Keeping an eye on the horizon, prairie style:

CHEYENNE — State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

They’re not saying, they’re just sayin’:

“I don’t think there’s anyone in this room today what would come up here and say that this country is in good shape, that the world is stable and in good shape — because that is clearly not the case,” state Rep. Lorraine Quarberg, R-Thermopolis, said. “To put your head in the sand and think that nothing bad’s going to happen, and that we have no obligation to the citizens of the state of Wyoming to at least have the discussion, is not healthy.”

h/t

As a companion piece to Cjunk’s “Wrong Rights” post below, here’s Daniel Greenfield on the destruction of liberty brought about by the implementation of said positive rights:

The only way to implement civil rights was to destroy civil rights in the name of civil rights so that everyone ends up with fewer rights, but learns to feel good about it. This has been the pattern for every civil rights movement since which demands its special privileges. Having run out of races, we are now pandering to such bizarre notions as sexual identity as genetic and permanently fixed, yet existing entirely apart from the body of the person, and that religiously motivated terrorism exists entirely apart from the religion.
This isn’t post-modernism, it’s post-reason. It’s post-everything. The left has always sought out the taboo and the transgressive, but as a society we are swiftly running out of transgressions to embrace and protect with government legislation. The more tolerant that Americans grudgingly become in the name of decency, the harder the commissars of correctness have to search for some new bigotry to charge them with.

Read the whole essay, “Uncivil Rights”, here.

Saving the baby polar bears one sucker at a time:

If (the Tesla’s) battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss…

h/t

…and more Americans started packing heat:

Last fall, I wrote about a surprising trend: gun sales have skyrocketed since Barack Obama became president. During that time, the stock of gunmaker Sturm Ruger (RGR) has outperformed gold. Analysts aren’t quite sure what’s causing the trend…

Probably just an outbreak of clingy bitterness.
Read Joshua Green’s “Barack Obama, ‘Greatest Gun Salesman in America'” here.

“Now, let me tell you a bit about your shitty new country…”
February 13 was the official launch of “People’s Citizenship Guide: a response to conservative canada.” Written by a group of progressive scholars with the intention of providing a “more honest alternative” to the official citizenship Guide, the People’s Citizenship Guide encourage new immigrants to join the ranks of the leftist grievance-mongers:

“The Canadian economy forms part of an unequal global economic system, a system which, shape by the legacies of colonialism, continues to privilege industrialized nations over those of the global south.”

Sun TV host Brian Lilley and guest John Robson spotlighted several other notable passages from The People’s Citizenship Guide on yesterday’s edition of The Byline:

“Canada has a long history of repression, exclusion, and exploitation.”

The unjust “exclusion” continues to this day:

“You must apply to become a Canadian “citizen” to vote in any election in Canada. This means waiting several years after arriving in Canada to become eligible, paying a significant application fee per person, passing a written exam in French or English, and swearing allegiance – perhaps in front of a military official – to the British Queen, who leads a Christian church. For many people, this process is a barrier to exercising their democratic rights.”

(emph. mine)

Fred L. Smith on the anti-business policy agenda of the left:

Ignored (in the storm about the Heartland documents), however, (is) a larger and even more serious issue – the growing effort to drive the market (and market-friendly voices) from the marketplace of ideas. The left has found that their statist alliances – trial lawyers and environmentalists, unionists and consumer groups – have been powerful in advancing their agenda. They’re not eager to see economic liberals do the same.
Note their systematic ideological-cleansing program: no one with any business links serving on a government policy advisory group; no one with a business background to serving in government; pejorative labeling in academic journals of any business-funded research; banning academics funding by business; passing stockholder resolutions against companies assisting pro-market policy allies..
If these efforts succeed, then the only legitimate voices in the policy debates will be crony capitalists and statist intellectuals. A serious threat and one that the Heartland incident should alert us to.

h/t

In a column at Time Magazine’s website, college administrator and early childhood educator Erika Christakis argues that Christians who oppose the Obama administration’s decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:

“Let’s see what our society would look like if we all had the luxury of imposing our unfettered will.”

This vaguely dystopian inversion of the truth – that it is progressive, secular champions of central-planning such as herself, and not Christians, who are imposing their “unfettered will” – informs her entire column. Her will, she will have you understand, isn’t unfettered or selfish, but an expression of rights: those who don’t want to pay for other people’s abortifacients, she says, are “unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy.”
You read that right: being disinclined to pay for the nominal – and presumably infrequent – expense of your neighbour’s abortifacients is an infringement upon your neighbour’s rights.
As for those recalcitrant Christians who are just too thick to understand that the beliefs of the proponents of big-state, enforced-secular leftism trump their own deeply-held spiritual belief that abortion is murder,

“At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children. Or perhaps they’d be willing to spend some time in jail in protest. At my taxpaying expense, of course…”

“Luxury of imposing their unfettered will” indeed.

US Supreme Court to revisit 2003 decision that race-based discrimination is legal.
Should be interesting.

In the post “Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats“, David Foster of Chicago Boyz excerpts a couple of timely passages from Eric Hoffer’s essay The Ordeal of Change, published about fifty years ago:

The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…

Hoffer was referring at the time, Foster notes, to “underdeveloped countries” and not to the modern west, but his description is an apt portrayal of our modern-day would-be central planners: bureaucrats, politicians, big-picture leftist pundits, and the chattering class of so-called progressive voters:

…there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them.

A seven-year-old Brit named Elliot Dearlove recently asked a five-year-old boy on a playground if his skin was brown because he was from Africa.
Whoops:

His mother, Hayley White, 29…received a phone call last month to say her son had been at the centre of a ‘racist incident’….”I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation…”

Elliot: “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty.”
Nice try, kid. You’re on file now.
Photo of the depraved perp at the link.

From a school textbook (“a comprehensive introduction to the study of Geography”) used by Grade 8 students in NSW, Australia:

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming, there are still people who deny that is a result of human activity. The most vocal of these deniers are conservative political thinktanks (sic) and the right-wing radio ‘shock jocks.’ (emph. mine)

Why, it’s almost as if unionized teachers are using Geography classes to brainwash kids with politically-partisan propaganda:

Fortunately, a new generation of world leaders is taking global warming seriously. In the United States of America, President Barack Obama is working to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels and is providing leadership in international efforts to reduce CO2 emissions…In Australia, the Rudd Labor Government is legislating for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme….