Seth Godin notes what the future holds in the information age.
The nations that will prosper in the future are the ones that adopt Classical Liberalism (Libertarian) philosophy first.
Category Archives: Libertarian/Political Stuff
Predictions
Almost exactly two years ago, I mentioned the government is getting involved in who may watch children and what they could be fed.
It should scare you, too. How long before the US government is telling you who can watch your kids and how they are allowed to do it, including what the children may be fed?
Two years later comes this story.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.
The girl’s mother — who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation — said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.
“I don’t feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home,” the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County.
The girl’s grandmother, who sometimes helps pack her lunch, told Carolina Journal that she is a petite, picky 4-year-old who eats white whole wheat bread and is not big on vegetables.
Read the entire thing, as there’s some spectacular stuff from the Government Agents In Charge of
Children’s Food. It’s easy to look like you can predict the future when you are predicting the expanded growth of power of the state; it’s easy because people are sheep and continue to allow this to happen.
An Open Letter to Republicans
Dear Republicans,
You have an opportunity in 2012. You are running against the weakest President since Carter. He has to run on his record, now, and there’s an awful lot of easy ammunition there.
Yet the best you can apparently do is Mitt Romney, and you are considering Rick Santorum?
I think Mitt can win. I don’t think there are significant differences between his positions and those of The One, but he’s probably marginally better.
Santorum? No. Have you learned nothing from the strength of the Ron Paul support? Do you understand that support will line up behind Gary Johnson as soon as the Republican primary race is over if Santorum is the nominee?
I think Gary Johnson could be the difference in a couple of states regardless of the nominee, but you all best realize how many people in your ranks lean towards Libertarianism. Sure, some on the Left will place a protest vote for Johnson as well, but the real alignment is with some of your ranks.
Just letting you know.
Don’t worry about me, though. I’m voting for Johnson regardless.
I guess this is OK
As long as there’s a Democrat in charge, this must be acceptable.
As the report notes, it’s particularly remarkable that these findings come on the heels of President Obama’s recent boasting about the efficacy of drones and his specific claim that the policy has “not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”, adding that it was “important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.” Compare that claim to the Bureau’s almost certainly under-stated conclusion that it has “found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children.” And targeting rescuers and funeral attendees of your victims is quite the opposite of keeping the drone program on a “very tight leash.” As Samiullah Khan, one of the Bureau’s field researchers put it:
In a war situation no one is allowed to attack the Red Cross. Rescuers are like that. You are not allowed to attack rescuers. You know, the number of Taliban is increasing in Waziristan day by day, because innocents and rescuers are being killed day by day.
Strictly speaking, the legality of attacking rescuers may be ambiguous because, as the Bureau put it: “It is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions to attack rescuers wearing emblems of the Red Cross or Red Crescent. But what if rescuers wear no emblems, or if civilians are mixed in with militants, as the Bureau’s investigation into drone attacks in Waziristan has repeatedly found?” But there’s nothing ambiguous about the morality of that, or of attacking funerals (recall the worst part of the Baghdad attack video released by WikiLeaks: that the Apache helicopter first fired on the group containing Reuters journalists, then fired again on the people who arrived to help wounded). Whatever else is true, it seems highly likely that Barack Obama is the first Nobel Peace laureate who, after receiving his award, presided over the deliberate targeting of rescuers and funeral mourners of his victims.
Change indeed.
Thank Goodness
Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey has proposed legislation banning food products made from or containing aborted human fetuses.
Freshman Sen. Ralph Shortey said his own Internet research led him to believe such a ban is necessary and prompted him to offer the bill aimed at raising “public awareness” and giving an “ultimatum to companies” that might consider such a policy.
Shortey said he discovered suggestions online that some companies use embryonic stem cells to develop artificial flavors, but added that he is unaware of any Oklahoma companies doing such research.
Whew. I know I’ll feel better the next time I grab a sandwich in Oklahoma. Hopefully he’ll address tooth fairy licensing next.
Create Value
From Adam Gurri, via Cafe Hayek.
The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.
It is all about value. Value is why raising the minimum wage does harm, not good, and why we need to put less power in the hands of the likes of SEIU, not more.
Land of the Free?
Johnathan Turley writes that, well, maybe not so much.
While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.
Company like Syria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, and Iran. You know, free countries.
Read the entire thing.
More stuff to keep you up at night
Via the ACLU, a story about, well, a court ruling on something affecting somebody, somehow.
Then we among the general public, including journalists from all the major media outfits in Boston, listened and heard nothing, as the prosecutors, our lawyers and the judge conversed secretly, in plain sight. I have no idea what they said. I still don’t know, because my colleagues, lawyers at the ACLU of Massachusetts, are prohibited by court order from telling me.
So all I know is what I saw. As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. After the proceedings this morning, I’m left with little of the former, and a whole lot of the latter two.
The known knowns: the scrum of lawyers, defense and prosecution, addressed the judge. I saw the judge speak to the lawyers. Then I saw our attorneys return to their bench, closer to where I was sitting, out of earshot of the sidebar. But the ADA stayed with the judge. He spoke to her, with his back to the courtroom, for about ten minutes. Our attorneys didn’t get to hear what he said to her, didn’t have a chance to respond to whatever the government was saying about our client, about the case. It was frankly shocking.
After those ten minutes of secret government-judge conversation, our attorneys were invited back to the sidebar, whereupon the scrum of lawyers spoke with the judge for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they dispersed. The judge uttered not one word to the open court. And that was it.
Stunned, I followed a group of reporters outside and listened as Attorney Krupp attempted to answer their questions. It was then I realized that the judge had impounded all the court records related to the case, and mandated complete secrecy governing the proceedings. The public wasn’t even to know whether our motion to quash had been approved or denied.
If you don’t think this is frightening, you’re an idiot and a sheep. Unfortunately, there are far to many idiot sheep who can somehow find their way to the voting booth.
