There seems to be a problem requiring people to adhere to the very thing that we immigrants have knowingly signed up for. Not a fan of it but it’s the price of admission I pay to play here.  It’s a nice conceit to think that you can wander around sans state or federal ID but seemingly the very thing I’ve had to live with doing for nearly a decade now, carry my card and have it available for inspection, is problematic because the police will somehow act like jerks in a way that’s different from their usual M.O:)  The funny part is that people are crying to the Fed Gov to protect them from the near word for word rendition a federal law that which they find  outlandish, racist and fascist to jackboot when AZ restated it.

“

“Permanent Resident Card
The Permanent Resident Card, Form I-551, is issued to all Permanent Residents as evidence of alien registration and their permanent status in the US. The card must be in your possession at all times. This requirement means that you are not only required to have a currently valid Form I-551 at all times, but also that you must carry your currently valid Form I-551 on your person at all times.”

The part of the law that is egregious I will get into later .

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In this article from the AZ Republic a newspaper that decides what stories we can comment on, this not being one of them,the word psychic is not in quotations yet the word excessive is. I’m going to attack,for it’s not possible to gently chide, suggest or be reasonable when dealing with the local government licensing woo-woo is bullshit. I’d love to know by which standard Gilbert are verifying the psychic’s services. Who on the council ensures that the chakras are handled in the correct manner and that no psychic residue escapes into the streets?

That made me a little angry. What made me a lot more angry was her concern of passing on the pricing of the licensing to people yet the comfort with charging money for fairy tales is quite ok. The rest is a free advert from the paper without challenge to what could be considered as a reasonable question aren’t you full of crystal powered poop?

Psychic wins battle with Gilbert over permit

A Gilbert psychic has challenged the town’s license and permit fees and won.

Paula Parris said the requirements to get a license and permit as a fortune teller in Gilbert were “excessive,” costing her $1,300 more than most other businesses.

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The conclusion of Medical Examiner Mark Fischione is that the cause of death was due to “complications of hyperthermia due to environmental heat exposure.” The manner of death is ruled an “accident.”

No one could forsee that forced exposure to the AZ sun would result in any health issues. You would spend longer in jail for forgetting a dog in your car should our “protectors” happen upon it. Ha you actually thought there was anyone here to be held accountable , nope  it’s the usual accident. How can a willful institutional decision,without which you can’t explain the existence of the holding area  under their complete control, be an accident?

For the state to even call this an accidental death is repugnant.Yep we have a defacto death penalty for victimless crimes and a pathetic write up in the state’s paper-of-record.  Thankfully one group of investigative reporter from the near MSM model still takes the time. Phoenix New Times 

Coroner’s report confirms heat death of Perryville prisoner

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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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Sky TV built the market for satellite TV in the UK, ass punched the woefully lacking BSB and merged with them. Then they made a mistake, getting big. See the UK spirit isn’t that of Dunkirk and stoicism under pressure  any more than the majority of the US is of freedom loving  don’t tread on me types.  It’s wanting other people to give you things for free and acting like a mob the moment it doesn’t go your way.

BBC NEWS | Business | Sky may have to share TV channels

The proposal to force Sky to wholesale its content is welcome, but we now need Ofcom to step up the pace and to enforce this rigorously,” said Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT Retail.

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Since it’s unlikely any of your mails stay within the same state the Fed Gov , aka TSOG ,as Robert Anton Wilson called them, have a nice new stick with which to beat you. Please don’t get sexually aroused at the thought of being beaten otherwise you’ll make felons of both of us. The idea that a crime “committed” against imaginary people, be they adult,child or a kitten that solves sudoko puzzles, is a crime is retarded.   Sex thought crime is on the rise here. You can be a child pornographer by taking a self portrait of your 17 year old self.  Children are no longer children. A child can be a drawing, story or they can be real people that appear to be younger than they are. None of the former can be cross examined in court as to the nature of their damage. The latter is a good thing for the prosecution as the answer is NONE because there’s no victim, ergo no crime. 

This should get appealed into oblivion but in the meantime I’d start worrying in case it doesn’t.  Encryption may be your best friend.

Circuit court: Emailing sexual fantasies to consenting adults a crime – Don’t Tase Me, Bro!

Sharing an obscene sexual fantasy over e-mail is a federal crime that enjoys no protection under the First Amendment, a federal appeals court said Monday, in a decision that drew sharp dissent from one judge and potentially set the stage for a Supreme Court appeal.

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So while Deputy District Attorney Lynda Fernandez asked jurors to
“focus on the conduct of the defendant rather than the value of the
item,” public defender Erica Gambale simply jingled two quarters and a
dime in her palm.

“This is it, ladies and gentlemen, this is it: 60 cents,” she told jurors. “At best, half that ketchup was left.”

As is the case in most of these stories the protagonist isn’t in the angel category but let’s get a little proportion here. I can’t get the cops in Phoenix to come out re having my car windows shot out which is WAY in excess of $0.60 in damages yet somehow this farce plods onward. An attorney friend of mine has often argued that making the police prove everything benefits the cause of freedom.Ensuring that anything called a drug is a drug is worthwhile because it takes money away from a system that clearly has too much of it due to the asinine, and over reaching, nature of it’s prosecution.

Calif. politician charged in stolen ketchup case

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We know how many people are shot breaking into houses, we know how many of them failed to carry out the seemingly easy step of disarming the homeowner and then , and this is the part I don’t get, successfully using a gun against the hapless fool who bought the thing.

And more here. http://en.wikipedia.org/ikw… which has faults pro and con re his work.

The myth that your own gun is more dangerous to you than not having one is on the face of it absurd but people have taken the time to refute the origin of this case. “protection or peril an analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home” where the original 43 times more likely figure the VPC uses. Its’ not an easy thing to sum up in a paragraph other than htt://guncite.com/gun-contp... has material from the original study author, Kellermann, that acknowledges errors in his initial work.
Later work suggests that it’s a 65-2 ratio http://www.saf.org/LawRevie… in favour of the armed:. Seem believable? The daily info is out there, story after story of self defense use

Let’s get back to today’s bullshit from the Brady bunch.

“Mexican criminals, and traffickers who supply them, cannot get the guns they need in Mexico because of Mexico’s strong gun laws,” Brady Center President Paul Helmke said in a news conference. But in border states Texas and Arizona, he argued, weaker gun laws provide easy access to a significant supply of high-powered arms.

Spot the logical error? Because it’s illegal to get guns in Mexico ,you know their strong gun laws that prevent them getting gun, they get them in the USA to bring back to Mexico where those amazingly strong rules appear to have headed out for a siesta. 

(BTW it’s illegal for a non resident of the border states to buy them without transferring them to an FFL) Since when did a fucking drug cartel get all civic minded and sentimental about paperwork?

Also what’s this bullshit re “high powered arms” relative to what? It’s emotive , unchecked, tripe and irrelevant without context much like the organization that spawned it. Yep all that research and I end up on an ad hominem attack.

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First let’s head off to a tiny little state with big problems.

Rhode Island proposal: Youth sports oversight, or overreach? – CNN.com

Democratic Sen. John Tassoni Jr. introduced a bill that would create a youth sports oversight council on the state level. The council would act as mediator in disputes between parents of youth athletes and sports officials.

I can’t wait till they mandate a video playback rule for all games involving more than three people. Let’s make an assumption that most of the parents were publicly educated.  How has their education and socialization by the state led to them being incapable , least in the eyes of their masters, from resolving disputes of a pretty trivial nature?  Some would say it’s working too well should you want a relatively docile population that you relies on you for every little thing.

Now off to a tiny minded state, at least where the legislators are concerned.

Oklahoma state rep wanted to prevent Prof Dawkins speaking to university,

“The God Delusion”, and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma;

So says state rep Thomsen in

house resolution HR1015 which replaced the foaming that the mouth version.I am glad they are interested in diversity because I can’t work out if this is pandering or stupidity.Could Kansas employ Oklahoma as their village idiot?  Would more money for education solves this level of idiocy? Maybe not Rep Thomsen is on the education sub committee. Here’s a follow up Dawkin’s appearance.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves there are other deserving applicants.

Put another ban on the Barbie mate!

“Democrat Jeff Eldridge introduced a bill in the House of Delegates on Tuesday that would ban the sale of Barbie dolls – and “other dolls that influence girls to be beautiful” – in West Virginia.”

Yet not a ban on male dolls without genitalia that influence people to become Democrats. 

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For the judges that sent kids to detention facilities because they got kickbacks?   Maybe, but the real culprits  those that allowed it go on. The public. Those that would even support a system that could allow jailing minors  for three months for creating a spoof site on MySpace are more of a problem then the idiots  that order it.  

It’s never been the politicians , it’s always been us.

Be seeing you.

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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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“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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Here’s what annoys me.  These companies   DO already make efficient cars  but people will not BUY  them.  They don’t need to retool  much. They make  world cars,  GM and FORD make successful small vehicles that work quite well in every other country  apart from the US because we all know that a good anti pollution measure in CA , in one big town in CA ,is  valid for the rest of the nation     We had that crap in the UK were the short distances we traveled and the ambient temperatures made our cars pollute more with the early catalytic converters  but it’s the thought that counts.

Transcript: ‘I’m going to confront this economic crisis,’ Obama says – CNN.com

I would like to see the administration do everything it can to accelerate the retooling assistance that Congress has already enacted. In addition, I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis, and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States of America.

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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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Here’s the ITN  story  and  here’s the part I Hate  

Judge Terence Maher told Ferenci that he had carried out "lunatic and grossly irresponsible maneuvers at considerable speed," according to CNN affiliate ITN.

And yet where’s the victim ?   I don’t give a rat’s ass about the  potential victims I want to see a real damage , to real people then  hit the  people with real consequences.   

The UK has turned into one big nanny state with  effete “ jobs worth’s”  trawling the nice and easily identifiable  rather than  going to discover anything that really improves the lives of the citizens.   This is a “free”  country that’s going as far as  setting up a    requirement that  your cell phone is registered, 

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Yes,  some bloody  defender against Hitler  we turned out to be.    This blows as  we have land in  Scotland  and the  idea of  trying to deal with people that have this mindset is one I don’t relish.     Also  someone needs to tell them that you can use phones bought in other countries on the local  networks, hah ha  like they care. It’s not about “furriners” it’s about control.  Children of Men   meet the UK    I seriously doubt V is going to be organizing much of anything there:)

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BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Highlands and Islands | ‘Success’ attracting crime gangs

The recovery of the guns was extremely important, following the break-in we dedicated a significant amount of resources to this enquiry, and it is always a concern when firearms are stolen as it is likely that they will end up in the hands of criminals.

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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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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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A Time To Choose by Michael S. Rozeff

This is a time to look at matters carefully and decide: Do you favor free markets or do you favor the State? Do you think that these failures are failures of the free market or do you think they are failures of the State?

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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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