Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Category: Rant

  • Memphis Bike Lanes

     

    I don’t think bike lanes are a great idea…mostly. Don’t get me wrong: a smart, separate, and affordable way to share an interstate bridge in a town with commuting problems is one thing, but messing up the whole town with crazy little specialty lanes is a bad idea. Cruising around Memphis recently, I spent about ten miles on bike lanes and so many things came to mind:

    1) The biggest problem is that when there are bike lanes around town, folks decide that’s where bikes belong. You’re not a reasonable vehicle any more the second you peddle outside the lines: you’re off the reservation. Most car drivers have this idea that they own the road, so this is already a problem if you are a pedaler or pedestrian or any of the other annoying variants getting in the way of the great automobile. I’m not looking to be, but I now am a problem if I need to leave the bike lane.

    2) Bike lanes themselves make enemies: every guy who before was parking on the curb is mad, the commuter who has been funneled down to four lanes from six to make room for the bikes resents deeply, the shopkeeper whose clients must now mind a gap while parking and then dodge cyclists before they can even gain the sidewalk is incensed. Drivers generally hated bikes already; now they hate the lanes per se…and, by extension, they hate cyclists even more; that won’t help out in traffic land.

    3) Bike lanes subvert basic traffic law and dumb down everyone. They’re mindless, like an interstate: we pedal onto one and turn off the brain; bike lanes appear around town, and drivers don’t need to worry about cyclists anymore so they get to think less because (see 1 above and repeat after me) that’s where bikes belong. I already compete as a cyclist for the attention of those with whom I share the road, with their texting, their spilling their coffee in their laps, their screaming spawn in the back seat, their hood ornament, and all the other things they focus on instead of looking down the road a furlong or so and figuring out what they might need to prepare to do in the next five or ten seconds with the two tons of steel they’re slinging around town. Right-of-way…what is this thing you speak of, mad man? My buddy reports this typical move today: car overtakes him and then suddenly turns right off the road immediately in front of him…while he’s pedaling over 20mph…because he’s a cyclist and is just in the way…because that driver has lost touch with all the simple right and wrongs he learned when he was 15 from the nice pamphlet that the governor printed for us all, which we all had to memorize before we could get the pretty wallet cards with our pictures on them. I guess if he drives over an old lady in a cross-walk, she had it coming for being so hopelessly out of date; get with the times, grandma; walking is lame!

    4) Ye gods these damned bike lanes are dangerous…and ugly! They need not necessarily be, but they generally are. There’s all this extra paint that’s super slick in the rain. Bike lanes often come with tons of extra furniture: little stanchions that corral us off at intersections and such. But the biggest problem is maintenance: if there’s a bike lane, I belong in it, supposedly, and I shouldn’t opt out of the leaf piles, fallen limbs, broken glass, sand, gravel, wreckage (literally: headlamp lenses, grill shards, random sharp bits of injection-molded carnage), and any other flotsam that heavier traffic knocks out of the “real” lanes and into the little lane where the guys with the thin tires roll. For a few miles on one street in town, both east- and west-bound bike lanes are contiguous, both on the north side of the street: west-bound I’m pedaling against traffic; who’s going to look for me over there on the wrong side of the street when they cross my lane at an intersection…how is this stupidity improving cycling in particular or traffic in general?

    5) No one knows what the lanes mean; the signage is random, inconsistent, and at least somewhat ambiguous. How do we merge so you can turn right and I can carry on straight? Does the bike lane trump other rules? Is that cyclist a criminal or a mere jerk for wheeling out of his bike lane to avoid a stretch of missing, broken, lumpy…whatever type of failed pavement?

    We’re teaching ourselves not to think, exacerbating the tension between cars and bikes, and pitting ourselves against our neighbors with these lanes. There’s got to be a better way to design traffic to be bike-smart than what I’ve seen around Memphis.

  • I Fucking Hate New York

    So…

     

    I just took my five hour I Can Haz Sekund Amendment Nao? class, and my typical “go fuck yourself” tendencies have been whipped up to a jiggly wiggly timey wimey ball of hate.

    Now, any of the following things could be true:

    • The people teaching the class didn’t know wtf they were talking about
    • I might not have correctly understood what I was being taught, even though I got a perfect score on the test afterward
    • The people teaching the class could have been trolling everyone.  NY gun laws are completely beyond Poe, after all.

    But assuming the rage-hormones haven’t broken my brain, let me share my loathing of this state’s government with you.

    Stop!  Don’t Touch!

    If you don’t have a pistol license in NYS, you are not allowed to touch a pistol.  Not own, not carry, not buy or sell, touch.  Criminal offense if you do.

    Catch Twenty-one-and-three-quarters

    In order to get a license to touch a pistol, you must submit your paperwork for said license, including the receipt of the gun you have purchased.

    https://giphy.com/gifs/reactionseditor-l0Iy9D4PZKRZ6chcQ

    Yes.  You must first buy a gun without ever having touched it.  That’s the way things work here.  Now of course, just because you bought it doesn’t give you any of the normal benefits of what we would normally think “ownership” implies.  Like, YOU CAN’T FUCKING TOUCH IT.  Or, I dunno, take it home mebbe?  You give the gun store some money, they give you a receipt (only).  You submit the receipt with your license paperwork to the judge and maybe someday you might actually own something that is a little more solid than a slip of paper (which, much like the Constitution in NYS, can be used for wiping one’s ass).

    Here Comes The Judge

    Now the class-givers were very happy to be teaching my group of people, as we live in a county with a “good” judge, 2A-wise.  Because you see, each county in NYS has a judge who determines whether or not people have their pistol licenses granted, and which version is granted.

    Everything not permitted is forbidden

    For you see, you’re not getting a license to carry a pistol; no no, that would be silly.  You are getting a license to carry a pistol for a particular purpose only.  And guess what?  Self-defense is a separate listed category not granted by the other permitted reasons.  My judge will pretty much automatically grant pistol licenses for the purposes of hunting and target shooting.  This means I can carry a gun to a gun range, from a gun range to my house, to a hunting location and from a hunting location to my house.  That’s it.  I can also use it only for target shooting and hunting.  So, if I am carrying it to a lawful destination and I am attacked by a crazed hobo, I may not use the pistol for self defense if I do not have a self-defense license.  I can roundhouse kick his face off, I can crush his skull with a rock, I can blow his head off with a shotgun, but if I use my target and hunting license pistol to stop him then I am guilty of unlawful use of a firearm.  I may not (may not, see below) be prosecuted for the dead hobo, but I will be prosecuted for the gun felony.

    Ain’t nobody wants to see that *(euphemisms helpfully marked)

    Now, open carry ist verboten in NYS.  Which means, you may not expose your gun* in public.  This includes printing it through a shirt or jacket — that’s a crime.   Once you’re inside the (private) gun range, you can take it out* and begin using your gun.*  This also applies to hunting on a piece of private land.  But what about on public lands?   No, you may not expose your gun*, you must keep it concealed at all times.  Yes.  That’s right.  According to the law, you can use a properly licensed pistol for hunting as long as you don’t take it out of your range bag/holster/etc.  Now the NYS game wardens apparently did not want to be the victim of accidental discharges so they have magnanimously agreed to not charge people so long as the hunters are a) dressed like hunters, b) are able to explain what kind of game they are hunting c) it is the season for said game and d) the pistol is appropriate for the type of game being hunted.  Unless they just feel like charging you that day, of course.

    Post Code Lottery, NYS Style

    Now there is a pistol license that allows you to just (concealed) carry the damn thing, it’s called an “unrestricted” license.  One of the reason why my judge is considered one of the good ones is that after having has a specific-purpose license for a year, I can then apply for an unrestricted license.  There are more classes involved, and they’re not offered all that often, and there is a waiting list for them when they are offered, but if I get into one, my county’s judge has a habit of granting them.  Albany county’s judge apparently never approves unrestricted licenses.  Some of the counties where the Night’s Watch are located will grant the unrestricted license without having a year of the training wheel version.  Judges change.  There’s no guarantee that the next judge of Saratoga county will be any better than Albany.

    It’s getting all Sondheim up in here

    Remember way back when you “bought” a gun?  Well, if all goes well, in a few months you might be able to take it home, once you have all your paperwork in.  Well, “you” and “your” isn’t completely accurate.  When you go to Ye Olde Sheriff’s office with your petition, you include some envelopes addressed to four NYS residents of good character who have known you for at least year.  According to the trainers, this is not a rubber stamp thing.  There will be background checks run on them, and the judge will determine whether the relationship is adequate for them to provide “proper” character references.  The Westchester judge requires that one of these four must have known you for at least five years.  So if you’ve just moved here from out of state, I hope your pistol collection wasn’t too expensive.  Once the judge accepts your four, questionnaires are stuffed into the envelopes you provided (Huzzah for saving tax dollars!) and sent out.  Until those four people return those questionnaires, your application will not be processed any further.  If they are too late in returning them, the application is canceled.  If the judge doesn’t like what they read, the application is denied.  If the application is denied, you may not apply again until three years have passed since the denial.  You’ll need to go out of state for all your pistol-touching* needs.

    It gets better.  Better, not good.

    Once you do get a pistol license, you can now touch pistols.*  This will help make your second purchase a better one, since you’ll have some idea of ergonomics.  Once you purchase your next one, the gun store will give you another piece of paper.  “What?” you may be asking. “Don’t I have a license to carry a pistol home now?”  Hahahahahahano.  Well, technically yes.  You have a license to (concealed) carry A pistol.  A single very specific pistol.  Not “your” new one. This also works in reverse. Your pistol can only be carried by the licensee (i.e. you).  You can’t lend out a gun.  Another pistol-licensed individual can touch it* and they can use it for purposes for which their pistol license is valid, but they have to do so while under your direct supervision.  The good part is that you can amend your pistol license to also include “your” new pistol.  You won’t need any additional judge’s approvals or character references, just some signed and notarized forms.  It still will take a few weeks to process.

    You’ve fucking done it now (alternative title: Fuck Andrew Cuomo with red-hot pokers covered with syphilitic hornets1)

    This has all been about pistols.  Long guns are much less regulated…  unless you get a pistol license.  Because once you’ve deigned to ask to exercise your rights, the government now has carte blanche to fuck you over.  There are vast [dammit, why can’t I find that scene from David Lynch’s Dune where Duncan Idaho says “vast numbers.  VAST.”] numbers of ways that you can violate the terms of your pistol license.  I believe they’re all crimes. Most of them are misdemeanors with no/little chance of jail time, but they are still crimes.  Which means you immediately become a gun criminal.   And gun criminals aren’t allowed to own any guns, even guns not requiring any special permission (even in NYS) to own.  It’s kind of ingenious in a Kafka/Ayn Rand villain sort of way:  make it so those people that want to own guns are more likely to violate rules.  Make the rules carry little or no penalties to keep from generating sympathetic victims but then also use it to disarm them.  Ta da!  You’re disarming people who want guns without restricting the rights of those who don’t want to exercise those rights; as far as the gun-apathetic are concerned, no violation has taken place.  Brilliant!  Though not as brilliant as my idea of opening a hipster pop-up restaurant selling heated Red Baron frozen pizzas for $35.

    And one last “Fuck You”

    All his ranting has been concerning the laws of New York State.  But the title just said “New York.”  Why?  Well, one of the laws pertaining to gaining a New York State Pistol License is… It is not valid in the five boroughs of NYC.

    I wanted to find someone flipping off the NYC skyline, or the Empire State Building. This is the best I could do

     

    1 Hyperbolically speaking, of course.

  • Household Chores

    I know, I know.

    You all have orphans to do all your mundane or nasty tasks. But sometimes orphans get sick. And nobody has an inexhaustible supply, even Glibs.

    So, air your dirty laundry. What household chore(s) do you loathe doing? And I realize this will be a mostly first-world-problem kind of list. Still.

    I’ll start. I absolutely detest unloading the dishwasher. I don’t mind loading it, or even washing dishes or pots and pans by hand. But I will procrastinate on unloading that blasted machine as long as I possibly can.

    Oh, and I hate folding laundry and putting it away.

    But maybe you’re a glass half full kind of person. What household chore(s) do you love doing?

    I love gardening for edibles. No, silly, like vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

    And…well.

    OK, maybe that’s it.

    How about you?

    Tomato seeds from SP's stash
    Tomato seeds from SP’s stash

  • Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Yuman Trafficking

    Cha too ma laya conky, ya neema loka nyan.

    During a press conference held earlier today, Donald Trump made the claim that thanks to the Internet “there’s more yuman[sic] trafficking, and slavery, than at any time in the history of this world.” Of course, Trump provided no citation for this remarkable claim, because citations are for losers. Nevertheless, I was curious as to the truth of this claim.

    A cursory internet search revealed many articles that put forward this claim, the earliest, being from an Alternet post in 2009. Indeed, this claim was repeated as gospel by several outlets across the ideological spectrum, including The Atlantic, World News Daily, and various newspapers. When authors of these articles deigned to provide a source for this claim, they usually pointed to various think-tank reports, including an Obama-era report by the Department of State, all of which place the total number of those enslaved around the world from 20 to 40 million.

    When one considers that on the eve of the American Civil War, there were almost 4 million slaves, this number may seem shocking. Well, it may seem that way if you are a drooling microcephalic. People who possess an intelligence quotient of 80 or higher (Stanford-Binet or WAIS, take your pick) are cognizant of another absolutely shocking fact: there are more people alive now than at any time in the history of this world!

    If, for the sake of argument, we take the highest estimate for the current number of slaves in the world, it represents a mere 0.5263% of a total global population of 7.6 billion individuals. Are Trump et al. truly claiming that in the past the total number of slaves had never represented more than half a percent of the world’s population? In 1860, slaves represented 12.57% of the total population of the United States alone!

    Comparing total number of slaves across time periods without accounting for the increase in total world population is a statistical trick even worse than the “1 in 5 women are raped at university” claim. Whereas the latter myth relies on cooking the books with both an extremely expansive and idiosyncratic definition of sexual assault that utterly destroys its construct validity and a piss-poor sample size that provides nowhere near the statistical power needed for the inferences made by the report, the former merely pins its hopes on the fact that you are innumerate.

    Now, all of this may just be merely risible fodder for the world-famous Glibertarians.com sneer take if it weren’t for the fact that these factoids are used as rhetorical lubricant for advancing public policy. The 2012 Department of State report used this claim to advocate for less restrictive requirements for victims of human trafficking seeking asylum, the 2016 WND op-ed uses the same claim to advocate for immigration restrictions from countries that follow sharia law, and today, Trump squarely placed blame on the Internet for this supposedly unprecedented number of slaves around the world.

    It is this mythology that is used as a screen for the power-grabs the Federal government has made through the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which Trump signed into law on April 11th. FOSTA-SESTA remarkably passed the House of Representatives with a 388-25 margin, and the Senate 97-2, with only Ron Wyden and Rand Paul voting against. Truly, it seems the naked ambition to control one’s fellow man is the only thing that enjoys broad bipartisan support these days. Well, that and the erroneous belief that there is more human trafficking and slavery than any other time in world history.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Politics’ Pseudo Pragmatism Problem

    By PieInTheSKy

    In this particular piece, Pie ponders people’s perceptions of pragmatism pertaining to politics, particularly partisanship. Is it just me or does this blog need more alliteration?

    2 Major Parties

    This is, as you know, the most important election of our lives. This is a time to be pragmatic; there is no place for philosophy or idealism. It is important to stop Insert Candidate Here and now. For every other country, add names of parties, rinse, repeated. This is something I am often faced with people when I try to discuss principle. A call to pragmatism is what I get. People do not have time to read and debate the fundamentals of economy, philosophy, and ethics. They are pragmatic. They care, mostly, that the party they oppose loses this time. This time is important, we will think of principle after. Unfortunately this time is every damn time.  So is this truly pragmatic? Yes, my candidate has many flaws, but the other is worse and this is not the time nitpick a bit of theft and fraud here and there.

    The question I would ask, as a libertarian, is when and how can we get to the point where the election is not that important and we can think principle? Also, if so many crucial elections were lost by the side The Great Pragmatists support, it is obvious The Wrong People will inevitably end up in power and the Most Important Election will be lost. So would it not be a good idea to reduce government power and make these often wrong elections less crucial? Of course not. This time, we cannot allow the wrong lizard to win. And when Our Side gets that elusive Permanent Majority, we will have the time to think upon the fundamentals.

    This permanent pseudo-pragmatism is rather obviously, to me at least, engineered for a very clear purpose: a way to keep people alarmed by the next election. Create urgency so people do not think long term, or in perspective. Many blame politicians for thinking only about the next election, but regular voters do the same. And more importantly, vastly lowering the expectations placed on politicians. Some Romanians have been voting the lesser evil for going on 30 years now, and are constantly screwed. And the lesser evil gets worse and worse, as it is no longer expected of politicians not to steal, but to be the lesser thief in the election. And this led to exactly what they wanted. So how fucking pragmatic is it, in the end, to constantly vote for the lesser thief? Maybe it would be better to vote on some clear principles. Maybe the lesser evil might lose until it becomes not evil? Maybe … eh who am I kidding?

    This so called pragmatism often leads to missing the forest from the trees, to miss the fundamentals of what a government should and should not do. In the end, to hardly notice that the parties are not all that different, and not in the positive aspects, if there are any. That certain people make bank whomever is in power. That lobbyists thrive, that laws are getting complicated mostly for the benefit of special interests. That year after year things are not improving nearly as much as they should.

    Each election we try to fix the cracked window, but what about the rotting foundation of the house? Well I don’t have time to think of the foundation, I am, after all, a pragmatist. That crack in the window is crucial, so it needs fixing. Laws and regulations are constantly patched without thinking if they are so bad to need constant patching maybe, we should rethink them. But people are pragmatists and they patch and patch and one year later a new patch is needed. Not unlike software, a point comes where the code is too complicated and full of bugs; you need to outright rewrite it.

    Beyond ideology of left and right, if people were actually intending to create a good society , some things would be a lot more bipartisan, like make things as clear as simple as possible, constantly analyze if things work and if not change, don’t patch. But they do not intend that. They want to push their little pet projects, protect their sacred cows and care not a jot about anything else.

    I used this Douglas Adams quote before, but I will again, ’cause I like it:

    “It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
    “You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
    “No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
    “Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
    “I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
    “So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
    “It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
    “You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
    “Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
    “But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
    “Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
    “What?”
    “I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
    “I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
    Ford shrugged again.
    “Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

    So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish…

     

  • ACLU, RIP

    It’s no secret that in counting from 1 to 10, the ACLU seems to always skip 2. It’s also no secret that they have a continuing habit of conflating, “You have a right to do X” with, “You have a right to demand taxpayer money to do X,” and their remarkably immoral support of Mandated Racism Affirmative Action is stunningly hypocritical. More and more, they seem to have lost sight of their purported mission, despite flashes here and there of doing something good. But this morning when I clicked over to their site to read an article about our loss of Fourth Amendment rights in the notorious 100 mile zone, I got this popup:

    Remember when they used to beg, “Donate monthly to fight Obama’s attacks on people’s rights” after the arrests of journalists, the abuse of the IRS to attack his political enemies, the drone killing of Americans, record-setting deportations, expanded domestic spying, and stepped-up incarceration rates for victimless crimes? Yeah, me neither.

    So at this point, it’s not a matter of the mask slipping, it’s been totally removed. The ACLU is nothing but an arm of the Democratic Party, no different than MoveOn.org or Democratic Underground, and now doesn’t even pretend otherwise.

    That sound you hear is Nat Hentoff and other principled civil libertarians of yore spinning in their graves.

  • War on the Media – Here vs There

    US media

    Compare the self-pity tone in this and this,

    versus

    Murdered Mexican journalist

     

    the real deal.

    Note the utter lack of help from their US komeraden? Oh wait, I forgot that they moved mountains here –

    His asylum denial has provoked outrage among many U.S. journalists and migrant advocates, who have organized protests outside the detention center where he and his son are being held.

    Couldn’t accredit them and have them come in on a work visa at a US bureau, eh? Get Carlos Slim to cough up a few bucks to help? Protest outside Mexican Embassy? Send lawyers, guns and money? What is Europe or Canada or anyone else doing as far as asylum?

    There has been a smattering of coverage, mostly last year, when a couple of high profile murders were in the news. But I don’t see much of an effort to do anything other than cluck. I guess it is just too hard to do anything or consistently bring this story to light, when you are too busy covering Cheeto Mussolini’s latest Tweet.

    Bah.

  • The Party is Over in Illinois

     

    Things are not good in the Land of Lincoln and believe it or not, they’re only getting worse.  Illinois already has the lowest credit rating of any state in the union (BBB- according to S&P and BBB3 according to Moody’s), along with having the dubious distinction of being the only state in the union to ever have a credit rating so low.  Coupled with this, the State continues to run deficits (with its deficits representing roughly 10% of its total revenues), along with having a backlog of bills in the hundreds of billions (for comparison, the State’s total operating fund revenues total roughly $60 billion), and having several woefully underfunded pension plans (the liabilities are conservatively estimated to total $100 billion).  Despite all this, though, recent news suggests that today may be remembered as better times in the State’s history.

    Most likely future state of the State

    The State is now floating an idea to  issue $100 billion in new bonds in order to shore-up its pension plans.  Essentially, the State is hoping that it can issue taxable debt (pension bonds are not tax exempt) and invest it in stocks and corporate bonds (which are the bulk of the underlying assets in a pension plan) and achieve a return greater than the interest payments on that debt.  This is utter insanity.

    At the State’s current rating category, the taxable bond interest rate on such debt would be roughly 4%, which is a lazy estimate and assumes that the issuance of such debt would not automatically trigger rating agencies to downgrade the State to ‘junk bond status’ (the State’s BBB- and BBB3 ratings are currently just one step above ‘junk’).  More likely than not, the State will have to pay an interest rate well above 4%, particularly since such a large debt issuance would only attract a very small segment of the market (more supply than demand equals higher interest rates for the issuer).  But, even assuming a 4% interest rate, the State will have to come up with roughly $4 billion in interest payments each year (again, this is a lazy estimate and does not account for several factors and the interest payment will likely be larger).  Remember, the money from this debt issuance is suppose to be invested in its pension plans, therefore even if the returns on this investment exceeds 4% on a yearly basis (which is likely in the near term) that money is just reinvested into the plans- the State cannot access those funds.  Additionally, the State is hoping that its interest payments will be less than the annual pension contributions that the State is required to make.  At a 4% interest rate (which, again is a very conservative estimate) the interest payments would be slightly less than the required annual pension contributions, however the State will have no flexibility with regards to making these interest payments.  With annual pension payments the State has the ability to reduce or not make such payments (which has occurred too often in the past and has resulted in the underfunding of the pension plans), but interest payments cannot be missed.  So in order for the State to ensure adequate revenues to make regularly scheduled interest payments it must raise taxes.

    Last time, we swear!

    The State of Illinois just raised its income tax rate in 2017.  The City of Chicago, the State’s largest municipality, has also been on a tax raising spree and will be raising taxes even more going forward.  And on a completely unrelated note, I’m sure, while these tax increases have been occurring Cook County (the second most populous county in the country and home to Chicago) has been losing more residents than any county in America; the City of Chicago has been losing residents (more than any other major city in the country), and the State of Illinois has been losing residents (more than any other state in the country).  People vote with their feet and they’re leaving the Land of Lincoln.

    Many seem to take this road, lately…

    Not to worry, though, while the State’s financial position spirals out of control Republican governor Bruce Rauner and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have been focused on the important issues (cosmotarian moment!, because reduce government spending, but not woke spending) What’s the point of bankrupting a State if you can’t approve more spending on culture war issues?  Somehow, I don’t think this spending will improve the State’s population decline.

    Whether these pension bonds are issued or not, the fact that the State is floating such an idea suggests that cost cutting reform is not being considered.  This means that Illinois is irrevocably broken.  No change in political leadership, whether in the legislature, or in the executive, can salvage the situation – this problem has long festered under both Republicans and Democrats.  This is a tragedy of the State’s own making, more than anything.  And though I fully expect Congress to discuss an ‘Illinois bailout’ within the next ten years, this misery should only be borne by the Illinois electorate and the poor decisions that it continued to make in the voting booth.  Let this be a lesson to the rest of the country.

  • Fast Food Nation

    Trigger Warnings: rampant misogyny and unnecessary cursing. I don’t claim to be a professional journalist, nor do I care to write in an erudite fashion. That’s Heroic Mulatto’s job. But, unlike HM, I do bring the alt-text.

    I’m not normally a McDonald’s guy.

    I don’t have any problem with them, from a philosophical standpoint. They make something they claim to be food, and bizarrely, many millions of people enjoy these products and shower them with money. It just typically isn’t something that I enjoy eating.

    Last week a buddy of mine told me to swing by and try their new Buttermilk Chicken Tenders. So, on my way home from work today, I stopped in to give this new item a fair hearing.

    Let me tell you, those things are delicious. I will seriously go there at some point in the future specifically to get those again.

    But enough about the food. As I was standing to the side of the counter waiting inexplicably for seven minutes (I thought the whole point was, “Yeah it sucks, but it’s fast“?), I noticed the young lady who took my order was a very attractive young Hispanic woman. Pretty face, perky tits, hips, the whole nine yards.

    I looked back into the kitchen, and saw at least two other relatively hot Hispanic chicks. So I started thinking to myself, man, if I hadn’t already been dating my eventual wife when I graduated college, this would be a totally sweet fishing pond for random ass. I mean, how picky can they possibly be? They work at fucking McDonald’s.

    Well known fact that she got her start working the fry machine at McDonald's
    This is what the girl who took my order looked like. More or less.

    So my 25 year old self would roll up, strike up a conversation, and be like, “Hey – I’ve got a regular job in a cubicle, involving Excel formulas and v-lookup. I make enough so that I don’t get a 100% refund on my taxes. I have a late-model car that isn’t upside-down financially, and my own apartment. I can take you out to dinner – at a sit-down place with a leather-bound menu. And I eat pussy like it’s goin’ out of style.”

    In my mind’s eye, at that point, any chick with little enough command of English and even less economic prospects would pretty much just drop her drawers. “Oh I suck yo dick!”, she says in a Vietnamese accent for some reason even though she’s clearly Mexican or Central American (damn you Full Metal Jacket for permanently fucking up my internal monologue when it comes to casual sex!).

    It’s kind of like my version of slumming. It would have been fun, and I would have had access to free McDonald’s, which I recall not being as gastronomically opposed to 10 years ago.

    That’s pretty much it. Oh, and I saw this flier on the way out. It was some kind of community outreach bullshit. What really drew my eye was one of the items listed among the other boiler-plate stuff like fundraisers and sponsorships. “Store Tours”. Um…what? How in the ever-loving fuck is giving a tour of your fucking shit-shack of a goddamn fucking store, and I fucking quote, “Giving Back To Our Communities”???

    Because if they did, that'd actually be pretty fucking awesome, and I'd sign up for the store tour.
    Our journey together for good? So do the McDonald’s locations in Snake Mountain and the Hall of Doom say, “Our Journey Together For Evil”?

  • Our National Conversation is a ‘Shit Hole’: A Rant

     

    So which one of you is this?

    I am fed-up with the nonsense that dominates our political discourse.  Nothing substantive is discussed at all anymore.  We have the establishment media still throwing a hissy fit over a presidential election that they lost and it is becoming impossible to discern between the Democratic Party, CNN, the New York Times (sorry, but Stossel is right about the ‘old grey lady’), the Washington Post, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS anymore.  The stupidity of our current national conversation is no more evident than the fact that on January 16, 2018, the US Senate voted to end debate on the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, thereby preventing an attempted filibuster by Senators Rand Paul, Ron Wyden, and Mike Lee.  This act renewed (since its passage is nearly certain now, as of this writing), for six years, the federal government’s authority to gather communications between people from the United States and foreign nationals, without a warrant.  Though the legislation has always been presented as ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation, the law also allows the FBI to peruse these communications to identify a crime. Thereby thoroughly gutting the 4th Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

    But, it doesn’t even matter what the particulars of the law are.  What is more important is that there was no national conversation about the renewal of such an expansive piece of legislation.  Instead, in the days leading-up to the Senate vote, our national media was fixated on ‘shit hole’-gate.  Did the president refer to some countries as ‘shit holes’ in a private conversation in the White House?  Truly gripping stuff.  And, as if in an attempt to go full retard, our national media then began dissecting the president’s physical and mental health (because it’s totes cool to ask those questions now).  And when the media’s speculation was rebutted by a navy physician that also served the previous president, they doubled down on stupid.  These stories were more important than debating whether or not the federal government should be allowed to eavesdrop on your personal conversations without a warrant?

    Democrats vs. Republicans

    Where are the grown-ups today?  In years past, we had commentators like Christopher Hitchens, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Mike Royko, and HL Mencken, to name a few, who cut through the minutia and focused on bigger issues.  Today we have this ass hat,  a bag of dicks, and shit for brains.  And when our imbecile pundits aren’t ignoring important issues like unreasonable searches and seizures by our government, they are actively attacking commentators who do warn against such actions.  Meanwhile the bulk of our political class is just as buffoonish, asinine, and unclever as the ass hats, bags of dicks, and shit for brains that cover them.  There are some exceptions within our political class, and to their credit, more Republican Senators voted against renewing FISA under a Republican president than Democrats who voted against renewal under a Democratic president.  And for that, I would grant Republicans a participation ribbon.  This ribbon is as useless as the Republican Senate and redeemable at the midterm elections for one “I will never vote for you worthless assholes again” from me, with love.

    The worst part is that the cause is most assuredly over.  If a universally reviled and unstable president cannot convince Congress that the executive wields too much authority, than nothing will.  FISA is permanent now.  The next time renewal comes around, I doubt even a mention will be made.  The State will continue to erode away at the Fourth Amendment and will continue to chip away at other parts of the Bill of Rights.  All the while, our chattering class will be fixated on the latest faux outrage committed by whomever occupies the title of “literally Hitler” at the moment.  Nothing is sacred anymore. This is a lost cause now.