Deeply Deeply Skeptical

"Americans should be deeply deeply skeptical of government power. You
cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that."

James Comey
FBI Director
October 12, 2014

Government Shutdown

And the Federal Government has shut down, as of yesterday, with only "essential" personnel working. "Essential" personnel apparently includes "people to close National Parks and monuments which don't ordinarily have any NPS staff, don't ever close, and don't cost any money to keep open", such as the WW2 Memorial in DC. Because they're being spiteful and petty and, oh wait, the Government Is Our Friend. Trust the Government.

Detroit

The City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy today--not the first municipal bankruptcy lately, but the largest one.

Argentina

Argentina has announced that they will be jailing hoarders, as bread prices skyrocket. They need 6 million tons of wheat, they produced nearly 10 million, and yet they still have a shortage.

Note also that the real inflation rate is more than twice the officially admitted rate--although saying the true inflation rate can also get you jailed.

Fortunately, That Could Never Happen Here.

Stupid and Evil

"We have a two-party system in America: The Evil Party, and the Stupid Party. And every once and a while the Evil Party and the Stupid Party get together to pass something really evil and stupid. That’s called ‘bipartisanship.’ " -- attributed to a Congressional staffer circa 1989

I'd say that each party is evil on some things, and stupid on some things, and there's some overlap.

Conspiracy Theorists

From a Facebook post, slightly edited:

Conspiracy Theorists suck at their jobs!
Where was the outcry warning us that the IRS was secretly attacking right wing organizations in an effort to stage a coup by fixing the results of a presidential election in the United States?
Where was the outcry that the DOJ was illegally harassing journalists to force them to disclose their sources on stories which relate to national security?
Why, for the love of God, didn't the Conspiracy Theorists warn us that the NSA is reading Verizon subscribers text messages?
YOU PEOPLE ARE LAYING DOWN ON THE JOB !
And I'm being told that list is a comprehensive list of the stuff the Obama Administration has actually been doing, and been caught at just in the last 30 days. 

Sadly, none of this really surprises me. 

Communism vs Capitalism

On April 17, a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, blew up, with over 160 casualties. I've heard people saying "The explosion happened because, CAPITALISM! It hadn't been inspected by OSHA since 1985 because, CAPITALISM!"

On this day in 1986--three years before the fall of the Berlin wall--the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine suffered an explosion and fire which spread contamination over much of western Europe. Over 130,000 people were evacuated; deaths from radiation exposure and cancers were estimated as at least 4000.

So disasters happen because humans are greedy, careless, ignorant, or lazy; it doesn't seem to matter much which economic system they're operating in.

Second Amendment

I've often thought that while I should, of course, have the right to any weapon I can buy, I'm not so sure that the guy down the street should be allowed to carry anything more than a plastic butter knife, non-serrated. That leads to the idea that if people are to have access to guns, perhaps there should be some requirement that they have some training. Larry Correia, however, points out that states with a training requirement are no safer than states with no requirement whatsoever. Mandatory training sounds like it would make things safer, but it doesn't. And policy needs to be set on the basis of what really works, not what sounds like it would work.

Billions of revolts

Americans revolt billions of times per day:

It’s not civil disobedience that I’m talking about. It’s the opposite: Civil disobedience is meant to be noticed. It is a price paid in the hope of creating social change. What I’m talking about is not based on hope; in fact, it has given up much hope on social change. It thinks the government is a colossal amoeba twitching mindlessly in response to tiny pinpricks of pain from an endless army of micro-brained interest groups. The point is not to teach the amoeba nor to guide it, but simply to stay away from the lethal stupidity of its pseudopods.

Books

Just received The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State , a book on government failure in the provision of law, and private alternatives. Five sections, which are:

• From Voluntary to Authoritarian Law
• A Public Choice Approach to Authoritarian Law
• Reemergence of Private Alternatives
• Rationalizing Authoritarian Law
• From Authoritarian to Private Law

Thus far I've only taken it out of the box and read the introduction, but speaking as the creator of the Alarishi Empire, this is a book I'm really looking forward to.

Police Use of Force

I don't usually link to HuffPo but this is worth reading.

Radley Balko: SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, And Pepper Spray: Why The Government Is Ramping Up The Use Of Force

Economic Bad Luck part 2

The President has been blaming our economic woes on "a string of bad luck". Not to say that external shocks don't have an impact, but if the main factor in our economy is luck rather than policy, then it will be hard to Mr. Obama to argue that he deserves to stay in office.
And if the main effect on the economy is policy rather than luck, then it will be hard for Mr. Obama to argue that he deserves to stay in office.

Clinton

It is a sad state of affairs when our current administration is so awful that they make me remember fondly the honesty and integrity of Bill Clinton… wow.  Yeah, ponder on that for a second.
--Larry Correia

US Debt

Here's a visualization of the US debt, at Kleptocracy Education. Hat tip: Barbra.

Why the budget talks collapsed

The more detailed version is at Keith Hennessey's blog, but the short form is that Obama didn't stick to what he'd agreed to, and Boehner did. Which is hardly a surprise.

Gunwalker scandal

As Larry Correia (best-selling novelist and former gun shop owner) put it:

As a novelist, if I were to write a thriller in which a federal law enforcement agency knowingly allowed and even encouraged thousands of American guns to cross the border to arm Mexican drug cartels, in an effort to pad their stats to push for more gun control laws, even though innocent Mexican citizens and a US Border Patrol agent were killed in the process, and afterward there would be a huge cover up that went all the way to the President… I know some reviewers would say that my plot was silly, just some naive right-wing fantasy.

Yeah… You got me there. Surely no federal agency would be that stupid. Surely nobody in Washington would arm brutal drug cartels just to push their own politics.

Nope. That’s crazy talk. [...]

This is bigger than Watergate. A crime was committed in Nixon’s administration and he tried to cover it up. The same thing is happening here. But at least in Watergate, nobody got killed.

As The Professor says, read the whole thing.

Why the Political Class Needs a Greek Bailout

An interesting discussion at Armed and Dangerous. Snippets:

[R]aising taxes won’t help. The amount of private wealth available to be taxed is insufficient, even if taxation could be raised to 100% without suppressing all economic activity. In practice, raising taxes leads to increases in spending which more than consume the increased revenue (by a ratio of 1.17:1 in the U.S. since the 1940s).

Cutting military or any other form of discretionary spending won’t work either. If you zero all that stuff out, public pensions and other entitlement commitments still require revenues larger than the taxable private economy can generate.

and

Our political class, like the aristocrats of the French ancien regime, believes in nothing so firmly as its own indispensability.Après moi le déluge; but when the bond-investor flight happens – and it is now a matter of when, not if – the teetering Ponzi scheme that funds their self-importance will collapse.

Spending a million

I spent a million dollars today.
Our condo association is re-siding and repairing eleven buildings, and the board voted on the bids today. The total was a bit over a million, and I voted, so...actually, they had a quorum without me, and everyone else voted a different way than I did, so I suppose I didn't actually spend a million, but "not spending a million" is only noteworthy if you're a government.
Incidentally, our Federal FY2011 spending was $3.8 trillion, or $3,818,800 million, which means a million dollars every eight seconds, all day, every day. I didn't vote in favor of that either.

Australia's a Good Role Model

One advantage of not having a One World Government is that different countries can try different things and see what actually works, as opposed to what ivory tower academics and inexperienced community organizers say will work.

Chinese censorship

It has been determined that this blog is not accessible from Shanghai, People's Republic of China. Apparently this blog could be a threat to a communist empire that rules over a billion people. Granted, it's not me in particular, it's any blogger or blogspot site. Still, I'm rather pleased.