Going Dark to Protest SOPA & PIPA

Just announcing that Creatures of Prometheus will go dark tomorrow, January 18, 2012, along with Wikipedia, Google, Mozilla, reddit, and many other sites, to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect IP Act.

These two bills, now being considered in Congress, would represent a massive power grab by Washington, and would change the way the internet functions, forever.  If either of these bills becomes law, the government will have wide, new powers to shut down entire websites, immediately and without hearings, trials, or anything, based on simple (or wild) accusations of piracy or intellectual property misuse.  Apparently, you can even be shut down for linking to such alleged material - it doesn't have to be actually posted on your webpage.

This is NOT the way online piracy should be handled.

You can learn more here: http://sopastrike.com/

Educate yourself.  Write your congresspersons and tell them to oppose these draconian bills.  Lend your voice to the struggle.  Washington needs to know enough is enough!

-Earl

p.s. I'll be back later in the week, with an update on the new pup!

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UPDATE: I created this avatar for my facebook and twitter accounts; feel free to copy and use it!

Forget the Tea Party, I Want to Start the Lemonade Party

It's a horrifying development that one of the themes of the Summer of 2011 is the ongoing war being waged by local municipalities all across the US against kids and their lemonade stands. It's a regular occurrence to see outraged links to these news stories in my twitter and facebook feeds.

Over at Josh Blackman's Blog, he has a nice little post about a recent NPR opinion piece on the topic, which I recommend you check out. He starts out:

When NPR has an opinion piece in favor of the right to earn an honest living–let the kids have lemonade stands!–you know the statists went too far.

The NPR piece itself neatly captures the essence of the issue in its opening line:

If lemonade stands are symbols of the American dream, and if lemonade stands are under attack in the United States, then the American dream is under attack.

To be more specific, the lemonade stand issue represents the American dream under a 3-pronged attack by statists at all levels of government:

1. The ongoing erosion of Property Rights. A person has the right to use & dispose of his property as he sees fit, provided he does not violate the rights of others in so doing. If a person wants to invite others onto his front lawn for the purpose of selling them lemonade, its his right. For the police to show up, and prevent this harmless activity from taking place, is pure thuggery. The police officers who enforce these laws should be ashamed of themselves, and don't give me any of that 'he's just doing his job' crap.
   
   Let me say it again in a bigger font:
   
   The police officers who enforce these laws should be ashamed of themselves.
   
   
2. Denial of the Right to Contract. Parties have an absolute right to voluntarily enter into mutually beneficial agreements of their own choosing. If I have lemonade to sell, and you're a willing buyer, there is no proper role for government in initiating force against us to prevent the sale. Of course, you have the right to ask me all kinds of questions about the quality of my product, and even sue me in court if I misrepresent what I'm selling you. But, as long as the transaction is purely voluntary, the initiation of force by any outside party, government or otherwise, to prevent it, is immoral. Ayn Rand identified this concept as:
   
   The Trader Principle.
   
   
3. Attack on individuals' Right to Earn a Living.  Ever heard of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Ever thought about what that really means, in a practical, nuts-and-bolts way? I think most people hear this well-worn phrase and picture, in a very lofty and abstract way, that America was founded as the place where you could follow your dream and do whatever you want to with your life. This is certainly true, but try thinking about it in a more concrete way. How about: A person has a moral right to earn an honest living by the means of his own choosing.
   
   How about one more time, with feeling:
   
   A person has a moral right to earn an honest living by the means of his own choosing.
   
   Of course, this concept has been completely turned on its ear these days. The slew of regulations, at multiple levels of government, that act as barriers to entry for new businesses don't just prevent new businesses from opening. They kill peoples' dreams. They prevent people from earning an honest living by the means of their own choosing. If you think that those regulations are actually necessary to prevent people from harming each other, I would refer you to point #2 above. The vast majority of regulation today is simple denial of the Right to Contract in the interest of furthering some political ends. I think that formulation deserves a Big Font, too.
   
   The vast majority of regulation today is simple denial of the Right to Contract, in the interest of furthering some political ends.

I think that today, the most critically abused aspects of Individual Rights are these three. The War on Lemonade Stands is a horrific encapsulation of what goes on every day, at all scales, when government oversteps its proper role of protecting our rights, and instead becomes the violator of our rights.

Although the Tea Party movement had its origins in a reaction to government abuses not unlike those described above, I and many others fear it will be (or has been?) co-opted by the Religious Right and their anti-Individual-Rights social agenda. Of course, the only real way to combat government intrusion is a robust, moral defense of Individual Rights, which the Tea Party has yet to embrace, and which is largely antithetical to any mainstream political thinking today.

I say forget the Tea Party, let's start the Lemonade Party! And while most appeals to take action 'for the children' make me retch, this is one I could actually get behind and advocate for.

Do it for the children!

----------------------------------

Update: 7/20/11

It looks like it's on! Turns out that Judy over at Consent of the Governed wrote this piece with much the same sentiment, and suggested August 20 as Lemonade for Freedom Day. Robert Fernandes has created a website called lemonadefreedom.com and facebook event page, and word is getting out. This is great!

Please help spread the word!

Israel Rally Update

Last Sunday afternoon I went down to the Pro-Israel Rally in front of the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles.  You can read the whole essay I wrote on why I was attending here.

The Consulate is located on Wilshire Blvd just east of San Vicente Blvd, and near the line between Beverly Hills and L.A.  Here is my overview of how the whole thing was set up, in the form of a marked-up satellite view:

They had closed Wilshire Blvd all the way from San Vicente on the west to Crescent Heights on the east.  I parked a few blocks north of Wilshire on San Vicente.  When I walked back, I learned that they had not just closed Wilshire to car traffic at San Vicente, but were not letting pedestrians through either.  They were diverting all pedestrians through the residential neighborhood to the north, and making them enter the rally area off of La Jolla.  I'm not sure why they did this.  Let's just say I'm sure they had their reasons, as the police presence was very heavy, and security looked extremely well coordinated.  There were LAPD, as well as Beverly Hills PD, and also lots of other private security peopleguys.

Here is a closeup of the rally area, with the area outlined in red where the crowd was the densest:

This map must be a little old because the 2 buildings on the northwest corner of the intersection weren't even there anymore.  That's where there were paramedics and TV news trucks were set up.

Here's how it looked when I arrived, taken from that northwest corner and looking southeast towards the consulate:

And another view in the crowd:

Some of the signs people were holding:

This makes a good point.  The people living in Gaza are not free,

they are living under dictatorship.  Hamas doesn't exactly 

recognize freedom of speech, for example.

'Peace Activists Don't Use Knives and Clubs'

Apparently other boats in the flotilla were boarded and

searched, without incident.  See www.FlotillaFacts.com

This is the main reason it is important to support Israel,

and this is why I was at this event. Read my previous post

for a more complete explanation.

This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Israel's enemies seek to undermine her moral right to exist and to defend herself.

This is called 'delegitimization' and is also one of the central issues of this incident.

Here is the crowd a little later, around 3pm:

Fliers & Handouts

In addition to the signs, a number of people were handing out fliers.  One very good one was from an organization called Stand With Us.  They were promoting these websites:

• www.FlotillaFacts.com: This appears to be a good source of facts regarding the flotilla that have been ignored in the anti-Israel reporting that has dominated the issue.  For example, there were other boats in the flotilla that were boarded and searched peacefully, and without incident.
• www.ShameOnTurkey.com: More info on Turkey's relationship to the whole incident;
• www.StandWithUs.com: Seems to be a general Pro-Israel information clearinghouse, specific to this organization, with info on other events and updates.

There was also an organization called the Israeli Leadership Council, promoting a project called Tzav8.org which lets you register for rallies and counter-protests that come up on short notice.  Their whole mission statement is too long to reproduce here, but I found it pretty interesting and encourage you to check them out and read it for yourself.  I plan to sign up for their emails, even if just to know what's going on in the world of protests and counter protests.  They also have a facebook page at facebook.com/tzav8.

Another leaflet I came home with was from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, titled "2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel LIES".  This one is pretty eye-opening as well, and you can read it online at www.wiesenthal.com/toptenlies

I was looking in the crowd for Gideon Reich, who I knew from the OActivists List would be there and possibly distributing some leaflets as well, but we missed each other. (It was a pretty big crowd!) He wrote up a nice blog post about his experiences at the rally, which you can read here.

The Crowd and My Overall Experience

I have to say, the overall mood was really much more of a rally or festival or celebration, than one of protest or counter-protest.  Everyone was smiling and friendly, and it was easy to approach and talk to just about anyone.

The speakers were really hard to hear, unfortunately.  That's really my only complaint.  I also found myself wishing there were a beer tent, but then I would remind myself that this wasn't really a festival, even though it seemed like one in some ways, and I could go to the bar later.

I was tweeting the whole time too, and I just found this cool app where you can revisit your old tweets, called TwimeMachine.  Through the magic (not really) of TwimeMachine, you can revisit your old tweets.  Here is a log of my tweets that day, courtesy of Twime Machine.  To read them chronologically, start at the bottom:

Crowd Size Estimate

One report I read indicated that LAPD estimated the crowd at 2,200.  At the time, I estimated the crowd as closer to 8-10,000. I thought I had tweeted that, but a quick check of my tweet log above shows that I must have been distracted or something and decided not to tweet it.  I wish I had, because my quick math shows that I was probably pretty close without going over, and would have likely won the Showcase Showdown if this were The Price is Right.

Here's how I defend my number:

I took the satellite image from above, imported it into AutoCad, and scaled it appropriately to the graphic scale shown on the map (omitted from the cropped image above.)  Then I traced a polyline around the red outline I drew.  According to ACad, the area encompassed by that line is around 50,000 square feet.

When designing a lobby or other closely packed standing space, the building code calls for 5 square feet per occupant.  50,000/5 = 10,000 occupants.

From my pictures, you can see that the crowd isn't exactly packed in shoulder-to-shoulder for that whole area, but they are that dense in some places.  Also, there were lots of people milling around outside the red-outlined area.  Plus, there were people coming and going the whole time.  So, if you took everyone who attended at some point during the afternoon, and packed them into that space, I think you would at least fill the red outlined area, if not exceed it.

So, perhaps the more accurate figure is 10-12,000 people.

The Helen Thomas Incident

There were several signs, of the homemade variety (as opposed to all those pre-printed ones I showed you above) declaring "Helen Thomas is a Nazi" and that sort of thing.  I was completely unaware of the incident of the previous Friday, and didn't really know what was up with this.  I got some info from one of the other protesters at the same time the tweet came through from my twitter friend @shlevy : "Affiliated with White House press, made a statement that the Jews should leave "Palestine" or some such."  Then I realized that I had, in fact, heard of Helen Thomas, the old lady that sat in the front row of the White House Press Corps, mainly out of tradition, but I had no idea she was such a fearless bigot.

You can always count on your tweeps to help fill in the blanks and connect the dots!

It wasn't until I got home and read the news that I realized the incident was relatively fresh, and I then didn't feel like I was out of the loop for not knowing.  I usually spend Friday and Saturday out in the workshop welding furniture, and miss out on the news those days.  If I were to sit down in front of the computer on a Friday or Saturday morning, I could blow an hour or two very easily, just indulging my inner news junkie.

Then came Monday morning's news of her retirement. I found this pretty interesting in the big-picture context.

On the one hand, Israel's government is left alone in the world, to defend her actions regarding the flotilla.  Many ships were boarded, in international waters,  to be searched for weapons and contraband.  All but one of these searches were conducted peacefully.  One erupted into the ugly spectacle we have all read about and seen video of, and for which Israel is universally condemned.  Israel has every right to conduct these searches, in the interest of her own self-defense against Hamas, and their never ending volley of thousands of rockets into Israel.  Note that these rockets have been launched after the Israeli pull out from Gaza in 2005.

Yet, on the other hand, the kind of speech delivered by Helen Thomas is resoundingly condemned and vilified, and her immediate retirement is the result.  Her speaking engagements are canceled, and she is put out of the Press Corps.

I'm sure that in the Arab world, Ms. Thomas is being celebrated.  Many accounts have surfaced that she was always known to be anti-Semitic, only that her timing and choice of words were extremely poor in this case, and they got the better of her.

Summary

Somehow, Hamas is seen by most as a legitimate body which is to be taken seriously and negotiated with in good faith.  Yet, Helen Thomas is instantly delegitimized by her own remarks, which are essentially the same thing Hamas is saying.

If only the world would wake up to the fact that Hamas and their brethren march in lockstep with Thomas and her ilk, and they mean it.  America needs to wake up to the fact that Israel's enemies are America's enemies;  that Gaza needs to be freed from Hamas; that, in fact, peace activists don't use knives and clubs; and that the delegitimization of Israel is wrong.

Only then can there be the real possibility of peace in the Middle East.


6/10/2010 Update to the Update

It has been pointed out to me that I did in fact tweet my crowd estimate, just before leaving the rally.  I somehow managed to crop my screenshot of the Twime Machine search at the wrong spot.  Here is the full tweet log, with my crowd estimate at the top:

My Letter in Opposition to AB48

I saw this item in my twittter and facebook feeds this morning:

@Rob_Abiera:  An End To Flight Instructors http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=27353 Excellent comments.

Apparently the State of California has unleashed a whole new bunch of regulations and fees on private flight schools in response to the bankruptcy of one such enterprise and the (apparently) fraudulent loss of up-front fees paid by students. 

In typical fashion, this was stealthily smuggled into the somewhat routine re-authorization of an existing bill, and the flight instructors and schools were caught completely off-guard.  

They are now trying to play catch-up and salvage what they can of their livelihoods, before they are driven completely out of business (or out of state) by the onerous fees. I wrote the following to my representatives in Sacramento, and to Governor Arnold, this morning.

Dear _______,

This is in response to AB-48 which was passed and signed into law last year.  This bill imposed new regulations and fees on private flight schools in California.  Apparently this was done in response to the bankruptcy of Silver State Helicopters and subsequent loss of up-front tuition paid by students.

The proper response to a case of apparent fraud such as this, no matter how large, no matter how many victims, is to prosecute it vigorously as a case of fraud. 

It is horribly unjust to sanction an entire industry, simply because of the fraudulent actions of one party.  To do so is, in effect, to declare them all guilty.  The only people or corporations who should be the object of government action are those who have been proven guilty, in  a court of law, of a specific crime against another.  The idea that government is legitimate in taking regulatory action against innocent businesses, who have done nothing wrong, is the complete inversion of the American concept of 'innocent until proven guilty'.

The proper legislative response, if any, would be to examine the laws around fraud that exist already, in an attempt to determine if there are any legitimate failings, loopholes, or other weaknesses in the law, which might create difficulties for the investigation and prosecution of actual fraud.

Many flight schools will be forced to close as a result of this bill.  That this sort of action, which will cost hundreds of good jobs, and destroy the hard work and dreams of many individuals, is perpetrated by the State of California on its citizens during the worst econonomic downturn since the Great Depression, speaks to the viciousness of those in power.

This bill will do nothing to protect the innocent from the unscrupulous, and will only make it harder for honest, hard working people to puruse their own happiness.

I urge that this action be repealed immediately.

Sincerely,

Mohammed Boobquake Cartoon

Recently, over at Free Colorado, Ari Armstrong posted an excellent piece on censorship and the First Amendment.  After describing how Comedy Central caved and censored a recent South Park episode, he wrote:

Thankfully, not all Americans are prepared to cower in some corner as terrorist goons shred the First Amendment and impose theocratic censorship. Some Americans are taking a stand.

Dan Savage proposed May 20 as "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day." This idea has been picked up by Michael Moynihan at Reason and Allahpundit at Hotair.

I propose only a slight modification to the plan: to protest death threats made by freedom-hating terrorists, Americans should draw Mohammed -- and publish their drawings -- by May 20.

I was all set to draw up a little Mohammed cartoon and put it up in time for the event.

Then, from out of nowhere, we had the BoobQuake!  Recently, an Iranian prayer leader scolded women who dressed immodestly, claiming that it was the cause of earthquakes.  One Jennifer McCreight blogged about it and then created a Facebook event around the idea, saying:

Time for a Boobqauke.

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that's your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I'm sure Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn't rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it'll be one involving plate tectonics.

So, who's with me? I may be a D cup, but that will probably only produce a slight tremor on its own. If you'll be joining me on twitter, use the tag #boobquake! 

She wrote up a more lengthy explanation on her blog here.   You can also read a quick summary over on Mashable, which is where I first discovered it.  I encourage you to join the Facebook group if you haven't already.

There is so much to love about the whole BoobQuake phenomenon (even for a gay guy like me!)  I normally wouldn't consider such an absurd statement out of Iran to merit the dignity of any response at all.  Yet, to meet it with such an off-the-cuff, sarcastic bit of silliness, and then to have that response take off like wildfire, like a mass demonstration, like a virtual taking to the streets of women with their cleavage -- the whole thing just restores my faith in humanity in so many ways.

When I was preparing my cartoon, I did a google image search under the cleric's name, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi.  It was actually really hard to find a picture of the guy amid all the cleavage that came up!  WooHoo!

So, I figured it was time to draw that Mohammed cartoon early, and incorporate BoobQuake at the same time.  If I can't go running around showing immodest cleavage, I can at least do this.  (I am wearing a v-neck today, but it seemed pretty clear that it was womens' cleavage that caused the quakes.  Oh well.)

So, without further ado, here are Mohammed and Sedighi discussing the events of today.  Somehow my Mohammed looks a little Jesusey.  Oh well.  It's kind of hard to figure out how to show him that anyone would get who he was. 

Anyway, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the cartoon online, provided that a link is provided back to this post, and that the cartoon is presented unchanged.

Environmental Envy: The Manhatta Project

New York City stands today as the crowning achievement of Western Civilization.  It’s population density of 71,201 residents per square mile is only possible because of the technologies of modern life.  The City’s rise to a global metropolis, housing and sustaining millions of people, in such density, in a relatively high level of comfort, would be a complete shock to the Europeans who settled there in the early 17th Century.

Recently, the Wildlife Conservation Society unveiled The Manhatta Project, led by Dr. Eric Sanderson.  They had undertaken a 10-year study to re-create Manhattan as it existed in its wilderness state, prior to its relatively rapid conversion to the thriving metropolis of New York.  Their results are presented on their website, or you can buy the book.

This project immediately begs the question: What’s the point of trying to figure all this out?  Why go to all the trouble to spend 10 years reconstructing a pre-civilized Manhattan, their “Manhatta”?  Surely there must be many other places where they could study the primitive coastal ecology of the Mid-Atlantic region, where they wouldn’t have to go to nearly so much trouble.  Why choose the one location that is the most highly developed of all possible locations, to fixate on the stark contrast between the undeveloped and the developed?  This last phrasing of the question answers itself.

In fact, this type of investigation - the recreation of a pre-civilized Manhattan -  is completly consistent with the view of environmentalism presented by Craig Biddle, over at The Objective Standard:

The basic principle of environmentalism is that nature (i.e., “the environment”) has intrinsic value—value in and of itself, value apart from and irrespective of the requirements of human life—and that this value must be protected from its only adversary: man. Rivers must be left free to flow unimpeded by human dams, which divert natural flows, alter natural landscapes, and disrupt wildlife habitats. Glaciers must be left free to grow or shrink according to natural causes, but any human activity that might affect their size must be prohibited. Naturally generated carbon dioxide (such as that emitted by oceans and volcanoes) and naturally generated methane (such as that emitted by swamps and termites) may contribute to the greenhouse effect, but such gasses must not be produced by man. The globe may warm or cool naturally (e.g., via increases or decreases in sunspot activity), but man must not do anything to affect its temperature.

From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that the environmentalists would go to all this effort to present a detailed image of the erasure New York City, and of all it represents:  the crowning achievement of the most technologically advanced civilization to have ever existed.

What do they say about their motives?  From their own website:

But why go through so much trouble to find out such detailed information about natural features that are long gone? Well, as you may have guessed, we at the Wildlife Conservation Society are interested inconserving [sic] wildlife. We know that many animal species are faltering because humans have taken over what was once wildlife habitat, converting it to cities, suburbs, farms, roads, mining operations, and other human-dominated landscapes. Of all of these types of development, cities are the most efficient at housing people. That is, cities concentrate people into a relatively small area instead of spreading them across the landscape. From a wildlife conservation perspective, that makes cities the best option for housing people. With more and more of the human population moving to cities, with several mega-cities of 10 million people or more on the horizon, and with a growing urban sprawl development pattern in the USA and elsewhere, we realize that we have the opportunity to “do” cities a better way . . . minimizing sprawl development between cities where the ecological gems, the “Mannahattas” of today, currently reside.

So, the project is aimed at coming up with new arguments for why human progress should be stopped: why "cities, suburbs, farms, roads, mining operations, and other human-dominated landscapes" should be prevented from being built.  This is what they mean by “minimizing sprawl development.”  (Sprawl is a myth, but that is another essay.)

The lesson is:  Look how great “Manhatta” used to be, before the civilized Europeans fouled it all up.  You humans should just be concentrated in cities, and all land-use decisions will be based on what’s best for the animals who live there now.

And again:

This is not merely an academic flight of fancy. Rather, . . . we will learn how to create cities that are more “livable” for people.

The Mannahatta Project began a decade ago, when landscape ecologist Dr. Eric Sanderson, a native Californian, moved to New York City to work for the world famous Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo. Dr. Sanderson realized that, to fully appreciate the concrete landscape of streets and buildings that was his new home, he would have to “go back in time” to recreate the its ecology from the “ground up.”

I would suggest a different type of historical analysis by which one could undertake to better appreciate the urban landscape of New York, which might also shed some light on the types of innovations that would make the cities of the future "more 'livable' for people".

How about an historical search for the inventors of those things and processes that made the construction of the city possible: of Bessemer’s steel; of Otis’ revolutionary elevator; of Eiffel and his mastery of structural steel engineering; of John Smeaton, the first civil engineer and an early pioneer of modern concrete; of Pilkington and the Float Glass Process.  Or how about all the untold engineers, surveyors, and builders who enabled the rugged, untamed landscape to be civilized and built upon.  What of the thousands of inventors and innvoators who created devices and refinements based on the ground-breaking work of these great men, without any of which the city would have certainly been very different than it turned out to be, if not impossible altogether.

To ignore all of these great men and the technologies they invented - all, one way or another, in the name of human comfort -- and instead spend 10 years in search of a pre-civilized “Manhatta”, denuded of all traces of Modern Civilization, and then claim that this study is for the purpose of discovering “how to make cities more appealing to people” is a terrible injustice, and an insult to the efforts of these great geniuses.

In The Return of the Primitive,  Ayn Rand defined ‘envy’ as “the hatred of the good for being the good.”  The Manhatta Project illustrates the anti-civilizaton, anti-man agenda of the environmental movement as what can only be defined as “environmental envy”.

On April 22, I will be celebrating Exploit the Earth Day.  I will spend the day reading about and toasting the achievements of the Great Ones whose hard work has enabled the transformation of vast wilderness areas into our thriving, comfortable, modern society. 

I encourage you to do the same.

We Are All Coloradans

Recently, the Colorado legislature passed, and their Governor signed, a law that authorizes the state to collect sales tax from Amazon, based on their Amazon Associates program.  That is the program where bloggers have ads and links on their blogs, and if a click-through results in a sale, the blogger is paid a small commission. 

I haven’t had time to read all the analysis, but essentially the new law declares that the Amazon Associates establishes a business presence for Amazon in the state, making these sales subject to Colorado sales tax that Amazon would be required to collect.  There is apparently a huge amount of red tape holding the whole thing together.


Immediately, Amazon dropped all their Colorado Associates.  Can you blame them?  Why put your face intentionally in the way of a swinging fist when you can just leave and take your toys someplace where they place nicely? 

Also, how is the Amazon Associates program, which is essentially just an online advertisement, any different from, say, taking out a magazine or newspaper ad?  If Amazon decided to take out an ad in The Denver Post, would that give them a business presence in Colorado?  The very notion is absurd.  How is a blog that happens to be written by someone who lives in Colorado any different?

Now, the bloggers are fighting back.  Notably, Diana Hsieh and Ari Armstrong, two leading Objectivist intellectuals/writers/activists, have taken up the cause.  Ms. Hsieh has launched a website, Repeal The Amazon Tax, where they have begun a campaign to have the legislation overturned.  There is also a Google Group that you can join to get updates on the campaign; Mr. Armstrong has been heading up that front.  My hope is that they succeed.

Why should I care, sitting here at home in Los Angeles?  What dog do I have in this race? 

Here’s why I care:  Because the intrusion of government, (at all levels: federal, state and local,) into the lives of the normal, law-abiding citizenry, cannot keep accellerating.  It’s not just growing, it is accellerating.  It’s like a Prius, careening out of control (if you believe any of that hype.)

I have been doing a lot of soul-searching, as I watch, to my dismay, as my fellow Californians vote to pass stupid tax increases and pointless bond measures like it's nothing at all.  From sales tax increases for pointless mass-transit projects, to Governor Arnold and his complete inability to manage his way out of a paper bag, let alone manage such an enormous entity as the State of California.  Then you have the L.A. City Council and local government, wasting money and playing favorites left and right.  The City Attorney has found a neat way to quash both property and free speech rights by cracking down with his regulatory iron fist, upon those giant supergraphics that they like to wrap buildings with these days.  (That one is a real shame, since the supergraphics often improve the buildings' appearance too.)

Through it all, the voice in my head has been getting louder, asking with all seriousness:  do I really want to stay in California, if this is going to be how it's going to be?  But then, is it really going to be any better anywhere else?  Should I stay and fight?  But that is a another question for another time.

The issue at hand for today is:  Can a small group of dedicated, principled, freedom-fighting Coloradans  defeat this tax?

If so, then I might feel like there’s some hope for the rest of us.

And, I pledge my solidarity, by declaring that

We Are All Coloradans

or, at least, this blogger is.

Presidential Hypocracy

I was just driving home, half-listening to the news on the radio, when I was jolted to full attention by the following quote, spoken in the voice of President Barama:

“...because nothing should get in the way of a family and its doctor.”

As I said, I had only been half-listening, (maybe even only one-third-listening,) and the news broadcast switched to another subject after the quote ended.  Still, it didn’t take any effort at all for the news junkie in me to realize that he was talking about his latest efforts to get Congress to pass his healthcare legislation.

I wanted to jump up and point at the radio and shout “You Lie!” but since I was driving and it was raining, and driving in the rain in L.A. is pretty much like driving in an ice storm anywhere else in the country, I couldn’t really jump up and level my accusation.

Come on people, let’s do a little reality check here.  Is there not already a MASSIVE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY and ENDLESS REGULATORY RED TAPE bogging down our healthcare system (and getting right in the way of a family and its doctor?)  For the President to make this particular statement, on this subject, in the context of what he is trying to do with healthcare in America, is utterly outrageous.  You can see it on YouTube here and if you scroll to 2:57 you will get the quote.  It is preceded by a pretty standard rant against the evil insurance companies, which of course completely drops the context of all the regulation that has them boxed into the dreadful state they are in these days.

Back when my Mom was still working as a nurse (Hi Mom!) I remember how shocked I was to learn that it was about a third of the man-hours of a doctor’s office that was given to regulatory compliance.  I’m sure it’s much higher now, probably close to half (or more?) as that was probably about a decade ago. 

Do we really need more of this?  How much red tape is enough?  Is there EVER enough?  The answer (from those holding the tape dispensors) is:  Clearly Not!   The problem with red tape is that the more of it you have, the more you need, to try to fix the unexpected problems that inevitably spring up as a result of the red tape applied to the problem in the first place. 

The red tape must be unraveled, not augmented.

And, there are so, so, so many good ideas out there for reforming the system, from tort reform, to reducing mandates and allowing interstate insurance competition, and encouraging those medical savings accounts, and many others, that there’s really no excuse for pretending that expanding the existing MASSIVE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY and ENDLESS REGULATORY RED TAPE is the way out of this mess.  (Yes, I realize that if the RRT is really ‘endless’ then it is a logical contradiction to characterize it as ‘expandable’ but there are far worse contradictions at work in the halls of Congress, and believe you me, they will find a way to do it.)  And if you think this bill will somehow streamline things or pay for itself with its own efficiencies or some such nonsense, you are living in Fantasy Land.

I also fully realize that the kind of contradictory double-speak exhibited by President Barama in this example is the norm these days, and it practically comes out of just about every politician’s mouth all the time, but he is the President after all, and as such it makes him a pretty clear target for criticism.