Splendid Isolation

Tag: Government

Avoiding The Stink

House & Home, Nature

Pigs stink!  News at 11.

Here’s one that made me chuckle:

A farmer has been paid almost £1.5million of public money to stop rearing pigs to allow 5,000 new homes to be built.

The deal is part of a move to reduce the amount of harmful nutrients flowing into waterways in Norfolk and to get house-building moving again, in what is the first deal of its kind.

The pig farm is on either side of the A47 bypass south of Norwich. By closing it down, the reduction in pollution means that officials will be able to grant permission for 5,000 homes elsewhere in the county.

Never mind the reduction in pollution;  just having a pig farm within a mile of a new housing development would render the houses either unsellable, or else priced so low as to be unprofitable to build.

Farms are noisome things, to be sure, and it’s not just pig farms either.  Fully a third of Mr. Free Market’s country estate is almost unusable (well, for my citified nostrils anyway) because of a neighboring cattle farm.  And speaking of city slickers:

Well said.

We Know Better

Food & Drink, Gummint

…saith Gummint, when it comes to just about every human product or endeavor.  Here’s a fresh dose of silliness, from a doctor (another group of busybodies):

Banning junk food won’t stop people eating it, just look at how Prohibition failed! But we DO need new regulations to tackle our poor diet

Oh we do, do we?  So banning won’t work, but the softly-softly approach by regulation will achieve the same ends (cf. gun control Over Here, another catalog of failures).  Let me continue:

How do you feel about being told what to do, particularly when it comes to decisions around your health? — I want to reach for my 1911.

Most of us, I suspect, think we should be left to make our own decisions (and our own mistakes). — Except for doctors, government busybodies and other foul control freaks

But I also think most of us would accept that there are areas where the government should step in and regulate” — errrr no.  Maybe 5% of all human activity might need government oversight, and I’ll entertain arguments from anyone who thinks that 5% is too much.

Anyway, after dealing with the low-hanging fruit (leaded gasoline and cigarettes), Our Good Doctor gets after food.

There’s no way you can ban people from eating junk food — not only is it everywhere but you also have to ensure there are affordable alternatives. — No, “you” don’t.  People would prefer to eat Twinkies instead of carrot sticks or oatmeal bars.  Leave the Twinkies alone.

But there are lots of things that could be done to nudge our behaviour, many of which Boris Johnson planned to introduce before he fell from power. — and not a moment too soon.

These include the end of BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) sales on foods high in fat and sugar — their main purpose, after all, is to make you eat more junk food. You rarely see BOGOF (US: BOGO) offers on fresh veg or fish. — errrr that’s because fresh veg and fish are perishables, hello.

Other plans included a ban on adverts for junk food and sweets aimed at children, online and before 9pm on TV. These measures are popular — a YouGov poll found a ban on junk food adverts before 9pm is supported by 62 per cent and opposed by just 17 per cent — but almost all the anti-obesity strategies Boris loudly promoted have been kicked into the long grass. — because they’re unpopular, stupid and bossy.  Kinda like Boris.  By the way, the same percentage (62%) applies to people who want to reinstate the death penalty in the U.K.  No?

With one in five children now overweight or obese when they get to primary school, and the number of obese adults projected to soon outnumber those of a healthy weight within the next five years, there is a desperate need for action. Yes, ban smoking in the young but we also need to be thinking about diet. — If we’re serious about reducing the number of fat people, why not just shoot them all in the street?  This would be the most efficient (and, by the way, the least costly) option.

And we just know that Gummint is all about efficiency — except in their own dealings, of course.

Let’s rather just shoot them.  On the whole, I’d be happier living among fat people than having Government busybodies peering into my shopping basket.

Not to mention:

 

Anyone else starting to feel peckish?

Do Something To Stop The Bastardy

Gummint, Homeschooling

A little while back I talked about how some refugee family (actual refugees) had fled Germany to homeschool their kids, because the German public school system is like our own, only worse, and they being Christian, thought they could find refuge Over Here and school their children according to their own beliefs and not in the godlessness of the public school system (as prescribed by German law).

So now they’re facing deportation because Gummint.

It’s bad enough that the German government was fucking them over — the State fucking people over has a long and storied tradition Over There — but now our Gummint is fucking them over despite the family not having broken a single U.S. law.

I urge you all to follow this link and sign the HSDLA petition.  Please.

And pass the link on to everyone you know who might support this family.  Every bit helps.

Quote Of The Day

Politics, QOTD

From Glenn Reynolds:

“At some point, the government’s behavior is sufficiently illegitimate that people will start acting outside of the usual channels. We’re getting dangerously close to that point, and our feckless overclass either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or actively wants that to happen.”

He’s talking specifically about the attempt to muzzle Trump for the 2024 election, but in fact you could apply it to pretty much everything they’re doing right now, whether it’s gun control, primary school education, destruction of the oil industry or [fill in the blank].

Broken Neighborhoods

Business, Crime

I was interested, although not surprised, to see this development:

High-end retail shops in California’s iconic Beverly Hills have reportedly begun to shutter their doors amid an epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies.

To be fair, a whole bunch of them had already closed because of California’s stringent WuFlu lockdown a couple years back.  But this latest “epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies” is absolutely the fault of the politicians and the voters who put them there.

Yup:  being soft on crime, whether allowing overt riots of the BLM genre or having the “shoplifting isn’t really a crime” mindset, can only lead to more and yet more lawlessness — something you’d think would be blindingly obvious to the dumbest of the dumb.

Clearly, Californians fall even below the above definition.

Let Beverly Hills sink — and the rest of that poxy state along with it.

Mixed Reaction

Government Thugs

I’m going to tread very carefully around this one:

An agent with the IRS is dead after being accidentally shot by another agent during a training exercise Thursday at a federal gun range, according to officials.

Arizona’s Family reports a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incident occurred at its gun range in the Phoenix area. The gun range was reportedly being utilized by multiple federal agencies at the time of the shooting through an interagency agreement.

Here are my thoughts on this rather touchy topic.

If this kind of training tragedy befalls actual federal law enforcement agencies  (FBI, DEA, Secret Service, etc.) then I am truly sorry, and mourn their loss.

But far as all the other federal alphabet agencies (IRS, DoE — Education or Energy — BLM, etc.) are concerned:  I don’t care.  They shouldn’t be armed in the first place, and therefore have no business being around a federal firearms training facility.

My reason for saying this is quite simple:  what the federal government has been doing for the past seventy-odd years is turning misdemeanors or regulatory infractions into federal crimes, and ordinary citizens into criminals every chance they get.  But for all that, the latter agencies are not law enforcement departments, as much as the government would like them to be such.

Let me get specific.

It is a totally abhorrent idea that the IRS — who are nothing more than a bunch of accountants and debt collectors — should be sending their agents to get firearms training (on the use of, lest we forget, full-automatic firearms).  Who are they going to use those guns on?  And don’t insult me with the “self-defense” argument:  we ordinary folk aren’t allowed to use automatic rifles and machine guns to protect ourselves;  why should these jumped-up bureaucrats get special treatment?  Let’s be honest:  when an IRS agent is issued with an actual assault rifle — that would be a full-auto rifle, not some semi-auto AR-15 — it’s not to protect himself or his home from rampaging tax delinquents, it’s most likely because he’ll be ordered to storm someone else’s home or place of employment (that would be the very definition of “assault”).  And by the way, that’s the job of the FBI, not the bean-counters.

So no:  as much as I feel the suffering and loss of this agent’s life for his family, the plain fact of the matter was that he had no damn business being there in the first place.

And the fact that he was there is entirely the responsibility of the federal government.

By the way, should any of the alphabet agencies read this, you should know that my opinion in this is probably the mildest you’ll encounter among the vast majority of the population.  Out there, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the popping of champagne corks.  The federal government offers little comfort to the population of this country;  they should expect little in return.

Update:  both in Comments and by email, Readers take issue with my stance on the Dept. of Energy not needing guns, in that they have to guard installations like nukes and other such power plants.

No.

If those installations are so important to the national security (and they are), they need to be guarded by the military and not by the paramilitary.  The point is that the military is Constitutionally restricted in terms of its deployment (against citizens), whereas a paramilitary force isn’t.  I’d rather that power be held by the Army (and therefore by Congress) than by a bunch of bureaucrats.