Chronicling the depravities of the State.
Part of the reason the battle for gun owner rights is so easy to fight these days is because our opposition’s lies are so easy to point out. Miguel over at Gun Free Zone caught the Violence Policy Center lying yet again.
Namely they claimed Louisiana has the highest rate of gun-related deaths in the United States when in fact Washington D.C. (you know that federal district with extremely tyrannical gun control laws) does.
Dennis Henigan, the President of the Brady Campaign, has another article up on the Huffington Post, and as usual it’s full of fear mongering and blatant lies. It’s almost comical to read through his pieces because they make a lot of claims but never have citations to back those claims. In the scientific community making claims that aren’t backed by evidence gets you laughed at and usually ostracized by your fellows until evidence is brought forth. I think it’s time that we started treating the gun debate like a scientific inquiry where all claims must be backed by evidence. Those of us on the side of gun ownership have been doing this for years so we can kick back for a while and relax, but those crazies in the anti-gun community need to pony up.
For some fun I’m going to go through some of the article’s claims because it entertains me:
Remember two summers ago when most Americans were appalled by the sight of guns openly carried by protesters at presidential speaking events and town hall forums on the health care issue?
Remember two summers ago when the anti-gun media tried to make the entire situation look like racial tension, even going so far as to fabricate evidence? If your side was willing to make shit up in order to push their agenda then you can bet your sweet ass that I’m going to demand evidence that demonstrates “most Americans” were appalled by the sight of guns being openly carried at those events.
When it comes to carrying concealed weapons, Perry certainly walks the walk. He has a concealed carry permit and proudly says that he carries a gun when he is out jogging.
I know you’re trying to make a case against Perry (which is really fucking easy by the way, I can’t believe you’ve fucked it up) but you have to realize that pro-gun people who are politically active far outnumber anti-gun people who are politically active. Thus this statement is going to cause more harm to your movement than good as it will improve the status of Perry in the eyes of the politically active pro-gun people. Usually if something works against your movement you simply ignore it and never bring it up.
He didn’t respond by saying the question is ridiculous. He didn’t say that in the close quarters of a rope line, with a multitude of people pulling and tugging at him, a gun could easily drop to the ground or be taken from him.
That’s why police standing in front of protest lines have their guns taken from them all the time… wait never mind, that doesn’t happen. Henigan this claim is idiotic, provide some proof of this happening or shut the Hell up.
He didn’t say that an armed candidate would be a nightmare for the Secret Service.
It must be quite the nightmare being the Secret Service actually taught Obama how to shoot.
Rick Perry apparently doesn’t think the question is ridiculous. In fact, his sarcasm suggests he has no objection to political candidates carrying guns to campaign events; he seems to imply that he may do so himself. One thing is clear. The governor has been so thoroughly marinated in pro-gun ideology that he is unashamed about taking it to its logical extreme.
There you ago again, making Perry sound favorable in the eyes of the politically active pro-gun population. I guess you’ve has been swimming in cognitive dissonance so long that you believe politically active anti-gunners outnumber politically active pro-gunners.
I wonder if this thought ever occurred to Rick Perry: If a would-be presidential assailant is undeterred by Secret Service agents with Uzis, why would he be deterred by a presidential candidate packing heat?
Objection, relevance? A potential assailant isn’t going to deterred by knowing that Perry isn’t carrying a gun so this entire statement is completely meaningless.
Yes, it is a good thing that senators can’t carry guns onto the Senate floor because the presence of guns, even carried by well-meaning, law-abiding citizens, increases the risk that arguments and conflicts will escalate to lethal violence.
Let it be known that I’m declaring bullshit, either provide evidence of this happening or shut the Hell up. I’m not aware of a single case of an argument between one or more people legally carrying a firearm that escalated into a shoot out. You keep making this claim Henigan but so far have yet to provide any evidence.
It is the same reason that our national parks are less safe because (due to legislation sponsored by Senator Coburn himself) concealed carry of weapons is now permitted within their borders.
Once again evidence is needed, or as Wikipedia would say, “[citation needed].”
It is the reason that our streets, restaurants and coffee houses are less safe in states that have made concealed carry easier.
Again, you need to provide some evidence. This blog, as well as many other gun blogs, contain tons of evidence that demonstrates that violent crime has been dropping even though carry laws have continued to be liberalized (using the classical definition of the word).
It is the reason that college campuses remain far safer than the gun-saturated communities that surround them, because the gun lobby has been foiled in its efforts to force colleges and universities to allow concealed carry
You can’t compare apples to oranges. A proper statement would be, “It is the reason that college campuses that continue to ban students and faculty from legally carrying on site have a lower rate of gun-related crime than campuses that allow students and faculty to legally carry on site.” Of course that statement would also be false but at least it would be a comparison of like things.
They may well be the way things are in an American nightmare where, in political discourse, the guns speak louder than the rhetoric.
That’s why so many political debates between people carrying firearms turn into shoot outs… never mind, once again that’s not the case which makes Henigan’s statements irrelevant.
The stupidity… it hurts. It seems the mayor of Salt Lake City, Ralph Becker, is pushing an ordinance that would make it a offense (punishable by a fine of course) to idle your engine for more than two minutes:
And it has persuaded Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker to fight back. He wants to outlaw vehicle idling (beyond two minutes) as a means to cleanse the air. His proposed “idle-free” ordinance, which carves out exemptions for defrosting, extreme temperatures, emergency vehicles and work trucks — while carrying a fine of up to $160 for a second offense — gets its first airing Tuesday before the City Council.
While the environmentalists are jacking off to how awesome this legislation is I’ll just laugh at the fact that this law can be easily bypassed by tapping my gas petal every one minute and fifty-nine seconds.
People seem to have forgotten about a concept often referred to as a “job.” This concept revolves around the voluntary exchange of labor for another good, usually money. As this concept seems to be lost on many people I’m going to explain it in detail.
As a person you have a right to self-ownership which necessarily includes the ownership of your labor. Life is easier when people utilize division of labor, having some people do certain tasks while others do different tasks. Division of labor works on the basis of exchange where one person gives their labor in exchange for the labor of another. Oftentimes instead of directly giving labor a person will exchange the product of their labor from a previous exchange. Generally people except money as the exchange for their labor and use that money to make further changes. Thus a “job” is nothing more than an exchange of labor between two individuals.
The concept of a “job” is pretty simple but there are some additional complexities. Of all these complexities the most obvious is the fact that certain “jobs” require more knowledge than others which puts a limit on the number of people capable of performing the required labor. Being a limit exists on the number of people capable of performing the labor those who possess the required knowledge usually demand a higher rate of exchange for their labor. This is why a computer programmer can get paid $100 per hour of labor while a person who unloads trucks at a convenience store only gets paid $7.25 per hour of labor.
There were hundreds of foreign students who apparently never learned about this concept and thus decided they were working too hard at a Hershey’s plant and walked out:
Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.
The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.
In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.
Emphasis mine. Note that the labor being performed requires very little knowledge which means most people are quite capable of performing it. Since so many people are capable of packing and moving boxes the amount of exchange that can be demanded for the labor is small. Usually this type of labor is called “unskilled.”
Still the students felt the exchange they were receiving for their labor wasn’t enough and decided instead to walk out and receive nothing. Still my favorite complain has to be the following:
“There is no cultural exchange, none, none,” said Zhao Huijiao, a 20-year-old undergraduate in international relations from Dalian, China. “It is just work, work faster, work.”
Welcome to America, our culture at one time was built upon work. Work is how this nation was able to enter the industrial revolution and create the concept of the assembly line. Work is what lead people to create household devices that people now take for granted such as computers, refrigerators, and microwaves. None of these would have been possible if people didn’t work and the American culture used to revolve around working hard to achieve what was often referred to as the American dream. So you are receiving a cultural exchange by working as it was part of the culture (I keep saying was because fewer and fewer people seem to be willing to work).
Another part of the American culture is the concept of not only bitching about a bad situation but doing something about it. If you don’t feel you’re receiving fair exchange for you labor you’re more than free to go elsewhere or, better yet, start your own business where you’ll have to work even harder in order to make money. This comment is also worth gold:
“You stand for the entire eight hours,” she said. “It is the worst thing for your fingers and hands and your back; you are standing at an angle.”
That’s called a “shift.” A “shift” is a span of time the person making an exchange for your labor wants to reserve your labor for. Generally these “shifts” are about eight hours although sometimes they can be shorter or longer. Finally these students received another cultural exchange:
The students said they decided to protest when they learned that neighbors in the apartments and houses where they were staying were paying significantly less rent.
“The tipping point was when we found out about the rent,” Mr. Efobi said.
Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. “We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,” Ms. Ozer said.
That’s called getting fucked by the government and isn’t strictly a United States thing. The State Department made you pay for visa, brought you over, and deducted whatever money they desired from your paychecks (when they do it to citizens it’s called taxes). Welcome to America, I hope you enjoy your stay.
OK mainstream media I get it, you absolutely hate Ron Paul. You hate him so much that you’re willing to simply ignore his existence and pretend that he’s not in the presidential race. But even with your hatred taken into consideration giving Rick Perry credit for bringing the Federal Reserve into political conversation is a bit much:
Perry has proven himself to very quotable early into his entrance into the campaign. His most notable quote was a not-so-guised criticism of the Federal Reserve and Chairman Ben Bernanke. Actually, forget guised critique, the cowboy from Paint Creek, Texas took a double barreled shotgun to the Fed with the following statement at a campaign event in Iowa:
“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”
Perry could have chosen his words more carefully, but the interesting takeaway is that he is currently the front runner in the Republican field, could realistically become President, and has in one of his earliest campaign appearances taken a direct shot at the Federal Reserve. Historically, a critique of the Federal Reserve has been left to the devices of more fringe candidates (enter Ron Paul), as the Fed has become an accepted institution in America. Not so anymore.
Whether the nature and organization of the Federal Reserve truly becomes a central campaign issue over the next 18+ months is yet to be seen, but if it does Americans should welcome it. With the proliferation of Keynesian economists in America over the last eighty years, the majority of Americans have largely accepted the role of the Federal Reserve in their economy despite the contra voices of economists such as Milton Friedman.
Apparently crazy uncle Ron doesn’t count because he’s a fringe candidate that nobody’s ever heard of. I bet that belief would go away if Paul did well in a major straw poll somewhere… man that would shut them all up.
Honestly I don’t know what else I can possibly say about this that the mere existence of this article hasn’t. The media is literally conspiring to completely ignore Ron Paul in every way, shape, and form. They’re even giving credit to other candidates for work that Ron Paul’s been doing for decades. The Federal Reserve has been Ron Paul’s major issue, that’s what he does. This article is like giving credit for the theory of relativity to Steven Hawkings simply because the author didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of Albert Einstein (this analogy does fail a bit since Steven Hawkings is fucking awesome and Rick Perry isn’t).
It is often said that the difference between a good economist (also known as an Austrian economist) and a bad economist is that a good economist is capable of seeing the actual complexity of economic decisions and all of the different affects such decisions had. People who advocate government programs and taxes are bad economists because they can’t wrap their heads around the actual root of most problems, government.
A friend of mine send me a link to a petition that is trying to urge Congress to place a tax on high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). To many people this idea sounds grand because HFCS has been linked to an increase in obesity in the United States. What these same people don’t understand is why HFCS was every created in the first place. A bunch of companies didn’t get together one day with an agenda of trying to create an evil product that would harm customers (this seems to be what many people think), they got together because the price of sugar was much greater than the price of corn. Why was sugar so much more expensive than corn? Because there are taxes and quotas placed on imported sugar as well as governemnt subsidies for corn producers.
The combination of these two elements has create an ecosystem where it’s much cheaper to produce HFCS than to use natural sugar. Once again we find that the government is the root of a problem yet people want that very same government to fix it. If you want to stop the use of HFCS don’t demand the government tax it, demand the government remove taxes and quotes on imported sugar and eliminate corn subsidies. Once those two things are done the price of corn will increase and the price of sugar will decrease making the use of natural sugar more attractive.
So Obama came to the small Minnesota town of Cannon Falls a couple of days ago on his Tour of Economic Destruction. I would have reported on it earlier but there were far more important and interesting things to write about such as my distaste for new trends in the first person shooter genre of games. Either way he came, he saw, and he accomplished nothing (his tour is turning into his presidency already). The Red Star has a small piece on the President’s visit and one of the shittiest live blogs I’ve ever seen about anything (if anybody from the Red Star is reading this please hire some people at Engadget to consult you on doing proper live blogs in the future).
As this is the Red Star the article and live blog both tout the President as the man who will deliver us from evil and vanquish all that may harm us. In reality Obama is a moron who, like almost every other politician out there, doesn’t have a clue on how to actually fix the economy. Instead of discussing the economy (which is the supposed purpose of this tour) and how he’s going to “fix” it the President’s visit seems to be nothing more than the beginning of his taxpayer funded campaign for the next presidential race. One of my favorite quotes from the article was the following:
Responding to a question about the legal challenges to his health care reform bill, Obama noted that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “instituted the exact same” individual mandate in Massachusetts.
“This used to be a Republican idea by the way, this whole idea of the individual mandate,” Obama said. “And suddenly it’s like they got amnesia. ‘Oh this is terrible. This is going to take away freedom for Americans all over the world, all over the country.'”
OK Obama I get it, you get your rocks off but forcing people to do your bidding. Because this masturbatory pleasure ends when people start calling you on your tyrannical activities you feel the need to justify why you did what you did so the serfs will shut up. But claiming that something was a Republican ideal isn’t a valid justification for anything. On top of that most Republicans wouldn’t consider Romney one of them in any real sense thus saying, “But Romney did it so that means the Republicans support it!” is stupid and meaningless. Further demonstrating his tyrannical tendencies Obama had this to say:
Noting that it was “not election season yet,” Obama said he had to mention a recent Republican presidential debate in which candidates said they would not take a deal that offered $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases.
“Think about that,” Obama said. “I mean, that’s just not common sense.”
Although I don’t agree with the Republican’s justification for not raising taxes (their justification being that the Democrats oppose it therefore they support it) when you look at taxation for what it really is the refusal to raise taxes is common sense. Raising taxes increase the amount of money the government steals for its citizens victims (might as well call us what we really are). Increasing taxes increases the criminal activity of theft and therefore should be avoided at any and all costs. On top of that taxes aren’t revenue, so stop claiming otherwise.
I know several people who constantly claim that they would be more than happy to pay more taxes. Every time I hear somebody state this I tell them that they can write a check Bureau of Public Debt anytime they feel the amount of taxes they’re paying is too low. You know what? To this day I’ve not had one person take up the offer and thus I consider them all a bunch of hypocrites.
Warren Buffett has been receiving heavy media coverage after stating that he wants Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy (in Buffett’s case wealthy means anybody making more than $1 million). Well I’m pleased to say that I’m not the only one calling people on their hypocritical bullshit as another person has made the information available for Buffett to donate a few billion to the Treasury.
Once again if you say that you’d gladly pay higher taxes shut up and actually do it. Cut a check to the Bureau of Public Debt and send it to the following address:
Bureau of the Public Debt
Department G
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188
Until you’ve actually done that shut the fuck up about raising taxes. If you have actually done that then congratulations you’re no longer a hypocrite and I’m willing to listen to your arguments.
The United Kingdom (UK) government had a meeting dealing with means of quelling the recent riots and instead of coming up with viable solutions they’ve simply come up with means of further tightening their grip of citizens. Not only have them discussed means of tightening their grip over the citizenry but they’re also making empty promises:
“To the law abiding people who play by the rules, and who are the overwhelming majority in our country, I say: the fightback has begun, we will protect you, if you’ve had your livelihood and property damaged, we will compensate you. We are on your side.
Emphasis mine. You guys have been doing a bang up job of protecting people so far. Why would the victims of the rioters believe their government is going to protect them now? Why didn’t the government start protecting the victims when the rioters came to loot and firebomb their homes? Give up? Because they can’t. There aren’t enough police in the entire UK to property defend the citizenry against all of the rioters. If the UK government was actually concerned with protecting the people living within their borders they would immediately life the ban on firearm ownership and allow people to have a means of self-defense.
Instead of allowing private individuals means of protection the UK government has come up with the following methods to curb the riots:
- To look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via social media when “we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality”
- Plans to look at whether wider powers of curfew and dispersal orders were needed
- New powers for police to order people to remove facemasks where criminality is suspected
- Courts could be given tougher sentencing powers
- Landlords could be given more power to evict criminals from social housing
- Plans to extend the system of gang injunctions across the country and build on anti-gang programmes, similar to those in the US
- He said the government would meet the cost of “legitimate” compensation claims and the time limit for applying would increase from 14 to 42 days
- A £10m Recovery Scheme to provide additional support to councils in making areas “safe, clean and clear”
- A new £20m high street support scheme to help affected businesses get back up and running quickly
- Plans for the government to meet the immediate costs of emergency accommodation for families made homeless
So you’re going to try enforcing curfew (I’m sure the rioters will go home at night if you tell them it’s the law), possibly suspend free speech by closing access to social networking sites, go after anybody wearing a mask, and spend taxpayer money to compensate the victims of violence who’ve been left defenseless because of your laws? Well I guess they have this entire situation solves and everybody can return to their tea and biscuits. Mission accomplish boys!
You can see me shaking my head as I type this but I must say the entire UK government must be a bunch of fucking idiots… never mind I already knew that.