Yet another felony that everyone will be guilty of

Should Faking a Name on Facebook Be a Felony?

This new expansion and re-interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would make felons of us all. This is the point.

Laws don't write themselves. Politicians don't draft legislation because they are bored. Every bill has a purpose behind it, even if that purpose is not obvious.

When everyone is a criminal because it is impossible to live without violating the law, enforcement becomes a political exercise. This law, and other laws that criminalize the trivial, allows agents of the state to selectively target people they or their masters don't like.

A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular. This is never more true than when it is the government that dislikes you. When the government has the power to arbitrarily charge virtually anyone with a felony, that society is not free. A nation in which citizens cower silently before the state and its agents, keep their heads down and walk briskly, hoping they will not be noticed - is not free.

Any government that is the enemy of the people and the usurper of their rights is a criminal enterprise.

Bachman listens to a lunatic and makes a fool of herself in the process

Bachmann: Gardasil causes “mental retardation”

Bachman:

There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.

Here we go again with the neo-luddite vaccination made my kid a weirdo nonsense. This is what happens when superstition masquerades as reason.

I suspect the woman making the initial claim to Bachman was being dishonest in the first place. There is a contingent of people who fear these vaccines because the disease they protect against is sexually transmitted. Rather than rationally fearing the disease itself, they fear that which inoculates against it. Why? Because even more than cancer and death, they fear that their daughters will have sex. Something that protects against cancer and death transmitted through sex, is irrationally seen as something that promotes sex, which is anathema to them.

But they cannot make that argument because normal people are not persuaded by it. No normal person sees something that protects a 12 year old girl from contagious cervical cancer as an incitement for her to go party like a co-ed on girls gone wild.

So instead they latch on to anything they can come up with, no matter how ridiculous. They freak out and get emotional, at which point they get stupid. Those who listen to them end up looking stupid as well.

Something to think about on the anniversary of evil

A passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

Government

The legitimate role of government is to regulate interactions between individuals and legal entities where the nature of the interaction is not already agreed upon by the entities in question, and to enforce valid contractual agreements between individuals that were freely entered into.

Everything else is extraneous.

Tea Partiers are racists, and other lies from the credentialed left

Academics dub tea partyers devout, racist

Consider the source

95% of Political Science faculty are self proclaimed liberal Democrats.

The problem isn't that they are wrong. The problem is that they are LYING.

It is extremely easy to create push polls to generate the responses that you want to hear. It isn't necessary to lie about the answer when you are asking a dishonest question. Normally reviewers would call you out for this, but not when those reviewers are religiously motivated to agree with your findings. These are also conference papers, which means that they have either not been reviewed, or were rejected by the journals they were submitted to. If the research was truly sound, they'd be published in a respected journal.

This is a case of credentialed sophists getting together and agreeing on a set of lies and misrepresentations that are then presented to the public as valid findings. It is also an example of why the humanities are considered a joke. Few people go into political science for legitimate reasons anymore. Those who do virtually never go on to pursue an academic career in the field. The discipline is today almost entirely made up of far left ideologues. Some academics in the humanities are more honest than others, but virtually none of them are conservatives.

But that's ok because the only people who believe them are others such as themselves. The Daily Kos echo chamber eats this stuff up, but mainstream Americans are unimpressed. When the ideas and principles that the tea parties believe in are presented to the public honestly, the vast majority of Americans agree with them. On election day the voters are going to pull the lever for the Tea Party because they agree with what we believe in even when they don't know it.

Leftists are in trouble because their ideas are bad. The Tea Party represents the rejection of these bad ideas in favor of better ones. I should know because I am the Tea Party. They accuse us of racism because they have no valid arguments to make. If they did, we would be hearing them. They can't argue against the things we actually stand for, the things we actually believe, because our ideas are unassailable. To attack us based on what we actually believe would only succeed in promoting our ideas. So instead they lie about us and call us names.

They hate us because we are right, because we are the living embodiment of their own failure to know and live with the truth.

http://www.tempeteaparty.org

Quote for the day

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.

It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.

The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.

The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

-Author Unknown

Return of the Ghost Dancers

Wolffe: Opposition To Obama Speech Possibly Based On Skin Color

The gratuitous use of the race card has exceeded the bounds of mere cliche and entered the realm of self-parody.

Do they actually think anyone is listening anymore, let alone taking them seriously?

This kind of nonsense used to make me angry because of how insulting it was, not only to conservatives and libertarians, but to the intelligence of anyone unlucky enough to hear it.

But now it's gone so far beyond pale that they aren't insulting people like me anymore, but making fools of themselves instead.

I almost miss the days when leftists actually pretended to have valid arguments to make. I miss their intricate sophistries because at least those arguments had a patina of legitimacy to them. This crap is such obvious nonsense it isn't even worth taking the time to debunk as only a total fool would listen to it.

I'm reminded of the Ghost Dancer movement among American Indians in the late 19th century. Defeated and broken, some groups devolved into a cult based on circle dancing whose adherents believed would bring back the buffalo and end the expansion of the United States. I don't know what kind of things the Indians chanted, but the chant from the left seems to be "Racism Racism Racism!"

It isn't going to work for them any better than it did for the Indians.