The Glade 4.0

It's a basic common sense thing. I posted the question because it is common and standard, and the answer flies in the face of common practice. We all see police officers in uniform taking or receiving discounts and consumer privileges from institutions. We see businesses that offer discounts to uniformed military, individuals with student IDs, individuals with GS IDs, etc. But you don't need the appearance of a conflict of interest. You don't need the possibility of abusing your authority. And, like I said, some parts of our government believe in being ethical, other parts don't.

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In other news, since you guys seem to think Expatriation is easy ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... TopStories

Excerpted Quote, you can read the whole article. It's about expatriation increasing despite the barriers.
You see ...

You can come, but you actually cannot leave. The government truly does believe it is entitled to your wealth.

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Yes, as a matter of fact I have.



You'll get no apology. In fact, your propensity for going around the boad demanding apologies is yet another of your asinine habits and a method of attempting to control the standards of discussion. In point of fact, your "defending yourself" is just a way of immunizing yourself against getting called out for your trolling. You ask a blantantly personal question, then when you're called out on it, claim it isn't one and then get some faux outrage worked up for supposedly calling you a liar and "knowing what you think."

All this really has been is an exercise in "Khross can tell other people what they're thinking and accuse them of trolling and whatever the **** else, but no one else can do it to him because he finds it offensive".



"OK, sorry for asking it in a personal way, let me rephrase."

You.

Asked.

A.

Personal.

Question.



And yet, it is. You are continuing to make these claims and shut down discussion because, as your next post shows, the question was entirely and utterly irrelevant to the matter at hand. All you're doing is insisting over and over that it wasn't personal in the face of common sense. You cannot admit you are wrong. In point of fact, this "you can't admit you're wrong" is yet another play from your playbook we've seen over and over before and has all the intellectual sophistication of a 15-year-old girl getting called out in social studies class. Just assert the other person "can't admit they're wrong" and make the argument about them!

Yup, Khross diverting things onto the other person. Imagine that. Note that all I originally said was I wouldn't answer questions of that nature.

Oh, by the way? I'll tell you your intent and motivations any time I damn well please. In this instance I don't happen to, but the fact is that your intent and motivations are hardly difficult to figure out, and certianly don't require any special mind reading skill.

What are you going to do about it? Cry some more? Get offended and make most of your posts where you try to talk in a condescending way when you're in no position to do so? Threaten me with doing the same thing? Don't make me laugh; you do exactly that all the time anyhow, so doing it more would hardly be a problem.



Which had absolutely zero to do with what was being discussed. You clearly did not read the discussion at hand. Bribes, gratuities and discounts had NOTHING to do with the Bucky Balls closure. The problem was government officials being overzealous in their duties. Was that unethical? Probably so, but that wasn't under dispute, and it's a different ethical issue entirely. Government officials who are overzealous in their duties are overzealous; that is not the same thing as corruption.

The question wasn't "was the CPSC in the right?"; they very clearly were not. The discussion was entirely about the merits of holding the government agency accountable and getting financial and possibly injunctive remedy for the corporation that made Bucky Balls, versus the merits of holding the individuals of the CPSC accountable directly in retaliation for their overzealous, and frankly childish, behavior.

Your entire question was just "Oh, hey, look, DE is posting, let me go in there and bring up that he's a police officer!"

In fact the course of the conversation was basically:

DFK!: "These people need to be sued and lose their jobs!"
DE: "The government can be sued. Why do you think it can't?"
DFK!: "I want the individuals to be sued!"
DE: "I don't see how that gives the Bucky Balls makers a better remedy."
Khross: "You're a cop! Can you accept discounts? Somehow, this is related to what you and DFK! were talking about."
DE: ".... seriously? I'm not going to entertain this ****."
Khross: "RARRRRR!!!!!"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

I posted a question. You responded with hostility. I clarified it was not a personal question. You started asserting it was and continue to assert as much. You are the troll and person diverting this thread with your baseless accusations and pretense. Please, continue to scream up and down you are in the right, because the following things are true --

1. You made the thread personal.
2. You are keeping the thread personal.
3. You are tacitly accusing another post of lying.

Oh look you ascribing intent and motive again.

But, hey, you kind of missed the part where DFK! was grousing about the government determining when and where it or its agents can be sued. That's still privilege, just a different sort from the kind most people know to be unethical -- discounts and freebies.

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Khross, you made the thread personal by asking a personal question. Your "clarifications" fly in the face of the obvious wording of the question.

As for accusing anyone of lying, tacitly or otherwise, you can pretty much stop using this excuse. I already explained that your intent is irrelevant, and thus whether you are lying or not is irrelevant. You have dragged this discussion on and on rather than simply rephrasing. Your insistence that this is somehow my doing is patently absurd, and representative of your complete inability to take responsibility for your own words, and refusal to recognize that you are on the same level as anyone else.

None of the above things are true. You're just wrong. Period. Your only acceptable course of action would have been to rephrase the question immediatly after I told you I won't answer personal questions.



Except that it isn't, and has nothing to do with ethics. Government officials cannot do their jobs if they are vulnerable to lawsuit every time someone doesn't like what they do; our society is highly litigous and legal action is a major threat; something you got on Arathain for failing to recognize in the school bus driver discussion. They are just like corporate officials in that respect, who ALSO generally have protection from individual suit. This is not a matter of any government privilege.. which you would ahve known had you actually been paying attention.

By the way, if this was the point you wanted to make, there was no reason for you to ask me a question at all. In fact, there was pretty much no excuse for it, personal or not. It served absolutely no purpose.

As for ascribing intent and motive,tough ****. I'll ascribe whatever intent and motive I want to you, since you cannot restrain yourself from doing so, and from slinging this complaint about to defend your trolling. When you shape up your attitude and stop

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

No, you're making the thread personal by refusing to accept what another poster says about their own intent. You are the one telling me what I'm thinking; you are the one trying to dictate intent and meaning. My intent is not irrelevant; you need it to be to justify your derail and offense. Stop trolling.

And, yes, comparisons of government privilege are apropos. The government does NOT retain the privilege to shield its agents from prosecution or liability, which is exactly what DFK!'s post address. In fact, the First Amendment guarantees the right to sue our government, which means laws limiting the right to petition for a redress of grievances are unconstitutional. And non-statutory privileges and judicial edicts that protect the government from the First Amendment are also unconstitutional. In fact, you have no argument on the substantive case because the First, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments collectively deny the Federal Government the right to determine when and were it can be sued.

So, yes, it is relevant; and yes, the question does matter. The issue at hand is government privilege; police officers are government agents. If I wanted to limit the discussion to just the Federal Government, I tend to type that phrase in caps. It's a specific entity. Government, without qualifiers, is just government.

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Khross, now you're just accusing me of trolling as a tit-for-tat measure. Your intent is irrelevant. You phrased that question in terms of me and my personal situation. You had no excuse for doing so, regardless of your reasons. You have persistently refused to rephrase it as a non-personal question.

Your complaints about people accusing you of lying and tellign you what you think are pretty much utterly pointless. No one is, but if you don't like it, stop engaging in the behaviors that cause that, and stop telling people what their motivations are all the time. You basically never get to even mention bias to me again because of this. You've done so repeatedly in the past, and complaining about my supposed ascribing of motivations to you now is the height of hypocrisy.



I hate to break it to you, but the government does, in fact, have the power to accept responsibility for the actions of its agents in order to shield them from personal responsibility for actions taken in good faith. The first amendment guarantees a right to "petition" (your idea that this means "sue" is interpretation, but I happen to agree) against the government, not against individual people who happen to work for it.

Furthermore, the Federal Tort Claims Act is in fact, statutory, and there is no such thing as an "unconstitutional judicial edict". Cort decisions cannot be unConstitutional unless so found by a higher court. You are simply inventing your own jurisprudence. Our legal system does not work that way. You use the jurisprudence and laws as they exist, or you use none at all.

The First, Ninth, and Tenth amendments do not, in any way, remove the government's sovereign immunity and even if they did that would only apply to the Federal government. State governments would still have it. Citing the Ninth Amendment is particularly laughable, as all it does is establish that rights outside the Bill of Rights can exist, not that any particular right does exist. It certainly has nothing to do with when the government can be sued.

This is yet another example of you simply trying to proclaim things unConstitutional because you don't like them. You're pretty much automatically wrong as soon as you go down that road because you do not determine what is and isn't Constitutional. If you can't cite a law or a case supporting your view as established law, then your argument fails instantly.



The question is not, in point of fact, relevant. Furthermore, there is no such thing as "just government" that can be collectively addressed in that way; you cannot make arguments relying on limits, real or imaginary, on the Federal Government from the Constitution as you did above, then make claims about government in general. This is a stolen concept fallacy; you are accepting the separation of Federalism in order to rely on Constitutional limitations, then rejecting it in order to talk about government in general.

As for the idea that immunity in this fashion is a privilege, it is not, and as pointed out, it is not a protection limited to public officials. Corporate officials cannot normally be sued individually either; the fact that the CPSC is trying to do so in this case is at the center of their overzealousness and is arguably evidence of malicious use of judicial process and bad faith.

Immunity for both corporations and government officials is there in order to prevent conflict of interest. Without it, the official's desire to protect himself, personally, comes into unresolvable conflict with his fiduciary duties to his organization. He cannot act in his organization's interest and protect his own at the same time. These laws exist for the same reason as any other law that prevent conflict of interest; they don't represent privilege; they represent obligation.

It is absolutely outlandish that you bring this up as some sort of problem of ethics or privilege and try to relate it to corruption such as acceptance of quid pro quo. Your grasp on the concept of ethics in question is just hilriously bad. You don't seem to grasp even the basics of ethics; apparently you are so fixated on the idea that government officials not getting personally sued is a problem that you can't be bothered to consider such concepts as conflict of interest or fiduciary duty.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Seattle sponsors "Gun Free Zone" program.

http://www.king5.com/news/cities/seattl ... 28521.html



Emphasis mine. I personally don't have a huge problem with a business expressing interest in this. I get a little sideways when I see the city promising to enforce these business' private rules. I wonder if they would remove someone from a bakery if the proprietor didn't want to make them a gay/lesbian wedding cake?


Edit: add image

While I don't agree with the silly "gun free zones" thing, I don't see why businesses should not set their own rules, or why the police would not remove unwelcome guests that don't leave.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't see this as any form of tyranny, but it is one method of achieving it.


It's nice of them to advertise their willingness to be victims.





The police should absolutely enforce the business owner's right to economic free association, just not selectively.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Link




My bold.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

On the Police Militarization Front:

Link

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Keeping the Unwashed Masses of Plebes stupid feels like tyranny to me:

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-math-under- ... 05230.html



Video is at link above.

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I'm going to grit my teeth and just assume she's not good at communication.

I would rather a child give the answer of 11, but know why it is 12, than a child give the answer of 12 and have no idea why it is 12.

This gets back to partial credit IMO. In engineering courses, if after deriving my equations, documenting my assumptions, and going through the math, I came up with a wildly wrong number, I would present this and explain why I know it's not correct. I'd typically get partial credit and my mistake identified. I'm hoping that's all this is.

Yeah, that's my guess, but it's still setting off my "fluff and nonsense" radar. It sounds a lot like the "whole language" approach to reading/writing instruction that was popular in the 80s and 90s, where correct spelling and word-use were de-emphasized in favor of promoting student engagement or ****. I had the older form of instruction in school - vocab lists, spelling tests, phonics lessons, etc. - whereas my younger brother got the whole language stuff. We were and are both decent writers and avid readers, but to this day, he has a more slapdash approach to word usage, and he can't spell to save his life.

I was just thinking about this during my commute this morning. There's a sign on the ferry dock, visible only from the water, that says it's a restricted area and unauthorized entry is punishable by a fine of up to $50k and imprisonment for up to 5 years. Now, I'm sure that kind of sentence would never be imposed in practice, but the mere fact that the statute even contemplates a 5-year prison term for what essentially amounts to trespassing is fracking ridiculous. So in addition to the excessive number of criminal laws out there, the excessive punishments they allow are also a serious problem.

That approach might be useful once the student moves beyond the basic add, subtract, multiply, divide up to 12x12 in a basic multiplication table. When teaching basic multiplication you first teach it by showing the student what 3x4 looks like: some sort of grid or something where hey can see that it's 3 sets of 4, or whatever the specific problem is.

Once they have that concept down, though, it's memorization. Up to 12x12 the kid should just know the answer. There's no reasoning involved, and shouldn't be: these problems are basic enough that the kid should just know how to do it, and also should not need to actually do the procedure every time. It just takes too long otherwise.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Does it have a statute number? If so, what is it?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It did list the statute (I think it was a regulation, actually: C.F.R. something-or-other), but I don't recall what it was. It mentioned something about the Coast Guard, so I'm guessing it's a port security thing. Even so, I think the statutes and available punishments should explicitly differentiate between simple entry into restricted waters (e.g. some idiot pulls his boat up to the ferry dock to drop someone off), interference with ferry operations (e.g. the idiot gets in the ferry's way), entry coupled with reckless endangerment, entry with intent to commit terrorism, and so on. Just having a broad statute with a wide range of potential penalties that are essentially left to the discretion of the prosecutor and judge is problematic.

Anyway, I'll try to check the statute/regulation number on my way home tonight and post it then.

Most likely it does exactly that, but it wouldn't all fit on the sign.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It does.. That's why it's a maximum (as indicated by the context clue "up to") five years and not a mandatory. Someone who is malicious can get the whole 5 and someone who's just lost and didn't see the sign can get much less.

Also reckless endangerment and and terrorism are their own statutes that be applied to any situation in addition to the trespassing.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

that said five years does seem a bit harsh for the nautical equivalent of "No parking" if that's indeed what it is.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Fyi, I took a look at the sign this morning, but I must have read it wrong, because the section I thought it referenced was related to general tub boat operations. I'll try again tonight!

Ok, so the sign references 33 CFR 165.169(a)(5), which reads as follows:


There's nothing in the regulation itself about the penalties for violation, so they probably come from one of the enabling statutes, but I wasn't able to definitively identify which one(s) with a quick Google. *sigh* It should not be so difficult to figure out the regulatory and statutory basis for a federal crime! Which, of course, is another aspect of the problem.

Tub boat?