If a country has a coup and their military overthrows a democratically elected leader, by law the US cannot provide military aid to them. Unless, it seems, the US government just *wants* to provide military aid…
A few days ago a Proton launch vehicle went a little “funny.”
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You might be wondering “what happened to range safety.” But the thing is, range safety worked perfectly in this incident. “Range safety,” in this case, being “a hell of a lot of Kazakhstan that we don’t care about, so go ahead and drop a big-ass rocket anywhere you like.”
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Also D’oh:
You hear about a lot of legal cases involving the 1st and 2nd Amendments… not so much the 3rd (the prohibition against forcing homeowners to quarter soldiers in their homes). Well, here ya go:
Short form: cops in Henderson, Nevada, wanted to use a private home as a lookout during an investigation of the neighbors. Homeowners refused. Cops used a battering ram to knock in the front door, shot him with pepperballs while he was prostrate on the floor (also shot the family dog with the same weapon), arrested the homeowner for obstructing an investigation. They also roughed up and arrested the guys parents at another private home, for the same lame reason.
There are all kinds of things wrong here. It’s the 3rd Amendment aspect that might be interesting. Now, the first problem with that is that these were police, not soldiers. But have you seen the police these days? It’s becoming more difficult to tell the difference. Just about the only way to tell them apart anymore is that the cops are likely wearing black, not camo, and masks to hide their identities.
This article covers only one side of the story, and the source is clearly biased. That said, if it’s even *half* right… Britain would seem to have a problem:
The short form: a student from Kansas was offered a summer job in Britain. When he got to the customs area at Heathrow airport in London, the customs official saw multiple stamps from Israel on his passport, took him out of line, locked him in a room for 9 hours and eventually deported him, reasons unclear. When the British guy who offered the summer job called the relevant officials to inquire why, he was reportedly met with a string of anti-semitism. A number of customs officials were involved, including apparently one wearing a burka, were involved with this.
So… if the story is basically accurate, Britain has started denying entry to Jews.
Other stories on this:
Some months ago, in a fit of “something must be done,” President Obama fired off a bunch of Executive Orders that were supposed to have some impact on firearms crimes. one of those orders directed the Centers for Disease Control to study firearms crimes, and how that impact public health. The National Academy of Sciences has just put out their report:
Where we learn:
Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence,
although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996;
Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive
gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by
criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to
more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about
300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the
other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only
108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization
Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per
year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken
from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is
difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically
about defensive gun use.
A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous
or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gunwielding
crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual
defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the
crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have
found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims
compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck,
1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck,
2004).
None of this is particularly new news to those who have been paying attention. Political hacks working to disarm the citizenry repeatedly trot out the line that a gun in the home is more likely to be used to kill a family member than to kill an intruder; but this of course ignores the fact that a gun can deter a violent intruder or other criminal *without* actually killing him. A “defensive use” of a gun might be to blow the back of a rapists skull off, but it might just as easily be the simple pointing of a gun at said rapist, or racking the slide of a shotgun. These actions will quite often cause your average criminal to decide to cease current operations and go somewhere else.
What *is* news is that this is an official response to a White House directive. One can hope (but little more than hope) that some reporter with actual integrity and courage will use this report to demand a response from Obama.
While there are many problems with government controlled, and even government influenced, healthcare, one of the most glaring is the fact that you wind up with bureaucrats running the show. Not bureaucrats who wound up as such after years spent actually in the industry in question, rather you wind up with bean-counting drones who are just better at bean-counting, BSing and backstabbing. As an example, here’s a description of a program the British Ministry of Health ran for some years that anyone with any sense at all would have aborted while the idea was still a defenseless embryo:
In short: just after WWII, Britain had a bunch of former servicemen who had been badly and permanently injured, making it difficult for them to get around. The Ministry of Health saw this problem and decided Something Must Be Done. In truly bleeding-heart fashion, that Something was to Give Them A Car. Not sell, not loan, not lease or rent or give tax breaks, but Give Them A Car. OK, whatever. But in true bureaucrat fashion, these were not standard cars. They were not even standard cars that had been modified to make it easier for people with wheelchairs and the like to get in and operate. Oh, no. These were specially designed, brand-new terrible cars. They were one-seater cars, so the poor cripples could not carry anyone else (the logic being, I suppose, who’d want to be seen with a cripple?). Plus, they were badly designed out of crappy materials. They were, essentially, the British version of the Trabant… but with one less wheel. Yeah. They were tricycles.
And apparently they liked to burst into flames. If you are “mobility impaired,” I guess having your car spontaneously combust might incentivize you to put a move on, discover reserves of agility you might have suspected were long gone.
The program dragged on for quite a while, finally being suspended in 1976. But people kept driving these deathtraps until 2003, when they were finally banned from British roads.
So, what can we expect from future government controlled healthcare? Free condoms, to be sure, but can we be certain that they won’t be made with fiberglass splinters and won’t spontaneously combust when exposed to, say, moisture? Free heart transplants, but with an ever-increasing anti-discrimination regime, you get simply whatever heart is in the hospitals fridge (how dare you suggest discriminating on the basis of blood type!)?
According to New York City, you are a bad, horrible very naughty person if you want British people in your British themed pub.
In short, advertising for employees and mentioning that being British would be a plus will score you a $2500 fine *and* mandatory “antidiscrimination training.”
So… anyone *really* surprised that Paula Deen got canned?
Back in the 1950’s, when cities or states violated the civil rights of citizens, the federal government would send in the National Guard to go straighten things out. I’m thinking that New York City government could benefit from being federalized.
Given how libertarian I am, things have to be *REALLY* bad for me to suggest that a local government needs to be kicked out by the federal government. But given how consistently awful the NYC government has been on matters of civil rights, I think it’s about time. Then on to Chicago.
Of course, this would require that the fedguv has a basic understanding of Constitutional rights. So… yeah…
Back in the 1970’s, the “Army surplus store” was actually filled with Army surplus. Military outfits, helmets, bayonets, de-miled flamethrowers, de-miled rocket launchers, flak jackets, instruments, grenades, shells, bombs, guns, you name it. Back then the stores were loaded with surplus from Viet Nam, Korea and even WWII, along with the “peacetime” in between. But if you go into such a store today, you’re far more likely to find a store full of commercial camping supplies and the like. Now, it’s not as if the military hasn’t been buying, and then replacing, shiploads of *stuff,* but there seems to be vastly less of it making its way back to the US civvie market. For instance: when was the last time you saw a civilian owned M-1 Abrams, AH-64 Apache or F-14 Tomcat?
There is news relevant on that topic:
the U.S. military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to wind down its role in the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014.
About 2,000 MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles are listed as “excess” and are being shredded.
One would imagine that there are a vast number of AR-15/M-4/M-16 magazines that are kinda beat up, but that civilian gun owners woul snap up if the price was right. Not to mention the M-4’s, M-16’s, M-14’s, Barrets, sidearms and all the rest that would find many happy buyers back home.
OK, the source here is “The Sun,” a British tabloid given to dubious journalism and photos of women in various advanced states of undress. That said, if this article is accurate, it is a rather disturbing indication of just how screwed up government-run healthcare can be.
The short form is: in Britain, the NHS (National Health Service) will give out taxpayer funded boob jobs. That is, they will give breast implants up to at least DD to women who want to be models. But at the same time, they have turned down a request for a breast reduction for a woman with 32H breasts who is in agony and had to give up her child-care job because of back pain.
That’s government for you. Do you want something for purposes of vanity? Sure, here’s a shovelfull of tax dollars (pounds, whatever). Do you need something that will, if you get it, keep you a productive worker and off the ole? Naw, nothing for you.
(In the interests of openness, I neither want nor need larger or smaller boobs. And while I recognize that breast reductions can be a source of great sadness for straight men around the world, I also know that they are sometimes necessary. It’s one of the great crimes of nature that something so awesome can be a source of physical and emotional pain. Grrr. Stoopid reality. See, this is one more important reason why we need to become a spacefaring civilization just as soon as possible… so that lower-gravity living becomes a reality.)
So the NSA is listening to every damn thing. The government is spying on everybody all the time in order to collect data to prevent terrorist attacks. Well, ok… but if you are going to spy on everybody, shouldn’t you actually spy on, y’know, everybody? Maybe even devote a little extra attention to the places where potential terrorists might tend to congregate from time to time?