Joe Lieberman introduces bill to give government the power to seize control of the internet to protect it against cyber-attacks. Joe Lieberman has turned into the Senate's lead tyrant. This is like giving Obama the power to seize control of an oil well to stop a leak. The government is not nearly as capable of securing the internet as the private sector, and it should never be capable of doing so. I'm sure Joe Lieberman knows that. This is just an excuse to shut down the internet to control speech.
Some want the FCC to monitor hate speech on the radio. I want to abolish the FCC.
The FTC considers a tax consumer electronics to fund newspaper subsidies.
"Additionally, they suggest making facts 'proprietary' and allowing news organizations to copyright them."Making facts proprietary? Like the temperature? Bizarro world appears normal compared to our world. We're experiencing the death spiral of central planning. Every market intervention harms people, makes them poorer and creates worse problems than it was intended to solve. Central planners then implement a more intrusive market intervention to fix the new problems, and that intervention harms more people, makes them even more poor and creates even worse problems than it was intended to solve. And so on. And so on. And so on until Bizarro world appears more normal than ours. This also shows how government is the enemy of progress. Instead of allowing dinosaurs to die, it wants to use violence to loot the people, slow social advancement and keep them alive as zombie companies.
RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:
Elderly Chicago man heroically stands up to government and obtains an illegal (according to the city of Chicago) handgun, then uses it to defend himself, his wife and his great grandson from an armed burglar. Make that doubly heroic.
"The old man moves slowly, with the aid of a cane. He reportedly acquired the illicit gun only after a previous incident, when the couple were robbed at gunpoint in their home by three intruders. Lastly, an ironic political detail, courtesy of the Sun-Times: "When he returned home, the man...wore a T-shirt emblazoned with President Obama's face and name." Talk about audacity."I love it.
Remember that devastating flood you didn't hear about in Nashville because it didn't affect a bunch of welfare cases? This is why there was no looting.
ECONOMY:
The census (and government hiring in general) is producing a false job spike. Productive, private sector jobs are still lacking.
EDUCATION:
Boortz reports "New Jersey Governor Chris Christie won't relent on the teachers unions. Good for him! He says that students are trapped by "selfish, greedy and disgraceful" teachers unions." Christie is kicking some butt.
GLOBAL WARMING:
The global warming fraud would be better off attacking human development for producing heat, from heating, air conditioning, cooking, refrigeration, running car engines and any other technology, than attacking CO2 production.
The frauds will not give up the lie that arctic ice is less than it "should be" despite all the evidence showing that arctic ice is expanding.
The real story behind the alarmist predictions that 2010 will be the warmest year on record.
"Today’s Times says, “Nasa analysis showing record global warming undermines the skeptics.” However, a closer look at the information which the Times bases its headline on shows that a combination of selective memory and scientific spin play a large role in arriving at it.
The conclusion is based on a new paper written by James Hansen and submitted toReviews of Geophysics. The paper released by Hansen has not been peer reviewed, and he admits that some of the newsworthy comments it contains may not make it past the referees.
Hansen claims that, according to his Gisstemp database, the year from April 2009 to April 2010 has a temperature anomaly of 0.65 deg C (based on a 1951 – 1980 average) making it the warmest year since modern records began. It is a fractionally warmer than 2005 he says, although an important point to be made is that statistically speaking, taking into account the error of measurement and the scatter of previous datapoints, it is not a significant increase."The first part of this year was market by el Nino, which makes the planet warmer naturally, like it did in 1998. But el Nino is gone now, so the rest of the year shouldn't be so hot.
There's a rare solar cycle 24 sunspot sighting today.
POLICE STATE:
Ohio Supreme Court rules that all that's needed for a speeding conviction is a police estimate that the victim was speeding.
"The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that an officer's visual estimation of speed is enough to support a conviction if the officer is trained, certified by a training academy, and experienced in watching for speeders. The court's 5-1 decision says independent verification of a driver's speed is not necessary."Forget radar guns. Who needs that pesky evidence stuff any more? On the surface, this may not sound like much, but this is really scary. This means a police officer can stop any car for no reason at any time, check for DUI, find an excuse to search the car and the driver. This is frightening. I'm telling you, we're the stupidest people in the world for doing this to ourselves.
In case you weren't convinced that the police, prosecutors, judges, legislatures and governors are in the police state together, states are making it illegal to record arrests at the request of police who don't want to be held accountable for their actions.
"In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists."We're the stupidest people on the planet.
"A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison."Big-time penalties. This is censorship of the actions of government agents. Hiding information is always harmful.
"Carlos Miller at the Photography Is Not A Crime website offers an explanation: "For the second time in less than a month, a police officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently paralyzing the 24-year-old man.""Can't have the criminals in uniform being hoisted on their own petard, now can we?
POLITICS:
Obama whines about Republicans and lies about his record. What's new?
Fewer than one third of Americans can name a Supreme Court justice, and only one percent can name all nine (I got eight- I couldn't come up with Stevens even though he's recently been in the news because he's retiring). I have mixed feeling about this. The federal government is supposed to be unimportant in our lives. We should only have to know the people we vote for - the president, vice-president, two senators and a representative. But the reality is that way of thinking enabled the aristocrats to create the leviathan government that is crushing our lives today. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. If from the time of the ratification of the Constitution, all Americans had demanded that all five people they vote for subordinated themselves to the plain language of the Constitution, we'd be light years further advanced than we are today. We'd have colonies on the moon and Mars and space science stations around every planet. We'd have sent spaceships to the nearest stars. We'd be able to travel to any place in the world in an hour almost as conveniently as I can drive to Cincinnati. We'd have underwater cities and farms. We'd have cured cancer. Communism would never have happened. Barring a few tyrannies - there will always be violent, power hungry men who manage to control others - the entire world would be free. Only a handful of people outside of those tyrannies would live in poverty or hunger, and it would be because they chose not to work. But instead we empowered government to loot us and to slow the advancement of civilization to the point where government is about to collapse it.
Corruption in the Florida Republican party? This isn't news. Lack of corruption would be news. It's impossible. Politics is corruption.
Another case in point: Haliburton lines the pockets of senior aristocrats investigating Haliburton's role in the Gulf oil spill.
Another case in point: Obama tries to trade a job with Colorado congressional candidate to get him out of the race. That's how they do it in Chicago (and everywhere else).
Another case in point: Congressional Black Caucus moves to restrict the powers of congressional ethics investigator because it's investigated eight CBC members.
How political corruption works on the local level.
If government tries to control the handling of the Gulf oil spill, it will be like a war - destructive.
Boortz reports "The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has officially voted to boycott Arizona." Stupid. Arizona will retaliate.
Obama calls the presidency the best job on earth. Of course he would think that. He loves having everybody in the world at his mercy. People who covet the power of the presidency should be disqualified from office.
MISC:
Ump blows call on last out of the game, costing pitcher a perfect game. Wow. No replay, please.
Walter Williams acknowledges the right to discriminate.
"Should people have the right to discriminate by race, sex, religion and other attributes? In a free society, I say yes. Let’s look at it. When I was selecting a marriage partner, I systematically discriminated against white women, Asian women and women of other ethnicities that I found less preferable. The Nation of Islam discriminates against white members. The Aryan Brotherhood discriminates against having black members. The Ku Klux Klan discriminates against having Catholic and Jewish members. The NFL discriminates against hiring female quarterbacks. The NAACP National Board of Directors, at least according to the photo on their Web page, has no white members."The Constitution doesn't give the government the power to override the natural right of free association. In fact, free association is doubly protected because it's covered by the Ninth Amendment. This abuse of power by government has institutionalized discrimination which was being wiped out by natural social forces before the Civil Rights Act.
"We live in antiliberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can't even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have traveled from the Age of Reason to our own times."Isn't that the truth. It's frightening that people are frightened of freedom but not frightened of government. That's like being frightened of a kitten but not a lion.
"What about the claim that government should regulate the grounds of exclusion? Let's say, for example, that we do not deny the general right of free association, but narrow its range to address a particular injustice. Is that plausible? Well, freedom is a bit like life, something that is or is not. Slicing and dicing it according to political priorities is exceedingly dangerous. It perpetrates social division, leads to arbitrary power, mandates a form of slavery, and turns the tables on who precisely is in charge in society."Rockwell's on a roll. John Stossel attacked for wanting to fight bigotry without government intervention. Remember when Obama was going to take the country past racial issues? How's that working out for us? As much as I abhor Jim Crow laws, I don't support the federal government striking them down. In that one instance, centralized authority led to increased freedom, but that instance is the very rare exception and sets a precedent for oppression - it's done just that because liberals use it as an example of good centralization of power. Decentralizing power is the best way to combat tyranny. Another view.
"National Review's Rich Lowry, for example, wrote: "[T]he Civil Rights Act was the last spasm of the Civil War. The South had frustrated the imposition of black civil rights during Reconstruction in a low-grade insurgency that successfully rumbled on into the 1960s. Black civil rights weren't going to be vindicated any time soon, absent the application of federal power again ... I'm sympathetic to libertarianism, but it sometimes has a weakness for theoretical exercises removed from reality.""Rich Lowry is wrong about this. The people were overcoming the Jim Crow laws. They were overcoming institutionalized discrimination. The Civil Rights Act aborted that process. State, statism, static, status quo. They all have the same roots. Because the federal interfered in the social evolution that was overcoming discrimination, it institutionalized the status quo nationwide, and the entire country suffers from institutionalized discrimination today. You cannot solve social problems with government violence.
"This sounds like a white, guilt-ridden rationalization to justify an abandonment of principle. And it has real world, not merely "theoretical," consequences. For one thing, it encourages grievance-driven race-based identity politics — and invites special-interest legislation to protect all manner of niche groups perceived as having been "held down by The Man." It is in these waters that professional victim seekers and exploiters like the Rev. Al Sharpton, race and gender "advocacy groups," and the Democratic Party do their fishing."And that's just the political aspects.
"Rand's critics also unintentionally expose the condescending way "compassionate conservatives" deem that blacks — still standing after slavery and Jim Crow — are in need of protection by rare "noble" whites from the bigot-infested world through which blacks are obviously incapable of navigating. Why else throw overboard the just and basic principle that private actors, short of engaging in force or fraud, should behave as they wish?"I couldn't agree with this more. Blacks were heroically overcoming discrimination through their own efforts. Rosa Parks didn't need the federal government to keep her seat. Martin Luther King didn't need the federal government to lead his boycotts. They didn't need whites patronizing them to accomplish the task, and by doing so, the whites ended the process, which was undoubtedly the goal of many all along. How could Democrats use blacks as political pawns if they overcame discrimination on their own? As with all government actions, the Civil Rights Act was about seizing power from the people, in this case heroic blacks and their allies, for the aristocrats. And it worked to near perfection.
"If National Review's Lowry owned a restaurant, would he discriminate against blacks? Does he intimately know anyone who would do so? How would he treat friends who patronized restaurants that refused blacks? Of course he wouldn't exclude. Nor would his friends or associates. Obviously none of those "noble" souls in his immediate circle would consort with racists. So why assume that some unacceptable percentage of the "unwashed masses" will act as merchant-racists — either without harmful consequences or the willingness to accept those consequences? Why do we further assume that, whatever the number of bigots, they will be capable of meaningfully affecting the day-to-day lives of blacks? If anything, these racists would have publicly outed themselves as part of the bad and the ugly.
The consequences of government coercion are more harmful than the certainty that some will use their freedom in ways that offend. Bad behavior tends to get punished in the social and business "marketplace." The Boston Red Sox, one of the last teams to hire black ballplayers, discovered fans valued winning much more than team racial homogeneity."This is a great essay.
If you win a soccer game in Canada by more than five goals, you lose. Mediocrity enforced by fiat. I hope the parents of the good kids start a competition league.
Activists use the government's gun to force restaurant to remove kiss urinals instead of just eating elsewhere.
Embedding transistors in human cells. To do anything worthwhile, they would make you very hungry.
Seawater naturally breaks down oil.
Essay lampooning the argument that governments rule with consent of the governed includes excellent example of the so-called social contract:
"I, the party of the first part (“the ruler”), promise:
(1) To stipulate how much of your money you will hand over to me, as well as how, when, and where the transfer will be made. You will have no effective say in the matter, aside from pleading for my mercy, and if you should fail to comply, my agents will punish you with fines, imprisonment, and (in the event of your persistent resistance) death.
(2) To make thousands upon thousands of rules for you to obey without question, again on pain of punishment by my agents. You will have no effective say in determining the content of these rules, which will be so numerous, complex, and in many cases beyond comprehension that no human being could conceivably know about more than a handful of them, much less their specific character, yet if you should fail to comply with any of them, I will feel free to punish you to the extent of a law made my me and my confederates.
(3) To provide for your use, on terms stipulated by me and my agents, so-called public goods and services. Although you may actually place some value on a few of these goods and services, most will have little or no value to you, and some you will find utterly abhorrent, and in no event will you as an individual have any effective say over the goods and services I provide, notwithstanding any economist’s cock-and-bull story to the effect that you “demand” all this stuff and value it at whatever amount of money I choose to expend for its provision.
(4) In the event of a dispute between us, judges beholden to me for their appointment and salaries will decide how to settle the dispute. You can expect to lose in these settlements, if your case is heard at all.
In exchange for the foregoing government “benefits,” you, the party of the second part (“the subject”), promise:
(5) To shut up, make no waves, obey all orders issued by the ruler and his agents, kowtow to them as if they were important, honorable people, and when they say “jump,” ask only “how high?”"This is why voting has nothing to do with freedom - no matter which ruler-wannabe you vote for you, you are still being ruled.
Tiny flying robots. Tiny flying robots at Wright-Patterson.
No comments:
Post a Comment