Month: August 2011

The Federal Government Moving to Attack Independent Farmers Yet Again

The federal government has a strong hatred of independent farmers. Their hatred is likely caused by the fact that independent farmers can’t contribute millions of dollars to the campaign funds of politicians like big agriculture businesses can. Either way the cause of their hatred isn’t really the point, the fact that the federal government continues to make life harder for family farmers is the problem. So what is the government’s new plan to make life more miserable to families already finding it difficult to get by? Easy, create a new regulation and require all farmers obtain commercial driver’s licenses in order to operate farm equipment:

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.

No only would this regulation incur additional costs to farmers it would also require them to take the commercial driver’s license test. Regulations such as this hit home for me as I grew up in a small farming community, Hell my grandfather was a farmer. Independent farmers aren’t exactly rolling in cash so any additional cost it going to hurt. On top of that farming isn’t a job you can just drop for a few hours while you go take your commercial driver’s license test, it’s an all day job that you must work every day.

But the real cost comes with regulating farm equipment like other commercial vehicles which require periodic inspections to receive a Department of Transportation (DOT) number. Each vehicle with a DOT number (which would be all farm vehicles under the new regulations) would need to be brought to the local DOT inspector which takes time (quite a bit of time if you’re driving a farm tractor from the country into town) that farmers simply don’t have.

Let’s also consider the fact that farmers have been operating their equipment since the creation of said equipment without any regulations put into place. Has their been a plague of deaths caused by farm equipment that could have been prevented had regulations been put into place? No. So the question that should be asked is what point is there in requiring these new regulations now? I’m not sure what their official line of bullshit will be but the real reason probably has to do with the millions of dollars received by government agents from large agriculture businesses that would love nothing more than seeing independent farmers wiped from the country.

Judge Sentenced for Selling Children to Juvenile Detention Centers

The title isn’t an exaggeration, a judge in Pennsylvania has been sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for selling children to juvenile detention centers. Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. accepted $1 million in bribes from Robert Mericle, the man who built the two juvenile detention centers that Ciavarella was sentencing kids to.

The bribery isn’t the only evidence showing Ciavarella was corrupt, many of the kids he sentences were prosecuted for very trivial crimes:

Ciavarella, known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanour, filled the beds of the private lockups with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes.

Putting a 10 year-old kid in juvenile detention for petty theft makes nothing but sense right? If we don’t put him away now he’ll just become a hardened murdering drug dealer! It’s not like a parent can bring their 10 year-old to tears by berating them for committing an act of petty theft or anything.

Seriously, how the fuck did that judge get away with this for so long? Didn’t somebody find it a little suspicious that children were going away to juvenile detention for first time offenses of minor crimes? Didn’t that raise any red flags?

This case also demonstrates a couple of flaws with of our “justice” system. First of all judges have too much power as they can literally hold you in prison for life (contempt of court), sentence minors to juvenile detention without any oversight, and can flat out rule whether a law is legal or not (supreme courts).

The second flaw that is pointed out by this case is how our “justice” system doesn’t deliver justice but simply punishments. In the case of theft justice would be the return of the stolen property, payment by the thief to the victim for the cost of recovering the stolen property, and the value of the stolen item as the thief really deprived the victim of their rightful property and thus should lose the right to an equal value of property as punishment. Instead our system tosses the thief in prison at taxpayer expense and rarely returns the stolen property, or at least the value of the stolen property, to the victim. This is a side effect of our country moving away from treating crimes as offenses against individuals to offenses against society.

In the end those who were wrongfully sentenced by Ciavarella are the real losers. Depending on their sentences they’ve potentially lost years of their lives. Those kids will never get those years back. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the wrongfully sentenced kids turned to lives of crime simply because they developed a view that they’re going to be punished whether they remain lawful or do criminal activities. When somebody feels as though they’re going to be punished whether or not they do something wrong that person will often just do the wrong thing.

The UK Prime Minster is Spouting More Malarkey

The United Kingdom (UK) government had a meeting dealing with means of quelling the recent riots and instead of coming up with viable solutions they’ve simply come up with means of further tightening their grip of citizens. Not only have them discussed means of tightening their grip over the citizenry but they’re also making empty promises:

“To the law abiding people who play by the rules, and who are the overwhelming majority in our country, I say: the fightback has begun, we will protect you, if you’ve had your livelihood and property damaged, we will compensate you. We are on your side.

Emphasis mine. You guys have been doing a bang up job of protecting people so far. Why would the victims of the rioters believe their government is going to protect them now? Why didn’t the government start protecting the victims when the rioters came to loot and firebomb their homes? Give up? Because they can’t. There aren’t enough police in the entire UK to property defend the citizenry against all of the rioters. If the UK government was actually concerned with protecting the people living within their borders they would immediately life the ban on firearm ownership and allow people to have a means of self-defense.

Instead of allowing private individuals means of protection the UK government has come up with the following methods to curb the riots:

  • To look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via social media when “we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality”
  • Plans to look at whether wider powers of curfew and dispersal orders were needed
  • New powers for police to order people to remove facemasks where criminality is suspected
  • Courts could be given tougher sentencing powers
  • Landlords could be given more power to evict criminals from social housing
  • Plans to extend the system of gang injunctions across the country and build on anti-gang programmes, similar to those in the US
  • He said the government would meet the cost of “legitimate” compensation claims and the time limit for applying would increase from 14 to 42 days
  • A £10m Recovery Scheme to provide additional support to councils in making areas “safe, clean and clear”
  • A new £20m high street support scheme to help affected businesses get back up and running quickly
  • Plans for the government to meet the immediate costs of emergency accommodation for families made homeless

So you’re going to try enforcing curfew (I’m sure the rioters will go home at night if you tell them it’s the law), possibly suspend free speech by closing access to social networking sites, go after anybody wearing a mask, and spend taxpayer money to compensate the victims of violence who’ve been left defenseless because of your laws? Well I guess they have this entire situation solves and everybody can return to their tea and biscuits. Mission accomplish boys!

You can see me shaking my head as I type this but I must say the entire UK government must be a bunch of fucking idiots… never mind I already knew that.

An Interesting Observation

I’ve been thinking and have made a rather interesting observation. Since the uprising in Tunisia there have been political dissent in several countries in the Middle East including Egypt, Libya, and Syria. In each case the people have finally become fed up with the actions of their government, drawn a line in the sand, and old those in power to get the fuck out. The actions of these political dissidents have been directed almost exclusively at the government which they hold grievances against.

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom (UK) events unfolded that caused a great deal of anger in the people towards their government, which sparked uprisings in the form of riots. Unlike the uprisings in the Middle East that have been directed towards the offending governments the uprising in the UK is being directed at private businesses, homes of private individuals, and other people who had nothing to do with the offending actions of the government.

A Trend of Connecting Right-Wingers to Nazism

I’ve been noticing a trend with many of the stories my more liberal (using the modern definition of the word) friends have been posting, which is an apparent attempt by some media sources to connect the idea of right-wing extremism with neo-Nazism. Two examples of this are this story and this story. Both stories are from Spiegel and use the terms right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi interchangeably.

I’m not at all surprised by this as right-wing extremism has been tied to everything from terrorism to racism over the years. I wouldn’t care at all if right-wing extremism actually meant violent extremism but to the media right-wing extremism usually refers to libertarians or those who simply lean more towards libertarian ideals then liberal (again, using the modern definition of the word) ideals. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to me if stories started popping up in the near future that imply links between libertarians and neo-Nazis.

At Least Somebody Understands “Free” Healthcare Isn’t Free

It’s seldom that I find salvation for my ever dwindling faith in humanity withing the socialist confines of the Red Star but I’ve found at least one individual of intelligence who wrote in:

An Aug. 10 letter refers to the cost to society for the choices made by a helmetless biker or beltless driver if injured. The point was made that the choices of an individual have potential dollar costs for all of us.

The writer then adds that universal health care would make this aspect a moot point. Unfortunately, the cost of care would still need to be paid. With universal health care, it would be paid by the taxpayers. Universal health care isn’t free; the premiums are just in a different form.

DR. RICHARD COCHRANE, VADNAIS HEIGHTS

Notice that the man is a doctor (doing a Google search for his name and Minnesota reveals he’s possibly an anesthesiologist). Why is that important? Honestly it’s not as he topic being discussed is economics, not medical practice, but people seem to think every doctor believes government “privided” healthcare is without reproach. I’ve not actually found a single doctor who supports the idea of government “provided” healthcare because they realize such a system will turn them into government slaves insomuch that they will no longer be allowed to select whether or not they’ll take somebody as a patient, the operations they will be allowed to perform, or what equipment their practice will have available.

A dirty little secret (which isn’t a secret to anybody with a brain) about government “provided” healthcare is that it basically takes doctors and changes them from free individuals into slaves of the state. The government gets to decide what operations will be covered (and rationed), who will go to what doctors, who each doctor will operate on, what medicines will be available (which the government already controls), what equipment each hospital will have available, etc. Nobody wants to be put into a position where they every move is controlled by another but that’s exactly the position government “provided” healthcare will put doctors in.

It’s also nice to see a doctor point out the fact that “free” healthcare isn’t free, the cost is just spread over the entire populace at the point of a gun.

UK Government Looking at Shutting Down Social Networks

If you had an disillusion that the United Kingdom (UK) was a free country it’s time to open your eyes. The UK Prime Minister is suggesting that social networks be shutdown:

Speaking in the House of Commons, Cameron said, “Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were, organised via social media.

“Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

The article itself opens with a quip about this being suggestion being worthy of China’s communist regime and they’re correct. In my opinion even suggesting that the freedom of speech be revoked is a sign that the government has become tyrannical (the United States government included). When agents of the government are willing to blatantly state their desire to censor free speech you know that they are no longer worried about backlash from a public who would rather be free than tyrannical (then again judging by the laws in the UK their citizens haven’t wanted to be free since inception).

We Should All Have “Top-Level Access” to The Bin Laden Assassination Video

You know for a fact that we live in a free country when an investigation is started because a congress critter thinks somebody received access to a government produced video:

A senior Republican has called for an inquiry into reports the White House fed secrets about the killing of Osama Bin Laden to Hollywood film-makers.

[…]

New York Times writer Maureen Dowd said film-makers had “top-level access”.

The White House called that report – and Mr King’s claims – “ridiculous”

There should have been an investigation started into why the video wasn’t released to the public in the first place. Remember when Obama promised that he would strive to create a more transparent government? I guess classified videos of America’s number one enemy being taken out counts as transparency. This line was also comedy gold:

The killing of the man behind the 9/11 terror attacks marked the recent high point in Mr Obama’s presidency.

When the high point of your presidential career is being in office when the military finally was successful in killing a wanted man you have some pretty major issues that need to be worked out.

According to The TSA They Have Rights, You Don’t

When I flow to Las Vegas I noticed signs posted talking about the rights of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rights. I didn’t really look at them closely nor think much of them but an anonymous (per their request) e-mailer send me the following picture last night:

After actually taking a minute to read that sign the irony hit me like the hammer of Thor. How ironic is it that the TSA agents who threaten, verbally abuse, and sexual molest air travelers are making statements about rights? Apparently it’s OK for them to violate your rights but it’s not OK for you to violate theirs. Don’t you simply love the government’s double standards?

But the best part is the last line that states, “Please give our officers the respect they deserve.” I believe everybody should follow this request. Agents of the TSA deserve to receive the middle finger, be called fucking assholes, and arrested by the police. If the TSA is requesting we give their agents the respect they deserve we should immediately start being belligerent towards those agents and calling the police when one of their agents sexually molests us. When they yell at us to take our shoes off we should respond with, “Go fuck yourself you statist prick!”

Anti-Gunner Idiocy on Parade

Sometimes I come across an article full of so much bullshit and stupidity that I have to actually take a few minutes to re-read it and see if it actually says what I thought it said after the first reading. Uncle pointed out one of those articles dealing with the recent massacre in Norway. It’s not good to make your entire article irrelevant in the first paragraph but this one did exactly that:

DEEP IN his 1,518-page manifesto, Anders Behring Breivik, the man accused of killing 68 people at a Norwegian youth camp last month, explained how he acquired the ammunition that he used in the attack: “10 x 30 round magazines – .223 cal at 34 USD per mag. Had to buy through a smaller US supplier (who again ordered from other suppliers) as most suppliers have export limitations. . . . Total cost: 550 USD.” He says he could have purchased the clips in Sweden, but they were cheaper through the U.S. supplier.

Emphasis mine. The article goes on spewing idiocy relating to gun laws in the United States but it’s completely irrelevant because Breivik could have obtained his 30-round magazines even if they were illegal in the United States. Why write an article implying that restricting 30-round magazines in the United States would have prevented Norway’s tragedy when the killer would have simply ordered the magazines from another country? You don’t nothing more than annoy a great number of electrons in writing your argument and making it completely irrelevant right from the word go.

Mr. Breivik’s claim is sadly believable, even though Norwegian officials have not confirmed the details.

I’m quoting this because it’s important a little later on, keep it in mind.

U.S. gun retailers can sell merchandise overseas and do not need to obtain an export license if the value of the goods being shipped falls below $100; sellers can avoid the licensing requirements — and buyers can avoid the additional costs — by breaking up the order into smaller shipments. U.S. law enforcement officials should determine whether the transaction was legal.

Once again the emphasis is mind. The author of this opinion piece seems to be making an argument without actually understanding how the legal system in the United States works. Law enforcement doesn’t get to determine what is legal and what isn’t, that’s done by our lawmakers and judges. The federal government (which is the only one that matters as this transaction was international and thus fall sunder federal regulations) has three branches with the legislative branch (Congress and the Senate) making laws with the judiciary branch determining whether or not those laws are constitutional if passed. Law enforcement is only tasked with enforcing the laws the legislative branch has passed and the judiciary branch hasn’t invalidated. They don’t get the determine jack shit.

Regardless of where Mr. Breivik obtained his weapons, the events in Norway should serve as a reminder of the absurdity of producing and selling such products.

Remember when I said that one quote would be important, well here’s the reason. The author is basically saying, “I have no clue if any claims I’m making in this article are true but damn it I don’t like 30-round magazines so I don’t fucking care. I also sodomize myself with a retractable baton.” OK I may have added a bit of editorial creativity somewhere in that paraphrase but the basic idea is true. The Norwegian government hasn’t actually come forth with any information related to the weapons used by Breivik. If his manifesto is accurate then we also have to ban a bunch of currently available chemicals as he used easily available components to build is bomb. Oh, and the next line is just fucking classic anti-gunner malarkey:

No self-respecting hunter would use such exaggerated force to take down a deer.

No self-respecting hunter would use a 9mm handgun to take down a deer. The 9mm isn’t a hunting round, it’s a self-defense round. Deer are critters of some size and using a 9mm is inhumane as it’s likely to injure but not kill the deer which is an outcome self-respecting hunters don’t want. Hell the .223 rifle that was being used by Breivik isn’t even a round that most deer hunters would consider acceptable for the same reason they don’t consider the 9mm acceptable. Finally, the right to bear arms has absolutely nothing to do with hunting.

These magazines too often find their way into the hands of deranged individuals, transforming them into efficient killing machines. In Tucson earlier this year, Jared Lee Loughner relied on high-capacity magazines to tear off 31 shots in a matter of seconds, killing six people and seriously injuring 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).

So you have two data points and all of the sudden these 30-round magazines are a plague unto the Earth? If we’re going to ban items based on whether or not a couple of people were able to successfully use them to harm others we need to get out there and ban automobiles, knives of all types, fertilizer, anything that can be used to start a fire, shovels, axes, etc.

There was a brief period of sanity in this country when high-capacity magazines were prohibited as part of an assault weapons ban. That ban expired in 2004; a Washington Post review of Virginia records showed that the number of high-capacity magazines used in crimes jumped dramatically in that state after the ban lapsed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Unified Crime Report also shows that violent crime itself has been dropping. This drop includes a decreases in the number of homicides where firearms were used as the murder weapon. So using the author’s “logic” we can say raising the ban on standard capacity magazines actually caused a drop in violent crime (no I don’t actually believe that, I’m just pointing out the stupidity in the author’s argument).

Some people are dumb, the person who wrote this opinion piece is just plain stupid.