Strike The Root Blog

The incredible destructiveness of casual government action is enough to give one pause.

Changes in daylight-saving time were added to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 on what must be fairly called a whim since there’s debate as to whether the time change is effective as an energy saving measure. After all, there’s no way to calculate the unseen changes in energy consumption patterns even if the entire 1% of electricity savings of a 30-plus-year-old study is actually realized. For example, what if more gasoline is consumed because of an evening of longer daylight?

Then the 21 day movement of the start date to the 2nd Sunday of March by the act amounts to a one-tenth of 1 percent change of the maximum hypothetical benefit. On the other hand, thousands of hours of human productivity are consumed in reprogramming software, and some technological devices are instantly rendered obsolete by their hardwired old daylight-saving time rules.

There are probably as many tiny (and big) gashes to our economy for as long as you care to look. 

Caught this in today’s Chicago Sun-Times:

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A teenager who sued the city after claiming a police officer forced her to do jumping jacks while topless has reached a $35,000 settlement, officials said.

Officer Shawn Patrick Shields found the girl, then 16, and a 19-year-old man together in a parked car. Shields told them he could arrest them for lewd behavior, authorities said. The girl said Shields had her perform five topless jumping jacks as he shone his flashlight on her.

One of Pensacola’s fine public servants forces a teenage girl into bringing his Girls Gone Wild fantasies to life, and the city’s taxpayers are the ones forced to make restitution to the gal. American justice in action.

Hope they at least fired the sick, cro magnon s.o.b.

For my money, Daniel Patrick Welch says it best on today’s S-T-R.

And Robert L. Johnson.

I thought maybe I’d blog a few comments on Shrubya’s Lie of the State address tonight, but after about the first five minutes of listening to it on the radio, I realized that I just wouldn’t be able to stomach it. (And that’s even without looking at his smug, smirking, arrogant mug.)

His transparently butt-kissing comment on having the privilege of being the first Decider-in-Chief to use the term “Madam Speaker” was sickening enough (not to mention his specious claim that “inflation is low”), but to listen to him blather his lie that Uncle Sam’s deficit has been cut in half three years shy of the appointed year of 2009 and preach the necessity of balancing the budget and “tak[ing] on the challenge of entitlements” was enough to make me want to puke on the floor. Not that I’m opposed to cutting entitlements (if that is indeed what Bush was alluding to)—every last one of the U.S. Federal Megastate’s welfare schemes should be phased out as soon as possible. It’s the blatant political maneuvering that I find so galling.

Where was all his talk of fiscal discipline the last several years, when his own party had majorities in both houses of Congress? If I recall correctly, they were busy expanding entitlements, such as adding the costly prescription drug benefit, not to mention looting the taxpayer through two of the single biggest, most bloated pork barrel projects in U.S. history—Homeland Security and the Iraq War. But now that the opposing party has the majority, Bush suddenly has the urge to “impose spending discipline.”

Now—after years of refusing to veto all but one single spending bill and collaborating with his fellow Republicrats in piling up trillions of dollars in debt to stuff the pockets of his various corporate buddies—he thinks he gets to contrast himself against the “liberal” Democrats as a man of free enterprise and small government in the hopes of scoring political points for his party in the process.

Barf.

Let’s just hope that all this resolves itself into the next best thing if we can’t permanently limit state power: Gridlock.

Is Pervez Musharraf’s government on Washington’s list of targets for regime change? From today’s New York Times:

“More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.”

“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.”

For proof of the U.S. government’s assistance and sponsorship of terrorists, see this.

For that matter, for proof of the U.S. government’s own terrorism, see this.

(NYT link may require registration.)

“Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong… The prosecutor who removed himself from the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case has hired a well-known law firm to defend him against ethics charges.”

They didn’t like that this prosecutor flapped his jaws to the press maligning the characters the Duke defendants.  They only noticed  because people  made a stink about it.  Now he could face disbarment.  Wow, they might kick him out of the old boy’s club?  I don’t think so, though.  It’s just for show.

His new attorneys often represent other lawyers and this is a quote from one of them regarding this case: “I have a firm belief that you look out for your own.”  That would work if you were talking about your kid brother on the playground.  It doesn’t work when you’re talking about a prosecutor stepping out of line.  The Trentadue case makes this showy slap on the wrist seem like a joke anyway.

The Chicago Tribune (maybe rr, bugmenot) informs us that several towns in the Chicago area are temporarily lifting their smoking bans for the upcoming football games. While I’m no fan of either sports or smoking, of course this is welcome news to any libertarian. But the real question is, why just a temporary ban of the bans? The only logical explanation I can think of is that some of the alderman are Bears fans. And smokers. Or they own bars.

Bill O’Reilly is, of course, known for saying incredibly boneheaded things with astonishing regularity. Once in awhile, he even writes an excrementitious book or two. Trust me: I used to read them in my personal Dark Age as a “God’n'Country Republican.” Please forgive me.

The latest one is really rich. A caller said this:

[Immigrants] also bring corrupting influences, too, like a third-world value system, which may not place much value on education, that can corrupt the education system.

To which O’Reilly responded:

Absolutely. And that’s why the dropout rate is so high. But let me just make one point: If you say “F you,” to a teacher in Mexico, that teacher can go out and beat the hell out of you — and worse, if you do it in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and those places. So, those kids would never dare, because there’s no, like, rules down there. You disrespect a teacher down there, you’re gonna be bleeding.

So, first off, in the “No Spin Zone,” more people would stay in school if they were bloodied on occasion by teacher-taskmasters.

It goes without saying that that’s ridiculous. The drop-out rate is high because American public schools - and public schools in general - are alienating for many groups of people, especially the exceptionally bright and the not-so-bright who have no interest in school. Dropouts occur simply because people - especially the latter group - lose interest in what happens in government “schools.”

It’s already been ably argued that higher education is grossly oversold (.pdf) in the United States. The same is true of high school; think of all your friends from high school - or maybe yourself - who simply detested school.

It has nothing to do with whether or not one my freely curse at “teachers.”

But, for a moment, let’s take on face value the contention that immigrants are poisoning the American “educational ethic.”

It raises the question: how would that be different from the present situation?

You see, some of us who aren’t shills for the State realize that schools are not about “education” or “social justice” or anything of the like. They really never have been. The American public education system was modeled (even if its architects wouldn’t admit it) on the tyrannical Prussian model of compulsory education and other evil devices. The Prussian system in turn probably drew some of its inspiration from the state-worshiping “ethic” of ancient Sparta, where children were stolen from their mothers by the state at an early age, and then placed in barracks to be readied for fighting and dying for tyrants. John Taylor Gatto writes:

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.

O’Reilly and his caller are concerned that immigrants are “importing” an anti-education attitude. But, in response they should ask themselves this: even if this “values import” is really taking place, what would it replace?

America’s very own anti-education ethic, of course.

I for one wish that pupils would say “F you” to their teachers more often.

Further reading: Inside American Education, Sowell; “Against School”, Gatto, “Enterprising Education”, Young and Block; and Education: Free and Compulsory, Rothbard.