Category: News

Reason magazine’s Hit and Run reports that the television news magazine 60 Minutes is going to run a piece about eminent domain abuse.

Reason also ran a story called “ Wrecking Property Rights: How cities use eminent domain to seize property for private developers“.

As some of you know, eminent domain abuse is one of the particular pet peeves of mine. So go read these pieces and arm yourselves for when your municipality comes for your house for a strip mall.

Some group called the Multistate Tax Commission has issued a report saying that Internet Service Providers should shed some of their tax burden. Hey, I’m all for lower taxes, but I’m a little worried when they start given little perks to some industries, because then the next one wants one, and suddenly my sales tax is at 20% and my property taxes are about 10% annually. Flat tax the corporations on their profits, but let’s not have our governments play favorites.

More troubling, though, is this from the mouths of the aristocracy:

“State and local governments understand that consumers need to get Internet access,” Tennessee Revenue Commissioner Loren Chumley said in a telephone news conference announcing the study. “The bill that was passed goes far beyond that. It has the potential to wipe out all telecommunications-related tax levies.” [Emphasis mine.]

Any time our Illuminated Leaders start babbling on about what luxuries consumers need, I tremble, for I see the future growth of the Great Society, paid for by….the taxed consumers!

Let no Child be without Broadband!

Rubbish! Now get back to work.

I have received mail about my post yesterday about the high school sophomores in St. Peters who got busted for do-it-yourself porn. As of this posting, three boys have been charged with felonies; the girls, of course, get none.

Let me point out, hopefully more succinctly, the absurdity of the charges. Follow me here:

1. Child porn laws touted as necessary protections for The Children who are not Smart Enough Or Responsible Enough (SEORE) to make their own decisions regarding sex and posing for photography therein. Never mind that The Children in this case are fifteen years old, three years short of the sudden burst from the maturity gland which will make them eligible to pose naked for anything they want.
2. Although these “children” cannot make their own reasoned decisions about posing naked and being photographed, the law will now prosecute them as though they are smart enough and responsible enough to make their own decisions regarding sex and posing for photography therein.

!SEORE = SEORE

Do you have that moebius strip of logic firmly grasped yet? They are being prosecuted as adults for doing something from which they are being being protected from doing something they cannot decide to do because they’re not adults.

It’s all a part of the ride on the official United States Eight Ten Year Adolescence. Face it, between the years of 13 and 21 23, children begin to phase into adulthood, and society and its occasional-lackey-and-sometimes-master government are pretty slow to dole out the adult privileges and responsibilities, and when they do, they stagger the ages and make it as drawn out as possible.

Consider:

• At 14 years old, if you shoot a person, you’re tried as an adult
• At 18 years old, if you get shot, you’re statistically “A Child” for those who collect statistics to promote gun control.
• Before you’re 16 years old, you can get a job and start paying your taxes to support The Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers in their pursuit of pharmaceutical immortality.
• However, you have to wait until you’re 18 years old to enter contracts.
• At 16 years old, you’re responsible enough to get a driver’s license and should know enough not to pile a bunch of your friends into your dad’s car, and go roaring around the streets until you collide with a retired schoolteacher on her way from the grocery and kill her and her nephew.
• Glass of wine at dinner? Not for 5 more years, you irresponsible welp.
• At 18 years old, you’re responsible enough to handle explosives and automatic weapons.
• However, concealed weapons will have to wait if you’re from Missouri until the Eddie Eagle Epihany hits you on your 23rd birthday and you can then safely carry concealed weapons.

What’s my proposed solution? At the 13th birthday, send each child into the Cave of the Mother Snake, where it must spend the night alone, without a Gameboy. In the morning, when the child emerges, it is an Adult. Drink responsibly, young man or young woman, and remember to use the booster seat when you’re driving.

Also, vote for me.

Thank you.

In a story certain to not shock anyone with the faintest memory of being young and hormonal and not suffering from the slightest repressed-guilt-turned-into-outrage, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

A group of 15-year-olds from a St. Peters high school who made a video showing two girls kissing and a naked girl being touched by two boys are facing child pornography charges.

All consensual among the fifteen year olds, but guess what? They’re facing child pornography charges! Of course. They’d be safe from statutatory rape charges if they’d limited themselves to copulation, but record it and wham! It’s a crime.

So they’re doing what curious and, let’s face it, unconstrained (whether by parents or morals) digital kids do, which is namely a little I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours, with the optional “see-like-a-blind-person” rule in effect.

Three have been referrred to juvenile court on charges of promoting child pornography, furnishing pornographic materials to a minor and promoting a sexual performance by a child. The other four are still underinvestigation and may be charged, police say.

“They did the act, they knew what they were doing, and they knew it was wrong,” said St. Peters Sgt. David Kuppler. “You can’t film a 15-year-old child nude no matter what age you are. It’s the same standard we would hold an adult to, it’s just the juvenile justice standard.”

Now the system’s going to brand them as sexual offenders, put their names on the Internet for the rest of their lives, and some suburban prosecutor will be one heroic step closer to governorship. That will protect and serve no one but… well, the government and its bit players hoping for named roles (instead of Municipal Assistant District Attorney #2, I will be David Justice, Avenger of the Oppressed!).

The kids all need a good swatting, without the cameras rolling, thank you. A good talking to, and a maybe bit of “Hold on for three years and you’ll be a Vivid superstar, but from here out, you’re wearing burlap.” But jail time (reform school time, I mean, not as bad as jail except it is)?

It’s a continuing shame that parents cannot discipline and their children and hence cannot trust other parents to discipline or train their own children. As part of this abdictation, the only alternative lazy or immoral parents can turn to is the heavy hand of Government, whose spanking hand is numb and unfeeling from overuse and whom the punishment is not hurting as much as it is hurting us.

Go read this post at Samizdata: A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?

I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:

You’ll have to go to the source for the list.

The wise Tim Blair says:

Kangaroos are friendly. Not like wombats; a wombat will leave you for dead every time.

Of course, he’s linking to a story about a kangaroo tugging the Lassie grift and drawing attention to a farmer who’d been knocked senseless. The kangaroo might just have saved the farmer’s life.

However, we here at RooWatch Central have covered this ground already. Beware the kangaroos.

Obviously, this Lulu character is up to something. Now Lulu is being lauded by Australians. Suddenly, she starts amassing wealth and then uses her popularity as a springboard for replacing John Howard, and suddenly, it’s just like On The Beach (well, in that it’s the end of the world, and it’s set in Australia).

Someone better take care of Lulu before she gets access to Australia’s nuclear arsenal or the Collingwood Magpies is all I am saying. Once she has the Bomb or a standing army, there will be no stopping her.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune knows the difference (but he’ll only share it with you if you register, which you should):

So the best thing the president could have done, politically, would have been to leave it all to the United Nations, to walk away while loudly declaring victory. That would have been the shrewd move.

You, Heather, and El Guapo, Cagey, and the Meatriarchy guy, go read the whole thing.

Show the Chicago Tribune Web servers what a musingtrickle feels like!

MSNBC is running a story entitled “What $87 Billion Buys: Instead of a war in Iraq, here’s what America could be getting for its money”. In this remarkable (as I am remarking on’t, werd) piece (of something), the author puts together a list of bullet points that describe things the government could do with $87 billion dollars instead of spending it rebuilding Iraq. In between lists, he inserts some snarky quotes by grabby people who haven’t quite gotten their hands full of your money on their pet projects yet.

Basically, Jonathan Darman, author of this Web Exclusive! says the United States Government could, and should, take that $87 billion dollars and:

• Hire millions more bureaucrats which would then need $87 billion dollars plus cost of living adjustments every
  year from this day forward, or

• Pour millions into the budgets of petty bureaucracies, who know they have to spend the money if they want to get
  it next year, which again means $87 billion dollars a year plus 8- or 10-percent annual increases forever.

The author of the piece obviously attended the remedial mathematical classes required to get a Poli-Sci degree along with our distinguished Congresspeople who have the motto if we have a dollar, we should rent something that costs a dollar a month forever.

(Link seen on Little Green Footballs.)

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is so excited that it’s left a puddle on the floor as it reports that:

“No Firearms” signs at many workplaces and businesses open to the public may be the first outward indication that Missouri has joined the states that allow residents to carry concealed weapons.

Gramercy, that will comfort the goblins. Businesses to rob and assurances of safety to ensure that if you’re a nutbar with a grudge, you can splatter as many co-workers as you want before the police arrive. You know, the guys with guns to stop you.

Time quotes “Mad” Albright:

Frankly, if there was a President Gore, we wouldn’t be in this particular mess.

What mess would we be in? Anyone think it would be less?

(Link seen on Drudge.)

Drudge linked to this story about a home owner in Florida whose house is being stripped from him because he violated the local home owners’ collective by putting up a flag pole. Now that the court wrangling is done, it’s time for some house rustling to pay for the bills.

Whereas everyone else seems to be focused on the “damn commies took away his flag!” aspect, it might be worthwhile to note the deeper erosion of human rights, that is, a property rights. To quote the self-satisfied snake from the home owner’s collective:

West Palm Beach attorney Steven Selz, who represents the homeowners association, said the ruling makes sense.

“There has to be a way to give the association a right to enforce its claims on the property,” he said.

Remember, the homeowners’ collective only has its freedom to infringe upon a man’s land only until the municipality decides your puny property taxes are no match for big box sales taxes, werd, and then you, too, get to ride the slippery slope from the recognition of individual property rights into statist security.

After the last Israeli strike (let’s not call killing a schnucking cancerous criminal killer an assassination for the umpteenth time–learn your etiomology, broadcasters, so perhaps you can stop making yourself look as ignorant as you think we rabble are that you want to educate), Hamas needed something to come out of its mouth when it foamed, so it had to come up with something. So they said:

“Targeting homes is violating all red lines,” the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, said in a leaflet distributed in Gaza City. “So the Zionist enemy from today shoulders the responsibility for the targeting of houses and Zionist towers everywhere in occupied Palestine.”

Unfortunately, Hamas has reached the Boogeyman Ceiling. Since Hamas has proven that its capable of killing as many innocent people, especially women and children, as possible and that it likes to do so, it doesn’t have any threats to scare people. After three years of regular-looking unhelpful hardware men spraying ballbearings, fasteners, their fetid entrails, and innocent blood, its probably hard to imagine anything worse than the constant threat of sudden painful death. How does Hamas turn it up a notch? It cannot, it’s the worst possible boogeyman, and the Israelis have nothing to fear but the worst, which is what they’ve had for many years now.

Den Beste shares the sentiments, and says it better. If you’re not reading his every post, you ought to.

The Missouri Legislature this afternoon voted to override Governor B. Holden‘s veto of its bill to allow Missourians who aren’t fatcats or their defenders to carry firearms for self-defense. Here’s the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story.

Or, as Carol Daniel of KMOX Radio “informed” us during the “news” at four o’clock, the legislature got the bare minimum of the two thirds majority.

That’s right, citizens, a scant two thirds of your elected officials have voted to recognize your right to bear arms and to bag your daily goblin limit. These few mouthbreathing outcasts have used due process of law to ram their agenda through the legislature.

But never fear, your self-appointed broadcasters are looking out for you. Just remember to call them next time someone busts through your patio door at three on a Thursday morning. Our phone lines are open!

The British gave up their weapons. Now, they’re going to give up their sovereignty. No vote, just fiat from the prime minister.

The European rulers who ride in their limos, with their entourages, no longer even put on the show of working through the will of their people. Welcome to the 21st century aristocracy, prole, now surrender some of your wages to keep the French elderly cushioned from the horror of their expanding retirement.

(Link seen on Fark. Thanks, Drew, you’ve ruined my day.)

Here in Casinoport, Missouri, one 15 year old said to a bunch of friends, hey, I just cracked myself over the head with a skateboard and it didn’t hurt, I am invincible (or words to that effect). So he asked his friends to help him prove the point, and unfortunately, one of his buddies found an error in the hypothesis by cracking Mr. Invincible’s skull and putting him in the hospital with a severe brain injury.

Authorities, of course, have charged boy #2.

He’s going to reform school for four years, where they’ll eat up a suburban skateboard kid. That’ll fix him. For just being a stupid kid. Crimeney, some of the things my brother, Him Jim, Dim Jim, and I did when we were young would undoubtedly be capital crimes now or threats to Homeland Security, which nowadays includes more than blowing stuff up. I’d discuss some anecdotes, but I am still in my mother’s will. Too much revelation, and the pets’ or vets’ organizations get my cut.

Also, our nation will be safer when being a teenage boy is a felony, so I urge our lawmakers to outlaw it immediately.