Posted on 02/25/2013 6:44:06 PM PST by Nachum
Michael Arrington is a prominent tech blogger, who sold his site Tech Crunch to AOL in 2010. As such, this particular story of government overreach, starring a gleeful bureaucrat taking the property of a citizen operating in good faith, may get a wider audience than the usual conservatives and libertarians who catch wind of such things. Good. For every story that gets attention, there are countless abuses that don’t.
The story starts with Arrington buying himself a boat. He lives in Seattle, where there’s much boating to be done. Having paid for the boat, named her, and had her imported from Canada, she was to arrive Thursday. After signing a few customs papers, Arrington was to be standing astride the deck of his vessel. No such luck.
I named her Buddy. It has state of the art electronics and a fairly new highly efficient propulsion system that the TechCrunch audience would be interested in.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
H. L. Mencken
He has a followup to this
“If America Was A Startup We’d All Quit”
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/22/america-startup-quit/
LAWSUIT!!!
It would be nice if he posted the name of the agent.
Not saying she was a 'person of colour' or anything like that, of course. (/sarc) Otherwise I would be accused of being a wascawwey waysist. *grin*
It didn’t even occur to me that her persuasion might have been any different than mine. However, it would be nice to have posted her name, or to still yet post her name, so the anonymity they are used to as federal agents is pulled back a little, and she has to go places and do things and be recognized as that agent who was giddy at having seized someone’s expensive property merely because they refused to sign a false official document. “Even though it didn’t matter, ‘it was just paperwork.’” (Try using that in court!) That agent should be shunned, if not fired.
You know, he's some rich doofus, destroying the environment, non-local airhead who hates gays and lesbians... I could go on but you get the idea.
Oh and I forgot to add: if it is indeed someone of anglo-saxon -type descent, unless they somehow are unable to get it by printing time, not only will it be quickly noted the second they do, but a poorly-snapped photo of him will be prominently posted as soon as possible.
Absolutely. After the morons realize that they are on a losing trejectory. Then for sure file a formal complaint, including her name, and demand that she be fired or at the least reprimanded, or retrained, or something.
Unless there is something missing in the narrative, I would sue her personally for incompetence, for abuse of power under color of authority, and publicise her name on facebook during the entire process.
I suspect that the support this guy would get would be overwhelming.
If this seems like no big deal, you might be wrong. Consider that everything good about modern civilization was invented by people who really needed to focus to get the job done. What happens to a world-class engineer or entrepreneur when he or she has to syphon off more brain energy to satisfying Safeway’s marketing strategy instead of designing new products? Now multiply that times a hundred because every retailer, website, and business is trying to complicate your life too.
The freeman has a more excellent spirit than that of the slave.
The freeman desires to create maximum efficiency in mundane, rote tasks so that he is free to concentrate on that which is more important, productive.
The slave, the bureaucrat, has no need or care to think this way. It is not his nature. His purpose is to keep busy for no other purpose than to keep busy, even if that means he has to break down or destroy his own environment. "Better" to keep busy pretending to solve [self-generated] problems, than to deal with the pre-existing problems that already need functional solutions.
For legitimate problem-solving the bureaucratically-minded is thoroughly unqualified, but his ego demands that he perceive himself a success. Hence a DHS drone (dronette?) scores success by crafting a sword out of a paperwork SNAFU.
That the error was currency-related, and therefore intertwined with layers of tax and regulatory mandates, meant the boat owner could not simply brush it off as "just paperwork". It would have been a snare of monumental, legal proportions. Not successful in enslaving the prey in that particular trap, the DHS drone resorted to exacting direct punishment upon her unyielding victim. The boat owner's crime was his stubborn insistence upon simple TRUTH.
The more complicated a mundane task can be made to be, the less time there is for that which is truly important. It is not in the slave nature to create and contribute and thus elevate himself (much less his fellow man) to a higher plane of existence or purpose. It is his nature to stay mired in the "complexity of daily life" and to grab, restrain, confound, or destroy those who desire to reach for and occupy that higher place.
Reminds me of
While Jewish belief also speaks of the soul's reward in the hereafter, earned through its toil in the course of life's journey, it sees the refinement of the physical and the infusion of holiness and purpose into the mundane as the paramount objective. It is the sanctification of the human body and the world at large that constitutes the very purpose of its creation.
Moshiach (Messiah...in Hebrew) 101
The price of unnecessary complexity in daily life is not hidden to the freemen, because they are the ones perpetually vexed - or rather taxed - by its existence.
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