I posted a different article about this, but here is another one that has new information regarding the incident:
From the article:
Chong, 23, was never arrested, was not going to be charged with a crime and should have been released, said a law enforcement official who was briefed on the DEA case and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Chong told U-T San Diego that he drank his own urine to survive and that he bit into his glasses to break them and tried to use a shard to scratch “Sorry Mom” into his arm.
Chong, 23, was never arrested, was not going to be charged with a crime and should have been released, said a law enforcement official who was briefed on the DEA case and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Chong told U-T San Diego that he drank his own urine to survive and that he bit into his glasses to break them and tried to use a shard to scratch “Sorry Mom” into his arm.
And just a little more:
When he was found on April 25, he was taken to a hospital and treated for cramps, dehydration and a perforated lung — the result of ingesting some of the broken glass. “When they opened the door, one of them said: ‘Here’s the water you’ve been asking for,’” Chong said. “But I was pretty out of it at the time.” Chong also ingested a white powder DEA agents said was left in the cell accidentally and later identified as methamphetamine. He described having hallucinations, saying: “I was completely insane.”
When he was found on April 25, he was taken to a hospital and treated for cramps, dehydration and a perforated lung — the result of ingesting some of the broken glass.
“When they opened the door, one of them said: ‘Here’s the water you’ve been asking for,’” Chong said. “But I was pretty out of it at the time.”
Chong also ingested a white powder DEA agents said was left in the cell accidentally and later identified as methamphetamine. He described having hallucinations, saying: “I was completely insane.”
Nicely done. Speak truth to power. Get it, lady.
Right on. That politician walked right into that one. One could easily replace Al-Qaeda with the United States, in that context, without a distortion of the facts. Well done by that lady by noticing as much (unless, it was planned which is likely) and for staying calm, and continuing her argument as well, while being taken away.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
I can't agree with Code Pink on everything, but I definitely respect their moral consistency on the issue of war and their all-round moxy.
Clayton -
Woah! I didn't notice until you mentioned Code Pink- but that's the same woman that danced at the Jefferson Memorial with Adam Kokesh and friends:
The Hayek Prophecies Trailer
Ron Paul Humiliates Clueless Statists [1-27-09]
Paul's great in this one. What's funny about this one is how he gets hounded as usual, but this time it's from someone actually on his side. Ratigan agrees with him and is sympathetic to his viewpoint, but is clueless as to the implications and the logical prescriptions of Paul's explanation of the situation...so he ends up almost treating him hostilely because he's so desperate for the answer. "We live in the real world. How do we get to your utopia? How? HOW?" Paul keeps giving him the answer but it's just not good enough for him because he doesn't understand it and it sounds more complex and un-do-able than what he wants to hear.
I do love the way the old guy admits 90% of what Paul's talking about is over his head though.
Brian Doherty on Ron Paul's Revolution
The Right to be Forgotten - interesting piece on privacy laws and the "right to be forgotten" from social networking sites, etc. Works well since I'm thinking of deleting and then making another FB page, I don't like how the timeline has archived all that information in a more searchable manner.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/05/eus-top-court-apis-cant-be-copyrighted-would-monopolise-ideas.ars
Um, this is the low content thread, right?
It's hard to not like this guy.
Governor Christie: This Is A Fight I Really Want
Yeah Chris Christie is great.
He's also getting to be morbidly obese from the looks of the things.
"Getting to be"?
He made fun of his opponant during the campaign for not making fun of his weight.
I worry for the guy, being that fat can be a serious health risk. Hope he finds a good nutritionist or something.
Jeffrey Tucker on why Government Hates your Lawn!
Third-deadliest U.S. food outbreak was preventable, experts say Washington (CNN) -- On a sunny morning early last September, Susanna Gaxiola fed her husband a healthy breakfast of fresh cantaloupe in their Albuquerque, New Mexico, home. Her husband, Rene, a Pentecostal pastor and minister, had been fighting a rare blood cancer and he was eating fresh cantaloupe and other fruit daily. Around the same time, Paul Schwarz ate fresh cantaloupe in his home in Independence, Missouri. Though 92 years old, Schwarz was still active and healthy, and ate fresh fruit often. And Dr. Mike Hauser, a podiatrist, also ate fresh cantaloupe with his family in Monument, Colorado. Hauser, 68, had been fighting myeloma, a blood cancer, but he was recovering well, even planning a bow-hunting trip in the mountains. Within days or weeks of eating the cantaloupe, all three men became horribly sick, and all eventually died painful deaths. Their deaths were directly caused by the cantaloupe, which was contaminated with the deadly bacteria Listeria, according to health officials. After a months-long investigation surrounding the outbreak, CNN has found serious gaps in the federal food safety net meant to protect American consumers of fresh produce, a system that results in few or no government inspections of farms and with only voluntary guidelines of how fresh produce can be kept safe. [...]
Third-deadliest U.S. food outbreak was preventable, experts say
Washington (CNN) -- On a sunny morning early last September, Susanna Gaxiola fed her husband a healthy breakfast of fresh cantaloupe in their Albuquerque, New Mexico, home. Her husband, Rene, a Pentecostal pastor and minister, had been fighting a rare blood cancer and he was eating fresh cantaloupe and other fruit daily.
Around the same time, Paul Schwarz ate fresh cantaloupe in his home in Independence, Missouri. Though 92 years old, Schwarz was still active and healthy, and ate fresh fruit often. And Dr. Mike Hauser, a podiatrist, also ate fresh cantaloupe with his family in Monument, Colorado. Hauser, 68, had been fighting myeloma, a blood cancer, but he was recovering well, even planning a bow-hunting trip in the mountains.
Within days or weeks of eating the cantaloupe, all three men became horribly sick, and all eventually died painful deaths. Their deaths were directly caused by the cantaloupe, which was contaminated with the deadly bacteria Listeria, according to health officials.
After a months-long investigation surrounding the outbreak, CNN has found serious gaps in the federal food safety net meant to protect American consumers of fresh produce, a system that results in few or no government inspections of farms and with only voluntary guidelines of how fresh produce can be kept safe. [...]
The article goes on to place blame on lax private certification services (oddly, from the mouth of other private firms as authorities on the subject), low funding for the FDA, claim that the disaster was preventable and naturally mock the capitalist solutions available. The result of the infestation is 30 dead, and 110 people made ill from ingesting Listeria.
First, the FDA has had increased funding for the last few years, its budget increasing by millions if not billions each time; the money's there if they need it. This presence of an agency which has a monopoly on forced inspections understandably reduces the incentive to provide inspection services. Further, there are concerns that the outbreak was caused by pollution from another firm- is this not an indictment of the federal government's capacity for protecting property rights? Nope! This could very well fall within society's optimal quantity of pollution for all we know- I wonder what society's optimal quantity of theft, rape, and murder falls? I'll have to return to this when I find where MSBTheft=MSCTheft.
When's the last time something like this has happened? Did it kill as many as the FDA does regularly? Consider this: beta blockers are reputed -from the FDA itself if I recally correctly- to prevent 250,000 deaths each year from occuring after heart surgeries. It takes about 10-15 years for the FDA to approve a drug for sale in the United States. We do the math and we find that, based on the FDA's own estimates (assuming that they are), the FDA killed anywhere from 2.5-3.75 million people in ten years, at least (this estimate is only for beta-blockers, which are surely not the only drugs being inspected -and withheld from sick patients- by the FDA). This is systematic murder. It's very easy for critics to have 20/20 vision in hindsight; it's a fatal conceit for critics to deduce, from this, that we have 20/20 vision in foresight.
Rand Paul Launches Campaign to End the TSA
And for fun:
The binge drinking machine? Mouth spray that gets you drunk in seconds - but you sober up just as fast
Note that the government also prevented a private company from testing all of its meat for mad cow disease.
Thought this was pretty interesting...
I recently spent some time integrating different concepts I read about into one coherent framework.
In particular I borrowed from Stefan Molyneux’ Universally Preferable Behavior and from Mises’ Human Action. The flowchart below is the result.
It enables you to (at least that’s the idea) categorize any theory someone proposes about Human Action into a proper sub-category.
FBI Wants Backdoors to Facebook, Twitter Immediately
Stephen King wants to be taxed more.
Apparently, he's never read the 1040 Tax Forum Instructions - you can put any amount greater than the amount you owe on your 1040. There's nothing stopping whiny bitches like Stephen King from paying more in taxes. The dishonest thing about this is that he's putting it forward as if he wants more of his money to be taxed when, in fact, he is seeking to have more of other people's money taxed.
Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged.
Government has never been bigger, its revenues and expenditures have never been higher and and our upward mobility has never been so low. Hmm, so the obvious solution is to have more, bigger government.
That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.
I worked out the total cash tax burden by multiply each income quintile with the population within that quintile. The "hump" occurs right in the middle, around $60K/yr. The pile of cash put in by people making around $60K/yr. is much larger than the cash piles put in by the higher and lower quintiles. All the supposedly "progressive" tax policies have done squat to alter this. In fact, I suspect it's arithmetically inevitable. And yet you have idiots like King yammering on about "fair shares" as if they have a clue what they are talking about.
Stephen King, either cut a check or just STFU.
New rage keeps Somali boys off street: video games
What killed Lenin? Stress didn't help, poison eyed
SPIN METER: Lawmakers' talk of cuts is just talk
Nichols says bombing was FBI op
JJ I'm going to have to "steal" that chart for my Tumblr, I seldom post anything political but that chart's pretty awesome (and in turn direct anyone interested here for the source.)
I want to note that I have a gripe with the made-up term "universally preferable behavior". First of all, it's less clear than "ethics" or "morality" which are already muddled words. Preferable by whom? And is it descriptive, as in, this is what people universally prefer? Or is it prescriptive as in "everyone ought to prefer these behaviors"? Is it deontological as in "you have a duty to prefer these behaviors (in yourself) because they are universally preferable" or is it consequential, as in "it is in your best interests that people around you behave this way, therefore, you should prefer that people behave according to UPB"?
Second, the meaning of "universal" is problematic. When evolutionary psychologists talk about human universals, they are clear to explain that they are talking about behaviors that exist in every culture and which are, therefore, indicative of some biological basis in the "hardwiring" of the brain that isn't altered by cultural peculiarities. But what is the exact meaning of the "universal" in UPB??
Finally, it doesn't get to the core fact that morality straddles two domains of study (which is a source of so much of the confusion about morality). On the one hand, it is a branch of aesthetics insofar as morality is an expression of the individual's preferences regarding the decorousness of his own behavior and the behavior of others. On the other hand, it is a branch of praxeology insofar as morality is the study of what people's actual moral tastes are - such study can be culturally universal, as in EP, or culturally-relative as in most of social science.
UPB = yuck, in my book.
^ Just had to pause this at 13:14.. OMG, WHAT?!
I'm not surprised- but when was this?
@Jack Roberts: Wow. That was an amazing talk. Mises is taking over the world.
I've been thinking about exactly what this lecture addresses - how things make us feel is the central study of the science of human action. Economics is merely a better developed subject of study than the other subjects within the larger house of praxeology. The final end of all human action is satisfaction, which is a feeling or state of mind. From this simple observation, most of the edifice of modernity can be seen for the sham that it is.
Clayton:[...] The final end of all human action is satisfaction, which is a feeling or state of mind.[...]
Which is something many entrepreneurs fail to remember (and, I think, parents too).
[...] most of the edifice of modernity can be seen for the sham that it is
What do you mean by that?
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
Modernism is obsessed with the Absolute, the objectivity of value. Numbers in spreadsheets are objective and measurable. So, numbers in spreadsheets are real by virtue of their association with the Absolute, whereas the feelings of the individual are merely an illusion, a magic trick (Dennett).
A lot of this has actually been highly entertaining - especially listening to the crowds reaction to the pro-Romney speakers. And the guys holding the camera have some fun commentary.
Nevada Convention streamed live
If you are gonna be attending your state convention - this is a good learning opportunity of how it can go.
I'm on a Dennett-lecture binge today - I found this lecture to be absolutely fascinating and if you substitute the word "government" wherever he says "religion", it would be pretty intelligible on Rothbardian terms! I think that the tone of Dennett's analysis of religion should be applied to our discussion of the State. We need to begin analyzing how the State really works and try to answer the question how we can turn it to benign ends.
Living free in the free state
More:
Much of what he has to say could be directly applied to the anti-state movement. However immoral and repugnant we can see that the State is, it's here to stay for the time being and it does do things that need to be done. Answering the question "what will replace it" is part and parcel of packaging anti-statism for consumption by the masses.
Freedom4Me73986:Living free in the free state
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Apr 29 2012 2:36 PM: (aka not even a week ago)
John James: Freedom4Me73986. You promised to never post another NH or FSP-related topic on here again. You have broken this promise probably around 10 times or more already. As Clayton has pointed out, this latest one is even a repeat of a previous video of the same dumbass event. Please honor your promise and stop posting this crap that no one even watches. Go live in the woods.
Freedom4Me73986. You promised to never post another NH or FSP-related topic on here again. You have broken this promise probably around 10 times or more already.
As Clayton has pointed out, this latest one is even a repeat of a previous video of the same dumbass event. Please honor your promise and stop posting this crap that no one even watches.
Go live in the woods.
What is your excuse for continuing to break your promise?
John James: What is your excuse for continuing to break your promise?
I would assume that F4M is not a man of his word.