enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS|A Beacon of Intermittence

I don’t have a 401(k) but I have an IRA and if it lost half it’s value it would amount to only a couple thousand bucks. I’ve drained my retirement investments down over the past four years or so in order to keep my mortgage paid and the kids fed.

For the past week or so I’ve asked each acquaintance I’ve encountered how much money they’ve lost in the stock market with their 401(k). What I found out is that other than the professional people, the vast majority don’t have money in the stock market, or anywhere else. They have property tax bills they can’t pay, but not 401(k)s. But the headlines scream, “Two trillion dollars lost in retirement plans in last 15 months.” I’m sure you’ve heard it or read it at least once in the past few days.

Of course after any catastrophic event the government in general and liberals in particular never miss an opportunity to seize more control of whatever they can, always making things worse. Seems many Democrats of the socialist bent, which is to say most of them, have long been unhappy with the whole concept of the individually controlled 401(k) plans and have longed to be rid of them. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, were mentioned in the article.

Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at The New School for Social Research in New York, which I have never heard of, testified before Miller’s committee, outlining how the government can better serve the people.

All workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5% of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3% a year, adjusted for inflation.

If someone came up on the street and explained something like that to me I would immediately suspect a scam where I give you several thousands of dollars in return for $600 and a promise of something better far in the future. At the very least it sounds like a 5% raise in social security taxes. I wonder long a 5% SS tax increase would stave off the bankruptcy of the failed Social Security program.

Ms. Ghilarducci also said:

“I want to spend our nation’s dollar for retirement security better. Everybody would now be covered”

What do you say to a comment like that? Ms. Ghilarducci must think very highly of herself. Only a socialist/communist could point to the failed Social Security program for the model of how to make something better.

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Pauli to replace Fannie & Freddie.

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Talk about out of touch with the American people. I didn’t pay my taxes on time for 2005, 2006, and 2007 because I had to choose between paying the government and paying my mortgage and I owe more in penalties and interest than Rangel’s entire tax bill for 2004, 2005, and 2006 on rental income for a beach house in the Dominican Republic, three rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, and free parking in a covered congressional parking lot for his dilapidated Mercedes. Most people can’t even park a car with expired registration or inspection at their apartment or in their neighborhood, much less in tax-payer funded covered parking.

The difference between me and Rep Charlie Rangel (D) New York, is that he was breaking the rules to not only avoid paying taxes but to gain additional tangible benefit as well, whereas I was just broke and couldn’t afford to pay them, largely due to policies enacted by people like Charlie Rangel, who is chairman of the most powerful ways and mean committee.

Rangel crys that he is a victim of guerrilla warfare from the Republicans during the mean season of presidential political campaigning. Well, welcome to the club, Charlie. Ordinary Americans are under attack by guerrilla assault from the government everyday of their lives.

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Improvements at the Texas City TWIC Enrollment Center

There have been some recent improvements at the Texas City TWIC Enrollment Center, including the elimination of the 10-week wait for an appointment and the establishing of a procedure to address the fingerprint activation problem which some Applicants have experienced.

There have been some personnel changes at the Enrollment Center, and there are now three computer stations.  One station is dedicated completely to TWIC card activations.

• The 10-week waiting period for an appointment at the Enrollment Center has been eliminated.  You can now make an appointment within a few days or a week.  Walk-ins are also accepted before approximately 3:00 pm each Monday through Friday.
• A software fix has been installed to enhance the fingerprint scanner’s ability to read your fingerprints during the card activation process.  If you have already attempted to activate your card, but were turned away due to a fingerprint problem, you should go back to the Enrollment Center and attempt another activation.  If the “Trusted Agent” (employee) at the Enrollment Center is still unable to get a match on your fingerprints, do not leave until he or she has created a “Ticket” for you in the TWIC Help Desk system explaining the “1:1 mismatch”.  Here is what happens next:
• The Ticket is forwarded by the Help Desk to their Engineering Group, who then adds your name to a list of Applicants experiencing the “1:1 mismatch” activation problem.
• The list of names is reviewed by a TWIC “Control Board” every two weeks to see if there are any Applicants who should not receive a TWIC card without a fingerprint match.
• The list of names is then forwarded to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), who then conducts another review to determine the final status of each Applicant who experienced the “1:1 mismatch”.
• All Applicants on the list who have been granted permission to activate their TWIC cards without a fingerprint match will be automatically notified by email or telephone, depending on the method selected by the Applicant during the on-line pre-enrollment process.  The notification will contain further instructions.

After you receive your TWIC card, please remember to stop by the Main Gate to show it to Security so that they may update your TWIC card status in our database.

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Good stuff:

So, in anticipation of any course of action that could possibly lead to a “confrontation,” postmoderns never take a moral stand. They look into the future, at where such a stand might lead them — and, terrified by the prospect, they back down pre-emptively. Often, they seek some sort of “compromise” with thugs that takes the “confrontation” option off the table. “Compromise” here means: anticipatory capitulation.

Read it!

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A commenter left this link in the comments and I almost missed it

An estimated 125,000 Western lowland gorillas are living in a swamp in equatorial Africa, researchers reported Tuesday, double the number of the endangered primates thought to survive worldwide.

I bet a dollar that at least one save the endangered species scam artists scientist in the group proposed wiping out the newly discovered bunch of erstwhile rare gorillas so as not to endanger the status of the remaining gorillas.

Some of these things you just know in your gut.

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I was going to write about this article yesterday (or was that Friday?) but it didn’t make the cut. But I came across it again and it pissed me off again so… Reported from Bloomberg:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said “economic egoism” has led to what may be the worst economic contraction since the depression of the 1930s, and placed some of the blame on the U.S.

I wonder how much American grain this asshole has eaten in his life? Ingrate.

The Russians, for all their miserable success at world domination, have to be the most egotistical jerks the world has ever seen. And for letting the Russians jump right back up to the table after their sound defeat in the cold war, Americans are probably the stupidest. Looking back I ask (again,) what peace dividend? There never was a peace dividend. There was a just a brief period of time where money was wasted on social programs insteadof wasted in the military.

Make no mistake, defending ourselves is a necessary cost, but still it is a waste of money when wrongheaded political decisions cause us to have to spend even a dollar more than is necessary. Our leaders squandered an historic opportunity to forge a lasting and prosperous relationship with the eastern bloc after the cold war. But no. The American leadership allowed things to go back to exactly how they were except now we have the crazy fucking Muslims thrown in the mix with all their crazy oil money. We are worse off now than we were.

The Russians and their complicity with pre-war Iraq and Iran are one of the biggest causes for all the problems we face right now. It was the Russians along with the French who made sure the terror problem didn’t get nipped in the bud because every dollar we spend on this terror non-sense is a dollar wasted, and Ivan knows this. For every Billion the Russians made from Saddam it was costing the U.S. a hundred billion to counteract. Ivan doesn’t fear the Muslims and terrorism so much because they don’t have any problems with wiping out a small city of Muslims. Or two. They don’t have a problem sending a million Russians to die as long as they kill 10 million Muslims.

I’m not trying to say we need to be more like the Russians, I’m saying we need to be more like Americans. We are in dire need of honest, principled people in charge of the state apparatus. We need to routinely purge our political class, including the bureaucrats. I don’t care if we send ‘em home with a sad look or hang ‘em from the light post on main street, just so long as we get rid of em. Sure a new batch will eventually rot, but so what. On the principle that everybody is corruptible, our elections need to be about ritual purgings where it is expected that almost everybody gets sent home. Make it like a Japanese game show where the losers are ridiculed, maybe hit with rotten vegetables.

The liberals like to say that the the War on Terror is costing us a trillion dollars a year. The reality is that the liberals are costing us this money. Failure to take care of the terror problem quickly and efficiently and at its source is costing us a trillion dollars a year. Failure to destroy the old Russian regime, for the second time, is costing us a trillion dollars a year. Prohibiting America from utilizing it’s own natural resources is costing us a trillion dollars a year. Allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons under the current terror regime is going to cost way more than a trillion dollars a year. It could cost us our very soul when a million Jews are wiped from the face of the earth in an instant.

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Dems do the same things expecting different results

To help correct the mortgage industry problems, house Democrats are in favor of more of the same policy that is the primary cause of the problem in the first place:

The Democrats’ measure, aimed at preventing foreclosures, would have the government step in to insure up to $300 billion in new mortgages for distressed homeowners. A House vote is expected by Thursday.

You can not make it easier for a person who can not afford a house to nonetheless buy a house anyway and expect anything but foreclosures down the road. To expect anything different is naive and/or insane.

The American Dream has nothing to do with the government providing everyone a house. The American Dream is about people seizing opportunity, working hard, and buying a house they can afford. The government providing for everyone is the exact opposite of the American Dream as it is traditionally understood.

Dems want immediate fix or forgetaboutit

What is it about the Dems that make them consistently cut off their noses to spite their faces? The Democrats would rather immolate the nation rather than let any non-liberal, non-PC policy succeed. If we sit back and let the Dems do everything their way, America will be destroyed.

On gas prices, Bush again asserted that he understands the pinch on typical families. He pushed for steps that critics say would offer little help anytime in the short term, such as encouraging construction of oil refineries and allowing more oil drilling in areas where it is now precluded.

Critics fail to acknowledge that something which it took Democrats two generations to destroy can’t be fixed in a day. In a market that is being driven to astronomical levels fueled primarily by manipulation and speculation based on fear of the future, alleviating those fears is just as important, and maybe more important, than bringing more production on-line immediately. If the speculators know we are building new refineries and if they know we will soon be drilling everywhere we can set up a rig, and if they know we will be building 50 new nuclear reactors the price of energy will fall.

It’s like after destroying our domestic energy production infrastructure, suddenly the Dems want Bush to shit some green energy in sufficient quantities to bring energy prices back into normal atmosphere or he and the Republicans are failure.

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Did we really need a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies., including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services to recommend this:

[A]n influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.

A group of twelve year-olds could have come up with the same conclusions. Survival is not rocket science. Besides, when survival becomes imperative, following the recommended government methodology is not a matter of high importance.

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When the government offers to help, politely decline…

Gov. Jim Gibbons intends to bill the widow of missing multimillionaire adventurer Steve Fossett for $687,000 the state spent in searching for the famed aviator last fall, a spokesman said. (Link)

And they didn’t even find the guy.

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America is done. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon.

Tuesday is the deadline for filing federal income taxes. Half of American taxpayers will pay 97 percent of the individual income taxes the government will collect for 2008, according to IRS data. The other half will pay little or nothing, yet receive billions in benefits in the form of cash, subsidies, “free” services and other benefits, and loans. There are indeed “Two Americas,” but the two aren’t the rich and poor, but taxpayers and tax consumers. (Link)

And I know that this will come as no surprise, but Pelosi and her liberal friends have much more shit on their agenda for which they will demand you and I pay. Well, I didn’t sign up to be a damn slave; I signed up for hard work and the American Dream. To date I have had plenty of the former and not much of the latter.

When the government takes more than I can afford to give, and leaves me with less than what I need for my own responsibilities (like sending my kids to college and providing for a reasonable retirement for me and the Wife,) that pretty much makes me a slave, or an indentured servant at the least.

For example, due to severe economic hardship over the past several years, I have no college savings and no retirement. We spent our savings to keep our house and to take care of our kids. And what did the government say when I went for assistance? “NO SOUP FOR YOU!” After working my ass off for thirty years, and paying unemployment taxes that would make the regular employee feel faint, all I got was “NO SOUP FOR YOU!! And by the way, here is your current tax bill. Pay us promptly or we will levy your house and bank accounts.”

Half the country is not going to continue to support the other half while providing less and less for their own. Nor should they. Nor would they be without the explicit threat of violence for refusal to pay. There will eventually be a breaking point and it could get nasty. Being an angry white male, I’m all for nasty. Until I have taken care of my own kids and provided for my own retirement I could give a shit about poor people or the environment. Make food out of poor people for all I care. Why should I provide for others to the detriment of my own? There is no reason academic or moral.

The government has made promises it can not keep. Due to its false pride the government is compelled to take whatever it can from whomever it can to fulfill its promises. At what point can a person say, “NO MORE!” I’ll tell you at what point, there is no point. Not if you put it into action. The police will come put you in jail or kill you if you resist too good.

We are free as long as we do as we are told, obey all the rules, and send in most of our money to the government. What a bargain!

PS: Re that last paragraph: I am quite certain there is more than one YouTube clip out there of Hillary saying pretty much the exact thing. Especially the soundbite “those who follow the rules…”

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And if you say Barak Obama I’ll puke.

I just read that the Banks are about to write off another $15 B. Are we over a trillion yet? A trillion dollars basically given to people to buy homes that they could not pay for. A good deal on the front end for those building homes, selling homes, financing homes, and The Home Depot; on the back end, not so good. For the middle class, who financed such largess since it was a government program that facilitated the boondoggle, it was a bad deal all around. Especially now that the people given a house they didn’t deserve are now classified as victims and eligible for even more monetary help they don’t deserve.

The Enron bubble seems to pale in comparison to the credit bubble. Lots of people — several of whom I know personally — lost everything they had due to Enron’s collapse (greed and corruption) so I wonder why we haven’t heard about all the people who have lost everything in the credit collapse? Did everybody at Bear-Stearns get to keep their pensions? If the government hadn’t bailed them out would everybody at Bear-Stearns get to keep their pensions? [More importantly, do the people at Bear Stearns deserve to keep their pensions? -Ed.]

How many times are we going to let big corporations (greed) and the government (corruption) destroy the economy? The American middle class is the most powerful economic engine the world has ever seen. The American middle class drives both the stock market and the government. Yet, in my brief recollection anyway, there has never been a economic meltdown caused by greed and corruption in the middle class. It’s always caused by those at the top.

Human beings, as a whole, are not capable of wielding power without corruption. Eventually they will set in motion events that are not to the benefit of the people they supposedly serve.

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There are so many things wrong with this story it’s not even funny. And, of course, it makes me very angry. Only a lying, arrogant sack of shit would proclaim himself a courageous leader while blaming the rejection of his attempt to implement state-sanctioned highway robbery as a simple matter of the poor common people’s obstinate resistance to change.

“It takes courage to ask people to change—even if it won’t really cost them much. It is sad but it is true. Political leaders today are afraid of their constituents,” he said in a speech at an environmental conference at Georgetown.

No, It takes courage to run as a Green candidate, you big loser, because no politician has ever been elected to save the planet. Next time, do us a favor and run as a Greenie. Besides, shouldn’t politicians be afraid of their constituents? If not afraid, then shouldn’t politicians at least be respectful of the needs of those they are elected to serve? Does Bloomberg really think his average constituent needs to shell out several hundred extra dollars a month because the city can’t manage their own traffic boondoggle? No politician is elected based on his or her promises to play wet nurse to Mother Earth. They seem to take on that job after they get into office since it presents a really effective way to swindle money from people.

Except for the mayor of New York and his enviro-whack cronies at the EPA, DoT, UN and other power-hungry, money-grubbing bureaucracies, no one cares that the mayor of New York isn’t doing enough to save the environment. For many people I’m sure there is a collective sigh of relief that Bloomberg wont be able to economically rape them because they have to drive into the city. I got news for Bloomberg, no one wants to drive in heavy traffic congestion and they for damn sure don’t want to pay the city $21 a day for the privilege of doing so.

As much as I’d like to hang this preposterous money-grubbing scheme on the despicable Mayor Bloomberg, it seems he has some allies in the Bush administration — if not Bush himself — who support this money grab.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters had said the administration hoped congestion pricing in New York could serve as a model for other cities nationwide. Charging drivers fees in congested city centers is a concept that has gained popularity around the world but has yet to be tried on a major scale in a large U.S. city.

By failing to pass congestion pricing before a midnight deadline on Monday, the state appeared to have forfeited an offer of $354 million in federal money to help kick-start the initiative.

So the citizens provide the start-up costs for their own further oppression? Isn’t that precious? The feds give NYC a third of a BILLION dollars of taxpayer money so they can build a clusterfuck bureaucracy to steal many more hundreds of millions from people required to commute to a job they probably really don’t even want.

I bet I can think of several different ways to alleviate traffic congestion that does not involve stealing money from middle-class commuters. I’ve written about some of these before and it’s very simple: Use telecom technology and common hub facilities to disperse the corporate workforces away from congested areas. Providing $354 Million dollars to those forward-looking entrepreneurs implementing the dispersal plan would be a good start.

But, you have to understand this will never, ever happen because it is simple, it requires no bloated bureaucracy to administer, it benefits the middle-class instead of taking their money from them, and it might actually work. Simple and effective solutions are not really desired by the politicians and no bureaucrat would ever disperse a taxpayer away from his or her tax base.

Big rotten chunks of the planet could be falling off into space and no politician would propose dispersing corporate workforces away from congested downtown areas.

I don’t care what anyone says, every single political issue no matter how it is wrapped up and sold to the gullible public is designed in an effort to take more money away from the middle class. If a problem happens to get solved, it is purely an accidental side-effect. As a matter of fact, I would be interested in knowing a single big problem since Smallpox was eradicated that was solved by any government program.

But wait, there’s more:

City officials estimated congestion pricing would reduce traffic by about 6 percent…

That’s it? Six percent? Bloomberg would rape and pillage a hundred million* people for a measly 6% reduction in traffic?

…and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue for transportation projects. Bloomberg shrugged off criticism that the fee was too high by comparing it to the price of a movie.

What an asshole. I’d like to see Bloomberg shrug off a brutal beating with a short length of rubber hose. Most people don’t go to the movies because it’s way too expensive for the value of the product. And most people certainly don’t want to have the price of a movie extorted from them every day they have go to work.

In lobbying for his plan, Bloomberg displayed a short fuse with anyone who didn’t support the idea, painting opponents as “stupid” people who didn’t care about the environment, progress and the health of asthma- afflicted children.

So if you don’t happily give to the government hundreds of dollars of money you don’t have so they can drop it down a black hole not only are you stupid but you don’t care about the environment, progress and the health of asthma- afflicted children.

I feel like I am constantly under attack by the government for my money. Our one lousy vote is insignificant in the face of the ubiquitous corruption in government. We can not vote ourselves out from under the oppression of outrageous taxation that even a two-worker family struggles to meet. So, what does that leave us with?

Until we can get the government back under the control of the common people, the American ideal of liberty and freedom is dead. If you don’t believe me, just try to not pay the congestion fee when it comes to a neighborhood near you.

more…

* I obviously pulled that number out of my ass, as there is no where near 100 million people in the State of New York let alone commuting to congested areas of Manhattan. I have no idea what I was thinking at the moment those brilliant words flowed from my pen, but 100 million is a big number and sure sounds good but it’s probably still a bit on the high side even after the new steal-money-from-those-suffering program spreads across the fruited plains from sea to shining sea, as the Bush administration supports. Unless you include those in Europe who have already been suckered into the program. That’ll probably get you to a hundred million.

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Related:

• Why Do We Have To Commute?
• Save my jet, please!
• The Internet will change everything II
• Change is in the air
• How the Internet is going to change everything

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Even if you honestly believe this will make anything better, you are part of the problem.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is likely to call for the creation of new regulatory agencies with broad powers over lending, the securities industry and business conduct, according to the draft of a study he commissioned.

Tacit admission that the banking bust is mired deep in corruption.

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So, do elected representatives really believe there is a need for some kind of license to move furniture, arrange flowers, and file a horse’s teeth, or are they just passing ridiculous, unfair, discriminatory, costly, protectionist regulation in exchange for money?

Did you know that in Nevada it is illegal to move a large piece of furniture for someone else under the title of “interior designer”? In fact, 21 states and the District of Columbia have enacted “titling” regulations or registration requirements for people who want to arrange other people’s furniture for a fee.

…

the professional florist’s lobby (yes, there is one) has succeeded in enacting legislation in Louisiana that makes it illegal “for anybody to arrange two or more types of flowers without passing a largely subjective state licensing exam.” The failure rate for the florist’s exam is actually higher than that of the state bar exam

…

[I]n Texas, veterinary groups are pushing to require “horse floaters” to obtain a veterinarian’s license. Floaters specialize in filing down the teeth of horses. That’s all they do. (Radley Balko via FoxNews)

It’s hard to blame self-important idiots who lobby for stupid regulations out of fear for their meager existence, but if elected officials are passing these unnecessary and harmful laws in exchange for money (and let’s face it, why the hell else would they pass such stupidity into law?) I am in favor of hanging, as you all should well know by now. Hang these sons of bitches and the problem will go away.

Hang em high, I like to say.

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Man, what’s the world coming to?

A federal appeals court has rejected a law requiring airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground. (Link)

Seems only the federal government can pass such a law.

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Everyone has to pay the piper. Instead of a ride home Art Madrid and Trisha Turner should have been treated to ride to the police station.

[La Mesa Mayor Art] Madrid was lying on the sidewalk near the passenger side of his Ford Explorer. [City finance department employee Trisha ] Turner was in the driver’s seat, her feet pointed out the open door. Vomit was observed around the SUV. (Link)

Most people don’t lose their jobs over a drunken indiscretion but almost no one gets a ride home either. It’s not that I’m in favor of incarcerating people over minor alcohol offenses (though who knows what these two were doing prior to pulling over and passing out in their puke,) but I am in favor of government officials being treated like everyone else.

If government officials want to drink without fear of being robbed and thrown in jail they have to let the regular citizenry enjoy the same privilege. On the flip, what’s good for me is good for thee.

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What if the local police said no?

Security details at Barack Obama’s rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena. (Link)

I am sure the Secret Service had their reasons to suspend the security checks but if the Dallas police were concerned over the order why didn’t they refuse? If they were so concerned — and after JFK was whacked in Dallas what sane Dallas official would not be concerned — why didn’t they just politely say, sorry but we can not do that?

The happy, swooning Obama crowd notwithstanding, it only takes a lone gunman to do the job.

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WE SIMPLY CAN NOT HAVE our children eating mistreated beef.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs

…

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection

…

We don’t know how much product is out there right now. We don’t think there is a health hazard, but we do have to take this action,” said Dr. Dick Raymond, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety.

Cows are so stupid it’s not even funny. It’s worth noting that the cows were being abused on the way to the slaughter house. I mean the nerve! abusing a stupid animal on the way to the slaughterhouse.

It sounds like a citation would have been the correct action.

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Along with 88% of the rest of the nation, House finds Bolten, Miers in contempt of Congress

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Since he was so kind to leave me a link, I visited The Muckracker’s blog and it is a nice compendium of bureaucratic malfeasance at the TxDOT. I recommend it to anyone who wants to get their blood up against corrupt government.

But I wonder why Sal is so singularly focused on TxDOT when every single other bureaucracy that has ever existed operates the same way. Any one. Take your pick. From local school districts to the Federal Executive there are those who will beg, steal, or borrow — mostly steal — for personal gain, viz money and/or power.

Having said that, I damn sure do appreciate the work Sal has done to slow the vile proliferation of toll roads. What a scam.

I mean, I probably wouldn’t care as much about the corruption if I had a nice piece of the action, especially seeing as no one seems to care that it’s going on. Or perhaps no one is powerful enough to put a stop to it. I don’t know. All I do know is that I really don’t like paying for it.

Maybe President Obama has a way to put a stop to the political corruption. Maybe that’s the change of which he speaks.

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Questions are being asked about who should be blamed, if anyone, for the death of Haydee Valdez Mendez, 30, of Houston, who was killed on impact when a Ace Transportation truck lost it’s heavy load after the truck was driven into a bridge. As of now no citations have been issued and the case has been given to the DA.

The crux of the case:

Pasadena police on Wednesday said the truck driver was issued a permit from the Texas Department of Transportation to transfer the vessel from Henderson to Pasadena Refinery, which is near the bridge. The driver took the route he was prescribed to take by TxDOT, police spokesman Vance Mitchell said.

The driver, however, did not heed a sign near the Red Bluff railroad bridge telling motorists the bridge’s clearance is 14 feet, 1 inches. The clearance sign is not on the bridge itself but posted on a yellow, diamond-shaped sign about 1,250 feet from the bridge.

“The driver told our investigator that he had been told his load was 14 feet, 6 inches,” Mitchell said. “So that’s a problem.”

The designated route the driver was to follow was Interstate 10 to Loop 610 to Texas 225 to Red Bluff, Mitchell said. The permit allowed the load to be up to 14 feet, 9 inches.

I wonder if it was designated by TxDOT where the driver could stop and take a piss? To me this is a slam dunk case. 100% of the blame should be placed squarely on the shoulders of TxDOT. With great power comes great responsibility. TxDOT has assumed the power to dictate terms and directions of using the road, they must bear the responsibility of their collective actions.

If you are not familiar with the burdens of complying with TxDOT, then you might not see this exactly my way but the Ace Transportation driver may have seen and interpreted the sign correctly but drove the truck into the bridge in good faith that the government knew what they doing or from fear of being caught deviating from the specified course.

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Maybe I can hate Bush:

Paulson, in an interview on CNBC, said the administration was involved in discussions with the mortgage industry to expand a current program to freeze adjustable rate mortgages for five years to include borrowers of loans at prime rates. Currently, the rate freeze only covers a much smaller segment of adjustable rate loans, those made to subprime borrowers. Those are borrowers with weak credit histories. (Link)

I feel like a total fucking idiot for not converting my fixed rate prime mortgage to a sub-prime adjustable rate. I could have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Or I could have been like every one else and just blew the extra dough on bling. If I knew there was no risk I would have done it in a minute. More than once. I for damn sure would still have my Harley.

On the less emotional side of the issue, the Bush administration’s policy amounts to propping up an industry with government largesse which is contrary to free enterprise and capitalism, which is to say it is un-American. Nor is it sound economic policy, in my lay opinion though I am sure there are many economists who would argue to their death that I am wrong. Economists who are employees and big stock holders of Citi and Countrywide, for example.

Just because these companies are huge corporations should not inoculate them from the same market forces that control mom and pop, for better or worse. The demise of Countrywide, or even Citi would be catastrophic in the short term for certain people but in the not-much-longer-than-the-short-term the immense resources currently controlled by these failed and corrupt operations and their stockholders would be redistributed to those who are better able to utilize them.

If Ron Paul were president, this would not be an issue. Citizens could be fairly certain that their hard-earned dollars would not appropriated and given to “those less fortunate” or “those least able to pay” which are euphemisms for “not you”.

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If Connecticut can do it, why can’t the energy deficient California? Arnold, quit bitching and do something.

Conn. Begins Offering Online High School Classes

What size is the carbon foot print of a typical public school? What size is the carbon footprint of a typical private school? Now, what size is the carbon footprint per child for each school? Obviously you have to include the excess administrative overhead when toting the public school’s footprint, not to even mention all the school buses. I think private schools would win hands down. Er, footprints down?

Common sense dictates that in the current political climate everything will eventually be tagged by it’s carbon footprint which will inevitably lead the opposition to make comparisons of the footprints left by government operations to those left by the private sector operations engaged in similar endeavors. It will be interesting to see how the bureaucrats will nonetheless justify the superiority and proclaim the dire necessity of public operations, like schools, regardless of how much they are killing the planet.

Of course, I’ve discussed this before until I am green in the face, but the number one thing we can do to immediately curb greenhouse emissions, as well as conserve energy, reduce traffic congestion, reduce the cost of maintaining and building new roads is to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. Would this be an easy thing to do? On paper yes, in practice probably not: There will be great opposition by people who sell buses, build and maintain roads, and grant contracts for building and maintaining roads.

How do we reduce the number of cars on the road then, you might ask. Well, with the Internet of course. Why transport the body when the mind is the only thing that needs to go? I know for some of you a light bulb just when off over your head but the rest are thinking what a dumb fuck. While many people make use of the Internet daily, they still don’t “get” the Internet. We can resist all we want but the Internet will eventually change everything.

Colleges have been offering courses over the Internet for years, probably for a decade now. Colleges are about making money by delivering quality education. Public schools are about control of curriculum, control of children, control of property taxes, etc.

Defensive Driving is offered over the Internet. To handle your court case you have to go the courthouse. Defensive driving courses are about making money as efficiently as possible. Court is about control.

The government is keen on solving the alleged global warming problem by regulating the shirts off our back while not endangering the current power structure. No one in government wants to lose his or her job due to efficient operations conducted over the Internet. They don’t mind letting a few clerks go at the tax office but anyone making over $50K with undisclosed perks will fight tooth and nail to keep the system in place regardless of whether it is killing the planet.

Ok, it all sounds good, you say, so let’s do it! In broad strokes, we begin with pilot programs implemented across the country targeted at large inefficient school districts that are not biased by extracurricular social activities, such as crime. (A slightly different plan will be required for these districts.) The goal would be to reduce the number of vehicles, e.g. buses, commuters, on the road by 10% in five years and 80% in ten years. The reduction occurs as more and more of the curriculum is delivered over the Internet.

At the same time offer great tax incentives for employers to integrate their infrastructure with the public broadband to keep as many people as possible from working in centralized locations. In other words try to get rid of the morning and afternoon commute. Middle and junior management loathe this idea because the people who would be telecommuting are the very ones they lord-ass over all day. They correctly assume that their jobs would be in danger.

Corporations will be able to adjust whereas the bureaucrats will never surrender because for the corporations it will always come down to the dollar and for the bureaucrats it always come down to power and control.

As one advances logically through the exercise of reducing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by utilizing the Internet, one will inevitably come to the conclusion that such a course will lead to the breakup of school districts: If I can get all my curriculum from the Internet, I don’t need school districts. And if I don’t need school districts, I don’t need school buses, or huge air-conditioned buildings, or a bloated administration at the local, state, and federal level, or school taxes to pay for all of same.

This realization then leads to the equally obvious realization that it will likely never happen in my lifetime. If we are to solve our looming social problems — both real and imagined — efficiently and fairly instead of on the back of the bourgeoisie, a revolution will be required to pry the power from those who are currently entrenched. The alternative is life in a bureaucratic tyranny that seems to have been accurately defined some sixty years ago by Orwell. How bout all them cameras. They are even on school buses now.

Related:

• Why Do We Have To Commute?
• Save my jet, please!
• The Internet will change everything II
• Change is in the air
• How the Internet is going to change everything

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Let’s say a company has x amount of money in a given budget year to contribute towards expenses of an operation. Pay more than x and investors bitch, less than x and product quality suffers. Suddenly, because some crooks were finally caught with their hands in the cookie jar everyone else has to suffer more regulation. Where were the feds when everyone was getting fat? Was anybody in the government held accountable when the roosters came home to roost at Enron, Tyco, and Martha’s Billion Dollar Network. Didn’t they already have a bunch costly regulatory compliance rules in place?

Not only do Sarbannes Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, etc, etc, ad nauseum amount to a significant contribution to a company’s total expenses, x, the dollars spent to remain in compliance of all the said bureaucratic red-tape were dollars that used to be spent on something else, like people who actually do work. So in actuality, increased regulation doesn’t eliminate jobs, it just transfers the jobs — along with the money — from one sector to another. The jobs are transferred from the private sector to the government sector. Instead of engineers and chemists you have lawyers and accountants half of whom work for the companies and the other half who work for the government. Nice and cozy.

Instead of money being invested in resources needed to improve all aspects of a business, it goes to fatten the bureaucrats who seek to impose further regulation. This pay-your-enemy-to-destroy-you seems to be an arrangement that we Americans find comfortable. The big irony of the whole middle east “conflict” is that we pay fundamental, aka radical Islamists billions of dollars every year for oil and are made out to be scum-sucking earth killers for doing so.

Ahhhh, forgedaboudit! Whachoo gonna do?

As long as it all fits in a “cost of doing business” analysis, anything is okay I guess. Doesn’t this seem wrong to anyone else?

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The reason: Bureaucrats:

Deployment of ADS has been delayed for years because of concerns about how non-lethal it really is. ADS has been fired, in tests, over 2,500 times. Many of these firings were against human volunteers, and the device performed as predicted, without any permanent damage. But generations of exposure to lurid science fiction descriptions of “death rays” has made the defense bureaucrats anxious over the negative public relations potential if something like ADS was actually used. From a publicity perspective, using more lethal “non-lethal-weapons” is preferable to deploying something safer, but that could be described, however incorrectly, as a “death ray.”

It’s okay if another device is more lethal as long as it doesn’t sound as scary. Wh, oh why are these fools in charge of anything?

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers, then the bureaucrats. Any lawyers out there want to make the case for reversing the order?

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People are capable of wondrous achievements when they are able to pursue their dreams.

‘[Temples of Damanhur] are to remind people that we are all capable of much more than we realise and that hidden treasures can be found within every one of us once you know how to access them,’ says Falco.

*snip*

Stunned by what they had found, the authorities decided to seize the temples on behalf of the government.

Of course they did. To accomplish anything great one must first figure out how to bypass the government. The world would never see this amazing piece of work if Falco had asked the Italian government, or any governemnt, for permission before starting.

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The next time you are driving through Houston and feel the urge to pull over to eat from a taco truck parked in the parking lot of a gas station, you can feel safe knowing that all Taco Trucks have to report in to the city everyday before they plan to sell food.

A rule in place since 2000 required daily trips to the commissary, but operators could take their trucks after serving food all day.

Conrad Janus, acting chief of the city’s bureau of consumer health services, said the revision closes a loophole that enabled truck operators to tell inspectors they planned to take their trucks later that night. That made it hard to ensure they actually went.

Uh, did the taco vendor have a receipt from yesterday? Oh, they could just say they didn’t operate yesterday. Well I guess we know why Conrad Janus is the acting bureau chief: No bureaucrat worth his or her salt would have left such an obvious cash neutral loophole in the original regulation.

So now, in order to more easily make revenue from the regulation without requiring a second inspection the following day, if an inspector shows up and a taco vendor is vending taco’s he or she must have a commissary receipt dated with the past 24 hours.

While difficult to argue against such common sense things as clean water in food preparation areas, I would argue whether more costly oversight from government bureaucrats actually improves the sanitation of the overall mobile taco vending operation or is this just a good way to lord over the petite bourgeoisie.

Now if there were only a government program to make sure these guys wash their hands regularly…

If you decide it is a good idea to eat from a taco truck, you probably think the government regulations make them safe, so enjoy your taco.

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Should free people be able to choose things for themselves or should free people cede their free will to retarded public officials because someone might get hurt? The attitude exhibited by this statement from Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA’s Medical Ethics Committee really hangs in my craw:

However, given that no drug or invasive medical procedure is risk free, is it ethical to make them available to people who are not ill?

In my humble opinion, the government does not have the moral authority to make policy based on ethics. They are a bunch of crooks who collectively have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they would not know ethics if it slapped them in the face.

How about this: If there were treatments proven to improve cognitive ability, would it be ethical to withhold the technology for any reason whatsoever? The number of dumb asses who could improve their quality of life is astounding.

I don’t know about you guys, but I am tired of ceding what tiny bit of sovereignty I have left to the state in the name of safety and ethics in exchange for nothing in return.

By the way, I’ve tried the provigil. It’s not for me. It costs about $12 a pill — roughly $400 a month — and has side effects I am not comfortable with. After my body adjusted to the dosage I didn’t really notice any cognitive affects at all. I can still get it if I want it but I choose not to. The key phrase there is I choose.

On the other hand, there is an appetite suppressant that I have used off and on over the past several years that also works as a mild anti-depressant. It’s called phenteramine. Does what it says with minimal side-affects. Perfect for me. For about a year now I can not get it so I have to go to another doctor who gives me a bunch of ethical medicine to take that makes me feel like crap, almost to the point of not functioning.

I don’t have the right to choose a relatively harmless medicine that I know works for me because of someone’s ethical and safety conscious decision. Or is it because the patent for phenteramine is long out of date and the pharmaceuticals along with their bought-and-paid-for political beneficiaries don’t make fat bags of money from it?

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I can understand the need to classify such reports, but really, why bother?

WASHINGTON — Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

So I guess the report was classified as “public”. Anyway, who cares about how many fake bombs are getting through airport screeners; it’s the real bombs that I’m concerned about. The number of real bombs getting through wasn’t mentioned in the USA Today article. Now that would be some real news if the number weren’t zero. There are those who are concerned about the fake bombs, though:

The failure rates at Los Angeles and Chicago stunned security experts.

How then can we say they are “experts”? Airport screening has been going on how long? The incompetence of the “security experts” is what is stunning. I guess Clark Kent Ervin is a security expert.

“That’s a huge cause for concern,” said Clark Kent Ervin, the Homeland Security Department’s former inspector general. Screeners’ inability to find bombs could encourage terrorists to try to bring them on airplanes, Ervin said

Ya don’t say!

And finally, no statement is too outrageous to a bureaucrat trying to mitigate bad news that reflects badly on them:

The failure rates at Los Angeles and Chicago are “somewhat misleading” because they don’t reflect screeners’ improved ability to find bombs, Howe said.

They certainly don’t. (Story Link)

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