Filed under: Domestic Policy, News of the Weird, Politics, Statism | Tags: Credit Card Companies, Moms Need Co-signers, Regulation and Red Tape
Oh dear, those wise elites in government really don’t think the ordinary folk who pay their salaries are very bright. They are so anxious to protect us from ourselves. Lawmakers apparently believe that Visa, Mastercard and Discover and might not have the incentive to properly manage their own credit risk. If not aided by new regulations from Congress, people might run up more debt than they could repay — like the elected officials who have run up the national tab by$1.2 trillion just this year.
The Federal Reserve Board has issued the specific regulations called for in the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (CARD). I love the way the acronym comes first, then they figure out the name. The name is a little odd for a regulation that prohibits private companies from acting independently.
Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth Duke declared the new rules to be a milestone in the effort to ensure that consumers who rely on credit cards are treated fairly.
It’s that old bugaboo “consequences.” The law is widely interpreted as prohibiting millions of stay-at-home-moms, and stay-at-home-dads from obtaining credit cards of their own. The “ability to pay” regulation requires credit card applicants to have an independent source of income to open an account or else find a co-signer.
(a) General rule. (1)(i) Consideration of ability to pay. A card issuer must not open a credit card account for a consumer…unless the card issuer considers the ability of the consumer to make the required minimum periodic payments under the terms of the account based on the consumer’s income or assets and current obligations.
(ii) Reasonable policies and procedures. Card issuers must establish and maintain reasonable written policies and procedures to consider a consumer’s income or assets and current obligations…It would be unreasonable for a card issuer to…issue a credit card to a consumer who does not have any income.
Homemakers actually do most of the household purchases, and over 45,000 of them have signed a petition of protest that has gone to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s really special being regarded as incompetent.
Filed under: Education, Freedom, Law, News of the Weird | Tags: Bureaucratic Control, Massachusetts, School Bake Sales
Common sense triumphs. Massachusetts state lawmakers overturned the ban on school bake sales. The controversial ban’s guidelines also prohibited pizza, white bread and 2 percent milk. Legislators heard plenty from outraged parents.
The theory is an “epidemic” of childhood obesity is threatening the lives of the country’s youngest generation —and that government bureaucrats must decide what foods children should eat and when. Hardly a day goes by without a new article about some bureaucrats somewhere telling people how to live their lives, or parents how to raise their children.
Like this:
Filed under: Law, National Security, News of the Weird, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: Common Sense, Sexual Harassing 6-year Old, Terrorist Babies
— Aurora, Colorado. A six-year-old boy was suspended from school for sexual harassment. First-grader D’Avonte Meadows apparently said the line “I’m sexy and I know it” to a female while he was standing in the lunch line. He didn’t even sing it —”I only said the song,” he told the reporter.
His mother was not pleased. She said she sees things like “fondling, looking up her skirt” as sexual harassment, not quoting an MTV line. “They’re going to look at him like he’s a pervert. And it’s like, that’s not fair to him.” Sable Elementary issued a statement saying it couldn’t discuss the case; but they pointed out a school board policy that defines sexual harassment as any unwelcome sexual advance. There is no age limit.
— Newark, N.J. TSA failed to properly screen a baby for weapons when it was handed from one parent to another during a metal detector walk through. Both parents were screened before leaving for their gate. A TSA official said that police were told that the slip up was a “low-risk factor” given the circumstances of the incident. A short the e later, the TSA personnel realized that the baby had no been checked and began searching for the family.
Port Authority police unilaterally made the decision to evacuate the terminal, sweep the terminal for explosives and re-screen all of the passengers. This, of course, inconvenienced hundreds of passengers and delayed many flights, said the official who was not authorized to discuss the issue by name because of its delicacy.
Is the country being run by a committee? This seems like the work of a committee, they always mess everything up. Terrorist babies indeed.
Filed under: News of the Weird, Russia, Science/Technology | Tags: Recreating an Extinct Species, Russia and South Korea, Wooly Mammoth
Woolly Mammoth Recreation: Wikimedia Commons
Researchers from Russia and South Korea are planning to resurrect the Ice Age woolly mammoth. The scientists signed a deal on Tuesday to share technology and research that could lead to the birth of a mammoth clone, gestated in a surrogate Indian elephant mother.
Mammoth remains were uncovered in thawed Siberian permafrost, and around the world, scientists have been trying to extract DNA from the remains. Paleobiologists previously were able to reproduce mammoth blood protein, and Japanese researchers want to resurrect the mammoth within five years.
This new project will move forward if the Russian institution, the North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic can ship the mammoth remains to the Koreans.
The project would work like earlier cloning studies that successfully reproduced dogs, a cow, a cat, a pig, a wolf and coyotes. The nuclei of mammoth somatic cells would be implanted into the nuclei of donor elephant eggs, to produce elephant embryos with mammoth DNA. The embryos would be implanted then in elephant wombs, where they would gestate for 22 months.
The earlier protein study showed that we can learn much by working with these extinct creatures — the mammoth blood was found to contain an anti-freeze component that no one would have guessed existed.
Woolly mammoths were not significantly larger than today’s African elephants, and males reached around 9 feet. Unlike today’s elephants they had small ears, the largest found are only 12 inches long. The tusks were extremely long, up to 16 feet long, and markedly curved. It’s not clear what the purpose was, they may have been used as shovels to clear snow from the ground and reach the vegetation underneath.
By 1929 the remains of thirty-four mammoths had been found with frozen soft tissues. Only four were relatively complete. Large amounts of mammoth ivory have been found in Siberia. Mammoth tusks have been items of trade for at least 2,000 years. They disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene —10,000 years ago, but an isolated population survived on Wrangell Island until roughly 1700 B.C. Woolly mammoths appear in cave art in Dordogne, France. Mammoth specimens have been found in North Carolina and Kentucky.
I suspect that anyone who saw Jurassic Park would find the cloning effort a little uncomfortable at best.
Filed under: China, Communism, Economy, News of the Weird | Tags: China's Empty Cities, Why Are They There?, Why Were They Built?
Britain’s Daily Mail has satellite pictures of 14 major new cities in China that are essentially— empty. No cars, no people, empty buildings, empty housing. They are ghost towns. Some have been abandoned years after their construction. “Some estimates put the number of empty homes at as many as 64 million, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country’s vast swathes of free land.”They have pictures of 35 empty cities.
A Chinese government think tank speaks of a real estate bubble with property prices overvalued by as much as 70 percent. The article warns of real estate bubbles and increasing prices, but why do prices increase if there are no buyers? I have seen elsewhere a tour of a new Chinese city with no population, fine stores — empty, a whole city, just empty. The suggestion is of housing too expensive for people. In a normal capitalist market, you would just lower the prices to start inhabiting the city, but this is not a normal capitalist country.
Obama has celebrated China’s new high-speed train, yet ordinary people cannot afford to ride it, and it has become a financial catastrophe for the nation. Are these empty cities just a vast infrastructure project providing construction jobs for the unemployed?
The Daily Mail article doesn’t really explain anything. I saw pictures a while back of what was called the world’s largest traffic jam that went on for miles and lasted for days, so there are cars in China in significant numbers.
If anyone can explain this mystery, please comment. It is a puzzlement.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Energy, News of the Weird, Capitalism, Law | Tags: E.P.A., Huge Penalties for Oil Companies, Really Stupid Regulation
A basic theme of liberalism is that big government is better government, because wise people from the better schools can do a more efficient job of managing and regulating the economy, because they’re smarter than the rubes out there with their Bibles and guns. They seldom say it straight out, but it does pop up accidentally every so often.
The powers-that-be have estimated that gasoline prices will rise significantly this summer, and some have suggested that it might be time to dip into the strategic reserve again. The reserve that was called a “reserve” and “strategic” because it was supposed to be there in the event of a real catastrophe. Higher prices may be hard on the pocketbook, but they are not a catastrophe.
One of the reasons that gas prices may be higher this summer is that oil companies will, when they close the books on 2911, have to pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury, because they failed to mix cellulosic biofuel into their gasoline and diesel fuel as required by law. In 2012, the penalties will be even higher. Cellulosic ethanol is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons of biofuel into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.
Trouble is, there isn’t any. Cellulosic biofuel exists in a few laboratories, but not commercially. It doesn’t exist. Small details like that have never stopped the EPA in its bid to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce the country’s “dependence on foreign oil.”
Michael McAdams, executive director of the Advanced Biofuels Association acknowledged that the technology for turning biological material into hydrocarbons is advancing, but not ready for commerce.
Retired Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn who serves on the American Council on Renewable Energy defends the statute. Even if the standards for 2011 and 2012 are not met, he said:
I am absolutely convinced from a national security perspective and an economic perspective that the renewable fuel standard, writ large, is the right thing to do. With oil insecurity and climate change related to greenhouse gas emissions as worrisome as ever, advocates say, there is strong reason to press forward.
Well, not so much. The entire case for a worrisome climate change is falling apart. Climate change appears to be absolutely normal rather than something to worry about. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is far less than it has been in the past, and mostly rises from the seas rather than the tailpipes of SUVs. There has been no warming since 1998, records of temperature have been falsified. We have discovered huge quantities of recoverable oil and gas in shale deposits across the country. What is depriving us of energy and keeping the cost of energy high is President Obama’s war on energy.
The Keystone XL pipeline delays have cost thousands of jobs and millions in economic activity. The president claims that even though it has been approved by every agency involved, it could imperil aquifers in the area, but doesn’t explain why all the other pipelines in the area are perfectly safe. The president delivered a real blow to the economies of the Gulf just when they could least afford it. All of the operators in the Gulf do not need to be shut down because there was a mistake on one rig. The administration has issued a ban on new uranium mining operations in the Colorado River Basin, citing “environmental” concerns. The “environmental” concerns seem to be a threat from Big Environment to withhold campaign contributions.
History shows that the money that individuals and businesses invest and spend, if left alone to do so, generates far more wealth and new jobs than any government-directed spending. The most successful cities and states dedicate their resources to creating the kind of conditions that attract private investment, rather than pouring public money into centrally planned visions of economic development. (Brian C. Anderson, City Journal)
Filed under: Environment, Freedom, Liberalism, News of the Weird | Tags: Plastic Bag Ban, Seattle City Council
The day after Christmas, since I have neither cook nor serving maid, is a day of graceful collapse. Nice family day, good company, good dinner, everybody liked their presents, went home happy.
Seattle is an interesting city. Very Green, in all senses of the word. Lots of trees, lakes, and environmentalists. Home to Grist magazine, and a city council that rivals Berkeley and San Francisco for sheer green goofiness. It was a few years back that they came out in favor of tearing down the dams in the Columbia (the source of Northwest power) to restore “wild rivers”, and then found themselves embarrassed when they took a field trip to the strange land across the mountains and found out how big the dams were and how complex. Oh well.
Now they’re at it again. Three years ago, they tried to impose a 20 cent tax on all plastic bags. That idea was shot down by voters in a referendum, but in this liberal enclave, official bodies have a history of ignoring voter referendums and initiatives.
So, the Seattle city council has imposed a ban on plastic bags and a 5-cent tax on paper bags, joining the nanny-state crackdown that is sweeping the nation. The ban will apply to all grocery, retail and convenience stores. It exempts farmers’ markets where many ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ foods are sold. The ban begins in July 2012.
There will undoubtedly be another referendum. This latest eco-fad is largely based on misinformation, and numerous studies have shown that if the reusable cloth bags are not washed with bleach after every use, they can be dangerous sources of food poisoning.
The whole thing began with a misreading of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland that found between 1981 and 1984 more than 100,000 marine mammals were killed every year by discarded fishing nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags. In 2002, a report prepared for the Australian government by Nolan-ITU said that the Newfoundland study attributed the deaths to “plastic bags.” The report was amended in 2006.
Seattle environmentalists were leaving nothing to chance:
Though why this performance would move anyone, is beyond questionable. The problem with cloth bags is that even well-wrapped meat, produce and dairy products are inclined to leak.
I am really fed up with nanny government in all its forms, and with businesses that have belatedly decided that it is time for them to climb on the green bandwagon. I just bought a box of Diamond matches for lighting fires, candles and my gas stove, and lo and behold, when I opened the box they were “green” matches, made with renewable wood from renewable forests or something like that. Not the familiar red tips with a white cap. The striking part is all green, and doesn’t strike worth a darn. You can’t even light them with the supplied striking side, let alone with a flick of a fingernail — at which I used to be reasonably talented.
Why would I care if the wood ( a whole box wouldn’t add up to a significant branch) comes from “responsible” forests? Are all “environmentalists” city people who live in apartments and think that nature is just wonderful when they walk in the park?
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Media Bias, News of the Weird, The United States | Tags: Every Single Year!, The Evil Media, Worse Than Pardoning The Turkey.
Thanksgiving traditions: Every year the media announces the rise in the cost of the Thanksgiving dinner, with special focus on the per pound cost of the turkey, and how it has been affected by inflation. That is followed by the rise in the cost of Thanksgiving travel by car or air, a discussion of how crowded airports are, miserable highway traffic and a weather report — preferably hazardous.
Why do they do this? Thanksgiving is supposed to be a happy time of family traditions, football rivalries, and gratitude for the blessings of the year. So here comes the news guy who has to work on the holiday and miss dinner? Or is he the fellow who just got divorced and has no place to go? Why is he trying to spoil the day for the rest of us? I find it a little — odd!
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, News of the Weird | Tags: Obama's Very Own Protesters, Obamavilles, Winding Down.
The Portland police have removed the Occupy people from Chapman Square and two other parks where they have been camped, and park service people are swamping out the debris with dump trucks and loaders. As they are cleared, chain-link fences are being installed around the parks to keep them from being reoccupied.
The Obamavilles seem to think that they are accomplishing something but no one really has any idea what they are on about. Lots of vague complaints about student loans, debt, lack of jobs, and the rich and the banks. incoherent indignation pretty much sums it up. Long on indignation, short on accurate information.
As all demonstrations, there are the initial students with raging hormones anxious to express their feelings, and then the socialists, anarchists and communists show up, but other than tearing down the everything, they aren’t very articulate. Cities have made the politically correct mistake of confusing the right to peacefully assemble with the perfectly reasonable idea that you don’t get to camp out in city parks.
Portland has moved people out of the parks, cleaned up after them, and avoided confrontation. A lot of people have offered to help clean up the parks and help restore them.
Salt Lake and Denver have been cleared out, there have been arrests. Sacramento courts affirm that there is no right to camp out all night. More death, more rape.
Time to pack up and go on home.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Liberalism, News of the Weird | Tags: Deep Thoughts at NASA, Scaring the Public, The Great Depression
Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff and Nobel Laureate and liberal hack Paul Krugman attempted to explain recently why Keynesian economics is just the thing to revive a depressed economy. Krugman suggested that a threat of an invasion by space aliens could spur economic activity, then when the economy got going they could say they made a mistake. His comment was meant to point out in humorous fashion that World War II, under the Roosevelt administration, succeeded in ending the Great Depression. So, you see we just need to spend a bunch more money.
Except World War II didn’t end the Great Depression. It did put people back to work. The military swept up a big chunk of young and able men, and factories of all kinds turned to producing military goods, not just for us, but for our allies as well. Factories and shipyards were running 24/7 and people swarmed to the centers where war work was going full blast.
But there were wage and price controls. There was rationing. There were no new cars, and no gas nor tires to make them run. There were no new appliances. Meat, sugar, butter were all rationed. There wasn’t anything much to spend money on, and constant war bond drives helped those who were working to build their savings. When the war was over, and civilian production returned, there was a great outpouring of demand. People needed cars, appliances, everything they had gone without for five years and more. Returning vets needed houses, new babies needed everything that new babies need. That’s when the nation really began to recover, and it had nothing to do with John Maynard Keynes.
But as the Guardian reports, never let a good idea go to waste. Scientists at NASA’s Planetary Science Division and Pennsylvania State University suggest that space aliens might destroy humanity to protect other civilizations. If we don’t reduce our greenhouse gases, it might tip off alien civilizations what a danger we are to the universe. They might just have to step in to take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat.
The highly speculative scenario is one that researchers compiled to help humanity prepare for actual contact. In their report “Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis” they consider three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful. [I hope that with our economy in the tank we're not giving grants for space alien investigation.]
“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.
Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.
Are they suggesting that our carbon dioxide emissions are harming the universe? Affecting life in other galaxies? For space alien aficionados the Guardian article is here. The picture is from Mars Attacks.
Some days it seems like we do live in an alternate universe. The stock market tanks, the unemployment rate climbs, and the president heads off for a luxury vacation in the playground of “the rich” that he demonizes when he’s not vacationing among them. Strange, strange, strange.
Filed under: Freedom, Law, News of the Weird, Politics | Tags: Everyone is At Risk., Federal Criminal Laws, Nobody Knows How Many!
For decades, lawyers, academics and government officials have attempted to count the total number of federal criminal laws. The best attempt was way back in 1982, when Justice Department lawyers undertook the effort as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered around among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law. They were trying to expose the idiocy of the system.
The effort spanned two years, and in the end produced only an educated estimate of something around 3,000 criminal offenses. Subsequent efforts by computer searches didn’t produce a specific estimate.
John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has tried just counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years said:
There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.
Even those who have never attended an auto race, like me, are probably familiar with the name Bobby Unser, three-time winner of the Indianapolis 500. He also survived sub-zero blizzard conditions in the mountains and faced down every challenge until he encountered the U.S. Forest Service.
Uh huh. Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho is a retired logger, a former science teacher and now a federal criminal. In 2009, the 68 year-old Mr. Anderson and his son went hunting for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. They didn’t find any arrowheads that day, but unfortunately they were on federal land. The law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.
The two men, faced with that reality pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got a year’s probation and a $1,500 penalty each.
The Andersons are two of hundreds of thousands of Americans who are charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws — as opposed to state or local laws — as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach. As the laws have increased, it has become ever easier for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many laws set a lower standard for conviction than in the past. Prosecutors don’t necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent.
The first federal criminal statute, signed into law April 30, 1793 listed just a few offenses: treason, counterfeiting, piracy and murder, maiming and robbery in federal jurisdictions. It’s easy for legislators to respond to the cry of ‘We need a law,” and much more difficult to pause and realize that perhaps we don’t really need another law. And when Big Government grows so bloated and intrusive that ordinary citizens become federal felons over something that they had no conception could even be a law— can we whittle down the size of government and particularly the intrusiveness, or are we doomed to all end up in prison?
There are many organizations working on trying to remedy the situation, and several authors have detailed the problem. If you want to see if you are at risk:
One Nation Under Arrest by Paul Rosenzweig and Brian W. Walsh
Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silvergate
Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of almost Everything by Gene Healy
