Liberty is not wearing your seat belt now. Not wearing one last month paled in comparison to the rush you get today. Just in case you were unclear as to the rules of liberty. I guess I was unclear about it, but some eloquent legislator said it was true.

It seems like a low bar for liberty.

I don’t know what wearing one without any sense of bother means. I guess the seat belt would be constraining. But not that much, provided that you are seated properly inside the car. Don’t try to get out of the car with one on. You’ll really be constrained. And don’t try to get out of the car while it’s moving. That’s another good tip.

In the name of liberty, we also rid ourselves of the Equal Right Amendment. But women don’t have to snap in their seat belts, so there’s that.

What woman can’t do for sure is ask the government to intervene in circumstances where a person becomes a danger to himself and others and that person owns a gun. That is probably none of her business, anyway, but she lives with the guy with the gun. Awkward. So thanks to tomato soup that our public safety defenses in Bismarck are useless. Liberty, dude.

And women can’t breast-feed in public without getting static from the 17-year-old assistant manager with the unfertilized beard. So keep that in mind.

This next one is a really bad idea from central planners for freedom.

Even if all employers in North Dakota paid a person enough for 40 hours of work for him or her to be able to afford a domicile and some food, this is still a local matter. This isn’t the Food Freedom Act that the Bastiat Caucus has been pushing for a few years, which frees food that never suffered any constraints.

This is a keep labor costs low Bill. We don’t want any of this living wage crap out here in the middle of an enormous field of snow. So we’re in charge of future options for your city. Some of us live a river’s width from another city in another state. Look at a map.

• “I introduced HB 1193 because it could protect jobs in District 24 and around the state from the fates being faced by places like Seattle. Tomorrow morning, a hearing will be held for HB 1193, which is designed to prevent ‘living wage’ labor price controls from coming to North Dakota. This bill guarantees uniformity of minimum wage laws within the state, preventing local subdivisions from setting local wage controls inconsistent with state law. Failing minimum wage experiments across the nation are grounds for caution and protecting our citizens from arbitrary labor rates that endanger the jobs of young and old alike. We don’t need price wars between our cities and townships in North Dakota.” — Rep Daniel Johnston, R-Kathryn

Seattle is doing quite fine according to some, and not so well according to others.

As this guy says:

• “In his recent column on worker benefits, Digby Solomon purports to prove that Seattle’s gradual increase in the minimum wage has been a disaster. He cites a University of Washington study. He doesn’t mention that there is another study by the University of California, Berkeley that reaches the opposite conclusion, and a second, more recent University of Washington study that admits their previous study was flawed and resulted in excessively negative conclusions about the pay raise.” — Newport News, VA Daily Press Letter-to-the-editor

I expect this was all hashed out at Peacock Alley after they decided.

But what do the northwestern tree people have to with us? If Seattle is a problem, we can just wait for one of our oil trains to blow the place up. It’s on our route.

All legislators should know by now that the Bakken producers are sending out tankers of crude oil and propane, butane, methane, ethane and who knows what else, on their trains in the same container. They knew what would happen if one derailed — explode — but did it anyway and the practice continues? Forty-seven out-of-the-womb people have been killed so far.

Because big oil was too cheap — 10-plus year ago — to install proper stabilization equipment, that would easily separate the explosive gases from the crude oil, Bakken oil trains are prone to explode if a tanker is breached during a derailment.

The Industrial Commission is directly to blame for the situation, but with no pressure from the Republican Legislature to do the responsible thing for public safety, the next one to shoot fireballs could be Seattle or Rugby.

Most people want something done about climate change. The legislature doesn’t care

Do you believe in Civil rights for all, including all LGBTQ? You came to the wrong place.

And there is this:

A bill is being considered to pile another brick atop a pregnant woman who decides to chemically abort a pregnancy. The doctor will have to tell the woman that the effects of the first pill may be reversed. But the doctor doesn’t know that to be true.

• “HB 1336, is a bill which requires that abortion reversal be added to the informed consent statute was heard in committee today. We had lots of terrific testimony show up in support of the bill. I want to thank Concerned Women for America, ND Family Policy Alliance, Catholic Conference, U. Mary Collegians for Life, Rep. Skroch, Dr. Jerry Obritsch, Dr. Becker, and others for your testimony.” — Rep Daniel Johnston

What do they think the second one is for? If the second pill of misoprostol is not taken, the odds are about half that the pregnancy will continue, coincidently about the same percentage as those women who go through an abortion reversal procedure. Well, huh.

Somebody is making money here. I don’t doubt the true believers. I guess it would the medical provider or whoever implausibly cornered the market on the progesterone hormone.

Maybe it’s just a marketing strategy to entice women to change their minds.

They don’t tell a person the cost on the “call now” websites. Just Google “abortion reversal” and get a hard sell for simply reading.

Either way, though, the treatments don’t do any better than doing nothing.

• “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing” — Billy Preston
• “The bottom line is we don’t change the way medicine is practiced because somebody has a new idea, you have to actually test that idea doing rigorous research and determining whether the treatment was safe and effective. And that’s the piece that was skipped here.” — Dr. Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN, and director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

All drivers who choose to go belt-free for freedom will need an “informed consent” speech from a doctor about the permanent nature of going through the windshield.