Slamland 2

Lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown refused to allocate state funds for an early presidential primary. This is from the LA Times and the discussion is here.

We bought a ticket in the nosebleed section because Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature refused to spend an estimated $100 million for a separate presidential primary early in the nominating process

Instead, they combined presidential balloting with the regular state primary on June 5, long after the Republican nomination surely will have been nailed down, most likely by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

That means Republican voters in the nation’s most populous state will probably have no voice in whom the party nominates for president. They can only shout a meaningless cheer or catcall. — Los Angeles Times

— Wait a hold it! Full tilt STOP! —

What’s wrong with this picture? There is no provision in the US Constitution for primary elections! Primary elections only provide the means to falsely propagate the the tyranny of the two-party system. Why should any state support ANY primary with scarce tax dollars? Each party should have and fund its own primary, should they even need one. I challenge anyone to find one sentence, in the US Constitution, that supports the concept of primary elections!

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

An article on the LA Times brings up the case of a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. The comments are here. This is a case, one among very many, that argues against the Death Penalty.

In short, this is the case of a prosecutor so eager to crank up his ‘win’ record that he sent the wrong man to prison, fully knowing that he was the wrong man! He then tried to destroy evidence that he did so.

In detail the prosecutor’s office, withheld exculpatory evidence and when ordered to save and seal the evidence. When the envelop supposedly containing was opened, the evidence, contrary to court orders, was not there.

Mike Davis, the former assistant district attorney, was also compelled to testify.
According to a transcript, Davis blamed lead prosecutor Anderson for withholding evidence.

Of course, Anderson claimed innocence. In the meanwhile, the actual perpetrator lived free. Is Michael Morton going to be compensated for the 25 years of his lost freedom? What about his future? He is unemployable now, he has no pension, no social security, and is now too old to recover from this life-injury. The reality is that his life was stolen from him and ruined for the sake of a lawyer’s ambition. Someone owes this man large!

Rant

While this is an egregious case, it is only one among a large and dark cloud of such cases hanging over the American legal system. Prosecutors are allowed to attack anyone with complete impunity and they are rewarded for their zealousness by promotions (Anderson is now a judge) and political perks and powers while enjoying complete immunity for their actions. The system is corrupt!

I once believed in the Death Penalty but that is when I still believed that the legal system was infallible. How many of the many in Texas that were executed when they were actually innocent? It is unfortunate that we cannot un-execute a person. It is better to imprison them for life.

Prosecutors need to be made liable for their zealousness as well. Misconduct needs to be be met with mandatory prison time, in the General Prison Population! When they lose, they should lose their jobs as well.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

The LA Times had an article that I commented on. It was about an Ad Hoc desert community. When your unemployment runs out, what are you to do? These folks are basically homeless but they survive.

During World War II, the Slab City site was Camp Dunlap, a Marine artillery training base. But ownership of the acreage passed to the state in the 1950s.
Even when it had money, the state government never showed much interest in Slab City. A plan to sell the site to a San Diego developer in the 1990s fell through; so did an idea by Imperial County to turn it into an RV camping ground. – LA Times article

Let’s face it, the Western US has more land than it knows what to do with. Yes damnit, California land prices are greed driven and not market driven, even now. 

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Yet another LA Times article, this one is about Prop 8.  The discussions are here.

It looks like it isn’t over yet. But the court is correct, it is about the initiative process and Prop 8 is a California Constitutional Amendment. This is serious stuff! However, I am confident that it will be overturned on US First Amendment grounds.

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Since the arguments for Prop 8 are solely religious in origin, prop 8 is clearly "respecting an establishment of religion" and prohibits "the free exercise thereof".

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

You haven’t seen me make a Polyticks post for a while. I apologize. This is mostly because the blood-sucking Ticks in DC disgust me, as do most parasites.

The recent Occupy Wall Street movement has largely left me puzzled. Yes, I am well aware of the disparity that they complain about but between their inability to articulate and the incoherence of most of the media on this issue, the language of the issue is chaotic at best.  The one that brought it into focus for me was Gonzolo Lira.

Unlike GL, I am a Constitutional Conservative and not a moral conservative. Morally, I am as liberal as they come, which still leaves me as a hard-right anti-socialist. I am an anti-religious conservative and reject all the religiously moral arguments of the neo-conservative right, like the Tea Party. In my opinion, the Neo-Cons are preachers in Polyticks¹ suits; politically and economically, I am a pragmatic centrist.

On the surface, it sounds class-war-ish but it isn’t, exactly. True, the 1 percent are at the top of the wealth pyramid but it is not their wealth that puts them there. It is the corporate assets that they control and through that control, they also control political assets. In short, they’re the ones that really run the US and that’s been a known fact since the fifties, the eighteen-fifties.

     There is a revolving door between One-Percenters in the government and the private sector—so the former government employees make it a point to “help” the private sector One-Percenters, at the expense of the public good. Think of the Obama health care “reform”—which helped no one, save Big Pharma and Big Med.
     There is zero chance that a One-Percenters who breaks the law will go to prison. He can put toxic substances in food production, inject toxins into groundwater to get at some oil, bankrupt a pension fund, steal and cheat people out of their homes—and there’ll be no consequences insofar as the law is concerned.
     The things he might have done might be immoral—they might be despicable—they might even be outright wicked and evil: But they are not “illegal”—because the One-Percenters change the laws by way of their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and thus never do anything “illegal”. They only do things which are immoral, and wrong—and thus not subject to legal punishment. – Gonzalo Lira

I disagree with GL when he calls them Corporatists. They were around long before there were corporations. The old word, ‘Monopolist’, fits them better, its modern incarnation is Oligarch. In the days of the American Revolution, they were called Aristos and there was much less separation between their money and political power. Regardless of what we may call them, they are the privileged 1% that runs the US and through the US, the world.

As Al Gore accurately put it (and trust me, my skin is literally trying to crawl off my flesh as the reptilian part of my brain reacts to me praising something that Al Gore, of all people, has said), the Occupy Wall Street movement is basically a primal scream of democracy. – Gonzolo Lira

Actually, like it or not, there is nobody that is 100% wrong, even Old Woodenhead Gore. In this case, the scream was so primal that a dunce would have missed it. However there may be just cause in the scream, the real problem is about what we can do about it. Every thinkable solution is loaded chuck full of poison pills.

1. Poly= many + Tick=blood-sucking parasite but then politicians and preachers are both a species of parasite. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

A family of seven, who remain unnamed, are about to lose four of their children for no other reason than that they are too fat.

The couple have not committed any crime and are not accused of deliberate cruelty or abuse. Their solicitor, Joe Myles, said there was ‘nothing sinister lurking in the background’ and accused social workers of failing to act in the family’s best interests.

Actually, nowhere in the article or subsequent research can I find any hint that these people have been convicted of any crime at all. The children are being taken strictly on Council Authority and without any detectable Due Process at all.

The couple and their children also had to adhere to a strict 11pm curfew. This involved ‘clocking’ in and out by filling in a sheet held by an employee who lived on site.

Basically, the family was placed into custody in a Council home. The only thing missing was the barbed wire but it is still a prison with live-in guards. They have still not been charged with any crime.

Her solicitor said he planned to use independent experts to prove that the children want to live with their parents and have been damaged by the social workers’ intervention. He added: ‘We may ultimately look towards human rights laws.’

No shit! Human rights my ass, this is a civil rights issue here! However, they obviously have no civil rights in the UK. The UK is not a free country. Those of you anglophiles who think that the UK does things right, take heed. No country that behaves like this can call themselves free.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Ref: Explanation of Green House Gases, by William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

The religion of Climate Change

The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I can agree with this statement. This article shows extensive research into the  [lack of] science in the Global Warming debate. He properly mentions the  Medieval Warming period (1000AD), which was promptly followed by Little Ice Age. He makes a credible argument for  the cause/effect relation to be the opposite of what the church of global warming claims. That changes in global temperature lead changes on atmospheric CO². This is backed up by ice core data that includes approximately the last million years.

The existence of the little ice age and the medieval warm period were an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel. The organization charged with producing scientific support for the climate change crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record.

In law, this is known as a Smoking Gun and it is well documented. It is basically rewriting the data to fit the desired outcome. The report that documents this is A. W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion.

Indeed, the computer programs that produce climate change models have been “tuned” to get the desired answer. The values of various parameters like clouds and the concentrations of anthropogenic aerosols are adjusted to get the best fit to observations. And—perhaps partly because of that—they have been unsuccessful in predicting future climate, even over periods as short as fifteen years. In fact, the real values of most parameters, and the physics of how they affect the earth’s climate, are in most cases only roughly known, too roughly to supply accurate enough data for computer predictions.

I’m only a Computer Engineer but I know computers, their software, and what they can do, very well. If a simulation cannot predict near-term trends with any reliability then it certainly cannot be trusted to predict long-term trends. At best, it indicates a fault in either the systems, the heuristics, or the algorithms. In this case, the claim is made that the models were “tuned” to fit the desired answer. This is something that I have long suspected.

A key systemic fact is that all computers are deterministic in nature. Once input A is given then output B will always result. The same input data will always get the same result. If it doesn’t then there is a fault with the system or there exists some randomized input values, which indicates modified inputs. The key point is that current data processing systems, no matter how complex, have to be predictable or the result cannot be trusted.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

I am posting to the thread on the recent DEA statement on marijuana not having an acceptable medical use. It quickly morphed into a drug legalization debate. The entry I like best is

Slamlander at 05:58 AM July 12, 2011

Dihydrogen Monoxide has no acceptable medical use either and it is not on any drug schedule. It is highly addictive and has withdrawal symptoms that always result in death. Taken in excess, it can also result in death, more certain than marijuana. In fact, iut is 1000 times deadlier than heroine. Its potential for abuse is enormous.

Dihydrogen Monoxide is also known as a Universal Solvent and can dilute and carry in solution almost any other substance, both organic an inorganic. An overdose of Dihydrogen Monoxide kills by dissolving and leeching out the minerals in the body. The sufferer enters a coma and dies. there is no known treatment for  massive Dihydrogen Monoxide overdose.

Why isn’t it on the DEA’s Schedule I?

By comparison Marijuana is relatively benign.

I wonder if any of them will catch it

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

New York Legislature passes gay marriage bill

This is actually a major defeat for the Religious Right.

This is also a major victory for Constitutional Conservatives

During the debates on the LA Times forum one commenter mentioned how the US was, as a nation, turning away from God. I have news for them and every other religious nutjob out there; The US turned away from God, as a Nation, the moment that the First Amendment was ratified. The US is a Secular Nation, by law and NOT by God!

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Congress takes aim at 401(k)s

The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis conclude that these retirement planning programs will cost the federal government about $600 billion in lost revenue over the next five years.

Yes, that’s correct and if they succeed, that comes directly from YOUR retirement fund. With the housing crunch, where many people had their retirement¹ , the only thing that they have left is the remainder of their 401(k) . Now the Congress-critters want to take chunks of that as well. They want to reneg on the deal that they made when they fixed Social Security the last time.

A separate study by the Stanford University Graduate School of Business says that the introduction of 401(k)s has had an enormous impact on how people invest in stocks and bonds. At the end of World War II, individual citizens owned 90 percent of the stock market; by 2006, they owned only 30 percent. The other 70 percent was held by institutions, including mutual funds, insurance companies and pension funds.

Okay, so what? Most folks don’t have the temperament to own stock directly. This is why they are using an Institution.

1. operative word is had here. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.