His defense of mountain removal mining:
I donât think anybodyâs going to be missing a hill or two here and there.
Stupid hills, always getting in the way.
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What is a hill? I mean, how do you define a hill as opposed to a mountain, or, flat, level ground. The reality is that all surfaces on the planet which aren't artificial seem to have discontinuities and wrinkles on the macroscale.1 Here is a dictionary definition:
A well-defined natural…
Rudy Giuliani, the erstwhile US Presidential hopeful, had his moment on Tuesday's CNN debate. I'm sure you've seen it. Over and over again. I won't bother doing it here. If you haven't seen it, here is a YouTube version. Rudy is explaining his "Catholic position" on abortion (you know which one,…
Mark Buchanan, quoting Lee Smolin, on how big science may be biased against innovative iconoclasts:
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If water had its way, this is what California would look like:
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Despite all the press this assclown is getting, I haven't been able to find anyone here in Louisville that will admit supporting him.
He might not be board certified, but he's a certifiable idiot.
Here's a dose of Rand Paul satire:
http://bit.ly/asYks5
It's a little unfair to scapegoat Rand Paul. Certainly, none of the large number of people promoting the idiocy that non-Libertarians should "work together" with Libertarians have any right to do so. He's very mainstream - and I know, because I was in the ALP at a time when many of the rising stars in the LPUSA were part of Alaska's LP (but vetted by the all-powerful Libertarian Party of California). I met nearly all the LP candidates for president.
As you'd expect from a party that advocates replacing social services with private insurance and advocates turning the commons over to speculators, they're mostly insurance salesmen and realtors, with a hefty presence of financial speculators, gold sellers, and lawyers.
The Libertarian movement is Southern Californian Bircherism with a pretty storefront. It's not "socially liberal," either. It supports your employers right to drug test you every hour on the hour, make you sleep with him or hit the road, and it's actually agnostic on using taxpayer funds for religious purposes - because most of the time, taxpayer funds should not exist, and the few legitimate functions, cops, courts, and troops, just have to work efficiently. It supports Fox's right to advertise itself as news and fire anyone who refuses to lie (so much for their pretense about not supporting fraud). It across the board supports the right of a franchise owner to tell his franchisees to say "We don't serve niggers here, and if you come in, we'll run you in to the sherrif for trespassing." Even if he owned every diner in the state, it would support that. It would support "Sundown towns" as long as they were company towns.
Also, despite its pretenses about fraud, as noted above, and force, in practice the Libertarian philosophy is at best the philosophy of a fence. They explicitly say that privatizing, even through force and fraud, will nonetheless always improve any situation or area. If something is taken from one private owner to another by force or fraud, they support the wronged party seeking redress, but that's the limit, there's still nothing wrong - to a Libertarian - with fencing the money you got by shooting people on the highway. And if it was part of the commons or owned by "gummint" then there is no wronged party, it's all a big win.
It's become obvious to everyone by now that Libertarianism is contemptuous of democracy, but it has an unfair reputation for venerating the Constitution. Actually, they treat the Constitution like anything else - where it favors corporatism, it's sacrosanct, and where it doesn't, it's "gummint" and it's irrelevant and to be ignored.