The Wrightwing

OK, another election is coming up and all the usual angst and apathy is showing up among those that still consider voting.

Jeff over at Alphecca has a rather intemperate if accurate rant on his feelings towards the whole situation. My only argument with him is language. He is far too polite and temperate.

My feelings are summed up in two bumper-sticker-like aphorisms:

Don’t vote: It only encourages them.

What if they gave an election and nobody came?

Since the political system has been suborned to the interests of the two old parties, and the courts are tools of the old parties, you have only two options: Do not vote or vote for some third party candidate that comes close, if you have one that has been able to jump through the rights-violating, unconstitutional laws that now regulate elections in this country.

So I vote. Desultorily. Reluctantly. With the hope of those that kept working in the concentration camps of so many tyrannies of the past: That a change will come before I die.

Each vote is a message. Even if they lose, as is all but guaranteed, each vote for a candidate is a message to whoever wins. The message is what people want.

This was far more apparent in decades past, when minority parties still had a chance. Note in that link that minority parties occasionally totaled more members of Congress than the difference between the two parties with the largest representation, and actually held real power. Once, in 1823-25, the total of third party seats was larger than the second party seats.

This all but ended starting in the FDR/Truman era, when ballot access laws were passed by the two old parties that so restricted access that minor parties were all but frozen out of the political process.

And since then we know what has happened. A continual erosion of rights and powers held by the citizens, all being transferred to the government at all levels. Ever increasing taxation, ever increasing regulation, an ever increasing, creeping, tyranny.

This will not end until freedom is returned to the political process.

But that is as likely as asking GM and Toyota to make it easier for and Nissan and others to sell cars.

The outlook is bleak folks, but bleak is not black.

Too bad None of the Above is not on the ballot. I would vote against them ALL. But since that is not an option, vote your conscience as best you can. Do not vote out of fear someone will get in you dislike. No matter who gets in will likely be just as odious as the other. Better to walk out of the voting booth feeling clean and honorable, than dirty and violated by a bad choice. I would rather cast an honest vote for an honest candidate that loses, than submit to being forced to choose between tweedle-scum and tweedle-scummier.

When you vote, do not waste it on the corrupt, cynical status quo of the two old parties. Look at all the parties and candidates and vote your consciences. There are many to choose from. Green and Libertarian candidates are the most active and largest of the minority parties, but even the smaller ones deserve your consideration, if they match your positions better.

Send a message, vote the truth, it just may set us all free.

Jared Kushner, a 25 year old law student, somehow has the financial means to purchase controlling interest in one of the most influential, if moribund, newspapers in the nation.

Jared Kushner, the 25-year-old son of a wealthy New Jersey developer who was sentenced to prison last year, has bought The New York Observer, paying what one person familiar with details of the sale said was nearly $10 million for a majority stake in the weekly newspaper.

In a private, back room deal at that. How much you want to bet he is acting as a beard for his father, a notorious, if reclusive, power player in NJ politics?

The families habit of making huge donations, even before they are old enough to vote, has gotten them into hot water and even in jail.

So now they own a paper. Oh joy.

/SARCASM I guess we will finally see what a REAL liberal voice sounds like now. After all, who can trust those radical representatives of the Republican Right, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, The New York Post, or The Bergen Record, The Atlantic City Press and The Newark Star Ledger in NJ. Fronts for Pat Robertson and Dick Chaney, all of them. All of them I tells ya! /end-SARCASM

Just like a liberal to throw away money for ‘the cause’ in an attempt to buy influence through a centralized, controlled source. Maybe it will turn into another Air-America. I can only hope they bankrupt themselves before they succeed. Not likely though, when they have control of our wealth through the government they own.

No, make the “What Fucking Planet Do My Fucking Senators Fucking Represent!?”

Both of them, Bob Menshevek Menendez and Frank “The Replacement” Loutenberg, voted against Victims Rights and for police abuse.

That’s right. My two ignoble “Sinators” believe that in a disaster such as existed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, when some 90% of the police force took off for high ground, leaving those left in the city to fend for themselves, whether either too poor to get out of the city themselves, and unable to, due to Mayor Nagin’s incompetence in failing to follow his own damn emergency plan, or able to but too stupid to do so, that these people left in the aftermath of chaos and criminality, should have their best, perhaps only, means of self defense summarily confiscated by any bossy little shit with a badge.

Perhaps they believe that those that populate Nagins “Chocolate City” are not to be trusted with guns? Many have thought that as well, in the past right up through today. The fact that these rich, white, men, who live lives of privilege in wealthy, well protected suburban communities with large police forces and near zero crime rate, also believe this does not surprise me at all. After all, aristocrats and royalists throughout the ages have objected to the arming of the peasantry, and always oppress the right to arms of those they deem potential threats to their power.

Please note that this bill would not prevent the confiscation of guns from those already prohibited by law from having them, (big help for DC residents, not!).

All this bill will do, (yes, ‘will’, since it passed OVERWHELMINGLY, provided it remains in the bill during conference), is forbid the few law enforcement authorities left from disarming the decent people that are just trying to defend what little they have left in the face of almost certain massive looting. The looters sure wont care about any law, hell, they’re LOOTERS, predatory scavengers taking advantage of people when they are at their most desperate and defenseless moment. I guess N.J. Sinators care more about the advancement of their plan to subjugate the populace of the country to the Progressive Agenda than they do about the lives of those beset by disaster.

Joined by the usual suspects in “hidiocies” like these, they once again show their true colors, the colors of the slave market, the red flag later adopted by socialists and progressives of all stripes.

Gun Control, Drug Control, Sex Control, Thought Control, Wage and Price Controls: They are all about CONTROL.

Hat tip: John Lott.

Over on NoGodBlog, the ‘house’ Blog of American Atheists, there is a post and comment thread about an attempted railroading of an Oklahoma Atheist family because their daughter objected to being forced into a prayer circle in her tax-payer funded Public School. The story is chilling in what can happen in America today. It is not just Islam that will engage in oppression and tyranny when it gains hegemony over a community. Without a courageous attorney and the support of American Atheists, and innocent man may have been imprisoned and a family run out of a state, forced to abandon their home and business.

So far, this case has attracted little attention outside the Atheist and Freethinker community. I can find no news sources on Google that mention it. Yet the only things this family did not endure were night riders and lynchings.

Corrupt and lying school officials, police, prosecutors and judges, along with biased and bigoted attorneys seeking to exploit and cheat them. It is a story out of the Jim Crow South. All you would need to do is change ‘Atheist’ to ‘African’ and you could not tell this story from others of that era.

Which brings me to arms.

I spend a lot of time, more than I probably should, on the NoGodBlog discussing and arguing with Atheists over politics, against collectivism and gun control, which many, though far from all, seem to support. At least within that grouping.

But one fellow there had a change of heart on guns, like I did over 25 years ago:

…I used to think as you do. I used to believe that guns were evil and the people that rely on them are cowards, afraid to back up what they say and do with little else but violence.

I swore I would never resort to gun promotion.

Then I took a job that required me to be armed, to take on the responsibility of protecting others. I leared how to safely handle a firearm.

The gun changed in meaning to me. I realized that it was little more than a tool. A tool when, in the right hands, has as much potential for good as it does for evil! Gun ownership did not transform me into a criminal. It did not give me any more desire to use a firearm on another human being than I already possessed.

It made me question the reason a free nation needs such a tool at all. I had my epiphany - arms make and keep humanity free and safe. Our revolutionaries did not merely bander harsh language with a tyrranical, abusive theocracy. They took lives and gave their own because they believed in their freedom!

I know how I must sound to you. Paranoid, delusional, even insane? I assure you that I’d have held those same sentiments not so terribly long ago! But I was an idealist. I believed in our police, our courts, our laws (and for the most part still do).

But I’ve also taken the bitter pill of realism, I’ve stood face-to-face with men that threatened my very life and the live of those I love. I’ve been forced into the harsh light of the truth: we will never, as a species, stop killing one another and we will never live in the utopias we dream of. The only solution to certain kinds of people will always be violence and it can only be met with violence.

There is more. Go and read the entire post and comments. A worthy story to become familiar with.

In my mostly wasted youth I was also very anti gun. I had stickers on my car from Handgun-Control Inc. The ones with a revolver inside an international ‘NO’ symbol, the circle-slash.

Then I went into the Army, (for the wrong reasons and all too briefly), and actually used some: M-16, M-60, M1911, M2, as well as taking the Armorer course, (not intentionally, it was ‘on the way’).

I still thought they should be severely restricted, but also kept reading on the subject, (among many). Being an activist in the LP, though coming to it from the left, for reason of personal freedom such as an end to Drug Prohibition, as well as an obsessive reader, I was exposed to ideas and thinkers from a wide variety of sources.

Having read the arguments on both sides, and having experience with arms, how they operate and their capabilities and just as important, their limitations, my mind was changed.

Everything I have seen, including the tragedies, since then has only reinforced my belief, a belief based on empirical evidence.

Like drug prohibition, gun prohibition is worse that whatever social ills it is supposed to cure.

While gun prohibition is no guarantee of political tyranny, it sets the stage. Every oppression or slaughter of minorities in history has been prefaced by a disarming of the targeted group. Go back in history before firearms were invented and you will see it. Look at modern history and you will see it.

In the past century alone, disarmed populations have been slaughtered in Armenia, Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, more.
The banning of guns has lead to massive increases in crime in Jamaica, Britain and Australia, not to mention cities like Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

Guns in the hands of individuals can lead to tragedies, but they are tragedies limited to what a single person can do.
Guns in the hands of governments, without an equally armed populace to restrain that government, leads to tragedy on a national scale, if not outright slaughter.

Minorities of all persuasions, racial, religious, political, all of them, should always keep arms, and not let the government know it.

The day the government decrees that you must give up your arms is the day you must use them, even if it is just to flee over the border to the safety of asylum in another country.

Recently, an Amendment to the Constitution was barely defeated. This Amendment would have authorized Congress to pass laws prohibiting the physical desecration of the flag.

The Text:

The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.

This would have been only the third time in U.S. history that the Constitution was used to oppress the rights of people under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government. The defeat was a good defeat, and hopefully this will not come up again. The upcoming elections in November will change the configuration of Congress, so that this will have less chance than ever of passing. At least it should if we have any respect for freedom.

Does anyone remember the two times violations of human rights were written into the Constitution?

The first time was at it’s very creation, and officially became law upon ratification on June 21, 1788 with that first and most egregious oppression of human rights, the Three fifths clause that institutionalized slavery in the US. The delegates knew that it would lead to conflict later on, but without it the slave states would not join a union, and fearing a division of strength in the face of the global powers of the day, not to mention the threat of mother England trying to regain control of her former colonies, the abolitionists relented.

And it did. A mere 73 years later, within the lifetime of many alive as youngsters when ratified, this bastard clause led to the Civil War in 1861. One of the bloodiest battles in history, the bloodiest in U.S. history so far, Antietam, occurred during that war. Wounds were created that still fester to this day, generations later.

The second time rights violations were written in was when Alchohol Prohibition was enshrined by way of the 18th Amendment. An attempt at human social engineering the world had not yet seen the like of in modern times, until the truth of the horrors of the Soviet and Red Chinese revolutions that were hidden at the time, saw light.

This rasp of idiocy led to a decade of violence, corruption and cynicism on the part of the American populace. It started the tear in the fabric of trust the public had in government, a tear that has grown ever larger as the decades since have rolled on. But we did learn one big lesson form that mistake. Never put these things into the Constitution, a lesson learned well by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he implemented his rape of the Constitution during his New Deal. A lesson learned by those that later went on to wage “wars” on Poverty, Drugs and Guns.

Both of these attempts to restrict rights through the Constitution led to violence and death. It could be argued that Prohibition still does, through the never abandoned idea that simply banning something potentially harmful, can make society all better.

What could be the consequences of a ban on Flag Burning?

The first erosion of the hard won victories in free speech, for one. After all, if we can ban something as offensive as flag burning some people, what can we ban next? Gay porn is offensive, so ban that. Next could be Heterosexual porn of certain genre’s and then of course all of it.

How about offensive political speech? I could certainly stand to see less of Rick “Gays ‘R Bad, mmkay?” Santorum, Ted Stevens, Cynthia McKinney, Jabba the Kennedy.

Those folks all spout stuff offensive to many, can we ban them next?

How about Intelligent Design nonsense? Can we ban that? No? Not enough support? Well Evolution then, that pisses a lot of people off.

What kind of response will we see from the population when more and more speech is banned as a desecration by more and more Amendments, provided the bother of further Amendments is even pretended. This would seem to be a perfect laboratory for the Law of Unintended Consequences. I, however, do not care to be a rat in that maze.

Flag burning is such an infrequent occurrence that to pass a Constitutional Amendment to ban it, it is clear, is nothing more than a cynical attempt to pander to the most rabid right wing ideologs in a manner that will intimidate the weak-kneed on the left to go along.

And it almost worked.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Bill Whittle, whose writing I was introduced to with his post Tribes, just before he went on hiatus to go do something trivial like earn a living, has finally posted.

Humans are animals. I do not mean that in a negative way. But that is what we are: creatures capable of great good and great harm, susceptible to animal fears and passions, lower than angels but not without grace. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – a man who has seen a fair amount of both good and evil – wrote of that fault line, “that line separating good and evil, passing not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart. “

As animals, we are wired to live in a state of nature. In the long marathon of our history, our civilizations are only the last two or three halting steps. It took millions of years to design and build the human animal. It will likely take that long again to design out all of the passions and furies that brought us here.

Until then, we live with a choice: to live in a state of nature, or a state of law. The state of nature is the default condition that the huge majority of human lives has lived under, and continue to live under to this very day – lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short in Hobbes’ memorable phrase. Or, we can chose to impose upon our internal fault line a series of laws and customs, a Civilization, that imperfectly attempts to keep as many of us as possible on the side of the angels.

That Civilization is not a natural state.

A long and worthwhile post.

And he promises MORE!

Giggity!

Hat tip to Geek

Kevin over at the Smallest Minority has posted a seemingly reluctant endorsement, (acquiescence?), to the need for a return to building nuclear power plants.

Some of the reasons he and commentors mention for, (and largely eliminate), halting nuke power plant implementation in the past include cost, inefficiency and danger.

Overly burdensome regulations, opposition willing to bankrupt itself to fight every plant built through regulatory hearings, the courts and by other means are all included therein.

Plus, as was pointed out, each nuke plant here is essentially a custom designed one-off. So each design has to be individually approved by regulators, rather than using a previously approved design. The costs are huge, running into the billions of dollars. No wonder power companies returned to building fossil fuel, (FF), burning power plants, like coal, oil and gas.

In addition, the design itself, requiring huge, redundant cooling systems guarantees they will be very expensive, even if regulations were streamlined, and designs were standardized

But what was not mentioned specifically is that expensive, high-pressure light water reactors are no longer needed, or may not be. There has been a move lately towards Pebble Bed Reactors, where the fissionable material is packed into billiard ball sized ‘pebbles’ and loaded into a reactor vessel. Helium is pumped through it, expands and drives turbines, at much lower pressure than steam, which also provides the cooling. Each modular reactor is fairly small, they can be spread out closer to the point of use, (lowering transmission loses and vulnerability to attack), and can be duplicated easily, since they are much cheaper to build than the current tech is.

Both mainland China and South Africa are leading in the drive to pilot and implement this technology.

The advantages are that if the reactor over heats, the Pebbles expand, increasing the distance between them, which slows down or stops the reaction, without the need to mechanically manipulate control rods, allowing cooling. If gas escapes, being helium, it rises through the atmosphere and eventually out of it, rather than cooling to water vapor and settling to the ground. Some designs do still use variations of a control rod, but the basic idea is the same.

Not a new design, a rather old one dating from the 1950’s. The high pressure light water reactors we use now were chosen for political reasons as much as for engineering reasons. Even then, they were given all sorts of subsidies and limits on liability in case of accident, all in a drive to make the US the leader in peaceful nuke tech.

Nuke tech has advantages, similar to those of FF, over renewable sources of energy, like ethanol and hydrogen as well as solar driven energy tech like photo-voltaic, wind and hydro, or geothermal.

Nukes can be placed anywhere, (within reason), just as FF plants can be.
Nukes are using a ready made store of energy that we only need to extract. The storing of the energy has already been done by geological processes over the course of millions of years. With ethanol and hydrogen energy stores, we need to do the storing of energy into them, (create them), that is not needed for FF.

With hydro, wind and geothermal, there are limited areas where they can be used efficiently, which is also true, to a lesser extent, for photo-voltaic. Not all places are suitable for hydro, lacking sufficient or suitable water sources. The same goes for wind, if it is intermittent or not sufficiently strong. Geothermal may be fine for Iceland, or those living near a place such as Yellowstone, but for Chicago, Boston, London and other cities not near geothermal vents it is a non-starter. Solar has the widest geological potential, but can be complicated with it’s need for battery storage to carry over through night or over cloudy days. While photo-voltaic panel costs are dropping, the cost of the infrastructure needed to support it has not moved much. Not to mention costs to recycle old batteries once they wear out. In some areas such as far northern or southern latitudes, it is not practical due to the weakness of the sunlight reaching the ground.

Nukes have been roundly criticized in the past, (and rightly so in many cases), but as the technology has matured, and new designs are being developed, it is time to reconsider it. Pebble Bed Reators are being critisized now as well. While some of the criticisms seem like complaining that modern cars do not have crank starters, we should listen to these concerns where they are rational.

What we should avoid though, is another drive to implement it as we had back in the 1960’s-70’s, with subsidies and liability limits. Streamline the process for approval, encourage the use of standard designs, perhaps by automatic approval of designs used elsewhere that were previously approved. But do not subsidize, and certainly do not limit liability in the case of an accident, as the Price-Anderson Act currently does.

Encourage the development of new technology, and permit use of designs developed elsewhere, such as China and South Africa. After all, in a global economy, there are US companies involved, (pdf link), in those efforts as well, so it will benefit us as much as them.

Lets stop being obstructionist, be watchful, but helpful, and let business and technology loose to solve our energy problems.

I used the phrase ‘up-thinking’ in a comment over at The Smallest Minority, and got a question from someone as to what it meant.

I realized it was rather obscure.

It is a reference to something that has been floating around in Libertarian circles for a few years now. An answer to how we define ourselves in the U.S. political spectum od Left/Right. Answer: We can’t.

But when you look at the various political quizes, such as The Worlds Smallest Political Quiz, arguably the most famous, and the charts the produce, the answer jumps out at you.

The answer is ‘Upwing’.

Which makes authoritarians of all stripes, left or right, ‘Downwing’.

I have recently seen Upwing used in some sort of quasi-collectivist technological context, but I have been hearing it in libertarian circles for at least a decade, so I feel we have precedence.

So if you consider yourself politically homeless, neither right nor left, socially tolerant and skeptical of govenment spending and solutions, perhaps you are Upwing.

Start spreading the word: Upwing.

You read that right: 24,000 pages. Twenty Four Thousand.

From the May, 31 2006 issue of IRS Newswire, (IR-2006-084):

The Internal Revenue Service today announced significant progress in its corporate e-file program, including the successful May 18, 2006 e-filing of the nation’s largest tax return from General Electric (GE).

On paper, GE’s e-filed return would have been approximately 24,000 pages long. After filing, GE received IRS’ acknowledgement of its filing in about an hour. The file was 237 MB.

“Having GE file electronically shows the program is working,” said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. “Having the largest tax return is a major milestone for the corporate e-file program. I appreciate GE’s work to get this done.”

(I just received this at 11:41 AM NJ time, it is not posted online that I can find yet).

Is there any better evidence that the tax code needs reform than that?

If my tax form costs me $200 for an “easy” one consisting of four little pages, it must cost GE well over a million dollars for this. At two cents a page to print it, it would cost almost $500 just to printit, plus copies for their own records, then the shipping cost…this is nuts.

I have some arguments with the Fair Tax, but they are fairly minor. It has some political momentum behind it, and with all its flaws, I think getting rid of this huge, invasive implement of torture and corruption that the income tax has become is imperitive.

No wonder so many companies and people are moving their legal residence to contries other than the US.

The revelation of the extent of the NSA’s molestation of the rights of U.S. citizens this morning by USA Today is outrageous.

From the article:

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

So every call you have made is now part of a single database under control of the governments most secretive and unaccountable agency. At least of the agencies we know about. Every call you have made to your mother, your pharmacy, your doctor, your local hobby shop, the golf course, radio call in show, CSPAN, or any call you made involving a harmless but illegal activity, like to your bookie or, of concern to certain Congressman, your local pimp escort service defense contractor.

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. “There is no domestic surveillance without court approval,” said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

Oh, well that’s OK I guess, unless:

In the case of the NSA’s international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

Oops. Guess it is only required except when inconvenient. When did the office of the President gain the authority to unilaterally amend the Constitution? Did I miss something? I have been busy lately, what with being unemployed and all…

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”

Verizon, the USA’s No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.”

Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: “We can’t talk about this. It’s a classified situation.”

In other words: “We can not say anything, and we welcome our new NSA overlords”.

Qwest was the only company to not comply and participate in this abortion of civil rights. At least Qwest understood the problems here, yet the others just complied, like paid prostitutes. I worked for a while for Bell Atlantic, which was later renamed as Verizon. I was in union spot, (CWA), and, for a short while, was a Group Manager in a Directory Assistance office . One cardinal rule was that no government law enforcement officer was allowed on the property without a warrant. If they showed up at the door, and demanded entry, we were to refuse unless they had a warrant to search, or to arrest someone on the property. And in the case of the arrest warrant we were to attempt to get the target of the warrant to leave the building first, before allowing the officers entry. I guess only Qwest still has this sort of concern for the law or the Constitution.

The article save me from spending a month or two looking this up:
Section 222 of the Communications Act prohibits the phone companies from releasing customer data under penalties that can range over $100,000 per violation. If this turns into a violation per customer, these companies are toast.

The NSA tried to con Qwest by claiming refusal to cooperate would compromise national security. When that did not work, they tried threats against future government contracts. When Qwest asked the NSA to go to the FISA court to get authorization, NSA refused, saying the court might not agree with them. RING RING ALARM BELLS! That alone should have been enough for Qwest to shut down talks, and they did. Yet the quisling, sniveling, Igors of the NSA’s Frankenstein program were all to glad to go grave digging in their databases to hand over parts to the monstrous conglomeration the government was assembling.

The companies will no doubt say they were just doing what authorities told them to do. Just following orders. Where have we heard that before?

I really hope that the ACLU and other civil rights groups step up on this one. This kind of massive fishing expedition into citizens peaceful activities must not be permitted to go unpunished.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” William Pitt

There was an article in one of NJ’s western papers about a fellow that was running his Mercedes diesel on used vegetable oil.

Perhaps the savviest alternative, though, involves a Mercedes and discarded grease from restaurants — two things you wouldn’t expect to see in the same sentence.

For $1,300 — including a $900 converter with a 10-gallon vegetable oil tank and filter — a 44-year-old Morristown man is now able to run his 1983 Mercedes Benz turbo diesel wagon with what he described as “recycled fryer oil.” Frank Hardalo exited the corporate world two years ago and bought a 50-acre farm in Flemington.

This article mentions a website, without a URL, but I have had zero luck finding it. Note to newspapers: Why even mention a website without giving the URL? (Because they are clueless?)

And in the Star Ledger, another story, (zip code/age registration required), which points out:

The Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t devised standards for veggie fuels, which may void auto warranties, says spokesman Elias Rodriguez.

“It’s just a way to take an old jalopy and get it to the junkyard quicker,” says Rick Geise of Kentucky’s Griffin Industries, the nation’s largest independent renderer. He accuses greasers of skip ping out on fuel taxes that support roads.

“When I fill up my car, I pay taxes,” he says.

While avoiding taxes warms my libertarian heart, it seems to be a way to leach off the rest of us. Plus who knows what kind of pollution this stuff is pouring into the air. While probably nothing awful, has anyone done research into what is in the exhaust of this stuff? Yup:

The increase in nitrogen oxide emissions from biodiesel is of enough concern that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has sponsored research to find biodiesel formulations that do not increase nitrogen oxide emissions. Adding cetane enhancers— di-tert-butyl peroxide at 1 percent or 2-ethylhexyl nitrate at 0.5 percent—can reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from biodiesel, and reducing the aromatic content of petroleum diesel from 31.9 percent to 25.8 percent is estimated to have the same effect. In the case of petroleum diesel, the reduction in aromatic content can be accomplished by blending fuel that meets U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) specifications with fuel that meets California Air Resource Board (CARB) specifications. EPA diesel contains about 30 percent aromatics, and CARB diesel is limited to 10 percent aromatics.

What the first article does not tell you is that the grease can not be used as a sole fuel source without a lot of work.

Here is a wikipedia entry on using vegetable oil as a fuel:

Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) is a fuel for diesel engines that can be either pure new vegetable oil or Waste vegetable oil that has been cleaned, although this is normally referred to as WVO. Vegetable oil used as fuel in a compression ignition or diesel engine is also referred to as vegidiesel or vegifuel. The most noticeable difference between an engine running on diesel and SVO is that the latter is quieter, but (with rapeseed based SVO) only produces 96% of the equivalent power of diesel.

The original diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil, so SVO burns well in some diesel engines. However, due to its relatively high viscosity, using SVO with unmodified engines can lead to poor atomisation of the fuel, incomplete combustion, coking in the injectors, ring carbonisation, and accumulation of fuel in the lubricating oil.

(yes, you need to be careful with wikipedia, but this entry seems to be sans-political-agenda, at least when I linked it. Wiki tends to change on a whim)

So we are not talking about bio-diesel here, which is a much more complex undertaking, involving lots of chemistry and refining to create.

So let’s look at this:
$2000-$3000 for the car, another roughly $2000 for the conversion, plus getting the grease from a source, most likely a restaurant. Filtering it, extra maintenance for the additional fuel system in the car, and remembering to start the car on normal diesel until the engine is warm, manually switch to the restaurant grease, and remembering to MANUALLY switch back to diesel fuel for a half a minute or so, to clear the restaurant grease from the fuel system so that you can start the car next time using petro-diesel.

All of this from a guy that, according to the first article, bought a 40 acre farm in an area of NJ where land runs a MINIMUM of $100,000 an acre in large lots, (higher in small single home lots), in order to run a goat farm.

A goat farm?
Yup. A goat farm.
In NJ.
Uhuh.

Hooboy, I could do a post just on that. I sense shades of Christie Whitman there.

Butokaywhatever.

The point is that this is not something he needs to do, but it is something that can be proselytized by greenie activists. And it is.

So this guy can afford $4,000,000 for a farm, and can go out an buy a car just to use weird fuel?

Let’s look at the costs and savings:

Used 1983 Mercedes diesel wagon, about $2500 in NJ.
Restaurant grease conversion kit, about $2000.

So $4500 mentioned in the article, plus extra effort to source the fuel, plus you can not run on that fuel alone, you still need petro-diesel.

With diesel hovering a little below $3.00 a gallon here in NJ this week, at least near me, you would need around 1500 gallons of this grease to pay back the investment in a car and the retro-fit, or around 650 gallons for the retrofit alone. And if the price goes down, as is likely since we are near historic highs, it will take longer.

Since these cars run around 25 mpg (they are way bigger, and older, than the 45 mpg diesel Volkswagens currently on the market), if you average 10,000 miles a year, that would be 400 gallons of fuel. If you use ONLY biodiesel, (which you can not), it would take almost a year and a half to pay back for the retro-fit alone. Almost 5 years for the car and retrofit.

Not a bad payback, BUT:

If fuel cost goes down, it will take longer.
If others start to look for this grease, competition will start to add a cost to this now-free fuel.

So while it may be cost effective now, it may not be if others start to do it.

Plus grease is a fire hazard. Storing this stuff at your house may be a concern for your insurance company, neighbors or even the fire department, depending on how and where you store it.

Plus if you are talking real bio-diesel, there is no payback, since it costs more to produce than petro-diesel.

In addition, I hear little about all the land that will be needed to farm the bio-mass needed to produce bio-diesel, or ethanol, for that matter. We are talking almost the entire land mass of the US turned over to cropland. Plowing under our national parks, forests and wilderness areas, every front and back yard, everything. Bio-diesel is little better than ethanol, and both would destroy the environment of this nation if we were to even cut our fuel use in half.

So bio-diesel may have a place in our fuel market, but it is a very small and limited place, the benefits of which will be realized by only a few, dedicated and energetic early adopters. Late comers will pay higher costs due to competition for the resource, whether that is restaurant grease or vegetable oil from cropland.

If we remove all subsidies from fuels, petroleum, ethanol, biodiesel, ALL of them, we can know the true costs and make rational decisions. Right now the only reason fuels like ethanol and bio-diesel are competitive are because of government subsidy or, in the case of restaurant grease, low demand and a free supply that exists regardless of demand. Government subsidy means that even if you or I do not use it, we pay for the neighbor that does, which is unfair to say the least.

So far as restaurant grease goes, folks that are advocating it seem to me, to be fuzzy headed idealists that have not considered the consequences of conversion on a large scale, and most that I have heard of, like Mr. Hardalo above, are ‘gentleman intellectuals’, who have a pet idea that they like for themselves, but have not considered the effects of forcing it on the rest of us.

Just because something can be done, does not mean it should be done.

My buddies of at American Atheists nogodblog point to a column in Newsweek by Marc Gellman, entitled “Trying to Understand Angry Atheists”, who asks: “Why do nonbelievers seem to be threatened by the idea of God?”.

Here is my response:

Mr. Gellman,

I hope this finds you well.

I have just read your column and would like to respond to your rhetorical question: “Why do nonbelievers seem to be threatened by the idea of God?”.

We are not threatened by the idea of god. We are threatened by YOUR idea of god. Yours and Falwell’s, and bin Ladens, and Robertsons, Roy Moore’s, and all fundamentalists of all beliefs. In the U.S. we atheists tend to gripe about christians because christians are in the majority. And an insufferable majority at that.

But we also gripe about radicals of all religions, judaism, mohammedism, hinduism, what ever ‘ism’ you can name. In India we fight against all sorts of spiritual charlatans and fakirs, mostly hindu, but also mohammedan. In Israel we fight conservative and hasidim parties.

We are not angry with our neighbors over their religion, so long as they are peaceful and non-intrusive. If I visit a neighbor or friend for dinner, I do not ask that they not pray before the meal, if that is their practice. At the same time, I ask that they not try to have a prayer circle at my home, when I have them over. They do not ask that I join their prayers, I do not care if they have a small discreet one at my house. Respect is a two way street, the host and the guest must be mindful of each other.

Which brings us to evangelicals. You mention them as a particular target of our wrath. Perhaps, but not because they are religious, but because, to us, they are a bunch of arrogant, self-appointed butinskis that won’t leave other people alone. Whether door to door mormons, seventh day adventists or others, or the local blue nosed, intolerant censor that wants to rid the local library of Harry Potter books or the works of Darwin. They are like a permanent mother-in-law that constantly reminds you that you are unworthy of being their child’s spouse. Even if they act as if they are all sweetness and light, it is always with a disapproving, condescending, sweetness and light. How would you react to someone that constantly disapproves of what you do in a non-religious context? That co-worker that always remarks on not eating meat in a superior tone, or that neighbor that always harps on those damn democrats/republicans?

We are angry, however, when we read things like “Perhaps their atheism was the result of the tragic death of a loved one, or an angry degrading sermon, or an insensitive eulogy, or an unfeeling castigation of lifestyle choices or perhaps something even worse.”.
There may be some that are ‘angry with god’, to paraphrase what you wrote, but not I, nor any atheist I know of. Those that I know are atheist because it makes sense, and the fables and superstitions of our neolithic past no longer fit in a world and universe that we increasingly understand.

We are angry when we hear things like: “How can you be moral without god or religion?”. I have had this, and similar, far more harsh things, said directly to my face.

We are angry when we read junk like the City of Detroit giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to churches for cosmetic improvements to church buildings. Why should we, taxpayers of all beliefs and no belief be forced to maintain a church we choose not to belong to? If the parishioners what the place to look extra spiffy for the Super Bowl, let them pony up the cash.

We are angry when we see George W. Bush funnel money to ‘faith based charities’, in a way that does nothing to ensure these public monies are not used to proselytize those ‘faiths’.

We are angry when the Vice President George H. W. Bush said:
“I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.”
As well as :
“I support separation of church and state. I’m just not very high on atheists”

We are angry when supposedly enlightened people like Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric, Bill Weir, Star Jones and countless others repeat the slander: “there are no atheists in foxholes“. This is a direct slap in the face of the many non-believers that have served, bled and died for this nation in all of its wars.

We are angry when we see political action by religious leaders that who were supposedly given tax exemption provided they do not engage in political action. We would rather they pay taxes and then engage in political action. The only thing that would change is the taxes, the amount of political action would remain the same.

We are angry when we see religious displays, almost invariably christian manger creche displays, set up and maintained by local governments during holidays, often with only a pretext of neutrality, like a small snowman or menorah discretely tucked away in a corner or half hidden by shrubbery. Often without even that. Those are our taxes to. When do the atheist and humanist displays go up? Or a hindu ganesh or kali? Or a mohammedan mohammed. Oops, forgot, you get killed for putting those up.

Atheists, freethinkers, humanists. We are all over the political map. All over the social map. We are of all sexes, races, national origins. We are conservatives, greens, liberals, libertarians, anarchists, communists, and probably others none of us have ever heard of. We are straight, gay, European, African, Asian and mixes of all of those. We are highly educated, or not. We work with our hands in trades, or with our minds in professions. We are athletes and couch potatoes.

Indeed, in an online poll a few years ago, in an atheist chat list, informal so unscientific, the results showed an almost 50/50 split between those that leaned conservative/libertarian and those that leaned liberal/green. Almost identical to what we see in the general population. The only difference was a higher likelihood of considering third party viewpoints. In other words, we are more likely to be open to alternatives and new ideas. I know atheists that are politically active and politically apathetic. I know atheist gun nuts and gun banners. Atheist pro-lifers and pro-choicers. If you are involved in any sort of civic, social or political group, chances are you talk to at least one atheist at every meeting, whether you know it or not.

So we are not angry at religion, nor are we threatened by the idea of god. We are angry at the actions of an overbearing, condescending arrogant majority that is imposed, often deliberately and with malice, on those of us that choose to believe in a rational, understandable cosmos. We are angry when we are accused of cowardice or immorality because we are heathens, infidels and non-believers.

And like a raw wound, constantly irritated by ill-fitting clothes, never allowed to heal, we react strongly when provoked by things that normally would not bother anyone.

If you want a peaceful society, keep religion out of the secular government that we all pay for, stop reserving special privileges for religion in the public square, stop subsidizing religion with tax dollars and regulations. Maybe then we atheists that you consider so angry, will stop seeming so.

In other words, do unto yourselves what you have done to others, then maybe you will understand what bothers us so much. And then maybe you will understand that golden rule that has been passed down through human societies since before the written word: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

GeekWithA45 has had a thought others have also entertained:

What if we granted statehood to all cities of greater than a million population? That would create 10 new states. There would be 20 new Senators seated into a senate of 70, and the overall number of seats in the House, and their composition would remain pretty much the same. My presumption is that most of these new Senators would be of a neoliberal bent.

I have contemplated this occasionally, but also have some qualms as does Geek.

The number of electors is equal to the number of Representatives and Senators a state sends to Congress, except that every state is guaranteed one Representative, so the number of Representatives may, or may not, change a bit depending on how the division is made. So if a state already had only 1 Representative and 2 Senators, and split, that would mean 2 Representatives and 4 Senators for the same area. But for larger states, like NY and CA, there may not be a change to the total Representatives, though there would be more Senators, as Geek points out. But since most, if not all of the states/cities involved have larger delegations already, I think the increase would be mostly, if not completely in the Senatorial numbers.

There is a limit on the number of Representatives: No more than one rep per 30,000 counted in the census. Though right now I think it is one per 650,000, though I do not have a source for that.

So all in all, the number in Congress would certainly increase, at least in the Senate if not the House, though the House would also likely get larger as well. So would the number of electors.

What would change would be the proportion of seats held by either of the two old parties.

Since the large, Democratic run cities would no longer be able to rule over the less populous rural areas, the number of rural conservative Representatives and Senators would likely increase. We would see a decrease of conservative Democrats, ala Lieberman, (who is conservative relative to say, Kennedy), as they are marginalized or absorbed by the Republicans, and ostracized by the usually intolerant radical left in the party, causing a shift farther to the left from the center in the Democrats, making them look like clones of Nancy Pelosi. I shudder at the idea.

But there would also be a similar shift in the Republicans. The less conservative republicans, like Guiliani, Specter, Whitman, etc., would tend to lose influence, since their base is largely in the urban areas, which would be monopolized by the Democrats. Moderate Republicans would start to disappear as they were either marginalized or absorbed by the liberals and Democrats in the cities. So the Republicans would likely start to look more like clones of Rick Santorum, a truly scary thought.

So there are pluses and minuses to this idea. The cities would cease to dominate the rural and suburban folks, but since the increased number of Senators would be mostly part of the conservative persuasion, and probably Republican, we would see a swing to the right in the Senate. The balance in the House would likely be a wash, since if there is any increase in the number of Representatives, it would probably be evenly distributed between rural and urban areas.

But the political debate would, I think, become even more polarized than it is now, since those controlling each party would tend be more part of the extreme part of each, than the moderate part of each party.

The problem I think, is the winner-take-all nature of our political system, which, if you look around the world, is uncommon. It leaves little room for moderates or minority points of view, and tends to give the most power to extreme points of view.

This can be illustrated by the tactics our own politicians use when they seek the nomination of their parties during the primaries, by catering, often pandering, to the ‘base’ of their respective parties by making speeches and taking positions to motivate the more extreme ends of each parties membership, but then after nomination, moving to the center by moderating their language and tactics for the general election.

This is also illustrated by the change in the makeup of Congress after the 1940’s, when, during the height of the cold war, at-large elections were eliminated and the winner-take-all Congressional District system was put in place, slowly, state by state. The small but dynamic representation in the House of minor parties has all but disappeared, and in most sessions, does not exist at all.

Political Divisions of the House of Representatives (1789 to Present)

You will note that at many times minor party representation in the house exceeded 10% of the membership, and in the 18th session, 1823-1825, minor party members totaled 36% of the membership, actually exceeding the majority party membership by 5 seats.

I tend to think some sort of system of proportional representation would make for a better system. It would eliminate the need for politicians to indenture themselves to positions they do not agree with and encourage parties with actual view points and principles to form. Voters would need to make fewer compromises, which I think would encourage more people to vote, since they would then have something to vote FOR, rather than fewer things to vote against. There would be more honesty in the political process, (which is not saying much as any increase in honesty would be breathtaking), since people could support parties and candidates that they actually agree with, rather than having to choose between two equally disagreeable choices or staying home and having no say.

This would also provide an outlet for more extreme viewpoints, allowing the major parties to cease pandering to vocal internal agitators.
It would also provide a platform for new ideas, where they can be offered without the dilution and marginalization that occurs when they are proposed in the current two major party system.

Of course, both ideas, city-states and proportional representation, stand little chance of enactment. The two old parties have too much invested in the current system to allow change. Just look at something as rational and desperately needed as tax reform. It has been debated for DECADES, with no real change. Something as fundamental as this will take the type of upheaval this country has not seen since the Great Depression or the Civil War.

Katherine Harris, the Florida Congresswoman running for U.S. Senate, facing a crumbling campaign, has played the religion card:

In her first major campaign swing since announcing that she would put $10 million into her U.S. Senate race, Katherine Harris got a morale boost from South Florida voters and preached the gospel to hundreds of evangelical Christians.

The Republican congresswoman addressed the Reclaiming America For Christ conference in Fort Lauderdale, where speakers railed against homosexuality, abortion and the American Civil Liberties Union. The title of Harris’ speech was “Bringing Faith to the Public Forum.”

”I can’t imagine public service without faith,” said Harris, amid stained glass windows and American flags. “I don’t know how anyone could serve, absent that enormous strength.”

She can’t imagine public service without faith?

Mohammedans pray for Diseases and plagues to afflict Israel:

The bird-flu virus found in Israel last week was sent by Allah to punish the Jews for being “the worst of humanity” and is the beginning of the outbreak of other diseases meant to destroy the Jewish state within the next twenty years, a Gaza preacher said at mosque services this weekend.

Sheikh Abu Muhammed, an imam at the popular Al-Tadwa mosque in Beit Lahia north of Gaza City, went on to ask Muslims at his Friday night sermon to pray for the sexual organs of Jews to “dry out” so they cannot reproduce, a Palestinian in attendance at the mosque services told WorldNetDaily.

A man and four children lynched and beheaded under suspicion of witchcraft:

A 60-year-old man and four of his children were lynched in the north-east Indian state of Assam over allegations of witchcraft, reports said Sunday.

Police officer A Hazarika told the IANS news agency that the five had been beheaded in full public view by workers in a tea plantation, who then brought the bodies to a police patrol.

The man\’s pregnant wife as well as three other children are believed to have fled, the report said.

The workers had accused the family of using witchcraft to engineer a disease outbreak in which two men had died.

A faith based prison is proposed in Texas:

Tom Green County commissioners gave extra preparation time Saturday to a group proposing a faith-based prison in San Angelo.

A man is under threat of a death sentence for converting his religion:

Despite the fact the hardline Taliban regime is no longer in power, an Afghan man faces possible execution for allegedly abandoning his Islamic roots and becoming a Christian.

“Yes that’s true, a man has converted to Christianity. He’s being tried in one of our courts,” Supreme Court judge Ansarullah Mawlavizada told the Middle East Times.

Then Vice President George H. Bush:

“I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.”

Gee, can’t imagine public service without faith Mrs. Harris?

I sure can.

In fact, it would be a safer world without it.

With all the crap going on in political cricles, do we really have the next election to look forward to as a way to clear things up?

More where that came from

And if you object to that, there is always this:

Tom Green County commissioners gave extra preparation time Saturday to a group proposing a faith-based prison in San Angelo.

The new management team of Dallas-based Corrections Concepts asked for at least two months to prepare more detailed financial information on the project. The commissioners did not set a timetable

Some days, I wish I were the mouse:

A DORMOUSE called Mickey got high after nibbling at the stash of cannabis his student owner hid in his cage.
Police raided the 22-year-old suspected drug dealer’s flat — and found the pot after noticing Mickey lying on his back.
“He was very stoned,” a cop in Mellrichstadt, Bavaria, Germany, said. Mickey is recovering.

The saddest thing about this, is that I am not surprised. Traveling legally, obeying the law, under protection of Federal law, is apparently illegal in New Jersey.
What’s your point? You’se gotta problem wit’ dat?

When Gregg Revell packed his bags for a trip to Pennsylvania last April, he had no idea how far he’d be traveling.
Before the week was out, the 57-year-old suburban real estate agent and grandfather would be arrested, thrown into one of the country’s most notorious jails, strip searched and inoculated against his will. The soft-spoken Utah native would be on his way to becoming a poster child for the National Rifle Association in a $3 million lawsuit.
During a nearly five-day stay in a Newark, N.J., jail, he would meet a terrifying side of America that most Utahns see only on television and briefly would become a jailhouse mentor to drug dealers and violent criminals.

All because New Jersey has a pathological, hysterical, fear of freedom.

I gotta get out of this state.

ASSemblyman Peter J. Biondi, Repugnantican from the Somerset/Morris area of New Jersey, has introduced a bill to forbid anonymous posting on public Internet forums, and to require identification of those that do post.

2. The operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish, maintain and enforce a policy to require any information content provider who posts written messages on a public forum website either to be identified by a legal name and address, or to register a legal name and address with the operator of the interactive computer service or the Internet service provider through which the information content provider gains access to the interactive computer service or Internet, as appropriate.

It is clear from this that Biondi is ignorant of current technology that does not involve paper, boots and brown shirts, and that he is ignorant of the needs of free speech in a free society, and is irrelevant to modern society after about, oh, say 1970. Your papers please!

This man is a laughingstock to anyone capable of programming their own VCR, which is all the more sad, considering that VCRs are nearing obsolescence.

Just as Democrats make themselves irrelevant by continuing to call for bankrupt ideological laws on gun control, socialized medicine, and the drug war, so Republicans throw away any credibility they have by promoting clueless ignorance such as this, along with anti-evolution, anti-gay laws. There are many other things these two old parties do to drive away good people of reason, but those are enough to list here.

If this should pass and be signed into law by our fuhrer governor Corzine, NJ would become the butt-pit of free speech, in complete accord with the goals of the federal authoritarian McCain-Feingold act.

Whether or not this passes, I hereby declare this website private. Membership is open only to members species whose genetic code is within 99.01% of the genome of Homo Sapiens. While I realize this is an extremely exclusionary requirement, excluding over 99% of the life-forms on the planet, I believe that this will make for a much more manageable site for the primary readers.

I will also consider auxiliary memberships for non-human sentients that are capable of making a cogent request for membership, in English, via the on-line registration process. I expect such requests to be very few, but none the less, welcome.

via drudge

Via Andrew Sullivan here is a secular Arab-American woman confronting an islamo-fascist on al-Jazeera TV, and ripping him a new one, in defense of western liberal values and condemnation of islamic terrorism and tyranny.

Link to video.

Transcript on jihadwatch:

Wafa Sultan, a psychologist from LA, here speaks with Dr. Ahmad Bin Muhammad, an Algerian professor — this was aired on Al-Jazeera on July 26, 2005. Sultan starts out by asking him why Muslim men become suicide bombers. She speaks plainly about the role of Islam:

Wafa Sultan: [...]In our countries, religion is the sole source of education, and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched. He was not born a terrorist, and did not become a terrorist overnight. Islamic teachings played a role in weaving his ideological fabric, thread by thread, and did not allow other sources – I am referring to scientific sources – to play a role. It was these teachings that distorted this terrorist and killed his humanity. It was not (the terrorist) who distorted the religious teachings and misunderstood them, as some ignorant people claim.

When you recite to a child still in his early years the verse: “They will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off,” regardless of this verse’s interpretation, and regardless of the reasons it was conveyed or its time – you have made the first step towards creating a great terrorist…

Astounding. Possibly suicidal. While here in America we have seen very few killing over things like this, or honor killing of women over family honor either, an action this brave and defiant by a woman may be more than some extremists can bear.

I hope she has made provision for security and self defense, though if she lives in California her rights regarding self defense are oppressed by the state. I would rather hear her voice again, than here of her being martyred on the altar of liberal democracy.

Politics is a dirty business, and the Democrats just made it filthier. I do not know what positions Hackett held on any issue. From the article I suspect I would disagree with most of them. But he sounds like a decent, sincere man with good intentions, agreeable to me or not. The Democrats just lured him into working for them and then turned around and committed a political betrayal reminiscent of a minister molesting a choir boy.

Any Democrat with an ounce of integrity or a smidgen of self respect should refuse to donate one dime to the campaign of Sherrod Brown, indeed should work against him. If not for his Republican opponent, then perhaps for a write in campaign for Hackett in the primary or for a third party candidate in the General Election. So far as Schumer and Reid go, they should be ashamed, but then neither of those two hacks have an iota of conscience left in their miserable, cynical, despicable little brains.

Hackett was running against seven-term Akron Democrat Rep. Sherrod Brown in a May primary, with the winner going on to face two-term Republican Sen. Mike DeWine in November (assuming DeWine wins his own primary against a longshot Republican challenger). DeWine is considered one of the most vulnerable incumbent Republicans, and the national Democratic Party is pulling out the stops to defeat him.

With Brown, a party insider, on board, the Democratic establishment quickly began pulling away from the fiery Hackett. Schumer, after having wooed him in August, called again in October. “Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive,” Hackett told me at the time. “But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do.” Hackett, a maverick who relishes the fight, decided to buck the Beltway insiders, and stay in the race.

Kevin over at the smallest minority has a gobsmackingly good post up on the reasons for poverty and violence in our underclass. He finds parallels between what is happening here and in the UK. His thinking matches my own in many respects, so closely it is scary. Rather long, but meaty and well worth the time. And done far better than I could have done.

A quote from the middle of the piece:

So, after decades of knowing that education has no economic value, and further decades of lack of employment opportunity, what is the result? A population that is willfully ignorant, desperately poor, generally promiscuous, disillusioned and angry and willing to use whatever drugs are available to escape (however briefly) their reality, but not willing to study or work to escape permanently, now that the opportunity actually exists.

They are also often violent. These characteristics are shared by both the American and British underclass. The biggest difference? The British underclass doesn’t kill anywhere near as often. Gun control enthusiasts point to that differential and claim that it proves that “gun control works,” but they always neglect to consider that homicide in Britain has always been a fraction of that in the U.S., even when neither country had any gun control laws.

Again, it’s a matter of culture: killing, in Britian, just isn’t “cricket.” Never has been. But beating people bloody seems to have gained a lot of popularity since the weapons laws were implemented. However, for immigrant Jamaican gangs, violence is just part of the business of dealing drugs, so much of the lethal violence in Britian is committed by - and often on - these immigrants. Culture, again.

Read, read and then read again.