Martha Stewart Did Nothing Wrong

May 8, 2012 Leave a comment


Martha Stewart, apparently headed to prison after her trial and conviction for the healthy practice of "insider trading"

Martha Stewart was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for doing something that actually helps society more than all of her home-making advice, combined.

What makes something good, or bad, is not whether it’s legal or banned. Anyone who disagrees can go explain it to Mr. Schindler.

The difference between right and wrong, good and bad, is whether you violate another person’s property (including their body). This is the one universal “good versus evil” shared by all societies and religions. All of the rest is popular social habits turned into taboos over time, be it covering random body parts (faces in Afghanisan, breasts in America), burping (bad in America, good in Bahrain), or mullets (it’s not that they’re ugly, it’s that they now symbolize a now-unpopular subculture).

Martha Stewart was convicted for doing something illegal that is not bad, and should not be banned. In fact, using any information you consensually obtain, in order to help you make economic decisions, is a good thing. Our economy would be healthier if “inside” information were built into the price of stocks sooner, instead of implosions coming out of nowhere, or companies with a great future having to struggle for capital because it’s illegal to use a “stock tip”.

The whole point of a stock market is to help distribute investments and capital more efficiently than any “expert” or central planner ever could. This requires the participants to be not only responsible for their own risks, but free to make their decisions on any basis they choose.

“Insider trading” needs to be restored as a matter of pride, like having a hot tip on a sporting event, not wrongfully condemned as another arbitrary taboo, repressing society.

Bernie Madoff did something objectively wrong, claiming to be investing people’s money while he was actually just paying off previous investors. That’s evil even when the government makes it legal and calls it a retirement plan…

But what Martha Stewart did was objectively good, using knowledge she had to convey price information to society, even though the government says it’s illegal and calls it “insider trading”.

Filed under Economy, Liberty, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

How Green Food Causes World Hunger — Eggs

April 5, 2012 Leave a comment


Do those sociopathic EU bureaucrats really think farmers can meet 500,000,000 people's egg needs...this way?

“Organic” and other “Green” agriculture and food production is already widely understood to be causing food shortages, and skyrocketing food prices, worldwide, but it’s often too subtle and abstract an effect for regular people to really understand.

But now we have a very stark, clear example, a crisis caused by imposing “green” techniques on everyone:

Forcing ALL eggs in the EU to be Free Range has made keeping up with demand impossible.

Eggs are one of the least expensive sources of healthy protein. It’s easy for poorer people to get, and in many foods they eat…and right now, in Europe, eggs cost up to 250% more than usual for this time of year.

Why? Because the entire European Union has banned all normal, efficient means of egg production.

Instead of the very politically-incorrect rows of chicken cages, in which the eggs are laid above a conveyor belt, all European egg producers are now forced to deal with “free range” hens, tremendously increasing the cost and slowing down production of eggs, and even harming the “environment”, by requiring far more space to produce.

The result? Eggs that cost three times as much,  pricing themselves and food made with them out of the reach of many of the people who would benefit the most.

And the EU wonders why their economy is collapsing.

“Green” techniques divert food to other uses like biofuels, and because they’re so much less efficient, use more land and resources to produce less food. They are also more dangerous, with more chance of carrying pathogens to your dinner table. And, on top of everything else, they can even increase your carbon footprint.

But here we have a concrete example of how the wasted space, lower production, and riskier techniques of “green” agriculture harms everyone.

Filed under Economy, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Today, Congress Will Kill 387 People

March 12, 2012 Leave a comment


The arrogance of government is not only obvious and crazy, when it's ordering everyone to get up an hour earlier...it's also fatal.

No, I don’t mean Congress will order the execution of 387 people today. I’d almost respect that more, because it’d be direct and therefore, in a sense, far more honest.

But, according to a snowballing body of science, the sleep deprivation you’re suffering today because of Daylight Saving Time ends up killing hundreds of people, and causing thousands of additional accidents…and government, like everyone else, is responsible for the consequences of the force they impose.

What’s more, after all that, Daylight Saving Time actually ends up wasting energy, instead of saving it.

While even the obsessively pro-big-government Washington Post says Daylight Saving Time is a Scam, and various usually-statist news sources run more articles each year outlining the harm it causes, like The Baltimore Sun, NBC, or the local news, what’s unusual is to see the death toll in real, human terms:

Sticking to only relatively conservative surveys, the stress caused by forcing 300,000,000 people to get up an hour earlier adds up to (1) a 10% increase in heart attacks for the first few days, (2) a 17% increase in traffic accidents for the first week, and (3) a 6% increase in workplace injuries.

Given (1)  500,000 heart attacks per year, (2) 34,000 automotive deaths per year, and some (3) 7,000 workplace deaths, that adds up to Daylight Saving Time causing a minimum of nearly four hundred needless deaths each year.

Of course this number is a rough guess, and simplified, but other surveys say it’s even higher, for example a 6% increase in heart attacks, but spread over a full week. That’s nearly six hundred deaths caused by DST, just from heart attacks.

I couldn’t find a solid number for the increase in suicides for this week every year, but let’s not forget that (4) little bonus.

And, as you probably have heard on the news by now, the trivial amount of lightbulb electricity saved is far less than the extra air conditioning electricity that DST causes people to waste. So it doesn’t even have a real reason to exist, in the first place.

Of course some government apologists will try to say blow off the death toll, denying responsibility. They will cry “but we’re not responsible for what people choose to do, even if our laws set the conditions! We’re not really killing those people”. But the consequences of their actions fall under what is called, in the world of  justice, the Felony Murder Rule:

If you commit a felony, therefore a really inexcusable crime, and because of the situation action created someone dies, you can be charged for murder, even if it clearly wasn’t your intention that he died.

In other words, when you commit a wrong, you become responsible for all of that wrong’s unintended consequences. A concept that’s a no-brainer to anyone who doesn’t belong to the political class.

This was true when government banned the disabling of airbags by short people who would be killed by them, and is true of them needlessly forcing every single person to get up an hour earlier for reasons that, themselves, are false in the first place.

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How Bush/Obama Create Terrorists

March 5, 2012 Leave a comment


If we were not still meddling in Afghanistan, we wouldn't be giving our enemies access to corpses to piss on, helping recruit more terrorists by giving them actual reasons to hate America.

‎“Look, we are AGAINST the Taliban, but if this action is repeated, we will all join the Taliban, and then these [US] forces will not be able to stay one more minute in Afghanistan.“

Next time some ridiculous neocon claims Muslims become terrorists simply because they hate our “way of life”, not because of what our own government does to them through its foreign policy, quote the Afghani man above (backed by a group of supporters), talking to journalists about the latest scandal caused by Bush/Obama’s foreign interventionism.

The people of Aghanistan have always hated the Taliban, because the Taliban essentially foreign puppets of our own Pakistani military “allies”…yet the Afghani people are actually being driven to support their Talibani enemies, by our own hypocrisy.

Filed under international, Politics

How Government Stimulus Caused the Great Depression

February 28, 2012 1 Comment


All through the Roaring Twenties, government spending declined, letting the economy grow. Immediately upon entering office, Hoover began increasing spending and regulation, stagnating the US economy, a pattern followed by the next two presidents. The economy did not truly recover until that behavior ended, with the revolt against Truman in 1946.

Filed under Economy, History Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Worried about Bed Bugs? Thank the EPA

February 9, 2012 1 Comment


The bed bugs should thank the EPA, for restoring them as a threat to the well-being of Americans

Yes, we all know that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of millions by malaria. But there’s something far more important to us in the US:

The scourge of bed bugs has been spreading like wildfire, and they are really unpleasant.

Bed bugs were pretty-much extinct in the US, by the early 1970s, killed off by DDT. There was a steady trickle of new invasions, from foreign countries, but they never were able to gain a foothold…

…well, at least not until the Gingrich Congress of passed the deceptively-named Food Quality Protection Act, in 1996. What Speaker Gingrich and Senator Santorum supported, contrary to their current claims of opposing Big Brotherment regulation, was a law massively expanding the EPA’s power, resulting in a ban of almost every remaining, human-safe pesticide that was useful against bed bugs.

There was once a large pool of pesticides we could rotate between to keep bedbugs down, like DDT. Thanks to some unscientific hysteria in the 1960s, by the early seventies DDT was effectively banned, when bed bugs had, for that time, built up something of a resistance to it anyway. Perhaps years later it could have been used again it not for the ban, but at least that left us with other defenses, like malathion, pyrethroids, chlorpyrifos, propoxur, and diazinon, which kept the bugs at bay…until the powers of the EPA were so dangerous expanded.

This allowed it to essentially ban propoxur, chlorpyrifos, and diazinon, and other treatments on pure speculation, using the deadly Precautionary Principle, but no hard science, and make malathion illegal for indoor use. Left with nothing to rotate with, pyrethroids have become less effective — they never were particularly good to begin with — and, ironically, are particularly harmful to humans.

Our lives are flooded with misery that is the fault of coercive government, but that we tend to blame on other things. When you try to open the door to some small business and it is locked, for example, you can blame the local government’s insane regulations, requiring all businesses to have a door that can be unlocked in case of a fire; which results in doors being needlessly locked in the first place. Don’t even get me started on how similar regulations regarding shoes have caused a modern plague of foot fungus problems.

In this case, the “mysterious” resurgence of bedbugs is thanks to the EPA…and thanks to guys like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who give it destructive new powers.

Filed under health, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Ron Paul in the General Election

January 11, 2012 2 Comments


When have the RiNOs not tended to blow Presidential elections?

There is this common myth that a “moderate” Republican — a big government interventionist — is the best choice for a general election. They are called the most “electable”…by the Big Government advocates in the media.

As proof of this, we can look to how well Bob Dole and John McCain did. Conservatives compromised their principles, and nominated a Liberal Republican, and then won the general election…

Oh…wait…they lost. In fact, “moderates” almost always do.

Yes, as FDR once pointed out, “me-too Republicans” like Dole, McCain, and Romney almost always lose, because you might as well vote for a Democrat as for someone who is imitating one. He used this argument against John Dewey, with great success.

In fact, the last three decisive turnouts for Republicans were all for “extremist Conservative” positions: 2010 with the TEA Party, 1994 for the Contract with America, and 1980 with the “unelectable” Ronald Reagan.

In fact, in 1980, the “moderate” Republicans ran a spoiler Republican in the general election, as an “Independent”. John Anderson, whom they would have preferred be nominated because he was an “electable moderate”, was supposed to split the vote, giving Carter the win.

Yes, the RiNOs actually preferred Carter over Reagan.

But what actually happened, of course, is that Reagan won in a landslide, even with a “moderate” Republican trying to steal his votes in the general election.

That shows just how much more electable a real Conservative is, than a “moderate”.

Americans still believe in the American principles that a Reagan/Goldwater sort of Conservative espouses, and will turn out in record numbers to support that, when it’s actually available in our false dichotomy of a two-party system.

And the only major candidate running for President today who has that form of American Conservatism — conserving the principles of liberty of the Founding Fathers — is Ron Paul. As Reagan put it:

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" ~Barry Goldwater

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories.

The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
— Ronald Reagan, interview with Reason Magazine (1975)

The claim is that Romney would win with independents (who are a plurality of the population, more numerous than Republicans or Democrats) and Democrats. But in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Ron Paul won among independents, and beat Romney among Democrats who crossed over to vote.

Paul would win a in landslide akin to the TEA Party, the Contract with America, and Ronald Reagan.

Romney will lose in a landslide akin to John McCain, and Bob Dole.

Filed under Philosophy, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Censorship Known as Campaign Finance Reform

January 9, 2012 Leave a comment


“If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” -- SCOTUS

We’ve had two major rounds of  ”campaign finance reform” violating the first amendment in the past forty years. Each one has turned out to INCREASE the very bribery and corruption they were supposed to end, becoming the very means of filtering money to candidates or officials, and promoting causes out of proportion with their real support.

This is because:

  • The Law of Unintended Consequences. Imposing simplistic “order”, by force, on a complex system always produces unexpected results, usually the opposite of what you intended.
  • Each one increased the power of government, making bribery of government that much more profitable
  • As long as government has power that is profitable, the private sector will pay WHATEVER it takes to obtain it. If the “reforms” made bribery more difficult, then it simply raised the cost, which made accepting bribes more profitable to the GOVERNMENT, increasing the incentive for officials to be corrupt.
  • By “organizing” the thing in question, through imposing a government bureaucracy on it, the “reforms” just create an orderly, static way of bribing government officials and calling it “legal”.

Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of…stupidity.

It is stupid to expect future, censorship-oriented “Campaign finance reform” to do anything but increase corruption and abuse, the way all previous ones did…even if it targets the speech of people who are associated with corporations.

Filed under Freedom of Expression, Politics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Killing the Economy to Create Jobs

December 9, 2011 2 Comments


Any job created for the sake of employment is as bad as having some people dig holes, while others fill those holes back in...no matter how pretty the description given.

Neither the government, nor any business in the private sector, should be specifically trying to “create jobs”.

That is like noticing that a healthy, fit man’s heartbeat is slower than a fat, sick man’s heartbeat, and therefore going around giving people drugs to slow their hearts: You are treating the symptom, but aggravating the problem.

Job creation must always be a natural symptom of a healthy economy.  Anyone trying to create a job for the sake of employing someone is only increasing inefficiency, leading to more lost jobs in the long run.

That is the sort of “stimulus” that got us into this mess in 2008, and exactly what is keeping us in it.

Makework jobs kill the economy the same way drugging fat, infected people to slow their hearts would kill human beings.

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Occupation is Violation

November 21, 2011 Leave a comment


You don't see this kind of mayhem at TEA Party rallies, because they want to protect your property rights and liberty, not violate them.

To “Occupy”, in the sense intended by the current hipster protest movement, means “to enter and take something, and refuse to stop”.

If one of these tantrum-throwing brats were to do the same thing to a date’s body, it’d be called rape.

The Occupiers are specifically trying, as they said they would, to interfere in the rights of other people, keeping them from being able to go where they want, to do what they choose, to use public or their own private property. To violate the choices of you and the rest of your community.

Hell, they object to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan…yet they want to occupy the community where you want to go about your daily life.

And that’s the most obvious problem with the Occupy Wall Street movement: They are, unlike the TEA Party, aggressors, in their methods and solutions.

They move into a neighborhood and try to violate your right to go about your business there.

It’s no wonder that actual rape is so much more common in the Occupied areas than elsewhere…it’s consistent with their overall philosophy.

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Remember the Troops Who Defended American Soil

May 30, 2011 1 Comment


The last war unarguably fought in defense of American Freedom was the War of 1812

I am sympathetic with “support the troops”, and am adamantly in support of a Memorial Day to honor veterans who’ve actually defended the US from aggression.

But I have never, ever found anyone who can explain to me how the veterans of ANY foreign war but WWII ever “defended our freedom”.

Even if I believed in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, I would like to know exactly how our freedoms are being defended by the troops there. Or were in the Vietnam, Korea, WWI, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, or the Civil War.

As far as I can see, these were all nothing more than foreign adventures for the esoteric agendas of politicians who valued their own power and advantage more than the lives of brave, loyal, but mortally exploited American boys. And the wars they drag us into are almost always used as an Appeal to Cowardice to actually abridge our liberty, back here in the States.

That’s not Defending American Freedom.

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How the Deficit Depresses Our Economy

April 4, 2011 Leave a comment


Our national debt, financed by treasury notes, bills, and bonds, depresses the economy by destroying private investment

The political class insists that we can’t cut our massive, $1,600,000,000,000 Federal deficit, because it would depress the economy and cost jobs. Their excuse is that the private economy is not creating jobs and wealth, so the government must take up the slack.

But what mysterious burden, on our economy, is preventing the basic private investment that creates wealth, allowing the economy to grow, jobs to be naturally created, all of us to prosper?

Ironically, it’s that very deficit.

How?

It’s because of the way the deficit must be financed:

The government has to raise every penny of the deficit it spends, by issuing treasury notes, bonds, and so on. Private people buy these, imagining they are “investing” by doing so. But real investment creates wealth, while government securities just finance deficit spending, as a debt that will be paid back by your grandchildren, as gigantic tax burdens.

This year, the Federal government will have to convince people to “invest” 1.6 trillion dollars in government notes and bonds, to pay for its deficit. Every single penny of that would, otherwise, have been invested in private enterprise, to create wealth.

Imagine if the private economy got an “extra” trillion-plus dollars of investment, next year. The massive growth in wealth and jobs is almost unimaginable.

Now imagine if, instead, the private economy had a trillion-plus in investment REMOVED from it by government. The massive loss in growth and jobs is entirely imaginable, because it’s what we’ve been suffering since the deficit increased almost one trillion dollars in 2009.

Every dollar the government spends steals one dollar from the private economy…either directly, by taking it through taxes, or indirectly, by financing it through a bond or note that steals that dollar from private investment.

Filed under Economy, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

The Fake Spending Cuts

March 18, 2011 2 Comments


If they're so interested in balancing the budget, why are they increasing spending and calling it a cut?

The Federal government has not had an actual, official budget for many months.

When it was time for a new budget last year, the one proposed had so much pork and needless spending hikes in it that even the Democrats who controlled both houses could not get it passed.

And neither they nor the Republicans have succeeded in passing a budget, to this day. They have instead, kept the government funded with “Continuing Resolutions”, temporary agreements to “continue” spending at current rates while the budget is debated.

In 1995, such continuing resolutions actually helped reduce the National Debt, because they held to current levels of spending for months, instead of the next year’s increases.

And people assumed that this is what was going on this year…but they underestimated just how corrupt the Congress has become. Last year the Democrats controlling Congress did not agree to traditional Continuing Resolutions, maintaining current spending…their “resolutions” were actually based on the proposed budget that most members of Congress were rejecting.

Flash forward to the last few weeks:

The Republican leadership has made a big deal about having made two billion dollars in “cuts” from the Continuing Resolution…and when that one ended, six more billion from the next CR.

They have been claiming credit for “ten billion dollars in cuts”. This would, if it were true, be the first time in something like 60 years that the budget was actually cut, instead of the rate of increase simply being adjusted.

Even the 1995 Republican Revolution only cut the amount spending was increased. This was called “cuts” by the most ridiculous Liberals of the time, because they seriously think that increasing spending the “planned” amount is not an increase, at all. So if you plan to increase spending 3%, and then increase it 2%, that is a “cut”.

This is what I had feared the “cuts” in the Continuing Resolution actually were; just reductions in the increase.

But it’s worse…as I noted above, the CRs were actually based on the rejected, larger budget. And the Republican leadership is corrupt enough to reduce only those proposed super-increases, leaving the temporary budget still higher than last year, then claim credit as if they’d actually cut spending.

This explains more clearly, to me, why 54 Republicans, mostly TEA Party types, refused to vote for the CR.

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Uther Pendragon is a Neocon

March 1, 2011 Leave a comment


Uther would have been right on board with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, as long as you told him that Hussein was developing chemical, nuclear, and magical WMD

There’s this show on BBC called Merlin. It covers the story of Camelot, of Arthur and Merlin, when they’re teenagers.

Prince Arthur’s father is, of course, King Uther Pendragon. In this version, Uther’s son is learning to become the good ruler his father is not.

In watching the show, Uther is presented ambiguously, as one of the protagonists, but I find myself force to take a stance (in my head, or to friends) against him, because he is constantly doing things that, were he not one of the “good guys”, would be instantly recognized as evil.

In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that he is actually the most evil part of the show, the actual antagonist without whom none of the greatest wrongs or conflict would occur.

What’s most interesting, though, is that every single aspect of his role in the show is identical to that of the violent, authoritarian interventionists in the American and British political class (sadly, this turns out to include Obama), in real life.

Although it’s a specific movement of Trotskyites, I’m using the term “neocon” for this movement, because it’s familiar and its evils are widely recognized across most of the political spectrum.

Uther Pendragon / A Neocon:

  • Claims to defend the people’s rights, but governs as an authoritarian, using safety as their excuse
  • Once quietly supported a movement for their own gain, but then decided it was their enemy
  • Has since imposed a police state, along with supportING violence, war, and tyranny elsewhere, in the name of stamping out that movement
  • Will unhesitatingly torture, imprison, or kill in pursuit of the war against the movement, including using proxies in order to be able to claim clean hands for themselves
  • Will threaten, imprison, and worse anyone who might reveal their involvement in some of these evils
  • With their brutality and wrongdoing in the name of crushing the movement and any other opposition, has created their own enemies
  • Those enemies included good people, driven bad by desperation under the evils of the abusive government
  • And actual evil men, criminals, et cetera, who would have been nothing more than part of a fringe underworld end up able to ally with and manipulate the desperate good people, gaining far more power and influence than they would without the evil of the abusive government
  • The people of the nation end up being subjected to retribution and violence driven purely as blowback against the previous evils of their government
  • That government lacks credibility in the struggles for justice of many other lands, despite a long-past history of being a beacon of justice

Frankly, I could have written an article about either the violent interventionists of the American political class, or Uther Pendragon, and then just did a search and replace for words like Bush/Uther, Camelot/America, and magic/Muslims, Gaius/Assange, and published the new version credibly, without any other modification.

Whose evils does this article really reveal most clearly…the fictional Uther or the real Neocons? Sadly, I think it’s hard to say.

Filed under international, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Egypt: Told You So

January 29, 2011 2 Comments


The people of Egypt are revolting against their brutal, repressive dictator, Hosni Mubarak. We Americans are glad. We hate tyranny, and oppose it whenever we can.

If only the political class of the Federal government felt the same.

This dictator is same one in the five photographs at the right…one of each president since 1980.

The one that the US has helped keep in power for over thirty years, handing out $2,000,000,000 to their tyrant each year. If you adjust for inflation, this feeble country’s tiny economy has benefited from over one hundred billion dollars in American taxpayer dollars, plus military aid, technology, et cetera. How much interest in the National Debt has accumulated because of this?

Each time I’m listing the evil tyrannies the Federal government has supported in our name abroad, I mention Hosni Mubarak. And the neocon types carefully ignore it. But now we see why.

When Mubarak is, hopefully, overthrown by the people of Egypt, will they forget that we’re one of the main reasons they suffered under this evil regime for all these years?

The Iranians didn’t forget. They were forced to turn to the Soviet-funded Islamic Revolution, because we supported the Shah of Iran, their own tyrant. They then, rightfully, saw the US government as having made itself their enemy, by having supported their dictator.

Now the Egyptians may well turn to Islamic Fundamentalist movements of their own, against their own US Government-supported tyrant.  Should the next Egyptian government feel any different than the Iranians?

Sure, real Americans have never actually supported this kind of promotion of tyranny…but we’ve stood by and allowed our government to do it in our name, in violation of everything American.

How long are corrupt Federal bureaucrats going to keep supporting evil around the world, while we real Americans reap the blowback when people finally find a way to strike back against it?

We just gave more military aid to the tyrants ruling Saudi Arabia, for example. They are hated not only by their own people, but by almost all Muslims around the world, who see them (correctly) as a foreign-supported monstrosity, occupying their holiest city. How long before this chain reaction of revolution against American-supported dictators reaches Saudi Arabia? If their next regime hates us, who could blame them?

We need, as an increasing number of Americans are beginning to say aloud, to stop violating other countries in ways that we would not want other countries to do to us, like supporting tyranny abroad.

Filed under international, Politics, religion Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ozzy Osbourne Caused the Arizona Shooting

January 18, 2011 1 Comment


We here at Pithy Pontifications are fairly certain that World of Warcraft AND Ozzy are to blame for pretty much everything

Blaming anything for the Arizona shooting is insane, because the shooter, Jared Loughner, is insane.

What the control-freak prudes of each generation forget is that when someone’s that kind of crazy, it’s not that some specific thing sets them off, it’s that they’ll find something to set them off, no matter what.

I remember when Dungeons and Dragons was causing an outbreak of mayhem and badness around the country. And when it was heavy metal. And then it was video games. At one point it was the Ouija board. Oh, and television. And comic books. Movies. At one point, of course the madness was caused by reefer, and teen sex by Rock & Roll. Oh, let’s not forget science fiction…pure evil.

And kids did play with all of those things, then hurt themselves or others…because if they hadn’t fixated on one thing, it would have been another. The problem is in those specific, screwed-up kids, not the object of their fixation. Should we blame John Lennon for the lunacy of Mark David Chapman? Jodie Foster for John Hinkley Junior?

Now, Dungeons and Dragons is considered something that encourages learning and creativity in kids. Heavy metal music is used in educational cartoon themes. Comic books are considered the gateway to literacy. The objections were all nonsense, people being alarmed by “different”, more than any actual threat. Some of the “outbreaks of violence”, examined later, were actually all-time lows in violence, but specifically covered by a sensationalist, politically motivated media.

Let’s not forget the most laughable example:

When Ozzy Osbourne caused an outbreak in teen suicide.

Some crackpot group of ninnies actually took him to court, claiming his songs, like Suicide Solution and Paranoid caused kids to kill themselves.

“I tell you to end your life, I wish I could but it’s too late” from Paranoid was specifically mentioned. And a song called “Suicide Solution”, well…case closed!

Apparently, the incompetent lawyers and guilty parents involved didn’t even bother to actually check out the details of their accusation: In court, while suing Ozzy for the suicide of especially dimwitted teen John McCollum, it came out that the lyric in Paranoid was actually “I tell you to enjoy life, I wish I could but it’s too late”. And that Suicide Solution was a song warning against the dangers of alcohol abuse. That pretty much ended their case.

What we have, right now, are corrupt political thugs on both sides trying to doubly victimize Gabrielle Giffords and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green by exploiting Arizona massacre, claiming it’s caused by freedom of speech (and we need to censor that with the Fairness Doctrine), or legal guns (and we need to reinstate the Brady prohibition, itself an exploitation of another shooting it never would have prevented anyway), or too much freedom for the dangerously common folk (whom we should ban from carrying guns within 1000 feet of any public official), et cetera.

Like Rahm Emanuel said:

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

But, really, you might as well blame Ozzy Osborne.

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