News You Need to Know – Page 43

Rocket Surgery

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has released a report that nobody will find surprising:

It’s not just your brakelight-riddled imagination: Freeway congestion in and around Minneapolis and St. Paul was the worst on record last year, according to a new report from Minnesota Department of Transportation.

The agency’s annual report on freeway congestion said congestion was up from 21.1 percent in 2014 to 23.4 percent last year. That’s the highest number since the agency started collecting data in 1993.

Anybody who lives in the Twin Cities knows that traffic congestion is terrible. But it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know why congestion is so bad. The blame is entirely on MnDOT. The brilliant men and women at MnDOT thought it would be a jolly good idea to tear up most of the major traffic arteries simultaneously. When you tear up a major traffic artery more traffic is forced onto the remaining arteries. If you tear up all but a few arteries the few remaining ones quickly exceed capacity and nobody can go anywhere quickly.

Not only did MnDOT decide to tear up all of the major arteries but it also seems entirely unconcerned with finishing any of the projects in a timely manner. Highway 100, for example, has been torn up all summer and still isn’t finished.

MnDOT’s report illustrates what everybody living in the Twin Cities already knows: whoever is in charge of planning road construction projects is a sadist who gets off on inflicting pain on motorists.

Guilty by Association

The State of Texas is preparing to execute a man (I know, what else is new). His crime? Being acquainted with a murderer:

They were there to call for Gov. Greg Abbott to halt the impending execution of Been’s uncle, Jeff Wood, who is scheduled to die on August 24, just five days after his 43rd birthday, for a crime that everyone, including prosecutors, admits he did not commit.

[…]

Wood was sitting in a truck outside the Texaco when Danny Reneau went inside and shot Keeran dead. Wood has said he had no idea that Reneau even had a gun or that Reneau would shoot his friend. Yet under the law of parties, prosecutors were allowed to impute to Wood the same level of responsibility for Keeran’s death as Reneau, the triggerman.

An extension of the theory of accomplice liability, the law holds that if two or more conspirators agree to commit one crime — say, a robbery — but instead, one of them commits another crime — say, murder — each party can be held responsible for the murder, regardless of individual intent, based on the notion that the conspirators should have anticipated that the crime committed would actually happen.

Guilt by association isn’t a crime. While Jeff Woods may have been friends with the murderer and in the vehicle with the murderer he wasn’t the murderer and therefore isn’t at fault for the murder. But in the magical Neighborhood of Statist Make-Believe the rules are made up and logic doesn’t matter. Things like having victims or causing damage aren’t necessary for putting a man to death. All that is needed are some arbitrary words written on a piece of paper and voted on by suit-clad mother fuckers in a marble building and suddenly a person can be executed for simply being acquainted with a criminal.

The fact that the State is willing to murder somebody for a murder he didn’t commit should be enough to illustrate the fact that the State doesn’t dispense justice.

Screaming at a Wall

It’s election season so a lot of gullible people have developed very strong opinions about which of the two indistinguishable presidential candidates must win in order to stave off the downfall of civilization. These opinions are manifesting online as ridiculous comments that would be considered hyperbole if the commenters didn’t actually appear to believe what they’re posting. I’ve seen comments by a gay woman claiming that anybody who doesn’t vote for Clinton is literally trying to murder her. On the other side of the aisle I’ve seen comments by a well-to-do white man claiming that anybody who doesn’t vote for Trump will be responsible for the downfall of the United States because evil terrorists from the Middle East will flood through its unprotect borders.

How can such ridiculous comments be taken seriously by anybody? Because logic isn’t a play. We’ve devolved debate into an exercise of virtual signaling:

Children are largely deprived of the noble joy of discovering truths as revealed by successful action. Instead they are left with the ignoble gratification of pleasing a taskmaster by reciting an answer that is marked “correct.” And this goes far beyond academics. For the modern child, learning “good behavior” is not about discovering through trial and error what kinds of behaviors are conducive to thriving socially. Instead, it’s about winning praise and avoiding censure from authority figures.

Thanks to this conditioning, we have all become approval-junkies, always on the lookout for our next fix of external validation: for the next little rush of dopamine we get whenever we are patted on the head by others for being a “good boy” or a “good girl,” for exhibiting the right behavior, for giving the right answer, for expressing the right opinion.

This is why the mania for virtue signalling is so ubiquitous, and why orthodoxies are so impervious. Expressing political opinions is not about hammering out useful truths through the crucible of debate, but about signaling one’s own virtue by “tattling” on others for being unvirtuous: for being crypto-commies or crypto-fascists; for being closet racists or race-traitor “cucks;” for being enemies of the poor or apologists for criminals.

We live in a society that teaches children at an early age that truth doesn’t come from experimentation and discovery but from authority figures. Instead of seeking answers through reason we seek them through approval of authority figures. That requires expressing the “right” ideas and expressing them loudly in the hopes that people in authority will hear them and give an approving nod.

This is another side effect of the public indoctrination system. Instead of providing children the tools they need to learn; namely grammar, logic, and rhetoric; public schools focus on making children memorize “facts” and having them prove that they’ve memorized those “facts” by regurgitating them on tests. This focus on memorizing “facts” provided by authority figures often has lifelong ramifications. One such ramification is cognitive dissonance. Take supporters of the drug war, for example. They claim to support drug prohibitions because drugs can kill people. They ignore the fact that the solution they support, prohibition, also kills people. Heroine might kill you over time if you keep using it but an officer shooting you during a no-knock raid performed to find heroine may also kill you. The solution ends up doing the same thing as the problem but most supporters of the war on drugs will ignore you when you point that out. People in authority told them that the solution to drugs killing people is stronger laws and more rigorous law enforcement efforts so that’s what they believe.

Online debates often feel like you’re screaming at a wall because most of the other people debating you aren’t relying on logic. The only way you could get through to them is if you were able to become an authority figure in their eyes. Then they would happily regurgitate whatever you told them was factual.

We Can’t Let There be a Giant War God Monument Gap

For being a super power the United States certainly doesn’t put much effort into its monuments. The Washington monument, for example, is just a giant phallus. The Lincoln Memorial is a bit neater since it does have a giant statue of a man on a chair. Mount Rushmore may be one of our most impressive monuments but it’s still just the faces of four dudes carved into stone. Other superpowers put a bit more effort into living up to the title. China, for example, just showed us who’s boss by building a gigantic 1,350-ton statue of a war god:

The statue has just been unveiled in Guan Yu Park in Jingzhou, China. It’s 58 metres (190ft) tall and weighs over 1,320 tonnes, and it contains over 4,000 strips of bronze. It was designed by Han Meilin, who is probably best known for his designs of the 2008 Beijing Olympics mascots, and the monument is so big that there’s even an 8,000sqm museum inside it! Guan Yu lived during China’s turbulent Three Kingdoms period. He carried an axe-like weapon called a Green Dragon Crescent Blade, which has been immortalised with him as part of the statue. The only difference is that the weapon now weighs 136 tonnes!

It truly puts everything the American Empire has built to shame. Not only is it huge but it also looks awesome:

Like You and Me, Only Better

Online harassment is pervasive. Death threats on the Internet are a dime a dozen and if you’re a woman there’s a good chance punk kids are going to subject you to a constant stream of variations on “Show me your tits,” followed by accusations that you’re a whore and should be killed. Anybody who has played online games has probably lost track of how many times pissed off children have claimed to have slept with their mother and challenged them to a fight in real life.

I’ve received enough threats online that I could paper my living room walls if I printed them all off but I mostly ignore them because I don’t really care. However, if you do feel the threats are credible and report them to the police you’ll likely receive little more than a shrug and a claim that there’s nothing the department can do. Things are a bit different when the harassment is aimed at police officers though:

Five police officers were killed in the Dallas shootings, constituting the highest number of police casualties in an attack since September 11. And as a result, law enforcement officials everywhere are suddenly much more sensitive to threats against their lives.

But one result has been that several police departments across the country have arrested individuals for posts on social media accounts, often from citizen tips — raising concerns among free speech advocates.

The police are like you and me, only better.

Another issue here, as pointed out by The Intercept, is free speech. A lot of people will argue that since many of the posts in question were threatening in nature that free speech doesn’t apply. But statements such as “I have no problem shooting a cop for simple traffic stop cuz they’d have no problem doing it to me,” aren’t threats in my opinion because the person is stating an opinion, not a course of action that they’re planning to pursue. If the statement had been “I will shoot any cop for pulling me over,” then it could been seen differently as the statement is expressing a potential planned course of action (of course it could also been seen as a statement expressing a willingness to defend one’s self). But then questions of means must be answered because a threat is meaningless if the person making it doesn’t have the means to go through with it.

Regardless of your opinions on threats in regards to freedom of speech, there is no question that the police are treating people who threaten them online different than people who threaten regular Janes and Joes. It’s no different than a politician who argues regular people shouldn’t be allowed to carry a gun but then carries a gun themselves or hires armed body guards to protect them.

Hire Professional Security, Not Off-Duty Cops

A lot of venues recognize the importance of having onsite security personnel. Unfortunately, many of those venues mistakenly hire off-duty police officers instead of professional private security agents. If you work for a venue that does this be warned that the agents you hired may walk off because they saw somebody wearing a t-shirt that offended their sensitive little feelings:

Four off-duty Minneapolis police officers working the Minnesota Lynx game at Target Center on Saturday night walked off the job after the players held a news conference denouncing racial profiling, then wore Black Lives Matter pregame warm-up jerseys.

Lynx players did not wear T-shirts supporting the Black Lives Matter movement ahead of Tuesday’s game in San Antonio.

“The Lynx organization was made aware about the concerns of the off duty Minneapolis police officers,” the team said in a statement. “While our players message mourned the loss of life due to last week’s shootings, we respect the right of those individual officers to express their own beliefs in their own way. … We continue to urge a constructive discussion about the issues raised by these tragedies.

What a bunch of cry babies. Were I in charge of their police department I’d fire those officers as they’ve proven themselves to be unreliable and too emotionally sensitive to perform police work.

Let this be a lesson to everybody though. When you need security for your venue hire professionals. There are a lot of quality private security firms out there that won’t leave you high and dry just because your employees do something that disagrees with their beliefs.

Somebody is Getting Added to the No-Fly List

It’s not secret to anybody who has had the displeasure of flying out of the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport (MSP) that something is wrong with the security lines. While there are several numbered gates they are no longer in use. Now there are only three. There’s the two main gates and then there’s the lesser known gate tucked away elsewhere in the airpot. This has lead to ridiculously long security lines and flights are being missed just so a putz with a badge can play their part in security theater.

If the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is a failure of an organization in general then the TSA at MSP is the idiot uncle of the family that everybody hates because he get drunk at the family get togethers and starts getting frisky with everybody’s wives and daughters.

Somebody has finally had enough and is filing a lawsuit:

A Minneapolis man is blaming the long lines at security for missing a recent flight, and now he’s suing the federal agency and the Twin Cities airport’s operator for $506.85.

In the lawsuit filed in federal court last week, Hooman Nikizad said his wait of more than 90 minutes on March 19 before he passed through security screening by the federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA) made him miss his afternoon flight to Los Angeles.

“I had to buy a ticket with another airline to be able to make my destination and meet my obligations,” Nikizad said in his claim, which noted the TSA had limited staff on duty at the time and “only one body scanner for the regular security line [in operation].”

I’m sure Mr. Nikizad will be added to the no-fly list. Regardless his lawsuit, as far as I’m concerned, is entirely justified. Expecting people to arrive hours before a flight for no reason whatsoever (see the TSA’s 95 percent failure rate) is unacceptable. If somebody arrives at the airport 90 minutes before their flight and is forced to buy another ticket because TSA couldn’t get its shit together then the agency should be forced to reimburse them for damages.

Apparently Forcing Everybody to Buy Insurance Doesn’t Make Prices Go Down

I have some shocking news for you. Even though the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed with the promise that forcing everybody to buy insurance would reduce prices the prices have — you might want to sit down because this is going to be shocking — gone up:

Insured Americans are having to shell out more and more for healthcare, particularly, hospital visits, researchers report this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. From 2009 and 2013—before the biggest provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014—people with individual or employer-sponsored health insurances saw a 37 percent rise in out-of-pockets costs for a hospital stay. Average bills jumped from $738 to $1,013. That’s about a 6.5 percent increase each year. However, overall healthcare spending rose just 2.9 percent each year during that time-frame and premiums—the cost to buy insurance—rose by around 5.1 percent annually.

“Every year, people freak out about how high premiums have gotten and how they continue to grow exponentially, but [out-of-pocket costs are] actually growing even faster,” Emily Adrion, first author of the study and a researcher at the Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy at the University of Michigan, told Bloomberg.

What could possible be going on here? How can involving more government not fix a problem? The reason is actually quite simple. When you’re required to do business with somebody they have little motivation to provide you a quality service or keep your costs low. This is especially true in a market that is heavily protected against new competitors. The health insurance market, through regulatory protections, is hard for any new competitor to enter unless they’re in possession of billions of dollars. Because of that the already established insurance companies feel safe keeping their prices high so long as the other established companies also keep their prices high.

Some Things Never Change

There are certain constants in the universe. Extremely massive bodies will have gravitational pull, for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction, and people will work for beer. A 5,000-year-old table was discovered and translated. What did this ancient tablet have to tell us? That people worked for beer. The tablet, as with many tablets in Mesopotamia, was a receipt:

Writing in New Scientist, Alison George explains what’s written on the 5,000-year-old tablet: “We can see a human head eating from a bowl, meaning ‘ration,’ and a conical vessel, meaning ‘beer.’ Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker.” Beer wages were by no means limited to Mesopotamia. In ancient Egypt, there are records of people receiving beer for their work—roughly 4 to 5 liters per day for people building the pyramids. And in the Middle Ages, we have several records of the great fourteenth century poet Geoffrey Chaucer being paid in wine. Richard II generously gave Chaucer an annual salary that included a “tonel” of wine per year, which was roughly 252 gallons.

Today you can buy the assistance of friends to help fix your vehicle, move your stuff, or perform other forms of manual labor using this ancient tradition of paying in beer.

One of my interests as of late is the history of human languages. Cuneiform, the writing used for the beer receipt, was the first writing system we’re aware of. Interestingly enough it, like most things, was a product of the market:

The Sumerians first invented writing as a means of long-distance communication which was necessitated by trade. With the rise of the cities in Mesopotamia, and the need for resources which were lacking in the region, long-distance trade developed and, with it, the need to be able to communicate across the expanses between cities or regions.

Trade is the mother of invention. Remember what I said about many of these tablets being receipts? This is because Cuneiform was originally developed as a method of communicating trade information over long distances. Many of the tablets recovered from Mesopotamia discuss business transactions. Over time writing became used in more areas of life and today we plaster our languages over everything.

Seceding is Good for the Soul

Yesterday Britain proved it had more guts than Scotland. When the opportunity to leave the European Union presented itself to the British people they actually voted to leave. It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the votes were tallied and Britain is already reaping the benefits of exiting:

Prime Minister David Cameron is to step down by October after the UK voted to leave the European Union.

Speaking outside 10 Downing Street, he said “fresh leadership” was needed.

The PM had urged the country to vote Remain but was defeated by 52% to 48% despite London, Scotland and Northern Ireland backing staying in.

Getting rid of that pig fucker is a huge plus. Sadly, this vote might also demonstrate that the spirit of Braveheart is completely dead in Scotland:

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was “absolutely determined” to keep Scotland in the EU so a second Scottish independence referendum was now “highly likely”.

Scotland my secede from the United Kingdom just so it can make itself the bitch of a larger master? Sad.

I should note that I was hoping the United Kingdom would secede from the European Union. Not because of the major issue at hand, the United Kingdom’s desire to prevent people from crossing its imaginary lines, but because I just wanted to see somebody secede from somebody else. I want to see continuous acts of secession until all seven billion people have seceded from all governments. One country breaking away from an ill-fated union is a good start.