Tag: Superdickery

Misplaced Children

The United States government has a difficult time keeping tracking of things. The Pentagon misplaces trillions of dollars; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives misplaces a lot of guns; and the Department of Health and Human Services misplaces over a thousand children:

Federal officials lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children last year after a government agency placed the minors in the homes of adult sponsors in communities across the country, according to testimony before a Senate subcommittee Thursday.

The Health and Human Services Department has a limited budget to track the welfare of vulnerable unaccompanied minors, and realized that 1,475 children could not be found after making follow-up calls to check on their safety, an agency official said.

Are these kids living happily with their sponsors? Have they been sold to human traffickers? Nobody knows, especially not the government agency tasked with knowing exactly this. Of course, as always, the failure is being blamed on a lack of funding. Government agencies are the only entities that I’m aware of that expect or outright demand a pay raise when they perform poorly.

Milking All of the Tax Cattle

While I still stand by my ruling that Atlas Shrugged was a poorly written book with dull two-dimensional characters, I will admit that it was also prescient. The United States appears to be entering the part in of the book where the infrastructure is in a constant state of deterioration. Even the parking ramps are falling apart. And you know what that means! Soak the tax payers a little more:

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter ordered the shutdown of a major downtown parking ramp Thursday, the day after a chunk of concrete fell on a parked car and two days after he and other local leaders launched a public campaign for $58 million in state money to replace the aging structure.

Strange, I didn’t realize that a parking ramp in St. Paul served the entirety of Minnesota. But it must otherwise Carter wouldn’t be asking the entire state to pay for his city’s shitty infrastructure, right?

Unfortunately, when infrastructure fails, it serves as an excuse by the political class to steal more wealth from those they rule. To compound this problem, even though the political class is stealing more wealth, the infrastructure never improves. So a vicious cycle of failing infrastructure leading to more stolen wealth followed by more failing infrastructure persists.

He Just Wanted to Go Home to His Fam… Oh

Another day, another bad apple:

MIAMI — A father is under arrest after allegedly beating his daughter at school.

The attack was caught on camera — and shows school employees going about their business and doing nothing to stop him.

The father, Raymond Emilio Rosario, is also a Miami-Dade police officer with a position at an airport.

This story is jam packed with terrible people. First you have the the father, a law enforcer, who beat his daughter. Then you have the school employees who just sat there and acted like nothing was happening while the father was beating his daughter in their presence. Finally you have his employer who will continue to pay him while he awaits his fate:

The Miami-Dade Police Department suspended him with pay.

A law enforcer beating his daughter isn’t a surprising story. Law enforcers have a notably high rate of domestic violence. However, it is a bit surprising to me that none of the school employees even reacted to the event. If you watch the video, they’re just sitting there and acting like nothing out of the ordinary is happening. I would’ve expected at least one employee to have enough courage to say to themselves that that wasn’t right and at least called 911 if they weren’t willing to intervene directly.

The Justice System Doesn’t Like Its Privilege to Commit Theft Curtailed

After decades of civil forfeiture laws being on the books, some states are finally deciding that giving law enforces the privilege to steal property without first convicting an individual of a crime makes government look bad. In the hopes of restoring a veneer of legitimacy, these states are either proposing or have passed laws that require law enforcers to actually convict an individual of a crime before they can keep their property. Needless to say, this isn’t going over well with either law enforcers or prosecutors:

Kunzweiler, the district attorney, said the extra level of protection was unnecessary and that raising the bar for forfeiture would effectively roll out a welcome mat to ruthless drug traffickers from Mexico.

“What we’re talking about is inviting some of the most violent people on the history of this planet,” he said on the Pat Campbell Show on KFAQ. “You see what goes on in Mexico, you see people’s bodies decapitated and hung from bridges. And if you want to bring that drug cartel ideology to Oklahoma, do exactly what Senator Loveless’ bill is suggesting,” he said.

“We have meth coming through here; it’s all coming from Mexico,” Kunzweiler continued, going on to say that Loveless was trying to remove “our incentive to take away their profit.”

If these really are some of the most violence people in the history of this planet, then prosecuting them for a crime should be the easiest case any attorney could take on. I don’t see why Kunzweiler is complaining. It sounds like these individuals are free money for him regardless since convicting them before keeping their property should be so simple that even a child could do it.

I have no sympathy for supporters of civil forfeiture laws. They’re advocating that the power to commit crime is necessary to fight crime, which is the entire basis of government come to think about it. But such advocacy necessarily states that crime in of itself isn’t bad but instead what determines whether a crime is good or bad is who commits it. If a private individual commits a crime, it’s bad. If a government agent commits a crime, it’s good. The entire premise is nonsensical.

Solve the Housing Shortage by Making Houses More Expensive

California is suffering from a decades long housing shortage. This shouldn’t surprise anybody. The regulatory burden in California has been increasing along with the population, which has made new construction more expensive than it otherwise would be. But instead of working to relieve the shortage by allowing homes to be built for less, the California bureaucrats have decided to make building new homes even more expensive:

On Wednesday, the California Energy Commission approved a set of standards that will require most new homes built in the state after 2020 to include solar panels on their roofs.

The standards (PDF) apply only to single-family homes and certain low-rise condos, townhomes, and apartments. Exceptions are made for homes with roofs that would receive excessive shade during the daytime or homes with roofs too small to benefit from a few solar panels.

The last two exemptions are interesting because they have the potential to change how houses are predominantly built in California. I foresee a trend in small roofs and heavy shading.

This legislation is also, rather obviously, aimed at coercing a preference for high-density residential. While that may make sense in an extremely dense urban area like Los Angeles, it doesn’t make sense to implement such a requirement statewide since much of California is actually rural and therefore space isn’t at a premium. However, bureaucrats are seldom aware that the existence they experience in their capital city isn’t the experience of everybody in their state, which is why centralized planning always turns into such a fiasco.

All Are Equal under the Law, But Some Are More Equal than Others

One of the supposed foundations of the United States governmental system is that all are equal under the law. Anybody who has read about the country’s history knows that this claim is utter bullshit. Even today the various governmental bodies use their power to create laws that directly target subsets of individuals. The government of Seat Pleasant, Maryland is being sued because it decide that not everybody is equal under its tax laws:

The owners of a discount market, a Chinese takeout restaurant and a liquor store say officials violated the city’s charter and state and federal laws when they created an ordinance that sent the property taxes of certain businesses soaring.

Steven Franco, who owns the discount market, said the “special revitalization” tax is a part of an attempt by Seat Pleasant’s leaders to lower the value of the properties so the city can buy the buildings for its own use.

“You can’t attract business like this,” said Franco, whose city property taxes last year jumped from $5,991 to $55,019, dwarfing the $18,269 property tax he pays to Prince George’s County. “It’s backward economic thinking.”

This situation isn’t unique. Municipal governments like to wield their property tax powers to run out business that they find undesirable. Of course they never claim to be doing as much when they’re writing such taxes since that could cause them to appear unfair. But everybody knows that there is an almost infinite number of ways to discriminate without appearing to be overtly discriminating. If, for example, you want to run liquor stores out of town, you simply hit the businesses in their neighborhoods with “revitalization” taxes that you claim to be aimed at “restoring” some parts of the city. This works well because many liquor stores are in poorer parts of town that city officials claim to want revitalized.

It’ll be interesting to see how this lawsuit turns out. I wouldn’t be surprised if the court sides with it’s fellow government employees.

Who Knew Punishing the Law Abiding Could Have Consequences

Everybody will die from opioid addictions if something isn’t done! We must roll over and let legislators and law enforcers do whatever is necessary to stop this threat!

That’s how I’ve been reading the news as of late. Opioids are the current boogeyman for the War on (Some) Drugs. Whenever a chemical becomes the boogeyman in the War on (Some) Drugs new legal restrictions are placed on it. Unlike many previous boogeymen, opioids are legally prescribed and many overdoses have been caused by legally prescribed drugs. In response to this, government busybodies have been putting pressure doctors to prescribe fewer opioids. The result of this pressure was predictable:

A report published yesterday by the health care consulting firm IQVIA shows that the total volume of opioids prescribed in the United States, indicated by the green area below, fell by 29 percent between 2011 and 2017, from 240 billion to 171 billion morphine milligram equivalents. Last year’s 12 percent drop was the largest ever recorded. The number of opioid prescriptions and the number of patients receiving opioids for the first time are also declining. The report notes that “decreases in prescription opioid volume have been driven by changes in clinical usage, which have been influenced by regulatory and reimbursement policies and legislation that have been increasingly restricting prescription opioid use since 2012.”

But as you can see in the graph, the total number of opioid-related deaths counted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indicated by the blue line, is not falling along with opioid prescriptions. To the contrary, it has risen sharply in recent years, driven by dramatic increases in deaths involving heroin (orange) and illicit fentanyl (the main component of “other synthetic opioids,” the category represented by the gray line). The CDC has not released final data for 2017 yet, but more increases are expected.

People addicted to opioids aren’t going to suddenly stop being addicted when their doctor refuses to renew their prescription. Instead they’ll seek out other ways to acquire opioids. Enter the black market. However, black market opioids are dangerous. Since opioids are the current boogeyman, people who deal in opioids face greater risks than those who deal in, say, cannabis. These risks necessitate concealment. The best way to conceal a chemical substance is to make it smaller and the best way to make a chemical substance smaller is to make it more potent.

Heroin and especially fentanyl are highly concentrated forms of opioids, which means they generally need to be diluted before use. Failing to dilute fentanyl properly can lead to a deadly overdoes. So the government has created the perfect storm by declaring opioids a prescription only medication and then taking away many of those prescriptions. And like typical government busybodies, instead of admitting that their policies may have been in error, they have doubled down, which is only exacerbating the situation.

Promises, Promises

There was a lot of anger when Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were arrested for, apparently, being black in Starbucks. Some people have claimed that there were other grounds for the arrest but form what I’ve found, and I admit that I hasn’t spent much time digging deeply into this so I could be incorrect, the arrest was for being black in Starbucks. But the reason for the arrest is irrelevant. What matters is the public’s perception of the arrest. That perception has caused a not insignificant amount of heartache for both Starbucks and the City of Philadelphia, which employs the law enforcers who performed the arrest. The City of Philadelphia, not surprisingly, decided to settle the matter with a payoff. However, it got off cheap:

Two black men arrested for sitting at a Philadelphia Starbucks without ordering anything have settled with the city for a symbolic $1 each and a promise from officials to set up a $200,000 program for young entrepreneurs.

Emphasis mine.

Promises from politicians aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Nelson and Robinson would have been better off taking the $200,000 and setting up the program themselves because I guarantee that the city is going to sweep its promise under the rug as soon as the public forgets about the entire matter. If Nelson and Robinson somehow do manage the make the city go through with its promise, the officials tasked with doling out the money will certainly find a way to disqualify everybody who isn’t politically connected. That’s how government programs work.

Overall, this was good news for Philadelphia and bad news for black people who frequent Starbucks because now neither the city nor its law enforcers have any motivation not to arrest people for being black in Starbucks.

Private Gun Registries

Gun control advocates haven’t had as much success politically as they had hoped. While a few states took measures to punish gun owners who did nothing wrong, the federal and most state governments left well enough alone. However, politics is just one way to forward your agenda. Some gun control advocates, the ones in actual positions of influence, are looking into implementing a private solution:

The financial companies have explored creating a new credit-card code for firearms dealers, similar to how they code restaurants, or department stores, according to people familiar with the matter. Another idea would require merchants to share information about specific firearm products consumers are buying, some of the people said.

Such data could allow banks to restrict purchases at certain businesses or monitor them. The talks, which are informal and might not lead to any action, have occurred against the backdrop of the national debate around guns in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., high-school shooting, which left 17 dead.

While the article notes that such a mechanism could be used to restrict gun purchases, it could also be used to establish a private registry.

A national gun registry has been at the top of the gun control advocates’ wish list. They know that confiscating firearms in the future would be far easier if gun owners were known to the State. But the politicians have so far been wary of implementing such a registry. If, on the other hand, financial institutions tracked which of their customers made firearm purchases, they would possess a de facto registry. Moreover, it would likely be a registry accessible to the federal government since it could subpoena the information.

Admittedly, this kind of registry would be easy enough to avoid by just paying cash for firearms. But such a strategy would only work if cash remained legal tender, which is something government busybodies are working to change.

Encouraging Black Market Alcohol

Have you heard the news? Prohibitionism is trendy again! It shouldn’t surprise anybody that alcohol has landed in the crosshairs of world governments again. After all, these governments have been waging a multiple decade war against every chemical substance that brings an ounce of joy to people’s lives. The latest strike by neoprohibitionists is Scotland’s decisions to set a minimum legal alcohol price:

It is the first country in the world to implement such a law, with the Scottish government believing its introduction will save lives.
The new legislation sets a 50 pence (approximately 70 cents) minimum price per unit of alcohol. Anyone licensed to serve alcohol in the country — in shops as well as bars and restaurants — will need to follow the new pricing laws.

One unit is 8 grams of alcohol, which in terms of drinks is equal to a 25-milliliter shot of 40% alcohol, such as whiskey, or 76 milliliters of wine at 13%. A standard 175 millileter glass of 14% wine in the UK is 2.4 units. In the United States, a standard drink is 14 grams of alcohol, equal to 148 millilters of table wine.

I can only assume that the politicians who passed this law are actually secret agorists. This law, like all forms of alcohol prohibition before it, will result in more alcohol business going underground.

Anybody who has researched Prohibition in the United States is well aware of the fact that alcohol didn’t cease to exist during that era. Alcohol actually flourish. People made their own bathtub gin, built their own stills, brewed their own beer, opened speakeasies, and found other ways to get the alcohol they desired in spite of the law. A lot of gangsters made a literal fortune from bootlegged alcohol.

People don’t stop consuming alcohol when a bunch of government busybodies decide to ban it or make it prohibitively expensive. If legal alcohol becomes too expensive, people opt for tax-free illegal alcohol instead.