Posted by: Old Grouch in Meta at 16:26:23 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 22:18:34 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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David Kirkham:

As fast as we can put up these Matheson = Pelosi signs they tear them out...  Every morning I drive by and the Republican signs are knocked over and I pound them back in.  Someone has a special dislike for the Matheson = Pelosi signs as they are invariably STOLEN.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 16:10:40 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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From Patrick, LabRat, Old NFO, and (for the psycho) Stingray.

And Brigid has a tale of ghosts.  And another of Zombie Spiders.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 15:30:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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When it comes to wasting police time, the biggest offenders appear to be...the police.  That, at least, appears to be the conclusion of the Home Office.  Its official statistics, published today, show that while police stopped over 100,000 individuals last year to “prevent acts of terrorism,” there was not a single arrest for a terror offence as a result of these stops.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 22:12:10 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Where do you go to vote out the CPSC? Or OSHA? Or the EPA?
 
Or any of the rest of the acronyms uncountable drowning America in alphabet soup. “We the people” has degenerated into “We the regulators, we the bureaucrats, we the permit-issuers”.  “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts of civilized society.  But today we’re all ignorant of the law, from the legislators who pass the laws unread to li’l ol’ you on the receiving end.  How can you not be?  Under the hyper-regulatory state, any one of us is in breach of dozens of laws at any one time without being aware of it.

...more and more of the elites [are] drawn from a narrow class of extremely well-educated people from a handful of metropolitan areas, few of whom have ever, say, been responsible for a profit and loss statement, or tried to bring a gas station into compliance with local and federal EPA regulations.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:53:39 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Karl Denninger:

Our society relies on the general premise that you can walk from the grocery store door to your car, and from your car into your apartment, in reasonable safety. That's part of the unwritten social contract that binds all of us together.

Nobody passed a law to make it thus - those laws were all passed for other reasons (e.g. "no murdering, no raping, no pillaging") - but the general agreement among the population that these laws apply to everyone, and the people who disobey them will be punished, is why you can, in fact, walk from your car to your apartment with a reasonable expectation that you'll get there without any extra holes added to your body.

If this element of reasonable expectation is lost, we have instant madness.

Once the population gets into its head that the very legal code that says you can't steal someone's house by lying about debts in court only applies to them, and not to banks, we're not far from the general population deciding that the rest of the law doesn't apply either - and if the banks aren't going to play it legal and straight neither will they.

Society cannot survive in its present form if that decision is taken by even a tiny percentage of the population.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 23:27:52 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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at Sinfest. Glad to see that Albert hasn’t lost his touch.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 22:14:30 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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As I recall, the original Tea Party was open to anyone. All you needed for admittance was anger.

There was one other requirement - you needed to be a patriot, too…

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:23:13 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Public Optimism in U.S. System of Government Hits a 36-year Low.

(via Insty)

RELATED, later (101028):

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:39:16 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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