Wednesday 7 August 2013
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Mark Steyn at National Review Online on the the militarization of America’s police in a nutshell:
Too much law enforcement in America has lost all sense of proportion: If you need six armed officers to police a nonagenarian in an old folks’ home, seven armed officers to police a 20-year-old female you suspect might have a beer in her shopping bag, thirteen armed officers to terminate Giggles the baby doe, you’re doing it wrong — and you’re the real threat to public order.
Yep.
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2013-08-07 ::
madlibertarianguy
Monday 5 August 2013
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The real problem that we face as a nation is that by and large, we’re not worthy of our Dear Leader. Or so he says. Robert Fulford at The National Post:
Barack Obama is disappointed with the American people. They’re not up to his standards. He’s troubled by their inadequate values and their eagerness to make big money. He’s not at all pleased about the TV shows they watch.
U.S. infatuation with celebrity lifestyle killing the American dream: Barack Obama
U.S. President Barack Obama has hit out at society’s infatuation with celebrity culture and suggested it might be killing the American dream.
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Obama also criticized a change in society he said had led to the wealthier elements feeling the need to engage in “conspicuous consumption.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama visited one of Amazon’s distribution centres in Chattanooga, Tenn., and sat down for an interview with David Blum, editor of Kindle Singles, a section that deals with short e-books.
In Chattanooga, TN, this week, when he sat down with David Blum to record an e-book interview for Amazon, he offered a critique of the American spirit in 2013.
At the relatively early age of 51, Obama has turned into a codger. He’s become, not physically but mentally, one of those geezers who sit on the porch and reminisce about the days when folks were much more sensible, the days when Obama and his generation were young. When kids knew how to do without and weren’t so demanding.
Yes. The problem with government isn’t those running it, elected after promising to fix everything. It’s with the heady subjects who just aren’t up to the standards of our leadership.
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2013-08-05 ::
madlibertarianguy
Friday 2 August 2013
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Radley Balko on prosecutorial misconduct and its effects on society:
In asking Eric Holder to investigate Eric Holder, Obama illustrated the difficulty of adequately addressing prosecutorial misconduct as well as anyone possibly could: Prosecutors are relied upon to police themselves, and it isn’t working. A growing chorus of voices in the legal community says the problem is rooted in a culture of infallibility, from Holder on down. And it’s against this backdrop — this environment of legal invincibility — that we get the revelations of massive data collection by the National Security Agency, government employees who lie to Congress with no repercussions, and government investigators, courts and prosecutors operating in secret. (Emphasis mine)
Any system of government that lacks accountability is bound to end up fucked, and prosecuting people is no exception.
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2013-08-02 ::
madlibertarianguy
Friday 2 August 2013
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Harry Reid is full of shit about the calamity of sequestration? You don’t say . . .
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2013-08-02 ::
madlibertarianguy
Wednesday 31 July 2013
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Richard Epstein at The Hoover Institution on yet another Obama speech on the economy:
The President’s speech at Knox College needs some close deconstruction because it sheds harsh light on a problem that has dogged his domestic policy agenda from the beginning: intellectual rigidity. The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.
Because he does not understand rudimentary economics, he relies on anecdotes to make his argument. He notes, for example, that the Maytag plant that used to be in Galesburg is no longer in operation—it closed in 2004—but he never asks what set of forces made it untenable for the business to continue to operate there. He never mentions that Maytag’s relocation of its manufacturing operations to Mexico may have had something to do with a strong union presence or the dreadful economic climate in Illinois.
Unfortunately, our President rules out deregulation or lower taxes as a way to unleash productive forces in the country. Indeed, he is unable to grasp the simple point that the only engine of economic prosperity is an active market in which all parties benefit from voluntary exchange. Both taxes and regulation disrupt those exchanges, causing fewer exchanges to take place—and those which do occur have generated smaller gains than they should. The two-fold attraction of markets is that they foster better incentives for production as they lower administrative costs. Their comparative flexibility means that they have a capacity for self-correction that is lacking in a top-down regulatory framework that limits wages, prices, and the other conditions of voluntary exchange.
[. . .]
Indeed he constantly thinks of his greatest regulatory failures as his great successes. No other president has “saved the auto industry,” albeit by a corrupt bankruptcy process, or “taken on a broken health care system,” only to introduce a set of unworkable mandates that are already falling apart, or “investing in new technologies,” which tries to pick winners and ends up with losers like Solyndra. The great advances in energy have come from private developments, most notably fracking, and not from the vagaries of wind and solar energy, which no one has yet figured out how to store for future use when needed.
The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.
It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.
Obama comes from a world where the theories he espouses are never challenged and accepted without inquiry. He has surrounded himself with people who also come from a similar place. He has blinded himself willingly, even though he thinks it’s everyone else that is making the economy fail to bounce back because he refuses to examine his own policies and make the appropriate changes. He continues to double down on the same policies over and over again, yet wonders just why things aren’t getting better.
It’s time he look in the mirror.
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2013-07-31 ::
madlibertarianguy
Tuesday 30 July 2013
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We have people in this country who actually believe that closing underperforming public schools in a budget strapped district is a violation of human rights.
Chicago-based human rights advocates have sent a letter to the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights asking the international body to monitor Chicago’s school closings.
The “letter of allegation” sent Tuesday evening to Geneva, Switzerland, asks U.N. officials to investigate whether the closing of 49 Chicago elementary schools violates children’s human rights.
“The United Nations taking this issue up and giving it serious attention will really bring home to Chicago and the United States that there are violations occurring here of human rights, potentially, not just about a budget crisis,” said Sital Kalantry, the University of Chicago law professor who filed the letter on behalf of the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights.
“(It’s) not just about closing schools to save money, but you need to be concerned about the rights of children when you close schools,” said Kalantry.
*Shakes head*
Get fucking real people. There are children in the world who are suffering actual human rights violations and this is the shit you choose to signal out? This kind of complaint cheapens the actual atrocities in the world that deny people their human rights.
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2013-07-30 ::
madlibertarianguy
Tuesday 30 July 2013
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Thugs gonna thug. From The Detroit Fox affiliate:
A Good Samaritan snapped photos of what appeared to be two men impersonating police officers involved in a pistol-whipping and robbery outside a Citgo gas station on Detroit’s east side on July 21.
Once Fox 2 aired those photos, an even more disturbing picture developed.
“Several unidentified police officers were working this particular robbery case, recognized one of the suspects in the photographs as being a member of the Detroit Police Department,” Chief James Craig said Monday.
Now under arrest are two police sergeants, a 47-year-old officer and 20-year veteran of the Detroit Police Department and his 42-year-old buddy from the police academy, who is a former DPD cop and 17-year veteran of the St. Clair Shores Police Department. The later recently received a distinguished service award.
“In fact, they were police officers, just not working on-duty at the time,” Craig said.
It’s the true nature of thugs to do thuggy things, and they won’t let being cops stop them. Stay classy men in blue. Stay classy.
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2013-07-30 ::
madlibertarianguy
Friday 26 July 2013
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A new addition to the list of groups proclaiming that they shouldn’t have to participate in Obamacare: the IRS (AKA the federal agency responsible for managing the ass fucking the rest of us get from the law).
The Internal Revenue Service is responsible for enforcing multiple provisions in Obamacare, including a slew of revenue-raising taxes and fees, the individual mandate, and the disbursement of insurance subsidies for insurance purchased through the exchanges. But an almost too-obvious ironic twist, its employees don’t want to buy insurance through those exchanges themselves. The National Treasury Employees Union, a labor group that represents IRS workers, has set up a form letter for union members to send to their congressional representatives urging legislators not to pass legislation that could shift tax workers out of their current federal benefits and into the exchanges.
Fucking delicious.
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2013-07-26 ::
madlibertarianguy
Thursday 25 July 2013
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Can one assume that considering that only 28% of Americans approve of race-based admissions policies (*cough* Affirmative Action *cough*) that the media will promptly begin to describe every Democrat who supports affirmative action as a political outsider and out of touch with mainstream America? That the democrats are being held under siege by those on the far-left fringe of American politics?
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2013-07-25 ::
madlibertarianguy
Thursday 25 July 2013
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First it was those working on Capitol Hill. Then it was the unions. Now it’s city employees in Chicago, Obama’s hometown that supports him in everything he does, that’s starting to bitch about Obamacare. Fuck them. They wanted it, they can take in the ass just like the rest of us.
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2013-07-25 ::
madlibertarianguy