12 thoughts on “First They Came For The Lemonade Stands”

  1. To be fair, the incident in Iowa revolves around a local 2-day ban on unlicensed vendors as a part of a state-wide week-long beer ru-, er, bike ride.

    And the story about it that actually made it onto the local news was about a 4 year-old who was allegedly “running” her own stand, even though she could barely speak in complete sentences or actually pour a drink into a glass without dumping the entire glass or pitcher over. Her father is a local politician who set the whole thing up to get publicity for his upcoming campaign.

    At least the kids in DC were actually running the stand themselves, and understood what they were doing. The kids in Iowa were all pawns of their parents, trying to get their 15 minutes on local TV.

  2. I have yet to see the regulatory nanny-state described by the more classically descriptive term, aka the other F-bomb. Hint: Fascism isn’t 60’s hippiespeak for ‘I don’t like you’ much as they wished it to be so.
    Can a constitutional republic be a fascist state? It seems that we have more and more evidence in the affirmative.

  3. Unlicensed cheese? What’s next? Kids running through sprinklers during a drought? Leaving your house without the proper government approved protective clothing? We need more swat teams. There couldn’t possibly be enough. More stimulus!

    Just got off the phone with my ex. She wanted my opinion on the debt deal. I gave my little rant about spending. She asked, what about revenue? I told her it doesn’t matter what the tax rate is. Revenue is going to be about 18% of GDP no matter. So revenue only goes up if GDP goes up. We have plenty of money, but nobody is going to risk any of it until Obama is out of office. She’s starting to believe. Now if only we could get on the same wave regarding Putin.

    Perhaps we should issue uzis to cute little lemonade stand vendors? Shorten horror movies… Monster breaks in front door… homeowner wastes them with a rocket launcher. Break for commercial.

    Swat team breaks into wrong house without warrant… homeowner (busty blond in bikini) wastes them with rocket launcher. Break for commercial.

    Ahnuld the governator breaks in front door… homeowner burns his skin off with flamethrower revealing metal skeleton. Suddenly Arnulds acting skills improve (he seems less wooden as a metal skeleton.) Break for commercial.

  4. Ran into this in a small way: Because we have data under ITAR control, we can’t export a database and send it to the vendor for them to inspect. We don’t know if a given engineer at BigDBCompany is ITAR compliant.

    Same problem with having them remote logon.

    So – ahha – scrub the ITAR data and then send it to them. This takes time. Also: some of the problems are related to the data: the odds are good we’re scrubbing away the problem that we’re trying to fix.

    We’ve been going round and round to get this fixed. It’s been a month, and the problems, minor enough, are piling up like flies.

  5. They make enough laws and we’ll come full circle. We’ll all be lawbreakers no matter what we do so we’ll all just ignore the laws.

  6. ken anthony Says:

    August 4th, 2011 at 6:57 am
    They make enough laws and we’ll come full circle. We’ll all be lawbreakers no matter what we do so we’ll all just ignore the laws.

    According to some people, this is already the case.

    Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can’t keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

    Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book “Three Felonies a Day,” referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.

    Mr. Silverglate describes several cases in which prosecutors didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand technology. This problem is compounded by a trend that has accelerated since the 1980s for prosecutors to abandon the principle that there can’t be a crime without criminal intent.

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