Monthly Archives: October 2017

YGTBSM

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This is from a Food and Drug Administration warning letter to the owners of Nashoba Brook Bakery, via The Wall Street Journal:

Your…products are misbranded…because…the labels fail to bear a complete list of all the ingredients by common or usual name….

Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient “Love.” Ingredients required to be declared on the label or labeling of food must be listed by their common or usual name…. “Love” is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient.

The utter idiocy of this bureaucratic foolishness wants no further comment beyond a simple question: why are the letter writer and his supervisor still on the taxpayer’s payroll?  There are other complaints identified in the letter that would appear to be serious, but they’re deprecated, and the letter cannot be taken seriously with this kind of nonsense included.

Another Example

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…of government regulatory failure.  The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates, among other financial institutions, brokerage houses, has its own investment portfolio.  FINRA charges fees from those it regulates for their privilege of being regulated.  And

In years when FINRA’s fee revenue exceeds forecasts and investment gains are strong, the regulator can rebate fees paid by firms it regulates.

Investment gains are strong.  However, FINRA turns out to be a crappy investor, getting just two-thirds of the return since 2004, when the regulatory body’s investment portfolio was created, that a simple-minded standard portfolio mix of 50% each of bonds and stocks would have gotten in the same period.  Its return shortfall, 3.4% vs that standard portfolio’s 6%, is a real money shortfall: $440 million for a portfolio of $1.6 billion.

And that has real impact on the regulatees that are so privileged: not only have there been no fee rebates since 2014, FINRA is raising fees on its regulatees to make up for its failure as an investor.

Go figure.

Not a Good Sign

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The EU thinks not enough progress has been made on the Brexit talks for there to be any discussion of a post-departure relationship between Great Britain and the rump EU.  You can understand that to mean the Brits haven’t surrendered enough of their nationhood over their effrontery to suit the Poohbahs of Brussels.

Leading lawmakers also slammed continued divisions within the British government over Brexit.

The WSJ piece centered on the Poohbahs’ demands, but the sentence just quoted gives the EU game away.

The “divisions” within the British government are just the noise of liberty and democracy.

Brussels’ plaint, furthermore, comes in an environment in which the EU is demanding that every member state must have the same tax rates, rather than engage in economic competition; member state businesses must be protected from competition by extra-EU businesses through extensively restrictive regulation and the lawfare of bureaucrats like the European Commissioner for Competition; and Poohbah pressure to move to a pan-European government and away from a federation of nations, the first step of which is to create a pan-European budget and tax and lending facilities.

Thus: Brussels’ constant harping in favor of order over the noisiness of democracy is not a good sign for liberty on the European continent.

What’s Their Limiting Principle?

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Progressives, as The Wall Street Journal puts it,

believe that every human problem can be solved with a policy tweak. A ban here, a background check there, and, voila, no more mass shootings.

But what’s their limiting principle?  What level of gun control would satisfy them?  What fundamental concept would make them believe they’ve gone far enough with their tweaks, checks, bans on an American citizen’s access to the means of defending himself and his family?  Besides their empty rhetoric of “I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t take all your guns away…,” I mean.

Some statistics would seem to give the lie to the Progressive-Democrats’ claims both about the ubiquitousness of gun violence and the purpose of these persons’ desired “controls.”

[A] 2015 Congressional Research Service report found that from 1999 to 2013 assault rifles were used in 27% of public mass shootings. The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 killed 32 people with two handguns. FBI statistics show that of 15,070 homicides in 2016, 374 people or 3% were killed with rifles. Some 656 homicides were committed with “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet) and 1,604 with knives.

Guns just aren’t that important to the violence humans commit against each other.  This, in turn, gives that lie to Progressive-Democrats’ claimed goals of merely wanting to “control” our firearms; our use of them is not out of control.

The Left, the Progressive-Democrats, don’t have a limiting principle.  Their tweaks, checks, bans are only first steps.  Their purpose throughout this “debate” is to disarm us completely, so that Government—one of the entities the 2nd Amendment seeks to enable us to defend ourselves against—will have the only guns.

Now, why might that be, exactly?

And this from a different angle on the Left’s desire to disarm us, from Larry O’Connor at Mediaite:

The US government is systemically racist and, through its inaction, seems willing to allow innocent, black citizens to be murdered by its police force. Furthermore, the judicial system is often rigged to protect the evil, racist officers by never punishing them for those murders. Additionally, the very same government is now in the hands of a fascist, incompetent criminal who, not only hates blacks and Latinos so much that he is willing to let the latter die of starvation and thirst [in Puerto Rico] rather than deliver humanitarian aid to them, but also calls the former [NFL player kneelers] “Sons of bitches” for protesting the racist country he oversees….

…if I really thought this country was so evil and so racist…I certainly wouldn’t want that evil, fascist, incompetent, and racist government to determine who could and could not arm themselves.

Why would a thinking American want a Government so evil to have the only guns?

The position on gun control of the Left generally and of the Progressive-Democratic Party in particular not only has no limiting principle, it makes no sense within itself.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall for the Mediaite link.

Gerrymandering and Voting Districts

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Further on the Supreme Court’s considering a Wisconsin gerrymandering case, and that dredges up some thoughts in my pea brain.

Taking the Federal government as my canonical example, I suggest the following to saucer and blow the whole gerrymandering question.  Each State should be divided into squares having substantially equal numbers of citizens resident.  Then, starting with four squares sharing a common corner that is at the geographic center of the State, add squares around the four, building outward in that fashion to the State’s borders, deviating from the square and the square’s straight-line sides only at those borders.

Notice that these squares utterly ignore all demographic considerations beyond the number of citizens resident in the State, the number of Representatives allocated to the State, and the number of citizens resident in each district.  That is, to repeat from my earlier post, what’s specified in the 14th Amendment, Section 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers….

And

…when the right to vote at any election…is denied to any of the male inhabitants…the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens….

That apportionment is according the number of individuals, not to any community, whether urban or rural or neighborhood, nor to ethnicity, political party affiliation, or any other criterion of demography.  In fine, a vote is an individual affair, not a community one, not a collective one, not a party one.  Indeed, further demographic apportion than “citizen” is illegitimate: all Americans are the same in the eyes of the law, and voting is a matter of the supreme Law of the Land.  All voters look alike in the polling station.

Note one more thing: such a district structure—any district structure, whether simple or gerrymandered—is essentially a political decision and so beyond the purview of any court to mandate.  It would be interesting, though, to see lower courts—perhaps a couple of appellate courts—explicitly require squares, anyway.  Such a ruling almost certainly would spark a nationwide political discussion on the matter and on the matter of voter representation generally, culminating in an explicit political decision on the proper way to draw voting districts.

With that decision, the Supreme Court then could declare the matter mooted and forestall a potful of fundamentally (and too often cynically) divisive lawsuits like the present Whitford v Gill, and like Davis v Bandemer, Vieth v Jubelirer, and others before them.

Of course, I believe in the Easter Bunny, too….