Category Archives: Law

Update IV: Mining Men

Business, Gender, Labor, Law, Regulation

The Upper Big Branch South Mine near Montcoal, W.Va., is where “a methane explosion killed 25 miners and left four more missing and thought dead. The mine, operated by a subsidiary of Massey Energy Co., had been cited for several violations relating to proper ventilation.” This is “the worst mining disaster in over 20 years,” reports the Hill.

A suspect source, the United Mine Workers, “said that the mine had been the subject of 450 safety violations and that the company has paid over $1 million in fines last year.”

Regulation generally works to the detriment of those it is intended to help, since a less-than-honorable company will find the fine cheaper than the fixes needed to bring the mine up to par.

Update I (April 6): Coal-mining accidents always remind me—but not other media member, it seems—that men do society’s most dangerous jobs. Poor men, especially, go underground to make a living; have done so for generations.
Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 classic How Green Was My Valley (your children should have read it) depicts this reality in an achingly beautiful way. The book haunted me for years after I had read it, as a kid. “Margaret’s Museum” achieves a good deal on celluloid.

Update II: The following is from an 1935 article, “The World’s Most Dangerous Jobs.” Since then working conditions have improved for men because of advancement is technology, among other reasons. I also believe that workers in the fishing, timber and electrical power-line fields have overtaken miners as far as death on the job goes:

“‘COME quick! There’s a man hurt!’ Almost ten times every minute, more than 4,000 times each working day, that cry resounds somewhere among America’s great mass of industrial workers.”

“Once every ten minutes that cry means death for another working man. In 1933 it sounded the death knell of 46 men a day. These dying, injured, and maimed men were following ordinary jobs in most cases. They were not stunting aviators, daredevil race drivers, or human flies. Who then has the most dangerous job?”

With an accident frequency rate of 65.28 per million man-hours of exposure, say the Safety Council figures, the coal miner works at the world’s most dangerous job.
There are approximately a million miners in this country. While these men are working just one hour of one working day, more than 65 of them will be injured at their work.
The miner then has the world’s most dangerous job.
Second to mining, is lumbering. This occupation has an accident frequency rate of 59.67 per million man-hours of work. Third in the list of most dangerous occupations is the construction industry with a rate of 55.66.
And what is the safest job? At the top of the list of some thirty industries, accounted for in the figures of the National Safety Council, stands tobacco processing with a frequency rate of only 1.43, the safest occupation in this country!
For many years coal mining has led all other employments in the annual number of fatal and permanent injuries suffered in accidents.

Update III: “Mining Safety Reexamined After Another Deadly Disaster in W.Va.”

Update IV (April 7): What I know about rescue protocol in mining accidents is dangerous, but not nearly as hazardous as the slow speed with which the rescue at the Upper Big Branch Mine is proceeding.

They’ve drilled one hole “to release enough methane gas so searchers can enter the mine.”

How many more holes must they bore before they’ll allow searches to brave the Pit?

Presently they appear to be endlessly testing air samples. Can you imagine the time lost sending samples to the feds? Even if they do it on location, which is what I presume is happening, from the vantage point of the relatives this rescue must looks like a Ninny-State operation.

Maybe the authorities involved have decided it is no longer a rescue, but a recovery operation. How I hope this is not the case.

Poor, poor people. But for the grace…

Grounds For A Constitutional Challenge Of H.R.4872

Constitution, Fascism, Federalism, Healthcare, Law, Regulation, States' Rights

In an interview with NewsMax.com, Judge Andrew Napolitano outlined the grounds upon which the Supreme Court of the United States ought to repeal major portions of Obama’s overweening health care legislation:

“The Constitution does not authorize the Congress to regulate the state governments,” Napolitano says. “Nevertheless, in this piece of legislation, the Congress has told the state governments that they must modify their regulation of certain areas of healthcare, they must surrender their regulation of other areas of healthcare, and they must spend state taxpayer-generated dollars in a way that the Congress wants it done. …

That’s called commandeering the legislature,” he says. “That’s the Congress taking away the discretion of the legislature with respect to regulation, and spending taxpayer dollars. That’s prohibited in a couple of Supreme Court cases. So on that argument, the attorneys general have a pretty strong case and I think they will prevail.” …

The Supreme Court has ruled that in areas of human behavior that are not delegated to the Congress in the Constitution, and that have been traditionally regulated by the states, the Congress can’t simply move in there,” Napolitano says. “And the states for 230 years have had near exclusive regulation over the delivery of healthcare. The states license hospitals. The states license medications. The states license healthcare providers whether they’re doctors, nurses, or pharmacists. The feds have had nothing to do with it.

“The Congress can’t simply wake up one day and decide that it wants to regulate this. I predict that the Supreme Court will invalidate major portions of what the president just signed into law.”…

Napolitano believes the federal government lacks the legal authority to order citizens to purchase healthcare insurance. The Congress [is] ordering human beings to purchase something that they might not want, might not need, might not be able to afford, and might not want — that’s never happened in our history before,” Napolitano says. “My gut tells me that too is unconstitutional, because the Congress doesn’t have that kind of power under the Constitution.”

The sweetheart deals in the healthcare reform bill used that persuaded Democrats to vote for it – the Louisiana Purchase, Cornhusker Kickback, Gatorade Exception and others – create “a very unique and tricky constitutional problem” for Democrats, because they treat citizens differently based on which state they live in, running afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause according to Napolitano. “So these bennies or bribes, whatever you want, or horse trading as it used to be called, clearly violate equal protection by forcing people in the other states to pay the bills of the states that don’t have to pay what the rest of us do,” Napolitano says.

Exempting union members from the so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive health insurance policies, while imposing that tax on other citizens, is outright discrimination according to Napolitano. “The government cannot draw a bright line, with fidelity to the Constitution and the law, on the one side of which everybody pays, and the other side of which some people pay. It can’t say, ‘Here’s a tax, but we’re only going to apply it to nonunion people. Here’s a tax, and we’re only going to apply it to graduates of Ivy League institutions.’ The Constitution does not permit that type of discrimination.” …

[SNIP]

In this televised interview, the Judge laid out more clearly the test for a constitutional challenge, namely that one is harmed by the legislation.

Note the comment on the impossibility of reading and making sense of H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 (my experience) each section of which amends and alludes to other laws in the US Code, which in itself is large enough to fill a house with paper stacked to the ceilings.

Update II: Canadian Anti-Coulter Cretins Crave ‘Positive Space’

Ann Coulter, Canada, Christianity, Fascism, Free Speech, Individual Rights, Judaism & Jews, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Political Philosophy

I’m so very pleased that Ann Coulter has, by necessity, turned her wrath on one of the most oppressive instruments in the Canadian state, the Human Rights apparatus. The Human Rights Commission, a Kangaroo court, operates outside the Canadian courts, affording its victims none of the defenses or due process the courts afford. For example, mens rea, or criminal intention: the absence of the intent to harm is no defense in this “court.” Neither is truth.

The apparatchiks of this machine have designated certain groups as protected species. Thus, the bedrock of western law, the rights of the individual, is turned on its head. Based on your membership in a group, you get to claim protected species rights—and acquire a lien on the property of other groups, who become prime potential offenders. The quasi-judicial Tribunal then acts on these definitions in the substance of its decisions. It’s all great for social cohesion.

And the designations keep growing. Last I covered the quasi-courts, it was deliberating as to whether to extend protection against discrimination on the grounds of “social conditions.” In other words, much like in the US, you do not posses absolute rights to your property. However, over and above the infraction against freedom of association and property that is American Civil Rights law, the Canadian kangaroo code would make it an offense to refuse to rent your apartment, for example, to a welfare recipient.

Devastating complaints have been launched against individuals whose speech the protected species dislike, often bankrupting and destroying innocent individuals guilty of exercising property rights or expressing politically incorrect thoughts.

In a truly free society, the kind we once enjoyed, one honors the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. Simple. So long as your mitts stop at my mug, you ought to be free to do as you wish. (Including ingesting drugs and ending one’s life, for vices are not crimes. “If for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else—government—owns him.”) People ought to be arrested only for crimes they perpetrate against another’s person or property.

Particularly apt is Ann’s swipe, in “Oh Canada,” at the mob mentality and congenital stupidity issuing from the free-thinking Millennials (whom I’ve described at length in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable”):

the Ottawa University Student Federation met for seven and a half hours to hammer out a series of resolutions denouncing me. The resolutions included:

“Whereas Ann Coulter is a hateful woman;

“Whereas she has made hateful comments against GLBTQ, Muslims, Jews and women;

“Whereas she violates an unwritten code of ‘positive-space’;

“Be it resolved that the SFUO express its disapproval of having Ann Coulter speak at the University of Ottawa.”

At least the students didn’t waste seven and a half hours on something silly, like their studies.

Update I (March 25): Where do you think “The Silly Sex?” would land this writer were she to return to Canada? Or “Women Who Wed the Wrong Wahhabi”? Or “‘Obsession’ By Muhammad”?

Update II: Coulter has never called for the conversion of Jews, as Myron (and lefties) contends. I’ve long since “Disentangled [That] Coulter/Deutsch Dust-Up”:

Although some Christian denominations have watered it down, a general filament of the Christian faith is the belief that salvation is predicated on accepting Christ. If Coulter were more than a brash, bonny (if bony) babe, she’d have explained that doctrine: To get past the Pearly Gates, Christians believe one has to accept Christ.

“But is belief in ‘perfection’ or ‘completion’ through Jesus tantamount to hostility to Jews?” asked Gabriel Sanders of the Jewish daily “Forward.” And he replied, quoting Yaakov Ariel, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a specialist in Jewish-Evangelical ties: “A conservative, Jesus-oriented faith doesn’t mean, in and of itself, that people are anti-Jewish. Some of the more favorable attitudes toward Jews have developed in Evangelical circles.”

Police State Shaking In Its Goose-Stepping Boots

Democracy, Democrats, Fascism, Law, Terrorism, The State

It’s the leading story on just about every cable network. “House Democrats are concerned about their security due to increased threats since Sunday’s vote to pass the health care bill.”

A grim-faced House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer held a news conference, where he bemoaned that “a significant number, meaning over 10” Democrats “had reported either threats, vandalism or other incidents. Capitol Police officials have briefed House Democrats on reporting suspicious or threatening activity and taking precautions to avoid ‘subjecting themselves or their families to physical harm,’ said Hoyer, D-Maryland.”

Hoyer was flanked by a chap called Jim Clyburn who mouthed cliches about the lessons of history, and threw the kitchen sink of civil rights, holocaust, homophobia in for good measure.

Most other news outlets ran with this story, against a backdrop of besieged Democrats speaking about the need for security details to guard their homes and families and wallowing in horror stories about a handful of disenfranchised voters who seem to have lost faith in the vaunted American mobocracy. (Your wishes to be left alone are ignored in a democracy?! You don’t say.)

Good luck to you in trying to get a security detail should your family come under threat or should your boyfriend threaten to kill you. The sponger class has no perception of how rarefied and cloistered is its worthless, parasitic existence.

How ludicrous and contemptuous for the political class (and its media sycophants), backed as it is by the tanks that took out tots at WACO, to put on this show—aimed at depicting a tiny number of angry voters who dared to step out of line as Timothy McVeighs in the making.