My “anybody but Obama or Romney” pragmatic side matches my “anybody but Obama or Romney” principled side.

In any case, I’m pretty sure there is nothing pragmatic about “anyone but Obama”, but it certainly explains the astoundingly lame set of candidates republicans had competing for the nomination.

Basically, you can vote for more bailouts, more war, more military spending, more expansion of government, more domestic surveillance, more expansion of welfare, more government involvement in health care, more innovative drug war tactics, more expansion of the prison population, more lobbying in DC, more expansion of the TSA, more federal debt, etc, etc, etc…

…or you can vote for Johnson.

There has never been a presidential election in the U.S. where it matters less whether you vote for the republican or the democrat. The only good thing about voting democrat or republican is that there will later be no question about whether you deserved what you got.

Good.

A murderer does something more than look at pictures.

Yes, we should stamp out child pornography. It should be illegal to produce movies of child abuse. The laws, however, make no distinction between a guy streaming video of him raping a seven-y-o, and a 16-y-o sending a naked photo to a friend.

The efforts to stamp out CP have resulted in a lot of arrests, a huge increase of guys incarcerated. Very impressive numbers. But the vast majority of those arrests are guys who have done nothing more than look at pictures and videos. Surely, that is a sick habit, an immoral hobby. But should it be a crime to look at pictures?

Oh, you might say, We should prevent the guy looking at pictures from touching children! And I say, When we arrest someone for picking pockets, do we punish him for armed robbery…just in case he might do that some day?

Something tells me that if he was white they’d have been more understanding of him. The fact that he has been detained and questioned three other times, including in his own backyard, should tell you there is something racial going on.

There’s most certainly a scale of harm, and cp falls on the “Yes, it should be banned” side of it (The real stuff, I’d add – when it’s fake/cartoon and no kid’s being hurt it’s simply disgusting, and disgust isn’t sufficient for a ban).

The two she is right on about are Catcher in the Rye and Brave New World.

I read “Catcher” twice and I still don’t know what it is about. I just want to slap Caulfield and say “They flew south for the winter. Now stop whining”. And that was when I was 17.

Brave New World: “This book is about the future. I think the future will all be robotics because that’s what it’s like in cartoons, so the book would be like that.” Add drugs and that is pretty much it.

How is that working out? How did it work out to ban alcohol? How is it working out to ban drugs?

Let’s make millions of individualized versions of this sign appear in store windows between now and November.

IT COST ME (x) [YEARS|MONTHS],
(y) NIT-PICKY PERMITS, AND $(z)
BEFORE I COULD EVEN OPEN THIS BUSINESS,
ALL THANKS TO GOVERNMENT “HELP.”
BUT I GOT IT DONE ANYWAY!
THANKS FOR NOTHING, BIG GOVERNMENT!

I release this wording to the public domain, to pre-empt anyone who would claim ownership of it.

Which is why children are children, nascent adults perhaps, but still not with opinions we should fawn over.