Chronicling the depravities of the State.
The powers of the current United States president never cease to amaze me. For example, he apparently remembers the bombing of Pearl Harbor:
“I remember Pearl Harbor,” Trump reportedly told Abe as part of a tirade against the U.S. trade deficit with Japan. The president reportedly wanted better deals to help U.S. car and beef producers.
Considering Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941 and Trump was born in 1946, he apparently has a really good memory, just the best.
After failing twice to accomplish anything noteworthy as the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, Gary Johnson announced that he was try his hand at failing to win winning a New Mexico Senate seat. This news was met with applause by the Libertarian Party people who prefer their libertarianism to be more watered down than most homeopathic remedies. Unfortunately, their hopes and dreams have once again been shattered because the game has once again been rigged:
In a sudden move with suspicious timing, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, an elected Democrat, announced today that voters in November will once again be able to vote for every candidate of a political party on the ballot by filling in just one blank. The option, known as the “straight-party” device, gives obvious advantage to parties with high voter-registration totals, while erecting roadblocks to otherwise over-performing candidates from third parties.
Don’t worry though, I’m sure the next election will be fair and will allow the Libertarian Party to bring its brand of watered down libertarianism to the national stage!
While many Libertarian Party members are screaming that this decision is corrupt and outrageous, the fact of the matter is that this decision is the norm. The Democrats and Republicans have a stranglehold on the political system because they’re in power and whoever is in power gets to make the rules. Whenever a potential threat, no matter how minuscule, to the duopoly appears, the rules are changed to eliminate that threat. The only surprising thing about this is the fact that there remains people who believe that a third-party actually has a chance of obtaining any meaningful power.
Of course I’m just parroting Samuel Edward Konkin III who warned the then young Libertarian Party about exactly this.
We have a dead woman in Iowa named Mollie Tibbetts. Her killer turned out being from Mexico. Although new information shows that the killer may have been in the country legally, the story originally reported was that he was in the country illegally. Needless to say, the original story was politically exploited.
Predictably the Republicans were using Tibbetts’ murder to crusade against illegal immigration. In their worldview either legal immigrants and people born here never kill people here or being killed by a legal immigrant or somebody who was born here is better than being killed by something who crossed the imaginary line that they call a border without first receiving the king’s permission.
The Democrats also swooped down on Tibbetts’ corpse to bitch about the difficulties faced by illegal immigrants. Apparently Tibbetts’ killer wouldn’t have killed her if he had enjoyed the same opportunities and privileges as legal immigrants and people who were born here.
I was happy for people in both political camps that a murdered woman played so well into their political agendas. Sadly, if the killer does turn out to have been in the country legally, this murder will no longer serve anybody’s political agenda. That would be truly unfortunate. There’s nothing worse than a murder that can’t be exploited for political gain.
One of Trump’s cronies, Michael Cohen, has plead guilty to charges against him. In a move that should surprise nobody, after pleading guilty Cohen decided to snitch on his former client:
US President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pleaded guilty in a New York court to violating campaign finance laws.
He said he had done so at the direction of “the candidate”, for the “principal purpose of influencing [the] election”.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you only conspire with individuals who, after your goals are achieved, will commit suicide by shooting themselves in the back of the head… with a shotgun… twice.
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.
The Australian government is once again pushing to make effective cryptography illegal by demanding that companies that utilize cryptography compromise their security model by implementing some kind of government backdoor. If you have any familiarity with cryptography, you know that what the Australian government wants, a backdoor that ensures only law enforcers and authorized individuals can access the encrypted information, is impossible. Once you compromise a cryptographic protocol, anybody who discovers the compromise can bypass the encryption as well.
However, that fact is merely a mathematical law. As the Australian prime minister noted, the laws of mathematics don’t apply in his country:
“Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” he said.
This realization will put Australia decades if not centuries ahead of other nations. Imagine how quickly Australia’s space program will advance when the politicians prohibit gravity and therefore eliminate the need for expensive rockets to reach space! Imagine how quickly the country’s electronics manufacturing market will advance when the politicians rule the laws of energy illegal and all of their electronics can run indefinitely without needing to be recharged! Now that Australia can simply render natural laws null and void with the stroke of a pen, there’s nothing the country can’t achieve!
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.
Advocates of government monopolized healthcare (they usually call it “national” or “universal” healthcare) argue that their favored system is necessary because market actors have an incentive to constantly increase the cost of healthcare. The opposite is true. Market actors have an incentive to provide cheaper and more effective services because doing so will attract new customers by both attracting customers who formerly couldn’t afford their services and siphoning customers away from their competitors. However, government has an incentive to increase healthcare costs because doing so protects its favored providers:
Dr. Gajendra Singh walked out of his local hospital’s outpatient department last year, having been told an ultrasound for some vague abdominal pain he was feeling would cost $1,200 or so, and decided enough was enough. If he was balking at the price of a routine medical scan, what must people who weren’t well-paid medical professionals be thinking?
The India-born surgeon decided he would open his own imaging center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and charge a lot less. Singh launched his business in August and decided to post his prices, as low as $500 for an MRI, on a banner outside the office building and on his website.
There was just one barrier to fully realizing his vision: a North Carolina law that he and his lawyers argue essentially gives hospitals a monopoly over MRI scans and other services.
In all fairness to the politicians of North Carolina, I’m sure the hospitals in the state paid them a tremendous amount of money to buy such a favor.
The reason healthcare in the United States is so costly is because the government has inserted itself more and more into the healthcare market. Medical products cannot be released without obtaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which demands a princely sum before one can receive approval. Drugs that used to be over-the-counter now require people to first pay a doctor to write a prescription before acquiring them. Government protected monopolies in the form of patents allow drug companies to charge whatever price they want because they have no fear of competitors offering a cheaper alternative. And stories like this, where new market actors are crushed by bureaucrats in order to protect their favored healthcare providers, are rampant.
When something is causing a problem, more of it isn’t going to alleviate that problem. Government is the reason healthcare in the United States is so expensive. Handing the government a complete monopoly over healthcare isn’t going to alleviate that problem.
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!
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.