Category: Current Events

A Green Beret demolitions expert who twice had explosives confiscated by the TSA before he tried to board airliners over the holidays has been released to the supervision of his superiors at Fort Bragg on $50,000 bail.

One basic idea is that hard work should be rewarded. Obvious, right? I mean, we’re supposed to be economists here! People respond to incentives, and they are risk averse. A winner-take-all society is not very conducive to hard work; I’m not going to bust my butt for 30 years for a 1% shot at getting into The 1%. But I am going to bust my butt for 30 years if I think this gives me a 90% chance of having a decent house, a family, some security, a reasonably pleasant job, a dog, and a couple of cars in my garage. An ideal middle-class society is one in which everyone, not just anyone, can get ahead via hard work.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. Here are some other delightful encounters with “fans” (and anyone who thinks this is a new phenomenon brought on by the advent of camera phones needs to read Harlan Ellison’s essay “Xenogenesis”, available in The Essential Ellison which is, as the title says, essential reading):

This is a politician, after all, who never won the votes of more than a third of the electorate; destroyed communities; created mass unemployment; deindustrialised Britain; redistributed from poor to rich; and, by her deregulation of the City, laid the basis for the crisis that has engulfed us 25 years later.