Reason Morning Links: Drug Buffet Edition
- Chuck Schumer wants to shut down the Silk Road.
- Yemen's president has left the country.
- A homeowner forecloses on the Bank of America.
- Anonymous exposes over 10,000 Iranian emails.
- A French court penalizes websites for having the word "torrent" in their URLs.
- The thin blue line that protects us from lawn ornaments.
The latest from Reason.tv: "Jefferson Memorial Dance Dance Revolution."
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Have we won in Libya yet?
Kinetic Military Actions are not considered to be wars so there is no winning or losing.
They started it…..
Reason.com: Mystery Science Reincarnation
…Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett also briefly riffed as the Film Crew, mocking bad movies in four directto- DVD releases from Shout! Factory. The Film Crew was fictionally tasked with providing commentary tracks for obscure movies by a mysterious millionaire known as Bob Honcho. They respond with mockery of such non-classics as Hollywood After Dark, featuring Rue “Golden Girls” McClanahan as a stripper. The Film Crew releases are still available, but Kevin Murphy indicated last year on the Rifftrax blog that new releases are unlikely….
Lab Rat* gets waterboarded.
*not actual rat
I wonder if women do better?
I wonder if fetuses do better?
I hear amoebas win the prize
Fuck the dancing link. Mine is better 😉
http://rctlfy.wordpress.com/20…..rk-police/
http://hotair.com/archives/201…..e-nominee/
Tea Party Express Chief (whatever that is) says they will back Romney if he is the nominee. Speak for your self there chubs.
Then Haley Barbour tells us the Republicans can’t have a purity test. Translation “suck it up and vote for Romney after we shove him down your throat via a crooked caucus and primary system”.
http://www.nationalreview.com/…..bert-costa
I wonder what Barbour will be saying if the top of the ticket next fall is Bachman, Palin, Johnson or Paul? Let me guess, it will be “the Republican Party has been taken over by extremists and left me so I must therefore support the Mitt Romney third party candidacy”. Notice how the rat bastard establishment are always demanding everyone else be good losers but they are the first to jump shit when things don’t go their way. It was awful centrists like Castle and Scarfazzi who were sore losers in 2010, not the Tea Party candidates.
Barbour needs to get it through his thick skull that Mitt Romney will never be President. If they shove him down the party’s throat through crooked primaries and caucuses, I and millions like me will stay home or vote third party. I would rather watch Obama turn the country into a communist dictatorship that be sleaze like Barbour’s cheap date. The communists will shoot him before they get to me anyway. Underestimate how angry the party is at your own peril Mr. Barbour.
…they are the first to jump shit… RC’z law is in effect
One might say it LOOMS LARGE.
Did you say something? I couldn’t hear a thing while I was eating this lollipop I appropriated from that kid over there.
Fuck Mutt Romney and the Barbour he’s riding on.
Barbour, Babar…. which weighs more?
I was just starting to regret dropping my R voter registration and not being able to vote in the primaries. Now I remember why I wrote them nasty letters returned in their fundraiser envelopes and dropped my registration. Craven fuckers.
I would rather watch Obama turn the country into a communist dictatorship that be sleaze like Barbour’s cheap date.
Yup.
Anybody but Romney.
I would sign up to be a litter-bearer to carry Palin around the country on a sedan chair while she flicked cigarette ashes on my head before I would cross the street to vote for Romney. And I am not exactly a big Palin fan.
Damn tags.
John, with all due respect, can you please explain exactly what’s so wrong with Romney that he’d be a worse president than Obama? Remember, you have only one life to live, and four more years with Obama will make up a significant fraction of that life.
Remember: you choose the most libertarian candidate who can actually win a general election. Anything else is petulant grandstanding, and really childish.
Romney strikes me as a pro-business and pro-capitalism governor with a decent respect for the Constitution. That puts him way ahead of Obama in my opinion. But again, I’m happy to be educated on how horrible Romney really is.
Romney gave us the mandate and Obamacare. If his career doesn’t die for that, justice must.
He is a huge big government conservative just like Bush. He would do nothing but put a bi-partisan stamp on this mess. Given that, I would rather see Obama re-elected so there is no doubt who is responsible.
Exactly.
And given the fact that every act – and I mean every act – of Romney’s public career to date has demonstrated that his only principle is “I, Mitt Romney, must be President some day” we can have no idea what he will actually do once in office.
The mandate makes him unpredictable, and that is truly dangerous. I would not be the least surprised to see him turn on a dime YET AGAIN once in the Oval Office and decide that “suddenly” he favors massive regulation of greenhouse gases, or nationalization of banks, or whatever.
He would be about as unpredictable as President as your average delusional street hobo. He could quite literally be capable of anything.
He is just as likely to do the right thing for the wrong reason as he is to totally screw the country in the name of being “historic” and “statesman like”. I would bet on the latter.
And to pile on, consider that, if Romney gets elected, he gets to play with a Republican House, and maybe a Republican Senate too. At least Obama would have to contend with a hostile House.
Add me to the list of those who’d vote third party before voting for Romney. Does the man have any principles beyond doing what’s best for Romney?
But any big government conservative is still going to favor a smaller government than Obama, especially in the economic area I see as more important than the social one. Even a big government conservative would be more likely to appoint judges who think the Constitution is more than a blank slate. Plus, being a bit of a shift-in-the-wind type, Romney might be quite amenable to Tea Party pressure on spending.
As for Romneycare, it’s not what I’d have done, but at least it was done at a state level. But no, I’m not thrilled with the idea of him as president, only relieved at the idea of it being anybody but Obama.
If Romney got on his knees and apologized to the country and admitted Romneycare is a disaster, I might be willing to consider voting for him. But he won’t do that. He continues to defend it. That tells me that he is hopelessly arrogant and unfit for office.
I think you have to take a longer view of the situation. The GOP is ultimately the best hope for long term small L libertarian policies in the economic sphere. In order to the GOP to understand that that is the fucking base they need to carry, we must make sure that any candidate whose policies have sufficiently violated the economic liberty interest be wholly unelectable, even against the most feeble and suffering opponent in the throes of an economic calamity. Mitt losing to Obama would send exactly that message and it might actually do wonders to cleanse the party of at least its more economic interventionists.
I don’t think Romney is an economic interventionist as much as he has no principles and just thinks it is his destiny to be President. He will say and do whatever will get him there.
It’s interesting that he didn’t just flip on Romneycare, it’s the one issue he didn’t flip on and probably the one he absolutely needed to.
Its called “Romneycare”. His ego prevents him from disavowing it. Its like one of those shiny raccoon traps. He’s caught, but he can’t let go.
Yes MNG, Romney has a “R” after his name, so you are allowed to admit there is something wrong with him.
I know you have some kind of amnesia John, but I’ve long criticized Romney, since way back in the last nomination contest (and Obama too, must be the “R” beside his name).
Well said. I am through with “practical” and “strategic” voting. The Republicans need to be made to understand that we as libertarians aren’t kidding when we say we’re principled. Claiming libertarian principles and then folding every time the Republicans point and say, “BOO! Scary socialist democrats are so much worse!” is just so pathetically laughable.
Barbour: “Principles are just so… icky.”
Man, reading politics-as-a-team-sport “ethics? integrity? get that shit out of my face, you fucking extremist, the other guys might win” stuff always makes me twitch.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/…..1fijg.html
Climate change “deniers” should be forcibly tattooed. Liberals are such wonderful people.
In fairness, he called it The dangers of bone-headed beliefs. Maybe he meant his own idea?
Yes, liberal are wonderful.
They are the promoters of inclusiveness.
They include everyone who agrees with them and exclude those who do not.
They are the model of tolerance.
They tolerate everyone who agrees with them and will not tolerate any disagreement.
They are the standard bearers for equality.
Anyone who agrees with them is their equal and anyone who doesn’t is inferior.
Yup. Liberals are so wonderful.
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.”
? Norman Thomas, Socialist Party Presidential Candidate 1940, 1944 and 1948
“We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialsm, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.” –Strom Thurmond crediting Nikita Khrushchev in a Senate speech July, 1961.
Perhaps Mr. Glover would care to put his money where his mouth is: He can choose a low-lying island and if it’s not covered in twenty years donate his estate to the deniers and off himself.
You know who else wanted people forcibly tattooed?
It’s OK when the Right People are doing the tattooing.
Yup.
Nikki Sixx?
which is why I continue to attend tractor pulls. The lack of liberals is worth the damage to my hearing.
Does anyone need to click on that link to know John is manufacturing outrage?
The link is clearly not a literal call for tattoing or forcing people to live in low lying areas. Holy crap, conservative ideologues meet humor and satire.
I assumed people were smart enough to understand it was satire. And the tastlessness of it is the point. Joking about tattooing people and forced migration is about as tastless and awful as it gets.
Do you need a guide or program or something to follow along MNG? I really don’t have time to explain everything to you.
Lord have mercy, John, don’t google Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal, your outrage will know no bounds!
John |6.6.11 @ 12:22PM|#
Can you believe the liberals these days? This guy swift wants centralized government to promote eating children! Liberals are cannibals!
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
Someone needs to make a lamp out of you, minge.
Ha ha, just making a joke. Get it?
Sarah Palin claims Paul Revere warned the British
One moment that you won’t find posted on the blog is Palin’s response to reporters when they asked her who Paul Revere was. Instead of saying, “Come on, everyone knows who Paul Revere, the silversmith and patriot is,” she stammered while saying this:
“He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.co…..-arms.html
She was right.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.co…..itish.html
The LA Times, like two papers for the price of one. And it is not her fault liberals stopped reading history because it was branded sexist and racist.
I don’t know, John.
This looks to me like one of those times someone makes a very basic history mistake, but then tries to cover it with a post hoc rationalization based on a thinly-supported revisionism.
“Well, since Revere told the British what he had done when he was captured, in a sense you could say he was riding to warn the British, so I really wasn’t wrong.”
Her statement would only make sense if it was Revere’s intention to get captured when he set out. And I haven’t seen anyone argue that this was the case.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to argue that Palin is stupid (for once). Coming up with a way to spin it so that Revere was really riding to warn the British requires a certain cunning of its own, that I wouldn’t have thought she had. It’s like one of those revisionisms you would argue just because it’s fun to be a dick about it, like I myself would sometimes do.
My sense is that she read some stuff about it and just like when she was “nailed” for saying we were going to party like it’s 1774, which the media ignorantly jumped on. So she realized if she claimed Paul Revere warned the British, the media would trip again.
Wait, she’s smart enough to have someone research obscure facts to trap the J-school geniuses? That doesn’t fit the narrative!
At least smart enough to have advisors who come up with the idea.
Please, look at that stammering, nervous meandering talk. She was lost in the woods.
Like Obama talking about any subject when the teleprompter is turned off!
Shouldn’t you be writing that new Tin Tin on the Congo cartoon? It is not racist after all.
Should Shirley Sherrod be fired today John?
Sigh.
John|6.4.11 @ 12:24PM|#
She should have been fired.
John|7.21.10 @ 11:20AM|#
The USDA should have never fired her.
Ask Obama. He is the one who fired her.
Maybe like you he was of two minds?
LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA!
Thanks again, Sloopyinca!
Considering that the entire administration should be fired. . .
^^this^^
God Bless Andrew Breitbart. He’s doing God’s work in some of the toughest neighborhoods in America
http://biggovernment.com/abrei…../0800-edt/
I just read that the UN just passed a resolution declaring Weiner’s Twitter account a No Fly Zone.
I also love how you attack liberals for seeing racism everywhere and then in the VERY next post attack me for not finding something racist.
Twirl, twirl, twirl.
Yummy John, yummy.
” is not her fault liberals stopped reading history because it was branded sexist and racist.”
“Shouldn’t you be writing that new Tin Tin on the Congo cartoon? It is not racist after all.”
John, deflater of racism charges. Except when he’s inflating them.
LA!
I love how you prance around when you hear a TEAM BLUE talking point like you’ve finally gotten your wish and the new ‘My Little Pony’ accessories have finally hit store shelves.
Like when I denounced the leftist feminist SlutWalk movement over the weekend? That TEAM BLUE talking point?
Thanks for trying though!
What’s wrong with a SlutWalk? Those sluts need exercise. You want a bunch of fat sluts all over the place? You want the whole city to look like last call?
Slut Walk?
I thought it was a parade of Gaga impersonators.
face it MNG, you are a partisan hack. And a poor one at that.
Yes, a partisan hack that in just the last two weeks has decried the President for breaking the law (War Powers) and breaking his word (medical marijuana raids), who just two days ago had to argue with two cons here(!) that leftists feminists were silly.
Yup, total hack. Methinks your statement says more about you than me.
Did anyone else get a visual when reading Yummy John, yummy? 😉
I pictured MNG lovingly sucking on John’s fat cock.
Yes MNG, Tin Tin on the Congo is racist as hell. That is the point. Sarcasm? How does it work again?
Yes I understood, it’s essential to my point actually, in that post you use that reference to fan the charge of racism (anti-Semitism) and right above it you criticize liberals for injecting charges of racism into history. Reading comprehension, how does it work.
But these kind of flip flops should seem familiar to you:
John|6.4.11 @ 12:24PM|#
She should have been fired.
John|7.21.10 @ 11:20AM|#
The USDA should have never fired her.
John was against it before he was for it.
And that has to do with Tin Tin and evil Jews kidnapping babies how? Is there anything for you that doesn’t relate to Sherod?
In the one comment you decry liberals for reading racism into history, in the other you accuse me of not buying into a charge of racism.
Do I have to explain your own comments to you now?
OMG, someone can change their mind as new evidence comes to light! Bring out the torches!
There’s no new evidence.
The story broke and John called for her to be fired. THEN the new evidence came out and he backed up on that. Now, months later, with no new evidence, he called for her to be fired again.
I never thought that the “new evidence” meant much of anything.
It didn’t. But MNG has convinced himself it did and thus it makes him right about everything else whether it has anything to do with Sherod or not. It has gone well past the point of tiresome.
So how come the new evidence caused you to change your mind:
John|7.21.10 @ 11:20AM|#
The USDA should have never fired her.
John|7.21.10 @ 11:26AM|#
Of course I did. But the fact that I took that from the story doesn’t mean it was the point of the story. I hadn’t seen the whole video. But seeing the whole video made feel better about this woman
And ‘liberals stopped reading history because it was racist and sexist’ is fucking joke you moron. You get a little bit more incoherent every day.
The colonists were British.
Blimey!
Why do Palin’s supporters act like she is some kind of great public speaker? Whenever I hear her answer a question from a non-Fox News person, she stammers worse than George W. Bush.
Worse than Obama off the ‘prompter?
Obama is an awful speaker without the teleprompter. Guess the afffirmative action does not inocculate one from aposeiopesis and filler language.
Thanks, LM. I learned a new word today!
Sarah Palin claims Paul Revere warned the British
Well, he did. In fact, he was British. This is 1775 we’re talking about. Pre-DOI. What country would he and the other residents of the British colonies been citizens of?
Yup. That’s right.
Somalia?
they were citizens of ROADS.
Experts back Sarah Palin’s historical account
http://www.bostonherald.com/ne…..l_account/
Yemen’s president has left the country.
Oh, please. Our president flees the country all the time.
Problem is he keeps coming back
But unfortunately ours keep coming back.
Thank you very much
A homeowner forecloses on the Bank of America.
That is a great story. Think I would have worked in some “pain and suffering” as well.
No joke… and if he lost any wages for not being at work for all these legal actions. I’m glad he won, but BoA should pay more than just his legal fees.
Too big to fail, but maybe too big to function.
The power of shark’s fin soup to convey status is enormous, and it pervades Chinese society. Serving shark’s fin soup at auspicious events has been a tradition for centuries among elites, but the Chinese bridal and restaurant industries have turned it into an essential element of any middle-class wedding or important business meal. As China’s economy expands, more people are putting the soup on the menu.
But activists in Asia and elsewhere are challenging the tradition, citing statistics that show the shark-fin trade may kill as many as 73 million sharks a year. It is possibly the single-largest threat to sharks worldwide, along with the incidental catch of sharks in global tuna and swordfish fisheries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..ml?hpid=z3
More importantly, you have some spinach stuck in your teeth.
Tried it, tastes like crap. The Chinese are stuck on this idea that the rarer something is, the better it must be for you.
The Chinese are the ultimate hipsters.
This is lacism stlaight up.
Apt description. I’m wondering when the unshaven masses of the East Village will start wearing gray Mao-suits.
yeah, and powedered rhino horn cures cancer, goes for $350/gram. That’s 7 times my observed price of cocaine, and it doesn’t even get you high.
dude it fixes ED, not cure cancer.
It is possibly the single-largest threat to sharks worldwide
And this is bad why?
No more “jumping the shark”?
How’s a shark with no fins supposed to jump? Be serious.
A homeowner forecloses on the Bank of America.
As fun as it is, this story is told from the defense attorney’s perspective. I imagine BoA will have a different version of events.
they blamed in on a lawyer
Maybe in BoA’s version they didn’t lose in court and didn’t actually end up cutting a check for attorney’s fees.
I’m sure they will. Though I wouldn’t take much stock in it. They foreclosed on a house where the owners paid cash and were slow to pay damages and fees that were court ordered. Once the moving vans came in, they sure found their checkbook quickly.
The local Sheriff seems convinced.
I eagerly await BoA’s version.
Ok, for once can we please, please get a fucking Monday morning treat and read that Chuckie Schumer has been shut down? Please?
I’m not picky, it doesn’t have to be news that he’d been found and videotaped fellating a chihuahua, but that would be bonus!
Chuckie never dies, he just keeps coming back in progressively worse sequels.
that would make my day
He even looks evil in that picture. One day his true form will be revealed!
After consulting a conservation agent, who told them to kill the gator if they felt it posed a danger, one of the officers shot it twice in the head before realizing something was up
It’s coming right for us!!
Concrete gators, the new menace.
Has anybody mentioned the South Beach police videotape incident yet?
http://www.miamiherald.com/201…..orced.html
Memo to cops – “Reno 911” is not a video training course.
Memo to cops – “Reno 911” is not a video training course.
Haven’t seen that on Reason yet. Just saw it for the first time on Fark yesterday. The Internets are letting me down on my cop-hating needs.
police allegedly pointed guns at their heads, threw them to the ground and smashed the cell phone that took the video.
“Our investigation shows that procedures were followed and the officers did not act improperly. The medal award ceremony will be this Friday.”
There’s no way a phone recorded a video onto a “SIM card.” They must mean a removable memory card of some sort.
STOP RESISTING!
I wrote about the gator assassination too 🙁
http://rctlfy.wordpress.com/20…..ommission/
No one gives a fuck.
No-trespassing gator tattoos! Get your no-trespassing gator tattoos!
Reason’s Doherty must have been on vacation last week because no one covered Ron Paul’s big Federal Reserve transparency meeting and hit job. But the boys at his fansite did –
http://www.dailypaul.com/16640…..-6-1-200pm
LMAO! The meeting was a fucking disaster for Paul. Read the comments at his fan site – they realize their hero is a zero and their stupid conspiracy gig is finished.
Since it came up last week, I read The Unincorporated Man.
It is a very good–if long–read. It plays off the robc’s ideas on fractional slavery very well, even managing to spin a somewhat plausible and very functional libertarian/miniarchist future. But one that only works because of a very, very deep flaw in their conception of freedom.
It is first of a trilogy, the 2nd book of which–The Unincorporated War–has already been published. The 3rd book The Unincorporated Woman is due out later this year.
There is evidence based on past posting, that at least one of the authors reads Hit & Run.
In the interest of remaining spoiler free, I’ll discuss it more off-list with anyone that wants to mail me at my handle link.
I grabbed it on my Kindle as soon as I saw it mentioned.
I don’t think this is a spoiler. I think one of the Twinkie wrappers should still have had a Twinkie in it and the Twinkie should have turned out to be edible and indistinguishable from a new one.
I also went ahead and read it. Concur entirely. Very interesting and subtle commentary on how moral relativism can lead one to minarchist/libertarian states where the primary freedom of self exists only as an illusion. It will be intersting to see if the authors believe total self-ownership requires more governance (assuming they choose to address that in the story arc).
Morality is relative. Hume, Locke, and Kant proved that long ago.
Yeah, I know. Some Americans still believe in Creationism too.
Moral relativism is ends > means. I can see Hume getting there as a utilitarian. Pretty sure John Locke wasn’t on board with that.
I’m not sure I’d call it moral relativism, more like an unprincipled pragmatic ethic that–while grasping the shape of freedom–doesn’t understand its essence.
They understand that most ends do not justify the means, they just haven’t shaken off the last few unexamined tyrannies they accept as axiomatic.
I always read “tyrannies” as “trannies”, but I don’t know why.
Morality is agent-relative, but it is not subjective, because all moral agents are trapped by objective facts about themselves that they cannot escape.
Is it worth grabbing from the library or would my free time be better spent on midget amputee latex porn?
Adults can multi-task.
Excellent point! If I don’t like the book though, I’ll be sure to whine unendingly and only click MOST of your links from now on. You have been warned.
Which book? TUM or the midget amputee stuff? Because the latter can be kind of hit or miss, frankly.
I’m trusting you on this one, librarian. And this is after I swore never to trust a library man ever again. Herpes is forever you know.
It’s all a trick to give you bookmydia.
One of the better sci-fi books I’ve read from the last 3 years. Not quite as esoteric as Stross or Mieville, but heftier than Scalzi. Well-written and thought provoking. Especially for the libertarian leaners out there. Gives you a lot to chew on.
protest your property taxes, then you could buy it
Fuck off, rather.
Witnesses said they were forced to hide video after Beach shooting
…On Thursday, The Miami Herald spoke to the couple that saw the end of the 4 a.m. police chase on Collins Avenue, then watched and filmed from just a few feet away as a dozen officers fired their guns repeatedly into Raymond Herisse’s blue Hyundai. They say the only reason they were able to show the video to a reporter is because they hid a memory card after police allegedly pointed guns at their heads, threw them to the ground and smashed the cell phone that took the video. …
Miami Beach Police Ordered Videographer At Gunpoint To Hand Over Phone
…Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets Memorial Day.
First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer.
Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling “you want to be fucking paparazzi?”
Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer’s back pocket as he was laying down on the ground….
Beat me by a minute, dagnabbit.
Police are getting a little bit testy these days.
Have they always been nuts? Or do high-quality cameras on cell phones just have their balls in a bind? Regardless, they need to sack up and grow a pair. Respecting rights requires brass ones.
They’ve always been nuts.
Wow… Those police officers involved in arresting and assaulting these individuals should be fired and thrown in prison for what they did. Even if shooting Herisse was justified, their treatement of the bystanders was criminal.
Daily Kos sticks up for Weiner by publishing identities of underage girls
Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas allowed the publication of underage girls’ identities on his blog in an attempt to vilify Andrew Breitbart and exonerate New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner. Tommy Christopher, an openly left-wing journalist at Mediaite, reported Friday morning that Moulitsas’s site published personally identifiable information about two young women who have become somewhat involved in the #Weinergate scandal….
Markos Moulitsas secretly thinks every underage girl’s information should be published. Hey, he might get lucky. . .
This is ridiculous. Why should the identity of teenagers who inject themselves into the story by providing false information be protected?
From the ‘Chuck Schumer wants to shut down the Silk Road.’ article:
In their letter, the senators recommended seizing the website’s domain name.
Can’t wait to see the feds try to shut down a Tor domain.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some overpriced drugs to order.
Looking at the Bitcoin exchange rates over I can’t help regretting not buying some bitcoins when they were really cheap a few months back.
And here’s a statement by the Silk Road operators.
As many of you know, U.S. Senators are aware of the site and aiming to take it down:
“This audacious website should be shut down immediately,” Manchin said.
Here’s a link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..71466.html
The die have been cast and now we will see how they land. We will be diverting even more effort into countering their attacks and making the site as resilient as possible, which means we may not be as responsive to messages for a while.
I’m sure this news will scare some off, but should we win the fight, a new era will be born. Even if we lose, the genie is out of the bottle and they are fighting a losing War already.
“It’s better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb”
“This audacious website should be shut down immediately,” Manchin said.
Let me be clear.
Just a doggone minute!
“Die have been cast”? Subject-verb case agreement fail.
“they land” too.
The author needs to play more games that use dice.
It is now apparent that the US government does not consider domain names to be “property”.
If they were “property”, then the US government would not be able to claim jurisdiction over the activities of websites that are based overseas.
If they were “property”, then the US government would not be able to seize them without due process of law, including jury trials.
Since the US government does not consider them “property”, I personally think libertarians should take them at their word, and no longer respect any property claim to websites or web content whatsoever. To me that would mean that the theft of web-based content or the destruction of web-based content via “hacking” could not possibly be a crime against property.
Surely they can have it both ways?
I agree with the silkroaders; I’m not too interested in checking out their wares, but the fact remains, no government controls the internet.
Not even China.
We’re working on fixing that as quickly as we can.
*Prepares to plant Old Glory on your TUBES*
To me that would mean that the theft of web-based content or the destruction of web-based content via “hacking” could not possibly be a crime against property.
I’d love to hear an argument like this busted out in court the next time some kid is hauled up for defacing cia.gov.
As long as the courts consider them property, they’ll keep ruling as they have, so I don’t think it matters if the feds are seizing websites. Do you think the different parts of government are always consistent and coordinated?
A old school rocker gesture
No one gives a fuck.
Bachman is a nice guy. Too bad both of his bands (The Guess Who and BTO) were the height of 1970s suckatude.
Hey, at least “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” is a classic, don’t you think? Check the link for an interesting story about how the song came have the stutter in it.
check the link
No
I found it interesting. Who knew Margaret Thatcher quoted BTO?
Don’t be dissin’ on The Guess Who.
Feminism by Treaty
‘Saint Bono’ the anti-poverty campaigner facing huge Glastonbury protest ? for avoiding tax
Bono is one of those smug, self-righteous tools who like to be generous with other people’s money.
When I was a kid, I and my little cohorts roamed far and wide, and felt completely unconstrained by property lines. However,in addition to being smart enough to distinguish a concrete alligator from a real one, we had not been indoctrinated with such Homeland Security homilies as “See Something, Say Something”.
If I had gone home after a long hard day of traipsing around in other people’s back yards and said, “Hey Dad- that guy over there has an alligator in his pond” my dad would have said, “So? Don’t pester it, or it will eat you; that’s undoubtedly why it’s there.”
“See Something, Say Something”.
Horsey. Horsey! HORSEY!! HOOORRRSEYY!!!
Ah, the sweet chaos of disaffected youth. LulzSec appears to be Anon yet less mature.
This, plus the Silk Road story, will have the Kill The Internet Act authoritarians like Rockefeller creaming their trousers.
There is evidence based on past posting, that at least one of the authors reads Hit & Run.
STEVE SMITH IN SPACE??????????
http://arealiensreal.org/john-…..sasquatch/
Is Bigfoot An Alien?
Steve now has his own series on Animal Planet
Silly TV show. You don’t find Steve Smith… he finds you…
They must be responsible aliens then, cause you never step in ape poop.
Isn’t it interesting that they would consider the big, shaggy, apelike creature to be a pet and not the highly advanced life?
Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas allowed the publication of underage girls’ identities on his blog in an attempt to vilify Andrew Breitbart and exonerate New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Fucking cause and effect- how does it work?
I thought the story was going to be that “torrent” was disallowed in favor of a more French-sounding word such as “tempete” ou “orage”.
“Torrrent” names! Get your “torrrent” names!
Don’t give them any ideas: Oh la la! French ban the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ from being used on TV and radio news programmes.
Predator strike kills actor from The Hangover
He must have been AQ #3. Its like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.
Pima County releases the redacted search warrant that eventually led to panic fire in a house containing a four-year-old child. Having a dirtbag brother and a bunch of old cars is justification to casually invade a man’s home.
There’s a reason they released these documents on a Friday.
Great editorial in the WSJ today on the drug war. From Mary O’Grady, who is probably the best journalist alive in covering South America. I will quote liberally since it is behind a pay wall.
Tomorrow marks the 79th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the U.S. prohibition on alcohol. On that day in 1932 John D. Rockefeller Jr., a vociferous advocate of temperance, called for the repeal of the 18th amendment in a letter published in the New York Times.
Rockefeller had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for the constitutional prohibition on alcohol. But his letter did more than admit the error of his investment. Because of his moral authority on the matter, it effectively ended the conservative taboo against admitting that the whole experiment had failed.
Rockefeller had not changed his views on the destructiveness of drink, and he asked for ongoing “support of practical measures for the promotion of genuine temperance.” But he insisted that lifting prohibition was essential if America was to “restore public respect for the law.”
Rockefeller’s reversal came to mind last week when former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, three former Latin American presidents from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and the current prime minister of Greece (among others) issued a joint report?as the Global Commission on Drug Policy?”describ[ing] the drug war as a failure and call[ing] for a paradigm shift in global drug policy.”
Like Rockefeller, the commission members do not embrace a laissez-faire policy toward drug use. But they recognize, as he did, that the attempt to use force to halt consumption has been disastrous. They recommend alternative approaches to controlling substances and more emphasis on treatment for addicts.
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AFP/Getty Images
Richard Branson (left), founder of the Virgin Group, speaks with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil and chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, June 2.
.The parallels between the situation Rockefeller faced and today’s scandalous war on drugs are dramatic. The wealthy philanthropist had begun his campaign against alcohol with great expectations. “When the Eighteenth Amendment was passed I earnestly hoped?with a host of advocates of temperance?that it would be generally supported by public opinion” and, he wrote, that teetotaling would eventually take hold.
“That this has not been the result but rather that drinking generally has increased; that the speakeasy has replaced the saloon, not only unit for unit, but probably two-fold if not three-fold; that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unbashed[ly] disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment; that as an inevitable result respect for all law has greatly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented degree?I have slowly reluctantly come to believe.”
He noted that any “benefits” from the 18th amendment were “more than outweighed by the evils that ha[d] developed and flourished since its adoption, evils which, unless promptly checked,” were “likely to lead to conditions unspeakably worse than those which prevailed before.”
Sound familiar? Almost 100 years after drug prohibition was ushered in, school children report that they can easily access narcotics and surveys indicate they are used across social classes. A May 23 story in the Economist reported that Canada now trumps Mexico as an entryway into the U.S. for the drug “ecstasy.” American jails are taking in record numbers of young minorities and converting them into hardened criminals; gang violence is on the rise; organized crime is undermining U.S. geopolitical interests in places like Mexico, Central America and Afghanistan. Thousands of innocents, including children, have been killed in the mayhem.
Having produced nothing but hardship for the most vulnerable, disrespect for the rule of law, terror in formerly peaceful cities and profit opportunities for gangsters, drug warriors now want to militarize the southern U.S. border.
If history is any guide, says Angelo Codevilla, in a recent Claremont Review of Books essay titled “Our Borders, Ourselves,” this isn’t going to end well. Look at what happened, he warns, in the Peloponnesian War when hostility broke out on the Athenian doorstep: “Having lost a friendly border, Athens turned itself inside out trying to secure an unfriendly one.”
The border is unfriendly not because of too few fences, drones or soldiers, but because American drug habits finance the traffickers. “These dollars, and nothing else,” writes Mr. Codevilla, “are responsible for the near collapse of law and order south of the border and for the insufficiently publicized corruption on the northern side.”
We have met the enemy and it is us, the Claremont Institute scholar posits: “Even if our southern border were completely closed off . . . it would do nothing to change the fact that mind-altering drugs have become morally and politically acceptable to mainstream American society.”
Americans can cut their demand, perhaps with education and by stigmatizing use, as was done with cigarettes. But until then, victory is unlikely. As Mr. Codevilla notes: “America’s assumption that restricting supply can somehow make it safe for us to tolerate widespread drug use has itself proved to be a habit-forming narcotic that has reduced our sensitivity to moral rot.” Rockefeller could not have said it better.
Good work, John.
Of course, some of us think that the state has no business in drug awareness and drug prevention campaigns, much less a DARE style role. Stigmitizing drug use, besides being morally reprehensible in and of itself, is a loser.
The comments at least last I checked were pretty positive among the conservative and not libertarian WSJ readers.
I think the drug war is like an totalitarian regime. In a totalitarian regime everyone hates the government. But the government stays in power because no one realizes that everyone else hates the government as much as they do. So, people go along with it and stay silent because they figure saying something won’t accomplish anything but getting them in trouble. Once people realize that everyone else hates the government as much as they do, the whole thing falls.
I think most people, if they are honest, don’t support the drug war. But the drug warriors have convinced people that that is a minority view held only by nuts. Thus, people are afraid to stand up and say the disagree with it for fear of being labeled a nut.
I sadly think a lot of people still support criminalization of drugs. I think they do so out of ignorance of 1. what drugs actually do and do not do and 2. what the WOD entails.
Drugs are bad because the government says they’re bad.
If they weren’t bad then they would be legal.
But because they’re illegal then they are bad.
They’re bad because they’re illegal and they’re illegal because they’re bad.
Drugs are bad.
Honestly only conservatives have ever made this argument to me.
The question I ask conservatives who respond in that manner is ‘would you use those drugs if they were made legal?’ to which they give an emphatic ‘no!’. So I then ask ‘well what does it matter?’, and they usually say ‘teh childrenz!’.
Good point.
and Shirley Sherod. Don’t forget Shirley Sherod MNG. All things do come back to her don’t they?
Hey, it’s you that keep changing your mind on that subject, not me. What’s you view today?
Yet, only a nut would support the WoD. Even from a utilitarian point of view, the WoD has been a spectacular misallocation of resources in addition to being a loser as far as reducing drug consumption.
Well, you get this view that the late Senator Moynihan voiced that you can either have a massive law enforcement problem concerning drugs or a massive public health problem concerning drugs.
As a utilitarian you have to ask yourself would the harm from increased availibility and use of drugs outweigh the harms the WOD produces?
I submit that you have exactly the same “public health” problem regardless of whether drugs are illegal.
The social problems caused by drug use are caused by heavy users/addicts. Those are exactly the people who use drugs regardless of whether they are legal or illegal.
What a drug war does is layer on top of these social problems all the additional problems created by a massively profitable black market and a brutal and intrusive enforcement regime.
I think the idea is that if drugs are more easily available you will have a larger number of people who use them and go on to become heavy users, therefore a net increase in these heavy users.
Even if this were true – and I don’t concede that it is – then the choice becomes one of:
1. Allowing those net new heavy drug users suffer the consequences of their own stupid decisions.
2. Using the criminal justice system to punish people who would not ever enter the set #1 above [because they were in the set of high-functioning users] as well as to punish people who merely respond to the economic demand users create.
It’s not just a question of the net negative impact to me. It’s a question of the net negative impact, weighted by the degree to which people deserve their own personal net negative impact.
And yes, I realize that in many cases that puts me on the side of the dealer rather than of the user, which is the reverse of the way most people look at it. But to me the dealer is just ignoring unjust contraband laws to supply a product people are willing to buy. I don’t see a lot wrong with that. It’s the users who are assholes. If you’re the kind of drug user who would spend their rent money on drugs or leave their kid unattended to go party in a crack house, fuck you I’m not on your side. You’re the problem here, and not the dealer(s). If you would pull your shit together I wouldn’t have to hear all the For Ze Childrenz shit I am subjected to every day.
I think the idea is that if drugs are more easily available you will have a larger number of people who use them and go on to become heavy users, therefore a net increase in these heavy users.
This assumes that addictive behavior arises from substances themselves, and not from people.
I don’t think that’s the case. This country has generations of people who have used drugs socially without becoming heavy users. Drug use doesn’t create drug addicts. People predisposed to being addicts find drugs to abuse.
I think Jacob Sullum referred to this as voodoo pharmacology in his book. The substances have these magic powers that override everything else.
Even if what you say is true (which I think it is) if a certain % of people who try drugs become heavy users and the number of people who try it increases (due to increased availibility) you get more heavy users.
The number of people who try it will probably briefly spike with legalization and then go back down to prior or lower-than-prior levels, just like with Prohibition.
The only time the political class will admit that government action failed to achieve its intended goals is when it can be used as a weapon against the other team.
They will never ever admit that their own policies are a failure, they will only point to the other guy.
Since both teams support the war on drugs citizens who do not put government policy above their own sense of morality, neither side will use it to attack the other.
Because of this I expect governments to step up the violence against drugs citizens who do not put government policy above their own sense of morality, because the alternative is to admit failure.
I think liberals can’t quite the WOD because a sizeable interest group in that coalition are the “helping professions” who make a living off treatments drug users are forced into. These folks are good for criticizing the more egregious law enforcement aspects of the WOD but they want to keep it illegal, that fosters their client base and makes them feel needed.
I think conservatives oppose drugs because of their fear of the new and what they don’t know.
Conservatives oppose drugs as a moral issue.
They’re bad because they’re illegal and they’re illegal because they’re bad.
It’s not fear or ignorance, because both of those things can be cured.
For them it is a moral issue.
But they don’t tend to oppose drugs that they are culturally familiar with, like alcohol or tobacco.
Alcohol and tobacco are legal.
Restrictions on legal activity, what the moralizing liberals like to do, is disrespectful to the law.
Now if tobacco were to be made illegal it would overnight become bad. But because it is legal it is not bad.
It is a matter of having one’s morality subordinate to what they are told by the government. They may know in their heart that something is not bad, but they second guess themselves and substitute government morality for their own.
Or my personal favorite, “Well, maybe it shouldn’t be illegal, but right now it is and the law is the law. So we have to keep punishing people because they won’t respect the law.”
Go drink some hemlock, douches.
C’mon, conservatives don’t want to legalize drugs like MJ because of its “hippy” stigma. And the other drugs are bad, m’kay?
I did not know that about Rockefeller. Too bad politicians have an instinctive aversion to ever admitting an error on a policy position.
Was this the same Rockefeller that pushed the draconian drug laws in NY, or one of his ancestors? Because either way there is some interesting irony going on there…
Blame the drug laws on Nelson, his son.
Many cited for using pennies to pay medical bill
I hope he pays the ticket in pennies.
Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time?
It’s Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.
Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
Sure, it’s not a lot on its own ? but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you’re making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers.
All those rabbid AGW pushers can do us all a favor and strangle themselves. It will completely remove their carbon footprints. The rest of us who remain can figure out our own problems.
Right, because it would be so much better for the environment if instead you bought a daily newspaper printed on paper to find out about movie times, or if you called MovieFone, or if you got in your car and drove to the movie theatre and then drove right home when they didn’t have the movie you wanted.
Why are people so stupid? It’s like this author thinks that if people didn’t have the net they’d just sit still in their houses and do nothing, and wouldn’t use different [and often more resource-intensive] ways of getting the information and entertainment they currently get from the web.
“Why are people so stupid? It’s like this author thinks that if people didn’t have the net they’d just sit still in their houses and do nothing,”
That is what he wants.
Please notice that you only get a fork. No knife. No spoon. I wonder what that means? No soup, perhaps? No steaks?
Sounds like they might be onto something there dude.
http://www.hide-your-ip.at.tc
Over at the NYT, Kristof says Pakistan is the new Somalia.
Meanwhile, the editorial board sez, Rule of Law? Do Not Want.
Mr. Obama has said he will recommend strong standards, but industry and many in Congress are furiously lobbying for the weakest they can get away with.
Last year, the administration put four proposals on the table. The most conservative, which industry prefers, calls for an average annual fuel efficiency increase of 3 percent, which works out to a fleetwide average of 47 m.p.g. by 2025. The most ambitious scenario, favored by environmental and consumer groups, calls for average annual gains of 6 percent, which works out to 62 m.p.g. in the same time frame.
Mr. Obama should hang tough. Given the vanishingly small prospects for serious energy legislation on Capitol Hill, the new standards represent his and the country’s most promising opportunity to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and America’s dependence on foreign oil.
If the duly elected representatives of the people won’t pass the laws *we* want, the President should just fall back on Imperial Decree. The fucking peasants don’t even know what’s good for them, so the Enlightened Class must step in and guide them.
(If “we” really want to see a mass adoption of 62MPG cars, “we” should “just” slap a twenty dollar per gallon tax on gasoline. That might be enough, but it could take fifty bucks per gallon.)
“(If ‘we’ really want to see a mass adoption of 62MPG cars, ‘we’ should ‘just’ slap a twenty dollar per gallon tax on gasoline. That might be enough, but it could take fifty bucks per gallon.)”
I hope they keep the subway rideable, because taxi rides are gonna be expensive.
“Environmental and consumer groups” don’t actually have to design, build, and sell cars. There are many motorcycles that don’t get 62 mpg. Automotive engineering isn’t subject to Moore’s law, so even in the near future it’ll be hard to make a high-mileage car that’s affordable, meets safety standards, carries four, and can get to highway speeds in the length of an on-ramp.
But we could solve this issue by requiring that every member of Congress can only drive a vehicle that meets whatever standard they impose. They’d drop this issue tout suite.
Pakistan is the new Somalia
PAKISTAN!!1ONEONE1!1ONE
….eh, I dunno. I’m gonna stick with Somalia Classic.
OMG. If we don’t solve the debt ceiling, interest rates could jump to levels not seen since the Fed started creating bubbles! This is not a bad thing (especially since I locked in 4% fixed on my overvalued house in January.)
the new standards represent his and the country’s most promising opportunity to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and America’s dependence on foreign oil.
I would think allowing exploration and development of domestic energy of all kinds would be our best opportunity to reduce reliance on imports.
Oh, and allowing the Canadians to expand their pipelines (which the administration is trying to block).
We shouldn’t be buying oil from Canadians. they will use that money to build doughnut shops all over America and radicalize the population. Better instead to buy it from the Saudis.
Better Sharia Law than Tim Horton’s, yeah?
That is right. You can’t trust those Canucks. You want your children eating donuts (that are delicious by the way) and playing hockey?
Never been to a Sharia cafe, but I can’t imagine their coffee being worse than Tim’s. Bring it on, I say.
My Dick in a Tweet
http://dailycaller.com/2011/06…..eet-video/
Fuck it. Let’s bomb France.
glad to see that after a week in Peru John and MNG are still lovers. After the first 1/3, morning links comments are just a lover’s quarrel.
And to repeat one:
I don’t always take a shit at work, but when I do I play Angry Birds
Interesting discussion. You should post your viewpoints about this on http://www.whitehousevoice.com!