Look all that’s going on is a part of our government is saying that we aren’t smart enough to make our own decisions. Apparently too many people don’t understand that drinking alcohol can get you drunk so the FTC wants to look out for all of our best interests.

Can we trust the FTC to look out for us? Sure. We can all trust the federal government to do the right thing.

In the meantime I’m going to pour my little bottle of “5 Hour Energy” into my big can of “Four Loko” and enjoy. First, though, I’m going to McDonald’s to get a super size fries. The FTC & Michelle Obama be damned.

The judge in this case didn’t issue a final decision on a case, but merely issued a ruling dismissing motions to dismiss the case. The judge was probably correct, but some of the statements in ruling go beyond what would seem to have been appropriate for the case at hand. For example, the judge could have ruled that an entity which is hired to milk cows for many people is a dairy farm for purposes of regulation, without having to suggest that the rules also apply to a person who personally takes milk directly from a cow for personal consumption.

BTW, it’s worth noting that many of the risks that pasteurization is supposed to avoid are very slight when dealing with the milk of one cow, but will increase nearly a hundredfold or a thousandfold if the milk from a hundred or a thousand cows is pooled together. It would be impractical for many large dairies to avoid mixing together the milk from different animals, but for someone with one cow, it would be no difficulty whatsoever. The best way to balance freedom with the protection of public health may be to provide that products which are made with the milk from a single animal (or, perhaps, some small number of animals) which is uniquely identifiable from the product packaging would be exempt from the pasteurization requirement.

Someone can be convicted on the word of one person, then can’t be unconvicted on that same persons recanting their testimony?

Of course not. Now that she’s recanted, her credibility is destroyed. No court could rely on her recantation…. duh….

It’s in the interest of general stores not to sell tainted milk. If they or a food safety organization determine that raw milk is too risky, they lose their profits if they go against such advice. Nothing says the food safety organization needs to involve government. People have just been conned into believing that lie.

CyniCAl (#49) : “You are Elliott the anarchist, right?“

I usually call myself a libertarian or an individualist. I know too many hard core people who have integrated their anarchist ethics far more than I ever will.

With a mortgage, family, etc., I’m not willing to buck the system so much that I risk having the big government machine roll over me at such a high cost.

“What you consider “obtuse,” is “consistent” to me. As an analogy, consider what happens to a bottle of wine when a drop of piss is added to it.“

Haha. I don’t know what to do with that analogy.

If you want to say government is bad, I’m not going to disagree. But at that point, any discussion of scandals, legislation, incidents involving people being abused by those in power is a short conversation.

There are degrees of evil and I see some value in a slightly more complex analysis.

“I’m always happy to agree to disagree, though I suspect we are 99% agreement and 1% disagreement. You may think that 1% is worth arguing about, but it’s the most trifling minutia, imho.“

That’s probably true.

For a few days, we even have geography in common. I flew into Long Beach last night. Luckily, no TSA incidents.

It appears the government–for whatever reason–deliberately sought to facilitate the acquisition of guns to known criminals, and only to known criminals. Do you dispute that? Obama has overtly claimed to be working on gun control “under the radar”. He has also overtly claimed that U.S. gun dealers were supplying huge numbers of guns, and that because of that new gun-control measures were needed. The idea that a person might commit a crime whose outcome would line up with his stated objectives seems pretty simple. Do you have a simpler one?

If Obama’s administration wasn’t intending that the guns it allowed criminals to acquire would be used for crimes, what was it intending? If the operation was a result of some rogue agents, rather than being orchestrated from the top, why aren’t Obama, Holder, et al. assisting the investigation and seeking to prosecute the people involved? Can you offer a “simple” explanation for why Holder and Obama are, to paraphrase Sherlock Holves, “dogs that don’t bark”? A simple explanation for their inaction is that they don’t disapprove of what was going on. Do you have a simpler one?

Someone can be convicted on the word of one person, then can’t be unconvicted on that same persons recanting their testimony?

Regardless of the intentions of the folks running the project, one likely effet of the whole thing would have been more pressure to tighten gun laws in the US. (Helpful hint: the driving factor in the Mexican drug war isn’t the American supply of guns’ it’s the American demand for drugs.)

I don’t doubt WH staffers yelled at reporters or that Democrats were going to spin this into anti-gun (waste not any crisis). But let’s not credit anyone in the USG with a plan so far-thinking until we get a lot more proof.

But when you realize the Administration started Fast & Furious to discredit gun rights in the Unites States, it all makes sense. This was not just a mistake that went horribly wrong. This was a lot worse than that.

And the media is being strangely silent. CBS even shut down its own reporter who questioned the White House (and who was yelled and sworn at by Administration people).

Make him a deal. He starts a marijuana farm in his attic, then you will build a still.

The penalties are pretty much the same.

The first thing I did was tell all my neighbors that I brew beer so if they see me boiling stuff or moving weird-looking containers in and out of the garage they know that’s what’s going on.

Well played, meth-cooker.

#45 | cryingSpaces | October 5th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Plenty of mentions over the past few weeks about Obama’s Fast & Furious scandal, but nothing yet on the Koch brothers selling oil equipment to Iran? Nothing on Reason either.

That seems like a great business plan and it should be profitable. Sell oil equipment to Iran because Iran has a lot of oil. That creates Amurican Jobs. Bravo, Koch. Bravo.

Too bad all those Mexican kids are getting killed with F&F guns Obama sold to drug dealers.

2000-2011 deaths from getting hit in head by oil equipment by drug dealers: 0.

Koch for President.

Just part of the good life in NH.

In the future, Congress should ask “What question do you think you’re answering?” after each question. I’d also like to see the Republican candidate ask Obama this during a future debate.

Lying: it’s different when the state does it.

@31 – I can tell you now what the University response will be – stop collecting the data. It’s happened here in the UK. The government has tried to get universities tutors to act as immigration enforcers. Many Universities have relaxed attendance recording requirements, and many tutors (including myself) are no longer directly recording it.

It was also a useful warning for other issues for us, but oh well. The people who turn up are the ones with good grades at the end of the day anyway, near-universally, so…

http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/03/the-latest-lid-ripper-in-kochs

http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/05/bloomberg-businessweek-on-bloo

What you consider “obtuse,” is “consistent” to me. As an analogy, consider what happens to a bottle of wine when a drop of piss is added to it.

I’m always happy to agree to disagree, though I suspect we are 99% agreement and 1% disagreement. You may think that 1% is worth arguing about, but it’s the most trifling minutia, imho.

Cynical (#34) : “C’mon Elliot. The two scandals are a distinction without a difference.“

Had both scandals remained a secret, the end result for the average American would be quite different. For Iran/Contra, it would be unnoticeable beyond a bump in the defense budget. For Fast and Furious, it could have been a new round of deprivations of the right to self defense, all based upon a big lie.

“They’re both State operations. “

Putting murderers and robbers behind bars is a state operation.

So is putting dissidents in a GULAG in Siberia.

Let’s not be so obtuse as to draw moral equivalences by ignoring everything beyond one attribute.

“To write that they are different is to subtly justify one over the other.“

No, I’m contrasting them to show how they differ. At most I’m prioritizing them by degree.

I don’t ignore when government officials maliciously set their sights on my rights, as opposed to setting their sights on a foreign regime they deemed to be a threat to Americans. That doesn’t justify covert, illegal operations or the “lesser of two evils” Cold War interventions. It simply makes clear who is the target.

They purport to represent and serve us. I realize that’s not true, but people who stand on such claims should make at least some effort to do more harm to the “bad guys” than to their own constituents.

“You believe that State operations of any kind are justifiable?“

What ever gave you that idea? And, what does that have to do with what I’ve written about the two scandals?