Dave Easterly’s Bravo Sierra Blog

How So-Called Government Regulation “Works”

From a Facebook conversation with a dear friend who happens to be a pro-government liberal, I tried to explain why government regulation never really delivers on the promises to protect consumers, make things better, and make corporations accountable. I know the language is a bit rough, but I hope I made myself clear.

Dave Easterly –
So… let’s say just for the sake of argument that you and I agree _COMPLETELY_ on the utter shittiness of the human race and its complete lack of moral rectitude. And therefore in the absence of a restraining force to prevent them from raping and pillaging and plundering the asses, villages, and treasuries respectively of every other human around them that people will act in the greediest and most foully evil way possible. Doesn’t sound far from the truth, right?

NOW! We have a conundrum because we have very limited possible options here for people to be protected. Let’s say that your suggested approach is option number one.
1) Let the government be responsible for protecting everyone from those in a position to take advantage of them.

Sounds okay to you, right? But wait… Isn’t government made up of… people? Those same greedy animals that are searching for ways to exploit and f**k over every other animal they can find? And now you’ve given them something NEW! You have given them +POWER+!! And they LIKE having it.

So here come the evil business men in their suits and ties to meet with the government bureaucrats in THEIR suits and ties who are given the power to “regulate” them. They meet in fancy buildings with marble floors and nice wooden furniture that’s been paid for by The Mundanes… the plebeian untouchable caste of which you and I are a part. In their fancy buildings we paid for (and after 5:00 in the titty bars and whorehouses where you and I are STILL footing the bill) these people in suits find ways to make their mutually-beneficial arrangements that get called “regulation” which ultimately just ensures that those paying the best bribes and kickbacks get the most favorable advantages in their quest to f**k you and me. Oh, they’ll tell us it’s “for our own good” and “to protect the common man,” but that’s just political theater for the news cameras. Government is even LESS honest and trustworthy and those they’re supposed to “regulate” and the “regulators” usually become the enforcers of the will of the “regulated” rather than protectors of Joe Citizen.

Can I make this any clearer?

Does that about sum it up?

In Praise of Red State Fascism

A letter ran in the local paper praising the same legislation that has made S. Hartgen a nationwide laughing stock. That letter appears here:
This was the response I wrote.

So if Hartgen’s bill were to become law, can I say that I felt annoyed, terrified, threatened, intimidated, harassed, and offended by the comments of the anti-Constitution and anti-Liberty comments of people I disagree with and have the State on my side? If someone threatens me or libels me, there are already laws to deal with it. I’d much rather have the freedom to simply click “Delete” on an email or instant message or click “Back” to navigate away from a comment that offended me and know that others have the same freedom than to rely on the State to “protect” me from what other people think.

It always gets my goat how hyprocritical some so-called “conservatives” are, getting up in arms when something “offends” their delicate little sensibilities by not being in 100% agreement with their narrow world view. They p**s and moan when a few gay rights activists picket a TV station and persuade them not to show a program that spends an entire hour talking about how gays are all going to burn for eternity and how they’re all evil, perverted predators. And yet these self-proclaimed “conservatives” would use the exact same tactics to prevent the broadcast of an opposing viewpoint like that those same people should have the rights and protections of marriage. And then they get upset when their goose-stepping, jack-booted authoritarianism gets called out for what it really is. Well, I have two words for these kinds of people: “STOP IT.” Stop calling yourselves “conservative” because you and your “Limbaugh Leninism” and your “Coulter Totalitarianism” are the very ANTITHESIS of real Conservatism. You don’t _deserve_ the adjective and you’ve distorted and stained that good word with your putrid stench. Stop calling yourselves conservatives and start being honest with yourselves and the world. ANYONE that would support any bill like this isn’t a conservative. You don’t have a right not to be offended by what’s on TV, the phone, or the Internet. You DO have a right to change the channel, hang up, or click to a different site and that is all a decent and mature human being SHOULD need.
Hartgen and his sycophants need to simply grow up and stop crying if their little feelings get hurt.

Again, I doubt it will make it through the filters at the local Ministry of Truth, but we’ll see.

Stephen Hartgen: Is he Idaho’s “new” Larry Craig?

It certainly looks that way… Larry Craig was a huge embarrassment to the Idaho GOP, and as a freshman legislator Hartgen has already ignited nationwide disgust and outrage, but both of these are probably outweighed by outright mockery at how clueless Hartgen (and by association, the Idaho Republican Party) really is.

People that know me know that I’ve considered myself a Republican my entire life until I got acquainted with the Twin Falls County GOP. If they are what it means to be a Republican, then I know I’m certainly NOT one. I guess non-theistic conservative libertarianism just doesn’t have a place in their little clique as far as they’re concerned, and that’s fine with me because the majority of them are people I wouldn’t want to sit down with at the same table anyway. But among ALL of them, I must admit that Hartgen was always the one who epitomized all the wretched and disgusting traits that I found morally and personally reprehensible – even worse than Grant Loebs, and that’s saying a lot.

It seems that when videos of the Twin Falls County GOP convention found their way to YouTube and some anonymous commenter made some very immature and inappropriate comments it hurt Hartgen’s little feelings. What shocked me about the whole thing was how, aside from a few choice expletives, the comment really reminded me of the kinds of things that I had always heard coming out of Hartgen’s mouth about the Ron Paul paleoconservatives that were getting involved with the local party. But I suppose that Hartgen, being the sort of fellow that he is, felt that he should be entitled to protection from having his delicate sensibilities offended. In all honesty, I think _THAT_ is where this whole thing started, but that’s only my speculation based on what I’ve seen and heard from this tax-leeching big-government neoconservative Jacobin New Englander during the time that I was attending the Twin Falls County GOP meetings.

So is he Idaho’s new national embarassment a la Larry “Wide Stance” Craig? Well, it took Craig YEARS in office to become a laughing stock and Hartgen managed to do it in much shorter order. And Craig could actually show some integrity and still come clean and admit his lifestyle, renounce all his past anti-gay rhetoric and voting records, and reclaim some credibility as a human being. I think it’s already too late for Hartgen because he can’t gain any credibility if he were to renounce his own love of big, invasive government, authoritarianism, and all the other traits that make Hartgen one of the most disappointing examples ever of what we send to our Capitol to “represent” us. It would be too little, too late and there’s pretty much no way it could ever seem genuine.

(BTW, I know this is old news [from December] but it had been sticking in my craw and I finally had to just get it off my chest.)

All I can say is… OMFG

Maybe NOW some of my Obamaphile friends will start to get why I’m always talking about why the Federal Reserve, bailouts, “stimulus” plans, and Leviathan government are bad…

The Christmas Day Tragedy

So I think it’s safe to say pretty much everyone knows about the events that happened just North of here on Christmas day… An 11 year old girl named Sage and her 12 year old brother Bear were sent walking in the middle of a snow storm 10 miles to their mother’s house after their father and uncle got their car stuck in a snow drift. The temperature when they set out on the 10 mile hike was in the mid-20s with a wind chill in the low single digits. They found the boy about 11 hours later in a rest area bathroom about 5 miles from where he and his sister started walking, delirious and suffering from hypothermia. A few hours later his dying sister was found partially buried in snow. She had turned back after a couple of miles and wanted to go back to the car but her brother wanted to press on so they went separate ways. The father and the uncle got the car unstuck and did what anyone would expect them to do… They turned around and went back home rather than going after the kids to pick them up and drive them the rest of the way to their mother’s or make sure they had arrived safely. Then after finding out they hadn’t made it to their mother’s they waited another FIVE HOURS to call for help.
Oh? That _ISN’T_ what you would have expected?!? Here is the timeline as reported by our local fish wrapper…

A timeline to tragedy

Dec. 25

9 a.m. – Vehicle became stuck in a snowdrift along West Magic Road, less than a mile from the Idaho Highway 75 turnoff, according to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office.

10:30 to 11 a.m. – Children start walking, according to their uncle and passenger, Kenneth Quintana.

12 to 1 p.m. – The vehicle is unstuck, according to Quintana.

1 to 2 p.m. – Children’s mom, JoLeta Jenks, calls Aragon saying kids haven’t arrived, according to Quintana. Aragon and Quintana drive back to where the children began walking and go on foot to look for them, according to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office.

7 p.m. – A friend of Jenks calls police saying the kids are missing. A Blaine County deputy and a snow plow head out to look for the kids, but they too become stuck after hitting a snow drift and slide off the road, according to the BCSO.

8:30 p.m. – Blaine County Search and Rescue set up on West Magic Road, one mile from the Highway 75, with one vehicle and two snowmobile teams, according to the BCSO.

Also, Quintana says he and Aragon stop their search for the children and meet up with police.

9:50 p.m. – The male child, Bear Aragon, is found in a Bureau of Land Management bathroom, near the intersection of West Magic Road and the Magic Dam Road in Camas County, 4.5 miles from where he began walking. He had hypothermia and was wearing only long underwear, having discarded his jacket, pants and shoes.

10:20 p.m. – Search dogs are deployed to look for the female child, Sage Aragon. The plan was to search from where Bear Aragon was found, back east towards Highway 75, after the boy told authorities he and his sister split up and she walked back to her dad’s car.

Dec. 26

2 a.m. – Sage is found unconscious and hypothermic next to a barbed wire fence on the south side of West Magic Road, mostly covered in snow and barely visible. She was wearing a down coat, black shirt, pajama pants and snow boots, according to the BCSO.

4:15 a.m. – Sage is pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center, according to the BCSO.

They also finally arrested the worthless uncle who was an accessory to this cruel act of murderous neglect. Just coincidentally, he was also busted with meth. Whodathunkit?

Now I’m never one to advocate the intervention of government in family affairs, BUT… When an agency exists – whose sole purpose it seems is to destroy families and wreck lives with an efficiency and prolificacy that may only be rivaled by the state-sponsored terrorist organization know as the IRS – that goes by the Orwellian name of “The Department of Health and Welfare” fails as COMPLETELY and UTTERLY as they did for Sage and Bear then one of two things clearly needs to happen. Either we abolish this worthless farce of an agency and send its tax-feeding reprobate “employees” in search of gainful work doing something OTHER than wrecking decent families while ignoring to the utter disinterest of those they’re supposed to “protect” reports of neglect that I suspect they received in abundance about this messed up family OR the public needs to DEMAND accountability for this agency to ignore the warning signs about families like this one that put their drugs or drinking or whatever before the well-being of their children.

Here’s what I had to say in the comments section of the local bird cage liner’s website after the arrest of the worthless and equally culpable uncle:

So has anyone at the Times News or the prosecutor’s office checked to see if there have been reports about neglect with Health & Welfare about these children? I would almost GUARANTEE that there’s a file as thick as business end of a Louisville Slugger of reports from teachers or others more concerned about the well-being of these children than their biological tissue contributors (i.e. people not worthy of being called “parents”). It is sad and unfortunate that these poor children had to be born to “parents” without enough sense to know that you don’t send a child out in an Idaho winter storm wearing nothing warmer than PAJAMA PANTS. We all know that the most likely reason they didn’t care enough to go FORWARD and make sure the children arrived safely at their destination was that there was something far more “important” (at least to them) waiting at home for the two men in that car, we just don’t know if it was in a bottle, a pipe, or a pill. I wonder when the last time this “good employee” passed a drug test was? Being in jail is too good for these people. I say jack up the jail and put them UNDER it.

We’ll see tomorrow if they actually pass it through their censors…

(UPDATE: As expected, my comment didn’t make it through the censors even though several later comments WERE posted.)

My thoughts on “wasted” or “protest” votes and candidate endorsements

(I initially wrote this as a response to someone who was considering voting for McCain instead of voting their conscience. But since I have posted anything for a long time I thought I would also put it here…)

A vote for the lesser of evils is still choosing evil over good.
Especially when there are non-evil options from which we can choose.
I will follow the advice of John Adams and vote my principles even if
I vote alone much like a certain congressman we all admire. I
completely understand the fear of a vote for principle being “wasted”
but are we any better or worse off with either demopublican? By
accepting the “You’re wasting your vote” mentality it is tantamount to
surrendering to BOTH parties’ stranglehold on the nation and our
system of government. If we keep caving at the last minute and keep
accepting what we are told to accept by those that would set
themselves up as our masters then we will never free ourselves from
the yoke of subservience and the message of “government is the servant
of its people and not the other way around” will NEVER be more than it
is today – a small group of “radicals” marginalized by the
establishment and the corporate media. This may well be the (much
deserved) death knell of the neocon controlled republican party and
the opportunity for Liberty minded parties to rise to fill the void
left in the wake of the rotting elephant corpse that once was the
party of principled men of honor and intellect like Robert A Taft and
Barry Goldwater but today only offers candidates like the Bushes (1
and 2), McCain & Palin, Larry Craig, and Stephen Hartgen. Neither the
left nor the right wings of this vulture that is destroying the
country I love has any real principles and therefore neither has
earned my vote. I don’t want anything I have not earned, yet they (on
both sides of the demopublican monopoly) have adopted an entitlement
mentality when it comes to our votes. I say NO MORE and never again.
The most valuable thing we have as citizens is our vote and I will
treat it as a thing precious and not squander it on anyone other than
the most deserving of candidates. I respect concerns about moral
issues but the bottom line is that when we abandon principle and
choose lessers of evils over good it is only THEN that we have wasted
our vote.

If you want to know who I’m voting for for president, I will say that there isn’t anyone on the ballot with whom I 100% agree, but I will vote for the one who most closely matches the philosophy of limited government, individual liberty, civil rights, and personal accountability. So you know who I’m NOT voting – either of the demopublicans. Believe it or not, I’m actually still undecided between Barr and Baldwin… Baldwin is too much of a theocrat for me and deep down I suspect Barr is still really a neocon in Libertarian’s clothing but either one is INFINITELY better than McCain or Obama. I respect Nader and McKinney for their principled positions but I cannot in good conscience vote for either one of them because I see their view of the proper role of government as not in line with our Constitution (just like McCain and Obama).
I am also opposing the demopublicans for the Senate seat being vacated by Senator Wide Stance, and voting for Dr. Rex Rammell, a conservative independent. No way am I voting for neocon Risch or big government liberal lobbyist LaRocco in that race!
For US Congress I will write in Gregory Nemitz, a principled Constitutionalist conservative who ran in the Republican Primary against neocon Mike “Wall Street’s Sellout and Bailout Congressman” Simpson.
Locally, if I could vote in Legislative District 23, I would vote for anyone BUT neocon liberty-hater Stephen Hartgen. Democrat Mike Ihler isn’t a perfect choice, but he’s far better than Hartgen. For LD 23, I would support Jim Patrick over Peter Rickards, but only narrowly. I actually respect Rickards for his highly principled positions but Jim Patrick is the better choice for our future economic development. The one man for LD 23 I can say that I 110% unequivocally support for re-election is cattle rancher and statesman Bert Brackett. LD 23 is lucky to have Bert representing them in Boise and I hope someday he might represent us in Washington, DC because we need more men of his principles on the Potomac.

Since I live in LD 24, I will cast my ballot for a principled and upstanding lady, Sharon Block. Sharon hasn’t always dazzled me with her grip on all the issues before the state legislature, but she HAS always proved willing to listen and has demonstrated genuine small-government principles, supports our state’s educators and children, and is a good choice for the people of LD 24.
Chuck Coiner (state Senator), who I would like to see replaced with a better fiscal conservative, is running unopposed, as is Leon Smith (state Congressman). Not much choice there…
Both our county commissioners are also running unopposed, and they have done a good job in difficult economic times and should stay in office, especially Terry Kramer.
Wayne Tousley’s irresponsible budget mishandling and his ineffective administration needs to end. For that reason I am supporting Tom Carter for Sheriff.

So… that’s my candidate endorsement list if anyone cares.

Idaho DOES Have a Good Choice for Congress

It looks like the bailout bill wasn’t the magic silver bullet many hoped for. As most readers know, Mike Simpson and Larry “Wide Stance” Craig voted in favor of this abomination. Luckily we now have an alternative to Mike Simpson in the congressional race. I’m talking about Write-In Candidate Gregory Nemitz. Gregory Nemitz is a hard-working and decent man. He is an internet entrepreneur who runs BeefJerky.com and I hope will join me in writing in his name on November 4th. Or go to the courthouse and vote early!

WRITE IN GREGORY NEMITZ FOR IDAHO CONGRESS!
Give Mike Simpson the boot!

Letter to Senator Crapo and Congressman Simpson Regarding the Economy

Here is what I had to say to our elected non-representatives:

Senator Crapo & Congressman Simpson,
I know there is a great deal of pressure to “do something” about the current mess on Wall Street. However, has it not always been a fundamental tenet of our Conservative approach that free markets work best? The best thing for the long term health of our economy is to let the long overdue correction finally come. And the sooner we get it over with, the less the overall pain. If the government intervenes now then when the inevitable correction comes it will only be worse and more devastating, not better. Any Congressman or Senator that votes “Aye” to bail out the compulsive gamblers who allowed their financial institutions to get leveraged at 30:1 or even higher ratios deserves to be recalled and replaced with someone who puts their constituents and PRINCIPLES first. I know that over the years you have found party loyalty and following the herd much easier than adhering to principle, so I hope for once you will surprise me and NOT disappoint me, your constituent. If, however, you cave and do the wrong thing yet again as I have come to expect from you over the years then I think you should know that I will lead the charge to get the necessary 153,000 or so signatures on a recall petition per Title 43, Chapter 17 of the Idaho Code.

If you REALLY want to do something to help our nation and the economy, stop being so cowardly and afraid of “terrorists” that pose no real existential threat to our great nation, bring our troops home, and start eliminating wasteful and unnecessary abominations like the Department of Homeland Security, the income tax and IRS, fiat money, the Department of Education, and anything not expressly authorized by The Constitution.

Your constituent and lifelong Republican,
Dave Easterly

A little perspective…

How do the other campaigns and the mainstream media explain THIS:

Special thanks to Andrew Bunde for finding and sending this to me!

Today’s Dose of Irony

I found this amusing – particularly the bottom line with the total number of results.