carry no real political clout, I could care less. If anything, blogging about it gets me exposure. And the article is a funny read.

As much as everyone hates the Phelps crew, nobody seems to actually fear them.

Attack of the Tables

I had a dream about filming a movie. The director was really fancy and liked to show off, so when he was assigning wardrobes to people, the wardrobe person brought in hundreds of supermodels wearing the clothing and asked people to pick out the clothing they wanted to wear for the scene. The supermodels formed single-file “trains” that moved around the large building like a battalion of centipedes, and the director walked with me to pick the outfit I wanted. I chose some grey cargo pants.

Next came the propmaster, who had a similar system to show off the props for the scene, except instead of supermodels holding the props, the props were on tables that moved around in similar “train” formations. Soon there were hundreds of tables of varying sizes snaking around the large room. They didn’t even have wheels, they just floated around like air hockey pucks.

But the system was new and unstable, and one of the prop tables went crooked and caused a traffic collision with another train of tables. Within seconds the entire room was swarming with crazed tables, sending everyone into a panic. Everyone ran for the exits but couldn’t make it past the furniture.  I soon found myself cornered by a few dozen of them, but when we all realized that these tables had no real weight behind them and could easily shove them away, everyone started having a great time. It was like the tables were big, harmless animals that chased people around and dumped little props all over the place.

Everyone except the director and the propmaster was laughing. The propmaster was trying to put the tables under control with his remote control, which wasn’t working, with the director screaming in his ear. I found myself crawling underneath a huge congestion of tables and heard people running around on top. It was a blast and I may have laughed in my sleep.

This could make a fun ending to a movie, where the main character is crawling under the tables looking for the girl, while she’s running around on top looking for him. The villain would be the director, who is ruined now that he can’t finish his movie due to these insane, moving tables.

Peasants and Clients

Oakland experiences a riot in response to the Oscar Grant shooting verdict. From The Guardian:

Rioters trashed parts of Oakland, California, today in protest against the verdict in a controversial court case in which a white policeman shot dead an unarmed African American.

At least 100 people were arrested after looting and confrontations with police in Oakland last night and early today. The protesters ignored a plea for calm by the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The policeman, Johannes Mehserle, 28, was found guilty yesterdayof involuntary manslaughter. The jury rejected the prosecution case that it was murder.

YouTube showed footage of Mehserle’s shooting of Oscar Grant, 22, who had been lying on the platform in a railway station on 1 January 2009, surrounded by police after a fight. Mehserle claimed he had thought he had reached for an electric Taser rather than his gun.

The case became a cause celebre in the US, with its echoes of the treatment of Rodney King, a black man whose severe beating by police in LA in 1991 was captured on video. The subsequent acquittals of four LAPD officers sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Police deployed in Oakland in riot gear yesterday and shops boarded up their windows in anticipation of a repeat of the rioting that took place in the immediate aftermath of Grant’s shooting. Up to a thousand protesters took to the streets last nightand early today, some wearing masks with images of Grant’s face. A banner was unfurled proclaiming “Oakland Says Guilty’.

Rioters, some dressed in black and wearing black masks, smashed shop and car windows, helped themselves to goods ranging from jewellery to groceries and trainers, and attacked police lines. Journalists were also attacked.

The Oakland police chief, Anthony Batts, told a press conference: “This city is not the wild, wild west. This city will not tolerate this activity.” He blamed anarchists coming from outside Oakland. “We started taking a number of rocks and bottles. We then made a dispersal order.”

Here’s a video of the Oakland looting.

Maybe it’s by chance or he’s just being timely and subtle, but Mencius Moldbug posted a blog about clients and peasants. He notes that peasants, aka the Tea Party, are mostly denoted as complainers, and rightfully points out that these same peasants elected the very ideology they’re now protesting:

If I had to describe it in a sentence, I would say that the rage is easily explained, but not easily explained in the terms of those who feel it. They are clearly angry about something, but the actual words that come out of their mouths are often nonsensical and contradictory. This is why it is so hard for so many to get a handle on. It is simply inarticulate demotic discontent.
…
The CAP historians mention these people a couple of times. Most notably, they mention the fact that this group, historically Democratic Party voters going back to the 19th century (“rum, Romanism and rebellion”), also historically urban, was living in the suburbs and voting for Reagan in 1980. They profess, however, to be entirely mystified by this transition. Surely, if we understand it, we can answer the question of what motivates the “tea partiers.”
…
What we can say quite clearly is that this tribal subpopulation has, in no temporary way, lost confidence in progressivism as a philosophy of government. Fortunately or unfortunately, they do not know how to unelect a philosophy.

And then talks about “clients”:

Last week I was at a party, at a warehouse space in one of the crackhead districts of SF, at which the subject of crackheads came up. The woman across the table, a member of my social class, expressed great sympathy for this class. I asked her if she had ever been victimized by such. She said: “two days ago, someone smashed a window in my car and stole my iPhone.”

And she perceived this crime through a pure Jean Valjean lens, with no sense at all that she had been *personally* victimized – much less, victimized by the government. Or a judge. Or an ideology. Or whatever. Rather, she considered it entirely normal and even laudable for a sophisticated, modern person to live in a city in which an iPhone cannot be left visible on a car seat, and she considered herself an idiot who had, for her $500 or whatever, purchased a valuable lesson about modern urban living….

Who would think this way? Well, perhaps if you were a Frenchman in 1944, and your property was looted and vandalized, by American soldiers on their way to kick hell out of the Nazis, you might think this way. The State Department thought this way about the killing of Cleo Noel. This is the way you think about your own clients and the excesses and abuses they commit. Certainly, if this woman’s car had been vandalized by cops, tea partiers, etc, she would have been enraged for life. We hate our enemies and not our allies – it is only natural.