Still deadlining. Picked up a couple more small assignments over the weekend. Sanity retreats again — but I shall chase it down and catch up with it!
- Dogs (and not wolves) use humans as tools. Every dog person knows that; now scientists do, too. (Tip o’ hat to MLS.)
- Yes. Really. The border fence is to keep the Mexicans IN.
- Methodists (good for them) demonstrate against private prisons. Would you like your state to make a deal with CCA guaranteeing to keep all its prisons at 90% occupancy for 20 years?
- Microsoft cautiously and wimpily begins to back away from CISPA.
- The consequences of printing money that nobody wants.
- Physicians aren’t just opposed to Obamacare; some are organizing to develop a “bottom-up,” market-driven alternative. Big meet this weekend.
- In news you can use, Survival Mom by Lisa Bedford is a seriously good book (and sometimes an amusingly good book) for anyone whose preparedness plans include children, elders, or pets — dependents of any sort.
Dogs are slow learners. 15-30 thousand years? Cats evolved humans into thumbs in just 9,000:
http://carlbussjaeger.blogspot.com/2011/05/if-cats-had-thumbs.html
Privatize everything, including prisons. State power is the issue here: it fills the prisons in the first place, and forbids competition between prisons.
And if a 90% capacity guarantee is written in the contract, the guilt for imprisoning nonviolent criminals still rests with the state–the businessman has not initiated force against anyone.
“both species hunt primarily by outrunning their prey”
It’s hard to take someone seriously when they start out with such blatent falsehoods.
My insurance recently stopped paying for chiropractic care at all. This is bad, because without regular adjustments i start getting dizzy spells so bad I can’t even talk straight, so my chiropractor and I had to have a talk about payment options, and he said he’d be perfectly willing to let me pay with stuff from my garden!!! Take that, Obamacare!
PS: I will gladly donate my unused commas to the author of that Obamacare article in order to make it more readable.
Ellendra: “It’s hard to take someone seriously when they start out with such blatent falsehoods.”
It’s S/c/i/e/n/t/i/f/i/c/ Socialist American; it’s pretty tough to take them seriously anyway.
But yeah, that doesn’t sound like someone with much exposure to human or canine* hunters. Or a decent dictionary: most predators seem to prefer running down prey rather than out-running it (the Holy Grail bunny being a possible exception, depending on which class you want to put it in).
* Sure, dogs run down prey, but at least half the time what I see is a short mad dash once the prey moved into range.
That dog article seems to assume that dogs are domesticated wolves. “Sometime between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago, probably in the Middle East, the long, protracted process of domestication began to alter the genetic code of the wolf, eventually leaving us with the animals we know and love as domestic dogs.” Are the researchers unaware that there were and apparently always have been such things as wild dogs, distinct from wolves?
Still are, for that matter. I’d have been more interested to see the results of an experiment running the same kind of tests on wolf pups and wild dog pups. The difference in performance between wolves and domestic dogs was pretty predictable. Wolves aren’t stupid, they just don’t use humans. This is news?
Here is a link for everyone to click on and ponder:
U.S. Troops In Neighboorhood Streets Fully Armed
http://libertarianreview.us/2012/04/30/u-s-troops-in-neighboorhood-streets-fully-armed/
Cheers,
Tom
Nathaniel — Do you really believe that, in joining with the state to take taxpayers’ money to imprison (among others) people who have victimized no one, “the businessman” — in this case a particularly nasty corporation — has not initiated force?
Actually, Joel, if I understand correctly, domestic dogs are descended from wolves and are close genetically to wolves than they are to either coyotes or wild dogs. I could be wrong, but I think that’s the latest finding.
Speaking of dogs… here’s a great story about a blind dog with seizures who found a cure in a new friend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fVDC_vQV1NM
Claire: It seems to me that he’s initiating force to approximately the same extent as people who contract with the government to build airplanes or roads.
Perhaps I oversold my case. The businessman is clearly a crony capitalist (at some level), but the correct response is to condemn the state that makes crony capitalism possible, not to condemn capitalism.
To be clear, I’m only disputing this sentence:
“Methodists (good for them) demonstrate against private prisons.”
This suggests you have a general distaste for capitalism when it comes to prisons. I’m arguing that the CCA’s success while being bad is primarily caused, directly or indirectly, by the state.
Nathaniel — Sorry I’m not very good at being correct. But I’m also not condemning capitalism.
However, I don’t believe that a private company that puts harmless people behind bars is on par with companies that build roads or airplanes. (Although it might be on par with those that build military airplanes if the company involved knew its planes were going to be used to attack innocent people.)
Thanks for the clarifications. In Libertopia, we might agree (though I expect there’d be scant use for prisons in Libertopia). Here in the real world, we may just have to agree to disagree.
Well, I have a problem when someone guarantees at least a 90% occupancy rate for prisons. It would encourage judges to have that kind of a conviction rate as a minimum whether or not someone was guilty or not.
Nathaniel, please consider these two bits, especially the last link:
“… Once upon a time, people used to settle their grievances privately, using tribal chiefs, third-party solons with appropriate reputations or simply concluding agreements among themselves with the threat of clan force hanging over the negotiations. It was better to settle, for the most part, than to expose oneself to violent consequences unto the sixth generation.
Thousands of years of building up a delicate system of private justice – including the threat of vendettas, duels, etc. – has been lost in the past several hundred years with the unfortunate rise of state-sponsored justice and British style “common law.”
There is, however, a REAL body of common law that people can recover if they choose to and it is one that will doubtless become more accessible on the Internet as time goes on – no matter how the elites try to retard such knowledge.” …
http://thedailybell.com/3542/Megauploads-Planned-Music-Locker–Example-of-Private-Justice
“… we’ve written a series of articles about private justice and claimed that the current state-run justice system in the US and the West is simply one more elite dominant social theme on its way to collapse in this Internet era.
We’ve also written that the “state-run justice meme” will be one of the last to collapse because it is one of the most important and heavily promoted. Most people simply cannot conceive of a justice system that takes place in the absence of a state intermediary.
Of course, hundreds of years ago people would not have been able to conceive of the system that is in place now.” …
http://thedailybell.com/3374/Is-It-a-Prison-Planet-One-Out-of-Three-Now-Face-Arrest-in-US
Jim B., is that not how the prison industrial complex is run now?
“encourage judges to have that kind of a conviction rate as a minimum whether or not someone was guilty or not.”
If you don’t think it’s already that way, spend some time at William Anderson’s Archives, for starters:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson-arch.html
Clark: I’m definitely on board with private law — Hans Hoppe and Bob Murphy (among others) are convincing.
In the wild living wolf and the human using dog article, I am sensing a similarity between freedom loving humans and “sheeple”. If there is a DNA test to differentiate between wolves and dogs, perhaps this is why the Borg want to record the DNA of everyone. Prelude to culling the herd of wolves.
Perhaps I read too much sci-fi.