SOPA. Crap. ‘Nuff said.
Except it isn’t. Massive outrage gets a temporary victory, but this will be back in another form as soon as the furor dies down a bit. Meanwhile, Larry Correia has a great rant about SOPA and all the other stuff we’ve let happen. Go read it. It’s worth it to get to the money quote from a friend of his (from whence I got the title of this post).
Tagged abuse of power, free speech, lie to me, Nanny State, pointless gestures, Politics, quotes, whiningHere’s a link to a tune I’ve been hearing on one of the cable music channels. This is the kind of thing that I would want in the soundtrack when they make the movie about my life. This would be the scene where I’m chain-smoking in a dark room while working at my computer and the passage of time is shown by a succession of cuts fading from one to the next with different clothes and growing stacks of books and papers and the only constant is the ashtray full of butts and the coffee cup.
Unlike all the good progressives out there, I don’t give a rat’s ass about income inequality. So the gap between our richest and poorest citizens is getting wider. Your point? I’ve come to believe that the fuss over income inequality is stirred up by childish envy and politicians. There’s always Johnny Entitled out there who believes they are entitled to all the goodies those bad rich people have without having to do what’s necessary to earn all the goodies and there’s always a Bobby Politics out there eager to tell Johnny that he’s right and he deserves all the goodies and that as a concerned public servant, Bobby will get Johnny some of the goodies if Johnny will vote for him.
And then Bobby Politics goes to work spinning a yarn about the millions of citizens living in poverty and the Bankers and Wall Street types who cheated other people out of their hard-earned money and that the decent thing to do would be to take some of the ill-gotten gains from all the rich people and ease the suffering of the millions of people without a decent place to live who can’t put food on the table for their children who go to bed hungry every night. We have to tax the bad rich people. Think of the Children.
Of course, there are actually a handful of truly destitute people (relative to the population) out there in this country and there are enough Bernie Madoff’s to point to as evidence that all rich people are bad. Like all good lies, there’s an element of truth. However, as pointed out in this article,
For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. For example, the Poverty Pulse poll taken by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development asked the general public: “How would you describe being poor in the U.S.?” The overwhelming majority of responses focused on homelessness, hunger or not being able to eat properly, and not being able to meet basic needs. That perception is bolstered by news stories about poverty that routinely feature homelessness and hunger.
Reality is a bit different.
In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker. The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European.
One could almost be convinced that the Johnny Entitlements and Bobby Politics of this country deliberately defined “poverty” in such a way as to make the “problem” look as big as possible to justify getting the Government to steal money redistribute resources from the bad rich people (who are all evil, soulless, cheating bastards) so the children don’t have to go to bed hungry (and Johnny Entitlement can get the goodies he wants without working for them and Bobby Politics can go right on spending other people’s money for another term in office).
Sometime I’ll talk about what I think we should do about the handful of rich people who cheated to get where they are, what we should do about the Johnny Entitlements of this country, and more importantly, what we should do about the Bobby Politics who live to spend other people’s money redistribute resources. But for now, take it as a given that in a country where the typical “poor” person lives better than most of the rest of the world, I am confident that gap between the income of the richest and poorest isn’t our biggest problem.
The idea that some of us are entitled to some of what others of us have IS, however, a problem. I like Don Boudreaux’s take on the idea over at Cafe Hayek (read the whole thing for the set-up):
Shouldn’t government ‘redistribute’ parts of Mr. Krugman’s New York Times column to me and other pundits who (according to the theory) can’t help but seethe with soul-shriveling envy at Mr. Krugman’s good fortune – good fortune that (also according to the theory) has less to do with Mr. Krugman’s merits as a columnist and more to do either with chance or with his pernicious and unfair influence with the Powers-that-Be?
Surely every ‘Progressive’ believes that those of us who now possess far less access than does Mr. Krugman to the opinion pages of the Times deserve to enjoy more of the access that he currently “controls.” And no ‘Progressive’ would let mere bourgeois obsessions with property rights and freedom block the state from forcibly redistributing such private property in the name of “social justice.”
I also like this quote, found at The Smallest Minority;
What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice. — Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts
Actually, I guess my point is pretty simple. Anyone whose life is ruined by their obsession with what someone else has is entitled to my pity. Nothing else.
Tagged abuse of power, Economics, envy, Politics, quotes, social justice
When my mother was in the first grade, she had to walk a couple of miles across a pasture to the one-room schoolhouse. She walked most of the way on a cow path through the fields. One day while walking home she was apparently not watching where she was walking and stepped on a bull snake. The snake coiled around her leg, thrashing around. She says she tried to shake it off, and thinks the snake uncoiled as soon as she lifted her foot. Bull snakes regularly run 5 or 6 feet long, so that’s a lot of angry snake wrapped around a little girl. Eventually, the snake got away from mom, or mom got away from the snake, or a combination of both.
Basically, it scared the living daylights out of her.
She’s been terrified of snakes ever since, and try as she might to not let on when my sister and I were little kids, we picked up on the fear whenever we were with her and we saw a snake. And, we saw a lot of snakes, as both sets of my grandparents were still living on farms at the time, and both had big gardens, and ponds, and chicken houses (snakes love chicken eggs), and other places snakes frequent.
I guess the short version of the story was that I grew up afraid of snakes.
One summer when I was about 7 or 8, I decided I was going to take care of the snake problem. I had three old, rusty railroad spikes I had found out in the country one day when I was wandering around (something I did regularly, as it was only three blocks to the edge of town, and only about half a mile to the river, and nobody thought anything about kids heading out to the river for hours on end when I was growing up). Anyway, I sharpened up the points to make something like a blade and took them out to practice throwing them so the points stuck in the ground. The idea was that when I saw a snake I was going to throw a spike and cut off it’s head. Now, railroad spikes are not exactly ideal throwing weapons, but I got to the point where I could stick a spike in the ground five feet away from me pretty much every time. So, the next weekend, when we went up to the farm, I packed my snake killing kit into an army green messenger bag, confident that I had the snake problem handled.
So it’s Saturday afternoon in early summer in Kansas. It’s hot, I’m sweating, I’ve got the messenger bag slung over my shoulder trying to pick strawberries. The bag is heavy and it keeps slipping off my shoulder. Eventually, I got tired of re-slinging it over my shoulder and started leaving it on the ground while I picked a couple of feet of the bed (Grandma’s strawberry bed was about two feet wide and forty feet long) then moving it to the next section. But, as I got tireder I started wandering further and further away from the bag before I moved it. The snake was, of course, in the very far end of the bed and when I saw it, I was a good ten feet from the snake killing kit.
It’s a very strange sensation to realize that all the work and effort and practice that you put in was wasted because you couldn’t be bothered to keep the kit with you. It’s a sensation I was reminded of a couple of nights ago.
I used to carry a gun in the house at all times. Generally speaking, we live in a relatively low crime area, but we’ve had a couple of instances of dodgy characters lurking around in the dark. When you’ve been sending people to prison as long as I have, you never know whether the dodgy character lurking around in the dark is a low-rent low-life looking for something easy to steal or whether it’s that guy you didn’t realize you pissed off who spent 5 years in prison planning to get even with you for ruining his life. (Yes, I have a healthy dose of paranoia. No, I don’t consider it a problem. You say “pathology”, I say “survival skill”.)
I got out of the habit of carrying at home while Rat Jr. was living with us. It seemed like there was someone up pretty much around the clock and the lights were always on, and they always had the blinds open, so I just quit carrying. But Rat Jr. is back in Idaho now and the house is quiet. I should have started carrying again the day they moved out, but I didn’t. I just didn’t really think about it.
I didn’t think about it until I leaned out the back door a couple of nights ago to try to get the dog to quit barking at flower pots or lawn chairs or cats or whatever it is she thinks she needs to bark at when I noticed that she was barking at a dodgy character luring in the dark behind the building just over from us. The whole “snake in the strawberry bed” thing ran through my mind in an instant, as I realized my current “snake killing kit” was upstairs in the night stand.
Time to get back in the habit.
Tagged Guns, Personal, stories
And we know this because the impending sense of doom is only intolerable today, instead of completely unbearable. Because the idea of putting one foot in front of the other in a connected effort to slog through the day brings only a grimace and a groan instead of random bouts of uncontrollable weeping and hysterical laughter. Because the physical act of putting one foot in front of the other in a connected effort to slog through the day is only mind-numbing and physically exhausting instead of actually painful.
Because it’s 9:00 PM and I’m still awake and posting to Ratlands.
OK, it isn’t really that bad, I just like stringing together depressing verbiage. Unfortunately, that first paragraph sucked. I’m apparently out of practice.
After 5 months, my new job is still kicking my ass. The Juvenile Justice system in Kansas is a lot more complex and convoluted than the Adult system. In the Adult system (the part I worked in, anyway), you get convicted, you get put on probation. You mess up probation, you get put on Intensive Probation. You mess up Intensive Probation, you get sent to me at the Residential Center. You mess that up, you go to Prison. (Yes, there are various permutations and exceptions, and it isn’t always that clean, but that’s basically it.)
In the Juvenile system you get picked up, they may charge you or send you home with your parents, or both, or you might get removed from the home on a temporary basis if “home” seems dodgy. You might get put on probation or declared a Child in Need of Care (CINC) or both. If you mess up your probation they can do a probation violation hearing where they can terminate your probation, continue your probation, put you on Intensive Probation (that would be with me), sent to a Juvenile Correctional Center (juvenile prison, but no one uses the “p” word and only if the crime you committed or the combination of your crime and criminal history make you eligible), or, if you came to the juvenile system from the CINC system, you can be taken out of the juvenile correctional system and put back in the CINC system if the Court thinks the services you would receive in that system would be better for you than if you stayed in the juvenile correctional system.
Notice that only one of the available options gets you to me.
If you do come to me on juvenile intensive probation, you see me for office visits, we go visit you at your house, your school, we check on any treatment you may be attending, etc. If you mess up, we do combinations of sanctions and incentives (stick and carrot) to try to nudge your behavior in the right direction. We send you to classes, we get you treatment, etc. If you continue to mess up we can do a Probation Violation hearing (PV), but to put you in juvenile jail before the hearing, we have to get an order authorizing removal from the home, an order authorizing a warrant for your arrest, and the warrant. At the PV hearing the court can put you back on Intensive probation, stick you in the juvenile jail for a few days as a sanction and then put you back with me, or put you in the custody of the Commissioner of the Juvenile Justice Authority.
In the Adult system, if you get put in the custody of the Secretary of Corrections, that’s a euphemism for “you’re going to Prison.” In the Juvenile system “custody of the Commissioner” means your Intensive Probation is terminated and you come back to me for Intensive Probation (only it’s called Case Management and not Intensive Probation), usually with a placement in a group home of some kind which you have to complete successfully, then you go home. But you might not be able to go home, so you might end up in a different type of group home or independent living facility until you can go home, or until you mess up and I send you back to the first type of group home, or if the crime you committed or the combination of your crime and criminal history make you eligible you might have a PV hearing and get sent to the Juvenile Correction Center, or you might get sent to a group home or a psychiatric residential treatment facility or correctional foster home. Every time you change facilities, we send in paperwork to Social and Rehabilitation Services stopping payment to the facility you left and starting payment to the facility you arrived at.
If you actually do time at the Juvenile prison, when you get out you can be sent home or to a group home and if you mess up you can be sent to another group home or back to Juvenile prison.
If you’re on one of the probation statuses and do well the Judge can let you off probation. For some situations you get “off paper” (get off probation) at age 18. For some crimes and situations, the Juvenile Justice Authority can keep you under supervision until you turn 23.
Except in certain circumstances, your case plan has to be revised every 6 months, but sometimes more. Every 6 months there is a hearing. One is called a permanency hearing which is designed to make sure you don’t fall through the cracks by making sure I’ve got a plan for getting you home or out on your own when you successfully complete whatever it is you are supposed to do, 6 months later there’s an Administrative hearing to make sure you are making progress in whatever it is you’re supposed to do. Then 6 months later another permanency hearing, etc. There are also 100 day reviews after you’ve been in a placement for 100 days.
Now, aside from the obvious oversimplifications for dramatic effect, you should know that the process isn’t as random and chaotic as it appears. At every step of the way, every decision on placement and program is about getting you into the programs and services that give you the best chance to learn to be a responsible person. It is, however, pretty much exactly as convoluted as I’ve portrayed it.
Actually, it’s more convoluted. I guarantee I’ve forgotten to include half a dozen options. I guarantee there are glaring errors of fact in my description. You’ve heard the expression “couldn’t find his ass with both hands”? Well, I’ve been at the new job for 5 months now. On the occasional good day, I sometimes feel like I might be able to find one ass cheek with one hand, maybe 3 out of 5 times.
Then someone comes along and points out one of my glaring omissions or errors of fact. I should also mention that I don’t actually do any of the stuff I’ve outlined above. I just supervise the people who do do all that stuff and who come to me to authorize them to do it and who are required to act like I know what I’m doing.
I was telling one of my former co-workers the other day about going to Topeka for training and how I’d left town at 5:30 in the morning. She was giving me a hard time about it, saying that she didn’t know that I knew there was such a thing as a 5:30 AM. I reminded her that I had told her several months ago that I love sunrises, it’s just that I prefer to go to bed right after.
So, for those of you who know me in real life, here’s an indication of how weird my life has gotten:
1. I see the sunrise pretty much every day, except when I get to work before sunrise.
2. I’ve been at work before 8:00 AM (sometimes considerably before) every day but 2 since the first of August.
3. I’m having fun.
Tagged Personal, workplace, wtf?Just in case anyone from the IT department at my work has figured out who I am and is checking Ratlands for incorrect thoughts or other improprieties, I can save you the trouble of searching the logs on my office computer. All these midday posts are written and scheduled for automatic publication in advance.
I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life, but blogging from my work computer on company time is not one of them.
Tagged blogspeak, Computers, ethics, workplaceFrom a video entitled “Questions you don’t have to ask Tea Partiers”
Tagged free speech, Politics, quotes, tea partyCan you really change the world by blocking traffic?
I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while because it’s important. Next time you create a password for an account, keep this advice in mind.
I have been doing this for a while, as a guy I really respect in our IT department told me about it several months ago. Using a phrase or a series of words you can create a mental image for makes remembering a password a lot easier. It does take some getting used to, and you still have to deal with password rules if you work in a organization that has them. At my work, we are required to have a “hardened” password of at least 8 characters, including letters and 2 of the following 3 “special characters”: a capital letter, a number, or a symbol. The best one I’ve come up with so far was a random phrase that is much longer than the 8 character passwords I was trained to create, types easily, but manages to include an apostrophe and a capital letter (which both make sense in the phrase) to meet the “hardening” rules.
Tagged Computers, Science/Technology, workplaceIn her discussions with her progressive friends, Rat Jr. called “bullshit” on the business of the “Occupy” folks wearing the Guy Fawkes masks like in V for Vendetta. She knew they had missed the point of the movie. I tried to give her some ammunition to use, but as usual, I was less coherent and certainly less eloquent than I would have liked.
This is what I should have said.
Tagged movies, Politics, quotesToday’s QOTD comes from TokenLibertarianGirl via Samizdata. (The quote is from the end of the video.)
Tagged Economics, ethics, Politics, quotesIt’s compassionate when you reach into your own pocket to help the needy.
It’s theft when you reach into somebody else’s pocket no matter how well intentioned the cause may be.
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