craschworks

Why the fuck is it illegal to buy eye glasses without a prescription… are teenagers abusing spectacles? Can you get high off that shit? Nope, otherwise people would be selling bifocals on the goddamn street corner. It’s a scam to keep shitty optometrists in business. Remember, every law requires the use of force by the Government. So if you support this law, you support the Government using force against those who break it.

Think that could never happen? Meet Da Young Kim. She owned a company that sold contact lenses. Not corrective lenses; fucking Halloween themed decorative contact lenses. However, the Government’s declared it a crime to buy decorative (non corrective) contact lenses without a prescription. So when the Federal Trade Commission suspected Da Young Kim might not be checking every customer’s prescription, they jumped into action; spending your tax dollars on an undercover sting operation.

Sure enough, they caught her selling decorative contact lenses to happy customers who didn’t waste their money on a pointless prescription. Even though there were no complaints from any customers, the FTC arrested her, and fined her $50,000. But… they acknowledged she didn’t have $50,000, so they auctioned off her car and kept the money as a “civil penalty.”

Now… after hearing that story, people will have one of two distinct reactions: Some will say “What the fuck? That’s bullshit! Fucking Government… Goddammit!” (Those are what you call “good people.”) Other’s will have this reaction: “Well the Law’s the Law. She knew she was breaking the law and she deserves whatever she gets.”

The following is addressed to that second group of people:
You needle-dicked pieces of shit are the main obstacle to the advancement of human liberty. Fuck you. You’re the Government’s bitch and your submissive attitude has enabled tyrants since Man came down from the goddamn trees. “All that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That’s you.

Back in the day people like you turned in runaway slaves because, hey, “The Law’s the Law.” Now you’re saying, “That’s ridiculous. It’s not the same at all.” Oh, so you know some laws are wrong… it’s just that your employees (the Government) didn’t quite fuck this woman over enough to reach your moral threshold for outrage. That makes you a “Douchebag.”

Haidt and his colleagues eventually recognized that their Moral Foundations Questionnaire was blinkered by liberal academic bias, failing to include a sixth moral foundation, liberty. They developed a liberty scale to probe this moral dimension. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that libertarians dramatically outscored liberals and conservatives when it came to putting a high value on both economic and lifestyle liberty. Haidt and his colleagues conclude, “Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.”

Next the researchers wondered, “Might libertarians generally be dispositionally more rational and less emotional?” On the standard inventory of personality, libertarians scored lower than conservatives and liberals on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Low scores on agreeableness indicate a lack of compassion and a proud, competitive, and skeptical nature. Like conservatives, libertarians are not generally neurotic, tending to be emotionally hardy. And like liberals, libertarians scored high on openness to new experiences, indicating that they have broad interests.

Libertarians scored lower than both liberals and (especially) conservatives on sensitivity to disgust. The authors suggest this tendency “could help explain why they disagree with conservatives on so many social issues, particularly those related to sexuality. Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of victimless offenses.”

Some of the more intriguing results involve the empathizer/systemizer scale. Empathizers identify with another person’s emotions, whereas systemizers are driven to understand the underlying rules that govern behavior in nature and society. Libertarians, unlike both liberals and conservatives, scored very high on systemizing.

I’m very skeptical of studies that purport to analyze the ethics of political groups. Too often, they serve merely to pathologize the groups that the study’s authors dislike. And they rarely make any effort to distinguish between conservatives and libertarians, lumping them together instead. Haidt, at least, tries to make the distinction. Interesting results, that accord with my intuition.

Swiss voters have approved a radical health policy that offers prescription heroin to addicts on a permanent basis.

Final results from the national referendum showed 68% of voters supported the plan.

The scheme, allowing addicts to inject the drug under medical supervision at a clinic, began in Zurich 14 years ago before spreading across the country.

A little bit of sanity.

Canadian researchers have unlocked the genetic secrets of the poppy plant, raising the possibility of making powerful narcotics from simple raw materials.

Building on the discovery of two elusive genes that enable the opium poppy to make morphine and codeine, researchers inserted synthetic versions of those genes into yeast and coaxed it to produced the potent painkillers.

It is an important step in a Canadian project that aims to produce the analgesics from a cheap raw material like sugar, says the University of Calgary’s Peter Facchini, who along with his research team member Jillian Hagel discovered the genes. They collaborate with Concordia University’s Vincent Martin, who genetically modified yeast to produce the narcotics.

Eventually, this technology will make it out into the illegal drug market. Imagine being able to brew opium as easily as you make bread. Will the drug warriors finally give up?

be wary of how often the word help is just a nice way of saying control.  I think there’s no more applicable place than in the world of anti-sex worker activists.  Sure, the line is, “We want to help women escape the sex industry”, but what’s really being said (and done) is, “We want to control other people’s choices about their own bodies and dictate politically correct employment options to people whose complex situations we don’t care to understand.”

Via Dan Lyke.

But funding of public pensions has been woefully short of what’s needed to make good on those promises. The shortfalls are “off balance sheet” liabilities that run into the trillions of dollars.

Here’s the bad news as reported by Professors Robert Novy-Marx (University of Rochester) and Joshua Rauh (Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management):

* Unfunded liabilities for public pensions run by the 50 states total $3.23 trillion — $21,500 per household.

* Underfunded pensions for municipal and local government employees add another $574 billion of hidden debt — $14,000 per household.

The data from federal sources is also grim:

* Unfunded US military-retirement obligations now amount to $30,000 per household.

* Unfunded federal civilian-employee pension obligations represent another $16,000 per household.

That means every US household (including the half that normally pay no taxes) would have to kick in $81,500 today to enable federal, state and local governments to meet just their cur rent pension commitments.

Sounds convincing, eh?! There’s only one problem — ‘Sicko’ had just been playing in Cuban theaters. Then the entire nation of Cuba was shown the film on national television on April 25, 2008! The Cubans embraced the film so much so it became one of those rare American movies that received a theatrical distribution in Cuba. I personally ensured that a 35mm print got to the Film Institute in Havana. Screenings of ‘Sicko’ were set up in towns all across the country.

“Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.

1. Sicko
2. Production year: 2007
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 113 mins
6. Directors: Michael Moore
7. More on this film

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.

Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”

Beautiful!

Rapiscan is one of the two companies that makes the nudie-scanners at airports for the TSA. Rapiscan CEO Deepak Chopra (who has the same name as the more famous Deepak Chopra, M.D.) recently was tapped by Obama to accompany the administration on Obama’s trip to India.

Also, Chopra is an Obama donor.

Yeah, don’t look for Obama to speak out against TSA porno-scanners anytime soon.