The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf? Apparently Obama hasn’t.

Comments Off on The Boy Who Cried Wolf  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-03  ::  madlibertarianguy

Petulance

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

This is the administration showing its true colors, taking their ball and going home when they don’t get everything their way.

These park closings are nothing more than the administration’s way of making sure that John Q. Public feels the “shutdown.”¹ Knowing that the average American will barely feel a ripple, yet needing us to actually notice that the swamp is only running at 80% right now, Obama has chosen to spend more money on closing parks, many of which aren’t even funded by the federal government (like the open air World War II memorial which is open 24/7, privately funded, has no admission fees, and is never staffed by federal employees at any time of the day that was barricaded off and staffed by armed park police to make sure that no one can visit), shows his utter petulance. He’s throwing a temper tantrum like he’s a 16 year old girl told that she can’t have the Mercedes she’s always wanted. Grow the fuck up, Obama. This isn’t the fucking Choom Gang.

Comments Off on Petulance  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-03  ::  madlibertarianguy

Poor Wittle Babies

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

It looks like somebody’s got their panties in a bunch. WaPo:

Don’t call the federal workers waiting to buy lunch from downtown Washington’s food trucks “nonessentials.” It’s like being branded with a scarlet letter N, or ending up the punchline of a late-night comedy bit that’s actually not that funny when there are bills to pay.

Essential. Nonessential. These are the terms commonly, although not officially, used for employees who find themselves in one of two controversial categories: starting players or benched, during a partial government shutdown that is being threatened.

For the government workforce there’s increasing frustration over the labels — officially known as “excepted,” as in allowed to work, as opposed to those sent home or “non-excepted,” long-standing vocabulary that’s part of an effort to destigmatize what are considered offensive labels.

Whatever the terminology, the labels are raising anxiety levels inside government offices with supervisors starting to inform employees Thursday about which category they are in, said federal workers who were eating together in L’Enfant Plaza.

In Washington, where jobs often define a person’s sense of self-worth, people eating lunch talked about their prospects and eyed one another, laughing nervously about which group they would find themselves in.

“It’s like a stab in the back. Like being told in high school that you’re average and not in the honors classes,” said Steve Ressler, 32, who worked in Homeland Security for six years and now runs GovLoop, informally known as Facebook for Feds. “But it matters, because we need the most talented people to work for government on issues as important as food stamps or Syria. We don’t want the best being driven away by all this beating up on federal workers.”

Yes. I’d say the whole operation is like being in high school. You don’t want to be labeled as non-essential? Get a job that actually contributes to society and the economy rather than being a paper pusher at a bureaucratic organization. Because when the government labels your government job as non-essential, you know that you’re job exists only because government is a jobs program.

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No It Isn’t

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

It’s actually quite easy to hate Rand Paul, you just have to ignore the facts of how he’s conducted business during his time in the Senate. Once you put principals ahead of principles, hating a man is super easy. This isn’t to say that one must necessarily agree with all of his positions

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Less Free

Friday 20 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Why the United States has fallen dramatically since 2000 as a country that had routinely been in the top 3 worldwide for economic freedom:

The authors [of the Economic Freedom of the World 2013 Annual Report] attribute the massive plunge with regard to Legal Systems and Property Rights largely to the “use of eminent domain to transfer property to powerful political interests, the ram[i]fications of the wars on terrorism and drugs, and the violation of the property rights of bondholders in the auto-bailout case.” But the U.S. has declined in all areas ranked by the index: Size of Government, Legal Systems and Property Rights, Sound Money, Freedom To Trade Internationally, and Regulation. In economic terms, the U.S. is not just a little less free than it was in 2000, but far less free. And it’s much less attractive to international investors and entrepreneurs as a place to try to build businesses and create wealth.

A decade of governments stealing from private landholders in order to sell said land to the politically connected, the community destroying war on drugs, the bank and individual freedom busting war on terror, government removing liability from private debt holders from having to pay their debts, blistering levels of government spending alongside massive growths in the size and scope of government, the obliteration of the dollar in an attempt to keep housing prices artificially high, and tomes of regulatory hurdles have made economic transactions of all kinds more expensive and more difficult. The common thread? Government. Please, Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. The. Way.

And to rub highly regulated salt in to the wound? Those who rely on the taxes and regulatory burdens that the rest of us are suffering from are living phat. They’re ahead nearly 25% over the last decade while the rest of us actually suffer the consequences of their actions.

Comments Off on Less Free  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-09-20  ::  madlibertarianguy

Reason 1,255,002

Thursday 19 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Students being suspended from school for a boy voluntarily turning in a pocket knife when he realized he had forgotten it in his pocket.

In his pocket, his son had a knife. He’s a hunter and uses it in the woods – in fact, he had just used it.

“He was cutting branches and what not with it,” Schaffner said. “Just forgot he had it in his pocket.”

There is no metal detector, no bag check there, but Schaffner grabbed a security guard.

“Intentionally, willfully handed the pocket knife,” he said.

He even voluntarily wrote out and signed a statement, saying:

“I was in the woods behind my house at my tree stand and forgot to take my knife out of my pocket … came to the game and gave it to the security guard.”

With that, the Fox Chapel principal kicked him out of the game and then early Monday morning kicked him out of school for 10 days.

Government schools are about following rules, not making good judgments; those get you in trouble.

Comments Off on Reason 1,255,002  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-09-19  ::  madlibertarianguy

Rational Choices

Wednesday 18 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Even crack addicts make good choices when given choices.

“They didn’t fit the caricature of the drug addict who can’t stop once he gets a taste,” Dr. Hart said. “When they were given an alternative to crack, they made rational economic decisions.”

When methamphetamine replaced crack as the great drug scourge in the United States, Dr. Hart brought meth addicts into his laboratory for similar experiments — and the results showed similarly rational decisions. He also found that when he raised the alternative reward to $20, every single addict, of meth and crack alike, chose the cash. They knew they wouldn’t receive it until the experiment ended weeks later, but they were still willing to pass up an immediate high.

According to Hart’s studies, drugs are rarely the problem, but the underlying factors which leads many drug addicts to use in the first place.

These findings made Dr. Hart rethink what he’d seen growing up, as he relates in his new book, “High Price.” It’s a fascinating combination of memoir and social science: wrenching scenes of deprivation and violence accompanied by calm analysis of historical data and laboratory results. He tells horrifying stories — his mother attacked with a hammer, his father doused with a potful of boiling syrup — but then he looks for the statistically significant trend.

Yes, he notes, some children were abandoned by crack-addicted parents, but many families in his neighborhood were torn apart before crack — including his own. (He was raised largely by his grandmother.) Yes, his cousins became destitute crack addicts living in a shed, but they’d dropped out of school and had been unemployed long before crack came along.

“There seemed to be at least as many — if not more — cases in which illicit drugs played little or no role than were there situations in which their pharmacological effects seemed to matter,” writes Dr. Hart, now 46. Crack and meth may be especially troublesome in some poor neighborhoods and rural areas, but not because the drugs themselves are so potent.

Those who have problems with drugs generally have other factors which predate any drug use which are then exacerbated by drugs. Drugs don’t cause people to become destitute; being destitute leads people to use drugs.

Comments Off on Rational Choices  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-09-18  ::  madlibertarianguy

Need Help Guiding Your Mortars?

Wednesday 18 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

There’s an app for that.

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I Wonder

Tuesday 17 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

I wonder if they’ll show his re-segregation of the federal government, and his criminalization of speaking out against the draft and World War I . . .

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No!

Tuesday 17 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The past couple of years have seen warmists, though still insisting that the world is doomed (DOOOOOOOOOMED!!!) because of the greenhouse effect global warming climate change, start to walk back their dire predictions as each and every one of them have come NOT to pass. They’ve tried to insist that the warming that hasn’t happened for over a decade, and that wasn’t a part of any of their fortune telling models, is “completely consistent” with their predictions, or tried to claim that the heat is being trapped by the Pacific Ocean while it awaits its inevitable release, bringing the downfall of humanity and the destruction of the earth for our evil human ways. But even the strongest proponents are starting to realize that maybe they’ve gone too far. CBS News:

Due to a complex system of measuring, a new study finds that global warming has been overestimated over the past 20 years.

According to the study from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, simulated climate models have combined a series of errors in external forcing and internal climate variability to show that global warming has progressed much faster than in reality.

I’m pretty sure that we didn’t need a study to show that each and every one of their predictions for global apocalypse was overreach. All we had to do was look. We still have ice in the Arctic (about 1,000,000 square miles more than last year), despite predictions, assumed from the results of various climate models that were said to have been conservative, claiming that by this year we wouldn’t have any ice at all. Temperatures have not been anywhere close to what any of the 44 models used by climatologists have predicted. In fact, for the majority of the period that global surface temperatures have been taken, they have been below the most conservative prediction, and significantly below the average temperature spat out by the various models (which is roughly what the IPCC uses when predicting warming patterns). Dr. Roy Spencer, former NASA climatologist notes “Obviously, there is a substantial disconnect between the models and observations for this statistic.” Obvious to those only who aren’t true believers in warming catastrophe. But there is good news for warmists: it seems that they have finally come to a conclusion that so-called “deniers” have been making for the last decade or so.¹ The conclusion of the study?

The study finds that, as a whole, the climate system is so complex that “there will always be uncertainties in assesments and projections of climate change.”

_______________
1. One needs to realize that there are various forms of global warming skeptics, and the vast majority of them aren’t anything at all like the “deniers” that warmists are fond of making their straw men with.

Comments Off on No!  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-09-17  ::  madlibertarianguy