The anti-plastic bag hysteria is spreading, with the self-important Los Angeles City Council now voting 11-1 to ban them.

Under the ban, stores that sell perishable foods will be prohibited from handing out plastic grocery bags.

“We’ve seen plastic bags clogging our gutters, polluting our rivers and piling up on our beaches,” Councilmember José Huizar said in a statement. “The time for the City of Los Angeles to take action to protect our environment is now. And every big city in the nation can follow our lead.”

Nearly two billion single-use plastic bags and 400 million paper bags are distributed annually in Los Angeles, according Health the Bay, a non-profit environmental organization.

If the ban is violated, stores will be fined an unspecified amount.

The law also calls for a 10-cent charge per paper bag.

“By 2014, more than one-third of Californians — 13 million people — will live in communities that no longer have to deal with the scourge and cost of single use plastic grocery bags,” Mark Murray, Executive Director of Californians Against Waste, said in a statement.

Scourge?

I for one love plastic bags and consider these bans a scourge, as they will only make my life more inconvenient. Paper bags suck — not only because they are not designed to be carried any distance with one hand, but because they kill trees, while plastic is an extremely inexpensive byproduct of the petroleum industry. Plus, as a dog owner I save my plastic bags and use them to pick up dog poop, so I don’t consider them to be “single use.”

I’m curious about one thing, though, and that is whether the bags are banned as a product, or only as a freebie to customers. Because I wouldn’t especially mind buying them in bulk if I had to, and just pulling them out and stuffing my groceries into them. I don’t see how they can stop people from using plastic bags.

Or can they? The liberal fascists have no sense of limits on what they can and cannot regulate. They never stop butting into everyone’s business, and there is nothing liberal about them. Every day I read about another petty tyranny, and this is only the latest.

As to the cloth shopping bags the liberals want to inflict on everyone, they really are a scourge. Not only are they are more labor intensive, but they load up with food bacteria, so unless you want to get sick, you will have to waste plenty of precious water washing them regularly:

A reminder to shoppers who use reusable grocery bags: Don’t forget to wash them after you’ve emptied them.

But never mind any of that! Liberals are at war with plastic bags, mainly because they get to feel good about themselves while telling people what to do.

So, expect this obnoxious idea to spread. If more people contract and spread E. coli, so much the better.

Meddlesome puritanical pigs.

Hard to believe that is an actual photograph I took, but it is.

I loved reading about what I hope is a growing trend — an apparently easy and relatively painless way to work around Obamacare:

WICHITA, Kan., June 14 (UPI) — A Kansas physician says he makes the same income and offers better quality care to his patients after he dumped all health insurance companies.

Thirty-two-year old family physician Doug Nunamaker of Wichita, Kan., said after five years of dealing with the red tape of health insurance companies and the high overhead for the staff he hired just to deal with paperwork, he switched to a system of charging his patients a monthly fee plus the price of an office visit or test, CNN/Money reported.

For example, under Nunamaker’s membership plan — also known as “concierge” medicine or “direct primary care” practices — each patient pays a flat monthly fee to have unlimited access to the doctors and any medical service they can provide in the practice, such as stitches or an EKG.

For adults up to age 44, Nunamaker charges $50 a month, pediatric services are $10 a month, and for adults age 44 and older it costs $100 a month. Although Nunamaker calls the practice “cash-only,” he accepts credit and debit cards for the fees and services.

Great deal for all concerned.

Except I do have one question. Is it legal?

Does anyone know? I mean, what we call “Obamacare” takes the form of a law passed by Congress, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court, even though very few of the people involved ever read through its 2000 pages.

Any law that is 2000 pages long worries me, because of the way the legal system works. If we consider that the IRS is charged with enforcement of Obamacare, and they are now training with AR-15s, shouldn’t someone out there actually know what is in that law?

Assuming that there is nothing buried anywhere in the thousands of pages of regulations that makes this illegal, I wonder how long it will take the Marxist busybodies to demand that “something” be “done.”

As this CNN piece warns,

Fed up with declining payments and rising red tape, a small but growing number of doctors is opting out of the insurance system completely. They’re expecting patients to pony up with cash.

Some doctors who have gone that route love it, saying they can spend more time with and provide higher-quality care to their patients. Health advocates are skeptical, worrying that only the wealthy will benefit from this system.

I don’t know exactly what a “health advocate” is, but I wouldn’t trust them with my health.

The idea — what is called “concierge care” — is spreading by leaps and bounds among doctors:

There are 4,400 concierge doctors in the U.S., 30 percent more than there were last year, according to the American Academy of Private Physicians, their professional association. “This is all doctors want to talk about,” says Jeff Goldsmith, a health-care industry analyst and trend spotter. “?‘I want to go off the grid. I’m done billing Blue Cross. I can’t deal with this anymore. It’s destroying my life and my relationship with my patients.’?”

But hold on! The “health advocates” are upset:

Others worry that the growth of concierge medicine will mean the affluent receive high-quality care while the rest of the country struggles to be seen by fewer and fewer doctors. “It is a step towards a two-tiered health-care system: a system where the rich get first-choice care and the not-so-rich get second-choice care,” says Kathleen Stoll, deputy executive director of Families USA, a health-care consumer advocacy group.

Another example of uncritical reporting. While Families USA claims to be a consumer advocacy group, it actually is a lobbying organization for Obamacare and appears to be an SEIU front group:

Families USA also took in over $8,000,000 that year, and over $10,000,000 the year prior.  That’s some serious fundraising for an organization that lacks an event coordinator and warehouse of cocktail napkins.

Who funds them, and who builds up their assets to such a large degree?

We aren’t allowed to know, but we can guess. Let’s take a look at their board of directors, and who do we see on it, but Mary Kay Henry, the new president of SEIU.

Fascinating.

So let me get this straight. An organization whose board of directors includes the SEIU president and whose funding is not know, but substantial, is out pushing healthcare stories to gullible newspapers through a sophisticated media strategy.  This group gets favorable media attention, but no one reporter ever stops to ask how they are funded, who they are allied with, or just what exactly $45 million will buy?

After reading that, there is not a doubt in my mind that these union hacks simply want to dictate policy.

Mark my words, if they have their way, they will make it a crime for patients to see doctors for cash.

Will the Republicans stop them? Like M. Simon, I’m feeling skeptical.

The right isn’t actually against socialism, they are only against the democrats in control of it.

Seen in the comments at Zero Hedge.

A member of a left wing activist group called Clowns Not Bombs (apparently facing deportation) went completely bonkers in a San Francisco BART station and a video of his antics has gone viral.

Yeiner Perez, 24, was arrested May 10 at the 16th Street Mission station after a incident in which he did handstands, flips and the splits on station turnstiles. He also lunged at and grabbed several passengers, as shown in a video recorded by a station agent.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s office is still weighing whether to charge Perez, but his arrest alerted federal immigration authorities to his presence and set in motion deportation proceedings.

If you watch the video, what he does is actually worse than that. He can be seen pushing one woman backwards to the ground.

What bothers me is to see perfectly able-bodied men doing absolutely nothing to help while an unarmed psycho terrorizes innocent people.

A commenter from Portugal has more wisdom than any of the clueless citizens who were at the scene. She opines (correctly, IMO) that Americans are too easily intimidated:

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. The man was OBVIOUSLY unarmed, so he presented no risk to anyone, at least if two or three people subdue him. If this would happen in my country (Portugal) people wouldn’t stand or pass by and let him wander about. And I personally would’t cry histerically and run away from him, but I’d stand up to him (I’m a 57 year old woman). I think you are too terrified by people, strange or not.

What really made this sink in for me was to watch the corrected (not sideways) version of the video. If you can stand it, starting at 0:55 you can see the naked man leaping back and forth over the turnstiles while the passengers dutifully ignore him.

I was very amused by the way these normal people — many of them young able-bodied men — intently focus on correctly inserting their fare cards through the reader while almost studiously ignoring the crazy naked man leaping on top of the turnstiles, and I still am, because it’s hilarious to see.

But I wouldn’t want to depend on any of these people in the event of any sort of problem, serious situation or life-threatening emergency. I suspect they would cut and run if a woman’s throat was being cut a few feet away.

Or maybe they would just focus on properly inserting their cards into the reader.

A comment to a Youtube video of Groucho Marx on “What’s My Line?”

You know the world is kinda messed up when you find peace of mind in comedy shows from 1950 and they are infinite times better than anything you can find either on tv or anywhere else today. :/ I’m 26 and it’s been about 5 years I can’t stand how idiotic everyone and everything has become… We applaud stupidity.

We also applaud insincerity.

Back in the 50s, we had a bald-headed president who was so plain spoken that he probably couldn’t be elected today.

Here he is, talking about the JFK assassination in 1963:

His obvious integrity and sincerity stand in marked contrast to the polished, nuanced, finger-to-the-wind ruling classes of today.

Interestingly, were he alive today, I think he would understand how an anonymous 26-year-old commenter would have so much more common sense than his, um, betters.

Via Glenn Reynolds‘ link to a link well worth rescuing, I learned that David Brooks — a man who claims to be a great arbiter of civil society if not civilization itself — is upset by what he calls “unmediated” people. I read what Brooks said twice and I don’t think he meant “unmedicated” but missed the c. Clearly, the man thinks it is bad to support the dowdy and rumpled Ron Paul, but civilized to support Barack Obama.

The reason?

Well, ranking high among them is that Barack Obama had perfectly creased pants:

“I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Here‘s “Run, Barack, Run.” Does Brooks deserve to be derided endlessly over the fixation on the pants crease? It is hilarious. It’s like Rich Lowry getting “little starbursts” from Sarah Palin’s wink. You can’t not bring it up. But let’s remember, Brooks’s vision of perfection, seen in a pant’s crease, came after they conversed, in depth, about Edmund Burke. That is, the 2 men were talking, in all likelihood, about the importance of civil society.

Sheesh. I knew Brooks was a fool, but I didn’t think he was that much of a pathetic dupe.

MORE: In other weird news, Pat Buchanan is advocating Republican racial politics.

FWIW, the Dems are so hopelessly racialized that I think the Republicans would do better as the only non-racial (race-blind) party. Playing up the white demographic angle is a loser.

Despite all the hoopla about pretending to help the economy, an item in today’s Wall Street Journal reveals that Obama administration couldn’t possibly be more viciously and stridently anti-business. The federal government — in the form of the EEOC — is applying the  ”disproportionate impact” rule to go after employers who run criminal background checks before hiring. The government claims that this will have a disproportionate impact on black applicants.

In complaints filed in federal courts in Illinois and South Carolina, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said two companies discount retailer Dollar General Corp. DG -1.12% and a U.S. unit of German auto maker BMW AG BMW.XE -1.75% generally barred potential employees based on the criminal checks, when they should have reviewed each applicant. The commission said the policies had the effect of discriminating against black applicants.

The suits underscore increasing government scrutiny of criminal and credit checks, which are widely used to screen job applicants. Some 92% of employers use criminal-background checks for some or all job openings, according to a 2010 survey by the Society of Human Resource Management.

It is important to note that none of this has anything to do with intentional discrimination. That is not even alleged, as it doesn’t need to be. All the government need do is show that more blacks have criminal records than whites, and VOILA! Using criminal background checks is presumed to be racial discrimination under the law.

Ms. Moore said rules concerning criminal-background checks are particularly important because blacks are convicted of crimes more often than whites. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, black men were incarcerated in 2010 at more than six times the rate of white men and nearly three times the rate of Hispanic men.

Mr. Lopez, the EEOC general counsel, said the Dollar General and BMW cases are “very serious systemic race discrimination cases.” At both companies, the EEOC cited statistical disparities in the hiring rates of blacks and nonblacks after the companies ran criminal-background checks.

The commission said Dollar General revoked conditional employment offers for 10% of its black applicants, but only 7% of its nonblack applicants, between January 2004 and April 2007. With more than 344,000 applicants involved, the numbers created an improper “gross disparity” based on race, the commission said. The company has more than 90,000 employees.

Not only is the disproportionate impact standard inherently tyrannical, but it would be hard to come up with a better way to wreck the economy. Imagine for a moment a landlord who refused to rent to people who cannot afford the rent. If it would be shown that more blacks than white could not afford the rent, then by the same logic the landlord would be discriminating. Ditto for an employer requiring literacy and numeracy. This is not merely crazy, it is downright evil.

And if if we assume the government’s position is correct, that blacks are disproportionately impacted by criminal record checks because a higher percentage of blacks have criminal records, what are the logical implications? Obviously, that more blacks have criminal records because the criminal justice system is racist. OK, if that is true, how is it possibly the fault of an employer?

Is it fair to charge the employer with ultimately being responsible for — and having to redress in his workplace — the shortcomings of the criminal justice system?

It is not fair, nor is it meant to be fair. It is simply anti-business. I suspect that’s the whole idea.

Grow the economy and create jobs?

Give me a break.

I like the sound of gunfire. I particularly like the Navy 3″ 50 caliber rapid fire gun. I had the honor of sitting next to one during military training exercises aboard my ship The Bainbridge DLG(N)-25.

Here is a modern version of that gun doing rapid fire

Navy training film about the 3″ 50.

The dual mount guns on our ship normally auto-loaded (IIRC) from a magazine below decks.

This video is not safe to watch. It is not pleasant to watch. In fact it is down right disgusting. WND (where I got the video link) describes the contents of the video.

The video shows a wedding celebration in which a group of men in a frenzy tear apart a live chicken by hand, then scrabble over its pieces to eat its raw flesh.

“The video is a glimpse into the dark and incomprehensible spirit that has possessed the souls of Egypt,” claims Walid Shoebat…

Well it is dark. It is not incomprehensible. This is a reversion to pre-civilized (tribal) behavior.

They know you rang a sex line at 2 am, but they don’t know what your talking about? You ring a suicide prevention hotline from the golden gate bridge, but don’t know what you talked about? They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance, but they don’t know what you talked about? They know you received a call from the local NRA office about gun legislation and then you instantly contacted your representatives but they don’t know what you talked about?

I saw the above on Facebook earlier, so I decided to Google the quote.

It is quoted on Democratic Underground which added this:

 -They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood’s number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.

But that is hardly limited to the left. Rush Limbaugh quotes it this way:

They know that you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 in the morning and spoke for 18 minutes, but they don’t know what you talked about?  Give me a break.  They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge, but they don’t know what you talked about?  They know that you spoke with an HIV testing service and then your doctor and then your health insurance company in the same hour, but they don’t know what you talked about?

They know you received a call — get this one — they know you received a call from the local NRA office while it was having a campaign against gun legislation, and then called your senators and congressional representatives immediately after, but they don’t know what you were talking about?  They know you called a gynecologist, they know you spoke for a half hour, and after that you called the local Planned Parenthood number, but nobody knows what you called about?

I’ve been busy lately, and I don’t know exactly what this means. But what I do know is that things are more polarized than ever, and when I see right and left both thinking along similar lines, that gets my attention.

The president’s reassurances don’t seem to be resonating very well.

This Facebook image reminded me of the famous Mae West line:

Ironically, students today would be suspended for repeating the Mae West joke, and not because it is sexual — but because of the mere mention of the word “gun.”

Considering today’s world of multitasking everything, if they let kids pretend bananas are penises, I see no reason why they shouldn’t let them pretend bananas are guns. Both can be dangerous, and both require a certain amount of control, right? So what’s the problem?

I mean, why not illustrate by showing this in schools?

Only an uptight liberal bigot would object.

A couple of days ago, I entertained myself for about two minutes by playing the Fox News / CNN switcheroo game. Between the IRS scandal and the Big Brother database revelations, it seemed to me that the country was in the middle of a major political storm, so I figured both networks would at least be covering these rapidly unfolding events.

Well, guess what? Fox was covering it big-time, but CNN was focusing on a shooting incident at a college in Santa Monica, California. Obviously, any shooting of innocent people is deplorable, but I found myself wondering why this story should be considered bigger national news than major national events which caused even the New York Times to editorialize that President Obama “has now lost all credibility.”

To CNN, the type of gun used in a shooting was bigger news than the biggest presidential scandal in many years.  Nothing surprising about that. Standard damage control by an outfit that is so in the tank for Obama that they might as well be working directly for the White House.

Still, I was curious about something that it seemed to me was being deliberately obfuscated.

Who did it?

In reporting a murder story,  little details like the identity of the culprit are supposed to matter, right? Maybe I’m getting too old, but since when has the basic whodunnit question become irrelevant and immaterial?

Why is the type of gun used by a particular son of a bitch considered more important than his identity?

It wasn’t until last night that I learned the suspect’s name, and I immediately understood the problem. It turns out that the suspect (who had been described repeatedly as “a white man”) has a name that our betters in the news media think we are better off not knowing.

John Zawahri.

Zawarhi. Jeez, what a creepy name. Why, it almost sounds like the same name as one of the most dangerous mass murderers on the planet.

I’m not the only one to notice the problem.

Whoever this Zawahri character was and whatever his motivations, his name alone messes up the gun control narrative they were busily ramping up.

I think his candidacy as  poster boy may be over.  ”White man” though he may be, his whiteness has been tarnished.

Worst of all for those who want to control our thinking, what would have been a great opportunity for another white privilege lecture has most likely been lost.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has more, and notes the utter failure of California’s strict gun control laws:

…California has had an assault weapon ban since 1989  (the year the shooter was born) and on transfers of high-capacity magazines since 2000 (when the shooter was eleven years old).  It has required all firearms transfers to be done through a background check since 1991 (when the shooter was two) and it appears that the shooter had been committed at some point — which is one of the things the California background check includes.

So, the murderer clearly violated a number of draconian gun control laws before he started shooting.

How surprising it must be to the liberals that a homicidal criminal would fail to obey the law!

MORE: From the Guardian Express: Santa Monica College Shooting Reveals Inconvenient Truths.

Jay Leno said something reassuring about President Obama. At least he is listening:

Well, this has become a huge controversy after it was revealed that the National Security Agency seized millions of Verizon phone records, and of course this has caused a panic among civil libertarians, constitutional scholars and cheating husbands everywhere. Oh my God.

How ironic is that? We wanted a president that listens to all Americans – now we have one. Yeah.

I for one am glad he’s listening. Because I have a question for him. Actually, it’s not my question, because Thomas Sowell asked it.

It’s a good question (even though I think I know the answer….)

John Cochrane argues that our darned political system is just not up the challenges of the economic times. He makes some excellent points re Reinhart and Rogoff, but unfortunately he makes a profound error is his assumptions:

…fiscal stimulus is essential when conventional monetary policy is powerless…

Monetary policy is never, ever powerless. A central bank can buy every asset in existence. The real problem is that the central banks are not trying hard enough — the Fed is married to its 2% inflation target (except when they seem happy to miss low) and for all the talk of “unconventional” QE the Fed has owned much larger proportions of total debt in decades past, BOJ is finally moving in the right direction after two decades but is still below where they should be, and the ECB isn’t even at ZLB, they’ve actually been raising rates. If all three adopted NGDPLT, the global economy would recover normally again.

Two, fiscal stimulus may be impossible even when it’s essential.

Fiscal stimulus is never, ever essential. See above.

Also, in re the larger point of the column, most everyone today forgets that 2000-2007 was not generally considered “good times” until after 2008 — there were recessions across Europe and the U.S. from 2000 to 2003, and the NASDAQ crash was in March 2000. That’s why Greece (for instance) was increasing spending by 10% a year — fiscal stimulus was deemed necessary and proper then, too. The wages of fiscal stimulus is a sovereign debt crisis.

(BTW, Canada escaped the early 2000s recession entirely and continued rapid job growth, despite a very non-stimulative fiscal policy (they kept running surpluses). Guess what their monetary policy looked like?)

But (and it pains me greatly to say this) I do think the left largely has the better grasp of current circumstances, as they are at least willing to entertain the notion of looser monetary policy. People on the right need to lose their obsession with “sound money” (I’m looking at you Paul Ryan!) — this is neither the 1970s nor the Weimar Republic. Both sides should be able to live with a looser monetary policy that fosters growth and employment and doesn’t increase deficits.

I realize the above title is nowhere near as all-encompassing as the famous pangram, ”The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

But it packs in a lot of suspicious words that we are being warned not to use because the idiots geniuses at the DHS are on the lookout for them.

The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.

Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.

The words are included in the department’s 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. To give you an example of the agency’s priorities, according to their own manual, they are searching for what are called IOIs (Items Of Interest), which include (naturally) any and all criticism of the DHS!

1.2  Critical Information Requirements

The attribution of IOIs by CIR allows the MMC to catalog articles into five specific categories dependingon the potential impact or type of article that is being distributed. These CIRs include:

1) Potential Threat to DHS, other federal, and state/ local response units, facilities,and resources.

2) Potential impact on DHS capability to accomplish the HSPD-5 mission

3) Identifying events with operational value…corroborating critical information

4) Identifying media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities

Read through the manual. Orwell couldn’t have done a better job.

This — and a whole host of other things — are happening in in a once-free country. Last night’s Drudge headlines provide a good enough example:

NSA, FBI secretly mining data from Internet firms...
'THEY QUITE LITERALLY CAN WATCH YOUR IDEAS AS YOU TYPE'...
Top secret PRISM program... 
MICROSOFTYAHOOGOOGLEYOUTUBEFACEBOOKSKYPEAPPLE...
Obama administration collecting phone records of millions daily...
Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over ALL CALL DATA...
White House: Critical tool against 'terrorist threats'...
Specifically targeted Americans, not foreigners...
'Homeland Security': Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches...
NSA SEES ALL: Phone Sex, Banks, Emails...
CIA: We'll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher...
'1984' Published 64 Years Ago Today...

Such stuff ought to concern more people but alas! I am very much afraid that many (fortunately not all!) of today’s young are a hopeless lost cause where it comes to privacy. This is a serious and ongoing problem, and I have been thinking about it a lot recently.

Americans traditionally love their privacy, but a new generation couldn’t care less, and I think I am beginning to finally understand how the dynamic has changed. Narcissism has come into full bloom in a new generation, and I think that part of the reason is that they grew up in an age when their so-called “self esteem” reigned supreme over normal considerations.

There has been a massive shift in child raising and child education which revolves around the premise that a child’s SELF ESTEEM must be constantly stoked with praise and that never “harmed.” Not only does this fuel narcissism (because kids grow up expecting to be told they are great no matter what), but it ironically makes it very difficult for the children to ever develop true and independent self esteem, which inner directed people have. There is now a large portion of a generation who are not inner directed, but are dependent on others for praise and for validation. As they lack true self esteem, they become puppets of others without even knowing it. It is beyond depressing, and while it may not have been evil by design, I worry that evil may be the result.

Narcissism is a huge, general problem with young people today. Malignant narcissism in children comes up constantly, and as this recent example illustrates, is not limited to any group.

The other night as I pondered narcissism, my thoughts turned to Facebook and the generally rampant invasions of what we used to call privacy that are now routine, and a very simple insight dawned on me.

We cannot have a sane discussion about privacy because we are simply not on the same page.

Think about narcissism. A narcissist wants attention. To be looked at. They feel meaningless without it. To talk about “privacy” in this context is so absurd that it is a complete cognitive disconnect. Privacy is alien and not seen as a right or a concern with a large number young people. And there are enough of them that the government can get away with this stuff.

It would be misleading to say that they “don’t care” about privacy or a “right to privacy,” because they neither need it or want it. In fact, they actively don’t want it. It’s almost as crazy as talking about a sun-craving plant’s “right to dark.”

I don’t know how I could hope to communicate my concerns to them.

As to DHS, for years I have argued that it is unconstitutional and should be disbanded. That this makes what I write an IOI and me a suspicious character a and a possible threat only proves my point.

But again, who cares? To worry about something being unconstitutional, you have to believe that something called the Constitution is the law of the land — something very few people believe today. This makes them safer, actually, because the Department of Homeland Security considers “constitutionalists” a terrorist threat.

If my concerns are well-grounded, perhaps the best approach is not to kvetch about the loss of privacy or the Constitution, but to sound the alarm about how the government is taking over Facebook and Google.

While I thought the schools couldn’t possibly get any crazier, today I read about a kid who got suspended from school merely for talking about guns:

OWINGS, MD — The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the bus ride home.

Bruce Henkelman of Huntingtown says his son, a sixth grader at Northern Middle School in Owings, was talking with friends about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre when the bus driver hauled him back to school to be questioned by the principal, Darrel Prioleau.

“The principal told me that with what happened at Sandy Hook if you say the word ‘gun’ in my school you are going to get suspended for 10 days,” Henkelman said in an interview with WMAL.com.

How about using the word “firearm”? How about a report about someone being given the 21 gun salute? How about a welding gun? Or a caulking gun? And how about the signs proclaiming a “gun free school zone”? Surely they are violations too.

This ongoing hysteria-based nonsense has become so absurd it’s downright grotesque.

What I want to know is how they still get away with making taxpayers pay for it.

MORE: The above story was reported in the British Daily Mail, which also notes another one:

…this isn’t just a problem for young boys. Early this year, a five-year-old girl was waiting in the bus line talking with a friend about a Hello Kitty gun that spit out bubbles.

We cannot be too careful!

I think they ought to suspend all schoolchildren in Michigan who attend schools that display the Michigan flag.

No seriously!

Via Glenn Reynolds, I learned about a secret apartment which was built in a shopping mall.

“Installation art,” the artists called it.

The man built the apartment with the help of seven other artists, and various people have lived in it over the past few years for up to three weeks at a time. The artist’s website about the project offers both an explanation of the “installation,” and a couple of long-winded apologies that sound suspiciously court-ordered—or to help him avoid getting the crap beat out of him the next time he’s pulled over for speeding, and includes this “thank you”…

Then I learned that the same thing was happening at the EPA. Except instead of calling it “installation art,” they’re calling them “Secret Man Caves”:

Secret Man Caves Found in EPA Warehouse

A warehouse maintained by contractors for the Environmental Protection Agency contained secret rooms full of exercise equipment, televisions and couches, according to an internal audit.

EPA’s inspector general found contractors used partitions, screens and piled up boxes to hide the rooms from security cameras in the 70,000 square-foot building located in Landover, Md. The warehouse — used for inventory storage — is owned by the General Services Administration and leased to the EPA for about $750,000 per year.

The EPA has issued a stop work order to Apex Logistics LLC, the responsible contractor, ensuring the company’s workers no longer have access to the site — EPA security officials escorted contractor personnel off the premises on May 17 — and ending all payments on the contract.

Since awarding the contract in May 2007, EPA has paid Apex Logistics about $5.3 million, most of which went to labor costs. Conditions at the facility “raise questions about time charges made by warehouse employees under the contract,” the report said.

“The warehouse contained multiple unauthorized and hidden personal spaces created by and for the workers that included televisions, refrigerators, radios, microwaves, chairs and couches,” the IG report said. “These spaces contained personal items, including photos, pin ups, calendars, clothing, books, magazines and videos.”

As to how you tell the difference between secret man caves and installation art, I’m stumped.

I just stumbled across an article which says that ObamaCare will wreck the US economy.

Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.

The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

What do Republicans plan to do about it? Fight the growing popularity of marijuana reform.

Evidently they are unfamiliar with Endocannabinid science. There are more endocannabinoid receptors in the body than any other receptor type. The endocannabinoid system is a major regulator in the body implicated in almost all diseases including cancer.

Yes – legal marijuana would do a number on big pharma. But it would lower medical costs considerably. Especially for cancer: Endocannabinoids And Cancer – NIH Publications.

H/T Ulsterman Report

Just as “money laundering” is being used as the cutting edge to destroy the last vestiges of financial privacy, so “kiddie porn” is being used to destroy the last vestiges of online privacy.

This is not to say that there aren’t such things as money laundering or kiddie porn, but how does the existence of whatever crime is in season supply a reason to crack down on everyone else?

Like, if the government wants to go after money launderers, why does it have to destroy the art business? And if it wants to go after kiddie pornographers, why does it have to nullify strong encryption?

I suspect the goal is something more than what is stated, and they are hoping ordinary idiots will hand over their records and their passwords without a fight.

Sad to see such tyranny prevail in a once free country.