Quote of the Day
Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.
Vista M. Kelly
Another Battle in the War on Kids' Lemonade
I have zero tolerance for this kind of bureaucratic stupidity. I can't speak for Georgia, but isn't it time local governments encourage kids to start businesses, by minimizing the cost (if any) and busy work involved with any relevant permits, licenses, etc? (In fact, shouldn't that be the case for businesses in general?) Let me give an example: unless there are a significant number of customers (e.g., a line of 10 people), to justify the costs of permits, licenses, etc.: they should be waived. Or capped at, say, a $25 annual fee, and all paperwork should be prepackaged and completed within 10 minutes by Internet.
I think what particularly sets me off on this story, besides the insanity of trying to charge 3 girls, just trying to make money to go to an amusement park, $50/day fees (plus paperwork) for selling lemonade on a front lawn, is the fact that police chief has become Big Nanny. "Oh, I don't know what they put in the lemonade, I didn't see them make it, etc." Apparently the Midway, GA police chief has nothing better to do with his time than to micromanage how people make beverages consumed on one's front lawn. Here's an alarming thing to consider, Mr. Police Chief of Midway, GA: maybe, just maybe, people drink iced tea on their front lawn, too, and I bet you don't get the public health inspector to test their ingredients. Unless if maybe someone chips in a dime to help cover his cost towards the tea. Yeah, you better send out a cop to see if anyone is going around making money selling iced tea on one's porch. Let's bust granny. Because we know what gets Mr. Police Chief of Midway, GA upset: lemonade is okay and healthy so long as people aren't being charged for it. What makes it evil is making money--after all, operating businesses at a profit must not be the American way, unless business owners are qualified for Obama stimulus programs.
New Airport Screening Constitutional?
Thumbs DOWN!
I don't want get into the weeds here; fortunately, I've not had to waste my good mind on the casuistries of our legal system, which attracts only the most pretentious, mediocre minds like Barack Obama's. Even a former Reagan SCOTUS nominee like Douglas Ginsburg sometimes lacks common sense. Long story short: the "naked body" image technology utilized by TSA in screening was the basis of a lawsuit by a privacy rights group on grounds of an unreasonable search (Fourth Amendment). It turns around the federal courts, of course, have arcane distinctions on what is considered "reasonable" and different types of searches: airport screenings come under a wide-berth "administrative search". That's right, folks: some unreasonable searches are "more equal" than other unreasonable searches. You get a feeling all the federal government has to do is put a "possible terrorist weapon" tag on anything, and TSA is able to tell 308M Americans to spread them. Ginsburg and his colleagues think some blurring technologies supposed implemented (after the fact, of course) for scanner technology means that, for instance, groping of 6-year-old kids is acceptable because your child's genitals may be blurred if you send them through a scanner instead of having them legally groped.
Of course, our brilliant legal system decides that because Al Qaeda is experimenting with some technology outside of the US that these nefarious 6-year-old's in large families flying to Disney World are caught up using the technology in question in some Al Qaeda plot. It stands to reason that the rest of the family wants to die together, not just the evil 6-year-old: after all, we have all those news reports of family reunions accompanying suicide bombers in the Middle East. Somehow I missed news reports of 6-year-old terrorists taking down airliners worldwide.
I can't resist one of my favorite expressions here: is the emperor wearing clothes?
Let our "brilliant" jurists get a clue: the overwhelming majority of searches come up empty; airline safety records have already better than many, if not most types of transportation; an American is probably far more likely to get killed or injured by a drunk driver than an international terrorist. You don't see nearly the kinds of search procedures and intrusion in dealing with DWI's than airlines. The fact that a stun gun was found on board a recent airliner (I haven't seen a more recent explanation: is it possibly due to human error by a federal safety officer forgetting his stun gun?) raises serious questions about the UNREASONABLE burden currently being assumed by travelers based on little more than paranoid suspicion by some federal bureaucrat, without having to assessment to any authorized review, the likelihood and cost-benefit trade-off.
Airline safety involves trade-offs against all sorts of risk, including pilot error, weather and operational/maintenance risks. The question for our feckless federal judges is why there is a double standard in terms of risk, that a terrorist risk is "more equal" than other types of risk. Risk is risk. Controlling risk does not eliminate the possibility of catastrophe. I argue that the burden we have been discussing is disproportionate to the risk.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
ELO, "Sweet Talkin' Woman"
