Tag: Nanny State Knows Best

Did Somebody Say Corruption

I have a love hate relationship going with Texas. On one hand the state is one of the few that is willing to stand up to the federal government, until they fold at least, but on the other hand they enact many authoritarian rules. Take for instance the latest executive order issued by Texas governor Rick Perry which will require all girls entering to sixth grade to get the Gardasil vaccination.

This is a major problem for three reasons; first the governor used his executive order powers to enact this and bypassed the legislation, second this occurred shortly after a doubling of lobbying efforts, and third Gardasil has been linked to paralysis. Let’s first talk about the lobbying effort that preceded this executive order:

Perry has ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. His current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.

The governor also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign.

The order is effective until Perry or a successor changes it, and the Legislature has no authority to repeal it, said Perry spokeswoman Krista Moody. Moody said the Texas Constitution permits the governor, as head of the executive branch, to order other members of the executive branch to adopt rules like this one.

So it seems governor Perry received a fair bit of money from Merck which causes this entire situation to reek of corruption. Fuck the whole idea of parents having a right to chose what is put into their childrens’ bodies and fuck the possibility that this drug could cause paralysis. If I lived in Texas I’d honestly consider this action an abuse of power and look into what is needed to perform a recall on the governor. The story claims the only means of overturning this executive order is if he successor removes it thus is seems pertinent to remove the current governor as soon as humanly possible. Of course if you can make a religious or philosophical reason against jacking your kids with this shit you could get an opt-out:

Texas allows parents to opt out of inoculations by filing an affidavit objecting to the vaccine on religious or philosophical reasons. Even with such provisions, however, conservative groups say such requirements interfere with parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children.

I wonder if parents can opt-out because the drug is potentially dangerous? That’s not a religious or philosophical reason but just common-fucking-sense. Just remember that the nanny state knows what’s best for you and your children so shut up and take the damned vaccine. If the vaccine causes your child to be unable to move afterward well that’s your problem not the state’s.

Nanny State Moving Against Hookahs

We sure are lucky that the nanny state exists to tell us what is and isn’t good for us. By Thor in Valhalla if we didn’t have the nanny state people may do things that could be harmful! Well don’t worry because nanny is working to remove yet another unhealthy things from the list of unhealthy things, hookahs:

But in fact, hookahs are far from safe. And now, legislators, college administrators and health advocates are taking action against what many of them call the newest front in the ever-shifting war on tobacco. In California, Connecticut and Oregon, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would ban or limit hookah bars, and similar steps have been taken in cities in California and New York. Boston and Maine have already ended exemptions in their indoor-smoking laws that had allowed hookah bars to thrive.

Is smoking safe? No it’s not but neither is a lot of the shit we do. Eating fast food isn’t safe, driving sure as the Hell isn’t safe, drinking alcohol isn’t safe, opening a box with a utility knife isn’t safe, basically nothing is safe. Everything you do in life carries risks and it’s up to you to determine if those risks outweigh the benefits. Well it was up to you until everybody was willing to delegate that power to the state, now the state gets to use their monopoly on the initiation of force to force you to avoid things it deems unhealthy.

So what should you do if you don’t like hookah bars? Don’t frequent them. Legislation doesn’t need to be passed to “protect people from themselves.” If you don’t approve of an activity then you don’t have to participate. If something may be harmful to the participants that is their problem and they can decide whether or not the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. What we don’t need is the fucking state coming in and telling us what is and isn’t good for us.

Political Correctness and Geometry

Political correctness has to be one of the dumbest concepts the human race has ever decided to waste time on. It seems people are paid to find phrases that may be offensive to somebody and then come up with a new phrase that’s fifty fucking words in length and somehow less offensive. I believe a theory was written somewhere that states the more words a phrase has the less offensive it is.

Well let’s take a look at the latest cluster fuck brought to us by a Seattle school who just renamed Easter eggs “spring spheres.” No I’m not making this up:

“At the end of the week I had an idea to fill little plastic eggs with treats and jelly beans and other candy, but I was kind of unsure how the teacher would feel about that,” Jessica said.

She was concerned how the teacher might react to the eggs after of a meeting earlier in the week where she learned about “their abstract behavior rules.”

“I went to the teacher to get her approval and she wanted to ask the administration to see if it was okay,” Jessica explained. “She said that I could do it as long as I called this treat ‘spring spheres.’ I couldn’t call them Easter eggs.”

In the frantic move to make something politically correct some administrative bozo also managed to screw these kids with geometry. An egg is not a sphere, it’s not even close. Obviously these teachers failed geometry because if they had passed they would know that a sphere is a perfectly round geometric object in three dimensional space.

Now that I think about it I believe the word school has bad connotations attached to it. Because of this I propose we renamed schools “equal opportunity non-discriminatory community oriented education environment.” Look how many words are in there, it can’t possibly be offensive!

What we really need right now is a lesson in political correctness by everybody’s favorite Gunnery Sergeant:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o7oKQECBjs]

Car You Can’t Own

Many people claim that we have a free market in the United States. These same people also blame the lack of regulations on our recent financial problems. Neither fact is true as we haven’t had a free market since… well ever honestly as there have always been regulations on the free exchange of goods between two people. Well I have yet another example of market regulations in the United States that I feel few are aware of, a list of cars the government says you can’t have:

Sure, some lustworthy Euro-spec cars can make it in. Witness the list of Show and Display cars the overlords at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration OK’d despite the fact that not one of them meets government safety standards.

Such cars must be exceedingly rare, historically significant and driven a mere 2,500 miles annually. But if you think a boatload of money and reams of paperwork can get any car into the country, think again.

Today, we present some of the cars people tried to import under Show and Display that were rejected by Uncle Sam. We aren’t talking about fanboy fantasies here, but actual cars that someone went to the trouble of tracking down and applying to the feds for.

The list contains 17 vehicles that us measly peasants can’t be trusted with.

You Will Do As We Say

This story can best be summed up with the phrase, “Shut up slave!” It seems one school in Chicago (where else) is prohibition children from brining their own lunches and thus forcing kids to eat what the school command:

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”

They will allow you to bring a lunch if you have medical reasons? How magnanimous of them! Why thank you Comrade Carmona for granting such a privilege to the lowly surfs! I’m sure you can guess how I feel about this police, it’s terrible. The school administration is basically saying they know better than the parents what their children should eat. Because a parent may decides to allow their child to bring chips with their sandwich it means brining lunches must be banned and any student who does so must be labeled an enemy of the people.

If I were a parent I’d probably be inclined to tell Comrade Carmona, “Fuck you! Go sodomize yourself with a retractable baton.” Then again if I were a parent I’d not subject my child to a public school in Chicago… or Chicago. Practices like this shouldn’t go unchallenged by parents. If you’re a parent with a child in this school you should pack your child’s lunch every day. When they take your child’s lunch bring the administration up on charges of theft.

Although public schools felt like a prison when I was attending one I must say it’s far worse now.

Child Abduction Services Knows Best

You know what’s great? Using Child Abduction” Services to bar parents from taking their newborn baby home. It’s nice to know that the state has this kind of power to protect our children from those evil little serfs we call parents. Take this instance:

“They said, ‘Well, if you leave the hospital I’ll have to arrest you and your husband.'”

Cecilia is referring to the police officer who was sent to her room just hours after giving birth, all because she and her husband told the nurse they didn’t want to keep Lilia overnight in the NICU to be treated for jaundice.

I guess I don’t really have grounds to make a complain if the parents if the parents were going to put the child’s life in danger. It would be crazy to let the parents go against the wishes of the doctor… oh wait:

The couple says it got a second opinion and spoke with a pediatrician at Summerlin Hospital, who agreed that it would be okay if the couple took the baby home with minor jaundice as long as they signed a medical release form.

What the Hell? The doctor signed off on the parents taking the baby home and yet Child Abduction Services were still called? Who the Hell called them?

But the nurse they originally worked with called Child Protective Services to report these new parents for not agreeing with the recommended hospital care.

Oh, it seems the nurse knew more than the doctor. Likewise the goons send by abduct the child also knew better than the doctor. I must have missed when they changed the curriculum for nurses and government stooges. At what point did the required education for becoming either involve heavy training in pediatrics?

Yes this is yet another case of the state coming in and imposing its will against the slaves… er, citizens, of the United States. It’s also frightening to see that the recommendations of a doctor will be completely ignored by the very goons who are supposed to protect children from abusive situations.

Zero Tolerance Means Zero Intelligence

Public schools not only have a history of being rather poor in the field of educating children but they also have a history of zero tolerance. Between kids being expelled for having shotguns off school property, kids being kicked out for making a gun shape with their fingers, and kids being given the boot for having Aspirin it’s amazing there are any children left in school. Well here’s another one for the record book, a 13 year-old kid was shown the door for brining acne medicine:

A typical middle school girl, 13-year-old Hayley Russell was worried about another acne flare-up when she brought her orange prescription bottle to Rachel Carson Middle School in Fairfax County, Virginia.

She placed the erythromycin on the top shelf of her locker so she could retrieve an antibiotic pill to take at lunch. And then she forgot about it.

The pills sat in her locker for months. When an administrator confronted her about them last May, acting on a tip from other girls, Hayley quickly acknowledged her mistake. But it triggered a disciplinary process that kept her out of class for more than seven weeks, banned her from even visiting Carson without official permission, and eventually forced her to transfer to another school.

Yes not only did she bring medication but she had the audacity to have a prescription for it! It’s sad to see things haven’t changed since I was in high school and administrators were sacrificing children in order to look like they were protective of the kids’ well being.

I Don’t Like It, Make It Illegal

I haven’t had a good nanny state story in a while but thankfully some Australian activists have shattered that fact. There seems to be a 25% increase in pedestrian deaths and the assume culprit are iPods. The most obvious solution to such a problem is to make it illegal:

But Mr Scruby said the rise in the popularity of iPods and other listening devices illustrated an urgent need for action by state government and manufacturers.

”The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars, but is apparently unconcerned that listening devices now appear to have become lethal pieces of entertainment,” he said. ”They should legislate appropriate penalties for people acting so carelessly towards their own welfare and that of others.

”Manufacturers … should be made to [warn] consumers of the risks they run.”

Yes that will fix the problem, legislation. I mean it always works so well. Once you make something illegal it’ll go away. I’m sure Australia will be free of iPod related accidents as soon as that legislation is passed. It’s a good thing government can protect us from ourselves.

I also love how they want manufacturers to put yet another warning label that will be ignored onto the device.

Burn Your Recyclables

Regardless of the fact that many recyclable products require more energy to recycle and create new again it seems Cleveland is going to force you to recycle:

The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables.

Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard.

Yup that’s right if you don’t roll out your recyclables container enough a trash inspector will dig through your rubbish bin and fine you if they find too many things in there that could be recycled. I think it would be smart to start burning all of your recyclables. Why? Because I, like many Americans, have a problem with authority (that’s a good thing). If you try to make me do something I’m going to do the opposite just to spite your ass. Hence if I lived in Cleavland I’d now be burning every recyclable item I had just so I could avoid bringing that bin out and waste the trash inspectors time when he digs through it and finds nothing.

How Much is Too Much

As I checked my Facebook feed I found a story being posted quite a bit with some interesting comments. The story is the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Board of Trustees awarded their Chancellor a $40,000 bonus. This is pretty inflammatory news to many of my friends who are still going to college in a MNSCU school.

The Chancellor makes $360,000 a year which people are screaming is too much. So that raises the question how much is too much? For most people it’s roughly $1.00 more than they themselves make. I personally hate the phrase, “He/She gets paid too much.” Why do I hate it? Because what right does somebody have to say another is making too much unless they are that person’s boss? Yes if I’m your boss and don’t believe your doing a good enough job to earn your salary then I have some reason to claim you’re making too much money and thus can fire you or lower your pay. But I’ve not heard a single person come up with an exact formula that determines if somebody makes “too much.” Last I heard businesses have a right to determine how much they pay their employees. Now complexity can be entered into this since MNSCU receives public funding but I’m unsure if the Chancellor’s pay comes for tax payer money received by the state or a different source. Either way even lowering his wages to $50,000 wouldn’t cut the tuition of each student by any noticeable amount.

The other thing that nobody seems to bring up is the fact $40,000 isn’t a whole lot of money for MNSCU. According to their website they have 32 public colleges and universities. $40,000 divided by 32 mean if that money were evenly distributed throughout MNSCU each college would get a whopping $1,250 each. In layman’s terms that means each school would get just about absolutely nothing.

Looked at another way they have 54 campuses so each campus would get about $740.74 which is less than some students pay for books in a semester.