Wednesday, December 31, 2014

From where Great Britain used to be

A 19-year-old from Leeds, West Yorkshire, who was arrested in connection with an offensive video he posted on a social media website has been released on bail.

A video, which was shared to the Yorkshire Standard, showed a man ripping apart an English translation of the Koran with his teeth and putting it in the toilet before burning it.

The police arrested the suspect on 27 December after people raised concerns for the safety of the person who had posted the video up following a number of public comments made in response to it.

People also called the police complaining about the offensive nature of the video.
Get all butthurt because of a video?  Call the coppers, who'll arrest the miscreant who thought that 'free speech' thing actually meant something.

Because it doesn't, especially if it offends a Protected Species.

And there's a bunch of idiots here who'd LOVE to be able to do this to anyone who offends them.


Zero-tolerance stupid and "Well, yeah, he died, but we followed the rules!  So shut up."


"We could be looking at a real train wreck after Feb. 15," said Stan Dorn, a health policy expert at the nonpartisan Urban Institute. "People will file their tax returns and learn they are subject to a much larger penalty for 2015, and they can do absolutely nothing to avoid that."
Last I heard the IRS actually has no legal authority to penalize people on this; they're hoping the curse 'IRS' will scare people into complying, and if that doesn't work stealing the fine out of refunds.  This is likely to get interesting.


Short version: corn ethanol, aside from being useful for buying votes from farmers, is crap as a 'green' fuel.


Ok, this is wonderful:
If politicians don't pass lots of laws, it's bad(even if we disagree with the laws some want to pass).

If politicians pay attention to people who aren't 'mainstream', it's a threat.

If people insist on holding principled positions instead of compromising all away, "the majority of decent Americans may in frustration come to view an authoritarian government as the only solution to political gridlock — as a lesser evil that has to be tolerated."

And it large part it's because lots of people insist on owning guns.

See? By actually believing the politicians should listen to the boss(us), we're pushing the country toward dictatorship!

This man is an idiot.








5 comments:

Billll said...

Reference that fellow in England: Don't they have the signs there advising people not to toss cigarette butts into the urinals as it makes them soggy and hard to light?

Differ said...

A public order offence for burning the Koran. Would he be jailed for doing the same to the Bible? Of course not. Why? Because Christians won't riot if you burn a bible, but muslims will if you burn a Koran, so we supress freedom of expression to excuse and avoid illegal actions by a violent minority....sounds like dhimitude to me.

Differ said...

I read Jared Diamond's books, Guns Germs & Steel and Collapse. Neither are good reads, being more like doctoral theses and filled with repetition. GGnS is panned by Victor Hansen for its assertion that GGnS were the only reason the west conquered the New World and not the inherently superior culture. Plus from the picture in the linked article he probably ought to learn to hold and shoot a bow correctly.

Differ said...

On the spectrum from pure fuels e.g. natural gas or coal to energy transfer media such as Hydrogen (or electricity) which do not occur naturally in a usable state, ethanol falls somewhere in the middle to energy transfer end. It has its uses but can never replace petroleum on a net energy balance basis. Too bad politicians cannot just leave the market to develop te best solutions on its own.

Differ said...

The Daily Beast article is good. I suspect more and more people wil find themselves so tied up in red tape that they'll simply decide noncompliance is no longer an unreasonable course.