Governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen. – Aristotle
Radley Balko is back to blogging regularly at The Agitator again; he restarted over the past couple of weeks but made the official announcement yesterday in a post which contained this fantastic and link-rich mini-rant: “Stop quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in defense of your censorious bullshit. In fact, stop quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes for anything. He was a racist, eugenicist, authoritarian asshole. I’ve never understood why progressives have thought so highly of him, back then, or now.” Balko was in top form this week, contributing every link down to the video via his Twitter feed. The video (which is here due to its coolness) comes via EconJeff, who also supplied the first two links below it.
- A swarm of cops with an attack dog and a SWAT team equipped with a tank, a helicopter and tear gas are dispatched for “high risk operation” of arresting a corpse.
- Congress literally doesn’t know what it’s doing.
- Cop shoots man in the back for jaywalking.
- The inherent sadism of prohibitionism.
- Freedom for me but not for thee.
- Paul Bunyan undressed here.
- The New Yorker gently mocks Facebook for banning that Adam and Eve cartoon I featured last week.
- How the future happened.
- The magnitude of the mess we’re in.
- Three congressmen praise Scientology.
- Malaysia declares V-neck shirts to be gay.
- Mentally ill man tased to death for shoplifting.
- A powerful, yet simple fable about faith in authority.
- Presenting the politician berry: all style, no substance.
- Sometimes you learn really awkward things about people after they die.
- Absolutely horrific account of how “sex offender” laws destroyed one man’s life.
- US government declares that male football players can subsist on the same amount of food as petite, sedentary girls.
This ad in favor of Colorado’s upcoming measure to regulate marijuana like alcohol is especially effective for anyone who knows what usually happens to dogs in drug raids:
- How ambitious and sleazy prosecutors literally made a federal case out of an internecine squabble among the Amish.
- The Secretary-General of the UN is against free speech, except for whatever kind governments decide to allow.
- “If the ice-cream store goes under, who knows what happens?“
- Police chief says people who use banned drugs are terrorists.
- He really puts himself into his art.
(Thanks to Walter Olson for the third item below the video, Tracy Quan for the fourth, Popehat for the fifth, Nun Ya for the sixth, Mike Siegel for the seventh, Luscious Lani for the eighth and Cthulhuchick for the ninth. The second-to-last one above the picture is from Lenore Skenazy, the last from Baylen Linnekin and the picture itself from Eapen Thampy of Americans for Forfeiture Reform.)