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I just have to share this recent item reported by the Opinion Journal.
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher reports on the case of eight-year-old Dusty Miller, who was almost expelled from the Montgomery County, Md., school system because he brought a “most dangerous object” to Burnt Mills Elementary School. The object? “A 99-cent nail clipper, available at any dollar store.” Writes Fisher:“Last week, the county, flummoxed by conflicting accounts of the clipper incident, decided to allow Dustin to return to school after nearly a month of sitting at home. But at no point in the hour-long hearing did anyone question the wisdom of rules that make it possible to expel an 8-year-old for having a nail clipper in his pocket.”
Where do they find people like this? Are they grown in a secret government vat? Is there a reason they are deathly afraid of getting their nails clipped? Is this a job for Mulder and Scully?
I’ve been reading how some NGO’s are worried whether the al Qaeda prisoners held at the Guantanamo Naval Base are being given “culturally appropriate” treatment. They were upset the US military shaved off prisoner’s lice-infested beards. The Horror! And not to mention the mortal fear Americans might commit nightmarishly inhuman tortures like… Allah Forbid! providing a side portion of Bob Evan’s spicy pork sausage for breakfast!
This got me to thinking. In 6 months or a year the trials will be over and it will be time to send the lot of them to their patiently waiting Houris. We really should be culturally sensitive about how we go about this. We wouldn’t want to insult the Muslim Street now would we? So… I’ve a suggestion that should satisfy everyone’s requirements: we send them to Yankee Stadium for a good old fashioned stoning! What could possibly be more culturally appropriate? After all, they do it to women in Saudi Arabia don’t they? So doesn’t that make it an appropriate death for terrorists?
Instead of rocks, we’ll use baseballs. After all, this is an American-style stoning we’re talking about here. Baseballs are also better because each person can write witty little messages on them. It’s really, really hard to print legibly on your average rock.
There are problems of course. Where do you come up with a couple hundred thousand baseballs? And what do you do for people who are just too far away? But these are problems I’m sure good old Yankee ingenuity and mass production can solve.
First toss at tickets must of course be reserved for the family and friends of the victims. Remaining tickets would be auctioned, with all proceeds going to the New York Fire Department and charities they endorse. Why, the Fraternal Order could build an Historically Correct (HC) memorial statue with only a fraction of the money raised!
Imagine the cheers as President Bush throws the first baseball! Just to be inclusive Hillary or Bill (depending on which one can throw a baseball) get to throw the second ball. (The reasons why they can’t cast the first baseball should be obvious even to the retarded). Even more money can be raised by auctioning off a few other early throws. Grandma’s get to take turns on batting practice machines with laser sights. Think of the fun of smacking your favorite al Qaeda in the gob with a Bob Feller fastball! Imagine what new meanings will be injected into quaint old Bronx colloqualisms like “In your ear!” or “Up your nose!”
The mind just boggles at the possibilities.
The shooting of the postal worker mentioned by Perry in an earlier article occurred only a few blocks from where I live. Of course all I knew of it was some sirens (common) and the sound of Brit choppers hovering in the area (likewise).
The postal workers threatened to stop all mail delivery if the neighborhoods in question did not guarantee safety of all postal workers, regardless of religion. I have heard the public outrage from across the entire spectrum shocked the paras to the point that they are talking disbandment, although I have not read confirmation of such. It’s probably in the local papers if so. People may be getting shot just up the street, but I still have to get projects out the door (cablemodem?) or I don’t eat. It’s funny how you can know what’s going on all over the world and hardly notice the world news happening around the corner.
The cast of characters at DOD briefings has been a great relief after years of mealy mouthed morons who went pale at the thought of admitting their job was to defend their country by letting the other side die for their country as quickly as possible. I had a particular chuckle over the following from the 11th December 2001 DOD News Briefing.
Q: Which was what? What was the desired effect?
Q: Can you describe to us anecdotally what the —
Myers: The desired effect was to kill al Qaeda.
Q: What sort of results are you aware of? What did your people on the ground see?
Myers: Dead al Qaeda. (Laughter.)
I wonder if they break into laughter as soon as they leave the press behind in the briefing room? Personally I’d be near pissing myself as soon as the door closed.
Whether fried bills raise eyebrows depends on how common they are. I would say the constituency for privacy in everyday monetary transactions is large enough to ensure that at least as high a percentage of fried bills is in circulation at that future date as the percentage of cocaine-positive US $20 bills today.
I’m sure we could come up with bulk fryers. Perhaps some enterprising liberty-conscious individuals of the future will find a way to casually blow the circuits in stacks of moneybags as they pass by the bank…
There have been numerous mentions recently of electronically tagging money, the latest of which was by Walter Uhlman below in Sergeant Stinger reporting for duty. But there is no need to worry folks. Follow this simple recipe and your privacy should be restored:
Take 1 wad tagged money.
Mix denominations and national currencies to taste.
Place on Microwave oven tray.
Set microwave to high for 30 seconds.
Enjoy the sparkles of frying microcircuits.
Remove and apply as desired.
No need to bend over and take it. Resistance is not futile. In fact, it’s a lot of fun.
There’s Pork in Their Horoscope, The Guv Replies
Reader Neil Eden contacted the Inspector General’s Office and received the following reply:
After careful review of your complaint, it appears that the appropriate office to contact within the U.S. Department of Education concerning this matter is the Office of Postsecondary Education. You may write to this office at the address listed below:
Accreditation and State Liaison
Office of Postsecondary Education
U.S. Department of Education
K Street, NW, Room 7106
Washington, D.C. 20006
Telephone # (202)219-7011
I trust that this information is helpful to you.
Keep us informed of the responses you get. The fun has only begun.
Sky and Telescope is not where one would normally expect an editorial on government waste. Mostly it covers more important issues like “what is the fastest way to cool down my Newtonian’s primary mirror?” or “are Type II supernovae assymetric?” But if there is one topic that unites astronomers of all persuasions from the most casual amateur to the greyest Chaired professional, it is science literacy. So it should not be surprising when The Boston Globe announced “Heavens smile on astrology school: It’s accredited”(1) your average astronomer was mildly upset, as in “I was mildly upset the wife emptied the house and took my dog and pickup truck and the good Dobsonian when she walked out on me”.
I first heard of this yesterday morning when I read Dr. Rick Feinberg’s scathing January 2002 editorial on the subject. He did a bit of research into the story. It all just gets better. Not only did the The Astrological Institute of Scottsdale, Arizona become accredited by the US Department of Education in August 2001; the Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences in Seattle, Washington, was granted the right to award Batchelor’s and Master’s degrees in June 2001. Now I have nothing against people who want to throw their own money away on supernatural claptrap; but as Dr Feinberg points out federal grants and loans can be awarded to students to help pay tuition. That’s right. All of you in America are now paying taxes to ensure your local gypsy fortune teller has a Diploma hung on her wall.
I strongly agree with Dr. Feinberg’s suggestion that Americans call the Office of the Inspector General’s hotline for fraud, waste, and abuse involving federal student aid funds. The number is: 1-800-MIS-USED (1-800-647-8733) or email at oig.hotline@ed.gov
(1)The article is no longer available on line at the Boston Globe, but a copy may be found posted here if you search well down the page.
As I seem to have gotten some dander up on a previous post (for which I am utterly unrepentant), this may be a good time for me to discuss a more general topic: why Libertarians are no closer to the Right than to the Left. I’m not going to do this by writing a philosophical treatise but by describing a personal journey.
I have been a Libertarian-writ-capitalized for almost as long as there has been a Libertarian Party. I missed the beginning by a few years and much regretted that lost chance to have voted for someone other than Jimmy Carter. I certainly would not have voted for a Republican (other than Goldwater but I was far too young then) under any circumstances, then or now, and most certainly not for one tainted by association with that most evil and dishonest of all 20th Century Presidents, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
I was a libertarian from the time I was a young teenager, but there was no Party to associate myself with or to tell me that I was not the only one with beliefs about individual liberty. I admired Barry Goldwater greatly and respected his opinion that the Vietnam war should either be fought or not fought. This earned him an undeserved warmonger label and succeeded in electing the man whose name I was chanting in marches around the Pittsburgh Federal Building a few years later when I was one of the organizers of a Guerilla Theatre troop of the Yippy variety:
Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today!
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!
This was partly youthful nose-thumbing at holier than thou right wing bigots and partly a major dislike of the concept of draft slavery. I might add that our troop broke up because most of it was involved in a court house riot after their targetted arrest at a demonstration in front of Draft Board member Julius Steinsaper’s house. I was away for Easter and missed the fun. I use the word advisedly as quite a few of my friends went to the hospital with patches of hair ripped out, broken bones, you name it… and I think one policeman pulled a muscle in his back while beating someone and another whacked his own hand with a billy club. That part of our troop became “The Pittsburgh n”, where n equals some number I have long forgotten.
In an earlier action we set up a baby doll in Mellon Square Park and offered passerby’s imaginary shots for a quarter. We were soon surrounded by about 20 or more police and police dogs; the street was blocked due to the number of police vehicles parked there while Pittsburgh’s finest debated whether we were violating a City or a State ordinance by carrying a toy Tommy Gun in public. Their boss finally came by, probably to find out why the rest of the city was denuded of police… he looked at the 6 of us with one toy tommy gun… he looked at the 20 some of well armed police surrounding us… he looked at us again… he looked at them, shook his head in disbelief and waved at us to just simply go away. I could not help the strains of “Alice’s Restaurant” going through my head.
One cannot say I came away from the incidents above with a great deal of respect for the police and the State. That is not even to mention the busts of friends for grass, the busts of others with planted drugs, the newspaper reports about friends busts that listed items that turned out to be birth control pills and the like…
Above all else, the 1960’s and early 70’s were a battle against an extremist right wing society that had no compunctions about the use of violence to suppress people. If you did not conform (and god help you if you were so nonconformist as to be black!) you were a Commie and the Enemy. This attitude in the government culminated in the Kent State murders of 1970.
On the day it happened I was at an antiwar demonstration at which my girlfriend was tossed in the back of a Tactical Police van. You know the sort, the cops they keep in a cage and feed raw meat to. So I was not in the best of moods towards the evil state when I saw the news about the murders a few hours later. I and thousands of other students were ready to go out and bring down the government that night, and if anyone had truly had a clue there would have been a nationwide attempt at something foolish. Even as it was, the reaction was so large and so angry and so sustained that it was the turning point. The kids who died at Kent State very directly helped end the draft, the war and everything the Right wing stood for.
Much of the New Left (ie the kids) in those days were profoundly non-statist. The by-word was “do your own thing”. Live and let live. Don’t enslave me to go fight your war for your reasons.
But there was another element. The left may have been the flag around which we rallied, but the flagholders had their own agenda, and towards the end that agenda started to be foisted on us. I could probably do a bit of research and give you the precise day on which I parted company from them. A Senator from Ohio was speaking in Skibo ballroom (the CMU student union) and instead of asking about the war or some other “correct” issue, I asked about support for the Mars program. For those who don’t know, this was the post-Apollo time when Mars programs were still being discussed… just before the long knives came down and the remaining Saturn V’s became horizontal bird houses.
After the talk, I was caught near one of the ballroom doors by one of my co-radicals, and a co-founder of CMU’s “Effete Snobs for Peace” (ESP). The exchange went something like this:
John: That was a really pig question Dale.
Dale: <3 beat pause> Go fuck yourself, John.
At which point I dropped all connection to campus radical organizations. John had done me the favour of explicating that the Left was as profoundly anti-liberty and anti-individualist as the Right.
This left me politically homeless for some years. I worked hard, did theatre, played music, partook of the musicians holy rites of SD&RR and in general lived the life of a free man (one that would curl the hairs of a Right-Winger) and utterly ignored politics other than to wish as much ill as possible on Tricky Dicky during the Watergate hearings.
Finally, in 1978 I ran across the Libertarian Party. I have voted straight party ever since. Or at least when I can get my absentee ballot sent over here, something which seems to be beyond the organizational capabilities of Allegheny County.
So if I seem a bit harsh on Right Wingers… it is because I am and I simply don’t much care. I do not see them as any more of a fellow traveller than I do those on the left, and the left has much better parties and is a lot more fun to hang out with.
I am slowly catching up with articles posted in my absence, and I really have to add my 2p about Kevin Holtsberry’s opinions on that lad in Australia. In two short words: They Suck. Any man who would deny a 15 year old his last chance to experience the joys of sex before his premature demise is simply sick minded. If people like this were in a position to have actually prevented it, I would go further and simply call them Evil, on a par with the Communists with whom Natalja also compares them.
Personally, I found this one of the more touching stories of a year that had all too much evil in it. I am very glad that in at least one case love and humanity prevailed. This is at the heart of why we want a libertarian society. Without State power men of evil intent will not have the power to prevent acts of compassion and kindness.
And in any case… there is always Las Vegas. 😉
I’ve stayed aloof from the flying fur up to this point, mostly because I’ve been preoccupied with critically important holiday activities. So many pubs, so little time! But the holiday season is now past and I find myself in stable condition and on the road to full recovery… so it is time to roll up the sleeves and get blogging.
Everyone seems to recognize that Ruby Ridge and Waco were important. I think some writers have skirted the edge of just why that is so without actually stating it: they were liberty’s canaries.
No one who has read about the Branch Davidians will argue David Kouresh was other than a wacko. He was a religious nut. He was at the outer limits of American society, His death showed us precisely where that limit sat and was a clarion call to those of more moderate beliefs. It showed them they had better join in holding the line or else soon find themselves on the wrong side of it:
First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I’m not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I’m not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I’m not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me.
Pastor Father Niemoller (1946)
I am not saying that the government actions were equivalent to the full blown horror of Nazism. They were not. They were however equivalent to the earliest, most tentative steps of it. Americans are not quite as sanguine about their governments’ motives and actions as Father Niemoller, nor are they disarmed or unwilling to fight if push comes to shove.
We need armed nuts; they serve a valuable purpose. To quote myself from a discussion on the politics of space over a decade ago and why we needed our own unreasonable extremists in that endeavour:
The ends define the middle
David Khoresh provided us a warning. He showed each of us exactly how far from the edge we stood and left us to decide what to do about it. The fact that American citizenry are armed means there is a very real set of checks and balances between citizen and government. The founders and the framers of the Constitution intended this to be so and that is why there is a Second Amendment in the hallowed Bill of Rights.
This is why I do not believe the United States is even remotely near a revolutionary situation. There are no problems there which cannot be dealt with in a civil and civilized Constitutional manner. I would go so far as to say no sane person should wish the line be crossed. Revolutionary results are unpredictable. Once a society has broken down into factions that solve all problems by weight of arms rather than by law, it can be beastly difficult to recover civil society.
Those of you who are Unix users will be familiar with the fortune cookie program. I am uncertain when it was first written, but it is rather ancient as such things go. That is why some of its’ many thousand quotes hark to a different era of computing, political thought and even humour. Although it does nothing “useful” it is fun and one of the items I consider mandatory for any computer I work with. If you include the non-politically correct ones there are some truly fine old bawdy limericks and the occasional ROFL (Roll On The Floor Laughing) stories that take the piss of any imaginable group or subgroup of humanity.
There are also many thought provoking quotes. Some make you just sit back and think. The following is one of those.
By the middle 1880’s, practically all the roads except those in the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were still five feet between rails.
It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard, in one day. This remarkable piece of work was carried out on a Sunday in May of 1886. For weeks beforehand, shops had been busy pressing wheels in on the axles to the new and narrower gauge, to have a supply of rolling stock which could run on the new track as soon as it was ready. Finally, on the day set, great numbers of gangs of track layers went to work at dawn. Everywhere one rail was loosened, moved in three and one-half inches, and spiked down in its new position. By dark, trains from anywhere in the United States could operate over the tracks in the South, and a free interchange of freight cars everywhere was possible.
– Robert Henry, “Trains”, 1957
I wonder how long the study would take today? Not to mention the environmental impact statement, the regulatory battles, the labour negotiations…
Sometimes one has to admit we have not advanced ourselves. We have only made complex what was once deemed simple.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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