Friday, April 14, 2017

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason;

Benjamin Disraeli

It has not been a great week: tax time, and a resurgence of my mild cold, and between them a great depletion of energy along with consumption of time. The IRS has invented more forms to use up our time, particularly the self-employed, while the print seems to get smaller and the instructions more complex every year.

I’ll start with this:

 

OMB asks for help to drain the swamp

Hi Jerry:

This is like a dream come true–I’m really encouraged.  OMB is actually soliciting suggestions from the general public as to which agencies, regulations, etc. could be eliminated.  Sounds like a great opportunity to bring up the Bunny Inspectors as well as a few hundred other possibilities.  Your idea about having all business regulations which are based on number of employees to double the number of employees would be another good one to submit.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/reorganizing-the-executive-branch

The deadline is June 12, so almost two months to get all the ideas in.

My pet peeve is the militarization of seemingly every cabinet department, forming their own SWAT teams, acquiring fleets of armored vehicles and arsenals of weapons.  This has lead to numerous horrible episodes such as a Department of Education SWAT team breaking down the door of a house where they thought a person who had defaulted on student loans lived, only to find out that the person had not lived there for months.  I guess they needed the practice or something.

I don’t know why these departments can’t just utilize local law enforcement or FBI field offices as needed, rather than having their own independent forces.

I’d also like to know what was behind Homeland Security’s order for 1.6 billion rounds of handgun ammo (100 year’s supply) a couple of years ago. 

I hope this effort is more effective than filing complaints with the Do Not Call registry.  Time will tell.

Best regards,

Doug Ely

I urge you to flood them with real and sincere recommendations. Yes, I’ve sent mine, but I don’t have great confidence that they are getting to the people I send them to. It’s a beehive back there, and everyone I know has a palace guard determined to keep people from bothering their bosses. When I was Newt’s science advisor it was simple enough to get to him when he was Minority Whip; I just walked into his Capitol office, appointment or not. But when he became speaker, I couldn’t get a message to him, at least not reliably or in a timely manner. If I was in Washington I could walk into his office – the staff all knew me – and sit at his desk until he came in, which assured a few minutes and sometimes more, but that was in the last century; after 9/11 you can’t just walk into the Capitol and linger. Now the Palace Guards rule everywhere. Pity, but there it is.

Anyway: bunny inspectors in the Dept. of Agriculture are certainly doing a job that need not be done, at least not by Federal agents. Agriculture for some reason has the job of insuring that stage magicians who use rabbits in their act have a license to do so, and that they follow Federally mandated rules for caring for those rabbits. I wish I were kidding about this, but I am not. It is so absurd that no one takes it seriously, and the savings cannot be all that much – I am not sure how many bunny inspectors there are. But there are a number of them. And they have supervisors. In the 50 States, there must be as many as ten districts, each with a senior civil servant supervisor, and perhaps a half dozen agents, and secretaries, and I have never met anyone who believes this is a job for the Federal Government. If the States want to regulate back yard rabbit pens – yes, you need a Federal license to sell pet rabbits (although apparently not if you sell them to be eaten). I wonder that the bunny inspectors don’t die of shame when telling people what they do for a living, and I suspect their children don’t admire them much; but there it is. If we need that sort of regulation, surely it is best left to the States? Or counties, or cities, or towns. I am sure there are local politicians with in-law relatives who would love to have such a high prestige job. Let city councils and county supervisors worry about the bunnies.

A more serious proposal (although I do not mean that abolishing the absurd office of Bunny Inspector is not serious):

If you want more people working, make it simpler to hire them. Exempt more small businesses from regulations. Double the exemption numbers. That is, if a regulation stipulates that it applies only to firms with ten or more employees, make that number 20. If 9 make it 18. I would go further, and double exemptions up to 99 employees; certainly, up to 50. There are a lot of businesses that might expand were the regulations not so expensive and/or oppressive. This simple exemption would let tens of thousands of firms hire more people, and would cost not very much. It could be passed in a week by Congress, but a Presidential Executive Order could accomplish a lot.

I used to have a list of Federal Jobs that don’t need doing; I probably could think of more, but those examples ought to be enough for a start.

I have often mentioned the expansion of armed Federal Agents, some indistinguishable from military units. We have no need of that. It would be cheaper and more effective to use local police for most Federal actions, and cheaper as well. What with Sanctuary Cities that may be a bit difficult to get across in these times, but there is no question that the Federal Government has too many armed agents.

As to Homeland Security’s purchase of a billion rounds of ammunition, maybe they need to go after a rogue baggage inspector?

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.

by Will Knight https://www.technologyreview.com/profile/will-knight/ April 11, 2017
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/?set=604130

I have long said that by 2024, half the jobs in America can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s salary of the human now doing that job. After reading this article I am inclined to raise that percentage.

In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he adds, “this was just way better.”

More and more people are arguing that as robots increase productivity, we must consider giving a basic living salary to all citizens (which is certain to mean all residents and their children, citizen, legal alien, undocumented alien, and illegal alien). Do we reconsider the difference between “deserving poor” and “Undeserving poor”? And who decides? Those who produce nothing, and whose contribution is to consume? What will they consume? What can they do that anyone wants done? I can think of people now who do things I don’t want done. Will there be more of those? If we can afford more bunny inspectors will we hire them?

Science fiction has skimmed across this, but the robot economy is coming faster than we thought. Note that robots are better – sometimes by a lot – at diagnosing future cancer than the best doctors. Now. Already. And they can’t tell you how they do it.

Subject: Here is your laugh for the day!

http://www.salon.com/2017/04/12/watch-5-reasons-maxine-waters-should-be-our-next-president/?utm_source=Salon+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=98687d8215-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5deda2aaa7-98687d8215-303274245

David Couvillon
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; 
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; 
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; 
Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; 
Chef de Hot Dog Excellence;  Avoider of Yard Work

United passenger drug off flight

He paid for the service, he had a right to expect it. A united pilot called into Rush today saying flying is a privilege and that they could not tolerate belligerent passenger because of 9/11. 9/11 was caused by trained terrorists which I’m sure were very docile up until they started slitting throats. In the case of terrorism, belligerent passengers are probably an asset. And united sells services not privilege. I shall not be flying united any time soon.

—

Phil Tharp

How Algorithms and Authoritarianism Created a Corporate Nightmare at United.

<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2017/04/algorithmic-dystopia.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

And see below on artificial intelligence.

yeah…

…and this is aside from things like the robustness of the equipment, the ecological damage caused by e.g. solar collection mirror systems frying birds, or windmill farms killing birds and/or diverting migratory paths, and other adverse effects, such as how windmill farms create such turbulence that no radar — military, civilian aircraft, weather — can get any sort of reading within an active farm.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2017/04/12/renewable-energy/100343640/

Renewable energy myths abound http://www.detroitnews.com Numerous myths are perpetuated that are not supported by any fair reading of the available data

~Stephanie Osborn, “The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”

http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com

Award-winning author of the Division One, Gentleman Aegis, and Displaced Detective series

health care

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
Since the argument has been made that money is the best, and sufficient, way to allocate health care, you might be interested in this article from today’s (London) Times:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/drug-giant-s-secret-plan-to-destroy-cancer-medicine-75rg6wt2n
It appears that Aspen Pharmacare, having bought the rights to five cancer medications, considered destroying existing stocks of a medication used to treat leukemia as a way of increasing the price “by up to 4,000 percent.” There appears to be evidence that the company orchestrated shortages in other ways: one Italian distributor reported that it “was having to choose which of two families with a child suffering from cancer was to receive the sole package they had because of a deliberately small supply.”
Whatever arguments can be made for the virtues of a free market, I don’t think any such market can be claimed to exist when a company can place the lives of its customers in danger unless they pay whatever price the company sets.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

I do not think many would disagree, but those who do would argue that it is their property and they should be free to destroy it. I recall during the Depression milk poured out on the ground, and eggs being destroyed; small pigs being killed; all by order of the Federal Government trying to end the Depression by raising prices. And yes, it did happen.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, agricultural price support programs led to vast amounts of food being deliberately destroyed at a time when malnutrition was a serious problem in the United States…. For example, the federal government bought 6 million hogs in 1933 alone and destroyed them. Huge amounts of farm produce were plowed under, in order to keep it off the market and maintain prices at the officially fixed level, and vast amounts of milk were poured down the sewers for the same reason. Meanwhile, many American children were suffering from diseases caused by malnutrition.^{[16] [}

Thomas Sowell

Dark Matter “Bridge” Interesting article at the Wired website. It’s headline basically says that galaxies are connected by a “bridge” of dark matter.
The article is at: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/dark-matter-bridge
There was also an article about a dark matter galaxy: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/dark-matter-galaxy-dragonflies-44
Happy reading!

David

I keep hearing alternative physics theories that do not require dark matter or dark energy, but they are well beyond my expertise. I grew up with the poem

The other day upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
Oh how I wish he’d go away.

We were taught that as a sort of algorithm, and it stuck with me; matter that you can never see and doesn’t exist anywhere near us seems strange to me; a bit hard to believe.

Air intel and Syria, and TLAM

Dr. Pournelle,
In partial response to one of my speculations, you wrote that you’d argue with my “…assumptions regarding our intelligence services. Some may be more competent in persuasion than they are in finding evidence.”
Perhaps. Yet it is my experience that the political and politically motivated representatives of the misnamed “intelligence community” in DC are not the same as the military tactical intelligence troops and commanders in the field (who are, incidentally, substantially less leaky). Long term observation and recording of the battlespace is well within the capabilities of all of our military services, and the tactical and logistics intelligence gathered thereby are from a professional cadre of well trained enlisted, commissioned, and (unfortunately) civilian contractor technicians with a primary interest in supporting military operations and not on beltway infighting. Can’t say that politics is not involved, but at that tier of intelligence gathering and interpretation, I’ll put my money on the E3 who is producing reviewing the imagery and the 05 planning and evaluating the strike (both likely USN, lest anyone’s anti-USAF bias gain influence).
Just FYI, TLAM has demonstrated an excellent runway damage capability in publicly released information from as much as 20 years ago. The very dated linked video puff piece shows some of that capability in testing at about 40 second mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sa7ZX58Kk4
The best use of a limited number of those would not be on a taxi way, but to damage large sections of the runway. If one had a lot of them, then taxiways are a good target, but better to use penetrators to take out sheltered aircraft and stored munitions, and HE to take out un-hardened targets. In the videos shown on the internet, with my less-than-well-trained-or-current skills, I saw very little runway and no obvious munitions storage structures. All I’ve seen was apparently infrared or low-quality, thermally-enhanced imagery, and has little detail. Damage to a “cold” aircraft structure was hard to spot, and had little resolution. I could not identify exactly what was burning at the hot spots, and they weren’t in frame for very long.
Of course, I’m not doing this professionally, and I don’t play an imagery analyst on TV. I have no evaluation of the provenance of the video, although I have some ex-professional opinions on the image quality. Mostly, it hasn’t been worth the short time I’ve invested in it: we need a pithy acronym for Just Another Fake News Story.
Best wishes to you and yours,
-d

Mostly I don’t believe Assad had motive to use sarin to kill 83 civilians; he could get that many with a platoon of light armor and a French 75, with far fewer consequences. I think Trump was taken in by a false flag operation and his family’s tears. He asked what he could do.

When the President realized what message that strike would have on Xi in his relations with North Korea, he simply did not listen to more false flag arguments. The strike was in fact pretty good foreign policy, although the Mother of All Bombs was even more so. That is a Machiavellian policy I can admire if not advocate. Minimal casualties, maximum effect; and if you’re going to do it. do it right. Check. No small injuries.

A fresh Diatribe for 20170413

Islam permits, encourages, and regulates slavery. So why should we be surprised to see it returning to Libya now that Obama took away the government that was preventing this stuff? Of course, our lefties are so ideologically headcrammed into holes in the ground they’ll never believe this is happening.

Libya: African migrants sold as slaves in slave markets https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/04/libya-african-migrants-sold-as-slaves-in-slave-markets

The regulation on slavery amounts to something very close to “do what you want but don’t destroy it’s value.” Sometimes brutality improves the value of the slaves to the Muslims. For example, blacks taken in slavery to Saudi Arabia and other Arabic Peninsula nations were routinely castrated so that they would not contaminate Muslim women. In this case young children were brutalized while grooming them for the sex slave market – in Britain.

UK: Muslim rape gang in court over 170 charges of sexual exploitation of 18 children https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/04/uk-muslim-rape-gang-in-court-over-170-charges-of-sexual-exploitation-of-18-children

They were captured off the UK streets. Therefore they were slaves. And, anything goes. Isn’t ANYBODY going to do something to stop this? Has the UK completely lost it’s moral compass? Has Europe as a whole lost it’s moral compass? It hurts to read this sort of news and then see nobody who can and should do something about it move off their backsides and actually do something constructive.

{o.o}

And perhaps that’s enough for the day.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 794 Thursday, October 17, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

Rejoice. The Bunny Inspectors, after a two week paid vacation, are back on the job. They will be paid for their “furlough” as if they had worked full time, with no loss of time off, and they can go back to watching stage magic shows to be certain that no thaumaturgist uses a rabbit in his performance without a Federal license from the Department of Agriculture, unless, of course, the rabbit is killed as part of the performance in which case no Federal license is required. I wish I were making all this up, but I am not. It’s the law. They will also inspect back yard rabbit cages where people who keep pet rabbits have their stock, and if anyone sells a pet rabbit without a Federal license the cost is about $5000 per bunny. If your kids keep rabbits, make sure they give them away rather than sell them. It is possible that they can sell rabbits for slaughter without a Federal license, but check with your lawyer before they do it.

So rejoice. The awful majesty of the Federal Government, for which Patriot blood was shed at Bunker Hill and Cowpens and Yorktown, will come down hard on those who dare use rabbits in public performance without a Federal license; and they will not be getting away with it, since the Inspectors are on the job.

The barriers are being taken down from the unattended turnaround at Mount Vernon, and the Veterans will once again be allowed to visit the World War II Memorial out on the National Mall; and tourists on busses will be able to “recreate” and even take pictures at Old Faithful. God reigns, and the Government at Washington lives again. At least until next February, when the Kabuki resumes. And for this we pay Members of Congress $170,000 a year plus plenty much beaucoup benefits and perks, only they are about to vote themselves a raise to compensate for their strenuous efforts in the Kabuki.

And the beat goes on.

I am scheduled to go back out to Kaiser in a few minutes where they will remove the stitches in my cheek (both outside and inside my mouth) and I am not really looking forward to it. And of course the various impacts bumps and bruises of my precipitation from bed to nightstand to floor early Tuesday morning are beginning to manifest themselves. It has not be a pleasant experience. Thanks for all the good wishes.

I’m fine if a bit disgruntled. The President is now castigating the Congress for not showing leadership in this crisis. I can’t think of a suitable comment.

The good news is that somehow the sequestration was kept intact so the government will spend less this year than it did last year. Not a lot less, certainly not enough less that we will not have to borrow money in order to pay the Bunny Inspectors for the paid vacation, but less. The budget deficit is decreasing. The Debt grows monotonically of course. We must borrow money to pay our debts, a situation that does not seem to be abating, but the deficit is marginally decreasing. This is a situation that the President intends to change; he has plenty of new places to spend money.

This is pledge week at KUSC, the LA Good Music station and that makes it a week of subscription drive at Chaos Manor. I don’t normally bug you about subscriptions, but when KUSC asks for money I do; which is to say, I operate this place on the Public Radio model. It’s free. I don’t allow chatter but I do select letter for publication and this place has one of the best letter sections on the web – admittedly I am a bit behind, but I will catch up on the mail. This is a place for rational discussion; think of it as a place for rational thought about the impact of technology on society. Politically I am a former protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, a former Cold Warrior, and that tends to color my views, but I am fairly skeptical about political theories as practiced by most political parties – and I have had enough experience managing political campaigns including for a Democratic Party Mayor of Los Angeles (Yorty) to know that no political theory is much use when it comes to government of real places in real times. Leaving me as a political skeptic.

Anyway if you do not subscribe this would be a good time to do so, and my thanks to the many new subscribers this week. And if you haven’t renewed your subscription in a while it’s never too late (or too early for that matter) to do so. Do it now while you’re thinking about it.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

And Roberta tells me it is time to go out to Kaiser and get stuck with needles. Sigh.

View 787 Thursday, August 22, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

More Bunny Inspectors. I seem to recall the President promising a laser like focus on expenditures and budget items, but that was back in campaign days.

Thomas Stemberg: A New Law to Liberate American Businesses

If Congress could close military bases, it can reduce job-killing regulations.

Nearly 30 years ago, I started a company called Staples Inc. SPLS -1.37% that went on to do pretty well. Launching a business like Staples in 2013 would be a much harder proposition, with success by no means certain. There are so many government impediments to business today that the next Staples—and its 50,000 jobs—might never get off the ground.

Chief among those roadblocks: the blizzard of bureaucratic red tape that buries businesses and stifles job creation. These include the additional 16 million hours that vending-machine and chain-restaurant business owners must spend complying with new food regulations each year. But there is also the license that magicians require to do a rabbit disappearing act, which mandates an annual fee, surprise inspections and a rabbit disaster plan. All told, American business faces 46,758 pages of rules to live by in the Federal Register.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578651852012786828.html

Stemberg proposes a commission like the base closing commission – the Defense Realignment and Base Closing Commission to be precise – that would take a laser like focus on regulations and propose lists of those to be abolished; the Congress would be required to take each list and do an up or down vote on the package, no amendments or sneaky readjustments. Whether it would work or not can be debated. Certainly something has to be. We have had for more than four years a President who promised, along with Hope and Change, a laser focus on budget expenditures.

I do get discouraged.

To give you some idea of just how bad things are in both the schools and the courts – that latter probably because the schools have been awful for decades – you might read these:

The 3rd Circuit Court’s ‘boobies’ boo-boo

The justices who decided the case of the breast cancer bracelets need to take a refresher course in adolescence.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-weaver-boobies-tinker-third-circuit-court-20130821,0,3570673.story

I am blessed that this never happened to me

School is no Place for a Reader

Jennifer A. Franssen

A perplexing fate awaits a reader in an elementary school. There is no place for this strange child in classroom, library or playground. Watching my daughter caught in this predicament I find myself troubled by the paradox of an institution charged with teaching children to read that seems unable to offer either welcome or nourishment to the ardent reader within its walls.

http://notesandqueries.ca/school-is-no-place-for-a-reader/

—

73s/Best regards de John Bartley K7AAY

If you want your children to be able to read, you must teach them yourself, preferably before they get to first grade. Just about all children from dull normal up can learn to read at age 5, and it was traditional for a hundred years for the English Upper and Upper Middle class children to learn to read at home taught in the nursery by nannies. There is no reason to assume that English gentry have better protoplasm than your children.

If you want to know more on that, see http://www.readingtlc.com/. My wife’s reading program is old, it’s clunky, it looks like DOS or early Windows because that’s what it was written for, but it works: seventy half hour lessons, and just about everyone from age 4 to 44 can learn to read nearly all English words of any length. By read I mean see the word and pronounce it even if this is the first encounter with the word, or even if it’s a nonsense word like porkmine or elfsocks or muckasimfor.

Many of us have always known this, but now it’s out:

Area 51: The real cover-up

The secret base didn’t house UFOs, but that doesn’t mean the government had nothing to hide.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley-area-51-20130821,0,943923.story

I didn’t know anything about the air pollution, but many of us understood that U-2 and SR-71 and other surveillance and high performance projects operated out of there. In 1964 I was editor of Project 75 which surveyed everything known about ballistic missile technology and had explicit need to know access to everything relevant to the present and future technologies in any way relevant to the Strategic Offensive Forces of the United States. That included flying saucers. If there were any extra-terrestrial technologies known in 1964 I never heard of them, and since the purpose of Project 75 was to structure the SOF to assure the survival of the United States, I can’t imagine why if we knew of any new technologies they didn’t get into the design survey. I certainly looked into everything known at Wright Patterson, and although I never visited Groom Lake I did go to the command hq. that oversaw the place. Nothing. (Nothing about Roswell, either, needless to say.)

But there was a cover-up, and the story is out now.

And a bit of encouraging news:

Jeffrey Singer: The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less

Bypassing his third-party payer, my patient avoided a high hospital ‘list price.’

Every so often I have an extraordinary and surprising experience with a patient—the kind that makes us both say, "Wow, we’ve learned something from this." One such moment occurred recently.

A gentleman in his early 60s came in with a rather routine hernia in his lower abdomen, one that is easily repaired with a simple outpatient surgical procedure. We scheduled the surgery at a nearby hospital.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324139404579017113415486176.html

The story tells how hospitals have different price schedules for insured and uninsured patients. You have heard the stories before, but this is explicit.

Perhaps there is a substitute for Obamacare?

Of course the whole notion of housing and food and medical care for those who can’t afford it has the problem that there is no agreed moral obligation to provide any of those to anyone unless you make certain assumptions that can be called ‘religious’.

Tocqueville noted that in Europe many matters of general welfare were traditionally considered a problem for government, and dealt with by government agents and bureaus. To his surprise nearly all those in America were dealt with by “the associations”: private associations some religious, some secular and civic. That American tradition was diluted over the years, but it still survives, although since Johnson’s Great Society days the tradition in America is like Europe. Housing and health and welfare are problems for government and taxpayers. As a result the associations have been weakened.

It may be time to reconsider just what are the responsibilities for being one’s brother’s keeper. Or sister’s. Or partner’s. The associations worked very well until times of great economic stress.  And the associations were better able to deal with the problems of ‘entitlement’, justice, fraud, and the whole question of the deserving and undeserving poor.

View 780 Monday, July 01, 2013

It has been a bad weekend and I’m a bit under the weather today but

THE BUNNY INSPECTORS ARE BACK

Some of your readers doubted the existence of the much-storied Federal Bunny Inspectors. Well, here is another sighting, much to the chagrin of small businesses:

www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/29/hare-brained-usda-reportedly-orders-childrens-magician-to-produce-disaster-plan-for-his-rabbit/

–Fred

Agriculture Department tells magician to write disaster plan for his rabbit

By Jessica Chasmar – The Washington Times – Monday, July 1, 2013

Magician Marty Hahne didn’t think things could get any more harebrained after the U.S Department of Agriculture harassed him for using an unlicensed rabbit in his magic shows two years ago.

Now, the agency is demanding he draw up a disaster plan for his furry friend.

The Ozark, Mo.-based magician contacted blogger Bob McCarty via email to explain his plight.

"You won’t believe what the USDA has come up with now," Mr. Hahne wrote late Friday afternoon. "If this wasn’t so stupid, it would be funny!"

"My USDA rabbit license requirement has taken another ridiculous twist," he continued. "I just received an 8 page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. They not only want to know how I will protect my rabbit during a disaster, but also what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly. I am not kidding–before the end of July I need to have this written rabbit disaster plan in place, or I am breaking the law."

Mr. Hahne also detailed the guidelines the USDA reportedly gave him:

• The new regulation became effective Jan. 30, 2012.

• The written plan must be completed by July 29, 2013.

• Mr. Hahne and his wife, Brenda, must be trained to implement the plan as written.

• The written plan must be available for review by USDA inspectors by Sept. 28, 2013.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/1/agriculture-department-tells-magician-write-disast/

Hello Jerry,

Hope this note finds you in good health. You’ve likely already received this information from numerous other sources, but I immediately thought of you when I saw it.

This morning, (Sunday 6/30) Fox News ran a story about the Federal Bunny Inspectors Service. Seems an 8 page letter has gone out to magicians around the country, informing them of the need to prepare (and presumably submit to theFeds for approval) a "Disaster Plan" for the care of their rabbits in the event of flood, fire, or other unfortunate events. Perhaps someone at the FBI (Federal Bunny Inspectors) reads Chaos Manor and feels a need to justify the Service’s existence.

The Iron Law, in Spades!

Dave Porter

Jerry,

Do you know where your rabbit is?

One of your favorite examples of most absurd programs has just taken a quantum leap into pathological absurdity.

http://bobmccarty.com/2013/06/28/usda-tells-magician-to-write-disaster-plan-for-his-rabbit/

Jim

I have a dozen other notes on this. Many apparently thought I had made up the bunny inspectors and were astonished to find that it is all true.

At least the rabbits will be safe from disaster.

One proposed disaster plan: a tag around the rabbit’s neck. “IN CASE OF DISASTER <KILL> <COOK> <EAT>”

Others have actual plans to lay in rabbit food. 

: Marco Polo If You Can

My friends in the Northern Areas, of Pakistan have a hard enough time being sandwiched in between Afghanistan, India, and China, but in recent years those regional Powers have more or less kept the peace

Last week things took a turn for the worse when the Taliban spilled over into their normally idyllic neighborhood:

http://takimag.com/article/playing_polo_in_heaven_russell_seitz#axzz2Xjqs7oBa <http://takimag.com/article/playing_polo_in_heaven_russell_seitz#axzz2Xjqs7oBa>

Readers are invited to drop in on them this summer- they sure could use some business, and they certainly can provide more adventure than the average adventure travel agency.

—

Russell Seitz

And be of good cheer…

They are FINALLY deporting illegal aliens for abusing the US hospital system…

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/polish-immigrant-deported-n-hospital-crippling-stroke-article-1.1382505

I thought this story might be of interest to you; you were recently writing about the illegal alien/undocumented worker thing as I recall…

And good reading:  http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_optimists_ta.html