Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency. – H.L. Mencken
Since this link feature developed from my guest-blogging on The Agitator, it’s only fitting that Radley Balko usually outscores everyone else as a source of links; since I don’t really think he “tweets” or “retweets” that much more than most of the other people I follow, perhaps he and I just have similar ideas of what’s both interesting and worth calling attention to. This time around every link down to the video is from his Twitter feed, plus the video itself; the first two below the video are courtesy of Lenore Skenazy, and the last two before the cartoon are from Grace.
- “Drinking to escape” usually isn’t quite so literal.
- Cops murder unarmed man, then destroy the video evidence.
- Woman faces 20 years in prison for massaging horses without a license.
- If you think Democrats are any less anti-science than Republicans, you’re wrong.
- No matter how many times I see a story like this, it never fails to bring tears to my eyes.
- If Obama was that unhappy with the ambassador, couldn’t he have just murdered him with a drone or something?
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if a seagull carried off a camera while it was running, this is the video for you.
- So, is the dirty little pervert going onto the “sex offender” registry?
- Another mother arrested for the “crime” of letting her kids play outside.
- Tired of conflicting claims about US federal spending? Here’s the chart for the past 35 years, per capita and adjusted for inflation.
- Neighborhood association sues a 4-year-old girl because her playhouse is too pink.
- Old boyfriends are sometimes hard to get rid of, but this is ridiculous.
- What contempt for the First Amendment looks like.
- Police chief imprisoned for robbing stripper.
- Yet another awe-inspiring nun.
- The longest-lived organism on Earth is over 100,000 years old.
- NASA engineers predict a fusion drive will be feasible in about 50 years.
- The New Yorker was temporarily banned from Facebook for “violating nudity standards” with this cartoon. Seriously.
- Insurance companies want to charge you for accidents you haven’t had yet.
- …then after the Twinkies, they move on to the harder stuff, like Chocodiles and Ding Dongs.
- Roberts, not Smithee.
- Police suspect fowl play.
- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- Philadelphia persecutes man for cleaning up dangerous eyesore, demands he put all the rubbish back.
(Cartoon via Ms. Samantha; following items via Deep Geek, Jesse Walker, Melissa Gira Grant, Pee-wee Herman, Mike Siegel and Amy Alkon.)
Don’t know if you saw this one little doozey …
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/15/13876716-suspected-anti-islam-filmmaker-questioned-by-federal-probation-officers?lite
Apparently the feds figure this guy was the major player in the “anti-muslim” film. He’s also been convicted of some federal financial crimes and he’s on probation – not allowed to use a computer or internet …
Story claims that they wanted to know if he violated the terms of his probation and uploaded a video to the internet. Well, you just KNOW what video it is that they’re concerned about. However, so what if he DID upload it? Is this the kind of SERIOUS CRIME his probation was meant to stop? I don’t think so.
So he’s “brought in for questioning” by federal “probation officers” and released 30 minutes later. He doesn’t go home though – smart move on his part now that the cops have tipped off everyone in the world about exactly where he lives.
So, he’s on the run now – and hopefully he’ll be able to run fast enough from the islamo-idiots who will be after him.
This is a “chilling” thing for the government to do and the message can’t be misinterpreted … “step out of line on free speech – and your ass is ours”.
Of course – universal criminality makes it easy for them to grab each and every one of us is we get too “uppity” for them.
what laws are those that dictate the colour of a playhouse?have people gone mad?i also found sth great online,although its from three years ago.its a quote by Megan Fox,where she says she thinks actors are like prostitutes,since they are getting paid to feighn attraction and love and to kiss and touch one another,things that people in a monogamous relationship wouldnt do with someone whos not their partner. some people accused her of being dump,that actors just feign physical contact(wtf?)and for real actors like Kate Winslet acting is so much more than love scenes(is that why her most famous scene is where she leaves a handprint on a window in Titanic,because for hollywood actors and producers love scenes bear so little significance?).actually i think actors go much further than most sex workers will.every single one of them has to kiss multiple strangers on the mouth,most sex workers wont do sth that intimate.
Laida, to me – that story is just a big nothingburger.
There are no laws governing what color you can paint a playhouse. This was a ruling from a Homeowner’s Association (HOA) – which is like a “neighborhood nanny”. They’re charged with protecting property values and keeping the neighborhood a pleasant place to live. Usually they are found in the more UPSCALE neighborhoods and they are elected by the residents themselves. This family knew it was moving into a neighborhood with an HOA and, in fact – that’s the reason most people move into those neighborhoods, because they know their property values are a bit better protected in a neighborhood that won’t allow someone to park a double-wide trailer in their driveway and make the place an eyesore.
I really don’t have any sympathy for this family. I would NEVER live in a neighborhood that has such an HOA. Well, actually, my current neighborhood has an HOA – but it’s voluntary membership only which means it’s powerless to dictate anything to me.
I mean the rules are – that the HOA sets the rules – and they knew that before buying the property.
Another way in which actresses are more whorish: millions of people can watch them do their sex scenes, while ours are generally performed discreetly in private.
yeah,i was really glad to see that at least one actress is that honest and unpretentious.the pretention of some specific groups of people in reference to sex workers is more infuriating to me than the hypocricy of the rest of the population.actors,pop stars and celebrities in general is one such group,another is Brits.there is a recent uproar in Britain about student sex workers and of course the ongoing battle of councils against strip clubs and brothels.yet,every summer in Crete,Rhodes and many other islands we find it impossible to walk through a road especially outside nightclubs, because of the young brats from Britain who puke and faint because of the alcohol,flash everyone and even fuck on the streets.perhaps we should have vice cops arrest them and not release them until their parents come and get them.let them gather their embarrassement for children first,before they revoke a strip clubs license.they do cause public disorder,harass people and offend public decency in a way that not even streetwalkers and their clients do.i mean,bitch your daughter almost threw up in my shoes,does not even wear underwear and does not have the decency to fuck the guy, whom she just met in a hotel room but she does it on the street and probably without condom,what makes a whore bringing a more dangerous element to the neighbourhood,especially when she works indoors?and how come theese antics of students are more acceptable than earning a bit cash for their tuition,in a far more discreet and dignified manner?the third group has to be housewives,this needs no explanation as to why.
The major difference is that actresses make way more money. If you’re a mainstream actress, and you do a popular movie, you get residuals every time the movie is shown. You’re a member of SAG, and you have protections. If you do porn, none of that is true. You get paid once, for the scene.
If the big Hollywood actresses made less money, they would be less respected. A general rule of life in the USA is you’re fine as long as you make a lot of money, no matter how sleazy you do it. Wall Street is a fine example.
you remind me of the reality as shaped in Greece with the many unpunished politicians that stole millions worth of public money.steal a hen and you go to jail,steal a million and youre fine.
Same here. Plunder the nation from inside a corporate suite on Wall Street, and you’re fine. Steal a loaf of bread, and it’s all “tough on crime three strikes and you’re out.” In fact, you’ll be lucky if the cops don’t execute you.
During my legal researching days, I encountered several cases where people who committed three minor felonies (e.g., small thefts, as opposed to crimes against people) were given life without parole because of those three strikes laws. The not-so-Supremes were happy to let such travesties stand.
Exactly right. As Charlie Chaplin said, “One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow.”
That must have been from Monsieur somethingorother… hold on…
{googles}
Monsieur Verdoux, a movie I only know about because of Laura. She’s seen, probably, everything of Chaplin’s which still exists.
This was always the case, actually. Premiums are based on the statistical-actuarial odds that you’re going to have an accident over the term of the policy. These basically take that to the next level by electronically monitoring your driving, which presumably much more predictive of your odds of having an accident, for some period. On balance, more accurate predictions make for cheaper policies for good drivers, and since this shifts the predictors to malleable behaviors (and away from uncontrollable factors, such as age, race, etc) may encourage people to drive more carefully on average.
That isn’t really the point, though. Whatever you may think of the policy cost-wise, the fact is that they’re monitoring every move your car makes, and under laws already in effect any government agency can subpoena that information from them without your even knowing about it; in fact most companies don’t even wait for an official subpoena, and simply hand it over on a “request” because the Supreme Court ruled that the data is not yours but theirs, and that you “voluntarily” gave it to them by “freely choosing” to contract with companies that it’s impossible to live in the modern world without (or, in the case of insurance companies, that you are legally compelled to contract with).
The “black boxes” are already in the vehicles – most of them anyway. George Bush’s NHTSA mandated black boxes for all new manufactured autos by 2013. There was another law that Congress was mulling over earlier this year.
So I’ve already got ONE EDR in my vehicle and the big brother(s) (gov’mt and insurance) can’t seem to cooperate with each other so the insurance companies come along and want to put an additional EDR in my car. At what point does someone PAY ME for transporting these things around for them at my expense?
Ass, Gas, or Grass – NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE!!
Those are good points.
The fact that this is a mandated market is especially troubling vis-a-vis how “voluntary” your exposure to data tracking is. If you’re legally obligated to buy it, then the only semblance of (legal) choice you have left is from whom you can buy. In principle, this still allows you to buy a policy without the tracker, or even buy from an insurer that doesn’t use a tracker, but if this kind of system is as effective as I’m assuming they are, then they’re going to proliferate through the insurance market quite quickly. Once that happens, we’re all legally mandated to have data recorders in our vehicles all the time… or start walking everywhere.
Or drive without the insurance, and pay the hefty fine whenever you get caught. Not much of a choice set, is it?
It’s one of the reasons I gave up on cars and just moved downtown (next to 95% of my clients). A car would be nice, but I balk at the premiums.
One of the few disadvantages of living where I do is that a car is absolutely vital; getting to the nearest stores by horse, shopping and returning would literally take all day (8-11 hours), even if the road and town were horse-friendly (which they aren’t).
I’ve never been able to drive because of my eyesight. Sometimes not having a car is a curse but, given the control the government has over anyone who is dependent on a car, it’s also a blessing. It’s also a hell of a lot cheaper. 🙂
They’ve got to rush these requirements in before the self-driving cars come out, because then there won’t be any excuse for it. Those things will have so many fewer accidents than human beings that it’ll be hard to justify anything based on “a good computer gets a lower rate.”
It’s like the cops cracking down on illegal brothels just before brothels are legalized.
I’m going to call false equivalence on the Left & Right science issue.
Rejection of science on the Right looks like teaching creationism in schools, attempting to masquerade mythology as science, despite the fact that we understand more about evolution than gravity. Wanting labeling of GMO foods is ultimately pro-consumer choice, which should be encouraged and not prohibited*. Though IANAL, I suspect there’s a difference between compelling speech and prohibiting speech.
Transgenic crops are recent advances in technology (~1995), and though we’re apparently looking for scapegoats in the rise of autism, using it across the board in our food is unwise. Drugs undergo clinical trials on statistically significant populations and they occasionally miss significant side effects. Why are we trusting that which we all consume, every day, with no freedom to know the difference and choose accordingly? I do not understand it. The onus of evidence should lie with the people encouraging the change to GMO, not with the people trying to watch what they eat.
At the very least, GMO-free foods should be treated like organic foods, by allowing people to choose more expensive food that they perceive as safer.
Further, the article uses the FDA as an example of pro-science and anti-science on two different topics: pro-GMO but anti-thimerosal. Is the FDA pro-science or anti-science? I would suspect that the FDA is subject to regulatory capture rather than guilty of a bias against science.
I’ve noticed there are a lot of articles out there trying to say the two main parties-of-screwing-us-over are equivalent in a lot of ways, and occasionally they’re quite inaccurate once you get down to the details. Taking both parties as equivalent on all issues is the easy road.
*: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/18/fda-labeled-free-modification/
Except that on every important issue, they really ARE equivalent. It makes no difference to me if the people who send armed thugs to oppress me gain their positions by inheritance, education, election or appointment, nor does it matter if they’re motivated by “revealed truth” from people who claim to be speaking for the gods or people who claim to be “experts”. Tyranny is tyranny is tyranny, and pretending one kind of tyrant is “better” than another based on minor differences is self-deceptive, distracting and dangerous.
Would it be appropriate to characterize your concept of tyranny as resulting from a breakdown in trust (for the people in charge)? Or an opposition to authority in general? Or is there a point on the spectrum in between that I’m currently unaware of? I’m looking for how you determine legitimate authority, and the point at which the laws/legislatures should stop having authority.
Any “authority” which exceeds its mandate, acts in violation of the public trust, refuses to control itself, constantly increases its own powers and (most importantly) criminalizes private, consensual behaviors, is intrinsically tyrannical. The only “legitimate” authority any government can have is that freely given by each individual independently of the wishes of others and of any accident of his birth, unless he chooses to fall under that authority’s protective function by causing harm to someone else.
Okay, so where does science factor in? Is it an important issue? If so, where is the equivalence? Is it due to the process of achieving consensus? The fact that research gets portrayed in media as “settled” when it effectively isn’t, or vice versa? If not important, why is it in your “link soup”?
I ask because science is a tremendously important issue to me, and being cautious about transgenic food seems wise. I did not know it was one of my hot buttons until I read that article. Please forgive me if my questions are obnoxious, or if I’m now slicing hairs needlessly.
I can make a very good case that “organic” foods are unwise …
1. Crazy inefficient as far as modern farming practices are concerned.
2. As the world population increases – it’s important to get more efficiency out of agriculture to feed everyone. Transgenic foods – pesticides – they all contribute to more efficient agriculture without compromising safety.
3. “Organic” doesn’t necessarily mean “safe” since E Coli has been found on even “organically” grown crops.
4. “Organics” are more expensive, less appealing both visually and to the taste, and really are just a niche snobbish endeavor. You’re not gonna feed the hungry people on this planet with “organics”.
I’m going to assume the scare quotes are there to distinguish “organically grown foods” from hydrocarbon chemistry. If it’s not that, then I’d prefer some clarification.
1) I’m under the impression that this is accurate.
2) There are social problems to be dealt with. Last I heard, globally, there is enough food for everyone but there are places where distribution is the primary issue. My concern is on a larger timescale: with increased pesticide usage across the board, we are increasing the chances of unintentionally selecting for a mutant pest resistant to the pesticide. Like antibiotics, over-use is probably not going to be a long term strategy.
I’d love to see safety studies associated with long term low dosage pesticide exposure, but that is unlikely. In places where there is malnutrition due to scarcity of nutrients, transgenic crops are a solid idea, especially with the addition of nutrients.
3) Never said it wasn’t. I’m a pretty big fan of Prometheus, personally. But bacteria resistant to 3+ antibiotics is less likely to be obtained through organic chicken and pork (http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleID=1355685).
4) Cosmetic appeal, in my experience, is less than teling about the quality of produce. Some of the best tasting fruit I’ve ever had was a little bit ugly, though aside from being anecdotal, I suspect there are other factors.
As far as the comparison between organic and non-organic goes, did someone spontaneously do a Pepsi challenge with them? Or has there been some actual research on the taste difference (i.e. control for location, soil nutrients, water, light, etc. with different pesticide/fertilizer usage)?
http://blogs.webmd.com/food-and-nutrition/2012/09/5-mistakes-people-make-when-choosing-organic.html references the above article
I’m amenable to letting people spend more money for organic food and/or non-transgenic food, especially if it’s a springboard for people to pay attention to what they put in their bodies in our over-nourished culture. In addition, we might as well give people the option of being part of eventual epidemiology studies in either the control or experimental group.
Yeah, I’m going to call false equivalence, too. Between 250,000 and 500,000 children a year go blind because of the bias against GMOs expressed in the campaigns by groups like Greenpeace (anybody want to claim they’re anything but Left?) against solutions like golden rice. On the other hand, approximately zero people are materially harmed by the teaching of creationism, though some intellects might be stunted.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Oh, by the way, almost all “non-GMO” staple crops in the world today are the product of ancestors that were deliberately randomly mutated in the middle of the 20th Century with artificial radiation in order to produce more variations for selective breeding to choose among. If you buy “organic” food, you’re eating stuff with genes that were created by artificially bombarding plant chromosomes with ionizing radiation in order to make the chromosomes break up and recombine at random.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, deliberately inserts known genes of known effect into foods, and then subjects them to safety and environmental testing requiring both FDA and EPA approval.
If you think the latter needs to be labeled in the name of consumer choice, how much more should you be demanding labels on the former? The process of creating GMOs is far more controlled and monitored than the process that produced the grains in USDA-certified “organic” food.
Interesting, I was unaware of GP and their objection to Golden rice (just looking it up now). It had not occurred to me that some transgenic crops were to add nutrients, not just pesticides, even though the idea makes a lot of sense.
I would prefer labeling in both cases.
Thank you. I’m going to go read up on this.
Yeah, if I thought Bt corn was more or less the general case for GMOs, I’d look at it with a more jaundiced eye. (I think Bt’s relative safety compared to sprayed-on pesticides is well-established, and thus Bt is a net risk reduction, but it’s definitely the sort of thing you want to be cautious about.)
But I look over at golden rice, and we know, fundamentally, what vitamin A does. You have to be a little bit worried about unexpected interactions of the new gene with existing ones, but you can grow the rice in the lab and actually test it to see if you get any unexpected chemicals. If all you’re getting is “what’s usually in rice, plus vitamin A”, and then you test it on animals and it’s okay, and then you do human studies, and still nothing shows up . . . then the question becomes, how much to you weigh the tiny uncertainty against millions of blind kids a decade?
Yeah, ideally, you’d feed them a more balanced diet. That’s expensive and requires logistics and time and everything else that explains why they aren’t getting a more balanced diet already. Even distributing vitamin supplements runs a recurring expense and distribution difficulty. Distributing an improved rice seed once is a lot easier, and then just keeps working for years and years.
Possible drought-resistance, or salt-tolerance, or similar things that just make crops easier to grow fall somewhere in between Bt corn and golden rice. They definitely need to be studied for safety since we can’t be quite sure what secondary effects they’ll have, but improving the yields subsistence farmers get from now on means reducing hunger from now on. It’s not a panacea, but it does reduce suffering. But if the EU bans all GMOs from import (like it does), African countries will ban importation of the seed (like they do) to avoid risks of their commercial farmers winding up with fields that cross-bred with the GMOs and thus can’t be exported. And then kids go malnourished now.
I don’t have all that much objection to labeling requirements as such. But it’s part of a general anti-GMO effort that’s preventing the relief of real suffering. Mandating labeling is a tactic to make GMO food less salable by playing on general ignorance (“Frankenfood!”) and thus uneconomical to develop — and like in the case of the EU ban on imports, discourages uptake of even the most beneficial possibilities.
Which of course isn’t immediately obvious to someone who comes up to both sides already shouting at each other.
I’m going to agree that adding nutrients is a valid use of transgenic crops, especially in parts of the world where malnourishment is common. Pesticide usage does concern me, but I will have to educate myself more about conventional pesticide usage as compared to organic pesticide usage.
Regardless, or perhaps because, of my personal ignorance, resistance to the labeling makes it seem like a much larger issue: “why are they stopping us from knowing? is it really that important to their bottom line to keep us in the dark? it must be really bad!”
If we let companies voluntarily label their foods as being non-transgenic, and there will be people who care and people who don’t. The people who are okay with it will look at the people who are rabid about it and go “These foods taste fine, they’re cheaper… Those people? They’re crazy and have money to burn!” and the issue will become a non-issue much faster.
Did anyone else find it odd to see both “[…]nearly $1 million donated to state proponents of medical marijuana by Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive insurance company who has been advocating for such laws[…] and “Progressive’s device plugs in right under your steering wheel[…]” from the same company? I always figured that drunk drivers run through the stop sign, while stoned drivers wait for it to turn green!
I always figured that drunk drivers run through the stop sign, while stoned drivers wait for it to turn green!>/i>
LOL!
We have a joke here that a snowmobiler froze to death in front of a radio tower. Why? He was waiting for the red light to turn green.
Re: The New Yorker cartoon and Facebook. It’s definitely not the first time they’ve banned an established institution for breaking its “obscenity” policies. Students from the New York Academy of Art as well as Centre Pompidou in France have run afoul of Facebook for posting works of art containing nudity: Facebook Censors Pompidou’s Gerhard Richter Nude, Fueling Fight Over “Institutional Puritanism”. Not that the art world doesn’t have its own puritanical streaks, but still not anything like this.
Anti-Science
This essay spends almost as many pixels whining about “the liberal media” as it does whining about the only two examples they could find of Democrats being anti-science in any way. One has to wonder why FOX didn’t blow the lid off of these things. Perhaps because there were also Republicans jumping on the anti-vaccine bandwagon. Michelle Bachmann and Nikki Haley come to mind.
Did some Dems drop the ball on this? Did Obama follow his standard pattern of appeasement in order to win over conservatives who will never be won over? Yes and yes. But, it isn’t some Dem-only thing which offsets Republican denials of global warming or of evolution, much less both. This is truly a pox on both houses, and I wish there were a vaccine for it.
On the genetic stuff: the significant thing here is that there has been no Democratic Party attempt to ban genetically modified foods. The thing on genetically modified foods was labeling, so that individual people who, for whatever reasons, scientific, unscientific, religious, ethical, pseudo-scientific or whatever, oppose such foods, can avoid them. And of course those who think that genegeneered foods are wonderful can seek them out. This isn’t anti-scientific; this is respecting the right of consumers to know what they are buying, whether such consumers are pro-science or not.
This whole essay was an exercise in false equivalency.
Grave-Sitting Dog
Stories like this come out from time to time. There was a dog in Hawaii who would walk to the same park bench, wait for a couple of hours, and leave, every day for several years. It was the park bench where his owner had his fatal heart attack, and the last place the dog ever saw him. Eventually, the dog was found dead at that park bench. Some people claim to have seen the ghosts of man and dog, walking together.
Ambassador
I’m not sure what’s so bad about thanking a foreign head of state for giving condolences when an ambassador is murdered?
Seagull-Cam
I’m glad the bird didn’t swallow the camera.
Federal Spending
Assuming that increases in federal spending are a bad thing and that decreases are a good thing, then the best record on that chart is Bill Clinton: federal spending went down very slightly.
Pink Playhouse
It’s their neighborhood, they can mash this out. Not my concern. If the little girl puts a red light in the playhouse window, Astarte help her.
YouTube
This genie is out of the bottle. Take it off of YouTube and it’ll just show up at Dailymotion. I guess Obama wants to be able to tell the Islamic world, “Hey, I tried.” But populations living under a dictator (as many of these countries are or recently were) will not and in fact cannot understand that “the most powerful man in the world” can’t stop a video, so it’s pointless to try. Instead, we need to stop propping up their dictators, stop killing their people, and stop trying to run their lives. They aren’t just mad about this dumb movie; they’re mad about a LOT of stuff.
Rob a Stripper, Go to Jail
I notice he got less than a month for each $100, but ti’s something.
Awesome Nun
What privatization gets you.
Fusion in Fifty
They’ve been saying that for the last fifty years. But so much is going to become possible, and even affordable, in the next fifty years that I guess even fusion power should happen in that time frame.
Flamingos
Maybe the pink flamingos should go live in front of the pink playhouse.
Camera Camera
But, but, but what will monitor THOSE cameras?!
Last note reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s concept of “Breaking and decorating”
About the spending chart: how much did the private sector increase over that period? Even after accounting for population and inflation, I’d hazard that it grew a fair chunk too. Inflation isn’t pegged to per capita income.