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Or rather, fuck your hypocritical bullshit when it comes to the issue of impaired driving.

Apparently my brother, out on his own and doing well in a productive job that he enjoys, with good opportunities, for what may have been the first time in his adult life, was busted for drunk driving over the weekend.

And so as a result of this, plus previous convictions when he was younger and more stupid and, per my understanding, recent changes to Iowa’s laws which chain him to these past offenses for the rest of his life, society’s rules now deem that his life be ruined.

Since his job involved a lot of driving, that’s gone. Since most of America operates on a personal automobile based transportation infrastructure (which, in combination with most of America’s participation in a culture of gathering for social drinking, seems like a difficult fit with zero-tolerance drunk driving laws, but we’ll come back to those), he’s now reduced to a poor sort of second-class citizenship, at best. He’s also apparently a convicted felon.

All because he got caught driving someone home from a bar. (more…)

Today begins the Fourth-of-July weekend. Five years ago, I marked Independence Day with an attempt at a political post which actually focused almost entirely on positive ideas. It makes interesting reading, I think, from the perspective of its nickel anniversary; I’m definitely still proud of it.

For this year, figuring that I wasn’t going come up with any kind of adequate positive statement, I had the following queued up instead. But I’ve had a better idea, which will appear on Sunday. In the meantime, being as vain as a summer day is long and therefore loathe to waste any of my precious brilliance (or a good profanity exercise; must keep in practice), I’m posting this bit today. Wherein I offer up a little reply to all those people out there tooling around, proudly sporting the message “please don’t put my flag on your foreign car” on their vehicle’s bumper. So:

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