Where to begin with this allegation… Behold 36 year old Mike Kelsey: Attorney, County Elected Official, Outdoors Enthusiast, Photographer and – it seems – lover of boys.
A county legislator from downstate New York is charged with sexual abuse for allegedly touching two teen-age boys in the Cranberry Lake area last summer. Michael N. Kelsey (R), 36, of Pleasant Valley, NY, was arrested by state police in Wappingers Falls Monday night.
“My understanding is that Mr. Kelsey is a boy scout leader. He was up here on a boy scout camping trip with several boys and he did touch at least two of them,” said St. Lawrence County District Attorney Mary Rain.
Michael Kelsey Esq, (R), Dutchess County NY District 25. Pervert Boy Lover and one of your fine elected representatives. Give him a call at Cell: (914) 475-0060 and let him know how he’s doing.
He was charged with sexual abuse, first degree, forcible touching and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
“The most serious charge is sexual abuse in the first degree. Sexual abuse first is a felony which carries up to seven years in state prison per child,” said Rain.
Kelsey was arraigned in Town of Pierrepont court Tuesday morning before Judge Robert Camp. He was freed on $2,500 bail.
Scott Armstrong, president of the Boy Scouts Longhouse Council – which covers St. Lawrence County – said the incident had nothing to do with the Longhouse Council and did not take place on locally operated scouting property. Kelsey was banned from scouting in October.
Armstrong said it was his understanding the charges stemmed from a trip made by Scouts from the Hudson Valley to the Cranberry Lake area. State police said Kelsey inappropriately touched two 15 year old boys during a trip August 13 and 14.
The chairman of the Dutchess County legislature, Rob Rollison, said in a statement that Kelsey should resign. “The news regarding the charges against Legislator Michael Kelsey are sad and deeply disturbing,” Rollison said. “We must be mindful that the allegations involve children and so our concern, first and foremost, must be for their safety and well-being. While he is allowed due process in a court of law, given the severity of the charges it is in the best interest of all for Michael Kelsey to step down from his position as legislator at this time.”
As well, Kelsey just lost a very tight race for state Assembly. According to his assembly web site, Kelsey is a lawyer, a part-time professor and “an avid outdoors man” who has climbed the Adirondack high peaks.
So here we have yet another f**cking pervert involved with the Boy Scouts (recently pressured to require admission of gay scouts and staff), as well as involved with a once Catholic institution. I have had enough.
It is easy to be upset about what is happening all around. The economy is being destroyed, deliberately, by insane economic policies. Incentives to work are being eliminated by punishing work. At the same time rewards are increasing for not working. Not surprisingly we get less of what we penalize (work) and more of what we subsidize (non-work).
As an economist I get sick over what I see happening to what was once a great engine of productivity, capital creation and improvements in standards of living.
After two centuries of progress that amazed the world, the conditions necessary for growth and productivity are steadily being removed. Their presence allowed the miracle of America. Their absence guarantees the decline. Carried to extreme, the US could become a second or third-world nation within a few decades. Virtually all changes in the last five to ten years point in this direction and these changes are accelerating.
As pained as the economic retrogression is, the loss of freedom is even more disturbing. It was free markets and free men that made America the dominant economic power and the beacon of freedom. Without freedom, no economic policy can succeed. Yet, just as economic policies seem designed to destroy rather than create, so too does the role of government as steadily destroys freedom with its expanded oppression and power. The absence of freedom is tyranny. The absence of freedom is also poverty.
Economic decline is difficult to convey, although data are useful.
The decline of liberty, however, is not easily quantifiable and even more difficult to communicate. An email from Simon Black, expresses his concern regarding Leviathan government and its increasing oppression. It provides as good a qualitative measure of what is occurring to freedom in this country:
By now it should be clear to anyone paying attention that most of Western civilization is on a dangerous slide into tyranny.
They’re confiscating funds directly from people’s bank accounts. They’re seizing reporters’ personal records and phone logs. They’re digitally spying on everyone’s emails.
They’ve authorized military detention and drone assassination of their own citizens.
They’re using tax offices to harass political opposition groups.
They tell us what we are allowed to eat and drink, what foods we are allowed to put in our own body.
Think about it. These are Soviet tactics, plain and simple.
What’s more, they don’t even care. They think we’re all idiots who are too stupid to even notice what they’re doing.
In fact, just a few days ago, Barack Obama staunchly defended his policies, saying “you can complain about Big Brother. . . but when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.” This is textbook sociopathic behavior: destructive, antisocial conduct and a complete lack of conscience.
Unfortunately this is just the beginning.
Imagine what it will look like in a few more years: trillions of dollars of more debt… more printed currency. More police state tactics. More invasions of privacy. More ridiculous regulations.
Many reasons have been given for the fall of the Roman Empire—greed and decadence, Christianity or the want of it, a decline in industriousness, lack of new territory to plunder, internal wars and over-reliance on the military and so forth. These are “civic virtue” arguments. More objectively, Tainter says the total cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the total return from the empire. The notion appears to confuse cause and effect if you squint and look at it just so. An automobile will eventually cost more in maintenance than the worth of its service justifies, but the deterioration itself isn’t due to the cost of maintenance. An asset has a trajectory apart from our mitigations of its effects. Continue reading →
Collapse is an overused word, a telescoping of events better described as a decline. The buggy industry didn’t “collapse” when the first automobile dealership appeared—Studebaker made both, nor did the vacuum tube disappear the day the first transistor was manufactured. The Roman and Byzantine empires didn’t collapse, they were transformed in a surprisingly orderly, if not voluntary, manner over a long period of time. No, they weren’t mere reorganizations or downsizing, and yes there were catastrophic events within those episodes, but a critical observer of the time would would rightly understand them to be something other than collapse. Continue reading →
The Grey Enigma 