Entries Tagged 'Federal Wars' ↓

Some college bureaucrats around the country are banding together to send a message that the federal nanny system isn’t working in regards to drinking age.

Top university officials in Maryland - including the chancellor of the state university system and the president of the Johns Hopkins University - say the current drinking age of 21 “is not working” and has led to dangerous binges in which students have harmed themselves and others.

Six college presidents in Maryland are among more than 100 college and university presidents nationwide who have signed a statement calling for a public debate on rethinking the drinking age.

One of the biggest gripes I’ve had with the drinking age is the mentality that goes with it. Parents should set the drinking age. When the state sets the drinking age it sends a subtle message that the state owns you. This is the same message that is sent with any prohibition type rules, regulations and legislation.

If you believe, as I do, that you own your own physical being and your own mind, then the state has no place telling you which substances are legal to put into your body. As long as you are not injuring other people you cannot commit a crime by ingesting a substance. Injuring yourself is not a crime because you are damaging your own property. The problem with this is that our current society teaches that the state has an obligation to take care of all of us individuals collectively. That means that all of us are expected to give up individuality to some extent.

We teach young adults that they are not responsible enough to decide for themselves what they put into their bodies instead of explaining the available options and allowing them to decide for themeselves in responsibly managed environments. Because of the nanny state, young adults have to hide their experimentation with substances that alter reality. This means that they are more likely to get into serious trouble or be injured during the learning process.

Instead of patronizing young people, we should teach them individual responsibility. Few legal adults, no matter how young or old, want to be coddled and talked down to. It’s time we recognized the hypocrisy of making someone a legal adult at 18 while telling them they are still not responsible enough to consume an alcoholic beverage. It’s time we understood that prohibition always causes more problems than it addresses.

So what exactly is the legal status of the nearly 20,000 people who forgot or simply didn’t want to present ID in order to fly?

The TSA began storing the information in late June, tracking many people who said they had forgotten their driver’s license or passport at home. The database has 16,500 records of such people and is open to law enforcement agencies, according to the TSA.

Asked about the program, TSA chief Kip Hawley told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday that the information helps track potential terrorists who may be “probing the system” by trying to get though checkpoints at various airports.

Do officials and authorities consider these people to be troublemakers? Terrorists? Future felons? After all, according to Mr. Hawley, it is likely many of these people were “probing the system.” The usual response is that government bureaucrats will “probe their systems.”

Later Tuesday, Hawley called the newspaper to say the agency is changing its policy effective today and will stop keeping records of people who don’t have ID if a screener can determine their identity. Hawley said he had been considering the change for a month. The names of people who did not have identification will soon be expunged, he said.

Civil liberties advocates have been fearful that the database includes passengers who have done nothing wrong yet may face extra scrutiny at airports or questioning by authorities investigating possible terrorism. “This information comes back to haunt people,” said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Frankly, there is no security oriented reason to present ID in order to fly. If you’ve been physically screened then you present very little security threat once you have boarded the plane. Knowing who you are serves no security purpose. Should you decide to cause trouble on the flight, it is very easy to land the plane and find out who you are for the purpose of putting you into the “bad people” databases that have sprung up in the last 30 years almost as fast as tax rates have increased.

I think it is great that the TSA has the common sense to realize that lack of ID doesn’t automatically represent a threat to airport or in-flight security. Now when in the hell will they develop a screening program so I no longer have to wait in the retarded lines and go through the idiotic boarding process? It’s been seven years since the towers went down. How long does it take to identify the 99.89% of passengers who represent a zero risk of terrorism? Is Homeland Security just a big jobs creation program or is it a massive exercise in permanent stupidity?

Scientists sometimes introduce a predator into an ecosystem in order to take care of a pest that is threatening say, the potato crop. These experiments often go wrong - the predator turns out to be more dangerous than the pest. Social engineers do the same thing as scientists, except with human beings. One example is China’s one child policy to control overpopulation. The jury is still out on whether or not that policy will benefit the world or China in the long term. It certainly doesn’t benefit human freedom.

In the United States, our greatest social engineering experiment is something most people called The War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is actually a war on freedom, when thought about literally. It is also an experiment in introducing a predator to take care of a pest. What do you do when the predator you introduced to take care of the pest turns out to be much worse than the pest?

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law.

But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out to be a big mistake. After reviewing the case, State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey acknowledged that the Calvos were victims of a multistate drug ring that used innocent people’s names and addresses to hide shipments of contraband drugs. But the mayor and his family were also victims of a home invasion by the SWAT team, based entirely on what turned out to be a false premise.

Some of you who read these words may want to argue with me. The police are here to help us you’ll say. Yes, some of them help some people some of the time. Unfortunately the helping is on the decline and the abuse is on the uptick. Survey 100,000 random citizens of the United States before the so called drug war began on their level of trust in the police. That would probably be a pretty high number. Survey 100,000 random citizens now. Most likely the numbers will be pretty low. Chances are that a lot of these people know someone who has been locked up for a consensual non-violent crime. You only have to be beaten up once by uniformed authorities to develop a lifelong distrust of all authorities. You only have to be locked up for a few months to learn to lie to the cops when they come around. After all, they are not your friends. They protect and serve only themselves. That is the lesson many have learned.

Public servants do not shoot family dogs. Peace officers do not initiate violence, they are supposed to prevent it. SWAT teams should be used so sparingly that when they are used, people are amazed. Instead, they are used so frequently it is almost like a car alarm going off - no one pays any attention. We’ve learned to ignore the sights and sounds of our freedom going away.

When the men in masks come to your neighborhood with concrete barriers and rolls of concertina wire just remember that they are there to protect you from yourself. If your family dog gets shot or you get beaten while trying to stop them from raping your daughter or your wife it is your own fault for questioning the authorities. They are just here to deal with pesky drug addicts and you got in the way.

Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so willing to give away the Constitutional rights of others. Maybe it is time to stand up and let your government know that you aren’t going to tolerate this sort of behavior.

Transhumanist technologies are going to explode in the next two to three decades. We already have a crude artificial heart on the market. Now it appears that an artificial pancreas is just around the corner.

Today, people with diabetes have a range of technologies to help keep their blood sugar in check, including continuous monitors that can keep tabs on glucose levels throughout the day and insulin pumps that can deliver the drug. But the diabetic is still responsible for making executive decisions–when to test his blood or give himself a shot–and the system has plenty of room for human error. Now, however, researchers say that the first generations of an artificial pancreas, which would be able to make most dosing decisions without the wearer’s intervention, could be available within the next few years.

Type 1 diabetes develops when the islet cells of the human pancreas stop producing adequate amounts of insulin, leaving the body unable to regulate blood-sugar levels on its own. Left unchecked, glucose fluctuations over the long term can lead to nerve damage, blindness, stroke and heart attacks. Even among the most vigilant diabetics, large dips and surges in glucose levels are still common occurrences. “We have data on hand today that suggests that you could get much better diabetes outcomes with the computer taking the lead instead of the person with diabetes doing it all themselves,” says Aaron Kowalski, research director of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s Artificial Pancreas Project.

The artificial pancreas project is good news for diabetics. However, barriers to implementation remain.

Technologically, the remaining obstacles for researchers are those of refinement–for example, constructing algorithms that are exquisitely honed to predict in which direction glucose levels are moving and at what rate. Other researchers are working on sensors that can monitor blood glucose over an extended period of time (currently, sensors must be replaced every three to eight days) and with improved accuracy.

Despite the fact that much of the technology is on the market, researchers must still prove to the FDA that their system is safe when combined with the algorithms, and that if anything goes wrong–if a sensor goes wonky or the insulin pump clogs up–the computer can sense it and either set off an alarm or turn the whole system off.

I’m irritated anytime the FDA is mentioned in a news article. Personally, it’s not clear to me that this organization has helped more people than it hurts. FDA rules slow down the medical technology development process and make it much more expensive. If I ever become a chronically ill patient, I’ll goddamn well seek the medical treatment I want regardless of FDA rules. If I have to leave the United States to get a particular treatment, so be it. I own my own life.

Remember those “rebate” checks Uncle Sugar sent out earlier this year? They failed to achieve a “stimulus.”

The evidence is now in and that optimism was unwarranted. Recent government statistics show that only between 10% and 20% of the rebate dollars were spent. The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending. This experience confirms earlier studies showing that one-time tax rebates are not a cost-effective way to increase economic activity.

These conclusions are significant for evaluating the likely impact of Barack Obama’s recent proposal to distribute $1,000 rebate checks to low- and middle-income workers at an estimated cost of approximately $65 billion. His plan, to finance those rebates with an extra tax on oil companies, would reduce investment in refining and exploration, keeping oil prices higher than they would otherwise be.

I fail to see how giving me back some money that you’re just going to steal again from my next paycheck is going to solve 50 years of rampantly irresponsible entitlement programs and the deleterious effect said programs have had on the American public, which is now, by and large, a bunch of whiners and gimme, gimme sycophants who vote for whichever stinking rotten liar promises the most free stuff.

The poor effects of the Bush tax rebate as fiscal stimulus, however, let Feldstein now attack the Obama plan for a $1000 tax rebate.  Nothing wrong with that - McCain has nothing better however - but what Feldstein doesn’t say is that if you follow the logic of his two op-eds (and this is not something I would necessarily buy into) the conclusion should actually be that fiscal stimulus would work better if it ran through government spending.

Government will always do the most expensive and least efficient possible job of managing any given problem. Government has no motivation to solve any given problem because if it did, then it would have to shrink itself. How many bureaucrats do you know who would be willing to eliminate their own job?

If hundreds of banks are going to fail, we need to be asking why. Who is responsible?

NEW YORK, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The United States is in the second inning of a recession that will last for at least 18 months and help kill off hundreds of banks, influential economist and New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini told Barron’s in Sunday’s edition.

Taxpayers will pay a big price for helping bail out the rest of the financial services industry as well, Roubini said — at least $1 trillion and more likely $2 trillion.

The banks will become insolvent because of mounting losses as a result of the housing bust and because they have only written down their subprime loans so far, he said. Still in front of them are their consumer-credit losses, for which they lack the reserves, Barron’s reported.

The entity responsible for oversight of banks (a self-appointed entity) is the federal government.

U.S. consumers, meanwhile, are “shopped out” and saving less, while the Federal Reserve’s performance in handling the crisis has been poor, Roubini said, because it failed to see that the problem extended beyond subprime mortgage debt.

Now, Roubini told Barron’s, the government is overregulating, bailing out troubled participants and intervening in every market.

“The regulators should investigate themselves for bailing out Fannie Mae (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the creditors of Bear Stearns and the financial system with new lending facilities. They have swapped U.S. Treasury bonds for toxic securities,” he told Barron’s. “It is privatizing the gains and profits, and socializing the losses as usual. This is socialism for Wall Street and the rich.”

We should be demanding that a bailout be off the table as an option. We should be demanding jail sentences for those officials responsible for this fiasco. A bailout will mean that the half trillion dollars in new debt the government is currently projecting will grow to an even larger number. It boggles the mind. Do we really want to saddle future generations with this sort of a ball and chain around their economic ankles?

The age of easy credit may be drawing to a close. The age of bailouts needs to die with it.

Seven more City of Philadelphia employees suspended in neglect case that ended in death of teen with cerebral palsy.

In announcing the discipline at a news conference Monday, Mayor Michael Nutter choked up while noting his own daughter is just a year younger than Danieal was when she died.

“I am fully, thoroughly and completely pissed off,” the normally reserved Nutter said angrily. If any city employee neglected his child the way Danieal was, he added, “I would kick their ass myself.”

An ass kicking seems kind of after the fact. The kid is already dead and buried.

“The fact that so many workers failed Danieal, however, speaks to a larger problem than some profoundly negligent DHS employees: it reveals an agency that is broken,” the report said.

One of the now-suspended employees was even promoted to head the agency committee that reviews child fatalities.

“We’re establishing a new culture of accountability,” said Nutter, who was out of the state when the 258-page grand jury report was released last week. “There’s not a shadow of doubt in my mind that this department will turn around.”

A culture of accountability huh? Let’s see where that promise goes. More dead welfare cases is my guess. Government can’t solve apathy because government creates apathy.

Nine people have been charged in Danieal’s death, including her parents, three family friends, two private employees and two city social workers. The city employees, who face charges of child endangerment, were suspended last week and face disciplinary hearings this week that may result in their dismissals.

Culture is the problem. That’s for sure. But the culture is a culture of big government. It’s a culture where personal responsibility is not taught and we’re not willing to talk about that fact.

If border agents decide to seize my personal laptop, they better be willing to throw a whole lot of resources at the thing. I’ve encrypted the entire hard drive. Hopefully it will make them suspicious - I’d welcome an opportunity to sue the feds over this policy.

As part of border search policy, government agents are now authorized to seize electronic devices and inspect documents in them, the document states. The electronic devices might include laptops, cell phones, portable music players or storage devices such as portable hard drives.

Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection will also be allowed to translate and share documents with other government agencies.

The DHS document, issued July 16, appears to state publicly a policy that has already existed. Laptops and electronic devices have been subject to search in the past, and travelers have reported not getting their devices back. The policy has drawn strong criticism from lawmakers and nonprofit groups, who charged that the searches were invasive and a violation of an individual’s privacy rights. Computers contain a vast amount of private information about family, finances and health, which could be easily copied and stored in government databases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has complained.

The new policy is not only directly in violation of the United States Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, it is anti-common sense. In the long term, the jack-booted agents of the borders of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” will do little to nothing to make Americans more secure.

What will border agents accomplish by seizing people’s private computers as they attempt to travel into or out of the United States?

• Train citizens that private property doesn’t actually exist in the U.S.
• Give people reasons to avoid traveling to the United States
• Waste time and money
• Speed up the decline of the economy
• Encourage civil disobedience

Americans just 30 years ago would never have tolerated this sort of behavior. Of course, the government has an excuse. It is “protecting us” from evildoers. Yeah right.

The policy document states that being able to examine documents and electronic devices is crucial for “detecting information concerning terrorism, narcotics smuggling… contraband including child pornography, and… other import or export control laws.”

Osama bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. By attacking the twin towers, bin Laden created a virtual police state in less than a decade. Where is the outrage? Americans should carry old laptops with encrypted hard drives full of useless junk repeatedly when they travel internationally. They should act suspicious and tie up the resources of the idiotic bureaucrats who are disrespecting us all with their new policy that spits on the Constitution.

If you think I’m just being alarmist or whiny, please read this person’s story of what I have to assume is a typical experience with crossing the border of the United States in 2008.

Georgia resident Andisheh Nouraee writes about what it is like to exercise his freedom to carry a weapon for self-defense in the great metropolitan melting pot of the South - Atlanta. The article is worth reading and the pictures are inspiring - in particular because Nouraee is of Middle Eastern extraction.

If you intend to rob me, stab me or punch me in the neck because you think I looked at you funny, I recommend you glance at my waist before lifting the pull tab on that can of whoop-ass.

I may be carrying a handgun.

Nearly everyone in our state can legally keep guns in their home. I am one of the few, the proud, the Georgia Firearms Licensed – one of a reported 300,000 Georgians permitted to carry a gun in public.

I am also one of Georgia’s 300,000 gun carry license holders. I don’t really worry too much when I don’t have my gun with me (which is rare). I do find it extremely useful when I bike, run or travel by automobile. It’s reassuring to be packing heat when I’m practicing for a triathlon on the rural roads around where I live and a pack of wild dogs decides they need to chase me and nip at my heels - I haven’t yet had to fire a shot but it certainly reassures me to know that if I feel teeth sinking into my calf I don’t have to try and hop off and beat the mutt into submission while his pack mates chomp down on other extremities or worse yet, my throat. If you’ve never experienced the pack mentality, I suggest you watch some video of a pack of dogs attacking a human being. Not pretty.

Humans in packs are even worse than dogs. Enough said about that.

People have many reasons for self-defensive weapons carry. Most people only need to be mugged once to realize that police provide an illusion of safety but not much else - they generally won’t be there to stop whatever bad thing happens to you while it’s happening.

I got my gun license a year and a half ago after I was relieved of my wallet at gunpoint at my front door by a man who threatened to come back for me if I cancelled my ATM and credit cards.

Since he was clearly comfortable dropping by the house unannounced, police told me to take the threat seriously by carrying a gun myself.

I’ve had handguns for target shooting since I was a kid, but never carried one for self-defense. After the robbery, I applied for a permit so I could carry a gun without breaking the law. And even before the license arrived, I started to carry my gun from my driveway to my front door, which is legal; I was scared the guy would keep his promise and come back for me.

Amazing! Police told Mr. Nouraee to get a gun! That’s wonderful. Let’s move on to the meat of the story.

Nearly everyone I spend time with regularly has a visceral and fearful reaction to guns. Having so many gun-dreading friends and acquaintances has taught me to keep guns where no one will ever see them. Carrying a gun in public seemed like peeing in the sink of a public restroom. Not illegal, but definitely a first-degree jerk move.

I was also afraid of the reaction of strangers. I would hate to be the subject of this 911 call: “Hello, police, I’m at the Publix on North Decatur Road and there’s a swarthy bald man here with a gun. He’s headed for the Lean Cuisine.”

So, although I had a permit, I was less than thrilled that the General Assembly passed H.B. 89 in April. The new law would give licensed firearms permit holders the right to legally carry guns into places that used to be off-limits: city and state parks, public transportation, and restaurants that serve alcohol.

We Americans are allowing ourselves to be conditioned to just this mindset. Guns are bad, MMMKAY? If a dude has a gun and he isn’t in uniform he must be planning something nefarious, MMMKAY?

The truth about guns is that they are merely an extension of the mindset of the person who has control of the trigger. I have never understood why we cannot focus on changing the mindset and instead insist that the gun itself is the problem. But our bureaucrat class feels threatened anytime control is taken away from their clerks and myrmidons. Which is how we arrive at these sort of stupid press conferences.

Mayor Shirley Franklin and airport General Manager Ben DeCosta held a press conference at Hartsfield-Jackson to publicize their intention to keep the airport a gun-free zone. They were joined by the media and a half-dozen members of the gun rights group GeorgiaCarry.org, there to protest the city’s position.

Bearden and his gun never showed up at the airport, though. But later that day, he did file a lawsuit against the city for banning guns from the airport. A hearing is scheduled next month.

The city argues the airport and its parking lots are municipal buildings, and therefore not subject to the law’s public transit provision. In their speeches, both Franklin and DeCosta emphasized the 9/11 attacks as reason to keep guns out of the airport. The city’s found a powerful ally in U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who’s demanding that the Transportation Security Administration ban guns from all parts of major airports.

“I keep hearing the phrase ‘in this post-9/11 society’ and I’m so sick of that,” said Mark McCullough, a GeorgiaCarry.org member who was at the press conference. “What 9/11 showed me was that the government has no ability to protect me. I don’t want to be walking around the parking lot here with [my cell phone] being the only device protecting me.”

While I was at the airport, GeorgiaCarry.org treasurer Michael Menkus invited me to a party. To celebrate their newly granted right to carry guns in restaurants that serve alcohol, members of the group planned to meet at Christos, a Greek-style pizzeria in Marietta, to eat dinner with handguns strapped to their waists.

I hope you’ll take the few minutes out of your life to read the rest of the story. I hope this because I hope to one day live in a place where guns are not the problem. I hope to live in a society that values rational discussion enough to realize that it is what lives in your mind that is important. A society that values individualism and self-determination will inevitably also value the life of the individual and allow individuals to defend themselves from aggressors. Societies that ban guns just end up with lots of stabbings. They also tend to end up with lots of people who cannot think for themselves in life threatening situations.

Some stories absolutely disgust me. This story about a mentally ill woman who refused to come out of the bathroom for two years and became physically stuck to a toilet because of sores on her body is one of them.

Babcock’s plight became known in February when McFarren called the Ness County sheriff, expressing concern about his live-in girlfriend. When authorities arrived, they found Babcock physically stuck to the toilet.

McFarren told police Babcock had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Medical personnel estimated she’d been sitting on the toilet for at least a month and said the seat had adhered to sores on her body.

She is now under the protection of a guardian who was appointed through the legal department at the hospital where she received treatment.

Six months on probation as a punishment for not alerting authorities to someone’s mental illness. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It is possible that this woman will receive appropriate care from the bureaucrats now in charge of her life. It’s also possible she’ll be abused, molested and generally thrown away and forgotten by society.

I don’t know what Pam Babcock’s mentall illness is, or her long term prognosis. I hope that she has a hope for recovery and the semblance of a normal life, but I’m dubious. If someone has reached the point where they are stuck to a toilet by the pus oozing from sores on their body, they are very ill indeed.

If people choose to live like animals, I don’t know that it is my responsibility to force them to live as a ward of the state instead. The boyfirend, Kory McFarren, doesn’t sound like a prize catch. However, he wasn’t physically hurting this woman. The story mentions no physical abuse. What was he charged with that resulted in six months probation?

If someone wants to sit on a toilet until they die why should the state intervene? Someone explain it to me. Why do we spend so much time and effort trying to protect people from themselves?