Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Sword Control

More stupidity from the British nanny state.

Britain plans to ban the sale of samurai swords because the weapons have been used in a number of serious, high-profile attacks.

The Home Office (Britain’s Interior Ministry) said on Wednesday the swords would be added to its Offensive Weapons Order from April next year, meaning they could not be imported, sold or hired.

However collectors of genuine Japanese swords and those used by martial arts enthusiasts would be exempt from the ban.

“In the wrong hands, samurai swords are dangerous weapons,” Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said.

Friday, December 07, 2007

Shot of the Day

Thursday, December 06, 2007

The Phoniness of the NIE Iran Report

Former UN ambassador John Bolton sums it up perfectly:

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the “intelligence community” on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.

All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than “intelligence” analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.

We live in an age where minions in government agencies try to influence public policy through press leaks and falsified reports. If you believe that the intelligence reports that told us WMDs were real in Iraq were nothing but propaganda, then you have to believe that the Iran report is too. Federal employees last longer than presidents. They often run their own end game to influence policy, and they have the own politics which tend to lean more toward the Democrats big government approach because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the state expanding and paying them more money. They also have an interest in discrediting administrations they don’t like. And they have been working overtime to discredit this one. What better way to do that than to slap them in the face with this Iran report after teh president has been making all these claims about Iran’s nuclear ambition.

But this goes way beyond gamesmanship. What if the problem is real? What if Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons? This is a state that has been a major contributor to the terrorist incidents in Iraq. A state which has helped fund Al Qaeda. A state which believes in the advancement of Islamic fundamentalism. Trying to make Bush look bad at the expense of a real threat is beyond stupid. It’s potentially life threatening.

Sure, so is a war with Iran. But that was never likely to really happen. Many presidents use public statements to call other nations to action, or scare others into changing course. A president with a year left in his term is not likely to start a major war. Not when he’s got two fronts going already. All the hysteria from the WAGD* crowd notwithstanding.

Let’s just hope that the mistakes made by the usual suspects don’t cost us again any time soon.

[WAGD - We’re All Gonna Die! aka Dr. Zachary Smith imitators]

When Stupid People have Power

All government, of course, is against liberty.
H. L. Mencken

The senate passed a couple of bills today. They deserve comment, The first is about Global Warming. It’s a bill that would radically effect our economy in negative ways. A bill that would put massive restrictions on our freedoms and choices, and all for spurious, unproven claims. And it’s passed to coincide with a UN global warming conference. As if the approval of that association of international poseurs is a worthy enterprise. How stupid can our politicians be? Plenty, it seems.

The bill would set caps on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from electric utility, transportation and manufacturing industries beginning in 2012 with the goal of cutting emissions 60 percent by 2050. It would create an incentive system that would give credits to industries that cut pollution. Industries that failed to reduce emissions would be forced to buy credits from others.

The Democratic-led Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11 to eight, largely along party lines, to send the measure to the full Senate for what supporters hope will be action early next year.

Oh, it has the bogus carbon credits escape clause. If you fail to meet your imposed goals you are forced to buy credits. Do you see what a scam this is?

This unnecessary law would impose major lifestyle changes on people that they aren’t even aware of yet. Don’t think it would end with this law if it made it all the way through the process. They would keep piling on, to look like they were doing something useful because that’s what most politicians are about. They’re like that guy at work who masters the art of looking busy while goofing off.

There’s already talk from some circles of having days with no electricity to “conserve energy use”. This is something that happens in poor countries all the time. In some parts of Russia there’s one day a week where you don’t get any power. Don’t be surprised if idiotic ideas like that raise their heads if more global warming bills pass. All of this is completely unnecessary.

The second bill is about just as bad.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

This is all about child porn...on the surface. I mean, who would argue against stopping child porn unless you were for it, right? This is how they get laws passed that start cutting into people’s freedoms. Some politicians have wanted to stomp on free speech and internet privacy for a while now. The restrictions this law would place on businesses that provide internet is excessive. It would force them to have all internet transactions and emails available for police/government inspection on demand. Right now many ISPs have ignored or held off similar demands from groups like the RIAA. But a law like this opens the door wide for different groups to legally obtain any and all information on your internet use. 

All they have to do is pass another law saying music downloading is illegal (which they have) and poof! Now they can come after your computer and ISP records instantly. The list goes on.

Both of these laws sound good on paper. One is about cleaning up the environment. The other is about fighting child porn. Who could argue with that?

Which is precisely how they like to wear down civil liberties. People wouldn’t willingly give up their privacy if the state merely asked them to. So they have to make it sound reasonable. Hey, we’re fighting terrorists! Were saving the planet! Were fighting child predators!

What they’re really fighting is the shreds of our liberty. One piece at a time.

UPDATE: The only presidential candidate who voted against this stupid internet law was Ron Paul. Kuicinich and all the rest voted for it. Ron Paul’s stock just went up in my book. 

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The New Bigotry

It’s one of the last forms of bigotry openly accepted in this PC age. The derision of fat people. And now governments are getting into the act.

New Zealand immigration officials are keeping a U.K. wife from joining her husband “down under” because they say she is too fat, the Daily Mail reports.

British citizens Rowan Trezise, 33, and Richie Trezise, 35, are living apart as she tries desperately to shed the pounds needed to comply with New Zealand guidelines that immigrants maintain a healthy BMI, or body mass index.

BMI is a weight-height ratio that estimates percentage of body fat. The New Zealand Immigration Service requires all applicants to undergo a complete medical examination, which includes body size measures like “waist circumference.”

The regulations were supposedly put into place for budget reasons. The country’s health care system cannot afford to open its doors to overweight immigrants, a spokesman for New Zealand’s Fight the Obesity Epidemic explained to the Daily Mail.

This after it has been revealed that being overweight isn’t always unhealthy. In fact, you can be overweight and healthy. The BMI is a false method of judging people’s weight.

But between airlines charging passengers more and governments denying them visas we have a new form of segregation. One that is sanctioned by governments who are eager to push the “obesity epidemic” theory so they can cut people out of insurance plans. It’s yet another agenda to cut more people out of entitlement rolls. 

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Scary

In some distant future, they will look at the people of today and think we were crazy. Kind of like we do looking back at Nazi Germany or the Spanish Inquisition. Maybe this is not as bad, but the very idea of calling CO² a pollutant, when it’s a natural process, is nothing short of wacko. Yet a bunch of media whores politicians are champing at the bit to pass some laws. Laws which will cost you a lot more money.

California sued the federal government on Thursday to force a decision about whether the state can impose the nation’s first greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light trucks.

More than a dozen other states are poised to follow California’s lead if it is granted the waiver from federal law, presenting a challenge to automakers who would have to adapt to a patchwork of regulations.

The state’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was expected after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed last spring to take legal action.

“Our future depends on us taking action on global warming right now,” Schwarzenegger said during a news conference. “There’s no legal basis for Washington to stand in our way.”

At issue is California’s nearly two-year-old request for a waiver under the federal Clean Air Act allowing it to implement a 2002 state anti-pollution law regulating greenhouse gases.

Eleven other states have adopted California’s standard as a way to combat global warming and five others are considering it.

“Our position is that it’s time for EPA to either act or get out of the way,” said Lee Moore, a spokesman for New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram.

All of this means car prices will go up and the climate will not be affected one bit. Only you will be.

And if they succeed here, trust me (as Arnold likes to say), that’s just the beginning. They will start going after other things. And where will it end? How many more laws restricting business and people will they pass? I shudder to think.

All the caterwauling about the Patriot act is fine. But there is plenty more to be concerned with from nanny state and “green” legislation. It’s all getting out of hand. 

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

March of the Food Fascists

I’ve been warning you all how dangerous the control freaks are, and how they will move from one bugaboo to the next when they’ve done their work. Tobacco has been all but banned. So they are looking for something else to demonize. What do you think they are talking about here?

“We are exactly where we were with tobacco in the 1970s,” said Barnard. “The health community was just starting to get its hands around the problem. This is clearly a long battle. But people are starting to wake up.”

They want to ban something. Something most people like. Guess what that is?

How about corn?

Yes, a food staple that is responsible for making Americans some of the best nourished people on earth. But in the F.F.’s so called minds, being well nourished is evil because that means OBESE!

The Obesity epidemic is another manufactured crisis like man-made global warming. And the same scolds and hysterics are lining up to line their pockets by the criminalization of foods. They’re going to start with wanting warning labels, then taxes, then limits, then bans.

We really can’t let these people continue on the way they are. They won’t stop with corn. Be certain that sugar, flour and any other processed food will be attacked. Then what? Hmm...maybe certain sports. Because people get hurt playing sports. You think I’m joking? Did you think corn would be considered enemy #1 in your life time? These people are beyond parody.

Look at the way tobacco and smokers are being criminalized. Realize that a lot of that is the product of years of hysteria and propaganda. Now they’re setting their sights on something you probably enjoy. Get ready.

UPDATE: Here’s the other method they use. Studies that claim ___ will give you cancer. They did that with cigarettes and it worked, so now they claim everything they don’t like will give you cancer. And you’re supposed to believe it because “experts say so”. This is a classic logical fallacy. Appeal to Authority.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Creeping Fascism Watch

Whatever you may think of Ron Paul, he raises plenty of good points in this essay. When governments are given more power they are loathe to give it back later. Income tax was supposed to be a temporary thing. So were a lot of other taxes that are still with us. The restrictions we have on our travel are probably not going away without a fight. If anything, they will probably get worse the next time we have a terrorist incident.

Politicians always claim they are looking out for us when they take away our freedoms. But we should never be suckered by that idea. Anny time a politicians uses the term for the children that should be grounds to vote them out of office. It’s never for the children.

If you’re a Bush hater who thinks the administration is making America a fascist state, you should be paying attention to what Democrats and nanny-staters are doing to stop smoking, fast food and anything else that annoys them. The so called “fight against global warming” is another tool of the political elite to get more power. Its based on bogus assumptions and logical fallacies.

The bottom line is, control freaks of any political stripe are never satisfied with the power they have. They will always want more. And in getting it, they will still be hungry. This is why limited government is a good thing. The people should have the right to say no. They should always have that right.

Perry de Havilland over at Samizdata breaks it down even further.

I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be ‘totalitarian’. The defining characteristic is, as the word itself suggests, that control over people be pervasive and total… mass murderousness, goose-stepping troops, waving red (or whatever) flags are merely an incidental consequence and which can be better described in other ways (such as ‘tyrannical, murderous, dictatorial, brutal, national socialist, communist, islamo-fascist etc.).

As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls ‘soft fascism’) in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws “for your own good’’ or “for the children” or “for the environment”.

The way smokers are being ostracized may make sense if you hate smoke. I’m not a smoker and don’t like it, either. But I know when people’s liberties are being trampled on. If they can do it to smokers, they can do it to others. And they are already started on that path with things like junk food and global warming skeptics. Organized hate campaigns are active in both the media and the internet, targeting those who don’t have the “correct” viewpoint.

It’s important that we don’t get tricked into going along with the hype machine. This is why I may sound like a broken record sometimes. But I think we have to stand up against this never ending wave of restrictions coming down the pike.

If we all speak out, we can scare some of the politicians into backing down. Provided we do it before they get more powerful.

UPDATE: Speak of the devil.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

More Repression of Free Speech

The denial of reality by so called “advocate groups” is sinking to increasingly subterranean depths in their pressuring of TV and film studios to ban things from the screen that they don’t like. Today it’s smoking. Tomorrow, pizza?

The biggest studios are usually like-minded when it comes to what is fit to portray on screen. But they have become divided lately in confronting one of the entertainment industry’s touchiest issues: smoking in movies that reach the young.

Under pressure from an antismoking lobby unsatisfied by a promise that the industry’s trade group made in May to consider tobacco use as a factor in film ratings, the six largest studio owners have been patching together individual responses to those who want cigarettes out of films rated G, PG or PG-13.

Smoking opponents view the result as surprising progress toward a virtual ban on tobacco images in all but films with R or NC-17 ratings.

Yet Hollywood is also waking to the realization that a committed band of advocates is rapidly changing what is permissible in the movies. And that precedent could embolden other groups campaigning to rid movies of portrayals of gun use, trans-fat consumption or other behavior that can be proved harmful to the public.

“It’s a chilling idea,” said Bill Condon, who wrote and directed “Dreamgirls” for the DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures units of Viacom.

This is the kind of crypto-fascism we should be concerned about. Because it doesn’t involve laws being passed, just the pressuring of the few corporations that control an industry into walking lock step with some ideology.

Our society has become increasingly under the sway of tiny pressure groups who dictate what’s acceptable. These groups are largely made of extremists. And they are managing to get laws passed that are stifling our liberties.

In New York city the mayor passed a law banning trans-fats. When major cities or states enact such laws it emboldens other political hacks to follow suit, thinking it will make them look like effective do-gooders. But in each case, it removes choices from people’s lives.

They always start with things most people agree with. Like smoking. Smoking is bad for you. Therefore, who is going to complain if it gets banned. Only smokers. And they’ve effectively, slowly made smokers pariahs. Forcing them to smoke in limited areas like Jews penned in a Ghetto. And we all know what they did to the Jews after they penned them in.

Once they get their way with one thing, don’t think they’ll stop there. The self righteous always have an axe to grind. Another freedom they want taken away from others. What seems mild at first becomes serious over time.

I remember when no smoking areas were a suggestion. Wait’ll you starting having to pay high taxes on junk food and then have to go to certain parts of town to get a hamburger because of zoning laws. Don’t laugh.

UPDATE: Hugging banned at a school. Stuff you never imagined is getting banned all over the place. We live in an epidemic of intolerance. 

Friday, September 28, 2007

Outrage DuJour

A WOMAN was locked up and “lost” for 70 years after being wrongly accused of stealing 13p.

Jean Gambell, 85, was “certified” indefinitely in 1937 over claims she had taken the cash while cleaning at a doctor’s surgery.

The money was found — but Jean still spent 70 years in a maze of care institutions.

She was “found” when brothers Alan, 66, and David, 63 — who thought she was dead — read a letter sent by a care home to their mother, who died 25 years ago.

David said: “I was about to throw it in the bin when I saw a name in the corner — Jean Gambell. I rang and they said our sister was there.”

Unbelievable.

UPDATE: A Close Second