Friday, April 30th, 2010
- The difference between pro-market and pro-business.
- My reaction to this figure is actually surprise that it’s so low.
- Judge in the Charlie Lynch case goes out of his way to avoid imposing ridiculous federal minimum sentence.
- I really hope this article is using the term “SWAT teams” figuratively.
- The NY Times writes up “epistemic closure,” the term my friend Julian Sanchez coined for the dumbing down of the right.
- Richmond, Virginia police closing down businesses for being “drug havens,” even if owners have committed no crimes. This isn’t particularly new (see the Rack n’ Roll Billiards category to your left). But it’s the first article I’ve seen on the practice in a while.
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TheAgitator.com
14 people a day die on the job. I don’t see a breakdown of causes: if someone suffers a heart attack and dies at work, is that included in the 14 per day? Yes, faulty equipment and faulty procedures can make a job dangerous. But so can driving to and from work. About 100 people die daily in traffic accidents.
Shouldn’t soldiers killed in battle or otherwise be counted among workplace deaths? Being a soldier is their job.
“Owner Alexander W. Sally was ordered yesterday to close Ann’s Soul Food on East Broad Street downtown. ”
By a stunning coincidence, Wall Street was closed down for good
today (in a pre-dawn raid) due to the numerous coke transactions by white-collar party-boys.
Damn, what’s the Finance world gonna do now?
Paul opposed the “Travel Promotion Act,” which subsidizes the tourism industry with a new fee on international visitors.
Also, Rep. Paul opposes the “Stealing Your Own Wallet Act.”
That pro-market versus pro-business distinction is completely incomprehensible to the lion’s share of Democrats and Republicans.
When I was young my father went to a drug haven every day after work.It was called Jack’s Bar.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/cop_bicycle_framer_dopMitmLOGCW8pRuUPrIgK Good in one respect. They convicted him for falsifying the report, but I’m not sure why they cleared the Cop on assault charges? I think the video is pretty clear in showing the Cop go out of his way to knockdown the cyclist. How is that not assault?
Love the comment (from the Cop guy) about the Cop doesn’t deserve jail time he needs to be able to get on with his life. Interestingly you never see Cops saying this when they testify against “criminals”.
(Do love the editorializing of hte NY Post in the article. Going out of its way to show the Cop is All American Apple Pie and the victim as a damn dirty hippie pot smoking cyclist).
“Mr. Obama said SWAT teams were being dispatched to the Gulf to investigate oil rigs and said his administration is now working to determine the cause of the disaster. ”
Trigger happy assholes on a oil rig. This has to violate an OSHA regulation somewhere.
But failing to make the distinction gives the Dems a pretext to slam libertarians.
I’ve heard people use this distinction between Pro-Business and Pro-Market for a while, they just used the terms corporatism vs. free market instead. It really goes to show how much corporate fascism (AKA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) has managed to absorb the terms capitalism and free market to redefine them to include corporate welfare policy. Only a government agency could call tax and spend politicians business friendly.
I’ve often wondered, should we keep screaming at the world that these definitions are not being appropriately defined? It seems like a waste of breath. Or should we just gravitate to a new word to describe what capitalism and free market used to mean…
“This will have a chilling effect on every new, young officer when they realize that mistakes now become crimes.”
One could only hope that new recruits would receive the ‘chilling’ message that committing a crime in uniform is still a crime. I’m not holding my breath, though.
“Pogan now faces anywhere from zero to four years in jail for filing a false criminal complaint”
Actual jail time! What an excellent way to drive home the point that just because ‘testilying’ is widespread, that doesn’t make it legal. Of course, I’ll eat a whole Ren Faire worth of silly hats if the Judge chooses anything but ‘zero’.
I’d love to see something like the following. Take a few crimes that both normal citizens and cops have been convicted of. Plot out a bell curve for the citizens – the X coordinates are the ranges allowed in sentencing guidelines (as a percentage – for the case at hand here, 0 years would be 0%, 4 years would be 100%). The Y coordinates are the frequency that that particular degree of sentence is imposed.
Now plot the same curve for convicted police. Think they’d overlap? Or think the police curve would be a massive peak at the far left, followed by a nearly-flat plateau?
14 per day actually does seem very low. The only way it makes sense is that it is work related deaths.
Think about how many people are using heavy machinery right now. How many are doing working underground, how many are logging, road construction,etc.
And only 14 deaths per day?
Actually, subsidies are *not* “pro-business”. They are “pro-some-specific-businesses-that-will-kick-back-part-of-the-subsidies-as-campaign-donations-to-ensure-an-endless-cycle”. They hurt business in general, since businesses like mine have to pay thousands of dollars each year in taxes to fund the subsidies that are going to these other businesses that are better connected politically.
As for Pogan – good start. But his buddy in the video also falsified a report and should be facing charges, also.
In the first time I read that report, I missed part of the Cop PR guys line. He thinks that officer Pogan deserves not only no jail time, but no probation either. My mind must have just deleted that part because it was beyond ludicrous.
Stunning.
–Still trying to figure out how it wasn’t assault.
The stimulus package funded a Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness, which is charged with determining what treatments and which patient characteristics will fall outside acceptable (reimbursable) treatments. The HC finance bill included a section that authorized the Council’s findings as binding, or will be when the law actually kicks in.
To run a search on the HC finance bill and conclude that, since the words death panels are not found, there is nothing that could be labeled a death panel — well, who’s suffering from epistemic closure now?
The Chamber of Commerce is for free markets like the National Education Association is for quality education.
While there may be 14 workers who are killed at work each day, I wonder how many are killed on the trip to and from work each day.
Of course, from a politician’s point of view, that is just a reason to enact more highway legislation. If we completely eliminated all injuries and deaths except one, they would have to write a law to try and eliminate that one from happening again.
Politicians are blind to the fact that the world is a decent place to live, not because of them, but in spite of them.
goddammit. The term “closure” means something different in logic and math than “closed-minded”. It doesn’t mean “won’t admit anything new” but it rather means, roughly, “one’s philosophy is so thorough that one can’t be surprised.” Or a bit more specifically, in this case, that one believes in the logical implication of everything they consciously believe. That they cannot be surprised by someone telling them that “[something you support] will cause [something you don't support] and here’s why…” (unless they are missing some empirical evidence)
Perhaps one can say that “closure” is closed-mindedness with regard to one’s position (although I’d prefer a term like “doublespeak closure” or “Soviet closure”), but it shouldn’t imply (as it does here) that they are also blind to evidence.
I really hope this article is using the term “SWAT teams” figuratively.
Probably not. SWAT team is just another term for “goon squad”.
The feds like to leverage events like this into a take-over of some kind. From their perspective, there are no disasters, just opportunities.
This is one of those days where i spend most of it realizing that “there really is no hope for this country, is there?” Makes me sad. :(
You should check out the update to the Richmond story…
Celebration short-lived for restaurant owner
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/article/DRUG29_20100428-222004/340812/
He gets to reopen as a take out only, but they arrested him on a bunch of felony charges (again for the drug dealers in his establishment) and is looking at 30 years.
I really hope this article is using the term “SWAT teams” figuratively.
We’ll know if they start killing the oil rig’s puppies.
“This will have a chilling effect on every new, young officer when they realize that mistakes now become crimes.”
We can only hope.
I hope “SWAT teams” is being used figuratively as well. Otherwise that crew may go to the wrong gulf, tear down a functional oil rig and kill all the fish in the immediate area.
Re: Deaths on the job.
The US mortality rate is 8.38 per 1000.
Using an arbitrary 300,000,000 people, that means 2,514,000 deaths per year or 6,888 per day.
That means about 2 in 1000 deaths occur on the job. Given that there are about 140 million people currently employed in the US, and assuming they work an average of 1,500 out of 8,760 hours per year (lowball to allow for part-timers), it would appear that Americans are safer at work than just about anywhere else.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/29/national/main6444311.shtml
To whatever decision Obama makes it remains a fact that with each passing hour this environmental catastrophe grows worse. And even though Obama has ordered military SWAT teams to protect other oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from any further attack, and further ordered that all drilling in the Gulf of Mexico be immediately stopped, this massive oil spill has already reached the shores of America and with high waves and more bad weather forecast the likelihood of it being stopped from destroying thousands of miles of US coastland and wildlife appears unstoppable.
Sorry, I tried to make that an indented quote but it didn’t come out that way. I did not write the above, it is from the article at the link, and I wish I would have just used “”s instead of trying to use html. Anyway, that article suggests the oil rig explosion was deliberate, an attack by N.Korea, an act of war against S.Korea. I make no judgement as yet, will wait and see, but it does appear to be a reasonable, even logical theory. It could also be disinformation.
And I just realized that was the wrong url/link, here is the correct one:
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/us-orders-blackout-over-north-korean-torpedoing-of-gulf-of-mexico-oil-rig/