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So right you are ! If there's one thing we've all learned from the financial crisis is that industry is fully capable of regulating itself without any government oversight.

Under President Bush government increased regulations more than LBJ or Nixon. There was no deregulation under Bush, though there was under Clinton.

Falcon

When weighed against a possible loss of lives, the cost of an hour's business at a Windmill is insignificant.

To take that argument to its logical absurdity, the safest way for us to live our lives would be for us all to stay in our houses and never go anywhere. Not only would that stop the terrorists, but it would eliminate the road toll, prevent mass murders and the worst anyone would ever have to fear would be cutting themselves on the cheese grater.

But we don't do that, because we accept that there will always be an element of risk in our lives, and that the compensation is a life that's happy, interesting and entertaining. Yes, it sucks if you're the one knocked down by a bus as you cross the road; but the chances of that happening are so small that we just accept the remote possibility and move on, safe in the knowledge that it's highly unlikely to happen to us. Considering that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are even less than being hit by a bus, why should we view it in any other way than as an incredibly remote, and therefore acceptable, risk? If we start jumping at shadows for things such as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, then we've got problems ...

(Thankfully, the global financial crisis has pretty much shoved terrorism into the background where it belongs. Nobody cares about Osama anymore, when they've got more immediate worries like mortgages to deal with ...)

That just embrazens the police to try again and again. Who is going to punish the officers when they don't find anything? The police? I know I don't trust the police that much. They've proven that they stick together, through their actions and through the actions of their unions.

The only people who can punish the police are the judges. Even they seem to have their hands in the cookie jar far too often (as many of the judges come from prosecutorial backgrounds, which means they probably have a too-close relationship with cops to begin with). But, when they do want to punish the cops, they have to have something in front of them. What's the likelihood of the owner of a house "accidentally" mistaken for a drug den or a gang hideout actually going and filing civil charges against the cops? Near zero. So the only time you get the cops in front of the judge for illegal searching is when the DA files charges, i.e., the cops actually found something. If the judge then okays the evidence, you end up with the cops being rewarded for their illegal behaviour, and they'll just do it again and again. Short of losing their badge, there is no punishment severe enough to get cops to only do illegal searches when they're right, and I'm not even sure that that is severe enough: cops often have superiority and god complexes, thinking that because they enforce the law, they're above it.

Of course, if they were heavily punished for not finding anything, I think KopBusters would suddenly get a lot of job offers. Probably mostly from gangs.

it isn't so convenient for female donors to supply large numbers of viable eggs (to say the least--in fact fertility treatments to trigger ovulation, followed by the procedure to harvest the eggs, is hard enough on patients to do it when trying to conceive--they aren't going to do it just to sell their eggs).

Ah but there are women who would sell some of their eggs if they could, it's currently illegal to sell eggs in the US. "Reason" magazine had an article on this, "The art of the deal in the gray market for human eggs", where the writer wanted to allow a couple to have her eggs.

Falcon

...but lately eminent domain is being used for such causes as strip malls, private golf courses, hardware stores and car dealerships. The justification for this has been the laughable "These businesses will pay more taxes than you do, so this seizure is in the public interest..."

What's truly frightening is that a few courts have been going along with this nonsense.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/28680.html

The current issue of "Reason" magazine's cover story goes over this, toll roads and parking, among other approaches to traffic congestion.

Falcon

bceause the "gubmint" is in a conspiracy to frame you

Uh, after enough police scandals, prosecutors knowingly prosecuting innocent people (withholding exculpatory evidence showing that the person did not commit the crime) and D.A.s declaring that they only believe in DNA evidence when it claims a man is guilty but not when it shows that the accused was either of the two men who raped a woman... I think its fair to say that the people in government are more than happy to frame anyone they wish.

I would love to see a "corporate death penalty"

There is one, corporations can have their corporate charter revoked.

Falcon

I'm at work and a bit lazy..just went for the first hits I could get when googling the topics, which I heard on various tv news stations last night and this morning.

But indeed....a mandated electronic medical record system, that is accessible and controlled by the feds? Well, I think anyone can see the possibilities for abuse. Heck, I'm not thrilled with their other databases they have on people, like the no fly lists, and the soon to come RealID databases. Add that all in with total medical history, and govt. healthcare and voila....

Look into the writings of the guy they wanted to BE in charge of health care, Tom Daschle. He's made statements "In my book, Critical: What We Can Do About the American Health-Care Crisis, I have proposed a Federal Health Board that would be a foundation from which we could address all three problems. In many ways, the Federal Health Board would resemble our current Federal Reserve Board for the banking industry."

Yeah, I think we've ALL see the great work the Fed has done with banking and all today, eh?

Again, from the guy that was to design the new healthcare system said "The decisions made by the Federal Health Board would be tough." but would be better than what we have. What are these TOUGH decisions they're gonna have to make? Rationing? Well according to this blurb "Perhaps most importantly, the Board would assess the effectiveness and costs of various treatments. He stops short of saying the U.S. should have a U.K.-style, hard-and-fast rule on cost-effectiveness. But he does say the U.S. "won't be able to make a significant dent in health-care spending without getting into the nitty-gritty of which treatments are the most clinically valuable and cost effective." his plan certainly sounds like the decisions of this board can overrule a local Dr's treatment decisions. We humans,despite looking a great deal alike, are VERY different, and a one size fits all tx regiment kinda scares me.

I"m also not thrilled with a committee deciding if I'm too old to get a particular treatment.

Sure, the medical record and collections thing looks pretty innocent as is stated in the bill, but, if you look at him wanting Tom in there to reform medical care, his beliefs, and all...no, I don't think it is much of a stretch to see what this might be laying the groundwork for...

Kids don't do drugs, or you may grow up to have more gold medals then anyone else, or even the President of the United States.

Hopefully Obama follows through with his view that "we need to...decriminalize our marijuana laws". While I'm not a user I'm all for clearing our jails/prisons from harmless offenders, or saving billions from a failed 'drug war'.

Pretty great for a while. Less great when the roads start falling apart, criminals realize the police can't afford bullets, the jails have to release all the inmates at once, the number of under-educated people around you starts increasing because the schools have shut down

Tax on fuel should pay for roads and property tax pay for law enforcement, the fire department, and schools. With people keeping more of the money they work to earn they can use it to pay for more higher education.

It's not like bailouts are the only thing we fund with taxes, you know. There are actually a hell of a lot of services that benefit you directly on a daily basis. Eliminate taxes and you'll end up either losing those services entirely, or else paying for them out of pocket anyway.

What are these services? A cut in defense spending can be paid for by a sales tax. Many of the other federal agencies and departments are not constitutionally authorized. Others like the Agricultural department can have their budgets cut, congress has given big businesses like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill billions of taxpayer dollars, in January 2008 congress passed a farm bill with about $200 billion in subsidies. Agricultural subsidies, which were supposed to be temporary, are nothing more than Corporate Welfare.

Falcon

Naomi Klein is a vicious, hateful liar. Her absurd claims are exposed here: http://www.reason.com/news/show/128903.html. Seriously, she can't be stupid enough to say of the crap in that book, so one can only infer she's maliciously lying. And you're buying it. Disgusting.

You obviously missed that the 4th Amendment was repealed recently.

No. It's likely that they'd illegally use a FLIR camera to look in your house before breaking down the door. Of course, when they get caught, they backpeddle.

Maybe your mother dieing is necessary for a particular market to stabilize.

You don't say how this is possible. Seems very unlikely to me.

This is a point that many anti-global warming dissenters miss. They will argue: "The world has been around for billions of years and will regulate itself. We shouldn't interfere." Yes, but the world doesn't care if we live or die.

The same site actually had a very interesting video on that topic. They pointed out that the most effective way to prevent global warming deaths was to buy air conditioners and malaria vaccinations, not reduce CO2 emissions.

The main benefit is that it feels so much better, as my fingers travel less.

Exactly.

Dvorak is a little faster than Qwerty, about 5% more or less. Liebowitz/Margolis essentially admit this, but downplay it because it's not all that big an advantage.

Its main advantage is that it reduces hand and wrist strain. Liebowitz/Margolis don't mention this, probably because Reason is not written for meat citizens who suffer from pain and inflammation. Its audience is corporate citizens who suffer from revenue de-enhancement and restructuring costs.

By the way, if you're interested in proof of Liebowitz/Margolis's bias, go read what they have to say about Earle Strong in the Reason article or The Fable of the Keys. They hold Strong up as the unbiased counterpart to Dvorak's "suspicious[]," "deck stacking" analysis. Nowhere do they mention that Strong had written seven years earlier that he was opposed to new keyboard design; that he seems to have had a strained relationship with Dvorak; and that, when asked by other researchers for his data, Strong said he had destroyed it all.

• Apparently typing contests were common at the end of the 1800's and there were several different competing typewriter keyboard layouts. QWERTY won out and manufactures with competing with different designs quickly moved to QWERTY.
• The original source for the famous US Navy study (which is frequently paraded which "proves" that typists can learn Dvorak with little training and type much faster) apparently doesn't exist at "the Navy Library, the Martin Luther King Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Technical Communication Service." However, the author was able to track down a copy of the study from "an organization called Dvorak International, headquartered in the attic of a farmhouse in Vermont." From the article "The report does not list the authors. The report's foreword states that two prior experiments had been conducted but that 'the first two groups were not truly fair tests.'" According to the study "adjustments were made in the test procedure to 'remove psychological impediments to superior performance.'" Further, according to the study, the so-called typists were poor at typing (below 30 WPM, below Navy standards). Also, the study was conducted by no other than Lieut. Com. August Dvorak (the inventor of Dvorak!).
• There were several controlled, well conducted studies around the world which showed that retraining QWERTY typists in Dvorak resulted in little change in typing speed.

Read it!

How about getting rid of patents altogether? Not just on software, but on everything. They ain't natural, but are purely government created monopoly privileges.

History seems to hint that rather than foster innovation, patents retard it. Here's an article summary that suggests Watt's patent slowed down steam engine innovation.

When I voted for him I knew I was compromising.

Then you suck. I voted for Bob Barr because he most represented my beliefs, even though I know he didn't stand a chance in hell of winning.

I felt like you, I wanted to vote for Bob Barr too. But after reading an article in "Reason" magazine on why voting for and Obama winning would be better than McCain winning I decided to select Obama on the ballot.

Now, if you actually supported Obama, then more power to you for voting your conscience. However, it sounds like you just flipped a coin and decided that (D) was less bad than (R).

First I supported Obama as the Democrat candidate for president, and Ron Paul as the Republican candidate. The "Reason" article went through the pros and cons of McCain and Obama then came out in favor of Obama as the least bad.

Falcon

What deregulation are you talking about exactly?

Hoover obeyed your wishes.

No, he didn't. This myth of Hoover being "laissez-faire" is completely unfounded; see, for example, this article by Murray Rothbard. His harmful interference included signing disastrous bills like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Revenue Act of 1932. In Hoover's own words:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action...

The revisionism surrounding Hoover is much like what's happening with Bush the Younger: for some reason, people stubbornly believe him to be pro-market, despite the fact that federal expenditures have risen dramatically during his administration, as have federal regulations.

The US economy didn't recover until WWII rendered it the SOLE FUNCTIONING ECONOMY in the world.

If by that you mean that the war had an even worse effect on most other major economies than it had on that of the U.S., you may be right. If, on the other hand, you are saying that the war actually helped the U.S. economy recover, then you are falling for the broken window fallacy.

And anyone who thinks Obama is going to make that much difference is smoking opium.

Speaking of Obama and smoking, it looks like anyone who was hoping for an abatement of the war on drugs is out of luck.

-jcr

During Prohibition my Grandmother used to go to speak-easys (sp?) with my Grandfather. She didn't drink much before or after prohibition, but during she did some. Why? It was taboo, it was exciting to do something bad. Reason magazine did a fantastic article about 15 years ago on the pros of legalization. Prostitution should be legal too. Latest article from reason magazine on legalization http://www.reason.com/news/printer/36178.html

http://www.rense.com/general9/gunlaw.htm

Here's a town where guns were *required by law* to be in every house.

When it was being written up, everyone was proclaiming there'd be bloodbaths in the streets, and violence would skyrocket with people shooting each other left and right over little disagreements.

The truth of the matter is that crime dropped immediately, down 89%. Now, it's a relatively small town [Though it's grown much larger since, and the crime rates have not.] but even if nothing had happened, if crime rates had not changed, that's more than enough to say "Why ban guns?" What's even more interesting is that gun crimes in places like Britain have been RISING since their gun bans have been in place. Though I understand this has been handwaved away as simply being the police reporting gun crimes properly now, instead of as other types of crime. [Here's a 2003 BBC citation on rising crime rates: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3195908.stm#map And here's an article about the rise in crime in general: http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html There are plenty more articles out there if you do some looking.]

The key thing people who want to ban guns do not fundamentally grasp is that guns do not cause crime. It's amazing how many people make this illogical conclusion: That if you give someone a gun, they will go out and commit crimes with it. Reality is drastically different of course.

Regardless of all these articles and statistics, at this point banning guns in America isn't going to work anyways. Too many people have one; guns, like drugs or alcohol, simply cannot be outright banned, no matter how much the state wants it to be so. Banning only drives them underground where they do not have proper oversight. Criminals will have guns regardless of the law.

You're probably thinking about the 2000 article in Wired, 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us', which he said in a 2003 interview was Wired's title, not his.. It was criticized in quite a few places, but there were plenty of people who gave merit to what he was saying.

I think it's wise to understand that there are risks inherent to almost any solution, and no just adopt technology for technology's sake -- look at what happened with the election machines, and those damned flash splash pages in the late 90s. I probably need to re-read his article, as I can't remember most of it, but I don't remember it being as pessimistic as people made it out to be.

this http://www.reason.com/news/show/32966.html

Why I will not vote for McCain, from his own mouth:

"I would rather have a clean government than one...where 'First Amendment rights' are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice I'd rather have a clean government."

source

OK, so a clean government is, to McCain, far more important than our first amendment rights. Odd, to say the least, but possibly understandable.

Or at least it is until you look a little closer. Charles Keating. A campaign staffed and run by lobbyists. An affair with a lobbyist. The pick of Palin, who abused her position as governor for personal ends.

Alone, his stated position that a clean government is more important than our first amendment rights gives me great pause. Combined with his actions, which make it seem that he doesn't really give a damn about clean government, i find it rather frightening.

How can you vote for someone who sneers at the first amendment?

But the long-term payoff is potentially huge. If just one of those immigrants turns around and helps found a major company,

Yes, of course. This would only be possible by an immigrant.

There are plenty, plenty of geniuses in America. However, these are fueled by their ideas, and by ideas that they get from abroad. Shut down the idea pipe, and the probability of new American geniuses drops. Recent policies NOT ONLY make it close to impossible to get a green card, but also make it ridiculously humiliating to go to a conference or visit a university. In the short run, nothing happens. In the long run, this shit backfires immensely. There is a real rush today between countries to get the best scientific talent, wherever it may be. I for one am Brazilian (thanks for your sympathy).... did you know I can apply for grants to the EU scientific agencies? That's how competitive things are: America makes my life extremely hard, while the EU and others say: if you can push the frontiers, we'll be proud to have you aboard.

What part of legal immigration dont you understand?

Plenty of blame to go around:
Pressured to Take More Risk, Fannie Reached a Tipping Point
SEC's 2004 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt
The Roots of the Crisis

And after all the fear mongering to push the bailout plan, which caused the stock market to crater, the plan probably won't work anyway; what's happening is a natural correction to the credit bubble:
Can the bailout work? Fat chance
Are we headed for an epic bear market?

The debate over the bailout is missing the big picture - we risk destroying the credibility of our currency, and when that happens, China and other countries with trade surpluses will stop taking our debt and things will really get tough:
The Chinese have been ready to treat U.S. Treasuries as a rock-hard store of value and loan us the dollars they accumulate at a very low interest rate. But what if they start to doubt the U.S. government will repay its debt?
"We are getting closer to a tipping-point," said Benn Steil, an economist. "People are asking: can we really trust the dollar as a store of value?"

Interesting reality you live in there.
results of a really quick google search:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html (england & gun control)
the Obama thing is a little hard to pin down, as he has been pretty good at avoiding any straight answers. But you could start here: http://www.ontheissues.org/domestic/Barack_Obama_Gun_Control.htm
note: if you are pro-gun control, you obviously won't see anything wrong with this.

Then your teacher was a douche and in the wrong.

Yea she was wrong but many others like Dominionists and Reconstructionists would do a lot more, such as stoning. There are plenty of Christian Talibans who would do the same right here in the US. These are the same people who want ID taught in schools as a science.

Falcon

Running thru a red light 10 seconds after it has turned red is one thing.
Running a red light because the city changing the time, shortening the yellow light, to catch more "red light runners" is bullshit.

http://www.motorists.org/blog/red-light-cameras/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118879.html

Yes, people who blatantly run a red light are dangerous, but the solution isn't to setup red light cameras, and modify times to catch more people to generate income. In lots of places it is about the income, and not about the safety.

I am aware of peak oil theories, but nowhere have I seen a theory that predicted "that we would be out of oil by now" (your words). Where are these predictions? Simply typing "peak oil" onto Google does not yield any predictions that the oil will be gone by 2008. You are just beating up your own strawman [wikipedia.org]. Where are these predictions?

HERE:

Apocalypse Yesterday

Predictions of imminent catastrophic depletion are almost as old as the oil industry. An 1855 advertisement for Kierâ(TM)s Rock Oil, a patent medicine whose key ingredient was petroleum bubbling up from salt wells near Pittsburgh, urged customers to buy soon before âoethis wonderful product is depleted from Natureâ(TM)s laboratory.â The ad appeared four years before Pennsylvaniaâ(TM)s first oil well was drilled. In 1919 David White of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted that world oil production would peak in nine years. And in 1943 the Standard Oil geologist Wallace Pratt calculated that the world would ultimately produce 600 billion barrels of oil. (In fact, more than 1 trillion barrels of oil had been pumped by 2006.)

During the 1970s, the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth projected that, assuming consumption remained flat, all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years. With exponential growth in consumption, it added, all the known oil reserves would be consumed in 20 years. These dour predictions gained credibility when the Arab oil crisis of 1973 quadrupled prices from $3 to $12 per barrel (from $16 to $48 in 2006 dollars) and when the Iranian oil crisis more than doubled oil prices from $14 per barrel in 1978 to $35 per barrel by 1981 (from $45 to $98 in 2006 dollars).

I found this by typing "Peak Oil" in Google. You do have to go the the second page however as the first two are mostly filled with doomsday scenarios, just like it has always been. I believe that was the point you were trying to refute.

Because heroin isn't exactly an unknown quantity. We've known that it's 100 percent addictive for, oh, centuries now.

Except that heroin is not 100% addictive: perhaps more like 10% of heroin users are addicts. And it was first synthesized in 1874 and only became popular after it was independently re-synthesized 23 years later, and was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute until 1910 - its addictive nature has in fact been understood for less than a century.

You know what's going to happen when you put that needle in your arm. You know because everyone else that's done it has ended up the same way.

Yeah, you might end up like David Bowie or Keith Richards or hundreds of other famous musicians, actors, writers, artists who have used heroin...for those can afford their fix and have access to the pure stuff, heroin use or even addiction is not a big deal. It's less damaging to your body than addiction to cigarettes or alcohol.

As Bill Hicks noted, "If you don't think drugs have done good things for us, then take all of your records, tapes and CDs and burn them. Cause you know what? The musicians that made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years? Real fucking high on drugs."

Which is not to suggest anyone go shoot heroin. The crap you buy from typical street dealers is cut with gods-only-know-what and may well kill you; and really, there are better ways to spend your time and money.

And yet, after decades of "tolerance" they're busy dismantling the Red Light district in Amsterdam

Again, your facts are in error. The prostitution shops were only licensed in 2000, not "decades" ago. And they're shutting down owners believed to have criminal connections, not the entire district.

I will recommend Peter McWilliams' book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country, available online at www.mcwilliams.com.

Sadly, McWilliams became a victim of the War on (some) Drugs when his access to medical marijuana, used to treat symptoms of AIDS and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was ended; forced to switch to the ineffective Marinol, he aspirated his own vomit and choked to death.

The misinformation you are spreading is killing people. Please, cut it out.

Because it's rather strongly believed that unbridled capitalism creates a superior societal wealth in individual & national economic terms, and in military terms.

Thank you, your comment has helped me see a new side to this problem. When wealth and military might grow to such extremes and concentrations, they begin to work against the freedom of everyman, but everyman has gained some wealth and feeling of protection and power from the military as well and so it is easy to convince he to subjugate his freedoms to the pursuits of more national wealth and power. This has gone on for some time (much longer than the Bush presidency) and now we are seeing the fruits of that choice, a decline in wealth and power, because common freedom is a root source of those things.

The fact is, both candidates are part of the authoritarian corporate class.

McCain is an authoritarian, but he's not corporate:

I got turned off by him in a personal meeting. I made a presentation to him that the government is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in (technology-related) pork barrel spending. I showed that the pork barrel spending is not only fundamentally bad, but also harmful to the people getting the money, the semiconductor industry. When I got done with the presentation, he labeled the pork barrel spending "peanuts." He poked his finger in my chest and said that he's "going to get rid of your big fat stock options."

You're a real radfem, aren't you?

In the United States, odds are that 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

First, I don't believe the RAINN stats on rape. I don't believe that so many women get raped. I checked RAINN's sources and they don't really tell you where exactly they get their statistics. They do give a long list of different studies they supposedly used to get their numbers here:

http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims

but you really can't find where that 1 in 6 number comes from. They don't tell you that. They don't tell you because it's not a valid statistic. It's a product of the imaginations of the paranoid people working at RAINN. RAINN is full of radicals who are just looking for ways to inflate sex assault statistics to epidemic levels. Take a look at the FBI's rape statistics for some numbers that are more grounded in reality:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/forcible_rape.html

RAINN is full of shit and so are you.

Women earn approximately $.80 to a man's $1

The pay gap is due entirely to the way the statistics are compiled. It completely ignores the fact that there are not equal numbers of men and women working in every field. Women are more likely to work part-time instead of full time. Even women working full time are likely to work fewer hours than men. They are more likely to leave their careers for extended periods of time. Women are more likely to chose to work in lower paying service industry positions than men. Women earn less money because they chose to earn less money. There is no pay gap when studies compare men and women doing similar jobs with similar levels of education, experience and seniority:

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/CAREER/trends/12/12/womenpay/index.html
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119920.html

The pay gap is another feminist myth, it's full of shit and so are you.

Most women in the US are not allowed to control their own bodies, as numerous State and Federal government regulations have been imposed on their reproductive systems and available medical procedures.

What the hell? I suppose you want all medical procedures for women to be completely unregulated? I'm willing to bet if that were the case you'd be bitching about how the government did nothing to protect women from unsafe medical procedures and fraudulent doctors. You're crazy. Women are fully able to 'control' their bodies.

The brunt of housework and child-rearing still falls primarily on women.

You make child rearing sound like some hellish chore or prison sentence. Women who feel like that don't have any business having kids in the first place. This will probably shock you, but many women *want* to have kids and they *want* to take care of them as the primary care taker. You are out of your mind and completely disconnected with reality. You've read one too many Dworkin books and they've fried your brain.

ALL of these forms of oppression stem from misogynistic beliefs--primarily pushed by those in power, but to a certain degree they are perpetuated by ignorant fools who buy into them.

Nearly all of the 'oppression' that people like you speak of is nothing more than an imaginary creation of your paranoia and victim complexes. You are a damn nut, and I'll not waste anymore time dissecting the rest of your drivel.

http://reason.com/brickbat/show/121315.html

July 12, 2007

Evan Herzoff was videotaping Denver police arresting someone when a
cop asked for his ID. Herzoff produced his ID and asked Officer
Jeffrey Morgan for his business card. "Let's take you to jail
instead," Morgan responded. Police handcuffed Herzoff and took him to
jail, where he spent the night. A charge of trespass against Herzoff
was later dismissed, and the city paid him $8,500 to settle a lawsuit.

"Dismissal from the department" is a heck of a way to mispell "getting a medal and commendations for his bravery".

The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution.

And when has that ever worked? Using guns on local LEO's or feds just brings more LEO's or feds with bigger guns and a bigger desire to kill you. It didn't work for Leonard Peltier, it didn't work for Gordon Kahl, it didn't work for Randy Weaver, it didn't work for the Branch Dividians, it didn't work for Corey Maye, and it didn't work for Kathryn Johnston.

And if you do defend your home from cops on a bogus warrant and they don't shoot you dead on the spot, you'll probably be hit with the death penalty.

As for putting the power company out of business, I'm all for it. Whoever had the bright idea of privatizing a utility should be shot. Fundemental public services should not be privatized they should be public and operating in a fully transparent manner. Roads, Schools, Libraries, Utilities, and Health Care.

Yea, we don't want things to work right, we want them to fail because nobody has a financial interest in making them work right. I can accept roads and libraries being government supported, local governments though, state government for most roads while the federal government can do the interstate highways. Actually because the feds have such a straggle hold on highway funding they were able to tell the states they had to change their IDs and drivers licenses. But not utilities or health care. You want transparency? And just how transparent has Bush been? Or congress? For instance though the public was 70% to 80% against giving subsidies to farmers congress approved a $307 billion farm bill. Though Bush was against it it sailed through congress with big enough a margin to override a veto. Now I've criticized Bush a lot but this is one thing I agree with him on. Now what will happen to those congress critters? I bet most will be reelected.

Falcon

I asked Harvard economist Claudia Goldin if there is sufficient evidence to conclude that women experience systematic pay discrimination. "No," she replied. There are certainly instances of discrimination, she says, but most of the gap is the result of different choices. Other hard-to-measure factors, Goldin thinks, largely account for the remaining gap -- "probably not all, but most of it."...June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap,"

Since the interest isn't equal, this could conceivably deny young men education in science simply because there weren't enough women to match.

Not only conceivable, but almost certain, since that's exactly what Title IX did to men's college sports.

I can't speak for municipal IT workers, but teachers are incredibly hard to fire:
How to Fire an Incompetent Teacher (make sure you check out the PDF flowchart)
The Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers

...but I happen to believe that most, if not all...

Hey, believe whatever you choose to believe.
Your inability to handle reality demonstrates the true worth of your comment.

Few people know that the citizens of New Orleans had their firearms confiscated right before the hurricane. This is only a few years ago.

Our own government stripped people of the arms they were using to protect themselves.

Several highly simmilar cases have come before the supreme court and all were very difficult decisions. The two most important ones were President Lincoln indefinitely detaining without trial citizens and press who spoke in favor of the confederacy. Unlike to day, where there is no declaration of war, Lincoln thought the consitution gave him the right to suspend Habeous. But the supreme court said it only applied in zones of conflict not the rear. And even under times of duress the constitution could not be switched off. Today's supreme court said almost exactly the same thing in the summary.

Then FDR also created the concept of "enemy combatants" for handling people who were spies captured inside the US boarders. While he should have treated them as Spies under war common law, instead he wanted their trials publicly suppressed and created a special tribunal outside the jurisdictions of any state but on US soil. The supremes had to argue about it. The argument was that clearly the US legal system can try people crimes so why not let it. And it would set a bad precedent for removing habeous for people captured outside war zones.

The book "In time of War" covers this an it's a great well written read. I recommend it highly.

I thought the following quote captured one aspect of the issue:

"But the real problem is the interminable detention period, which has no reasonable judicial excuse. The dissenters are quite right that America has offered a quite generous set of procedural protections for enemy combatants. But these are mocked when a detainee is an indefinite prisoner with indefinitely incomprehensible status. The problem is not the legal process but what happens when the federal government holds that process, at its whim, in open-ended abeyance. The federal government still gets a lot of leeway, and the benefit of the doubt, from the Court, especially in wartime. But ours is so nonobviously wartime, and the Bush administration has been so lax, opaque, and seemingly quite pointless in its interminable detention of a wide range of variably important prisoners, that todayÂs ruling seems to me to confirm the wisdom of both the majority and the dissent. I suspect the ruling will, if anything, cause most of these detainees to actually be tried, which would be nice, but not released, which would not be. And that strikes me as not only nice but just."

link

A good question is where does McCain stand on obeying the Constituional restrictions faithfully. Here's two articles from Reason Magazine (libertarian bent):

Longer and Shorter

Several highly simmilar cases have come before the supreme court and all were very difficult decisions. The two most important ones were President Lincoln indefinitely detaining without trial citizens and press who spoke in favor of the confederacy. Unlike to day, where there is no declaration of war, Lincoln thought the consitution gave him the right to suspend Habeous. But the supreme court said it only applied in zones of conflict not the rear. And even under times of duress the constitution could not be switched off. Today's supreme court said almost exactly the same thing in the summary.

Then FDR also created the concept of "enemy combatants" for handling people who were spies captured inside the US boarders. While he should have treated them as Spies under war common law, instead he wanted their trials publicly suppressed and created a special tribunal outside the jurisdictions of any state but on US soil. The supremes had to argue about it. The argument was that clearly the US legal system can try people crimes so why not let it. And it would set a bad precedent for removing habeous for people captured outside war zones.

The book "In time of War" covers this an it's a great well written read. I recommend it highly.

I thought the following quote captured one aspect of the issue:

"But the real problem is the interminable detention period, which has no reasonable judicial excuse. The dissenters are quite right that America has offered a quite generous set of procedural protections for enemy combatants. But these are mocked when a detainee is an indefinite prisoner with indefinitely incomprehensible status. The problem is not the legal process but what happens when the federal government holds that process, at its whim, in open-ended abeyance. The federal government still gets a lot of leeway, and the benefit of the doubt, from the Court, especially in wartime. But ours is so nonobviously wartime, and the Bush administration has been so lax, opaque, and seemingly quite pointless in its interminable detention of a wide range of variably important prisoners, that todayÂs ruling seems to me to confirm the wisdom of both the majority and the dissent. I suspect the ruling will, if anything, cause most of these detainees to actually be tried, which would be nice, but not released, which would not be. And that strikes me as not only nice but just."

link

A good question is where does McCain stand on obeying the Constituional restrictions faithfully. Here's two articles from Reason Magazine (libertarian bent):

Longer and Shorter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Barr#Terrorism

So yes, he voted for the Patriot Act, but ensured that it had sunset provisions, and has publicly stated it was a mistake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Barr#War_in_Iraq

Again, he's reversed his position due to changing information.

There's an in depth interview with him at Reason that goes into these questions in more detail: http://www.reason.com/news/show/28960.html

As for the Wicca thing, that is troubling, and I hope it was based on ignorance of the religion more than anything else. His comments on it sound like he was parroting what he heard in Bible class as a kid. But I still think he would make a better choice than McCain or Obama when it comes to civil liberties and restraining the power of the government.

Its only after he is tenured (depends on the school system, could take a year or three) that he is unfireable deadweight for life (or until he gets a student pregnant... and even then I'd give him better than even odds in NYC). Until he gets tenured, he "merely" gets a union and an absolutely byzantine system of grievance protections to keep his lousy carcass in the job.

New York City decides to fire a 5 year veteran (tenured after 3) for gross incompetence. Costs $250k, 2 years.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05272008/news/regionalnews/253g_to_fire_one_teacher_112703.htm

A flow chart of what you need to do to fire a NYC teacher. Warning: PDF. And its big, and I'm not talking file size.

http://oldsite.reason.com/0610/howtofireanincompetentteacher.pdf