Paranoia Is Rational

On the heels of the California Supreme Court decision about cell phone searches comes a great discussion of what the decision means on a practical level from Ars Technica. Here's a quote I want to highlight:

A May 2010 study from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers found that three out of every five new nonviolent criminal offenses don't require criminal intent. The Congressional Research Service can't even count the number of criminal offenses currently on the books in the United States, estimating the number to be in the "tens of thousands."

So, are you still certain you're not a criminal? To use my favorite example, just remember it is a violation of federal law (i.e. a crime) to use many cleaning products in a manner inconsistent with their labeling.

We've reached the point where the game is thoroughly stacked against Joe Q. Citizen. The .gov can find proof of some sort of crime, given enough evidence to parse. You may not think the .gov will ever be interested in you, and you may be right. However, given some of the more absurd examples of incompetence displayed lately, you may come under the crosshairs entirely by accident. Remember, its' not paranoia if they're out to get you.

Why give the .gov any help? Password protect your phone and don't talk to the cops.

Never Talk

So, Roger Clemens is going to be indicted for perjury over his testimony to the feds. This comes on the heels of the news that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Hairhelmet) was convicted of exactly 1 of the 24 counts against him. Coincidentally, the charge he got stuck with was lying to the feds.

I'm no great legal theorist, but the feds have cleverly managed to make talking to them seem like the worst possible option. If they're bound and determined to get you, they simply parse through every statement you've made to them, find one where they have plausible (but not necessarily dispositive) evidence to the contrary, and bingo! Time in a federal penitentiary for you, bucko.

What's more pathetic, in my opinion, is that perjury has become the fall back prosecution when they can't pin anything else on an otherwise innocent victim. No insider trading occurred? Perjury! Can't get the conviction on corruption charges? Perjury! Not enough evidence for steroid charges? Perjury!

Let us also not forget the feds are completely free to lie to you if they think doing so will help them convict you or others. You have a statutory duty not to lie, but they have no such corresponding obligation. You can also be prosecuted for lying, but federal agents won't get sanctioned for anything up to and including accidentally killing you. There's a pretty severe imbalance on the consequences scale going on here.

Given the well-publicized cases lately, I just don't see why anybody talks to the feds at all, let alone voluntarily. Anybody having any contact with the feds should smile cheerfully and invoke their 5th amendment rights. Alternatively, you can pull the "I do not recall at this time" routine. Either way seems preferable to later being prosecuted for perjury.

ObamaCare Supporters Are The 3/5ths Who Shouldn't Vote

Well, I think I’ve calmed down enough to have this post not be just an endless tirade of profanity. What the hell, even the morons at io9 have chimed in on health care and how it will prevent possible future dystopias. If they can chime in with their completely asinine nonsense, I figure I’m entitled. However, if you, for whatever misguided reason, supported this monstrosity, you need to shut the fuck up. This is my little lesson to you and why, exactly, you bought a bill of goods with money that wasn’t yours and that you had no right to spend. More importantly, you won’t get what you want and it’ll cost even more than you were told.

So, what shall we tackle first? Let’s try an easy one. All you morons who thought this bill was “revenue neutral” or would reduce the deficit, raise your hands. Got them high up in the air? Good. Now bring it back down, as hard as you can, on top of your pointy little skull. Stings a bit, doesn’t it? It’s only what you deserve for being gullible. The bill will cost more than projected, which means it will be neither revenue neutral nor deficit reducing. I predict this with absolute certainty based on the knowledge that every other national health care entitlement in this country has done so. So, if we’re only off on the cost by as much as we were with Medicare, this goatscrew will cost us all a mere $8.6 TRILLION over the first ten years. Oops. Of course, if we did better on the math this time around, it might only cost us $1.8 trillion. I feel so much better about fiscal responsibility already, don’t you? The cost could be anywhere from double all the way up to 17 times the estimates, based on historical data. I don’t see any deficit reduction with those kinds of errors.

So, let me ask another dumb question. We’re going to give everybody insurance and then we’re going to make preventative care visits free for everybody. So, one might reasonably conclude the demand for health care will go up. That’s usually what happens to the demand for goods when the price drops, in case you were wondering how I deduced this. Is all this extra health care going to magically appear from nowhere? I don’t see any incentives in the bill to provide health care, and I certainly can see more than a few disincentives. So, if your head isn’t still sore from your self-administered beating in the last paragraph, can somebody who supported this crap explain where the actual health care to meet all the new demand is going to come from? I don’t mean the magical insurance talisman you managed to get everybody to pay for, I mean the actual doctors and nurses and facilities and equipment. Any provisions in the bill to address this minor, almost petty, issue? Any at all? Hmm. This might could be a problem.

Now, let’s be real about what this bill does. It’s a huge, brazen attempt to shift the cost of providing health care to anyone but the people actually receiving the care. Why anybody thinks this is a good idea is beyond me, since this usually means otherwise productive resources get wasted. One of the issues here, since a bunch of people apparently spent years taking the short bus to school, is transaction costs. Passing the money around from you to the insurance company to the doctor incurs costs every time the money changes hands. Add the government into the mix, and there’s at least another set (or twelve) of hands the money has to pass through before it gets from you, the recipient of health care, to the doctor, the provider. So, if we initially had a hundred dollars of purchasing power to spend on health care, by the time the money passes through all the hands in a complicated dance of regulatory legerdemain, how much is left? Here’s a hint: less than a hundred dollars.

How much less is the question, isn’t it? Who here thinks throwing government into the mix is going to raise the amount money that actually gets spent on health care? No, instead the money will go to pay salaries of GS-7s to shuffle around your doctor’s request for reimbursement and some other random pieces of paper until they’re all neatly paper clipped together and sent to finance where some other overpaid fed drone will enter the data into the system to send a check for the wrong amount to a different address. All of this activity, by the way, will be lumped under “health care’ in the budget, so “health care” spending will have gone up, despite you actually getting less health care for the same budget.

As an aside, I may start a tattoo shop that tattoos TANSTAAFL and Somebody always pays on peoples’ foreheads. I figure if you dolts see it enough, sooner or later it might just sink in. I figure if you supported the health care reform, you’re almost certainly not imbued with enough understanding to figure out why paying to get self-evident truths tattooed on your forehead is a bad idea. Really, you’re the perfect audience if I could just get a government subsidy for you to give me.

Now, let’s cover a few facts about insurance. This bill includes a version of shall-issue coverage. This means no matter what is currently wrong with you, an insurance company has to issue you a policy if you can pay the premiums. (If you can’t pay, you’ll get a subsidy, so don’t sweat it.) The insurance companies are not allowed to deny you coverage because of your medical history, gosh darn it! Because insurance is vital! And a right! Or some such bullshit. I admit, I don’t understand the deranged fantasy economics that make this a good idea. There’s also no lifetime limit on coverage. So, in our brave new Obamanation you can obligate some company to unlimited expense by buying a policy from them. Now, in a world where ignuts didn’t try to repeal the law of supply and demand, this would mean your insurance would be pretty damned expensive. Right? If I could obligate you to unlimited expense by writing you a check, that check would be pretty substantial, wouldn't it?

Now enter the notion of community rating, which is also in the bill. The insurance company doesn’t get to charge premiums based on the risk of something going wrong with your health. They are forced to charge the same premium to everybody. So if somebody has a really expensive policy while most people have much less expensive policies, guess what happens? The premiums level out until the same amount of money comes in to the insurance company. So for most people, the premium will go up. How special! But that’s okay, because you’ll get money from the gummint to pay for the premiums if you can’t afford them! How much money will this cost the government? Nobody knows! However, I’m going to boldly make a prediction it’ll cost more money than anybody projected, and will break the federal budget. At least, it's working that way in Massachusetts so far, so I've got a pretty good data point for my prediction.

Of course, maybe if we weren’t spending all our money on insurance, maybe some of the money could go towards the actual provision of health care. But I’m guessing none of you supporters understand the concept of opportunity costs. I recommend a primer that can be found here. I think the pull quote is right up front in the third paragraph:

the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil

Substitute “politician” for “economist” and the result is much the same. Seems like we got a bunch of bad politicians and shitty economists around here setting policy, doesn’t it?

Of course, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Short-sighted legislators made a bunch of bad policy decision, and kept piling on more in various misguided attempts to fix the unintended consequences. This kept up until all y’all fools felt Obamacare was somehow a good idea and not a clusterfuck. Let’s review the first law of holes, shall we? If you’re in a hole, stop digging. Likewise, if your well-intentioned, well-meaning government regulations are causing a problem, don’t add on more regulations. You just get more problems. Did this simple concept ever occur to any of you as the administration and his enablers in Congress led you by the nose towards disaster?

Finally, I’d just like to add one more thought: FUCK YOU. You’re so damned terrified something bad might happen and you might have to pay for your own medical care that you feel you have carte blanche to make the rest of us pay for your insurance. You think your desire for something is enough justification to get the government to take it from the rest of us. If the idea that you, and not me, and not the government, are responsible for your life, your health, and your destiny terrifies you that much, go get a lobotomy and have yourself institutionalized. You don’t deserve to walk the earth pretending to be a citizen of a free country. You think like a slave and you act like a slave and you want your master, the government, to protect you from the imagined horrors of the world. Well, guess what? Some of don’t think we’re incapable of facing the world without the government telling us how to manage our lives. Some of us don’t want the shackles you would so willingly place on yourself and everybody else. More to the point, we’re not going to wear them. Don’t think this over. You haven’t won a damned thing.

Meltdown Imminent

I have to say, between the ruling today in Citizens United and the Brown victory there's a whole bunch of people with odious political inclinations who's heads are exploding right now. From my perspective, it's pretty freaking sweet. Between the inability to face up to the implications of the Brown victory and the hyperbolic pants-wetting hysterics about today's decision, it's only going to get worse.

And I'm going to enjoy every single minute of it.

Why Government Doesn't Work, Part Umpteen-Million

So, you poor suckers are gonna get "health care reform". It has nothing to do with health care, and it won't reform a goddamn thing, but you're gonna get it anyway. Tom Harkin (D-Out Wandering) openly admits any bill that's passed will be subject to mission creep almost immediately.

In the future, amending it and changing it isn’t going to be as tough as passing it in the first place.

So, he and his compatriots will continue to tinker and screw around with your health care if they can get it passed. Yay.

Of course, it's not all bad. Depending on where you sit, it may be a great bill.

The health-care industry has captured the regulatory process, and it has used that capture to eliminate any real competition, whether from the government, in the form of a single-payer system, or from new and more efficient competitors in the private sector who might have the audacity to offer a better product at a better price.

Me? I work in the oil industry, so all I can see is a giant screwing coming along.

Finally, I will ask a question that is somewhat antiquated in the modern era. Where, exactly, in the Constitution did we delegate the authority to Congress to require us to buy insurance? I'm just not seeing it anywhere in my copy of the document.

Sticker Dissonance

Driving in to work this morning, I saw a car with two bumper stickers that don't quite match up. One was an Obama-Biden campaign sticker. The other said "I'm A Constitution Voter".

Umm. Yeah.

Unless those stickers were applied by two different people, the level of cognitive dissonance required to hold both of those thoughts at the same time verges perilously close to madness.

Happy Birthday!

222 and looking good. Now if we just get more people to understand and pay attention, we'd be better off.

Slight Mistake

So, apparently Sonia Sotomayor doesn't quite understand the whole Constitutional law thingie we've got going on. Well, that's what Randy Barnett thinks, anyway. Key quote from the good professor:

This is both a grossly incorrect (and empty) understanding of the doctrine governing the protection of fundamental rights and an inaccurate statement of the precedents concerning the incorporation of the right to keep and bear arms into the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.

Hmm. So, refresh my memory. Why is she qualified to be on the Supreme Court? If her understanding is as limited as Professor Barnett thinks, why'd she get nominated?

Of course, I hold to the view, first articulated by others, that she is the least worst nominee we're going to get from the n00b. Any other SCOTUS nominee will be worse by an order of magnitude. As evidence, I point to the plethora of czarlets the new administration has created. None of them are subject to vetting, and the results are interesting. As an example, I give you the Science Czar.

SCOTUS blocks the Auto-Rama

My initial thought: it is about time. Ruthie's going to get her 4 justices, and I hope it is the precise 4 that Teh Barackulous and his merry band of socialist flying monkeys doesn't want. I am feeling optimistic that there are 4 members of the high court who may jump on board just for the opportunity to strike down this, maybe TARP...and potentially all of this unconstitutional government intervention. Hey, maybe there's some hope & change for me after all.

One can only try to look for a bright spot, right? Needless to say, there are so many potential outcomes and ramifications here...and the Supreme Court could just be the ones to save us all.

Short Week

You'd think that would mean less work related aggravation. Not so much, unfortunately.


marriedtothesea.com

I think that sums up my week already. I could discuss the newest Supreme Court nominee, but as she's already revealed herself to be temperamentally unsuited for the position, I don't see much need. Others have commented on her previous decisions. I'll just propose to you a simple experiment. Does this statement strike you as racist?

A wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina female who hasn't lived that life.

If it strikes you as racist, perhaps the racist nature doesn't change much no matter which skin and genitalia combinations you substitute into the phrase. Of course, if it strikes you as just peachy, perhaps we're farther away from that color-blind society we're supposedly striving towards than I thought we were.

Subpoena Power

So, Karl Rove has been subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. A random thought occurred to me, so I'm passing it along.

Where does the subpoena power of Congress originate? Is this something Congress gave themselves under the necessary and proper clause? I'm not seeing anything relevant in the appropriate passage.

The Candidates Weigh In

The presidential candidate of choice around these parts has weighed in with his opinion on today's ruling. Of course, since he wrote the LP amicus brief for the case, I think we can guess which side he was on.

Everybody's favorite reading comprehension impaired candidate issued a statement hilarious for the lack of self awareness it displays. Two gems:

Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today's ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right- sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

So, we can expect a bipartisan assault on gun rights cosponsored by Sen. McCain when, exactly?

This ruling does not mark the end of our struggle against those who seek to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens.

True enough. You're still a Senator, so there's work yet to be done on that front.

The asshat who locked up the donk nomination has yet to release a statement. It'll be hard for him to reconcile his statement that the DC law was constitutional with the fact the Supreme Court said it ain't. Some constitutional scholar he is.

We Won!

So, for once and for all, I'd kindly like everybody to have a nice cup of STFU about the meaning of the Second Amendment.

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a
firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for
traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
Pp. 2–53.
(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but
does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative
clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it
connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.

For the clueless here, the prefatory clause is the part about "well-regulated militia" and "security of a free state". The operative clause is "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Anybody who ever said the militia clause meant restrictions on the right of the individual to keep and bear arms can now eat a bowl of dicks. SCOTUS says you're wrong.

Now, can we get those people to admit the 4th means something?

Not Yet Time

Everyone expects the Heller decision to be released today, so y'all will pardon me if I sit around clicking refresh every couple of minutes instead of doing something useful.

Soon Enough

The Supreme Court is busily handing out opinions for the cases heard in the 2007 session. 4 came out yesterday, and 22 remain. In the remaining cases one is of particular interest around here. I refer, of course, to District of Columbia v. Heller, which centers on the 2^nd Amendment. While the court cogitates, here’s an interview with the lead attorney for the case.

I am, like the rest of the hardcore RKBA community, awaiting the decision impatiently. I don’t think we’ll get everything we’d like, but I don’t think we’ll get fucked over either. A sort of unhappy medium will be reached, despite Obamarama’s contention that DC’s gun laws are constitutional. They’re not, and a guy who is supposedly a “constitutional scholar” should know what the actual document says. Of course, running against him is a guy who has spent his entire adult life sworn to uphold and defend a document he has apparently never read.

On that note, have you considered an alternative to either one of the donkelphant nominees this fall?

Evidence, Please

I have avoided commenting about the FLDS raid and the aftermath. Lots of allegations being tossed around but surprisingly little hard evidence was coming out. As things turned out, that's because CPS and the rest of the minions of the state of Texas didn't have much in the way of actual, supportable evidence. Of course, if you don't believe me, you might believe the Third Court of Appeals. The ruling is here, and a fairly lengthy breakdown of the decision can be found over at Lone Star Times.

I'll give you the thirty second summary. In order to justify removing children, CPS alleged a whole host of things for which they have no supporting evidence. All this was done because somebody thinks the FLDS is creepy and strange.

This ruling is a victory for all of us who care about civil liberties and any of us who might be considered creepy and strange. The bar for the state coming in and taking your kids ought to be set pretty goddamned high, and should be based on something more than just the personal prejudices of state workers. As personally repellent as I may find the FLDS belief system, the members have a right to hold those beliefs and to teach their beliefs to their children. The state doesn't get to come in and take hundreds of kids because mommy and daddy don't believe what the state thinks they should. That way lies a particularly vile form of tyranny that we've seen before elsewhere, and we sure as hell shouldn't acquiesce to someone trying it in the US.

Grits for Breakfast has been all over the case from the get go. He's also got a good post up on the burning question of who's going to pay for this giant clusterfuck. With cost estimates running up to $21 million dollars, somebody is going to take a huge budgetary hit. Maybe the cost, if nothing else, will cause the idiots who triggered the investigation to look a bit more closely next time.

Untrustworthy Bastards

And by "Bastards" I mean the Secret Service. Heartless Libertarian has the details.

Yesterday

Arthur C. Clarke died. He was probably one of the few genuine optimists working in the sci-fi field. He was definitely one of the greats, and will be missed.

Oral arguments for Heller were heard as well. Legal analysis of the argument is left to more cpabale minds. I found it amusing when Justice Roberts was explaining to the DC lawyer how he interpreted the statute in question and the DC lawyer told him that wasn't necessarily correct.

Umm. I'm not a lawyer and all, but when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is telling you how he interprets the law, you pretty much agree with him because you can't win this argument. You may be right, but you're still gonna lose.

Electoral College Math

GWA.45 pointed out this excellent article about why the Electoral College is important. The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ll give you the 20 second summary.

Without the Electoral College, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and the other major urban areas would decide who the President is.

Liveblogging Netflix!

So I'm watching This Film Is Not Yet Rated from Netflix. A big pet peeve is prevalent throughout this movie. The MPAA is a private organization. The MPAA is not the government. So when people start whining about the 1st Amendment, they need to STFU.

Yes, the MPAA is a powerful industry organization. So what? Sell your film on the internet. You want to buck the system, accept the price for following your artistic vision.