I would love to spend more time with my kid, work less and hell yes I would like to have a larger house and faster car. I don’t. I bought a sane car that gets 30+mpg,  oh wait have 2 cars that get 30mpg. An affordable ( under 1/2 the loan I could have gotten) house whose valuation had been hit,hard. Sadly we earn to0 much to get a reduction on the loan. Earn too much for EVERY frigging thing we’re asked to fund for people that claim through no fault of their own that they couldn’t possibly save or live in a smaller place   or  drive a vehicle with sub 20″ rims.

There is a rational argument for one of us to quit working, and the other to take a job with 50% of the wages because it’s as near as dammit to breaking even.  Hell I should just quit altogether judging by the liberating feeling one has from  being out of work.From Newsweek

This theory has played in showrooms, where consumers like Ellen Ribitzki of Ringwood, N.J., recently traded in her General Motors sport utility vehicle for a Santa Fe Hyundai. Though she and her husband are currently unemployed, she called the deal too good to pass up. “We do a lot of traveling and that engine light kept flashing on and off,” she says about her old SUV. “It was a good incentive.”

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The UK has a cradle to grave welfare state that may, arguably look after the body, but the real damage is done to the mind.

“I’ve worked here for three-and-a-half years and now I’m being sacked for no reason. I’ve been used.”

What else did they think they were doing? Of course they were used that’s the whole bloody point. Rather than being people that are in , at least illusory, control  of their lives the opposite seems to be the mindset.  

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It’s at this point I disagree with Mark Cuban and his insistence that  taxation  has minimal to no effect on those starting a business  which may hold true for a 5 – 10%  swing in either direction but at 83% I seriously doubt it.  Several , small, very small, ventures that Creddy and I considered  were impractical to enact because the local  town, county and state permits  made it prohibitively expensive  relating to the expected return. E.g you have spare herbs from a hydroponic garden  and you may make say   $1200 extra a year,  er no not legally you can’t:)    Yeah I know it’s not the big league but  come on  it’s not legal to offer surplus  from your garden.. Grr  anyway  rant off:)

Public wants taxes that hurt the rich | Politics | The Observer

“People had assumed that this group were more than competent and it must have been deserved. There is now a feeling that these people have been responsible for others losing their jobs.”

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Hospital suspends worker who failed to report NFL star’s gunshot – CNN.com

Bloomberg, who has long fought against illegal gun ownership, said public figures “make their living because of their visibility. They are the role models for our kids, and if we don’t prosecute them, to the fullest extent of the law, I don’t know who on Earth we would. It makes a sham, a mockery of the law.”

One word answer…..

Spitzer.

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Unwarranted Violence by William Norman Grigg

Under existing judicial precedents, a police officer cannot be held criminally or civilly liable for failing to come to the aid of an individual citizen whose person and property are under criminal attack. However, police agencies across the country routinely discipline police officers who fail to fill their quota of traffic citations.

This may at first glance seem to be a spurious comparison. But consider it in light of the principle of opportunity cost as applied to the time budget of the typical patrol officer: Should he organize his time in such a way that he can be available to help a victim of violent crime, or in the best way to take advantage of “hot spots” for traffic violators, thereby making his quota and enhancing his prospects for lucrative overtime?

A given officer can be in only one place at a given time, after all, and each hour spent trolling for inattentive drivers represents an hour taken away from the task of “serving and protecting” the local population.

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“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads”

The industrial revolution is still spinning.  We’re stuck  for the most part with a  work week, physically showing up  and  covering the costs of maintaining ourselves in food and transport outside of the house.  For many of us it makes little to no sense given that our jobs are hunting  ideas on the antipodes of our mental planes  ( oh  I just won a Private Eye Pseud  award:P) 

So the big plans  from our new Saviour in chief?   Newer versions of the same old ways.   Much as I dislike state  mandated jobs I can at lease express a preference for the kind of boondoggles that I like. Where’s a decent broadband plan?   Where’s the “iPhone in each pocket”  speech?   We’re so in love with tangible structures that  even if you could prove 100% that schools could be run remotely , cheaper  with higher grades and none of the lose of their precious  “socialization  I doubt we’d ever see such a thing.     This looks more like a way to keep on living as we have rather than looking forward to something that may  look like change:) 

  My usual  reservations about the  energy issue is that mandating  technology or favoring it with tax policy can kill off truly innovative stuff. There’s a reason we have ethanol in gas and it’s not because it’s good for anything other than those that happen to grow the raw material.  

How about getting rid of all the regulatory crap that has us  traveling to  “beg” permission to modify or uses the items as a trip reduction method? 

Now were did we put all those engineering graduates?

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Why is that entity never to blame? 

Why is the cure for the failure of of that entity an excuse to give them more money and power?  Really really puzzling. The reason I need to write things like this is I’m  getting worse at discussing them because it’s hard , really hard to get it across in person.  I’m tired of being in  MPG or environmental  debates with people whose cars are less efficient than mine. 

It’s a bS argument because it’s nowhere near as simple as they make it out to be.   Let’s tax fuel more so people will use less of it.  After all poor people don’t have cars ,fuck em.  That’s not my experience with  my less well off  rural friends that can’t afford much in the way of efficient cars  and end up driving the  motoring dregs. Still  it beats  walking  four miles  to store or taking kid to sitter, dr etc.  

 Person is on min wage/  tips.  Fuel prices =  higher food prices   say another 10-12  a week.  That’s a couple of meals , few hours sitting or something useful that a person working 40-60 hours a week may want.  Only ear thhis shit from people with jobs that could readily afford it.. you know  I wouldn’t mind paying.. well  fucking do so.     Save $1 a gallon each time you fuel and donate it to something tangible to help the people ,you’re so eager  to take money out their pockets , rather than  hurting others to feel good about yourself.  Sadly no  we’ll take that money and give it to  state to make the Soylent Wheels for our slow  backslide into steam.  I’ve driven a lot of cars made by nations rather than private companies and boy  do they suck!   Put it this way I’d not  be surprised if  they added in flotation devices  as a requirement from the Senator from Massachusets.  
 
LewRockwell.com Blog: That Private Jet Non-Issue, and Political Thinking

I am sure that Henry Waxman truly believes he can run an auto company or any other company when, in truth, he only can run his mouth. One reason that Congress really wants this bailout is that people like Chris Dodd and Waxman want their chance to be acting CEOs and show everyone how to build “green cars.” Of course, anything which is built under their direction will be horrible, an overpriced and heavily subsidized piece of garbage that no people in their right minds would buy.

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# There are several similarities between the two politicians
# Historians say Obama can use Lincoln’s strategies to help him lead the country

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Preachers  that get up daily and tell us that $20  a month saves a life , you know that life is life  one could go as far to call them pro-life  crowd?   Yep rather than having two men  or women  be recognised by the state  ( big problems with that but going to ignore that for now;) )  they would condemn  3.65 million people to an early death just to stop two people expressing a civil commitment.   What the fuck is wrong with you sick bastards?    That 73 million  was just for the CA marriage amendment by the time you add in the other states it’s quite a bit higher.  That’s pretty much evil right there.  In some ways it’s a good thing we substituted naked aggression for the paper substitute because  they really would act out their malevolent fantasies again and again as they have done throughout history.  We call this progress;)  Anyway  to a post from a  rather good UK  blog that captures in many more words than  Mencken did.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken

Now over to.

Samizdata.net

Many will find the glee of the statist left over the next few days and weeks hard to endure, but to be honest I have been walking around with a grin all day. Finally the era of gradualism is over and the masks are going to come off. The USA has voted for statism and it is going to get exactly what it voted for at a juncture in history where it will very quickly be impossible to hide the cost of those votes.

Obama is not the start of a new era, he is the death knell for the old one.

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America the Banana Republic: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it

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Ouch:) 

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Doesn’t matter. You’re still going to be paying for them.

We’re giving money to GREAT AMERICAN COMPANIES like  GM to make products that the USA doesn’t use for the most part. Thanks EPA  .

General Motors is investing $445 million to build an engine plant and upgrade an existing vehicle assembly plant in Thailand. The new 14,492 m² (156,000 ft²)
facility will be GM’s first diesel engine plant in Southeast Asia and
will provide four-cylinder diesel engines for use by Chevrolet in
Thailand and other global markets and brands.

Finance Or Refi Daily
General Moneyhole
and  for the love of Chrysler what are you doing back , again.    Ford has some interesting cars  overseas,  GM has some neat small diesel powered cars in other markets  it’s the USA that won’t let them fill the roads with small efficient  cars , or even let them try.  Maybe it’s time to  let them drive off into the sunset so we can free people up to work on things that we actually want to buy.  If there’s not a MASSIVE luxury tax imposed on foreign cars in the near future I will be quite surprised because it’s the only thing that will get people back to the home market.

A $25 Billion Lifeline for GM, Ford, and Chrysler – FlowChart (usnews.com)

Detroit desperately needs the help. Many analysts expect all three domestic car companies to face a life-threatening crisis if the U.S. car market, down about 20 percent so far this year, stays in the doldrums. GM and Ford could start to run out of cash by the second half of 2009, a precursor to declaring bankruptcy. Chrysler’s finances are now private, but its sales are down even more than at Ford and GM, and it may be starting to bleed its corporate parent, Cerberus.

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McCain suspends campaign, calls for Obama to do same – CNN.com

He said struggling homeowners must be taken care of in any economic recovery plan — and that taxpayers should “not be spending one dime to reward the same Wall Street CEOs whose greed and irresponsibility got us into this mess.

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Here’s my objection.

Republican god is mean , insane and listening to his words proves that they are not fit to lead. 

Democratic god is nicer, rational and while not the best situation it’s possible to support someone for president that  talks with invisible men.  This is an inconsistent view for people that claim a reality based view to hold. Oh well  I’ll return to that in part 2.

While Hungary was never as hard line as some of the other countries in the Soviet bloc, even trying to get out from under them in the mid 50’s, the conditions were still  atrocious in relation to the USA at the time.  What follows not an exhaustive list, it’s anecdotal  from a guy, Tames Birilov,  that was  born there and was there, –really- there with a chunk of the wall to prove it at the time it fell down.  

• All houses the same size, all guest homes if you had to have one similarly small and regulated you had to have a job.   If you sucked at job   so what.
• Curfew  8pm   without running the risk of having to justify yourself to the satisfaction of the police
• Yep they had secret police,  and apparently NO violent crime  of any significance ( the state monopoly on violence is something US politicians  ) Corruption was another matter altogether
• education free, one week vacation to a Soviet country  free, transport cheap  , personal transport awful ( trabant anyone? )  clothes, food, etc were all cheap the problem  was in finding them to buy anyway.  Cars could only be bought every five years.
• They kept tabs on what you made, e.g  if you  saved,  or  dealt or did anything to increase your material wealth to the point the neighbors would notice they’d inquire  about it.  
• Of course politicians had nicer shit.  Go figure.  Some animals are always more equal.

There’s much more but you get the idea that a pretty serious communist paradise was in effect here.  Now for the surprising parts

• Crimes against the person minimal.
• people had less stress
• better personal relationships
• people  possessed more common sense when applied to materials.
• many  would like to return to that as a way of life.

That last point is the kicker that I am going to address in the next post since it really ties into the biggest objection to libertarianism that people have. How do you transition a society were explicit promises have been   into something else?   

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This  from Wikipedia

The Glaswegian workforce who were all recruited from the shipbuilding industry were also not versed in the intricacies of motor vehicle assembly, and Imp build quality and reliability suffered. They also brought with them their militant left-wing values, and as a result strike action and industrial disputes were a rule rather than an exception. In 1964 there were 31 stoppages and only a third of the plant capacity was realised – 50,000 rather than 150,000. On the other hand the Imp was seen as a “Scottish car” and was popular north of the border.

All I can say is that the Imps sold a shit lot of Datsuns ( Nissan)  as people were getting tired of having to bump start their relatives at the end of visits.  I’m surprised at how well loved the cars seem to have become  and put that down to the UK diet of deranged moo cows.

Hillman Imp – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Hit & Run: 2008 Convention > The Shorter Barack Obama – Reason Magazine

Government cannot solve all our problems. Just the ones involving energy, education, work, the weather, cities, the countryside, sick children, sick mothers, joblessness, hopelessness, and frightening foreigners who do not live in Iraq. Now if you’ll all look under your seats, every one of you is going home with a new car!

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quarks vegas,
originally uploaded by haltse.

Oh damn it sucks that this place is closing . They mix some strong ass drinks..

Nice decor.

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Doubts over the veracity of this brought up in the comments but. The state has ran tests on the population re syphilis , radiation and LSD amongst other things so is it any wonder people could believe this.

Washington Times – Politics, Breaking News, US and World News – “Want some torture with your peanuts?” by Aviation Security

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Don’t Make Me Come Down There sticker
$2.00

Don’t Make Me Come Down There sticker. Just a subtle warning from the
Almighty, to his so-called followers, lest they continue spreading
hatred and division in His name!

New Products for Freethinker science lovers darwinfish holders civil right workers and many others

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I dropped my involvement with the national party a couple of years back which is a shame as I’d like to double remove x 23 any association with the kind of people that think that Barr = liberty. He may say that he doesn’t want the boots of the Fed on your face but he’s not so forthcoming over about the fifty pairs on a state level that can regulate with the same disregard for the people they’ve claimed lay under their control.

Classically Liberal

Has quite a few posts on this odious man from Georgia.

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To reiterate  I am not a democrat, a republican nor libertarian  any more so this isn’t partisan.

Today the AZ Democrats decided that their propaganda  outweighs my financial interest in not hearing from them. In short they behave like they know what’s best for you and you can  damn well pay for it.   Which is kinda neat given the subject matter.

I pay for my voip system per minute , ergo sending me a message  that I have to pay to retrieve is incurring a loss. Yes it’s a small loss but in the context of these economically illiterate assholes ( that would be the democrats)   telling me how much they care about the  little guy  is the last straw. ( you know the camel? he says hi how’s the wife and kids?)   Oh god yes won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?

They decided to call our phone to let us know that Mr Shaddeg is a mean wittle man and that I need to  lock up my kid’s candy jar asap.

“Not only has John Shadegg voted again and again to deny health care to
needy children, now he’s opposed to giving families a tax rebate to
jump start the economy,” Bittner said. “He’s completely blind to the
needs of Arizonans, and this country.”

OMG there’s 35 republicans with brains  ? Damn that’s shocking.   Frankly it doesn’t matter we’re scroomed ( screwed and doomed) either way.   Keep it up folks   Gold at 1000 soon:D

Arizona Democratic Party

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Just in case I don’t pass approval  with this one. Here’s the reply to the last comment which has yet to be approved.

I don’t use drugs. ( I’m just not opposed to those that do) Strike 1:
I was “attacking” your incorrect ideas  and not the person holding
them.   I’m very much anti state.All the woes you try to lay at my
feet are caused by them. Yeah  I’m sorry I made such  a mess in the inner city.

I’m not even from the USA  your  presumption of privilege based on
some atavistic fantasy of my family lording it over the poor  is your
second strike.

Lastly I’m an anarcho capitalist. If you must hate me  at least do it
for the right reasons.

So rather than being pleasant and discussing ideas lets talk about
your claim to love mankind and help them when you can’t even take an
obvious case like Anton-wilson  and apply   his philosophy correctly,
regardless of wether you agreed with it or not.

Thank you, I can  do without you, and your friends, modeling society
for me when you can’t apparently control your anger at the world
without attacking a commenter on your blog that holds a contrary
opinion.

You have no idea which non profits I assist, no idea which causes I
lend technical assistance to  and no basis in reality for your claims
that I am oblivious to severe structural issues within my adopted
nation.  We just don’t agree on remedy that’s all.

That’s the problem with  collective solutions you can’t see
individuals and  have decided to take me for that which I am not.   A
key lesson that RAW had to offer and one which is never going to take
with someone stuck in the Fnords  of  gender, race  or  perceived
privilege

Good Times and Bad Times in Lost America: An interesting tidbit about Robert Anton Wilson—he despised democracy

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