David McElroy

We have a special treat this week for biblical scholars. A recently discovered painting has finally explained what Paul meant in Second Corinthians 12:7.

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If you need a router for your home, you probably head over to Target or Best Buy and pick up an inexpensive one for $30-50. If you have special needs, you might select a fancy one and pay $100 or maybe $150 — at the most.

But that’s not what the state of West Virginia did when it got a $24 million federal “stimulus” grant to put routers into libraries, schools and health clinics. Instead of buying inexpensive routers — or even high-end commercial routers for about $500 — the state paid $22,600 for each router. Instead of buying equipment designed for small institutions, the state bought 1,064 routers designed for large institutions serving tens of thousands of computers.

What’s worse, various technology experts working for the state warned about the overkill before the purchase was made, but the state bureaucrats didn’t listen. The excuse? The state bureaucrat who made the decision said that putting the same expensive router into every school, library and other institution was done in the name of “equal opportunity.”

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Cleaning out the notebook….

In the last couple of days, it’s become widely know among certain libertarians and anarchists that someone they knew and trusted in Philadelphia was arrested for drug sales and coerced to become a government informant. A lot of people are very angry with her for betraying them in order to cut a better deal for herself. I’m surprised that anybody is surprised.

If you’re curious about the situation, you can read more here, but I’m not really interested in getting into the details and the blame. The bottom line is that police arrested a young woman and then released her after they blackmailed her into worked for them. (Oh, wait. It’s not supposed to be blackmail when the state does it, I guess.) She was set loose to inform on her friends about their drug purchases and to set up people selling drugs.

When police had enough evidence, they arrested a bunch of people and they eventually found out that the friend they had trusted was the one who set them up. They’re angry and hurt. She’s trying to justify what she did.

All I can say is that when someone holds a gun — metaphorical or otherwise — to your head, you’re probably going to do what the people with the gun ask you to do. This woman betrayed her friends to save her own skin, but I have trouble getting too upset about it and I certainly can’t act surprised about it. That’s what almost everyone does in the same situation. It’s easy from the safety of our homes to pontificate, but it’s a very different thing when you’re sitting in a jail cell facing the prospects of losing everything. Self-interest almost always kicks in. Right or not, that’s just reality.

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