President Donald Trump has picked Jim O’Neill, a former investor and critic of health regulations serving under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to take control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, following a tumultuous week in which the agency’s director was forced out.
O’Neill, Kennedy’s deputy at the Department of Health and Human Services, will supplant Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist who had been the CDC director for less than a month.
Monarez’s lawyers said she refused “to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.”
I remember back then coming across a proposed “constitution” someone had posted on the Internet for one of these sea-steaded micronations. It was presented as a contract rather than a constitution, every citizen was supposed to literally sign on to it (or be treated as a non-citizen). It was zany. Hundreds of pages, with all sorts of minutiae. The main bit I remember was the rather large section that was the equivalent of the American second amendment, it had detailed rules about what kinds of landmines one was allowed to put on one’s property.
A constitutional right to place landmines, on a seastead micronation that would no doubt have rather constrained living space.
I’m generally in favour of personal liberties and all that, I can see how libertarianism can appeal as something that seems like a reasonable idea. But it’s so easy for it to just go careening wildly off the edge of reasonableness into territory like this.
Ha! That rings a bell. Somewhere back in the mists of time, I wonder if I ran across the same thing. Or I seem to remember something about a contract, and I thought there was also a component of buying into it with large amounts of money to help fund it. Sort of like a proto-GoFundMe project.