Squeeze

Thursday 10 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Squeeze drug traffic lanes in the Caribbean in the 70s and 80s and the traffic shifts to Mexico. Squeeze Mexican traffic lanes through the 90s and aughts, and the traffic shifts right back to the Caribbean.

More of the cocaine smuggled to the United States is passing through the Caribbean, officials said, representing a shift in which drug traffickers are returning to a region they largely abandoned decades ago.

[. . .]

Last month, William R. Brownfield, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, told the Miami Herald that the Caribbean trafficking corridor of the 1970s and 1980s is “still around and will begin to look more attractive” to criminal organizations as they search for an alternative to Central America and Mexico.

[. . .]

The larger, more valuable shipments, have been accompanied by an increase in drug-related violence as cartels and their agents work to establish themselves and control territory.

Prohibition inspired violence ramps up, people die, and drugs still get through. In fact the drug market is so good that drugs are both more pure and cheaper than they have been in over 20 years. Way to go, drug warriors. You spend billions and billions per year on stopping drugs, and all you accomplish is dramatic rises in violence accompanied by better and cheaper drugs. It’s almost like it’d be better if you didn’t do anything at all. The prison state would be significantly diminished, fewer people would die as a result of prohibition which creates incentives for drug cartels to perpetrate violence in order to protect lucrative profits, and the government would stop wasting taxpayer dollars which, since the beginnings of the drug war, add up to well over a trillion dollars.

Comments Off on Squeeze  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-10  ::  madlibertarianguy

Aggression

Thursday 10 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Johnathan Carp, former combat medic in Iraq, on modern day police tactics:

The shooting on Capitol Hill of Miriam Carey, an unarmed woman who refused police commands to stop her car, was a familiar situation for any veteran of the Iraq War, with one significant difference — rather than moving through a progressive escalation of force while attempting to defuse the situation, Capitol Hill police officers went straight for their firearms and shot to kill. Since returning from my service as an Army combat medic in Baghdad six years ago, I have watched American police become more aggressively violent than my fellow soldiers and I were ever trained to be.

[. . .]

Police militarization is a hot topic lately, especially in libertarian circles, but American police are beyond anything contemplated by the American military. While abuses certainly occurred in Iraq and elsewhere, our procedures as soldiers in a war zone were designed to avoid violence and protect the lives of the Iraqis, and we understood that that meant accepting some risk ourselves as soldiers. American police today appear unwilling to accept any risk whatsoever and seem willing to kill anyone and anything that could possibly be seen as a threat; according to the chief of the D.C. police, Cathy Lanier, these police officers “did exactly what they were supposed to do.”

While Lanier’s statement may be true in terms of police policy, we cannot accept those policies. Deadly force cannot be the first and last choice for dealing with any potential threat, and police officers must be trained to strive always to protect the lives of citizens, especially of suspects. Policing is a dangerous job, but as someone who has held another dangerous job, I must say that our American police need to understand and accept the risks they take when they accept the badge and understand that they are there to protect others before themselves.

(Emphasis mine)

Cops use deadly force regularly for three reasons: 1) the public has not yet reached a point where the police opening fire with little regard to the safety of anyone but themselves is unacceptable. Most people seem to accept the boilerplate excuse of “OFFICER SAFETY!” as a valid excuse for any acts of violence, and few seem willing to question whether a 300 pound law enforcement officer should legitimately fear for his life because of a 12 pound terrier; 2) police departments refuse to find any fault in even the most egregious shootings perpetrated by police officers, and therefore cops are very rarely held accountable for what would be considered brutal crimes were they done by non-cops; 3) cops are cowards. Despite risk to their person being a part of their job, any risk is too much risk and so the attitude of shoot first, ask questions later has been employed.

Comments Off on Aggression  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-10  ::  madlibertarianguy

Wolf

Wednesday 9 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The president who cried wolf. Jeff Cox:

Washington’s efforts to scare Wall Street haven’t come to much so far.

The message hardly could be clearer from the Obama administration: An impasse over approving a continuing resolution that would keep government going threatens to morph into a crippling battle over the debt ceiling.

Wall Street should be petrified of such an occurrence and is taking the looming crisis too lightly, President Barack Obama told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.

In a statement Friday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned that Social Security recipients, disabled veterans and those on Medicare and food stamps face peril if the debt ceiling deal doesn’t get done.

Oh, and Wall Street should be worried, too, he said.

“The stock market, including investments in retirement accounts, could tumble, and it could become more expensive for Americans to buy a car, own a home and open a small business,” Lew said. “We cannot put our nation in the position of not paying its bills because Congress has refused to raise the country’s debt limit.”

Markets haven’t bitten, however.

But Wall Street isn’t concerned. It is, afterall the job of financial analysts to evaluate various aspects of the economy in order to evaluate risk and plan accordingly so that clients (and themselves) are as insulated as possible,¹ and with the non-event known as the sequester proving to have been little more than a minor blip on the overall economy, which Obama also told Wall Street would be disastrous, they just aren’t buying the hyperbole. But not only are they ignoring Obama because he’s had a long and distinguished history of predicting economic and social calamity if he isn’t granted his wishes, but because none of the available data compiled by Wall Street firms suggest that not raising the debt limit will have a huge impact on the broader economy.

Perhaps more importantly, however, bonds have barely budged.

The 10-year yield—considered a benchmark for the bond trade—actually is a few basis points lower since the shutdown began.

“Take a look at yields on 10-year Treasuries,” Nick Raich, CEO at The Earnings Scout and formerly of Key Private Bank, said in a report Friday. “They have been falling ever since the Fed decided not to taper. If bond investors really did not believe they would get their money back from the U.S., they would be selling their bonds left and right causing yield(s) to skyrocket.”

To be sure, credit-default swaps—used to protect against U.S. debt default—have risen this week.

And there was a hiccup in an auction of four-week notes, with the yield going from near-zero to 0.12 percent on fears of short-term redemption problems.

But, overall, Wall Street has refused to take the bait from an administration that has been peddling fear aggressively for the past several days.

“I think we get it resolved,” Kim Rupert, managing director of global fixed income analysis for Action Economics in San Francisco, said of the debt ceiling issue. “The experience from two years ago (during the last debt ceiling debate) wasn’t very helpful, but the fact that we came through virtually unscathed has lessened the fear at this point.”

Reaction elsewhere on Wall Street has been more vitriolic.

Hedge fund manager Keith McCullough, at Hedgeye Risk Management, called the default rhetoric “shameful” and said the market is ignoring Washington.

“Lew should be ashamed for spewing this fear-mongering nonsense,” McCullough said in a blog post. “As for the Bond Market…It doesn’t believe a single word from these guys on default risk. Otherwise yields would be ripping.”

So the bond holders who have a massive financial interest in the government paying its debt is not concerned about the government paying its debt. Hmm. Perhaps it has something to do with the purposeful obfuscation on the part of Obama and the media that purposefully conflates not raising the debt ceiling and the government defaulting, not being able to pay its bills, and those on Wall Street understanding that the narrative is a rhetorical move designed to strengthen Obama’s political position, and not one that sits in economic reality.

_______________
1. Though these systems designed to evaluate risk are not foolproof or immune from error, nor am I trying to imply that they are.

Comments Off on Wolf  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-09  ::  madlibertarianguy

The Important Stuff

Wednesday 9 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

It’s nice to know that our government schools are prioritizing the important stuff.

Comments Off on The Important Stuff  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-09  ::  madlibertarianguy

Under a Rock

Tuesday 8 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

You think there might be something under that rock?

The ATF agent who blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious has been denied permission to write a book on the botched anti-gun trafficking sting “because it would have a negative impact on morale,” according to the very agency responsible for the scandal.

After first trying to stop the operation internally, ATF Agent John Dodson went to Congress and eventually the media following the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010. Two guns found at the murder scene were sold through the ATF operation.

Dodson’s book, titled “The Unarmed Truth,” provides the first inside account of how the federal government permitted and helped sell some 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels, despite evidence the guns killed innocent people.

Dodson, who is working with publisher Simon & Schuster, submitted his manuscript to the department for review, per federal rules. However, it was denied.

Greg Serres, an ATF ethics official, told Dodson that any of his supervisors at any level could disapprove outside employment “for any reason.”

Serres letter said: “This would have a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix Field Division and would have a detremental effect [sic] on our relationships with DEA and FBI.”

Anyone who believes that Dodson’s book was denied publication because it might cause morale issues has also been under a rock. It’s also nice to know that this representative of the federal government doesn’t think enough of the inquiry to even use fucking spell check.

Comments Off on Under a Rock  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-08  ::  madlibertarianguy

A Worthy Mission

Tuesday 8 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

A worthy mission indeed. Janice Podsada:

[John P.] Mackey, 60, chief executive and co-founder of Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods and now co-author of “Conscious Capitalism,” is on a mission to rebrand capitalism and improve its reputation by demonstrating that love, passion, idealism and empathy play a central role in creating successful, competitive businesses.

Capitalism “is the greatest system in the world that’s ever existed. It’s lifted millions out of poverty,” Mackey told about 250 people who joined him Tuesday inside the Joslyn Art Museum’s Witherspoon Concert Hall. Mackey’s presentation was part of Bellevue University’s 5th Annual Signature Event to promote the “American success story and values” taught by the university’s undergraduate Kirkpatrick Signature series courses.

Business, which is based on the voluntary exchange of goods and services, has taken a beating and been “disparaged by intellectuals and elites,” Mackey said. Throughout history, its practitioners, including Jews in Western Europe and the Chinese in East Asia, have routinely been persecuted, he reminded his audience.

And yet, he said, capitalism has been the economic system that has boosted literacy and increased prosperity.

Preach.

Comments Off on A Worthy Mission  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-08  ::  madlibertarianguy

No Recourse

Tuesday 8 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

You know government is a fucked up institution when you can follow the law as it has written, yet it still has the power and means to take your children away from you. mlive:

When Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved the state’s Medical Marijuana law to help patients suffering with pain, little did they know that some patients would be hit with another malady…paranoia. If I legally use marijuana, could the authorities take my kids away from me?

The recent case of Baby Bree underscores that parents can lose custody of their children even if they legally grow and consume marijuana in their home.

A referee recently ruled that Maria and Gordon Steven Green were subjecting their six-month-old baby to possible danger because of grass.

“They were worried about the possibility of break-ins, armed robbery that kind of thing,” mother Green explains. “He (the referee) put that out as a possibility and that warranted immediate danger for the child.”

The Greens and their attorney contend they had a legal right to have the drug since she
is a licensed caregiver and father Green has epilepsy, but Child Protective Service workers, charged with protecting children from abuse, saw it differently and petitioned for the right to remove the baby from the home.

In round one, the state won.

Whoever in CPS decided this case deserves a serious ass kicking. Not some schoolyard pushing and shoving bullshit, but a straight-up beat down. Then a series of criminal charges also seems appropriate.

Comments Off on No Recourse  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-10-08  ::  madlibertarianguy

The Crux

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The crux of the AGW debate from the POV of “deniers.”

With the IPCC now issuing the first segment of its latest mammoth study on the same topic, readers should take the NAS pronouncement with a large grain of salt—and the IPCC report too. This is an attempt to change the subject and ignore the elephant in the room: the crisis in “consensus” climate science arising from the growing mismatch between model-predicted warming and observed warming.

Less warming means smaller climate impacts, and less ostensible need for radical changes in the way we live to deal with them.

The urgent issue in climate science today is not whether man-made global warming is real but whether the climate models that scientists use to predict it are realistic enough to assess future climate change and inform public policy. And scientists themselves are pointing this out.

The real, observable evidence increasingly shows that the models, which are no more than computer simulations based on the data and assumptions that scientists currently think are relevant, are way out of line with the changes that scientists are able to measure. And the gap is widening.

The idea that something is fishy with the “science” is corroborated by the fact that the reports which supposedly describe the science, are not science, but politics disguised as rigorous scientific consensus and designed to elicit prescriptive policy preferences.

The lull in global warming has been noted by skeptics to show the flaws behind the science and the theory that human activities, primarily through burning fossil fuels, causes global temperatures to rise.

This has some governments worried, reports the AP, as documents show that the U.S. government along with some European nations tried to convince the report’s authors to downplay the lack of warming over the past 15 years.

The AP reports that “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.”

“The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean,” the AP noted. “Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics. …Using 1999 or 2000 as a starting year would yield a more upward-pointing curve. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for skeptics.”

Concern by governments over the lull in warming comes ahead of the deadline the world has set for reaching a global climate agreement in 2015. This report would serve as the scientific underpinning of such an agreement.

“This is the culmination of four years’ work by hundreds of scientists, where governments get a chance to ensure the summary for policymakers is clear and concise in a dialogue with the scientists who wrote it, and have the opportunity to raise any topics they think should be highlighted,” Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the UN’s climate authority, told the AP.

(Emphasis mine)

And it’s not just “deniers” who would agree that something with how the science is presented is fishy. Some scientists are skeptics too.

“I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed it was 95 percent sure that global warming was mainly driven by human burning of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. The I.P.C.C. also glossed over the fact that the Earth has not warmed in the past 15 years, arguing that the heat was absorbed by the ocean.

“Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean,” Lindzen added. “However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.”

“However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability,” Lindzen continued. “Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.”

And Lindzen isn’t the only one. A former warming alarmist, Judith Curry of The Georgia Institute of Technology agrees with his assessment that the 95% “consensus” is bogus being as there is more uncertainty now in light of the various climate models used to calculate global warming and the actual observations of what has actually happened differ greatly.

But even if one completely dismisses the presentation of the science, you’ll need to address the vast chasm between the predictions of climate change science in the primary literature and the reality of what has actually happened in the real world. What has been imagined by climate scientists has not been corroborated by reality. We still have summer ice in the Arctic despite predictions from just 6 years ago that it would all have melted away by now. Temperatures are anywhere from 71%-300% lower than have been predicted by the various climate models that have driven scientists in their predictions of what a warmer earth would be like. In fact, of 117 predictions made by climatologists during the 1990s, 114 of them have been wrong (PDF). That’s 97.4% of the time the very scientists who have told us the end is nigh have been proven to be wrong. How the IPCC can claim 95% certainty of their hypothesis when 97% of their predictions, and all of their models, have been wrong, I’m not sure. And I’m certainly not buying in to the idea that telling me “CONSENSUS!” is a good enough reason to convince me that global warming or climate change or climate variability or whatever term warmists want to use this week is a real problem, as opposed to using SCIENCE as a cover to enact policy changes. Nor are an increasingly larger number of scientists.

So while the world may well be warming, the earth isn’t warming anywhere nearly as quickly as every single climate model has predicted (and hasn’t warmed at all in over 15 years) and the nefarious effects of global warming as predicted by scientists have been overwhelmingly wrong. Is climate change a problem? Not now it isn’t. Will climate change create problems in the future? No one knows, and those who are supposedly in the best position to tell us have been inarguably wrong in their previous predictions. And all that adds up the one point that many skeptics have been making for years: that the science to date is not yet solid enough, not yet accurate enough to use as the evidence needed to set world-changing policy which would involve massive wealth transfers and the dramatic rise in energy prices, altering economies around the world drastically.

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

It Continues

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Zero Tolerance Strikes Again.

A pretend game of cops and robbers landed a Florida elementary school boy with a very real suspension after he made a pretend gun with his thumb and index finger.

The mother of 8-year-old Jordan Bennett said her son was only playing with his friend at Harmony Community School in St. Cloud. She fears his one-day suspension, which was handed down Friday, wrongly labels Jordan as a violent person.

“There was nothing in his hand. He used his thumb and index finger,” Bonnie Bennett told WKMG-TV. “It was a game. He made no threatening advances or threats to harm anyone. No words were said.”

The mother of 8-year-old Jordan Bennett said she’s prepared to go to court to fight for the suspension to be removed from her son’s record. Jordan made a pretend gun with his hand while playing cops and robbers with a friend at school. (Photo: Shutterstock.com.)
“They took a child that has never been in trouble before and went to the extreme,” the mother continued. “A child that has no history of violence is now classified as a violent offender.”

The school, on the other hand, said the game crossed the line established by the district’s code of conduct. A school representative told WKMG while they can’t give specifics into the incident, it was reviewed and found in violation of school policy. The school did not specify the specific code violation that was grounds for the suspension.

Can we bulldoze government schools to the ground yet? They aren’t about education, or encouraging people to use critical thinking skills to make good decisions. They’re about teaching kids to obey without question.

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

Labor Unions

Thursday 3 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

When you’re Obama, and you’ve lost the labor unions, you know that your policy is utterly fucked.

Labor unions are among the key institutions responsible for the passage of Obamacare. They spent tons of money electing Democrats to Congress in 2006 and 2008, and fought hard to push the health law through the legislature in 2009 and 2010. But now, unions are waking up to the fact that Obamacare is heavily disruptive to the health benefits of their members.

Last Thursday, representatives of three of the nation’s largest unions fired off a letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, warning that Obamacare would “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

The letter was penned by James P. Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; Joseph Hansen, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union; and Donald “D.” Taylor, president of UNITE-HERE, a union representing hotel, airport, food service, gaming, and textile workers.

“When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act,” they begin, “you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat…We have been strong supporters of the notion that all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. We have also been strong supporters of you. In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure this vision. Now this vision has come back to haunt us.”

Perhaps you should have read it to find out what’s in it instead of deferring to the Nancy Pelosi school of legislation and blindly supporting congress as they shoved that piece of shit down our throats along a party line vote.

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