You know the drug has hit home when dying cancer patients are being robbed and beaten savagely for their pain-killing narcotics.  As if that weren’t bad enough, the media put out deliberately redacted stories to prevent us “little people” from knowing what  happened.

A Fredericksburg cancer patient is recovering after being brutally beaten during a robbery Monday.

Police said three men knocked on 43-year-old Eddie Butler’s door Monday night, in the 300 block of Altoona Drive. When the victim answered, the men pointed a gun at Butler and demanded money and prescription drugs.

Prescription drugs?

Technically that’s true, but why the euphemism? Clearly the people who edit these stories don’t want the public to know the motive, which is a very simple economic one

Pills that cost 50 cents at the drug store are worth 50 dollars on the street. The drugs themselves are basically worthless.

What make them “valuable” are laws which make them ever harder for addicts to get and drive up street prices.

That false price differential caused a poor dying man to be beaten within an inch of his life, and it isn’t even reported.

Police said Butler resisted, and the suspects responded by beating him with a metal baton. “They went in my pockets took my rent money and the meds I had on me and took off,” Butler told 8News reporter Nate Eaton.

Investigators were appalled at the brutal nature of the attack.

“Because of the victims weakened condition due to his medical problems there was no need for these three assailants to attack him with a weapon,” said Natatia Bledsoe, spokesperson for Fredericksburg police.

Investigators believe the suspects knew that Butler, in the final stages of throat cancer, had prescription medication. The suspects were seen fleeing the scene in a white SUV.

There they go again with “prescription medication.”

Why is honest reporting so feared?

And why are people being beaten and often killed over essentially worthless substances?

The post I just did Liberty? We Can’t Afford It – Says Coulter got me to thinking about how to end the welfare state. Coulter is incensed that welfare money would be going to support dopers if drugs were legalized (as if that isn’t the case currently).

Well Ann is not too bright. Just think of the demand to end the welfare state if drugs were legalized Ann. First we get more liberty and that causes a demand for more liberty. Make the jump to lightspeed Ann.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Glenn Reynolds recently linked an April post he wrote about some poor schlub who found himself raided by a SWAT Team because person(s) unknown had downloaded kiddie porn using his unsecured WiFi signal.

That had prompted this advice from a reader:

Never, EVER set a password on your Wi-Fi router. Background : 30 years in IT. I have many clients who are defense lawyers, and this is the advice they are giving me based on ‘water cooler’ chat going on in the profession. Long story made short, passwords = you did it, at least in the eyes of less-than-tech savvy juries. The only way to establish reasonable doubt is to NOT have a password.

I’m not sure I would give that advice to unsophisticated, squeaky clean people, because in a very general sense it is true that under our system the totally innocent usually have less to fear than the completely guilty. And if you really aren’t doing anything illegal with your computer — meaning no drug or sex trafficking, no kiddie porn or copyrighted video downloading, etc. — then why leave your signal open for anyone in range to do those things?

But the lines are getting blurrier and blurrier. Even people who think they are squeaky clean might not realize that what they are downloading is copyrighted. And how can they be sure that their teenage kids aren’t breaking one law or another online?

As to those who are in fact dirty, or those who are vulnerable to being framed or blackmailed by enemies, while I am not advising anyone on how to commit a crime, I think they would probably be smart to leave their routers unsecured.  Because, unless investigators find the goods inside your computer or something, anyone could have downloaded anything simply because the router was unsecure.

Think about it. If you’re dirty, doesn’t common sense suggest muddying the waters by letting everyone else share your bandwidth?

Not long ago, I learned about a hot spot which flooded a hipster neighborhood with a powerful T1 Wifi signal beaming from an apartment occupied by neighborhood drug dealers who came and went in an unpredictable manner. Assuming they were doing illegal things online, sharing that bandwidth made a lot of sense. Especially nowadays with everyone and his mama carrying a laptop. Unless the cops were to find the exact laptop that had downloaded the damning data, with the damning data still on it, it would be impossible to figure out anything, because anyone could have used the signal.

The name of the game is reasonable doubt.

I don’t mean to offer advice to cyber criminals, but I could easily see the idea spreading even to rebellious types, with entire neighborhoods deciding collectively to turn off security. Essentially, that would mean free neighborhood WiFi, with no way to control what anyone does.

When the government makes everything illegal and busts people for downloading what they didn’t download, they’re asking for such acts of civil cyber disobedience.

I can hear it now. “In a lawless world where we are all criminals, the only security is to be found in not having security!”

Hey, it isn’t illegal not to have a password, is it?

I don’t especially like Rick Perry. (So far, at least.) My main objection to him politically is grounded in his longstanding support for sodomy laws, something I find annoying in this day and age. It is one thing to oppose gay marriage, but to support imprisoning adults for consenting sexual activity with other adults strikes me as bigotry against those people by definition. In fairness, I don’t know whether the man still supports sodomy laws (despite claims that he does, his statements are nearly a decade old), but I wish some intrepid reporter would pin him down as I think it’s a fair question. In that respect, I was hardly reassured by his appearance as the main act at a huge AFA prayer event, because the AFA not only supports re-criminalizing “sodomy,” but believes the First Amendment only applies to Christians. If such positions do not constitute bigotry, then what does?

So Perry as a candidate worries me. I would also like to know whether he supports the war on drugs and I can’t seem to pin that down. He voices support for the Tenth Amendment, and although his sincerity in that regard has been questioned because of his finger-to-the-wind waffling, I cannot find any statement from him on federal preemption of state drug laws, especially marijuana legalization. Jacob Sullum wonders whether medical marijuana will be the next exception to Perry’s federalism.

(While it’s really a subject for a different post, I think it’s worth noting here that in practice, drug laws are in many ways worse than sodomy laws. That’s because while both imprison people for victimless crimes of a consenting nature, as a practical manner the sodomy laws were never enforced with anywhere near the savage ferocity of the drug laws. We never had a “War on Sodomy,” nor SWAT team raids, nor were millions of Americans imprisoned for sodomy. By any standard, the degree of tyranny and oppression visited on American drug offenders far surpasses the treatment of Americans convicted of sodomy. In terms of election perspective, the war on drugs is a much, much more important issue than sodomy laws, as the former is a pressing national issue while the latter is dead — except to a fanatic cabal of true believers who write GOP platforms which make Republicans like Rick Perry look like loons.)

Assuming he doesn’t waffle on them, I do like Perry’s economic positions, though. He seems about as pro-free market as it is possible to get and still be within striking distance of the White House, and I hope he can be trusted to remain that way.

A number of critics on the right are concerned about his background as a Democrat. Among conservatives, a question being asked is “Did Perry vote for Reagan?”

Why not just admit to having been a loyal Democrat in those years? Might help win over the swing voters.  In his announcement speech, he invoked Reagan, but made no mention of his political evolution as Reagan used  to, even though it would have been a good opportunity to do it.

In the American Thinker, Perry also stands accused of being so Jihadi-friendly as to be guilty of “systematic sedition.” While I’m skeptical of that claim, the guy is so new to the national arena that who knows?

Stay tuned. I guess we’ll find out whether he is a sodomy law-loving systematic seditionist soon enough.

MORE: Roger L. Simon disagrees with Rick Perry on gay marriage, but thinks he would be a good president. He also links this video which shows Perry to be a very pleasant and likeable man.

Likeable as he is, and even though I would vote for him if he is on the ballot, I simply cannot find enthusiasm in my heart for any candidate who believes in sodomy laws.

My standards may be low, but they’re not that low.

I dislike libertarian purists, and don’t think I’m being too much of a purist when I say that wanting to imprison adults for consensual sex in this day and age is just way over the top.

MORE: Conor Friedersdorf argues that Rick Perry has betrayed his own federalism.

A quote (from Perry):

Limiting government seems to be but a quaint notion today for Republicans who prefer instead to set aside principle to use government to achieve their own, preferred–supposedly conservative–policy goals.

While I like the sound of the above, Friedersdorf sees it as an indictment of Perry. By Perry.

Eventually, none of this will matter.

Basically, I might be able to forgive Perry’s abandonment of principles, but I wish the “principles” he is willing to abandon would include his former support for sodomy laws.

Maybe then I could muster a show of enthusiasm.

A really smart woman discusses the pleasures and pitfalls of high IQ dating.

Many people equate high IQ with “high achieving”, but they are two distinct things. Women with an above-average intelligence (IQ range of 110-130) are likely to be professionals: lawyers, nurses, dentists, mid-level civil servants, journalists, managers, teachers, pharmacists, librarians, or the like. High IQ women (those with an IQ>130) will tend toward more creative or “typically masculine” pursuits: surgery, engineering, research science, politics, philosophy, authorship, mathematics, music, art, architecture, high-level civil service, military office, or entrepreneurship. A woman would normally have to have unusually high visual-spatial scores in order to reach 130, which is why men outnumber women in that range and in those occupations.

Which is why intelligent women are so much in demand. They are rare birds compared to the number of high IQ men.

I have checked out the comments too and the vast majority are excellent. Also the blog hostess Alte chimes in frequently in the comments.

Posted by Alte on May 27, 2011 at 8:41 am

As to Chris’ comment, I thought it was relevant because of his assumption that having an “advanced degree” means that the women are high-IQ, but the majority of advanced degree holders are not high IQ. This is proven with simple statistics — there are way more advanced degree holders (6% of the adult population) than people of high IQ (2% of the adult population).

Add in the fact that most (58%) of those advanced degree holders are women but women are in the minority among those with high IQ, and that many people of high IQ don’t have advanced degrees, and it is just more proof of the fact that there is little direct correlation between advanced degrees and IQ>130. In other words, although someone of high IQ is more likely to have an advanced degree than someone chosen randomly from the general population, most people with advanced degrees are not high IQ — even those with prestigious degrees (technical schools like MIT or CalTech being the exception, as they select candidates with high v-s abilities).

You have to remember that high IQ is associated with DOE (over-excitability), which makes standardized education (i.e. college) very difficult for many of them. The women are also more likely to have highly fluctuating hormone levels, heavy and painful periods, and children with behavioral problems. All of those things mean that high IQ women who marry often fall out of the high-achievement pool rather quickly, which is one reason why homemaking is so prevalent at the very top of the income scales.

I had that problem with college sort of. I found women. Woo hoo! And I found them more exciting than the school work. Not to worry. I worked my way up to aerospace engineer completely bypassing the whole college thing.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

What’s the world coming to?

The youth of today are not only boasting about turds, they’re putting Best-Of videos on Youtube!

Yes, they’re actually into uploading their pet frogs’ “greatest shits” videos:

For a late-night tie-in with the world’s contemporary economic problems (hey, this blog is old, but I do try!), there’s a 17-page Vanity Fair piece which maintains that the German attitude towards excrement lies at the heart of underlies the problem.

Excerpt:

Perhaps because they have such a gift for creating difficulties with non-Germans, the Germans have been on the receiving end of many scholarly attempts to understand their collective behavior. In this vast and growing enterprise, a small book with a funny title towers over many larger, more ponderous ones. Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

Dundes caused a bit of a stir, for an anthropologist, by tracking this single low national character trait into the most important moments in German history. The fiercely scatological Martin Luther (“I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole,” Luther once explained) had the idea that launched the Protestant Reformation while sitting on the john. Mozart’s letters revealed a mind, as Dundes put it, whose “indulgence in fecal imagery may be virtually unmatched.” One of Hitler’s favorite words was Scheisskerl (“shithead”): he apparently used it to describe not only other people but himself as well. After the war, Hitler’s doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces, and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him. Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. “The combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior-dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content—is very much a part of the German national character,” he wrote.

Well, I’m glad that’s settled. And to think I had been worried about frog poop.

Everything can be a metaphor for something.

Even if you have to strain.

I am getting a little tired of the way so many people throw up their hands and blame “social media” when incidents like this “flash mob” theft spree occur.

The caption reads,

according to the video, the officer refused to investigate the crime, and only viewed this incident as shoplifting.

IMO, attitudes like those of that officer (along with many other people) are the problem. Not the existence of sophisticated communications technology.

That the thieves used social media is only relevant insofar as it is proof that the crime was not mere shoplifting, but a much more serious criminal conspiracy to commit grand theft.  That video shows multiple felonies, and if it can be shown that the people talked to each other beforehand and entered into an agreement to hit that 7-11, that is by definition a criminal conspiracy.

So why aren’t the police doing what  they would do if they had a bank robbery video? They have evidence to arrest the people shown stealing, and they can obtain warrants to search their communications devices to look for evidence of conspiracy. But they don’t do that. Instead they sit back and complain about the social media.

BTW, a conspiracy is simply,

an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement.

It doesn’t matter where or how they agreed. Whether on the street, on the telephone, via email, by texting, by Blackberry, Ipod, on Facebook, at a web site, wherever.

Why is the focus on the method of communication instead of the crime?

QUESTION: Couldn’t what happened here also be considered looting? The thieves deliberately staged a small riot, and used the chaos to their advantage.

Rioting and looting are also more serious crimes than shoplifting, whether they are enabled by social media or not.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

That’s a real mouthful, and I don’t know whether it is the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s way of  expressing frustration, or whether it is a sign of changing attitudes towards free speech. Here’s the background:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A rapper could face criminal charges after a tweet from his account incited a telephone flash mob that overwhelmed the emergency phone system at one of busiest stations of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department, the agency said Saturday.

The sheriff’s department alleges The Game tweeted the Compton station’s phone number Friday and told his 580,000 followers to call the number if they wanted an internship.

Naturally, this tied up the switchboards and callers with emergencies couldn’t get through. I don’t know whether the rapper had been hacked as he said, or was was pranking, or whether he might have had some sort of political motive:

“Yall can track a tweet down but cant solve murders!” the tweet said. “Dat was an accident but maybe now yall can actually do yall job !!!!”

A call and email to The Game’s publicist, Greg Miller at Big Hassle Media, was not immediately returned.

The rapper finally took down the number around 11 p.m. Friday after a third request from Parker, who took particular issue with the accusation that deputies are not doing their job.

“Under the LA county sheriffs we’ve reduce homicides in Compton by over 50 percent in recent years and crime is down in Compton, but it’s particularly helpful when the public can contact us,” Parker said Saturday in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “This incident was the social media equivalent of going into a crowded movie theater and shouting ‘Fire!’”

Investigators will document what happened, how many calls flooded the station, the rapper’s tweets and other information, and will turn it over to the district attorney’s office next week, Parker said. The rapper could face charges of maliciously disrupting or impeding communications over a public safety radio frequency, obstruction of justice or other charges related to delaying a peace officer from doing their job.

It is not at all clear whether the rapper in question is the one who posted the tweet. But even if he did, if his intent was to engage in some kind of protest, I’m having conceptual difficulties in seeing the difference between having callers flood a police switchboard as a protest and having listeners to a radio talk show inundate politicians with calls and emails.

Hence my worry. I also worry about the desire to crack down on social media, because that’s what they’re calling blogs these days.

It is axiomatic that there is no right to incite a riot, but I worry that what has been going on lately with “flash mobs” — and now “telephone flash mobs” — may be blurring the distinction between what constitutes incitement, and what constitutes a riot.

A lot of people are expressing frustrations over the increasing use of communications technology to facilitate flash mobs, and in Oakland, the BART police shut down wireless so demonstrators would find it tougher to disrupt the system. But what about people who might need to make emergency calls? Why wouldn’t turning them off constitute “maliciously disrupting or impeding communications over a public safety radio frequency” just as much as a tweet asking people to flood them with phone calls?

In today’s Free Press, columnist Mitch Albom calls the situation “the 21st-Century mob”:

“It’s instantaneous and it’s anonymous,” said Paul Wertheimer, founder of Crowd Management Strategies. “What we’re looking at is the 21st-Century mob.”

The 21st-Century mob. Just press send.

[...]

…how do you stop it? Some have talked about blocking the signals of digital devices in certain volatile areas — sort of like an instant jamming mechanism. But that supposes: 1) You can identify that area quickly. 2) You have the technology. 3) You’re not also blocking legitimate use of those devices — like an elderly person calling for an ambulance on a cell phone. (Already in San Francisco, civil libertarians are complaining about the rapid transit incident.)

Besides, once you identify a hot spot, hasn’t much of the damage been done?

You can’t keep people from assembling in America. But what happens when the point of the assembly is to disassemble something?

I think the answer to that would depend on what was being disassembled. Many people would love to see SWAT Teams disassembled. Others want Planned Parenthood disassembled. While still others want the Tea Party disassembled. As the activist who designed the Wisconsin Blue Fist put it,

These people need to be stopped at all costs.

By all costs? By any means necessary? Is that idle rhetoric or a call to arms? Is there a difference between saying that in a discussion group or blog post and tweeting it to people who are in the middle of an angry demonstration? Or does the distinction hinge on the amount of “influence” the speaker has? Under the First Amendment, there is no distinction between speakers.

Is there really a problem necessitating new laws? Rioting is already illegal and so are calls for violence. Communication technology has evolved to allow more sophisticated and more rapid communication to ever-larger numbers of people, and ever larger numbers of people are involved. But it strikes me that the flash mob problem usually involves more local, urban communications between people who either know each other and are of a similar mindset, and who use public transportation to get around quickly to the designated places.

It would be just as logical to blame these flash mobs on cities, or unsupervised young people with nothing to do and all the time in the world, as it is to blame social media.

Hey, how come no one has thought to blame public transportation?

Reason’s Jesse Walker looks at the Iowa caucus numbers:

The results are in from the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, and Michele Bachmann has emerged victorious with 4,823 votes. Ron Paul, the only bearable candidate in the running (*), finished a very close second with 4,671.

That asterisk stands for Gary Johnson, who ran technically but not literally. (Or would that be literally but not virtually? Anyway, he was on the ballot, but did not campaign.)

As to frontrunner Mitt Romney, he was beaten by another frontrunner who wasn’t technically running, but who ran virtually anyway:

Perry didn’t have an official presence at the straw poll, but he nonetheless attracted 718 write-in votes — better than frontrunner Mitt Romney’s 567.

FWIW, I don’t think Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul will be the nominee.

I think Sarah Palin is smart to stay out of the race at this point, and I like her approach of simply being there without really being there (as opposed to Perry’s not being there while being there).

The whole game is a bit surreal. To be is not to be.

An animal rights activist I am not. I eat animals and I have no problem with humane farming. But whether you want to call it an animal “right” or a human duty, I think deliberately torturing animals is wrong, and I am appalled by the unnecessary torture of animals that goes on in China. I have complained about it before, but this news item about a mother bear and her cub utterly horrified me, and I think it ought to nauseate anyone with the slightest degree of kindness or compassion. In what I think is a good sign, the story has horrified many Chinese, because it touches on the most basic of instincts — a mother protecting her own:

The Chinese media has reported on an extraordinary account of a mother bear saving her cub from a life of torture by strangling it and then killing itself.

The bears were kept in a farm located in a remote area in the North-West of China. The bears on the farm had their gall bladders milked daily for ‘bear bile,’ which is used as a remedy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

It was reported that the bears are kept in tiny cages known as ‘crush cages’, as the bears have no room to manoeuvre and are literally crushed.

The bile is harvested by making a permanent hole or fistula in the bears’ abdomen and gall bladder.

As the hole is never closed, the animals are suspect to various infections and diseases including tumours, cancers and death from peritonitis.

The bears are fitted with an iron vest, as they often try to kill themselves by hitting their stomach as they are unable to bear the pain.

A person who was on the farm in place of a friend witnessed the procedures and told Reminbao.com that they were inhumane.

The witness also claimed that a mother bear broke out its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

The workers ran away in fear when they saw the mother bear rushing to its cub’s side.

Unable to free the cub from its restraints, the mother hugged the cub and eventually strangled it.

It then dropped the cub and ran head-first into a wall, killing itself.

At first I thought the story sounded a bit too fantastic. I found the link here, and I was very skeptical about the claim that animals would commit suicide.

Ever wonder if animals are intelligent? Consider this story from the Chinese press, which has been reporting this week on the strange case of a mother bear who broke free of her captors, strangled her cub, then killed herself, all to avoid a life of medical torture.

In Chinese traditional medicine, a bear’s bile, extracted from the gallbladder, is thought to have healing powers. “Bear farmers” keep the animals in tiny cages where they are literally crushed as they grow larger and larger. Meanwhile, a small hole is cut in their abdomens, permanently, where bile can be drained from the gallbladder.

The practice has led to people observing some rather unusual bear behavior, like bears that attempt to kill themselves by hitting their chests, gnawing off their paws or beating their heads against their cage as if they’d gone insane.

The problem with the above argument is that animals lack the same awareness of death (based on self awareness) that humans have. I have known for a long time that animals will inflict fatal or near-fatal injuries on themselves in order to escape, but that is not grounded in anything approaching suicidal thoughts. Rather, it is the instinct to escape. Many an animal has gnawed off its leg to escape a steel trap, and many have bled to death as a result. Animals wracked by pain will of course not only want to escape confinement, but they will do anything to escape the pain. Even humans do this, and I am not sure that those who have jumped to their deaths from burning buildings rather than burn to death have necessarily committed conscious suicide.

What I think happened here is that the mother bear had the maternal instinct to protect her cub in the only way she knew how and when that failed another instinct kicked in. Even hamsters will eat their babies when danger threatens. She stopped her cub’s suffering, and once she was temporarily loose, I think she made an all out mad dash to escape (the torture lasts for many years, until the animal dies), and took the chance that maybe she could crash through that man-made wall.  It is anthropomorphism to call it suicide, but that does not make it any less shocking. I may be naive, but I hope the spectacle of seeing a mother bear do that torments those callused torturers for the rest of their lives, and that it helps bring this monstrous, superstitious practice to an end.

Anyone who wants the details of what goes on routinely in China can read this sickening report.  Or this. Utilitarians ought to keep in mind that the stuff they extract from the bears is available elsewhere, so there is no need for these horrors to be committed by our principal trading partner.

What is done to certain humans in China isn’t much better.

MORE: Bear in mind that the animal rights activists in this country have done much to increase the suffering of animals in places like China. Not only do they argue that a bear is the moral equivalent of a chicken or a silkworm, but the constantly agitate for laws which, well-intentioned though they might be, have caused animal experimentation to be outsourced to places like China, where it goes unpoliced. By trying to address the problems rationally, animal welfare movement has been much more effective at preventing cruelty than the animal rights movement. PETA, for example, can’t do a damn thing about what happens in China; instead they engage in vegan exhibitionist antics:

“Where is PETA when you need them?”

Showering naked in Hollywood. I’ll bet the Chinese bears are really impressed.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/03/22/peta-models-shower-nude-in-hollywood-to-protest-meat/

Hey, bears eat meat, but they don’t lock their prey in cages and torture them for years out of superstition.  Nor should we.

In Prohibition Regimes I took a general look at how Prohibition regimes are associated with a breakdown of the rule of law. I want to be a little more explicit here.

What does prohibition teach? Break the law if you can get away with it.

And how do you get away with it? Too many people are doing it at once for the police to keep up.

What is amazing to me in all this is that no one else can see the pattern. Is it a cause of the riots in England? Doubtful. But it is certainly a contributor.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Ann Althouse was physically attacked recently by a leftist thug in Madison. She got it all on video.

From a screenshot of the video, here’s the man, whom the crowd did absolutely nothing to stop.

Many of the demonstrators are wearing the same red, Communist clenched-fist T-shirt.

I couldn’t help notice that the man is wearing a Che Guevara button:

So, a violent Communist thug who admires a violent Communist murderer attacks a peaceful citizen journalist in supposedly civilized Madison while “peace-loving” lefties look on and do nothing. No doubt they think attacking people they disagree with is just fine. And peaceful!

I am not surprised, but I am sick and tired of the way the mainstream media portrays these people as something other than what they are.

MORE: Blue Fist designer Carrie Worthen argues here that right wing = racism:

Racism is the basis for right wing rallying. All this teabaggerism? What do you think the root of all that is? You think we’d see any of this fervent democracy-annihilating shit if a black man weren’t president? No way no how. They are actually and unapologetically proud of their racism. These people need to be stopped at all costs.

(Emphasis hers.)

Spoken like a true fanatic.

Not that the tyranny involved will surprise anyone, but this report qualifies (for me, at least) as the outrage of the day.

A new rule being proposed by the federal Department of Transportation would require farmers to get commercial drivers licenses.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which is a part of DOT, wants to adopt standards that would reclassify all farm vehicles and implements as Commercial Motor Vehicles, officials said. Likewise, the proposal, if adopted, would require all farmers and everyone on the farm who operates any of the equipment to obtain a CDL, they added.

The proposed rule change would mean that anyone who drives a tractor or operates any piece of motorized farming equipment would be required to pass the same tests and complete the same detailed forms and logs required of semi-tractor trailer drivers.

Drivers would keep logs of information including hours worked and miles traveled. Vehicles would be required to display DOT numbers. A CDL in Virginia costs $64 for eight years, or $8 per year, not including the cost of an instructional class and the written test.

If the DOT reclassifies farm vehicles and implements as commercial vehicles, the federal government will have regulatory control over the nation’s farm workers, estimated at over 800,000, by requiring them to have commercial drivers licenses.

That possibility worries county farmers and others in Halifax County interested in agriculture.

The implications ought to worry a lot more people than that. Farms are private property, at least that was long the rule back in the days when this was a free country that respected property rights. Any driving that takes place on private land does not occur on a public road, hence vehicles on them traditionally do not need to be licensed, nor do drivers. What sort of vehicle is driven on a farm — or by whom — is no more the business of the federal government than if I were build a go cart and drive it around in circles in my tiny backyard.

The DOT proposal is being called “insane” and “absurd”:

“It’s hard enough fighting Mother Nature, insects and all…now we have to fight the federal government,” he added. “We’re getting more rammed down our throats, and I could see repercussions across the nation. This move is another inane gesture in my opinion,” Waller concluded.

Bruce Pearce, Halifax County Soil and Water Conservation district manager, agrees with Waller.

“It’s absurd, we’re being regulated out of business,” Pearce said. “I can see where you need to take precautions if you take these things on the interstate.”

Pearce said driving a tractor on a road is not like driving a semi-tractor trailer on the highway.

“If it passes, there will be a lot of citations written,” he said. “It’ll create a financial burden on the farmer.

“Many farm workers are migrant workers, and they don’t have drivers licenses,” he said.

“If this thing passes, it would be detrimental to the agriculture business,” said Jason Fisher, Halifax County Extension agent for Forestry and Natural Resources. “They’re going to get a bigger fight from other places.

“It would be stifling to agriculture,” he said. “For the producers here, we’re looking to do things to help them maintain their farms. CDLs would mean additional costs to the farmers.”

Scott Crowder, Halifax County Farm Bureau president, agrees with Fisher.

“I think it’s absurd,” he said. “It’s just more federal bureaucracy and another infringement on small business.”

Crowder said farm tractors and other machinery on county roads is a common sight in most rural areas.

“When you live in a rural community seeing farm equipment on the road is just something that’s a part of life,” he said. “If this thing passes, it will create more strain on small business, and that’s what farmers are. It will affect their bottom line. Call your congressman and senators,” he concluded.

It is an infringement on everyone’s property rights. Naturally, the ruling class would call such complaints “petty.” They think the feds have the right to regulate everything, including how farm animals should be raised, what sort of lighting can be used in buildings, and probably what kind of nails can be driven into the roof on a barn.

Hey don’t laugh. They’re already claiming the right to regulate rain which runs off rooftops as “pollution,” and they are calling every square inch of land part of one “watershed” or another, because they don’t believe in private property rights.

Of course, if you really think about it (and as M. Simon frequently points out), the philosophy justifying such federal encroachment of rights is as old as the war on drugs. If the feds have the power to tell a farmer what he can and cannot grow on his own private land, then why wouldn’t they have the power to tell him what he can and cannot drive?

Seen that way, our freedom was lost long ago when the posts were put in the ground, and few complained. And all they’re doing now is putting up the fence along the posts.

But that’s an old rant:

pretty soon, all exit routes will be blocked, and the fence will be a done deal.

People will not know they are encircled until it is too late – like putting in all these very deep, robust fence-posts with no fence panels. All seems open. One day you will wake up and the panels are in, you are trapped and they can decide what law they wish to impose to nail whomsoever they desire.

How many warnings do we need?

That was a rhetorical question I should keep asking.

In an article on what Obama can do to regain public support, I came across this little gem referring to Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain.

The racist pizza guy?

BBBut Herman Cain is Black. Um. I thought the rule was that Black people can’t be racist. Wait. I get it. Only Republican Blacks are racist. Those Blacks targeting whites at the Wisconsin State Fair? Republicans all.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I was looking at the women’s vote in the 2008 election. And came across this:

Women’s votes were a significant factor in Senator Barack Obama’s victory, with a sizable gender gap evident in the election results….Women strongly preferred Obama to Senator John McCain (56 percent for Obama, 43 percent for McCain), unlike men, who split their votes about evenly for the two presidential candidates (49 percent for Obama, 48 percent for McCain).

The Republicans have their work cut out for them.

Take my own mate. I was telling her before the election that Obama would be a communist disaster. She voted for Obama anyway. When I asked her why, she said she didn’t like Palin. Not because of Palin’s policy positions. Nope. She didn’t like the way Palin talked. Ugh.

BTW the mate now agrees with me that Obama is a disaster. And we voted in Illinois which went solidly for Obama. So two canceled votes. Not important. What is important is the attitude.

Sometimes I despair that we ever gave women the vote. Just kidding honey. Well, maybe not. (I’m in the dog house now – if she reads this).

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The American Thinker is discussing the breakdown in respect for the rule of law. I have some ideas about that.

Prohibition regimes always engender a spirit of lawlessness among the populations they are imposed on. It seeps into the wider culture. See Prohibition, Alcohol, 1920 to 1933.

Had enough yet?

We now have two generations who have grown up in a prohibition regime. If it goes like Alcohol Prohibition we will have a 20 year hangover once we end it. Maybe longer since this has gone on longer.

Half of all kids growing up try pot. That is a LOT of folks whose adherence to the rule of law has been weakened. And of course just a generation ago such law breaking was a felony. Now it is more often just a caution or ticketing offense. Still.

In a Prohibition regime you give people practice in breaking the law. Is that really the training we should be giving half our kids?

Might I add that Alcohol Prohibition was a scheme cooked up by Progressives and some Social Conservatives. Billy Sunday ring a bell? The Progressives are no longer backing that. Leaving Conservatives holding the bag (all puns intended).

When the Democrats come back it will be under a banner of ending Prohibition. A former LEO friend of mine thinks it will happen in the next 5 years. The Maker help us if the right is on the wrong side of the issue.

And what will the Left run on? “Protecting people from themselves is not a legitimate function of government. That is what we have family and friends for.” i.e. they will pretend to move to the right.

Let me add that only a police state can protect people from themselves. Why the Right wants a nanny state is beyond me. You are sharpening the dagger that will be used against you. Ah. Well. I guess there is a reason why they call the two parties names. One is evil, the other is stupid.

I’m no more interested in moral socialism than I am in economic socialism.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I’ve been watching the debate for over an hour, and I am worried that the country is fractured in so many ways and in so many different directions that it’s tough to analyze.

Even though I don’t like him, I would absolutely not count Gingrich out. I think he is sitting in the background positioning himself as a very articulate alternative to both Romney and Perry. Looking ahead, I think that as the red meaters coalesce around Perry (which they will as the other anti-Romneys drop out)), Romney and Perry will end up in a huge slugfest, and the uglier it gets, the more Newt will benefit. Like McCain, Newt can lurk in the background with his heavy DC creds and the ability to always sound like some voice of common sense.

Ugh.

MORE: While I admit this is highly subjective and judgmental, based purely on my years of sizing people up, I don’t think any of the candidates I saw tonight other than Romney or Gingrich have any hope of ever being president.

So right now, it is looking like the GOP nominee will be Romney, Perry, or Gingrich.

Whether I like any of them is irrelevant.

I wonder if any one has told the President? The whole story is here.

It’s only mid-afternoon, but I’m confident this is the strangest story that’s going to cross my desk all day. A pair of twins who caused a media frenzy a few years ago by presenting themselves as the cute faces of white supremacist racism have renounced their former hatred, saying that medical marijuana has helped them see the error of their ways.

Too funny!

Cross Posted at Power and Control