Here comes the rain again
For the last several weeks, Louisiana has been inundated with rain — reportedly receiving 6.9 trillion gallons of rainfall in one week alone — which has, of course, led to massive flooding. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the floods (though, thankfully, very few people have died), and many of them needed rescue. Fortunately, many area residents took it upon themselves to help their fellow man, and a loose coalition of boat owners called the "Cajun Navy" sprang up, which headed out to patrol flooded areas and search for people in distress. There is no doubt that the quick and comprehensive action of the Cajun Navy is much of the reason why so few people have been killed by this record-breaking flood, and it’s a wonderful and awe-inspiring thing to see people coming together to help those in need.
Of course, the government is upset at them because they didn’t ask permission, opting instead just to go save lives.
Republican State Senator Jonathan "J.P." Perry of the Vermilion-Lafayette area said he is working on legislation that could require training, certificates and a permit to allow these Good Samaritans to get past law enforcement into devastated areas.
In a radio interview on News Talk 96.5 KPEL in Lafayette, Sen. Perry said it comes down to two main points for law enforcement officials.
"At the end of the day, there are going to be two things that are going to be the hurdle when you approach it from the state’s standpoint," Sen. Perry said. "Liability is going to be number one for them. They don’t want the liability of someone going out to rescue someone and then not being able to find them, and secondly, there’s a cost."
This is why government is garbage. Garbage at saving lives, garbage at setting priorities, garbage at giving radio interviews — it’s garbage all the way down. Just as senator Perry probably-too-candidly said, "liability is going to be number one for them." Their top concern always is, and always will be, passing the buck. If the government authorizes a rescue attempt and it’s a fiasco, that’s going to look bad, and scumbag state senators might lose their cushy do-nothing jobs. If the government sits back and does nothing, it can always just claim there was nothing that could have been done, everything was too risky, and if only the government had more money maybe things would be different.
Speaking of money, that brings up his second point: there’s always a cost. To your humble narrator, of course, the cost involved in volunteers going out on their own time in their own boats with their own fuel seems to be pretty well taken care of, but people who are competent at logic and math don’t waste their lives in the government. Only a churl would suggest that senator Perry was thinking of the "cost" as a lost opportunity to mulct the taxpayers to fund a state-run rescue outfit.
Of course, as you’d probably expect, senator Perry posted a video on his Facebook page a few days later, in which he made it clear that he never said all those things he said:
"The intent of what I want to do is to completely un-regulate it to where our volunteers are not stopped from going out," Perry said in the video. "What’s happening is, it’s all getting twisted around like I’m trying to put a fee on it. I’m trying to tax it. I’m trying to require a permit."
We here at Last Week in Weird would like to put out a call for trained, licensed volunteers to track down the evil replicant who is posing as senator Perry on radio talk shows and explicitly discussing his plans to require volunteer rescuers to pay fees, take training classes, and get government permits.
If only Paul Celucci were still with us
Everybody’s favorite pretend libertarian, Gary Johnson, was in classic form last week. First off, he gave an utterly insane interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie in which he stubbornly refused to take even one single libertarian position; even when Gillespie throws him absolute softballs and feeds him the right answer, as with the vaccination question, Johnson still fumbles the ball. It must be seen to be believed.
Johnson wasn’t done being bizarre with just that, though. Oh no. He also gave a different interview last week to the Mormon Deseret News in which he positively glowed with praise for that wonderful icon of the libertarian movement, Mitt Romney:
If Mitt Romney wants to be a part of the administration, that would be a guarantee…
I think [the position] would be for Mitt Romney to decide Â…and I say that with reverence to his skills as a business person and having run the Olympics.
As of press time, it’s unclear if Johnson’s "reverence" is for Romney in particular, or if he simply has an odd fetish for Republican governors of Massachusetts. Regardless, it’s an entertaining time to be a proper libertarian; watching establishment "libertarians" try to rationalize Johnson’s continuously-increasing awfulness is a blast!
Cracks in the façade
It’s pleasing to be able to report good news once in a while, and, last week, we actually got a break in the seemingly-unremitting storm of political correctness flooding forth from the university system. The University of Chicago’s Dean of Students, Dr. John Ellison, sent a welcome letter to the incoming freshmen that laid the table for them rather bluntly:
Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn, without fear of censorship. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others. You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called "trigger warnings," we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual "safe spaces" where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.
Fostering the free exchange of ideas reinforces a related University priority — building a campus that welcomes people of all backgrounds. Diversity of opinion and background is a fundamental strength of our community. The members of our community must have the freedom to espouse and explore a wide range of ideas.
I’ll be the first to admit it’s not flawless — it could do without that weird bit about alleged "harassment," for starters — but it’s a breath of fresh air in the mad world of modern academia. Especially pleasing to me is that he drops in everybody’s favorite nonsense-word — "diversity" — but then makes it immediately clear that his priority is a kind of diversity that actually matters, and not the filling out of some government race quota checklist.
Of course, the letter opens with the line "Dear Class of 2020 Student," which part I absolutely hated because holy cow does that make me feel old.
Happens to the best of us
Everybody loses something now and again. Who among us has never forgotten where he parked, left home on a rainy day without an umbrella, or lost track of where he set down his delicious beverage? We all do it, your humble narrator included. So I guess it’s only natural that the United States Army accidentally misplaced six and a half trillion dollars last year. Whoops missus!
That’s $6.5 trillion in accounting mistakes for the year 2015 alone. That’s such a huge number that it doesn’t even make a lot of sense. The annual budget for the entire U.S. military in the past few years has been around half-a-trillion bucks.
How could the Army misplace, fudge, misappropriate or otherwise lose $6.5 trillion? It’s simple. Years of no oversight, bad accounting practices and crappy computer systems created this problem. And remember, this is just the Army and just its general fund.
So we’re clear on this, the Army didn’t "lose" several trillion dollars the way you or I might do; it’s not as though some general or other went out drinking with six and a half trillion dollars in his wallet and woke up the next morning with no clear idea where the money was, but with the conviction that, in the words of the great Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, she was worth it. No, when the Army loses trillions of dollars, it’s because the military’s accounting practices are so bad that they end up having no idea what they did with it.
Still and all, it boggles the mind how one’s accounting practices can be so bad that one can misplace 6.5 trillion dollars out of a budget that totals only 282 billion dollars. That’s right, friends: the Army managed somehow to lose track of twenty-three times as much money as it actually had, a level of efficiency only possible with a government program.
One more fun bit:
This is an accounting error caused by a combination of bad financial practices and computer errors. It is not a smoking gun proving the U.S. military is embezzling funds from the American public. (Emphasis original)
Well, okay, but "embezzlement" is defined as "the fraudulent conversion of another’s property by a person who is in a position of trust, such as an agent or employee." What else the United States military does I am not equipped to say.
Hillarity
Remember Dr. Drew Pinsky? Good. I don’t. Apparently he’s some type of celebrity TV doctor; for the past five years, he’s had a popular show on CNN’s daughter channel, HLN. Earlier this month, Pinsky appeared on the KABC radio show McIntyre in the Morning and said the following about Hillary Clinton’s health:
What is going on with her health care? It’s bizarre. I got to tell you. Maybe they have reasons, but at a distance, it looks bizarre. There ought to be some sort of standard for people that are going to lead the country or are going to making these important decisions. Again, Hillary may be fine with all of this. I mean, it’s dangerous and it’s concerning, but you can see — and by the way, there were two other things that gravely concerned us. When she hit her head, she had to wear these prism glasses when she came out.
… That is brain damage, and it’s affecting her balance. Now clearly, it hasn’t affected her cognition, but tell us a little more about that. That’s profound. And then number two, when they screened her for heart disease, again, they did an old-fashioned screen. It just seems like she’s getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansas when she was a kid, and you’ve got to wonder. You’ve got to wonder. It’s not so much that her health is a grave concern. It’s that the care she’s getting could make it a concern.
Eight days later, CNN announced that Dr. Drew’s show was being cancelled. Admit it: you thought I was going to say he turned up dead, didn’t you?
In related Hillary Clinton brain damage is-she-or-ain’t-she news, apparently Google refuses to autocomplete searches about Clinton’s health problems, which is a mite odd. And speaking of things that are odd, check out this picture of Clinton’s speech earlier this year at the Democratic convention:
Notice anything peculiar about that picture? Yeah, neither do I. Looks pretty much exactly as it should. Now here’s a picture from Clinton’s bizarre "vast right-wing conspiracy" rant last week in Reno:
Isn’t it peculiar that there isn’t one single "Hillary" or "Stronger Together" hat, shirt, sign, button, or anything visible anywhere in the crowd? Do the kind of people who attend these events really tend to bring utterly generic "USA" signs? I’ve never seen that. Now, I’m not willing to go down the road with people who claim the whole event was faked in a studio months ago with a screened-in crowd — as though the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and the wall-to-wall billionaire superdonors behind them can’t afford to shoot non-generic crowd footage for their phony rally videos — but I will point out that, whatever the reason, it’s certainly weird.