Category: Politics

Soon Everything May Not Cause Cancer

WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

That label seems to appear on everything. While it is meant to warn consumers about potential cancer-causing chemicals in their products, it’s really a testament of the foolishness of democracy. That label was the result of Proposition 65, which was a voter initiative that appeared on the California ballot and was voted into law by California voters.

Fortunately, some sanity may be returning to labeling. After a judge decided that coffee should include a Proposition 65 warning label, some people have finally decided that the warning label may be getting applied a bit too liberally:

After a judge ruled in March that coffee should be served with jolting labels that alert drinkers to a cancer risk, the state of California seems to have woken up to the concern that its pervasive health warnings may have gone too far.

“There’s a danger to overwarning—it’s important to warn about real health risks,” Sam Delson told The New York Times.

Delson is the deputy director for external and legislative affairs for California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The office proposed a regulation shortly after a March ruling that would unequivocally declare that any cancer-linked components of roasted and brewed coffee “pose no significant risk of cancer.” Today, August 16, the proposed regulation is getting a public hearing in Sacramento.

If the regulation is adopted, it’s expected to nullify the warning on Californians’ sacred morning brews. It’s also expected to water-down the controversial law known as Proposition 65 that led to the warning—and scores of others.

Warning labels become pointless if they are applied to things to which the warning doesn’t apply. The Proposition 65 warning label has been misapplied so frequently that it has becoming the common butt of jokes. Nobody with an iota of common sense takes the warning label seriously.

Even if Proposition 65 is watered down, it should remain a testament to the stupidity of people in large numbers.

Democracy Sure Is Fragile

I’m sure Alex Jones is enjoying all of the free advertising that he has received from being banned from Facebook, Apple, and YouTube. Normally a marketing campaign with so much outreach would cost a small fortune. However, the real entertainment value in all of this is the pro-censorship crowd’s rhetoric. For example, take Senator Chris Murphy’s comment:

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is calling on other tech companies to ban more sites like InfoWars, and says the survival of American democracy depends on it.

“Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it,” Murphy tweeted Monday.

The survival of our democracy depends on censorship! If Jones is allowed to express himself, democracy will fall!

Democracy must be very fragile indeed if a single man’s speech can take it down. But the festering pustule that is mob rule has survived for hundreds of years even though many countries under the system have traditionally been in favor of free speech. That being the case, I’m inclined to believe that democracy is, unfortunately, more resilient than Murphy says.

The most amusing thing about democracy to me is the fact that its most vocal advocates generally hate it. While their mouths are talking about the greatness of democracy their hands are working to stop anybody who votes the wrong way. When somebody says they love democracy, what they generally mean is that they love the idea of a system where only those who agrees with them are allowed to vote.

Another Reason Not to Build the Wall

We have received yet another reason to support not enforcing immigration laws or building a wall to separate the United States and Mexico:

WASHINGTON — President Trump reiterated on Monday his threat to shut down the federal government this fall if Congress does not deliver on Republican demands to crack down on immigration by enforcing security on the border with Mexico and building his long-promised wall.

Shutdown the federal government? Oh no! Anything but that!

Why Would Anybody Publicly Claim That They Believed a Political Promise

Think about the most embarrassing thing to which you’ve ever publicly admitted. Now breathe a sigh of relief because no matter how embarrassing it was, it wasn’t this embarrassing:

The founder and owner of CustomMousePad.com, Jennie Stewart, came forward yesterday with what she believed was a promise from a Republican congressman to save net neutrality. Last month, Stewart alleges that she was assured by Rep. Don Young (R-AK) that he would sign the Democrat-led discharge petition to force a vote in the House, which would reverse the Federal Communications Commission’s December vote to revoke the rules.

Why would anybody publicly claim that they believed a political promise? I have a hard time believing that there is a single person above the age of six who isn’t aware that politicians lie for a living and that everything they say should be treated as total malarkey. What really blows my mind though is that anybody published this story as if it were news. The only time a political promise is newsworthy is when it is kept.

Buying Votes

Every politician buys votes but most go about it in a roundabout way. Promises of tax breaks for companies, wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the masses, and increases to welfare benefits are common ways to buy votes. But one mayoral candidate in Chicago decided to try the direct route:

CHICAGO — Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson says he wasn’t trying to buy anyone’s vote when he handed out close to $200,000 to churchgoers.

[…]

The Illinois State Board of Elections said Wilson didn’t break any campaign finance laws because the money came from his non-profit foundation.

I appreciate this level of honesty. If a politician wants to buy votes, they should just fork out the cash. This strategy is far better for voters because they get paid upfront whereas political promises usually go unfulfilled and when that happens the voters don’t get their payoff.

Foreigners Influencing Elections

Anybody who has been paying attention to the news is aware that there is a lot of evidence that foreigners are influencing our elections! Before those of your who have assigned yourself to the left of the binary political spectrum jump up for joy thinking that I’m finally going to lambast Russia for defiling our most holy of traditions, I’m not talking about Russia. It’s actually time for those who have assigned themselves to the right of the political spectrum to jump up for joy because I’m going to talk about illegal immigrants being allowed to vote in a domestic election:

San Francisco began registering non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, to register to vote Monday in the November election for the city school board, reported The San Francisco Chronicle.

The move follows passage of a 2016 ballot measure by San Francisco voters opening school elections to non-citizens who are over the age of 18, city residents and have children under age 19, reported the publication.

Just kidding, I’m not really going to talk about this either. Instead I’m going to use this as a launchpad for mocking both of you!

Both sides are flipping their shit over foreigners influencing domestic elections… if they believe those foreigners are interfering with their agenda. Those who have assigned themselves to the right generally take aim at those who crossed the imaginary line separating the United States from the rest of the world. They believe that these line crossers only vote for people on the left side of the political spectrum. Meanwhile, they are entirely fine with the possibility of Russia influencing domestic elections because they believe that Russia is manipulating elections in a way that will ensure politicians on the right of the political spectrum will win. People who have assigned themselves to the left believe the reverse. They want line crossers to vote because they believe that they will vote for candidates on the left and they don’t want Russia to influence elections because they believe it will work for candidates on the right.

If both sides would be honest and admit that they don’t care about the issue of foreigners influencing domestic elections but only care about forwarding their agendas, they wouldn’t be a bunch of hypocrites.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Californians were scheduled to vote on a measure to divide the state into three separate states but they won’t have that opportunity because a men in muumuus said so:

The California Supreme Court shot down the controversial initiative from appearing on the November ballot in a unanimous decision, writing that “significant questions have been raised regarding the proposition’s validity.”

Proposition 9 would’ve asked voters whether California should separate into three states: California, Northern California and Southern California. It would’ve been subject to approval by US Congress. The initiative had gained enough signatures in June to qualify for the ballot on November 6.

“We conclude that the potential harm in permitting the measure to remain on the ballot outweighs the potential harm in delaying the proposition to a future election,” the justices wrote.

Proponents of Democracy believe that it gives the people an opportunity to voice their opinion to their government. That’s true only if their opinion isn’t radical. Democratic systems have a lot of safeguards in place to protect the status quo. If, for example, you are able to get enough signatures to get a radical measure placed on a statewide ballot, the safeguard of the courts kicks in to toss that measure out.

Whenever I say that real change cannot be realized through political means, somebody lists off all of the changes that have occurred through political means. What all of those changes end up having in common is that they’re minor, not radical. You cannot, for example, vote to abolish a political office, you can only vote on who occupies that office. So you may managed to get a slightly less terrible candidate to occupy an office but that isn’t real change, that’s a minor change. If you did try to get a measure on a ballot to abolish a political office, one of the state’s safeguards would kick in to prevent you from realizing your goal. That is democracy in a nutshell, the plebes can do no more than vote on some minor details.

Points for Honesty

The United States has announced its departure from the United Nations Human Rights Council:

After more than a year of complaints and warnings — some subtle and others a little less so — the Trump administration has announced that the United States is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley announced the decision in a joint statement Tuesday.

As a violator of human rights, it’s nice to see the United States being a bit more honest about itself.

Seriously though, the Human Rights Council has been and remains a joke. The best punchline of this joke in recent years was the appointment of Saudi Arabia to a major panel. While the United States commonly violates what many consider to be basic human rights, Saudi Arabia takes matters to a whole new level. But what can anybody expect from a government made up exclusively of other governments?

What will be the aftermath of this decision? In all likelihood, nothing. What modern human rights abuses that have been perpetrated by the United States have been done during its council membership. When one considers that and considers many of the other nations that are allowed membership to the council, one can only assume that being a member doesn’t require abiding by any of the council’s decision. The council, like the United Nations in general, is toothless. Since it’s toothless, continued membership wouldn’t dissuade the United States from perpetrating additional human rights abuses even if it remained on the council.

This decision is so inconsequential that it shoudn’t even be newsworthy.

Civitates Foederatae Americae Delendae Sunt

Since I’m on the topic of perspective, let’s take a moment to consider the current crisis, immigrant children being held in concentration camps:

Reporters and Democratic lawmakers have been allowed inside a detention centre that lies at the heart of a growing storm over a new US policy separating migrant children from their parents.

Authorities did not allow photos or videos to be taken inside the centre, but US Customs and Border Protection later released several images. Former First Lady Laura Bush has compared it to the internment camps used for Japanese-Americans during World War Two. A Democratic congressman who visited the site said it was “nothing short of a prison”.

If you listen to many partisans, you may be lead to believe that Trump is personally kidnapping these children to put them in concentration camps. The first red flag in this article should be that photos were not allowed. Why should that be a read flag? Because it raises an awkward question, from where have all of the pictures of these concentration camps come? Awkward questions often have awkward answers:

There’s also precedent for warehousing immigrant children at military bases. In 2014, Obama temporarily held kids at an emergency shelter at Lackland AFB in San Antonio — a development that Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott were appalled by at the time. The photo at the top of this story — of Central American kids at a Border Patrol processing center — has been repeatedly mistaken as a recent, Trump-era image. In fact, it’s from 2014, during the Central American refugee surge.

Many of the pictures being passed around supposedly from current concentration camps full of children are actually from concentration camps full of children that existed under the previous president. Yes, you read correctly, concentration camps that existed under Obama.

If it wasn’t for humanity’s wonderful feature referred to as cognitive dissonance, this news might shake some partisain’s political faith in their party. Fortunately for them, cognitive dissonance will guard most of them from having to accept this difficult information. However, all of us should keep in mind that human rights abuse is nothing new for the United States of America.

From kidnapping Native American children and forcing them to abandon their heritage and language under the guide of civilizing and educating them to interring Japanese Americans during World War II for no other reason than their descent to the continuous abuse of black individuals from slavery to Jim Crow laws to the drug war, there hasn’t been a single instance in the United States’ history where the federal government wasn’t abusing large swaths of people.

None of the human rights abuses being perpetrated under Trump are new or without precedence. Moreover, if voting could fix this, as most partisans either outright claim or imply, this issue would have been fixed already.

If you’re actually looking for a solution to the human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States government, there is only one solution.

Civitates Foederatae Americae delendae sunt!

The Best Timeline

This timeline that I find myself in just gets better and better. While one might think that a retired eccentric basketball star buddying up with a former reality television show host to make peace with the pudgy dictator of a small isolated nation is the story for an awful summer comedy movie, it actually happened. Likewise, if I told you that a pimp won the primary for a political party that is most known for being neopuritanical, you’d probably think that it was also the story of a terrible summer comedy movie. But once again it actually happened:

LAS VEGAS — Pimp Dennis Hof, owner of half a dozen legal brothels in Nevada and star of the HBO adult reality series “Cathouse,” won a Republican primary for the state Legislature on Tuesday, ousting a three-term lawmaker.

Hof defeated hospital executive James Oscarson. He’ll face Democrat Lesia Romanov in November, and will be the favored candidate in the Republican-leaning Assembly district.

We’re well on our way to a President Camacho.