Malum prohibitum? Solum restituere
News ·Sunday July 1, 2007 @ 07:21 EDT (link)
Twit cut me off on WA-520 heading east near Avondale Road on Friday at around 1830: WA 496 UXS, white Honda Civic LX.
Good news: the zombie immigration bill was turned by, well, everyone's claiming responsibility, so let's just say the American people, whom the political elites still listen to them now and then. The very idea of combining a security bill and an amnesty bill is ridiculous; pass a security bill (a well-guarded wall, employment verification and penalties, removal of any tax-supported benefits for illegals, prohibit renting, getting driver's licenses, etc.), and then we'll talk.
There are (says the supreme court of Washington state) two types of crime: malum in se (wrong in themselves, e.g. assault, rape, arson, theft), and malum prohibitum (wrong because they are forbidden, e.g. speeding, prostitution, drug crimes). There is a large subset of malum prohibitum crimes which are also victimless. I delved into my book of Latin verbs to come up with restituo and its present infinitive, restituere (conjugated like constituo); solum restituere means "only restore". If there is no victim and no damage, then there should be no penalty. Speeding tickets are a huge source of revenue for many locales, and the "crime" causes nobody any harm. It's likely that some speeding drivers will, in certain circumstances, be more likely to get into an accident, but let's punish that crime (by making the offender pay for the damage, not by assessing some vague ticket for harm to society, i.e., a random town revenue tax).
House prices seem to be declining; this isn't good for anyone looking to move (unless the market they're moving to is declining faster, and one could still be caught "upside-down"). Builders will build new houses until they run out of land or run out of money. A moratorium on new homebuilding would be a good idea, or if that seems unfree, just hike the cost of permits; land that allowed building can be rezoned to no longer allow it. Of course, that would be very much against a free market, but it's horrible to watch builders pave the land as the population continues to climb, when population should really be leveling off or even decreasing. We don't need more bloody people, and it'd help if every random twit would stop thinking that their genetic material needs to be preserved. You're not a unique snowflake, and your best contribution to society would be to not breed; this goes double for illegal aliens and their anchor babies.
It is a terrible thing to inherit a garden; you don't know the plants, because someone else put them there, so you have a whole array of them whose growth patterns and care you have to find out the hard way.
MDM went and changed their channel lineup; Zap2It, where our MythTV box gets its program listings, took about a week to respond. For the interim, I fixed our existing channels with a small perl script; it was slightly tricky because I wanted to keep the channel IDs the same so that we'd continue to record the same programs on the moved channels. Speaking of the Myth box, we added a new 500 Gb SATA HD about a month ago; it integrated nicely into the LVM video partition, although on a later remount it the names of some video files, but perl again came to the rescue: I used the MythTV database to match files and programs and fix the filenames. About a week ago we installed a second DVD player; just a reader this time. It didn't come with any rails so I stole them from the floppy drive holder.
