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Feminists should remember that while we often don’t take ourselves very seriously, the men around us often do. I think that the way we can honor these women who were executed, for crimes that they may or may not have committed—which is to say, for political crimes—is to commit every crime for which they were executed, crimes against male supremacy, crimes against the right to rape, crimes against the male ownership of women, crimes against the male monopoly of public space and public discourse. We have to stop men from hurting women in everyday life, in ordinary life, in the home, in the bed, in the street, and in the engineering school. We have to take public power away from men whether they like it or not and no matter what they do. If we have to fight back with arms, then we have to fight back with arms. One way or another we have to disarm men. We have to be the women who stand between men and the women they want to hurt. We have to end the impunity of men, which is what they have, for hurting women in all the ways they systematically do hurt us.

—Andrea Dworkin (1990): Mass Murder in Montreal, Life and Death, 105-114.

On 6 December 1989, seventeen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; he went into an engineering class with a gun, ordered the men to leave, screamed I hate feminists, and then opened fire on the women. He kept shooting, always at women, as he moved through the building, killing 14 women and injuring 8 before he ended the terror by killing himself.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

GT 2004-12-06: The Montreal Massacre:

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men—and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women—because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

Today is a day to remember fourteen innocent women who died at the hands of a self-conscious gender terrorist. Like most days of remembrance, it should also be a day of action. I mean practical action.. And I mean radical action. I mean standing up and taking concrete steps toward the end to violence against women in all of its forms. Without excuses. Without exceptions. Without limits. And without apologies. Andrea Dworkin wrote I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism: stalking, battery, confinement, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. Make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. As Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

(Via Anarchogeek 2006-12-03.)

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a roving bug, and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the roving bug was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone.

Kaplan’s opinion said that the eavesdropping technique functioned whether the phone was powered on or off. Some handsets can’t be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

… A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug, the article said, enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down.

For its part, Nextel said through spokesman Travis Sowders: We’re not aware of this investigation, and we weren’t asked to participate.

Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it works closely with law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way possible.

A Motorola representative said that your best source in this case would be the FBI itself. Cingular, T-Mobile, and the CTIA trade association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

… Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like General Motors’ OnStar to snoop on passengers’ conversations.

When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were being monitored.

—Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache, c|Net News (2006-12-01): FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

As uninteresting as I may be to the FBI or other government spooks, I can’t say that I’m particularly reassured by this little private-public partnership, or by its innovative steps towards a more robust Stasi-statism.

If you want to say something without sharing it with government agents, the best thing to do is to leave your cell phone in the car, or to remove the battery until you finish talking.

Note also the following:

This week, Judge Kaplan in the southern district of New York concluded that the roving bugs were legally permitted to capture hundreds of hours of conversations because the FBI had obtained a court order and alternatives probably wouldn’t work.

The FBI’s applications made a sufficient case for electronic surveillance, Kaplan wrote. They indicated that alternative methods of investigation either had failed or were unlikely to produce results, in part because the subjects deliberately avoided government surveillance.

Bill Stollhans, president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia, said such a technique would be legally reserved for police armed with court orders, not private investigators.

There is no law that would allow me as a private investigator to use that type of technique, he said. That is exclusively for law enforcement. It is not allowable or not legal in the private sector. No client of mine can ask me to overhear telephone or strictly oral conversations.

—Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache, c|Net News (2006-12-01): FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

And that’s precisely what’s wrong with it. You and I have no right at all to treat our neighbors like this, and neither does any agent that we might voluntarily hire. Judges tolerate this kind of snooping only from government agencies such as the FBI, and then only because the prerogatives of the National Security state are taken to confer special privileges to its anointed agents and to rob ordinary folks like you and me of the privacy and immunities we would ordinarily expect. But putting on a government badge actually does nothing at all to confer the virtue, the knowledge, or the right to be trusted with that kind of invasive power. If private citizens, who at least are spending their own money and are in principle accountable for their actions, cannot be trusted with the power to snoop on their neighbors like this, then a secretive armed faction, which has a long history of criminal misconduct, and which is in effect accountable to none save God alone, certainly cannot be trusted with it, either.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-05-22: Spy vs. Spy
• GT 2005-11-05: Dramatic Irony, Part II
• GT 2006-01-11: The A Fortiori War Powers Quiz, Take One
• GT 2006-01-05: An Open Question for Constitutionalist Liberals

For the second time in five months, hundreds of thousands of households (including mine) in eastern Missouri and western Illinois have experienced multi-day blackouts — and while I’m always ready to “rough it” for a few days when necessary, this is not a minor matter. People died for lack of electricity in July, and people died for lack of electricity this weekend.

The natural first tendency is to demand that someone “do something” about Ameren UE, the utility company that can’t seem to keep the damn lights on. Maybe something does need to be “done,” but I doubt that most people have a good idea of what.

Let’s start from the beginning:

Yes, Ameren UE is a monopoly — or more specifically it has a monopoly on one service: The provision of alternating current over a large, ubiquitous network of power lines in a particular region.

Ameren UE doesn’t have a monopoly on electricity per se — barring interference from one’s local political hacks, one is free to install solar panels or a wind turbine or whatever and tell Ameren to keep their juice. I’m thinking about doing one or both of those things myself.

The ability to do those things (even setting aside the fact that, at the moment, they’re more expensive than just paying Ameren, especially with respect to up-front investment) isn’t really relevant, though. This is still not a free market. By law, no other company may purchase easements, stick some poles and lines on those easements, and go into the business of pushing alternating current over those lines to paying customers in what government has declared to be Ameren UE’s domain.

I discussed the problems of faux-”privatization” with a state-oriented leftist friend of mine this weekend, while we sat around the table in my dark, unheated kitchen. Not surprisingly, we both concluded that faux-”privatization” hits customers with the worst effects of both the private and public sectors (although, as you might imagine, we differed on what to do about it).

For its part, Ameren UE wants to make a profit. Fair enough — that’s what businesses go into business to do. However, the business environment in which it seeks its profits is an artificial one.

In a real free market environment, competition is an omnipresent factor. Even if nobody is actually competing with you at the moment, someone will start competing with you the instant it looks like it can be done so profitably. You either have to beat your competitors, or perform so satisfactorily to your customers that prospective competitors don’t bother to challenge you.

For government’s part, in a government-conferred monopoly environment, “public utility commissions” are created to protect the customers … but they can’t do so nearly as well as real competition would. These commissions set rates and rules, but being political entities they are subject to political influence. Who carries more influence with such commissions:

- A centralized business with a single agenda and an overriding interest in those commissions’ operations? Or

- A diffuse base of customers with varying agendas, most of whom usually have “utilities and utility bills” way down their lists of priorities?

Ameren UE and companies like it put a lot of money into buying political influence, and that influence is relentlessly used for the purpose of securing the company’s profits. Most of Ameren UE’s customers don’t think much about the politics of utilities until the lights go out … and even if they did, it would take quite an effort to put together an effective lobbying operation on behalf of those customers as a group with a common interest (especially since those customers can’t bill Ameren UE for the costs of lobbying, as they bill us).

Ameren UE is free to let its infrastructure decay while it takes profits, to minimize its investment in upgrading that infrastructure, and to cut back its work force so that it has bare minimum staff in normal times and not nearly enough when a storm comes through. It’s free to do so for two reasons:

- Because you and I aren’t allowed to call up Ameren UE and say “screw you — I’m switching to Acme Power and Light. Come get your meter out of the way so they can put theirs in;” and

- Because big business naturally has more influence than small customers over the governmental bodies which are supposed to pinch hit for that kind of competition.

Many “progressives” believe that the remedy to such situations is to somehow untangle government power from corporate influence, but history shows us that that’s a naive expectation.

It was not customers who called for government control over utilities in the early 20th century — it was the utilities themselves! See Jan Bellamy’s “Two Utilities are Better Than One,” in Reason magazine for more historical information.

From anti-trust to the Food and Drug Administration to your local utilities, government regulation has nearly always been pushed and promoted by the entities allegedly to be reined in or controlled … because those entities knew that it would ultimately be they who held the reins and sat at the controls, or stood over the shoulders of those who did. Regulation would not be permitted to hurt their bottom line — rather it would enhance it by allowing them to exclude would-be competitors and thus free them from the market’s tendency to force better service and lower prices.

Regulation is not a tool of self-defense for consumers — it is a tool of monopolization for corporations. Faux-”privatization” is particularly pernicious: When the inevitable failures occur, it allows the regulators to falsely blame, and the regulated to falsely cite, the “free market.”

The solution is not, as some will no doubt advocate, more government control over Ameren UE. It is less government control — less government, period — for Ameren UE and other anti-competitive firms to exploit and influence to their own benefit and their captive customers’ detriment.

Officer Michael McHale (2006-11-30), on reactions to the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell:

I love all you monday morning quarterbacks. You really don’t have a clue. I sometimes wonder why law enforcement officers offer there lives for the likes of you, your not worth it. … But, hey, as you go through everyday lives don’t worry we will continue to DIE to protect you so you can make more money and get more things. Because it is our mission to “Serve and Protect”, even you.

I never asked you to.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence

Dennis Prager, Townhall.com (2006-11-28):

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam [sic] , the Koran.

He should not be allowed to do so — not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.

First, it is an act of hubris that perfectly exemplifies multiculturalist activism — my culture trumps America’s culture. What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

Forgive me, but America should not give a hoot what Keith Ellison’s favorite book is. Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible.

Speak for yourself, please.

Jackass.