not with a bang but with a wimper

www.steynonline.com/6505/piper-lament

..." Because if you won't push back against the small-scale stuff, by the time they come for the big things you'll no longer know how to rouse yourself. In old, settled societies, tyranny starts at the edge and works its way inwards. And the essence of tyranny is its capriciousness. It's easy to say, "Well, I don't go to bake sales, so what do I care?"

Every day in this country tyranny's whimsy descends on some law-abiding person out of the blue. You buy an imported vintage car, and you wake up with Homeland Security agents surrounding your home and confiscating your property. This weekend it was two of my fellow Granite Staters - 17-year-old Campbell Webster and Eryk Bean, of Concord, New Hampshire.

Instead of enjoying meth and twerking like normal well-adjusted teens, they like bagpipes. Master Webster comes from a long line of bagpipers: his father Gordon was pipe-major for the 1st and 2nd Batallion the Scots Guards and personal piper to the Queen. So he passed on the 1936 family bagpipes to his son, and young Campbell uses them to play in pipe championships in North America and around the world. So this weekend he was returning to New Hampshire from a competition in Canada, which is how a newspaper story comes to open with a sentence never before written in the history of the English language:

BAGPIPERS have expressed their fear over a new law which led to two US teenagers having their pipes seized by border control staff at the weekend.

They can chisel that on the tombstone of the republic. On the northern border, bagpipers are "expressing their fear", while on the southern border gangbangers have no fear and stroll through the express check-in. Putin has no fear of American power, the mullahs have no fear of American power, the Chinese politburo has no fear of American power, ISIS has no fear of American power, but the world's bagpipers fear it, and with good reason."...

Meanwhile, over in Europe:

..."On the eve of the Great War, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed: "The lamps are going out all over Europe."

Today the lamps are going out on liberty all over the western world in a more subtle and elusive and profound way. The rest of the west doesn't have a US-style First Amendment. British Commonwealth countries have robust instruments of freedom going back to Magna Carta; Continental Europe has a rather more erratic inheritance, but they are supposedly supporters of things like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, a lot of them are far too comfortable with the proposition that in free societies it is right and proper for the state to regulate speech. For example:

~ The response of the EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security to the Danish cartoons crisis a couple of years ago was to propose a press charter that would oblige newspapers to exercise "prudence" on, ah, certain controversial subjects.

~ The response of Tony Blair's ministry to the problems of his own restive Muslim populations was to propose a sweeping law dramatically constraining free discussion of religion.

~ At the end of her life, Oriana Fallaci was being sued in her native Italy and in Switzerland, Austria and sundry other jurisdictions by groups who believed her opinions were not merely disagreeable but criminal.

~ In France, Michel Houellebecq was sued by Muslim and other "anti-racist" groups who believed opinions held by a fictional character in one of his novels were not merely disagreeable but criminal."...

www.steynonline.com/6499/darkness-falls

..."The FDA discussed whether a label should have one column of nutrition information or two columns — to enable “per serving” listing as well as “per package” totals. Or “per mint” in place of “per serving.”

The proposal discusses whether items are packaged or wrapped as a group and whether there is additional wrapping of each item to be consumed.

Perhaps most importantly, the FDA proposes “to redesignate § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(F) as § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(E), redesignate §101.9(b)(2)(i)(G) as § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(F), redesignate § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(H) as § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(G), and redesignate § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(I) as § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(H), because the proposed rule would remove current § 101.9(b)(2)(i)(E).”

There is no mention of how many federal workers took part in the 17-year effort or"...



Read more: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/6/...t-on-/#ixzz39llbYzyy
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Earlier I saw a story where federal employees said they were watching porn instead of working because there wasn't enough to do. Maybe it would be better if the Feds went back to the porn sites instead of harrasing Americans.

FredHayek wrote: Earlier I saw a story where federal employees said they were watching porn instead of working because there wasn't enough to do. Maybe it would be better if the Feds went back to the porn sites instead of harrasing Americans.

Precisely.


" "But there's a bright side to this. While they're surfing for porn or shopping online etc, they're NOT plotting against us. Not auditing our taxes, not working to shut down power plants, not investigating churches, devising unworkable health care ideas, not harassing landowners over swampy places on their farms, ..... you get the idea. At least they're only wasting the money spent on their salaries and not making life worse for others. " "

www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsgs.aspx?su...ze=50&batchtype=Next

mymountaintown.com/forum/6-the-courthous...-work-for-misbehavio

Hadn't considered the pluses of the govt watching porn instead.

I wonder if the legislature has been watching porn? They haven't done anything.