Magnifisyncopathological

CBS News: The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?

"I like to say that the new energy technologies could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," [John Doerr from the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins] explained.

[...]

Twenty large, well-known companies have quietly bought and are testing Bloom boxes in California.

Like FedEx. We were at their hub in Oakland, the day Bloom installed their boxes, each one costing $700-800,000.

One reason the companies have signed up is that in California 20 percent of the cost is subsidized by the state, and there's a 30 percent federal tax break because it's a "green" technology. In other words: the price is cut in half.

Don't take this as something it isn't. Don't let someone tell you that a 30% cut in federal taxes has helped make this technology possible. If they say that, they've got their cause and effect mixed up. The government didn't help anyone or help do anything.

A more accurate way of explaining it is 30% of the dollar cost the government aggressively imposes on individuals (and the organizations they own) who add economic value to human existence has been temporarily waived per conditional government approval. The line between economically feasible and a waste of money is thin enough that a third less in this expense makes a difference. This tech might revolutionize world well-being, and for some companies, a few hundred thousand bucks are part of what stands in the way.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the number of people with great ideas, promising implementations, and the willpower to face the risks. Think about the diverse level of interest in improving humanity out there, trying to make It work. Think about the thousands of decisions made each day, many with the weight of cost factoring in at the moment of truth. Most people can't buy whatever they want; they have to spend wisely or go broke. This is no different from an organization designed to create and manufacture a product.

"This is affordable. Yes, we should do it."

...or...

"We'd never make any money. No, we shouldn't do it."

I think of the untold, unpublished, unrecognized, uncountable mountains of "no" built up over the decades, a mute chain on human progress. I'm no utilitarian and I don't think the critical determinant of any moral question is the amount, degree, or breadth of some positive outcome. But if those are the grounds upon which someone argues for the aggression necessary to enforce the tax system against people trying to voluntarily buy and sell goods and services, they have no legitimate reason to claim this statism made the Bloom Box possible. The government decided to let these people keep more of their money. That isn't help just like a robber isn't helping you when he decides to leave the TV.

I predict many of the coercive collectivists known as politicians will praise this as an example of proper government policy. I predict I'll vomit a little in my mouth every time I hear it, knowing that some dolt claiming to be a supporter of free markets and individual liberty will be on shortly to concede away the former by compromising on the latter.

Posted by drizzten at 11:47 PM | Permalink

Chutzpah, the quality of shamelessly violating social acceptability, is sometimes embodied in the story of a person who kills his parents and, during his trial, calls for the court's mercy because he's an orphan. I'd say giving the Nobel Peace prize to someone partially responsible for over 3,500 civilian deaths certainly qualifies.

I can't see how any government agent is qualified to receive a prize rooted in concepts of peace.

Within days of his inauguration, Barack Obama ordered military strikes that killed civilians in Pakistan. Those were not the first civilian deaths for which he shares responsibility.

He maintains an active war in Afghanistan. Iraq is still occupied. He has so far shown little substantial departure from Bush's policy on handling suspected/accused terrorists.

As far as I know, he has not helped end any significant conflict overseas.

Domestically, the case is even weaker. He supports not only the essential structures of taxation and economic regulation, but wishes to expand them. Both of those structures are actively violent against Americans and foreigners every day and constitute a direct threat against peaceful individuals.

This is an award given on the basis of two things: who he is not and how well he has tried to explain who he is not.

I think this will become a classic example of an elite body misreading a situation and provides further proof the Peace Prize is more of a stamp of political approval than anything else.

He should decline the award. Barring that, he should accept it and then immediately gift it to people exponentially more deserving. Chinese dissidents, Iranian protesters, etc.

Funniest comment I've read so far on the situation was from JonLee11 : "Maybe Obama won bc he got a black man and a white cop to sit down and have a beer together."

Posted by drizzten at 01:48 PM | Permalink

I've been lazy and have not replaced my bedroom's busted ceiling fan and I prefer having a constant airflow while I fall asleep. I need to replace my sheets because the current set is just plain old and worn out. Down the hall from me, one of my roommates and his girlfriend digested TV in his room all evening. I had been sitting in bed for several hours studying managerial accounting and thinking about my relationship situation. Several topics were bouncing around in my head:

• Cleaning the cat litter box
• Hoping the $650 I gave my neighbor will help fix her roof after one of the trees in my yard hit her house
• Filling up the Golf's tank soon
• What the hell I'll do when I finally graduate college and leave my current job
• A public speaking presentation on Andrew Bird for one of my classes
• Editing and posting at least 300 pictures I took over the last few months
• Juggling bills and my income
• What I'll be wearing at a theme party next weekend
• What the deal was with the two gunshots I heard that evening

So last night I honestly had trouble sleeping. I wasn't physically or mentally relaxed.

And what is the very first e-mail in my inbox at work this morning?

Please read and pass on


This came from a Marine unit over in Iraq ... Their wish is to send it

to as many people in the country as possible.

(Be sure to read their note at the end of the e-mail).. Hopefully we can help them achieve their goal.

I HOPE I DO NOT HEAR OF ANYONE
BREAKING THIS
ONE OR SEE
DELETED
This is a ribbon for
soldiers fighting in Iraq . Pass it on to everyone
and pray.
SLEEP LAST
NIGHT?
Bed a
little lumpy...
Toss and
turn any....
Wish the heat was higher...
Maybe the a/c !
Wasn't on...
Had to go to the john......
Need a drink of
water...
?
?
Scroll
down

Yes.. It is like that!
Count your blessings, pray for them,
Talk to your Creator
And
The next time when...
The other car cuts you off and you must hit the brakes,
Or you have to park a little further from Walmart than you want to be,
Or
you're served slightly warm food at the restaurant,
Or you're sitting and cursing the traffic in front of you,
Or
the shower runs out of hot water, Think of them...


Protecting your freedom!

Dear Jimmy,

Hope all is well in Iraq. We are so proud of you for going over there to fight for our freedom. A lot has happened since you left...

Our home was taken by the feds for back taxes we owed, and then the family business was condemned by the city so they could build a football stadium.

Mom was arrested for carrying a gun in her purse and your brother is in prison for smoking a joint. At least your sister is okay, though she has to go to court for not wearing a seatbelt.

We wish you were here to help pay for all the legal fees, but just knowing you are over there fighting for the liberties we cherish makes it all worthwhile.

Love, Dad

It was bad enough being told from all kinds of earnest, well-meaning people that I should be grateful that tens of thousands of soldiers are risking their lives to save mine...but apparently that simply is not good enough.

I now have to stop whining about my own personal displeasures because those soldiers are stuck in conditions far shittier than mine. Stubbing my toe pales in comparison to walking ten miles in filthy boots filled with sand and sweat. Finding a decent place to eat is nothing compared to Day #274 of MREs. Trouble sleeping in a house with central air but a bedroom without a ceiling fan is a joke when people sleep in spite of mortar attacks, sunburns, the aforementioned boots, vast distances between you and loved ones, the nightmares of your friends dying in front of you, knowing your mission is tossed around like a toy in partisan pissing matches, and in spite of the fact that perhaps you only joined the Army because you wanted help paying for college. Now, you've lost a girlfriend, your high school crew is moving on with their lives, and you don't trust the interpreter for your platoon.

I get all that. I get that it sucks and it's hot and it's dusty and it's fucking depressing and some assholes keep planting bombs that blow sanity and bodies apart. For all those reasons and a lot more, I want those people home. I've wanted them home for several years, withdrawn "precipitously" and post-gawddamn-haste. The sooner the better. I'd much rather they not have to deal with post-traumatic stress and fucking amputations and arrogant officers and loser noncoms and the idea of a "vacation" neutered down to a few weeks back home before getting sent out into the shit again. For the third time.

But I refuse to abstain from dwelling on my own very present problems simply because there are others in the world who are worse off than me...and I particularly refuse to temper acknowledging my own problems on the morally fallacious grounds that unwanted sacrifice demands my humility and thanks. Sacrifice - the act of giving up something of value in exchange for an even lesser value - is rotten enough. Don't make it worse by asserting that I ought to embrace sacrifice done in my name long after I've withdrawn my sanction.

Posted by drizzten at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

After a day and a half writing to people twittering about #welovethenhs, my co-evangelist brought the following post to my attention:

@axiomthree you're comparing a violent act to taxation. There's a bit of a difference there.

@axiomthree Ask @lanej0 how violent things get when you refuse to pay your taxes. Hiring a crew to rob for you in uniform, that's taxation.

@Drizzten I got a letter asking me to kindly pay my taxes. Does that count as violence?

Charles (Drizzten): Write your own kindly letter telling them you've got better things to do with your own money. Keep telling them that and see how long it takes until the deputies show up with guns and handcuffs.
Jonathan (lanej0): interesting idea. I think that the one officer on the island probably has better things to so though.
Charles: I'm absolutely serious. Tell them calmly that you won't pay any income, property, or sales taxes. Watch how you, via no action endangering or hurting anyone somehow becomes a criminal. Indeed, you merely stated your refusal. For merely claiming what's already yours. Taxation is mundane-it's-so-routine, delayed, 3rd party theft.
Jonathan: I guess the difference is that I voluntarily pay because I know that that money is being put to a common good
Charles: So the ends (the ever-elusive common good) justify the means (forcing other Canadians to pay up).
Jonathan: I guess. I think of itmore in terms of insurance. You pay into it so that it's there if you ever need it
Jonathan: two kids delivered in hospital, and haven't had a massive bill to pay afterward. Family with cancer that still own their homes.
Charles: You certainly pay (because you support it), but suppose my Canadian cousin refused (for whatever reasons). Should he be ultimately subjected to arrest, confinement, and asset forfeiture if he continues to refuse to pay for everyone else's services?
Jonathan: If that's what the majority agrees to (I would wager that the majority of Canadians support our health care system).
Charles: I hope you don't mean that because I think that's a horrifying, contradictory argument. Deserves a full blog to discuss further.
Jonathan: It's extremely difficult to discuss via 140 char snippets. What I mean is that ideally laws are enacted through majority rule
Charles: Mind holding that thought? I'll whip up a proper post tomorrow if you'd like to continue.

First Things

So what is taxation? Here's where I exit the conventional wisdom and enter the unsettling land of Extremism. Please bear with me.

Taxation as an idea is much more specific than violence. Taxation typically refers to a type of multi-party property transaction. In this transaction, an original property owner is supposed to give an organization called the government some amount of property (normally a quantity of money). The government says it will use that money for various activities which will probably generate some pragmatic or moral outcome. The government may say paying this amount is part of what keeps society possible, it may say paying this amount will help alleviate suffering or injustice, and it may even say paying this amount is an outright duty the owner owes to the government.

But, above all, the government says the owner should pay this amount because failure to do so will mean the government will get violent with the owner and it would be wrong for the owner to resist or retaliate against that violence. As I said to Jonathan, if you don't believe me, just watch what happens when you don't pay taxes.

..."mundane-it's-so-routine"...

There is no statute of limitations in the tax code for fraud. For those who want to keep the account, he said, "I remind them that they are committing felonies each year when they sign their tax return."

Copyright ©2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

State tax officials have put more than 1,200 businesses across the state on notice this week that they are out of business unless they pay their overdue sales taxes immediately.

For most, that action came in the form of a personal visit from the state Division of Taxation, ordering business owners to lock their doors at once.

[...]

The letters hand-delivered by the hundreds this week reiterated the message that owners are now operating without a permit and that under state law “each officer of any corporation which so engages in business shall be guilty of a misdemeanor” for which they can be fined up to $5,000 and imprisoned for up to a year.

“Each day in which such person so engages in business shall constitute a separate offense,” the letter says.

© 2009 , Published by The Providence Journal Co.

The new act will also allow the provincial treasury to add an additional fine up to five times the tax that would have been payable on the illegal tobacco.

Six hundred cartons of contraband tobacco, seized earlier this week in North Bedeque, would carry more than $20,000 in taxes.

Under the current law, the individual could be charged that $20,000.

The new act, if passed, would see the tax bill increase five-fold to $100,000 plus the fine.

Those charged could also be jailed and vehicles used in the importation of contraband cigarettes, whether it be a car, boat or plane, could also be impounded.

© The Guardian

There is no question that voluntary compliance is the cornerstone of Canada's self-assessment taxation system. This simply means that the government expects you to respect the law and comply fully with your tax obligations.

This approach does not imply that the law cannot be enforced if necessary. The Income Tax Act and other laws provide a range of penalties for offences such as tax evasion, failure to pay taxes, failure to disclose income, or refusing to file a tax return. These penalties can include fines, third-party claims, seizures, and criminal prosecution.

RCMP found 150 cases of illegal, unmarked cigarettes in plastic bags and 25 cases of "discount" brand cigarettes when the rental truck was stopped in the West Hawk Lake area.

None of the cigarettes had proper tax stamps. The man could face fines up to $5,000, up to three months in jail, or a tax penalty of more than $970,000.

© 2009 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.

Don't be tempted by the French ‘custom' of tax evasion, where the sale price declared to the tax authorities (prix déclaré) is reduced by an ‘under the table' (sous la table) cash payment. If you're buying a property direct from the vendor, he may suggest this, particularly if he's selling a second home and must pay capital gains tax on the profit. (Obviously if the vendor can show a smaller profit, he pays less tax.) You'll also save money on taxes and fees, though you'll have a higher capital gains tax bill when you sell if it's a second home.

You should steer well clear of this practice, which is illegal. If you under-declare the price, the authorities can revalue the property and demand that you pay the shortfall in tax plus interest and fines. They can even prosecute you for fraud, in which case you can receive a prison sentence! The authorities can also decide to buy a property at the under-declared price plus 10 per cent within three months of the date of purchase.

© 2009 Parisvoice

Strike an officer - even in objective self-defense - and watch the hammer drop.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who pauses and thinks about it. Without the threat of police violence, many laws would be ignored outright. How much money would government revenue bureaus receive if these payments were actually voluntary? It does not take many demonstrations of the government's willingness to use this power for the majority of people subject to the government's laws to obey in general.

That general obedience should never be mistaken as full voluntary consent because the counterparty to each individual is an organization "negotiating" in bad faith.

Therefore

However, he's wrong on the substance.

Next

Posted by drizzten at 01:24 AM | Permalink

Over at DailyKos, Edger seems quite pragmatic about his Canadian health care system:

Canada's medical system is a single payer system as many of you know. The monthly premium for a single person is about $40.

Two years ago I developed a bladder infection, so I walked across the parking lot from work to a walk in clinic on my coffee break to see a doctor. The wait was about ten minutes. I presented my medical id card, saw the doctor, was diagnosed, and she wrote a prescription for antibiotics that cost me $18.

There was no bill for the doctor visit. It was covered.

• kidney ultrasound
  
• consultation to discuss the ultrasound and to schedule a surgical consult
  
• surgical consult
  
• kidney removal plus three days in the hospital

In the comments, DiegoUK relates a similar story and says, "Cost to me? Not one red cent. It all comes out of my taxes." (Bonus points for stating "Heath care is a right, not a privilege.")

unclejohn says, "[Massman] paid high taxes for public services that [he] actually used and benefited from. If [he] were to buy those services in the private sector, as Americans are forced to do, they would have cost [him] much more."

And finally, Barcelona says:

Where are the ads targeting each and every individual obstructionist Senator and Congressman and making the following simple point: (S)He has a gold-plated health insurance and (s)he doesn't pay a dime for it. When (s)he gets sick, YOU pay for his doctor's visit, his tests, his state-of-the art surgery by the best surgeons in the best hospitals in the country. YOU. Your tax hard-earned money, your tax dollars, the money you don't have to afford even the most god-awfully inadequate, pre-existing-condition-and-gazillion-exclusion laden health insurance. YOU.

Barcelona's rant is particularly interesting since that's exactly what socialized health care does to everyone. It forces ME to subsidize YOUR shitty health. But that's only objectionable when an elite get the benefit.

I fucking hate these people.

Posted by drizzten at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Consequentialism is the bread and butter of modern state justifications. Why embrace one of their central premises? If convincing others something is wrong because it doesn’t “work” then your opponents will logically cloud the discussion with various ways it does work…if only SoAndSo was in charge, if only NewLaw was passed…if only we acted for the benefit of others rather than ourselves…if only the human experiment was tweaked via collective coercion….etc.

I agree libertarian state reform is a functional contradiction and can’t work. But its morality isn’t affected by its pragmatic potential.

Posted by drizzten at 12:28 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Joe, it is possible that Mr. Olivia cares more -in this instance- about the protection of certain values from cultural erosion. It's the same rage I feel when I hear interventionism advocated by someone claiming the title of free market defender. These days, words are at best used to obscure meaning. With increasing frequency, they are used in direct contradiction of their clear meaning. When we're talking about people's lives and property, it is worth getting upset now and then.

But, Mr. Cowen's statement is not defensible on free market grounds. Obama is a typical statist with atypical persuasive skills. Press him hard enough and he will attempt to protect and preserve government power. He's awful on economics and that's because he's awful in other aspects of his philosophy. He thinks collective coercion is routine, unquestionable on pragmatic grounds.

This isn't some mean pox I'm trying to cast on him. This is something probably supported by 98% of the world.

And I'm under no illusions about where the direction of things points. While being nice and polite has it's place and should be used when one has specific tasks, that formality has value because not everyone deserves it. GMU has a public reputation for being libertarian. Not everyone there rejects collective coercion against the peaceful affairs of individuals using and exchanging legitimate private property. Press me hard enough and that's my standard before I'll accept someone as a market fundamentalist. I get the sense Mr. Olivia shares a similar minimum qualification.

People who call interventionists defenders of free markets, radical capitalists, or extreme libertarians should be called out on it.

Interventionists should be honest enough to reject the titles.

UPDATED 5/12/2009 8:55am
Someone pulled the blog post from the von Mises site but you can see the Twitter post that brought it to my attention here:

Tyler Cowen, Resign!: Tyler Cowen: "I do not agree with Obama on all points but he understands economic policy b.. http://tinyurl.com/o5yv7s

Posted by drizzten at 02:04 AM | Permalink

Short of making the most difficult economic changes, however, there is the matter that even blue-dog Democrats ought to be able to handle without flinching: establishing the government as employer of last resort.

[...]

There is no natural rate of unemployment. But there is a natural – that is, fundamental – right to work. The social and economic costs of unemployment – lost income, crime, broken families, physical and mental health problems, interrupted educations, shattered retirements, social unrest – ought to be plenty to make providing full employment a slam dunk for politicians supposedly in tune with their constituents.

Once again, Meteor Blades demonstrates he knows jack shit about economics.

Posted by drizzten at 10:34 AM | Permalink

The last seven years have revealed that almost the entire American establishment views itself as immune to the moral and ethical rules it applies to every other country in the world. Now we know, at least.

Posted by drizzten at 10:45 AM | Permalink

I am sure the proposition that "everyone should pay income taxes" seems obvious to you and me.

It is irrelevant whether I make $1 a year or a million. It is irrelevant whether 75% of American government is funded by the richest 10% or vice versa.

There is only one claim to be laid upon an income earned honestly through voluntary economic transactions and that claim belongs to the income-earner. Everything else (tax brackets, deductions, credits) is pointless distraction from the core moral issue of right and wrong. Taxation is wrong, full stop. Tweaking that systemic theft so it suits your personal sense of justice just reveals how perverted that sense really is.

Posted by drizzten at 04:35 PM | Permalink

With Angela Merkel and others gunning to remove "Cowboy Capitalism" by initiating international financial regulation and Barak Obama aiming for more modest reforms and government spending is Obama the free market's best hope?

How does this make you feel?

Should the world have uniform financial regulations?

The free market? Can someone please point me to a substantial population of people who currently enjoy such a thing? Every single commenter who talks about the excesses, drawbacks, problems, downfalls, and viciousness of "the free market" or "unbridled capitalism" or "laissez-faire" and so on is guilty of a massive category error. Nothing even close to those systems exists today in any sizable population. This is a world of profoundly mixed economies and the trend for the last 100 years is firmly away from the individual freedom necessary for actual capitalism.

Obama is not going to be capitalism's savior. He doesn't support the voluntary exchange of private property and services on whatever terms to which the seller and the buyer agree as long as each party is the legitimate owner of the property they propose to peacefully exchange. On the contrary! Whatever principles he has are incompatible with that economic system, full stop. He may be slightly less worse than Brown and substantially less worse than Merkel and Sarkozy, but they are all market interventionists at heart.

Obama won't even be the existing situation's savior. He does't want the current (im)balance between market and government. He's comitted to major changes towards increased state control and is firmly in line with the other big players with that goal.

What Obama and company want to save is enough economic wealth so they can build the coercive egalitarian societies they think we ought to have.

The entire circus makes me sick and the only uniform economic regulations humans need are prohibitions against theft and fraud.

adios,
-Charles

Posted by drizzten at 10:49 AM | Permalink

I get the heebie-jeebies any time a politician makes a business decision.

What he forgets is that the state and the economy are fatally intermingled today and barring superficial time-waste like resolutions expressing the chamber's sense that cancer's bad, m'kay, every bill brought forth by politicians is an attempt to make business decisions for someone else. Situations like GM and AIG are just the painfully obvious examples of market intervention. Pick a popular cause or political clause: 99% of the time, someone is looking for a price control, a trade constraint, or monopoly power...all of which involve the coerced transfer of business decision-making power away from legitimate actors and towards the system establishment.

[UPDATED 2:17pm]
Barack Obama embraces the bold-faced lie by stating "Let me be clear: the United States government has no interest or intention of running GM" immediately after stating:

...my administration will offer General Motors adequate working capital over the next 60 days. During this time, my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan.

They must ask themselves: have they consolidated enough unprofitable brands? Have they cleaned up their balance sheets or are they still saddled with so much debt that they can't make future investments? And above all, have they created a credible model for how to not only survive, but succeed in this competitive global market?

Posted by drizzten at 01:07 PM | Permalink

Obama tells Leno he was stunned by AIG bonuses

According to NBC, Obama was the first sitting president ever to appear on "The Tonight Show." He'd already appeared twice as a candidate. already appeared twice as a candidate.

In his opening monologue, Leno lots of people were surprised Obama would come on NBC — figuring he'd be tired of big companies on the brink of disaster with a bunch of overpaid executives.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[UPDATE 3/25/2009 11:50am: I screwed up and forgot to publish this the day I wrote it.]

Posted by drizzten at 08:26 AM | Permalink

And why is taxpayer money necessary for [federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research]? That means those of us who oppose embryonic-stem-cell research - for ethical, moral, or religious reasons - must finance it. Why not leave all this to the private sector and private capital? That wouldn’t make me any happier from a moral standpoint. But at least I wouldn’t be paying for this research with my tax dollars.

• rejecting taxes that fund military aggression
• rejecting taxes that fund the arrest and imprisonment of drug users
• rejecting taxes that fund any type of commercial regulation beyond force and fraud
• rejecting taxes that fund imminent domain

Posted by drizzten at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This person is attempting wholesale intellectual robbery in the name of good.

Posted by drizzten at 10:51 AM | Permalink

The joy and glee exhibited here is pure establishment pundit masturbation. Hot shit, this new guy who can not only manipulate others but do it smartly and make others feel better about themselves!

Meanwhile, the practical application of the politics of Sullivan's hero will indeed be interesting to those unfortunates who step in the way of his state.

Posted by drizzten at 11:33 AM | Permalink

If the CEO of a floundering company can continue to decorate his office while things are going to hell, and eventually collect a golden parachute while somebody else picks up the pieces, where, exactly, is his incentive to not fvck up? I mean, the whole argument for capitalism is that the profit motive is supposed to get people to solve problems and make stuff work. Conversely, the whole argument against communism was that with no profit motive nobody will do anything productive.

The proper argument for capitalism emphasizes individual freedom as the political endpoint of a whole philosophy that only spares a glance for "making things work" at the end of our analysis because, well, of course things that adhere to reality work! A drafter who ignores the implications of two planes intersecting at 90º is a drafter whose building will not work. A corporate executive who ignores basic issues like not producing things people want to buy so he can offset the costs of producing them is an executive whose company will not work.

The profit motive may be a nifty way social freedom reinforces itself but it isn't the reason we advocate for that freedom in the first place.

Posted by drizzten at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The media and world elites hailed President Obama's executive order requiring all interrogations by U.S. personnel to conform to the Army Field Manual and directing the closure of CIA detention facilities. Several experts have stated that the enhanced interrogation methods presumably prohibited by Obama's executive order were instrumental in thwarting terrorist attacks. Historically, the U.S.has lowered its defenses (by drawing down forces, reducing armaments, etc.) upon the cessation of hostilities or pursuant to treaty (and such draw-downs have been famously criticized for inviting attack). In the present case, the U.S. remains in armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups. None have renounced their intention to inflict heavy casualties upon the citizens of our country. This raises the following questions:

On what past occasions, if any, has our Commander-in-Chief unilaterally abandoned effective defenses during pending hostilities?

On such occasions (if there were any) did the Commander- in- Chief announce such abandonment to our enemies?

What was the result of any publically- declared unilateral abandonment of effective defenses during ongoing armed conflict?

• Seizing library/Amazon.com/Google records and indefinitely detaining anyone who sought information on bomb-building, weapons training, and defeating local security measures.
• Banning all Arabs and Muslims from entering the United States, followed by kicking out all existing Arab and Muslim visitors.
• Closing all government buildings, public utilities, tourist attractions, and national landmarks to the public.
• Imposing imminent domain proceedings against any private property within 500 yards of said buildings, utilities, attractions, and landmarks to expand the security bubble around them.
• Outlawing all private VFR aircraft within five miles of said buildings, utilities, attractions, and landmarks to further expand the security bubble around them.
• Requiring rigorous background checks for anyone renting a large-capacity vehicle.
• Arresting anyone caught in public without a national ID card.

You'll note, however, that none of the above exhibit an intersection between effective and moral.

Neither, I submit, do "enhanced interrogation methods."

Posted by drizzten at 01:19 PM | Permalink

Nationalization is a hard sell politically. Small government, free-market types naturally have a problem with the Feds coming in and taking over stuff. But counterintuitive though it may be, overt nationalization is more consistent with the principles of a free market than covert government subsidy. Real capitalists nationalize.

A real capitalist would hopefully, by this late stage in the game, be telling all involved to fuck off and leave his and his clients' property alone. No TARP. No bailout. No asset seizure. No taxes. No SEC. No legal tender laws. No state. No matter what professional liars say would be the projected harm to "our" economy: no violation of basic principles.

How's that for a third way?

Posted by drizzten at 01:48 PM | Permalink

Obama is not my president. I most emphatically do not want a president. I voted for no one and I desire no one in that position of power.

So no matter how soaring the rhetoric, how grandiose the dreams described, or how awesome and wonderful everything will be if we just follow his plan, just remember that every time he uses plurals like "we" or "our" he is simply not telling the truth.

It's a small point to make in the face of all the CHANGE coming this way, but it matters. Language is important and deceptive pronouns are a big part of the problem.

Posted by drizzten at 09:10 AM | Permalink

I was reading though a CNBC article on Citigroup's crappy stock performance and saw two links on the right side of the page. The first was a blog post by Cliff Mason titled Is Now The Time To Legalize Drugs?. The second was a featured slideshow titled Cost of Chronic Pain Relief (or as it says within the slideshow, A Gallery of Medical Marijuana).

Mr. Mason's post has some good stuff in it:

Barack Obama won't admit that the war on drugs is a failure, but in his autobiography he admitted to doing cocaine in his youth. During the primaries the Clinton campaign tried to gin-up a scandal out of this fact. I think the real scandal is that the President Elect believes that other people should go to prison for something that he, and many others, get away with Scott free.

[...]

The war on drugs does two things: it makes the business of drugs more profitable and more violent, and it sends lots and lots of people to prison.

[...]

No one believes that illegal drugs are anything but harmful, but Americans, or at least our leaders, use that fact to stop any discussion of a rational policy to deal with the problem.

[...]

It's a fact that we can't prevent people from getting their hands on drugs in this country by locking up dealers and using F-16s to spray herbicides all over Colombia. We've tried for over 30 years, and the only thing the policy succeeds at is ruining lives.

On the other hand, I think the medicinal pot slideshow is an unqualified success. Each page gives a quick description of the twelve varieties displayed along with per-ounce and per-pound street prices. Chemdog, Jack Herer, Island Sweet Skunk, Kali Mist, O.G. Kush, NYC Diesel, Sour Diesel, Trainwreck, Super Silver Haze, Sweet Tooth, and Purps are profiled and shown.

Gives me the munchies just looking at them. :)

Posted by drizzten at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Attack on Israel from Lebanon threatens 2nd front

For a second straight day, Israel said it suspended is Gaza military operation for three hours to allow in humanitarian supplies.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Extreme Alaska cold grounds planes, disables cars

Ted Johnson planned on using a set of logs to a build a cabin in Alaska's interior. Instead he'll burn some of them to stay warm.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Both are front-paged Yahoo! articles.

Posted by drizzten at 08:48 AM | Permalink

Largely the result of a new relationship growing into something fresh and important, this year has so far been quite nice. Other things are also well. I had a good Christmas and a special New Year's. Hopefully I can wrap up my final requirements for graduation this year and finally earn my bachelor's degree. The half-assed job I did in my classes last semester didn't taint my GPA. My half-brother lit a fire under my ass and I'm now finally brewing my own beer for the first time. More acquaintances than ever are gaming with me on Xbox Live. The last time I owned a bike was in '98 and a friend will help bankroll a replacement for me, opening up another way to exercise and new things in Austin to explore. My family's stable. Most of my friends are alive and kicking.

There are many things over which I could be gritting my teeth:

• The property tax "receipt" sent to me by Nelda Wells Spears, the professional thief of Travis County's government.
  
• The sudden death of my car stereo.
  
• Obama.
  
• Palestine.
  
• The pack of dangerous fools attempting to rule Austin and Texas.

Since September 2002, 99% of my blogging revolved around me reacting to politics and the news. I have probably written three or four "doing things differently from here on" posts over the years. None amounted to much. I'm not about to curse myself with another such promise. I cannot help the need to vent when I read about some prick threatening others with police violence for non-compliance.

However, as I cleaned up my house in anticipation of the aforementioned relationship coming over, I finally realized just how many books I've picked up over the years and - even worse - how few of them I bothered to read.

This. Will. Not. Do.

So, in conjunction with what will almost certainly be a dense year of collegiate reading, I want to own up to my book collection. I will begin by finishing issue #107 of The New Quarterly, a Canadian journal of writing. Next is a gift from my new lady friend, What Matters: The World's Preeminent Photojournalists and Thinkers Depict Essential Issues of Our Time. Browsing through the back cover, the table of contents, and the intro tells me I'll find lots of grist for disagreement. And next? Well, I never did finish Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago...then maybe on to the Akira graphic novels, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - An Inquiry into Values, perhaps Reform and Revolution in China - The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei, all interspersed with readings from Rothbard's Libertarian Forum.

Onward!

Posted by drizzten at 12:24 PM | Permalink

Government plans massive Citigroup rescue effort

Analysts consider Citigroup the most vulnerable among the major U.S. banks -- especially after it failed to nab Wachovia Corp., which was bought instead by Wells Fargo & Co. That was a missed opportunity for Citi to gets its hands on much-needed U.S. deposits that would bolster its cash position.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Why are more mistakes popping up?

Posted by drizzten at 08:17 AM | Permalink

I've noticed more and more basic English grammar errors in Associated Press and other wire services stories. More annoying, they've all been in front-page articles on Yahoo. For example:

Dems expect Big 3 to show they're worth helping

With the survival of a major manufacturing at stake, a top adviser to President-elect Barack Obama warned the companies that there is little the government can do without a viable plan to retool and restructure.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Posted by drizzten at 04:01 PM | Permalink

Just posted this in the comment section of the Hit & Run post on Professor McPherson:

Though it is important to note the relevance of Professor McPherson's status as a state employee and to remember the prerogative of a legitimate private employer to set the standards for his or her employees, I sincerely cheered upon reading this op-ed.

Mandatory, lowest common denominator training is annoying and presumptuous. There are some of us out there who know how to properly behave around others who aren't in our immediate social circles. Basic presumption of innocence for someone without a record or an allegation ought to count for something.

That these policies are often defended with arguments abhorrent to defenders of a free society is bad enough. The real burn is in the organization's (whether statist or private) refusal to certify that it did not currently suspect Professor McPherson of harassment. It's sad because it implies they do and it's sad because it shows how desperate organizations are to avoid these aggressively sensitive civil (and in some places, criminal) lawsuits. Some of those lawsuits have grounds, some of them don't. However, it is often enough just to bring the suit in order to stain reputations and attack market value.

Then again, he's publicly attacking a central tenant of modern politics. He clearly isn't concerned about how most people will think of him...

This guy is flipping the double intellectual bird at the heart of modern political mythology. He's probably unemployable in all of the worst firms now. I hope someone with some spare capital and a functional mind takes advantage of this opportunity and offers Professor McPherson a job or a university chair somewhere.

Posted by drizzten at 08:24 PM | Permalink

I've been hard on Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle in the past. She's bad on negative externalities, was wildly off regarding the $1 trillion Iraq war, and misidentified the ethics around the CEO pay debate.

However, this is too good for me to ignore:

But whatever your feeling about government intervention in the economy, or the correct level of income inequality, I think there's one thing we can all agree on: for the world to get better, things that don't work have to fail.

Screwing up opens the door to improvement. The more you protect people from experiencing the fruits of their mistakes, the less likely they'll learn from them.

Posted by drizzten at 04:32 PM | Permalink

Yeah, I know approximately A HISTORIC NUMBER OF AMERICANS have already DONE PATRIOTIC DUTIFUL THINGS and will certainly ignore me and the quoted below, but I don't care. Reading shit like this is irritating.

Voting is like choosing your next meal from the tank of a portable toilet behind the downtown bus station.

-Kent McManigal

As I traveled this morning to my place of work, in an attempt to lead a productive life and earn my living, I saw the endless parade of people wearing those popular "I Voted" stickers on their lapels. And this morning I finally realized why those adhesive badges are colored red. When you vote, you have the blood of coercion, violence, war, theft, and illegitimate rule on your hands. It is more than an endorsement of a particular candidate or party, it is an endorsement of a system that rules over us all with an iron fist. It is a plea to the school bully to not take all of your lunch money, but just to steal a certain percentage of it. And it bends the rules of morality to assume that when 49 people out of 100 say something is wrong - it is, and when 51 say it is right, it is.

-Rob Sieg

I know a lot about why they're going to do this, and I do not know how to illuminate it without their taking insult at all of it, no matter how supplicant I might be in the presentation.

At one point in a discussion about it, it was proposed that we should all "agree to disagree". That horrible old cop out.

I didn't ask what would happen if I disagreed with the United States Government, or the massed opinion of people who are going to vote tomorrow.

-Billy Beck

I suggest that we exercise this right not to participate. It is one of the few rights we have left. Nonparticipation sends a message that we no longer believe in the racket they have cooked up for us, and we want no part of it.

-Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Why do people think an idea that would be ludicrous on the market makes sense in politics? Why do people continue to regard as saviors those whose record shows unfailing support for activities few of us practice on our own, such as plunder and war? If we want change for our betterment, we will turn to the realm in which we are sovereign and reject political solutions altogether.

-George F. Smith

From this day forward I will do my best to refrain from imposing my will on my fellow human beings. Instead, when I feel strongly about something I will seek to persuade them while also keeping my mind open to the persuasive arguments of others. To this end I commit to doing the hard work necessary to develop my own emotional intelligence to the point where I have achieved complete mastery of my emotions. If ever I should fail to live up to this high standard I will not beat myself up. Instead I will have the courage to admit it and to seek to correct the situation.

I will lead by example and be a force for positive change in the world by working to reduce conflict, alleviate suffering and increasing the joy of my fellow human beings.

In the great tradition of passive resistance pioneered by the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King I resolve to peacefully withdraw my support for the democratic system. I will not vote and I will not cooperate with any government except when forced to do so by the armed force of the state.

-Alex Ryan

I'll continue to vote occasionally against taxes or in local elections where a few votes can make a difference, but I will never vote to give someone the immense power that is illegitimately vested in the Presidency.

-Lance Adams

I don't vote because I see no reason to participate in the collective anointing of someone who will violate property rights and end up killing innocent people, when my vote doesn't even have the slightest chance of influencing the outcome.

-Bob Murphy

The electoral landscape has as many rotten boroughs as the mortgage or "real" estate one. If your vote is for one of the two approved parties (sometimes three in non-U.S. parliamentary democracies), it’s bundled and counted, and if not, it’s tallied in a cluster of votes which are given only nominal status. Usually this is performed as some kind of musical chairs routine, where your vote bundle gets something called a "seat" if your team has played the game correctly. If you want to dissent, your vote bundle is not given a seat, but your group can tell each other with grave faces that you’ve "done" something to "change" things. Let’s be clear about this. Most votes for change are bundled and thrown away. From this fact you might guess that voting is merely useless, but that isn’t the case. Your vote for alternative candidates is useless but not your vote for the system. Your vote is useless for change but powerful for stasis – it ratifies the system and sends a strong message that you think it’s okay to have a dynamic where any vote for change is tossed out. Don’t kid yourself. Your deed in the voting booth isn’t merely useless, it’s pernicious.

[...]

When people ask me what I have against democracy, I assume they mean other than its long history of bloody foreign adventures or other than the fact that its best forms are always complicit with totalitarian regimes, or other than the fact that it arises in slave states like 18th-century America or ancient Greece, or other than that it pretends to authenticate the self by sending it as a degraded proxy elsewhere to cede authority to people who are usually dumber than oneself and always less scrupulous, or that its rituals of affirmation and allegiance are too embarrassing to watch on TV even with the sound turned off, or that it’s too embarrassing to contemplate the image of one’s otherwise intelligent friends watching things called "debates" as if their irony somehow buffers them from the idiocy. So maybe they mean, other than the obvious. Do the Made in China stickers all over their apartments count as something other than the obvious? Do we need Hannah Arendt to tell us that democracy is merely a stage on the way to totalitarianism? Here’s what you get in a democracy: until December 31st of this year, the label "Made in Canada" can legally be affixed to apple juice grown in China by Chinese people using Chinese apples and reduced to concentrate in China, on the basis of its having water and a container added to it at the Canadian end [Clark Hoskin, Edible Toronto, Fall, 2008]. You can learn everything you need to know about democracy’s self-deceptions from that word "Made." Statist self-deception is constitutive, not incidental.

-David Ker Thomson

I don't vote, and don't expect I ever shall. Being even one-scintillionth responsible for placing the unbelievable and unspeakable powers of the current U.S. government in the hands of any of the people seeking it strikes me as irresponsible in the extreme. Besides, as everyone knows, those who vote have no right to complain about the outcome.

-Brian Doherty

Posted by drizzten at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just voted… and don’t feel…. anything…

She's not stupid. She's not incompetent. She wants people to just get along, be happy, and enjoy themselves. She's a decent person who is overwhelmed by the signals around her and was let down by an act canonized by almost everyone as the most sacred of citizen duties, an act whose prelude was so relentlessly hyped that it's no wonder she felt empty after entering a booth and checking a few boxes.

I sat on it for almost an hour, wondering what to write. This was my response:

*begin extremist soapbox rant*

You shouldn't feel anything after voting. Whomever you voted for does not know what you specifically want him or her to do and how to do it. A vote for a person cannot convey that information, only broad generalities. The act itself is really just a disingenuous form of demanding other people force others to do the government's bidding. Voters rarely take responsibility for their candidates' bad actions while shout from the rooftops every minor superficial improvement that occurs once the candidate is elected. Everyone complains about "apathy" among non-voters but it is only us who didn't lend our sanction who can rightfully complain about the rotten system on our backs.

Staying home literally has a greater impact on your life than voting. The resources consumed to operate the voting system and to get your vote into their hands dwarf the chance your vote will determine the outcome - even in a "swing state". You'll do more exponentially more good in the community by going shopping or volunteering to help others.

*end extremist soapbox rant*

In my mind, I'm a broken record, saying the same things over and over again. The only differences are ones of emphasis and contextual tact. What options do I have when most of my arguments lead straight to state abolishment as a necessary goal? If I loathe government, that means I loathe representative democracy. Some people take that very personally. Sometimes I can maintain composure and try to keep the conversation civil.

Other times, I want to start quoting Spooner and just fucking have at it. Voting means many things, but what it doesn't mean is justice, respect, honor, or prosperity. Its connection to actual legislation is tenuous to say the least:

When a majority of eligible individuals (picked by a majority of eligible citizens who bothered to vote) in the House and a majority of eligible individuals (picked by a majority of eligible citizens who bothered to vote) in the Senate agree to pass a bill that first had to "leave committee" (each consisting of appointees and rife with political favoritism) to be "reconciled" (code for watered-down-to-general-acceptability) in order for one eligible individual (picked by a majority of eligible citizens who bothered to vote) to sign and execute, does that constitute the unanimity so often implied in political rhetoric? And that's assuming these Representatives even bothered to create legislation for which their constituents asked!

Gawd, I hate election season.

Other posts:
The Austin American-Statesman, Voting, Free Speech, and Information
The Disingenuous Voting Fetish
A Solicitation to Those Who Say I Shouldn't Complain If I Don't Vote
Contradiction as Innovative Political Strategy
Democrats Are Not Pacifists
Somewhere, Somehow, You Will Always Be a Minority
Political Agendas, Mentioned and Not

Posted by drizzten at 10:18 AM | Permalink

Or, "One of the Coming Bank Compulsion's Happy Morons."

The steam is building. I worried here that there really aren't many steps left between the cumbersome regulatory structure in place now where private ownership is at least nominally the case...and the kind of deeply intrusive state compulsion that represents outright usurpation.

Felix Salmon says:

...any loans banks extend today have a good chance of being marked down tomorrow. They have huge exposures already, and are in the process of deleveraging: the new capital will help them bring their capital ratios up if they don't go ahead and lend it out.

Lending Treasury's funds, on the other hand, is a risky thing to do heading into what might well be the worst recession of the post-war era. Wallace anticipates real consumer spending falling by 10%, and homeownership rates falling by 4 percentage points; those kind of changes could devastate companies' abilities to repay their loans.

Remember too that even a generous tier-1 capital ratio of 10% implies 10x leverage: a bank which receives $25 billion of new capital can use it to make $250 billion of new loans. You don't need very many of those loans to go bad before you start eroding your capital base even further.

America's banks -- and the world's, for that matter -- have had de facto unlimited access to very cheap Fed liquidity for many months now. That hasn't induced them to lend. Will this latest recapitalization do the trick? I'm far from convinced. And what's more, the demand for loans is drying up fast: do you really feel like buying a bigger house right now, or taking out a car loan? Well, businesses are in the same boat. In a recession, their ROI falls, so they borrow less.

*teeth gritting*

So what the does Mr. Salmon want to see? FULL FUCKING STEAM AHEAD!

With less demand for money, and no real desire on the part of the banks to lend it out, I think it'll take more than hand-waving statements from the Treasury secretary to get the credit markets moving again. I do hope that Paulson is looking one step ahead here, and coming up with ways to compel the banks to lend -- even if they don't particularly want to.

The moral vacuity Mr. Salmon displays here is remarkable all on its own, but I rant too much about degenerates and thugs as it is. No, this is Example #1 of heart-stopping non sequiturs. Mr. Salmon lays out economic reality and then flat-out whistles past it.

He hopes bankers will be forced to ruin their businesses and threaten their customers' property. Actually, threaten taxpayers' property, since we're stuck with the damned FDIC. He explains multiple reasons why economic actors are doing what they are doing and then, without addressing those reasons, simply calls for a doubling-down of the very same bet that has been poisoning the game from the beginning. "The market doesn't need to be screwed up. Here is why the credit market is screwed up. I wish the government would point guns at people so they continue screwing the market up."

Then there's the minor issue of his Olympian presumption to know - and coerce - what's best for an entire industry.

I know it's easy to demand people be ordered around at the threat of police violence (that's what the state does). Damn near everyone else is doing it. But c'mon, man.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who - surprise surprise! - doesn't have the intellect or guts to see what's going on.

Posted by drizzten at 02:15 PM | Permalink

I'd love to hear an explanation of what "civil liberties" means that doesn't involve a screaming contradiction.

For example:

Speaking as liberal who does want government much more involved in regulating the economy, I can say that neither I nor anyone I know favors such government involvement for its own sake. We favor it because we think it will be best for the country.

That extra government involvement in the economy does NOT extend to, say, extra government power over civil liberties.

Posted by drizzten at 12:42 PM | Permalink

According to the AP, that's what Joseph Ratzinger said today. I dug around Benedictus XVI's website hoping to find a complete quote, but the speech isn't posted or hasn't been translated to English. Either way, the intent and spirit of the statement is a middle finger to logic and reason, just a blank-faced rejection of reality.

He apparently said it in the context of the current financial crisis, perhaps trying to explain - correctly, in some cases - that people who pursue money for money's sake are not living their lives to the fullest. From that perspective, I agree. There is a clear line between self-interest and outright greed. Though the latter is a legitimate goal as long as its pursuit is undertaken without aggression, money cannot coherently be the endpoint to one's life. True avarice like this is rare, but worth mentioning.

However, I have my doubts Ratzinger drew distinctions that fine. He's the uber-Christian so he won't be able to just remain reasonable about things. He's from a philosophical tradition that stresses the pointlessness of the here and now (despite the glaring contradiction that creates when other topics arise, such as systematic starvation or war). What matters is the color and texture of your faith's fabric. What matters is agreement with him and the institution he leads.

Nevermind that taking his words at face value (which is one of those pesky default positions public liars hate their audiences to take) means hilarious, frightening, and absurd consequences. I had no idea I was typing on my Gawd's Breath Keyboard to compose this post. Do the hundreds of people involved in car accidents this morning doubt in any way the "solid reality" of mass multiplied by velocity? Maybe this mystical air enriched with a few select soundwaves (or, more charitably, a dead language written upon decaying paper) is really what Ratzinger's audience experienced when he spoke. Maybe that's what he experienced while he spoke!

I wonder if the pope's bedroom door is solid. Or the Vatican City's 9-figure budget. Or the love of newlyweds. Or my inability to peacefully conduct my affairs because I lost my driver's license. Or the friendships I've documented all over my kitchen. Or car bombings in Pakistan. Or you, reading this, right now.

Why are these people taken seriously?

Posted by drizzten at 09:33 AM | Permalink

Not in every way, of course. But at least a few are falling on the right side of a couple high-order questions.

I'd like to see more discussion of where to assign credit for the defeat.

- Another Dissent on the Bill's Defeat, John Hood in National Review Online

But central banks and governments cannot transform unprofitable investments into profitable ones. They cannot force institutions to increase lending when they are so exposed. This is why calls for throwing more money at the problem are so totally misguided. Injections of liquidities started more than a year ago and have had no effect in preventing the situation from getting worse. Such measures can only delay the market correction and turn what should be a quick recession into a prolonged one.

[...]

The confusion of Chicago school economics on monetary issues is so profound as to lead its adherents today to support the largest government grab of private capital in world history. By adding their voices to those on the left, these confused free-marketeers are not helping to “save capitalism”, but contributing to its destruction.

- Bailout marks Karl Marx's comeback, Jeff White in the Financial Post

So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.

The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer.

- Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer, Jeffrey A. Miron on CNN

If capitalism depends on designating a person of godlike abilities to manage demand and supply for all forms of money and credit -- currency, demand deposits, money-market funds, repurchase agreements, equities, mortgages, corporate debt -- we are as doomed as those wretched citizens who relied on central planning for their economic salvation.

Think of it: Nothing is more vital to capitalism than capital, the financial seed corn dedicated to next year's crop. Yet we, believers in free markets, allow the price of capital, i.e., the interest rate on loanable funds, to be fixed by a central committee in accordance with government objectives. We might as well resurrect Gosplan, the old Soviet State Planning Committee, and ask them to draw up the next five-year plan.

- Loose Money And the Roots Of the Crisis, Judy Shelton in the Wall Street Journal

Posted by drizzten at 09:41 AM | Permalink

Andrew Sullivan created the Malkin Award for "shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric." Certainly a worthy cause, but he undermines the value of that label when he nominates remarks like Lisa Schiffren's:

I always listen to Mark Levin while making Friday night dinner. Tonight he is giving the most serious, intelligent, cogent explanation of the current economic crisis I have heard or read anywhere. He is giving a precise political and legislative history going back several administrations, but concentrated in the Clinton Administration, where the major changes that led down this road were initiated. Funnily enough, he has explained just what it is community organizers do. Advocating, for instance, for affordable housing for the poor — the poor who traditionally rent, because they are bad loan risks. The day that reasoning by banks was junked as "racist," was the day this crisis became a possibility. I don't think he's ad-libbing — and I, for one would love to read the transcript at NRO in the next day or two.

Ignore the connotations to Obama because this is far larger than whose ass warms the White House.

One of the issues at the heart of the current set of poor economic symptoms is the simple fact that people were encouraged to live beyond their means. Ideally, I'd just call this marketing and leave it at that because people who attempt this cannot do so forever. Debts need to be paid and paid with money. Those who can't pay their debts will see their financial reputation negatively affected and will be offered fewer and fewer opportunities to play with other peoples' wealth. The truly incorrigible face bankruptcy and poverty for being reckless, and rightfully so.

But that isn't how things are. No, now there are various public sentiments that interlock into a web of collectivistic protections that shame, insult, or outright ban perfectly legitimate actions people want to take in order to protect their property. Combine that with the inflationary bubble created by the Fed and its banking system partners-in-crime and the result is a system where commission-hungry brokers encouraged or helped people to lie on their mortgage forms to secure nonexistent money from institutional frauds who quickly spun around to sell those empty promises to financial giants who, blinded by their sense of entitlement and power, couldn't be bothered to perform basic due diligence on the assets in which they invested the trust of millions. Lies were pyramided upon lies that were repackaged as gold and sold all over the world as safe investments.

Identifying one of the central problems is hardly intemperate right-wing rhetoric. It is absolutely necessary if anyone is going to fucking learn anything from this mess!

Posted by drizzten at 01:34 PM | Permalink

Actually, it's hard to find a coherent argument in The Undefended City.

Mr. Whittle (someone whose writing skills I once praised) uses the following language to describe John McCain and Sarah Palin:

And standing against all this hypnotic power — the power of the mythmakers in Hollywood, the power of the information peddlers in the media, the corrosive power of America-hating professors on every campus in America… against all that we find an old warrior — a paladin if ever there was one — an old, beat-up warhorse standing up in defense of his city one last time. And beside him: a wonder. A common person… just a regular mom who goes to work, does a difficult job with intelligence and energy and grace and every-day competence and then puts it away to go home and have dinner with the family.

His entire point is to rile national defense and culture warrior types up.

Well, most of what I learned about Vietnam I learned from men like Oliver Stone. This self-loathing narcissist has repeatedly tried to inculcate in me a sense of despair and outrage at my own government, my own culture, my own people and ultimately myself. He tried to convince me — and he is a skillfull man — that my own government murdered my own President for political gain. I am told daily in those darkened temples that rogue CIA elements run a puppet government, that the real threat to the nation comes from the generals that defend it, or from the businessmen that provide the prosperity we take for granted.

I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes –visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest.

No wonder they must be destroyed. Because — Sarah Palin especially — presents a mortal threat to these people who have determined over cocktails who the next President should be and who now clearly mean to grind into metal shards the transaxle of their credibility in order to get the result they must have. Truly, they are before our eyes destroying the machine they have built in order to get their victory. What the hell is so threatening to be worth that?

Only this: the living proof that they are not needed. Not needed to govern, not needed to influence and guide, not needed to lecture us on our intellectual and moral failings which are visible only from the heights of Manhattan skyscrapers or the palaces up on Mulholland Drive. Not needed. We can do it — and do it better — without all of them.

Ask the common people of all politics and persuasions aboard Flight 93 whether greatness and courage has deserted America. Through this magical crystal ball — the one we are using right now — we common people can speak to one another. And by reminding ourselves and those around us of who we are, where we came from, what we have achieved together and of the marvels we have yet to achieve, we may laugh in the face of despair and mock those people that think a man with an MBA from Harvard knows more about running a gas station than the man that actually runs the gas station.

It is the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity — and not those of the preening cosmopolitans that gape at them in mixed contempt and bafflement — that have made us the inheritors of the most magnificent, noble, decent and free society ever to appear on this earth. This Western Civilization… this American City… has earned the right to greet each sunrise with a blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains.

Hard work...FAIL. Compared to the work citizens must do in order to support them and their schemes, politicians' labor is an insult. We can toss out the laws and regulations standing in the way of entrepreneurs, capitalists, business owners, and innovators that blanket this country. It means ending the rotten thieving charade we call taxation.

Personal responsibility...FAIL. In addition to the logical conclusions a properly self-reliant society would experience, we can also chalk up the end of the war on drugs, all laws against consensual sexual acts, massive chunks of state and local law regulating our behavior, and so on.

Common-sense ingenuity...WHO KNOWS. At this point, I'm amazed there are still individuals out there who still bother to slog through the collectivist nonsense in order to produce.

Mr. Whittle thinks the two serial liars on the GOP ticket embody these values. Do you?

Posted by drizzten at 05:02 PM | Permalink

What makes capitalism different from socialism?

What differentiates free market economics from other theories of economics?

What does unregulated, laissez-faire, and hands off mean?

"The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices.

The regulatory failure is rooted in a markets-are-good-government-is-bad ideology that has been ascendant as long as Mr. McCain has been in Washington and championed by his own party."

"The only thing that is certain is that the era of the unbridled free-market economy in the US has passed -- at least for now."

"Despite all the regulators in place, the current system overlooks many of the most important transactions. Half of our financial markets--controlling some $10 trillion in assets--are barely regulated at all. These entities include investment banks, hedge funds, and mortgage companies (which are not banks but made the bulk of subprime mortgages)."

"When dyed-in-the-wool capitalist institutions like Lehman's go begging for state subsidies, it's an admission that pure capitalism has limitations that only regulation can handle."

"While I am a free-market advocate, I am also for creating regulations that eliminate speculators who destroy the value of individual stocks and bonds."

"This will come to be seen as the greatest regulatory failure in modern history."

"The worst outcome of all this piecemeal, after-the-fact doctoring of a chaotic situation is that all this financial peril could have been prevented if government overseers had not allowed financial institutions to run amok."

Have their senses have failed or are their rational faculties faulty?

No one emotion is overwhelming another for me right now. My worry about my retirement account (average fund performance since this time last year: -15%) fades when I hear some asshole on TV begging for a politician to whip up A Plan To Save Us All. My exasperation at generations of backwards economic thought is overruled when I bitterly think of the billions of people getting the wrong impression of what results from an alleged free market.

That last is perhaps my greatest fear. What remaining sensible mainstream advice is getting utterly drowned out by screaming for bans, rules, imposed order, and increased state authority. Those "reforms" will be the equivalent of pushing the walls of a trench up higher with little regard for the unyielding nature of gravity.

Things will get worse.

Posted by drizzten at 08:45 AM | Permalink

Austin-American Statesman: Church's plans to sell land for apartments upsets neighbors

...Bethany Lutheran Church sought city approval for 272 apartments to be built on part of its Southwest Austin campus...some neighbors are protesting and threatening to sue to stop the project, saying that the church, which plans to sell the land to a private developer, should be required to use the normal zoning process..."We want to make sure that any development on this property complies with all water quality and land-use requirements."...annex more than 13,000 acres that year and apply its environmental regulations, including the SOS ordinance, to development on that land...church was required to upgrade its water quality pond to SOS standards..."You couldn't build anything on the land because by the time you did the re-irrigation and water quality retention pond, there was no building space left."...the land was never zoned in the first place...the City Council wasn't required to hold public hearings...city will not require the water quality controls on the site to meet SOS standards, but the church will have to enlarge...begin irrigating...harvest some runoff...new deal eliminated two retail or office sites...number of units that can be built on that land was reduced...the height of the buildings was reduced...neighbors still upset with the deal and how it was handled have formed a nonprofit called the Oak Parke Brodie Wild Preservation Group...any development on the church's site, which is in the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, to adhere to SOS requirements..."The church couldn't sell their land."

Copyright 2008 The Austin American-Statesman. All rights reserved.

This kind of shit - the endemic, rampant, and almost universally ignored category of property rights violations known as "local law" - is vastly more responsible for economic sluggishness than the increasing cost of oil, sub-par graduates from the Public Education Machine, and other common targets.

Posted by drizzten at 11:32 AM | Permalink

This man, like every government spokesperson, is a professional liar. Here's what he said in reaction to Bush's Thailand speech about human rights (itself an act of gagging hypocritical proportions, but you already knew that):

The Chinese government puts people first, and is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens' basic rights and freedom.

Rights are not self-reinforcing things. Rights violations as tiny as stealing a paperclip from an employer and as incomprehensible as unflinching genocide have occurred since the beginning of humanity. These acts, responsible for an Olympus Mons of victims, were not stopped by some meta-power that corrects deviations from the ethical standard.

The same goes for speaking the truth.

Chinese citizens have freedom of religion.

The desire, as illogical as it is, to see liars shut up is so powerful it hurts.

These are indisputable facts.

Human Rights Watch
Index of Economic Freedom - China
Amnesty International
Tibetian Center for Human Rights and Democracy
Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index
Religious Freedom in China
Human Rights in China

And from me:
China's "outward signs of capitalism"
Unclear on the Concepts

China is a billion-person liberty train wreck and the only joy I get out of liars like Qin Gang is their reactionary annoyance when someone they cannot ignore publicly reminds them who they are.

Posted by drizzten at 09:43 AM | Permalink

Back in the Olde Tymes, I enjoyed posting some of the weirder spam one of my e-mail addresses collected:

• SPAM...Cooked the Wrong Way
  
• FYI...
  
• A Bad Choice of Title
  
• SPAM Patrol
  
• Um...Ouch
  
• No Thanks
  
• Shock Spam Advertising
  
• Adventures in Spam
  
• I Declare Fraud!
  
• Wisdom in SPAM
  
• Who's Behind Stupid Spam?
  
• Integrated Insanity

But I've got two new ones now!

From: "Ferral" deam_1962@gulfpackaging.com
To: Drizzten
Subject: God Destroys Boise For Not Being Gay Enough

Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:50:54 +0900

Bush 'Troubled' by Gay Marriages. Declares San Francisco Part of 'Axis of Evil'
http://sugar-dreams.it/viewmovie.html

C'mon, be creative!

6 / 10
Points for trying, but ultimately a failure for lack of cohesiveness.

From: "Susumu" Susumu-koolvis@gscomm.com
To: Drizzten
Subject: Nigger slang derails McCain's campaign

Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:36:20 +0200

New cheaper drugs in store for HIV patients http://gotharestaurant.it/start.html

*delete*

Posted by drizzten at 09:58 AM | Permalink

The AP: McCain gets Social Security but criticizes system

People are not required to take Social Security payments, according to B.J. Jarrett, a spokesman with the Social Security Administration.

"An individual does have the right to refuse his/her Social Security retirement benefit. However, Social Security is an entitlement program and an individual would essentially be forfeiting a benefit based upon contributions during his/her working lifetime," Jarrett said.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Since 1996, the feds have threatened law enforcement violence my employers and I unless we paid them some arbitrary percentage of my income. Not counting 2007, their coercion has netted them over $14,000.

Ideally, I'd get all that back, with interest. Not involuntary participation in some scheme that, while it's a "compact between generations," I have to be aware that "the law governing benefits may change."

Yeah.

I'll tell you right now, I'm willing to forget that small fortune was ever stolen from me via administrative proxy. Keep it. Probably reeks of bureaucrat.

But in exchange, I want you motherfuckers to leave me alone. I want nothing to do with your "program." You do not have my consent. Refrain from harassing my employers. I don't trust you. Cancel my account. You're fired on general principles.

And by the way, stop calling these microrobberies "contributions." It's insulting to those remaining Americans who can think clearly.

Posted by drizzten at 09:59 PM | Permalink

But not for the outraged reasons here.

McCain isn't about to stop the systemic, unjust, coerced transfer of wealth from the young to the old. But it is nice to hear someone accidentally imply they're against it.

Posted by drizzten at 04:59 PM | Permalink

The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

Michael Arrington

Mr. Arrington apparently thinks that property rights magically evaporate once said property is placed online. How novel! Must be one of the side benefits to the new business model everyone keeps talking about where if it ain't gawddamned free and instant for everyone, it's a fucking kick in the nuts to What The Net Was Intended To Be.

Posted by drizzten at 03:05 PM | Permalink

The Guardian: 'My daughter deserved to die for falling in love'

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,' he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British soldier in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. 'They are men and know what honour is,' he said.

I can't believe how I could have not seen this when I was a supporter of the invasion.

She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her 'relationship' with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months. But the young, impressionable Rand fell in love with him, confiding her feelings and daydreams to Zeinab, 19.

It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand's two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

'Death was the least she deserved,' said Abdel-Qader. 'I don't regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,' he said.

1. There is no such thing as objective morality and concepts such as right and wrong behavior are more the result of cultural preferences than anything else.
   
2. Tolerance for other cultures' differences will lead to greater harmony among our diverse humanity.

It says people ought to be treated as individuals and regarded by their own actions. Otherwise, it would be OK to simply stereotype swaths of people.

It says people ought to be respected as human - a unique status from which we ought to derive special value when considering our actions. Otherwise, there'd be no prohibition against treating others as means for our ends.

It says people ought to use our rational faculties when evaluating someone's actions or life. Otherwise, lying about someone's nature or misrepresenting one's own would be acceptable.

Hopefully you can spot the problem. The first premise denies the existence of universal standards of human conduct while the second assumes them. This hair-tearing schizophrenia surfaced again and again in the class as the teacher tried her best to get the students to think outside the American framework. She'd warn us to avoid rushing to judgment against others on the basis of superficial knowledge within minutes of condemning current American culture...all within minutes of hinting that there really is no logical way to compare the value of one culture to another.

The folly of it all was heightened during our assignment to form into groups and select a foreign movie no one within the group had seen and answer several cultural questions about it.

'I don't have a daughter now, and I prefer to say that I never had one. That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends. Speaking with a foreign solider, she lost what is the most precious thing for any woman. 'People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.

'I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,' he said, his voice swelling with pride. 'My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.'

Abdel-Qader, a Shia, says he was released from the police station 'because everyone knows that honour killings sometimes are impossible not to commit'. Chillingly, he said: 'The officers were by my side during all the time I was there, congratulating me on what I had done.' It's a statement that, if true, provides an insight into how vast the gulf remains between cultures in Iraq and between the Basra police the British army that trains them.

I could see it in every group when it was their turn to discuss their answers to the rest of the class: how do we talk about how horrible some of the characters were without being judgmental?

I just wanted to scream.

Sources have indicated that Abdel-Qader, who works in the health department, has been asked to leave because of the bad publicity, yet he will continue to draw a salary.

And it has been alleged by one senior unnamed official in the Basra governorate that he has received financial support by a local politician to enable him to 'disappear' to Jordan for a few weeks, 'until the story has been forgotten' - the usual practice in the 30-plus cases of 'honour' killings that have been registered since January alone.

Such treatment seems common in Basra, where militias have partial control, especially in the districts on the outskirts where Abdel-Qader lives.

While government security forces and British troops have control over the centre, around the fringes militants can still be seen everywhere on the streets or at the checkpoints they have erected. And they have imposed strict laws of behaviour for all the local people, including what clothing should be worn and what religious practices should be observed. There are reports of men having their hands cut off for looting and women being killed for prostitution.

Homosexuality is punishable by death, a sentence Abdel-Qader approves of with a passion. 'I have alerted my two sons. They will have the same end [as Rand] if they become contaminated with any gay relationship. These crimes deserve death - death in the name of God,' he said.

One of my guiding lights in any analysis of others is to try and separate the signal from the noise. Someone who lives inside the geographic boundaries of a dominant culture isn't necessarily someone who believes in and supports that culture. Some people are mentally incapable of honestly agreeing with something that abstract. Others, because they are unable to immediately leave, find themselves aping or mimicking that culture in order to not draw attention to oneself and maintain an existence for the time being. Still others may be an active cultural participant, but are secretly disturbed by what they see and host doubts about the culture within, who might not participate if it weren't for the bullying social pressure from others.

Despite their increasing degree of culpability, I'd never write off anyone from the above categories. While some may indeed be guilty of individual crimes, they aren't real believers. Forgiveness is possible.

He said his daughter's 'bad genes were passed on from her mother'. Rand's mother, 41, remains in hiding after divorcing her husband in the immediate aftermath of the killing, living in fear of retribution from his family. She also still bears the scars of the severe beating he inflicted on her, breaking her arm in the process, when she told him she was going. 'They cannot accept me leaving him. When I first left I went to a cousin's home, but every day they were delivering notes to my door saying I was a prostitute and deserved the same death as Rand,' she said.

'She was killed by animals. Every night when go to bed I remember the face of Rand calling for help while her father and brothers ended her life,' she said, tears streaming down her face.

She was nervous, clearly terrified of being found, and her eyes constantly turned towards the window as she spoke.

Two men ran from their homes to help. They rushed Leila to hospital and a passing taxi took the other two. But Leila died at 3.20pm, despite several operations to save her. As she lay in her own hospital bed receiving treatment, Mariam said that she heard someone saying that Leila had been shot in the head. But there were other mutterings that were clearly audible. 'I could hear people talking on the corridors and the only thing that they had to say was that Leila was wrong for defending her daughter's mistakes and that her death was God's punishment.'

[...]

Police said the incident was a sectarian attack and that there was nothing to link Leila's death to her family. 'Her ex-husband was not in Basra when it happened. We found out he was visiting relatives in Nassiriya with his two sons,' said Hassan Alaa, a senior officer at the local police station in Basra. 'We believe the target was the women activists, rather than Mrs Hussein, and that she was unlucky to be in that place at that time.'

It is plausible. Campaigners for women's' rights are not acceptable to many sections of Iraqi society...

Since February 2006, two other activists from the same women's organisation have been killed in the city. One of them was reportedly raped before being shot. The other, the only man working for the non-governmental organisation (NGO), and a father of five who was responsible for the organisation's finances, was shot five months ago.

The Observer visited Rand's father and two brothers at their Basra home, but they refused to talk beyond Hassan proclaiming his father's innocence. When asked if he would be visiting his mother's grave, he shrugged: 'Maybe in the future.'

Mariam has moved out of her home. But within hours of speaking to The Observer a close friend went to her new address to deliver a message that had been left for her at her front door. It read: 'Death to betrayers of Islam who don't deserve God's forgiveness. Speaking less you will live more.' She believes it was sent by Leila's killers.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Via John Derbyshire.

Posted by drizzten at 11:33 AM | Permalink

I'm tired of a society of unthinking collectivist punks telling me to contribute or else.

I don't want to "pitch in" to an entity that has no legitimacy.

I don't want to "pay my share" into the hands of liars, thieves, morons, destroyers, and others whose job involves telling others how to do theirs.

I hate seeing wealth, productivity, and individual progress wrecked as a matter of routine policy.

I, like millions of other Americans, have sent in my income tax paperwork. It makes me ill to think I've been participating in national theft day for so long.

This, according to the People Whose Opinions Matter, is a "change election." I think it's time I started changing my life.

Posted by drizzten at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Los Angeles Times: Designing better choices

The libertarian aspect of the approach lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like. They should be permitted to opt out of arrangements they dislike, and even make a mess of their lives if they want to. The paternalistic aspect acknowledges that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.

Awesome, so where do I mail my paperwork to opt out of the federal and Texas Constitutions and the whole cascading intrusive mess of laws they spawned?

I've got pot to grow, fully automatic rifles to fire, and just one lifespan to enjoy without taxation destroying chunks of it.

Posted by drizzten at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thank you, Dr. Roderick T. Long.

To: All those currently exercising positions of responsibility in the Government of the United States of America, whether elected or appointed, and whether at the federal, state, or local level

Whereas the United States Government's claim to legitimacy is purportedly based on such principles as the consent of the governed, human equality, and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and

Whereas few if any of those over whom you claim authority have ever consented to such governance; and

Whereas governments, as claimants to such authority over others, are by their nature inconsistent with human equality; and

Whereas your laws, ordinances, decrees, and policies generally stand in violation, directly or indirectly, of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

We, the undersigned, hereby demand:

That you cease to claim to be acting in our name or as our agents; and

That you cease all attempts to exercise authority over your fellow human beings, on this continent or elsewhere; and

That you work to dismantle the institution or set of institutions known as the Government of the United States of America, in every branch and at every level, as speedily as possible; and

That you make no attempt to interfere with its replacement by voluntary associations of free and equal individuals.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Via Two--Four.

Posted by drizzten at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Who can fix health care, who can fix our economy, who can create new jobs, who can reduce the price of gas at the pump?

Hillary can.

Posted by drizzten at 11:33 AM | Permalink

As I've posted to an Animeboards thread in the Members Only section:

Says DraniX:
Utopian fantasies fuck up the entire world.

Correct. Fantasies, by their nature, are prone to doing that. If one is to adopt or create a philosophy of living, then it certainly helps to have your ideas grounded in reality.

To specify, communists thought that they too had a pretty solid idea of how to create a utopia, specifically of the socialist persuasion. And it seemed solid in theory, at least to them. But I'll bet you not one of them could cite a real-world example of its success.

You need to speak with more Commies. Once you separate the water-headed teenage wanna-be rebels from those who've actually done their homework and can tell Proudhon from Bakunin, they're likely to fall into two categories:

1. There are many real-world examples of small gift economies (insert various local examples) as well as the prominent case of the anarchist communes in post-civil-war Spain before WWII
2. You are correct, because those damn dirty capitalists and authoritarian socialists keep mucking things up!

But that isn't the real point, here.

Such is the case with libertarians. Prove me wrong.

Prepare to be bored.

Libertarians cover a broad spectrum of belief and while some generalized things can be said about them, the moment you get into specifics everything gets complicated. There are Christian libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, sick-of-the-corrupt-GOP conservatives, independents who waffle between the two big parties, conspiracy nuts, Democrats who'll vote Libertarian just to mess with the Republicans, hardcore Libertarian Party members, people who just want the police to let them get stoned, people who just want to own a full-auto AK-47, and serious political scholars who argue for strictly limited minarchism.

Ask that room of "libertarians" for real-world examples of libertarianism in action and I wouldn't be surprised if you received 10 different answers. You'd hear about the first hundred years of the American Republic, ancient Iceland, various Protestant sects, Somalia, the Vatican, Antarctica, Switzerland, the theoretical moral line between one legitimate property owner and another, the Better Business Bureau, the Internet, and on and on. Would any of them be correct?

That gawd-awful mashup of ideologies and preferences is one reason why I'm not comfortable with calling myself "libertarian" even though it's the one term that most easily conveys my basic thoughts to the average person. It's why I self-identify as an anarcho-capitalist or free market anarchist. At least those terms narrow down the discussion.

Do I have any real-world examples of historical free market anarchism? No.

There are like-minded folks who believe there was a period in Iceland's past where something relatively close to our ideal was reached. I haven't researched it and am open to thinking either way. Others like to argue that any action that is not taken under the direct influence or duress of the state is essentially voluntary and free-market; I disagree.

However, despite not having any examples to which I can point, I don't think that in any way undermines the desirability of my ideal. Rather, it just reinforces just how long governments (specifically, the philosophies of political aggression that give rise to them) have been attached to our necks.

The lack of evidence can also be explained in other ways. The very idea of functional stateless societies is relatively new to human thought. The idea of radical free market capitalism is even more recent. It shouldn't be surprising to see few if any records of intentionally anarchist communities, let alone anarchist communities that explicitly enact a pro-private property and pro-free trade charter. There is intense antagonism between the majority of anarchists today (who stem from communistic/socialistic roots) and the majority of radical laissez-faire libertarians (who stem from individualistic/egoistic roots). We're talking about fractions of a fraction of a splinter ideology arguing definitions until throats are weary and fingers are worn.

Toss in the simple fact that just about all dry ground on this planet (and all of the pleasant, arable land) is currently under control of some state somewhere and add to it the quite obvious hatred establishment politicians and nationalists feel towards secession movements and what do you get?

Nothing of any substantial value worth using as an example to support my politics. Boo-hoo.

What is important is understanding this: I don't argue for a utopia. Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Walter Block, and others don't believe everyone is an angel and will magically stop raping, robbing, and assaulting others if the state is abolished in a defined geographic area. We are aware, far more so than most people, of human nature and the temptations in front of us to cut corners when faced with the irreducible reality that life is a choice. One can either be productive and self-sufficient, or one can be a parasite to varying degrees. The single biggest reason why things are fucked up today is because too many people choose parasitism over production and that parasitism exists primarily in the form of the state.

A private court system in a society that recognizes aggression (the initiation of physical force) as the principle crime is not going to be crime-free. It is not necessarily going to be graffiti-free, obnoxious-loser-free, abortion-free, sleaze-free, idiot-free, pollution-free, or hatred-free.

But it will be substantially more free than anything else out there. And that's what counts.

Posted by drizzten at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From my MySpace Anarcho-Capitalism group: Anti-Abortion: A Collectivist Position

Some Guy. What Guy? That Guy. Who? wrote:

Certainly the most common argument against abortion is that it's human life. It may not be conscious, but it's human life, which makes it valuable.

But species is a group distinction. An individual may be a member of one species or another, but the label of a certain species is a group distinction.

Currently, only members of Homo sapiens sapiens meet my qualifications for sentient, rights-bearing individuals. That very may well change over time if extra-terrestrial life is discovered. Until then, Wise Man (Wiki) is valuable because he or she is a member of Wise Man Group due to the requirements of belonging to that group.

Think of it this way. If an organization only allowed men to join and rigidly enforced that requirement, we'd know that all members were male. Similarly, if part of what defines membership in Homo sapiens sapiens is a rational faculty capable of not only knowing the difference between right and wrong but figuring out why knowing that difference is important in the first place (a Randian approach to species and rights), then we know that those life forms categorized as Homo sapiens sapiens are intrinsically valuable due to their rights-bearing nature.

The essentially collectivist approach to organizing individual things into like categories doesn't necessarily mean the approach is Collectivist in the political sense. You have an interesting argument, but I think it doesn't get much further than step one. Or perhaps I'm horribly misunderstanding you?

However, whether it be Hitler or MLK, Einstein or Paris Hilton, Mozart of Barry Manilow, etc. everybody's equally human. Nothing can make anyone "More" human than anyone else. & Even body parts qualify as "Human." Furthermore, you're no more human than a tumor.

Err, so are battlefield medics who amputate hemorrhaging limbs and cancer surgeons murderers? I think I've misread you here because it contradicts what you write later.

I'm not at all shy of asserting tumors and arms have no moral weight whatsoever.

The distinction of a given species bears no moral significance. & While it's true that certain species are more intelligent than others, one's biology is the cause of one's individual traits, but it's the effect that matters.

If actual, living Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis were discovered, then I think your point would be more valid. Currently, the only species that morally matters (and as a cat lover it pains me to say this) are existing human beings. It just happens to be a fact that all known human beings belong to the same species.

Maybe you should clarify what you mean by species. Humans and dogs are not examples of different species; they belong in significantly different classifications.

"Human" is to "Sapient" what "Automobile" is to "Transportation."

Correct. Humans are sapient and that doesn't exhaust the possibilities of other creature being sapient either. Of course, sapience is not the only measure of individual moral worth.

To say that a being which is nothing more than a cluster of cells is just as important as a fully conscious being with dreams & aspirations, just because they're both human, reveals this argument's Collectivist thinking. A fetus lacks what makes individuals valuable, such as consciousness, so Pro-Lifers appeal to something it has in common with another individual, rather than rely on any traits that it already possesses.

How do you respond to the issue of the crippled, the unconscious, and the comatose? They lack at various times some of the critical features that make humans distinct from other animals.

Furthermore, to attribute one's importance to one's species is extremely Anti-Individualistic since valuable traits such as intelligence are individual traits, not group ones.

Intelligence is absolutely important to determining moral worth...but it isn't the true fundamental as I see it. Other animals show signs of nontrivial intelligence. What sets humans apart is intelligence combined with rationality and self-awareness. Again, classification in order to enhance understanding doesn't imply political Collectivism to me. It can certainly lead to it, but that's an individual decision (read: error!) to make in the abuse of reason for illegitimate ends.

Espousing the "Sanctity of Human Life" detracts from what makes a individual valuable, & without the Species Card, a fetus loses its value since it quite simply has no value whatsoever.

Of course, my perspective in this is radically different from most people who tout Sanctity of Life arguments.

The other commonly used argument against abortion is that a fetus is a potential individual.

I'm with ya on this one. :)

As well, to help illustrate my point, a fully-developed human may have the potential to do many things in the future, but that's not what gives it value; what gives it value is its ability to think, feel, & act.

I will reiterate my question above: How do you respond to the issue of the crippled, the unconscious, and the comatose? They have the potential to become "full" again.

So, what's the point of this blog? The point is, you can't be a Classical Liberal if you're Anti-Abortion.

The point of my reply is to suggest this conclusion - at least the portions derived from the first half - shouldn't be welcomed so soon.

I'm not anti-abortion, mind you. Just playing a little Devil's Advocate and curious to know what further thoughts you (or anyone else) have.

Posted by drizzten at 11:15 AM | Permalink

No adult American alive on January 20, 1961, will ever forget the stirring words of President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." The nation's young leader thus captured the spirit of a new generation. Today a hardened and cynical generation that has endured Vietnam, Watergate, 9/11, and other soul-depressing events since JFK's assassination still accepts the promise of personal initiative, but shared sacrifice has become a lesser-known concept for many. We have it within our power to change this, and to go back to the future. A new Constitution can fuel America's transformation into a society that once again fulfills Kennedy's vision.

The best means available would be a constitutional requirement that all able-bodied Americans devote at least two years of their lives to the service of their nation. The charge must be broad, and the civilian and military options must be many, to accommodate the varied talents of the population and the diverse dictates of conscience. But the principle must be immutable: Enjoying the benefits of living in a great democracy is not a God-given right. In exchange for the privileges of American citizenship, every individual has obligations to meet, promises to their fellow citizens and posterity to keep.

Universal National Service (UNS) would be a kind of Bill of Responsibilities, a useful complement to the Bill of Rights. A simple but powerful constitutional clause would decree that "all citizens of the United States, who are of sound mind and body, shall be required to give two years of service to their country, in a manner prescribed by law."

-Larry J Sabato

...a requirement that every able-bodied person between the ages of 18 and 26 give two years to Universal National Service (UNS)...

Posted by drizzten at 04:29 PM | Permalink

Well, in that case, I hope you get what you ask for.

Good and hard.

More later.

But not before I return with tons of pictures from the Maker Faire this weekend.

I do have priorities, ya know.

Posted by drizzten at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If it’s going well then we need to continue it. If it isn’t working then we need to keep trying.

You know, there are a lot of people who would never accept that sort of “logic” in regards to any other government program, but they totally buy it when it comes to a war.

-Thoreau, over at Unqualified Offerings

This one issue, more than any other concrete example of politics, is what drove my shift from minarchism to anarchism.

Posted by drizzten at 12:41 PM | Permalink

The Scotsman: Greens see red after EU keeps duty on light bulbs

THE European Commission is under fire from green campaigners and retailers for plans to extend duties on energy-efficient light bulbs from China.

The Chinese light bulbs have been subject to import duties since 2001, because the commission says the products are sold in EU markets for less than their true value.

Yesterday, EU commissioners met in Brussels and agreed to keep tariffs of 66 per cent in place, despite calls from green campaigners to bring down the price of energy-efficient light bulbs to encourage consumers to make greener choices.

[...]

Around 270 million energy-efficient bulbs are sold each year, compared with two billion ordinary (incandescent) lightbulbs. Energy-efficient bulbs are three to six times more expensive than ordinary ones, although they last five times longer.

Both Philips and General Electric, two electronics giants, wanted restrictions lifted. They argue that Europe needs cheap energy-efficient bulbs from China to meet growing demand. However, Osram, a German company, opposes ending the duties.

©2007 Scotsman.com

The real outrage is that these people are so arrogant as to assume to know what the true value is of any given thing for you and I. Stop and think about that.

Then tell me how it materially differs from classic socialism.

Posted by drizzten at 10:29 AM | Permalink

See for yourself.

My problem isn't that it induces the gag reflex (all politicians involuntarily earn the same response). My problem is that she fucking means it.

"As I travel around America, I hear from so many people who feel like they're just invisible to their government."

Clearly, the blind are leading the blind.

Posted by drizzten at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The amount of money needed to bring our infrastructure up to a passing grade has been estimated at about $1.6 trillion.

-SanJoseLady

Even if they did, it wouldn't justify looting my paycheck to pay for it all.

Posted by drizzten at 12:40 PM | Permalink

I only value voting as a means to an ends — the right to vote turns out to be the best safeguard against losing peace, stability, and economic freedom.

Taking this person at his or her word: do you think the right to vote is the "best safeguard against losing peace, stability, and economic freedom"? My career as a voter wasn't very long - I voted in the 2000 Presidential election and the 2003 Texas Constitutional amendment ballot - but my career as an eligible voter is significantly longer. Frankly, I see nothing but absolute declines in the degree of peace, stability, and economic freedom in the United States.

Posted by drizzten at 02:12 PM | Permalink

CBS News TB Patient: "I'm Very Sorry"

[Andrew Speaker]'s father, also a lawyer, taped a meeting with the CDC prior to leaving for his honeymoon.

"My father said, 'OK, now are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he's a risk to anybody, or are you simply saying that to cover yourself?' And they said, we have to tell you that to cover ourself, but he's not a risk."

Speaker, his new wife and her 8-year-old daughter were already in Europe for the wedding when the CDC contacted him and told him to turn himself in immediately at a clinic there and not take another commercial flight.

Speaker said he felt as if the CDC had suddenly "abandoned him." He said he believed if he did not get back to a specialized clinic in Denver, he would die.

"Before I left, I knew that it was made clear to me, that in order to fight this, I had one shot, and that was going to be in Denver," he said. If doctors in Europe tried to treat him and it went wrong, he said, "it's very real that I could have died there."

[...]

Speaker, however, could be sued by fellow airline passengers, especially if any caught the disease from him - which some legal scholars say is much more likely.

"He may be personally liable if someone contracts TB" from being near him on his recent flights to and from Europe, said Peter Jacobson, a University of Michigan professor of public health law. "I can see a jury coming down very hard on someone like that who willfully ignored advice not to travel."

[...]

In the past week, Speaker was quarantined in New York City and then again - under guard - at an Atlanta hospital. The quarantine order was not approved by a judge, but rather issued under the CDC's administrative powers.

There's a reason for that, Jacobson said: In certain rare instances, such action is deemed necessary to avoid legal delays in rapidly protecting the public from a disease-carrying person.

© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Julie Louise Gerberding, M.D., M.P.H., "CDC Director, Julie Louise Gerberding, MD, MPH has been leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) since July 2002. She also serves as a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Emory University and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco."

Tanja Popovic, MD, PhD, F(AAM), AM(AAFS), "Tanja Popovic, MD, PhD, CDC's chief science officer, joined the agency in 1989 as a Fulbright Postdoctoral fellow. Since then, she has served as the chief of the Diphtheria Reference Unit, chief of the Epidemiologic Investigations/Anthrax Laboratory, and co-director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Prevention and Control of Bacterial Meningitis. Prior to her position as chief science officer, she served as CDC's associate director for science (Feb 2004 - Jun 2006)."

Stephanie B. Coursey Bailey, MD, MS, "Stephanie B. Coursey Bailey, MD, MS, was known for her ties to CDC long before becoming chief of the Office of Public Health Practice in October 2006. Since 1999, she has worked with CDC on projects, including co-chairing the National PH Workforce Taskforce, serving as a senior consultant for local practice to PHPPO, and serving on the National Advisory Committee for the Elimination of Tuberculosis, among others."

Stephen B. Blount, MD, MPH, "In his current role, Stephen B. Blount, MD, MPH, is responsible for CDC's global health portfolio that includes an annual budget of $900 million, 200 US government staff assigned to 50 countries, and 1,500 locally hired staff and contractors. He provides programmatic and financial oversight for the Global AIDS Program; global immunization and disease eradication activities;, malaria, tuberculosis, and tobacco control efforts; and international training programs. Dr. Blount is the lead strategist for CDC's global activities and manages key partnerships with ministries of health, other US government agencies, UN organizations, the World Bank, private foundations, multi-national corporations, non-government organizations, and academic institutions."

Richard E. Besser, MD, "Richard Besser, MD, serves as director of the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response (COTPER). He is responsible for all of CDC's public health emergency preparedness and emergency response activities. COTPER is the primary CDC/ATSDR organization tasked with oversight of terrorism preparedness, response and protection for the nation from biological, chemical, radiological, and naturally occurring emergencies."

Hmm. All docs so far.

Rear Admiral Mitchell L. Cohen, MD, USPHS, "RADM Mitchell L. Cohen, M.D., was appointed director of CDC's Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases (CCID) in May 2004. As the director, he provides leadership for CDC's largest, most complex coordinating center which includes the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention; National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; National Center for Preparedness, Detection, and Control of Infectious Diseases; National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne and Enteric Diseases. When combined, these national centers represent a budget of roughly $4.0 billion and employ over 3000 staff nationally and internationally.

Dr. Cohen received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke University. His postgraduate training was in internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, and in infectious diseases at the University of Washington in Seattle."

Steven L. Solomon, MD, "Steven L. Solomon, MD, currently serves as the director of the Coordinating Center for Health Information and Service. He received his MD from Tufts University and is board-certified in internal medicine, preventive medicine, and infectious diseases. He was in the private practice of internal medicine and infectious diseases before joining the Epidemic Intelligence Service at CDC in 1981."

First do no harm.

I think they've forgotten that.

Posted by drizzten at 08:52 PM | Permalink

Posted on National Review Online's second GOP presidential debate symposium:

"[Ron] Paul needs to become a Democrat."

That's Kathleen Parker demonstrating how absolutely bonkers some conservatives and Republicans have become over national security. Here is a guy whose political philosophy - despite being fundamentally statist - runs completely perpendicular to the Democrats'. He speaks out passionately against the welfare state; against economic regulation; against the government forcibly inserting itself between legitimate private property transactions; against taxes in general and the income tax in particular. Even as a shit-poor attempt at a joke, how could you conclude he should become a Democrat?

Because he thinks there are very real consequences to an interventionist foreign policy? Because he is suggesting the United States government frequently stirs up hatred and anger when it meddles in the affairs of others and therefore motivates a small number of those so agitated to strike back?

Democrats only like him because he's against the wars on terror and drugs, wants to reduce corporate welfare, and sticks to a mostly principled legislative policy. They loathe everything else and they particularly loathe the reasons why he thinks the way he does, which ought to be warning enough that they really don't want him on their side.

I don't think Paul believes America "deserved" the terrorism on September 11th, 2001. I think he's closer to my position: the US federal government did things that pissed off Islamic fundamentalists already irrationally predisposed to hate the liberal secular West (as well as its Judeo-Christian heritage), sowing the ground for the attacks throughout the last three decades. Therefore, one way to protect Americans from terrorism is to stop government policies that piss off those Muslim fascists...which would also have the more important primary effect of ending government action in areas it does not belong.

Don't construe this as a "Vote for Ron Paul in 2008!" message. That was just a really stupid thing for Kathleen Parker to say.

Posted by drizzten at 05:05 PM | Permalink

Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times writes this as an aside describing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

"a social liberal and fiscal conservative"

Bloomberg is a social liberal? Really? As in, someone who generally respects the freedom and rights of individuals to pursue their noncoercive desires in a social setting...and not some lazy political label used by conservatives to slap on someone who supports abortion and weaker penalties for smoking pot?

Let me also express considerable skepticism about Bloomberg's alleged fiscal conservatism. I mean, this is the mayor of New York City under discussion. Has he actually "reined in" the budget, "cut the growth" of annual spending, or other buzz words for doing jack shit about the local gov's creeping size? Or has he actually, in reality, truly reduced the size of a monstrosity measured in the tens of billions?

Do these two terms really mean anything anymore when even their meager original meanings have been appropriated for clearly illegitimate use? And what the hell does it say about Our Current Affairs when one of the leading conservative-leaning newspapers allows this bullshit to be said regarding someone who is perhaps the most prominent mayoral example of nanny statism in the United States?

Egads.

Posted by drizzten at 09:33 AM | Permalink

But I'm very uncomfortable with enacting legislation that denies the ability of young women to exercise rational judgment over how they use their bodies.

Ezra Klein

Regardless, in the very next sentence he writes: "...I'd be much more comfortable with a remedy that sought to outlaw the particular model of GGW, which seeks out girls whose decision-making capacities are severely impaired (because they're drunk) and does so in pressured environments (where groups of guys will be hooting for them to flash)."

So much for any hope of this guy to take a real stand against the heavy cultural statist hand of Garance Franke-Ruta.

Posted by drizzten at 01:43 PM | Permalink

After discovering the limits of statism in the waning days of the Cold War, we in the West...

Reihan Salam

Posted by drizzten at 09:37 AM | Permalink

Billy Beck plunges the knife in a location that so desperately deserves the wound.

A law enforcement official close to the investigation told The Associated Press on Thursday that the governor typically does not wear his seat belt, and that his state trooper detail had not been successful in persuading him.

Mother. Fucking. Hypocritical. Tyrants.

Posted by drizzten at 12:14 AM | Permalink

Jane Galt's attempt to explain away the relatively small practical problems with large CEO salaries totally misses the point of nearly all the criticism aimed at them.

Absolutely: people harping on multi-million dollar compensation packages don't understand the complicated financing that occurs not only when the deals are made but as the deals mature and complete

Absolutely: converting high CEO pay into some "socially useful" function would require the radical realignment of whole industries at a moment's notice

But this doesn't really matter to most of the people who bitch about business executives making 40 times the money of the regular guys working for the company. Their objection is fundamentally moral. They think it is simply wrong for someone to make that much money, regardless of what he or she does. They see big bonuses and they retch. Listen how often people describe the top pay packages as "obscene."

They see inequality as a sin.

Therefore, even if you could rebut their think tank arguments about some objective measure of a negative economic outcome, they'd still fall back on what really bothers them: the free market does not produce egalitarian results. By not confronting that complaint squarely, 90% of today's "free market" defenses are simply wasting their time by, in effect, spending their energies trying to knock down agile straw men with the damned lies of economic statistics.

Posted by drizzten at 11:52 AM | Permalink

...and the annoying limits of modern wire journalism!

The AP via MyWay: Pot-Growing Takes Root in the Suburbs

In Coldwater Creek, a middle-class housing development outside Atlanta, the neighbors mind their own business and respect each other's privacy - ideal conditions, it turns out, for growing marijuana in the suburbs.

Police this month raided an utterly ordinary-looking red-brick house on the block and broke up a pot-growing operation with 680 plants arrayed under bright lights.

"You'd never know from the outside. I guess that's the idea," said Doug Augis, who lives with his pregnant wife and a toddler in Coldwater Creek. "That doesn't give you a really good feeling."

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All right reserved.

Why, Mr. Augis? Why does that bother you?

Is it a wish to have an accurate picture of the people who live around your family? It's better to be told the truth than to be deceived by lies, I have no doubt about that.

Is it simply an emotional reaction to seeing a drug bust in your neighborhood? A group of men armed with paramilitary training and the ample will to use their firearms raided a home within shooting distance of yours. It was possible the growers were armed as well and they could have decided to fight it out.

Is it a reaction to knowing Drug People lived near you? I know that decades of government propaganda and media fear-mongering can take a heavy toll on one's objectivity. While I'm comfortable around many recreational drugs and drug users, there are instances where the distance between me and them isn't enough. Some people just don't know when to quit.

Is it your desire to know what others are doing inside their homes? I have neighbors whose public lifestyle and house exterior arouse great curiosity about the activities inside. Their lawn is fed a steady diet of beaten up trucks, empty bags of chips, and discarded cases of beer. My only face-to-face interaction was with a middle-aged Hispanic man wearing pants that had seen many construction projects who, in terrible English, eventually explained he wanted to borrow my phone to call his boss to pick him up the next morning.

Is it a subtle comment about the bizarre economic situations those in the recreational drug market face every day? Drug prohibition has driven billions of dollars and thousands of people underground to conduct their business. They want their production to be kept quiet and unknown, the opposite of a healthy market. I feel a sense of dread as I see people twist their legitimate lives into pretzels to avoid government attention and wonder what it holds for us in the future.

Or is it really a matter of wanting safety and security for you and yours at all costs, resulting, in practical reality, in the removal or elimination of anything that upsets you? What upsets you, in the case, is the "crime" of growing marijuana for profit and the attendant black market elements that are often involved with it. Well, we can safely say those black markets and the frequently dishonorable people who operate within in wouldn't exist if pot wasn't outlawed. There wouldn't be an artificial price premium attached to it and wouldn't nearly attract the current degree of organized crime's attention.

I'm sure there are other layers of possible explanation for your unpleasant feeling, Mr. Augis. If you ever run across this web page, feel free to e-mail me to give your side of the story.

Posted by drizzten at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Where is it? I want to see this society where private property owners are let free to do as they wish with what they own. Reveal the people who are free to charge as they wish for the goods and services they provide. Show me this land of zero taxation, zero regulation, and zero collective control over the market. Point me in the direction of the culture Bill Keegan speaks of so harshly.

When ya find it, lemme know. I'll be the guy standing alone over here, in the certainly-unfree United States of America, not holding his breath.

Posted by drizzten at 07:18 PM | Permalink

New York Times: What Starbucks Can Learn From the Movie Palace

Metering and charging for a service, of course, is the prerogative of any business owner in a free market.

In fact, one could easily make the case that the whole of most political philosophy these days revolves around finding new ways to deny that prerogative and to expand existing laws that violate it. As a statement of principle, you will find very few people who support a person's right to freely negotiate a sale with another person.

Posted by drizzten at 02:53 PM | Permalink

David Mizner's Dailykos diary: Edwards Rejects Clintonomics; will Obama?

Now, labels like "populist" and "progressive" don't do justice to the complexity of the issues and individuals involved. Few pols fit neatly into an ideological niche. But there's a fundamental choice that must be made, a fork in the political road. Do you stand with People or with Power? Edwards has made his choice.

Who'd dare side with Power in Its grinding conflict with People? How could you pick an impersonal thing over the huddled hopeful hearts of millions? Obviously, those choosing Power have no sympathy and shelter no concern for humanity! The clear choice is with People! Down with Power!

Claims that Mr. Mizner is just being rhetorical will be ignored. The whole point of his post is to showcase what he believes is Edwards' populism, his radical departure from DC establishment thinking, and his willingness to "[promote] fair trade and an activist government that helps the middle class, the working class, and the poor." Any normal observer of American politics will recognize the regular identification made between The People = Good and Titanic Faceless Power = Bad. There are times it even makes sense in context.

This isn't one of those times.

Contrary to Mr. Mizner's formulation, Edwards hasn't made his binary choice between people and power. He hasn't ditched one for the other. He certainly has not given up on power. In fact, he is whole-heartedly in favor of it.

He wants to use the power of the state for a vast overhaul of welfare programs, seeking more state spending and more subsidies. He wants to force businesses to cover more health care costs and he wants to force all Americans to get health care. He wants to use the state to throw up more barriers to trade so domestic jobs are protected. He has no problem with growing the deficit in the short or long term provided the middle-to-lower classes get their government funding.

He's fundamentally no different at all to anyone currently seeking or thinking of seeking the presidency. He's just a little more honest about his goals and his means: more power for the feds and more will to use it.

Posted by drizzten at 02:15 PM | Permalink

Reuters via the Washington Post: U.S. not ready for Japan free trade talks: USTR

"We're not ready for an FTA (free trade agreement) with Japan right now," Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Wendy Cutler said during a discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "I'm not saying it's impossible. I just don't see it happening in the short term."

In one sense, "we" are not ready for free trade. Not actual free trade. Eliminating the state in economic transactions and taking a clear moral stand against interventionism is, in terms of things people fear most, right up there with encountering Satan and getting stabbed in the gut with a rusty spoon. Quite clearly, given the demonstrated preferences of the vast majority of both Americans and Japanese, they do want neither to freely exchange goods and services with one another nor do they want to witness the free exchanges of goods and services amongst third parties. Being free means you don't have to deal with government-imposed regulations and don't have to pay taxes to subsidize government-favored individuals and their organizations. If honest free trade were to occur, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind a movement would spring up within hours to shut it down and control it.

However, in another sense, "we" are ready for free trade at any time. It is not necessary for two government committees to meet and establish the whens and the wheres and the hows and the whos. Humans are ready, in principle, to take back control over their lives when they wish. We have the capacity to do so and we damn sure have the need.

Unfortunately, the desire for it seems to constantly run afoul of muddled thinking and incompatible philosophies.

For a libertarian system, free trade agreements occur naturally and as needed. No need to design or create anything.

For a system of statism that simply will not unclench its bedrock grip on humanity, it would consist of a law passed by each government that thoroughly, categorically, and radically abolishes every government law standing in the way of anyone trying to buy or sell with a foreigner. A real free trade agreement would take seconds to design. It would only take a sentence to accomplish this, preferably located in the Constitution or its equivalent.

Of course, the fact that it can be changed is an argument that it cannot be trusted to remain true to the principles that animate it.

Posted by drizzten at 03:16 PM | Permalink

FreeRepublic: Preambles, 50 States - No 'God' in Government??

To those who doubt that G-d has blessed the United States of America I offer this thought.

In the late 1700s two nations embraced instituted a Republic. One founded its laws on its faith in G-d. The other founded its laws in its faith in human enlightenment.

300 years later one has had a consitent history of progress. The other is a mess.

Shalom.

17 posted on 08/21/2006 8:18:47 AM PDT by ArGee (The Ring must not be allowed to fall into Hillary's hands!)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies ]

1. Thinking the United States legal system was philosophically founded upon faith in the Christian gawd, France's legal system was philosophically founded upon the power of individual human reason, and both nations have more or less adhered to those ideas;
   
2. the deliberate disassociation from the Enlightenment of the founding ideas and people of the United States; or
   
3. the implication that it is necessary for people to be not only religious but to ground their system of order in religion and have a direct blessing from their gawd in order for their nation to prosper.

The belief that the Republic of France was grounded in markedly secular and non-religious ideas could be true. I haven't studied that period of history and know far less than what I know of American history. However, this image is a popular representation of the original Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. There are several religious aspects to the painting: the Ten Commandments-style of presentation and the angelic figure pointing to an all-seeing eye are the first that come to mind. Then, if theocons are going to claim "Divine Guidance" (Hawaii), "Great Legislator of the Universe" (Massachusetts), and "Author of Existence" (Vermont) as evidence of religious inspiration for the 50 states' legal documents, then they also ought to accept this sentence from the French Declaration: Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen...

I'd argue the US has grown less religious with time, if not in absolute or relative population than in intensity. Though the recent surge in Christian political activity might seem as a counterpoint to this, I view it as just that: a temporary surge.

ArGee presents us with an either-or. One nation (America) founded its laws on its religious faith and one nation (France) founded its laws on human enlightenment. Therefore, the US borrowed little from the Age of Reason during its formative processes. Anyone who argues the people and ideas of the Enlightenment played little or no role in the creation of the United States is astoundingly wrong. Thomas Paine, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and the others who were both instrumental to the Enlightenment and incorporated its ideas into their own didn't positively influence the creation and early foundational years of the United States? ArGee later whips out the "revisionist history" label when responding to someone who questioned his post; I think the pot is calling the kettle black here.

Finally, I've got little to say to someone who relies on divine blessing in order to have a comfortable, safe, healthy society. If that person honestly believes that, then there would be no reason to produce anything. People could just sit together and pray for all they need. They wouldn't need to build churches, homes, and factories. They could forgo earning an income, growing crops, and passing on knowledge to younger generations. If the kiss of the almighty is the crucial characteristic that determines societal success, then why direct your energies away from securing that heavenly grace?

Hell, if human reason and religious faith are antithetical, then how does one justify their belief in not only gawd but for their stance on the necessity of that gawd's sanction in order to secure peace and just social structure?

I say all this in light of the Sam Harris / Andrew Sullivan discussion on religion, where I think Harris has Sullivan by the balls more often than not.

Posted by drizzten at 11:52 AM | Permalink

New York Times: Text of U.S. Security Adviser's Iraq Memo

[Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki should demand] that all government workers (in ministries, the Council of Representatives and his own offices) publicly renounce all violence for the pursuit of political goals as a condition for keeping their positions

Hadley, Hadley, Hadley. Don't you understand that the nature of government requires its agents to engage in or support violence in the pursuit of political goals?

Posted by drizzten at 11:16 AM | Permalink

The "fairness doctrine" is making a comeback and the recent House and Senate wins by Democrats are adding fuel to that fire, just as some have predicted.

That's not about regulating content, that's about regulating ownership and it's an entirely different thing. The fairness doctrine applies to the regulation of what is actually broadcast. It doesn't say anything about who owns what's broadcast.

- sterno, on DailyKos

Happy Friday, folks.

Posted by drizzten at 09:52 AM | Permalink

Reference.com's Word of the Day for Tuesday November 7, 2006:

obfuscate \OB-fuh-skayt\, transitive verb:
1. To darken or render indistinct or dim.
2. To make obscure or difficult to understand or make sense of.
3. To confuse or bewilder.

The Austin American-Statesman, Voting, Free Speech, and Information
Un-limited Austin Government
Contradiction as Innovative Political Strategy
Somewhere, Somehow, You Will Always Be a Minority
Austin Mayor Will Wynn Should Mind His Own Business
How to Buy Votes
Dr. Judith Apter Klinghoffer Misunderstands the Nature of Democratic Government
A Solicitation to Those Who Say I Shouldn't Complain If I Don't Vote
Charles Hueter is an Idiotes!

Posted by drizzten at 08:37 AM | Permalink

I think Republicans should shore up their coalition by offering libertarian reasons for social-conservative positions.

[...]

[The Children's Defense Fund's] approach to helping children and families is for the government to take over the economic function of the family. Hardly a libertarian organization. If they don't like Rick Santorum, that's probably a good sign for advocates of minimum government and fiscal restraint.

[...]

[The 13 issues they listed as important for 2005 supported by Family Research Council] are much more closely attuned to libertarian sensibilities than anything the Children’s Defense Fund has offered, or is ever likely to offer.

Rick Santorum and other social conservatives may not be every conservative’s cup of tea. Some of his issues and rhetoric may make you uncomfortable. Personally, I can’t think of any politician who doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies some of the time. But fiscal conservatives and libertarians, can vote for Rick Santorum with a clean conscience.

-Jennifer Roback Morse, "Libertarians for Santorum" in National Review

"[The liberals'] entire agenda is I should be able to do whatever I want to do as long as no one gets hurt."

"We hear this on abortion: I should be able to do with my body whatever I want to do as long as I'm not hurt - or I should be able to take drugs, and do whatever I want to do as long as, as long as I - I should be able to, ah, you know, whatever in particular in the area of sexual freedom, and and personal issues, this is the mantra of the left, which is: I have a right to do what I want to do. And that is not the kind of freedom that our founders envisioned, it is not the kind of freedom that makes up a society that is, that is uh, devoted, as the subtitle of the book says, to the common good."

Nitebeat: "But isn't the notion of working for the common good - if uh, a liberal were talking about people should spend more time working for the common good, wouldn't they be accused of being kind of a little pink, a little socialistic?"

Santorum: "No, not at all."

Watch the rest of the video for this guy's remarks on the pursuit of happiness. I don't know what to call someone who'd vote for this guy, but "libertarian" isn't one of them.

Posted by drizzten at 02:12 PM | Permalink

News8Austin: First Amendment rights limited at the polls

"They think that they can wear whatever they want to wear and that I do not have the authority to tell them what they can wear. And in that case I tell them, 'Yes, I do have the authority. I'm responsible for running this election according to election law,' " early voting clerk Ginny Knapp said.

[...]

The law is meant to keep any political influence away from people ready to cast their vote.

Whether you're casting a ballot or just stopping for coffee, the same rule applies across the board.

"It is a free country," Knapp acknowledged, "but they have to abide by election laws."

Copyright �2006TWEAN News Channel of Austin, L.P. d.b.a. News 8 Austin

Austin-American Statesman: Effort to unchain dogs meets resistance

A city ordinance proposed by a group called Chain Free Austin would make it illegal to leave tethered dogs outside unless their owners are with them.

[...]

The city already has a law that sets restraint requirements for dogs on private property. (A violation is a Class C misdemeanor, subject to a fine of up to $500.) Among the provisions:

•A person may not restrain a dog in a way that does not allow the dog access to shelter and water and may not use a tether that is likely to become entangled.

•Dogs may not be tethered to a fixed point for more than eight hours unless the restraint is at least 10 feet long, has swivels at each end and is attached to a pulley or cable that is mounted no more than seven feet above ground level.

Chain Free Austin's ordinance would do away with the eight-hour rule, thus making it illegal to restrain or anchor a dog by a tether unless the dog's owner or handler is physically present. (The restrictions would not apply to veterinarians, groomers or obedience or law enforcement trainers.)

Copyright 2001-2006 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P. All rights reserved.

Posted by drizzten at 11:36 AM | Permalink

Fla. Church Probes Priest Tied to Foley

This mental image must be purged!

Posted by drizzten at 02:46 PM | Permalink

What crosses your mind when you read something like this?

Aaron Sorkin, the Hollywood liberal behind the West Wing and the new Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip continues his streak of using attacks on Christianity to begin his shows. Townhall.com writer Brent Bozell has the story saying, "maybe cursing out Christians is his show-opening good luck charm." In addition to his attacks on Christianity, Aaron Sorkin is funding the liberals attempt to take over Congress and impose their radical agenda on America. Sorkin is contributing to dozens of Democrat candidates including Ted Kennedy and his online left-wing minions. Only you and conservatives like Ann Coulter, Hugh Hewitt, Thomas Sowell and the rest of Townhall.com's over 100 conservative leaders stand in their way. Stop their liberal plans by joining the millions of Townhall.com conservatives now!

What kind of a person writes/approves/sponsors this shit?

Posted by drizzten at 10:55 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

It was my fealty to the notion of personal liberty that made me a Republican when I came of age in the 1980s. It is my continued fealty to personal liberty that makes me a Democrat today.

-Markos Moulitsas, leading off a Cato Unbound discussion

That blog post on libertarian Democrats, imperfect as it was, struck a chord. But it wasn't written in a vacuum. It stemmed not from theory or philosophy (I'm neither a theorist, political scientist, nor a philosopher), but from personal experience and from my excitement at the growing ranks of Western Democrats who aren't just transforming the politics of the Mountain states, but will hopefully lead to the reformation of the Democratic Party and a new embrace of the politics of personal liberty.

He thinks individual freedom without the opportunity to exercise it is pointless, completely ignoring the concerted challenges to his unstated premise: individuals cannot be trusted to create their own opportunities for themselves and therefore we must have a state to herd us along. No note of the decades of scholarly effort that, at the very least, cast doubt on this most sacred of political assumptions. He assumes you and I and everyone else simply would not be able to intelligently make our own decisions without the state compelling companies to disclose information on their products.

He wraps it all up thusly:

So a "free" market needs rules ("regulation") in order to function. And such rules should be welcome so long as they are designed to enhance and protect our personal liberties.

Everything I said in The Myth of the Libertarian Democrat applies as it did back in June. Kos may be espousing a position marginally nicer to some existing and future victims of state aggression, but I'm getting real sick of him selling him and his compatriots as friends of individual freedom. They are not and I could spend all day highlighting examples to disprove his claim and demonstrate the opposite.

The only grains of truth in his essay are those condemning Republicans as hypocrites and shills for corporate welfare. He closes with this:

For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we've seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and - most important of all - individual freedoms are paramount.

What do you think about a political party that is more "comfortable" than it was in the past with letting people run their affairs as they see fit, a comfort based not on any unyielding principle but on political expediency?

UPDATED 10/6/2006 1:15pm
Kyle Bennett sent in the following comment:

Kos and his ilk have a very different notion of "personal liberties" than libertarians do. It's not just a political difference about what constitutes a personal freedom, but a fundamentally different epistemological and metaphysical view of what freedom is. They look at freedom as something like Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms". Things like freedom from want, freedom from fear, etc. The root of it is that they see *any* obstacle as an impingement on their freedom, where libertarians see coercion as the only obstacle that qualifies. Poverty, tragedy, discomfort, lack of opportunity, and even the need to pursue your own happiness, etc., to them, these are all examples of freedom being limited . Their "state of nature", against which the legitimacy of government is measured, is not the libertarian one in which everyone gets a spot on the starting line, but one in which everyone has a comfortable spot on the finish line, complete with a bed of laurels, and so never has to actually run the race. It's the *universe* that is his nemesis, not (some) other men - except for those other men who take the universe's side against his, i.e., those who hold reality and reason as primary.

And where libertarians see the only obligation of society as that of not *causing* the limited class of obstacles (coercion) that limit their freedom, from their view of nature flows the Kos Kind's vision of society as having a positive obligation to remove or prevent the things they see as limiting freedom.

In that sense, he's not engaging in any contradiction, (at least not until you delve deeper into the derivation of his notion of "personal liberties" - there's contradictions a plenty to be found there). It may not even be a cynical and insincere attempt at some kind of rapproachment, he probably actually believes it.

--Kyle Bennett
www.humanadvancement.net/blog

If Kos is sincere about seeking a sensible partnership, this again highlights how little he studies the fundamental issues. Libertarians generally adhere to a "negative liberty" mental framework while the more statist political ideologies advocate a "positive liberty" mindset. There are exceptions to this. For example, I remember (but can't find at the moment) Kos making some negative-liberty-style arguments against the drug war, government banning gay marriage, and government spying. Of course, the smart money is on him ultimately favoring "positive liberty" arguments leading to government intervention in any given situation.

I shudder to think about the intellectual acrobatics it would take to reconcile two 1,000-word Kos-authored essays elucidating his position on random personal liberty issue (such as bike helmet laws or consensual sex) and random broad economic issue (such as minimum wage laws or tariffs). The irony being that at their core, every issue becomes a concretely, painfully personal issue at some point. Libertarians generally understand this because, in yet another significant departure from Democrats, they see and analyze the individual as the fundamental unit of society. Not the class, race, sex, orientation, religious belief, and so on.

It is good to see Democrats opposing various Republican Party schemes and elevating their civil liberties rhetoric. However, I am absolutely convinced that much of this is the result of their dislike of Bush, today's GOP, and everything done that can be linked to them. I'm not at all surprised to see Nancy Pelosi put forward a muddled government-expanding mix of solutions as a hint at what she'd do to redirect the House of Representatives' agenda.

Posted by drizzten at 02:19 PM | Permalink

Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader's e-mail:

Eric Hoffer once wrote, "The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without." This could not be more true of anyone, Right or Left - we all have the propensity. Once we stop accepting criticism as an opportunity to reflect and evaluate, we become less.

Let's say I make a claim: humans act. Now, this is not a very controversial claim to make and it is not only easily provable in reality, but impossible to disprove, because the very attempt to disprove is itself an action by a human. In light of this, it seems clear to me that it is possible for there to be statements that are true and do not require constant empirical testing to continually establish their validity. Therefore, choosing to "[accept] criticism as an opportunity to reflect and evaluate" on such truths is foolish. While there might be value in opportunities to educate the ignorant on those claims (such education being increasingly needed, unfortunately) as well as value in taking the time to reveal the emptiness of counter-arguments to such truths in partisan literature, of what value is there in subjecting a fact of reality to repeated test?

The outcome of such an approach taken seriously is a constant broad skepticism that cripples your ability to function.

Do I exist? Whew, yep. Will I float away if I rise from my chair? Whew, nope. Is water wet today? Whew, still is!

The absurdity of that outcome is why so few people actually mean it when they assert philosophical skepticism. Press them for any length of time and most folks will reveal they do indeed believe in some hard truths that, while perhaps vulnerable to criticism, are still truths they think don't require never-ending verifiability. Memento has the following scene:

NATALIE

You decided to help me. Trust yourself. Trust your own judgment. You can question everything, you can never know anything for sure.

LEONARD

There are things you know for sure.

NATALIE

Such as?

LEONARD

I know the feel of the world.

(reaches forward)

I know how this wood will sound when I knock.

(raps knuckles on coffee table)

I know how this glass will feel when I pick it up.

(handles glass)

Certainties. You think it's knowledge, but it's a kind of memory, a kind you take for granted.

Of course, "being open to criticism" can be meant in the sense of being capable of hearing criticism without exploding into a litany of insulting accusations, red herrings, and fallacies. One day my comment system will be up and running again and I'll face the same statist arguments I've faced for years. I've chosen to be patient and give each person a good faith credit chance each time I encounter them. I'm prepared to toss my ideology if someone can prove it incorrect (i.e., prove it incompatible with reality), but that hasn't happened and frankly, I don't see how it can.

Posted by drizzten at 11:07 AM | Permalink

Internet gambling seems pretty lame to me, but if people want to do something as dumb as that, well, it's their money. I don't think Washington should tell them what to do.

-Glenn Reynolds

However, accepting this argument implies a few things. It stands as an absolute rejection of taxation. It represents a total rejection of government licensing laws. A great deal of the things Professor Reynolds advocates on his blog would be, at the very least, deeply questionable on this single principle alone. There would be no American executive government to send military forces overseas. There would be no American legislative government to constantly lobby, contact, and influence in order to shape existing, delay proposed, or introduce new laws. There would be no American judicial government, either. There would be private businesses engaged in the production of values in order to voluntarily transact with individuals and all the vibrant flourishing of human civilization attendant to such a system.

So does Glenn Reynolds support private property? That depends if he advocates the existence of government. If the answer to the latter is "yes" the answer to the former is "no."

Posted by drizzten at 09:43 AM | Permalink

He started Liberty Tax Service, "the second largest international tax service." The company is "one of the top franchise opportunities in Entrepreneur magazine's list of top 500 franchises."

Since he's been doing tax work for decades, perhaps it's time he left the industry and attempted other lines of business? Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head for company names:

Jovial Funeral Services

Beautiful Combover Salon

Or he could simply continue the current trend and go for Effective Government Agency.

Posted by drizzten at 11:23 AM | Permalink

I had no idea that advocating a more progressive tax system was the moral equivalent of throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face.

-LizardBreath, at Unfogged

The result of a more progressive tax system is to throw more acid on Cindy Crawford's face than the average person's. Say, a pint rather than an ounce.

Neither action is justifiable because both constitute an act of aggression against the individual. Similarly, it doesn't matter whether a tax rate of 5% or 90% is advocated. Neither are justifiable because both constitute an act of aggression against the individual.

Posted by drizzten at 10:46 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Texans for Texas ain't afraid to engage in political doublespeak:

What is the TUSF? The Texas Universal Fund was established by the PUC to help telephone companies keep rates affordable in high-cost rural areas. While often referred to as a "subsidy", the TUSF fund is not taxpayer funded, it is funded entirely from assessments on telecom customers' bills. The assessment comes in the form of a 5.65% surcharge on taxable intrastate telecommunications services. The surcharge rate will drop to 5% in October 2006. In addition to keeping local rates affordable in rural areas, the TUSF also funds lifeline service to the poor, service for the hearing impaired and other programs.

The law requires all telecommunications companies including local, long distance and wireless companies to contribute to the fund. Beginning January 1, 2001 the rate is set at 3.60 percent. Companies are not required to collect this charge from customers, but most of them do.

Here's how AT&T/SBC describe this "fee":

Texas Universal Service
Texas Universal Service: is a fund that allows affordable service to high-cost rural customers, funds the Relay Texas and Specialized Telecommunications Assistance program for the hearing-disabled, and funds telecommunications services discounts to low income customers (Tel-Assistance and Lifeline).

Let's be honest. This isn't an assessment or a fee or a charge. This is a tax.

Back to the TX4TX folks:

While the larger companies derive most of their revenues from the dense, lower-cost and business rich population centers, the small incumbent telephone companies get a much larger portion of their total revenues from the TUSF. For most of these small incumbents, the TUSF comprises twenty to sixty percent of their total revenues. A loss of these funds could literally put some companies out of business. A significant TUSF reduction could curtail the ability of others to invest in the critical infrastructure needed to support the types of services small-town Texas needs to conduct commerce and keep rural residents connected to the rest of the world. A reduction in the fund would most likely trigger local rate increases. As rural income levels trend lower than in urban areas, any rate increases will be more difficult for rural customers to absorb.

Moreover, while telephone service competition abounds in urban areas, the competitive landscape in rural Texas is more complex. Due to geography, much higher per-customer costs and fewer revenue-rich business customers, full-service telecom competitors often shun rural areas, leaving customers with fewer competitive options than their big city counterparts. While some competitive and wireless telecom competitors are certainly making inroads to selective rural markets, often the rural local phone company is the only reliable single source of affordable telephone, DSL and internet service.

And this is not a subsidy how?

Note the language here: it is identical in all essential aspects to the whole sordid Democrat/liberal argument for all manner of state economic interventions on behalf of the lower classes. Because poor and isolated people might be without some service, the state must force others to pay for the funds that underwrite their access to that service. Because there are fewer competitors in a specific area, the state must step in and help provide. Think of the rurals!

This is socialism. These are supposed to be conservative Republicans, supposedly advocates of limited government. Clearly, sympathy for their grandparents out in Roberts County and other low-population-density locations outweighs their commitment to principle.

Furthermore:

Finally, rural incumbent telephone companies cannot pick and choose which markets and customers to serve. As PUC-mandated providers of last resort, rural telephone companies must serve all customers within their franchise territory. And rates must be affordable.

UPDATED 9/6/2006 9:50am
Corrected some grammatical problems.

Also, the Texans for Texas e-mail included a link to Coalition to Keep America Connected. From the front page:

When Congress updates our communications laws, we must ensure that a 'digital divide' does not emerge in America: Where some consumers have access to the latest technology, and others must rely on outdated systems. Where some have affordable rates, and others have to sacrifice necessities each month for service. Where some children experience the educational benefits of Internet access, and others are left behind. Every American deserves the same opportunity to enjoy the benefits that affordable technologies bring. The Coalition to Keep America Connected was created to ensure that affordability concerns never prevent Americans from being connected to one another. We believe that all consumers should have access to affordable telecommunications services and the latest technologies, no matter where they live.

No.

What they either manifestly ignore or simply don't care about is that these services are not provided free of charge. They ultimately cannot be provided free of charge. The materials and the labor have to be purchased at some point. Imagine the complexity of a "basic" telephone connection:

1. plastic and circuit boards for the phone itself
   
2. wood, metal, and insulators for the telephone poles
   
3. miles and miles of wire for the lines
   
4. engineering and producing all three, as well as the switchboards to integrate it all together
   
5. hundreds of man-hours of labor to erect the poles and string the wires
   
6. knowledgeable, trained, and state-licensed electricians to supervise the connections
   
7. vehicles to transport the line and pole workers
   
8. support staff to keep them on task and working towards a coherent connectivity plan
   
9. funding up front to pay for all this before the very first bill (or subsidy) is even collected
   
10. agreements and standards-compliance with existing utility infrastructure to make sure everything works together

I mention these providers must do this because the people asserting a right to a service imply the creation of a class of people who are forced to labor for the provision of that service. If I have a right to a DSL connection, local calls, and a cheap cell phone plan, then by the nature of a "right" it is a violation of my rights if I am not supplied with those services. People who take this stance are saying it is immoral and wrong for me to not have these services.

But who is the rights-violator in this instance? Let's say I live out in BFE. Are the executives in AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Sprint, Comcast, T-Mobile, and other telecommunications companies violating my rights by deciding to not extend their service plans to my region? Are they violating my rights by extending their service plans to my region, but at an increased price relative to the prices they charge in urban areas? Did these executives and the people who own the companies infringe upon my natural (and hell, even "Constitutional") rights?

This is as nonsensical as asserting I have a right to a car wash. It posits a claim on someone else's private property based on something so empty as need and national trend. I mentioned above that this is socialism; hell, it's positively Marxist once you strip away the fancy posturing. These people have a need; therefore, other people must be forced into alleviating that need.

It is possible to conceive of a purely voluntary system whereby telecommunications companies tell their normal customers something akin to the following:

We have decided, in the interests of expanding the cohesiveness and connectivity of the American community, to expand our services to those rural areas to which we currently do not offer service and reduce the price we charge to those people who qualify as not making enough money to afford our current plans. However, this is going to be an expensive, multi-year endeavor that, if all other considerations are left as they are, will eat into our profit margins and may complicate existing plans to upgrade our existing services.

Therefore, starting in a few months will be a small change to your bills. We will add a spot where you can elect to pay above and beyond what you owe to us. This donation will go towards paying the costs of achieving of the above goals.

You can donate as much as you want or nothing at all. We have chosen this route because we don't want to drive you away or impose an additional economic burden on your shoulders. Of course, this does not offer the same guarantee as a specific additional charge required of all our customers, but we will explain this to the people to which these new services will extend. If they agree to sign up with us, they will understand their service may depend on your generosity.

If you object to paying this additional fee, you are welcome to break your relationship with our company. If you have existing contracts with us, we will agree to waive the agreement so you will be free to close your account(s) and find another service provider.

To those staying with us, we will provide a monthly accounting of this additional charge to keep you abreast of events and show how this money is being spent or saved. Should you grow tired of paying the extra charge or think we are misallocating the funds, you can end our business relationship whenever you want.

Thank you for your consideration.

We have decided, in the interests of expanding the cohesiveness and connectivity of the American community, to expand our services to those rural areas to which we currently do not offer service and reduce the price we charge to those people who qualify as not making enough money to afford our current plans. However, this is going to be an expensive, multi-year endeavor that, if all other considerations are left as they are, will eat into our profit margins and may complicate existing plans to upgrade our existing services.

Therefore, starting in a few months will be a small addition to your bills. This extra charge, estimated to be no more than a few dollars, will go towards the cost of expanding our rural coverage. It will also go towards underwriting the expenses of our poor clients. We've opted for this path because a voluntary donations system would not ensure a steady stream of revenue for the project and we think most of our customers will understand why we are doing this.

If you object to paying this additional fee, you are welcome to break your relationship with our company. If you have existing contracts with us, we will agree to waive the agreement so you will be free to close your account(s) and find another service provider.

To those staying with us, we will provide a monthly accounting of this additional charge to keep you abreast of events and show how this money is being spent or saved. Should you grow tired of paying the extra charge or think we are misallocating the funds, you can end our business relationship whenever you want.

Thank you for your consideration.

Posted by drizzten at 01:22 PM | Permalink

The Courier: Even GPS has Louisiana’s coast wrong

The issue: Even state-of-the-art GPS devices can't keep track of our quickly eroding coast.

[...]

There is a potential fix, but it will cost an estimated $14 billion. Local residents and other Louisianians are coughing up dollars as fast as we can, but we won't be able to staunch the flow of marsh into the sea by ourselves. We need help from the rest of the nation, too.

It sure sounds like a pleasant word. Conjures up visions of resolute volunteers aiding their fellow humans in a time of need. We picture a bucket brigade fighting a neighborhood fire; a tall man offering to get a box down from the top shelf for a smiling old lady; a friend going out of her way to pick you up from the car repair shop. Help is a wonderful thing. Why? Because it is done willingly by the volunteer as a service to someone the volunteer thinks deserves it.

But what The Courier's editorial board is asking for is not help. What they want is a bigger chunk of the federal taxes collected from offshore oil production (otherwise known as "royalties") to be diverted to Louisiana to address the state's receding and eroding coastline. Why do those oil producers make those payments? Out of the sheer magnanimity of their humanitarian hearts, desirous only of seeing some of their wealth spread around the country to fund crucial government projects? Suuure.

Are they "helping" the country? No, those funds are paid because oil producers want the licenses issued by the government that grant them the privilege to produce oil. They don't want to lose the licenses because without them the government will send in the police to stop them. It is also worth noting that existing oil producers gain an advantage over those who want to enter the market because the licensing process is a barrier to entry.

But, essentially, the "royalties" are paid primarily because the oil producers are afraid of the police violence involved in the arrests, jailings, and asset seizures the government imposes on those whom it catches breaking the law. The Courier editorial board isn't seeking the oil companies' help. It is seeking a greater portion of their wealth as taken against their will.

When someone points a gun at you and says, "pay up or else," what results is not help, but a form of slavery. Making this worse is the board's assumption the oil royalties extorted from these companies belong to "the rest of the nation." This sets up their declaration that Louisiana deserves the help of the whole nation, rather than making it clear what they really want is the oil producers' wealth. This is a good example of the extent and grip of the rhetorical and intellectual sloppiness that I see all over the place.

Posted by drizzten at 01:25 PM | Permalink

But the president, any president, shouldn't have more free time than you and I.

- No Way In Hell President Bush Has Read 60 Books

...I'd rather that he simply keep reading instead of thinking of new ways to screw us all...

The context of this is the report that Bush has read 60 books since the beginning of 2006, even though it seems impossible for Mr. Cesca (and myself) to think an American president sitting through the events of 2006 could possibly have the time to read - and absorb to any practical effect - more than 8,000 pages. The skepticism isn't limited to Mr. Cesca. The US News and World Report article was posted August 20th, so let's say Bush has been reading for 32 weeks (January 1st through August 12th). That's more than a book and a half a week.

Shit, I might need reading lessons from this guy! My backlog is ridiculous: A Weakness for Socio-Political Literature, Bookaholic, My Only Experience with Loompanics..., von Mises Book Bonanza!, etc. I've hardly cracked any of those yet.

Of note within those books Bush allegedly read...get a load of this: Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 by Walter McDougall. Here is part of the Amazon review:

Beginning with the original intentions of the Founding Fathers and the various interpretations of those ideals over the years, he deconstructs the role of the U.S. in global affairs, questioning both the logic and motives of how the nation deals with friend and foe. One of McDougall's major contentions centers on efforts to affect other countries' policies and governments by projecting U.S. standards or choices on them. He is particularly concerned with what he views as an overextension of resources and wisdom, and the glaring hypocrisy such efforts reveal. He points to several examples of how time and energy was wasted trying to change those who were uninterested or unwilling. As McDougall points out lucidly and convincingly in Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776, one nation cannot cure the major ills of another, and the price of such an attempt is too great to risk.

Posted by drizzten at 11:36 AM | Permalink

War may be the answer to a very specific question, but what about the other implication in The Objective Historian's comment?

The fundamental disconnect with reality that so many Regressive-Democrats have is the concept that "war is not the answer." In fact, that is sometimes true; but in the vast majority of cases, it is the answer. E.g., why do you, as an American have freedom of speech? War. Why do we have elections to determine those in authority? War. Etc. Pacifism is ridiculous on its face as are inanities like an eye for an eye makes both sides blind. No, at some point one side surrenders qua surrenders and a resolution exists just as by any other means of diplomacy.

-The Objective Historian

So, are Democrats pacifists? Is there something fundamental in Democratic ideology that endorses pacifism?

I think it is reasonable to assume there are pacifists who politically reside near the Democratic Party. I think it is reasonable to assume there are actual pacifists working within the organization attempting to make its outlook, policies, and candidates more pacifist. It is also, I think, reasonable to say Democrats proclaim an overall preference for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. However, it is in this third generalization that the justification for this post's title arises.

Democrats, like just about every other political party, seek to use government power to solve problems. They propose taxes to redistribute wealth from those who don't need it as much to those who do. They want regulatory agencies to restrain how companies do business. They think it is perfectly acceptable for the state to govern and shape the local, regional, and national economies towards a particular direction; price stability, low interest rates, unobtrusive inflation, full employment, and so on. Most have no objection in principle to government defining the limits of acceptable speech. Most have no objection in principle to universal health care coverage.

In this, Democrats are really no different from Republicans. They both seek to use the state to tackle social and economic problems. A plane of even greater agreement, one which they rarely hesitate to join together on, is in the realm of order and peace. Both parties heartily endorse using the state to protect us and our property from murders and thieves. Neither have any serious principled objection to the current triad of government lawmakers, government law enforcement, and government courts of adjudication.

This is why no Democrat could ever truly be a pacifist. To endorse all those positions is to endorse the direct use of violence or the threat of direct violence against those who won't obey the state's commands. The procedure in America is roughly as follows:

1. If the objector isn't arrested outright on the spot, the state sends warnings of its intention to levy fines and/or arrest the objector if compliance isn't met.
   
2. These warnings continue and escalate if the objector continues to resist.
   
3. In some cases, a warrant is issued and law enforcement is allowed to arrest the objector when they come into contact.
   
4. Eventually, law enforcement begins hunting for the objector.
   
5. At some point, private property such as bank accounts and homes are seized.
   
6. Public denunciations, if not already communicated, are made.

An honest pacifist who takes nonviolence seriously and steps back to fairly appraise the above system couldn't endorse it. He or she may think crime should be opposed in a variety of nonviolent ways, but such a person couldn't support a state system to do it because the state must engage in violence in order to stay in power and enforce its laws. There may be laws on the books right now that technically don't call for police violence, things like simple executive proclamations and congressional resolutions. Even those legal documents, however, could not have been made without the existing tax structure to pay for the land, offices, supplies, and labor that went into their creation.

This is, to be clear, not normally the focus of those who call Democrats pacifists. The more common complaint is a pacifistic foreign policy where the United States only engages in warfare when the threat of war is imminent or has been fulfilled. Obviously, a government that responds to violence with violence stands in contradiction to pacifism's doctrine of negotiation, endurance, surrender, or retreat. I doubt very much that any Democratic government elected in America would take such a foreign policy stance given the need to win votes from so many people who have a weaker threshold for justifying war.

But even considering that, the same underlying violence that keeps the police, courts, and legislature going is the same underlying violence that pays for the people, services, and physical resources that would write and discuss the hypothetical pacifist policy of negotiate, endure, surrender, and retreat. Who would pay for the army of diplomats these alleged Democrats would need to deploy? How would these foreign service officers, consular officials, and ambassadors get from place to place or communicate among thousands of contacts? Who would pay for the buildings, office supplies, and assistants these people would need to occupy to get their work done?

I'll tell you: millions of individual wage-earners who would have held on to 10-35% of their rightful wealth if it were not for the IRS's threats to harass (send warnings, "audit"), fine, and arrest you...threats that are not empty, despite the general incompetence of state organs. These folks are presented with a choice: either follow our orders or face escalating state violence up to and including your death at the hands of a law enforcement officer if you resist enough.

How could a conscientious pacifist accept that system, so permeated with credible threats of violence and its widespread usage?

No, Democrats are not pacifists. Republicans are not pacifists. This is because statists are not pacifists.

Posted by drizzten at 05:15 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Gettin' e-mail spam with that in the title and body. Seems like line that originates from the Bible:

The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is servant to the lender.

Proverbs 22:7, New International Version

Today's New International Version has it as The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.

The Message version translates it to The poor are always ruled over by the rich, so don't borrow and put yourself under their power.

In the New American Standard Bible, the passage is The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower becomes the lender's slave.

The New Living Translation writes Just as the rich rule the poor, so the borrower is servant to the lender.

The award for the most explicit goes to the New International Reader's Version: Rich people rule over those who are poor. Borrowers are slaves to lenders.

Hmmm.

I wonder how much this kind of anti-economic thinking hindered growth over the centuries. Biblical shame aimed at lenders (and borrowers, who apparently choose to become "slaves" in defiance of gawd's desire) had to have placed a terrible burden on some people who tried to take the Bible seriously and run a business. I can imagine children who've read this chapter and verse for the first time wondering in horror what they've been doing to their friends and what their friends have been doing to them the whole time.

Oh no - I lent my pencil to Robert yesterday! How did I make him my servant? All I did was ask him to return it to me when he was finished. I've seen how black people were treated, but I've never whipped or humiliated Robert for not doing what I wanted. I wasn't using my pencil at the time and if he promised to bring it back in a few hours, I wasn't going to hurt him or push him around. If he was forgetful I would just remind him to bring it over the next chance he gets. Even if he broke it by accident I wasn't going to punch him or something. Maybe just ask him to get me a new one. But now I feel terrible! Have I committed a sin? Am I going to Hell? I better not tell my parents in case they punish me...and I'm not going to share my things again because I don't want to be a bad boy.

And vice versa:

What? I needed a dollar from Carol to buy candy last week and she said she'd give it to me buy only if I gave her a dollar-twenty-five by tomorrow. I knew that I'd get my allowance yesterday and I'd have plenty of money to pay her back. I really wanted a snack last week. I was going to give her the dollar back anyway; she told me she wanted the extra twenty-five cents to get something this week. Carol had mentioned she was just a few cents away from enough money to get her mom a birthday present, so I guess the twenty-five cents is going towards that. But I'm still free, aren't I? She didn't ask me to jump through hoops or anything. I promised to pay her the dollar-twenty-five and I didn't know you could promise yourself into being a slave.

What total absurdity. Think of all the proud Christian men "enslaving" their neighbors when they let them borrow lawn mowers and the millions of "enslaved" pious women who're temporarily using Tupperware from their mothers. A loan isn't a slave contract. It is a voluntary agreement between people to do certain things at certain times. Well-written contracts have clauses in them that explain the peaceful procedures the parties are to take in the event of a breach of contract. Poorly-written contracts may lack these things and may specify harsh penalties in case of failure to fulfill one's obligations, but the parties to the contract agreed to those penalties at the time of signing and with the exception of contracts explicitly

Asking someone to do something in exchange for you doing something isn't a servant-master relationship. It is the foundation of a normal, prosperous society.

UPDATED 8/24/2006 1:44am
Debt and Voluntary Servitude

Posted by drizzten at 01:35 PM | Permalink

Policy Review: War-Torn Democrats

[P]rogressives [...] affirm the universal application of the principles of individual freedom.

Where is the progressives' universal concern for the principles of individual freedom when applied to, for example, the business owner who honestly thinks the labor of an employee is not worth paying a mandated minimum wage and who would otherwise earn less if it wasn't for the state's threat to violently take away that business owner's freedom?

Where is the progressives' universal concern for the principle of individual freedom when applied to, for example, the parents who honestly think they will do a superior job of educating their children and yet who still pay for the public educations of other children because the state has threatened to violently take away their freedom if they do not "contribute"?

I could list examples for days because the thousands of concrete issues at stake boil down to the myriad ways the federal, state, and local governments habitually, ritually, repeatedly, consistently, and openly violate the principle of individual freedom...ways that are championed by progressives on grounds that habitually, ritually, repeatedly, consistently, and openly set aside that principle in order to accomplish some goal.

If this was a man who could think straight, he'd realize the total insanity in making the above statement and then saying later:

The centerpiece of [Peter Beinart]'s prescriptions, as it was for the contributors to [Will Marshall]'s book, is the call for extensive new programs for the economic and political development of the Middle East. Beinart wants the U.S. to fund these programs generously while carrying them out in cooperation with our European allies, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the Arab Muslim nations for whom the programs are intended. In theory this is appealing.

Such robbery would be decried as a violation of individual freedom in the context of the street, but progressives are constitutionally incapable of carrying that abstraction to greater levels once "the community" or "the common good" is invoked.

Similarly, see John Kerry's clarion call for the wholesale forced collectivization of the remaining marking in American health care:

Here's my bottom line - these are the four principles I'm going to go to the mat to make real:

FIRST - Every American, and I mean everybody, must have health coverage by 2012.

SECOND - To get there, we start with kids first. They're born; they're enrolled in health care. They go to child care, they're enrolled. They go to school, they're enrolled. No "ifs," "ands," or "buts," every child gets health care - automatically, immediately, every child in America gets health care now.

THIRD - We must and will control the skyrocketing premiums, co-pays, and exclusions that make a mockery of the insurance hard-working families pay for month after month. No longer will families be pushed into bankruptcy by medical bills they can't pay -- no longer will sons and daughters have to choose between paying for a doctor's bill for one child or college tuition for another -- it is time to finally guarantee that as health care costs are held down, Americans get the health care they need and deserve.

FOURTH - and finally, instead of telling tens of millions to wait until they are sick enough to go to an emergency room, we must and will assure high quality and preventive care for every American.

When Kerry asks of progressives, "what are you willing to fight for to make health care work for everyone?" he wants to know how much of their tolerance for individual freedom they are willing to set aside. Doctors who set their own prices...not acceptable. Insurance companies following the terms of their contracts and denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions...not acceptable. People who choose to shoulder the full risk of potential medical expenses down the road...not acceptable.

You will change their ways, or face people who can hurt, kidnap, and steal from you because they have state-granted immunities to do so.

Kerry wants to dictate what our health care options are and how those services are rendered. Kerry - and everyone who doesn't flatly reject his "principles" on their face as a result of the tyranny they imply - sees individuals as means to an end.

This is why I'll never be a "progressive."

Posted by drizzten at 02:55 PM | Permalink

"They called him brother? That's just embarrassing," said Charles Barron, a black New York City councilman who is making his own bid for Congress in a neighboring Brooklyn district.

"People keep saying David has the right to run. Well, we should be talking about group rights, not individual rights. Black people who have been oppressed and repressed, we can take care of ourselves. We don't need him to take care of us," Barron said.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Nevermind the pragmatic problem of defining just exactly what constitutes "the group." The entire concept is incoherent.

Posted by drizzten at 11:19 PM | Permalink

Patton said regardless of the cause or the cures [of Colorado's and Denver's ozone and smog problem], something must be done.

"Smog pollution problems are no longer confined to urban Denver, but reach far across the Colorado Front Range," she said. "The reality is that we need a comprehensive solution."

-Vickie Patton, attorney with Environmental Defense

The reality is that we need more collective supervision and control over individuals and their property via the state.

Posted by drizzten at 10:24 AM | Permalink

The AP via the Houston Chronicle: House rejects changes to Voting Rights Act

Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., called lawmakers who wanted to loosen the requirements in the law "ideological soul mates" of lawmakers who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"For them, this is not a debate about fairness, it is about ideology. Ideology has no place in today's debate," Hastings said. "We should do this not for the partisan benefit but because, as John Kennedy said, it is right."

� 2006 The Associated Press

He's certainly using one to make the claim this law is "right."

Posted by drizzten at 06:10 PM | Permalink

With no increase in the minimum wage again this year, it's up to the states to try to help provide workers with liveable salaries.

-redlami

Posted by drizzten at 08:00 PM | Permalink

Is it just me, or is the Middle East a lot like 7th Grade with RPGs?

-Instapundit

Posted by drizzten at 12:07 AM | Permalink

Connecticut Bob:

Joe Lieberman supports the approach of the Catholic hospitals when it comes to contraceptives for rape victims (as reported in The New Haven Register, by Gregory B. Hladky on 03/13/2006, via KissJoeGoodbye.Com).

Lieberman said he believes hospitals that refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims for "principled reasons" shouldn't be forced to do so.

"In Connecticut, it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital," he said.

Well Joe, that's not very helpful. I mean, I know that you'll never need emergency contraception at two o'clock in the morning after having been brutally raped. So I guess it's easy for you to disregard any woman who is unlucky enough to have gone through that trauma.

Forcing others to do what you want sexually to them = Not OK.
Forcing others to do what you want medically to others = OK.

Posted by drizzten at 04:17 PM | Permalink

Instapundit points to Lee Harris in TCS Daily who says:

Thus, in the coming century, those who are advocates of capitalism may well find themselves confronted with "a myth gap." Those who, like Chavez, Morales, and Castro, are preaching the old time religion of socialism may well be able to tap into something deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument, while those who advocate the more rational path of capitalism may find that they have few listeners among those they most need to reach -- namely, the People. Worse, in a populist democracy, the People have historically demonstrated a knack of picking as their leaders those know the best and most efficient way to by-pass their reason -- demagogues who can reach deep down to their primordial and, alas, often utterly irrational instincts. This, after all, has been the genius of every great populist leader of the past, as it is proving to be the genius of those populist leaders who are now springing up around the world, from Bolivia to Iran.

This is why socialism isn't dead, and why in our own century it may well spring back into life with a force and vigor shocking to those who have, with good reason, declared socialism to be no longer viable. It is also why Georges Sorel is perhaps even more relevant today than he was a hundred years ago. He knew that it was hopeless to guide men by reason and argument alone. Men need myths -- and until capitalism can come up with a transformative myth of its own, it may well be that many men will prefer to find their myths in the same place they found them in the first part of the twentieth century -- the myth of revolutionary socialism.

This is the challenge that capitalism faces in the world today -- whether it will rise to the challenge is perhaps the most urgent question of our time, and those who refuse to confront this challenge are doing no service to reason or to human dignity and freedom. Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail.

�2000-2006 TCS Daily

Therefore, I find it counterproductive (to say the very least) to endorse the stance that humans are incorrigibly irrational and can only be persuaded to see or agree with your argument by appealing to emotion and myth (!!!).

Professor Reynolds actually gets nearer to the point than Mr. Lee when he pithily comments, "Because there's a believer born every minute?" Not born, dude.

Swindled.

Posted by drizzten at 10:33 AM | Permalink

National Geographic: Young Americans Geographically Illiterate, Survey Suggests

Young adults in the United States fail to understand the world and their place in it, according to a survey-based report on geographic literacy released today.

• 41% didn't know the Amazon rainforest was in South America; 42% didn't know the Sahara was in Africa
  
• 54% didn't know Sudan was in Africa; 40% didn't know Rwanda was in Africa
  
• 63% couldn't find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East; 75% couldn't find Iran or Israel; 44% couldn't find any of those four; among those with college experience, 23% found all four countries and of those without college experience, only 6% found all four
  
• 88% couldn't find Afghanistan; 70% couldn't find Egypt; 65% couldn't find the UK; 44% couldn't find Brazil
  
• 51% couldn't find Japan; 47% couldn't find India; only 6% could successfully find China, India, Japan, North Korea, and Afghanistan...and only 9% of students could do it
  
• 70% couldn't find North Korea on a map; 63% didn't know the North-South Korean border is more fortified than any other on the planet
  
• 31% couldn't find China; 82% didn't know Mandarin Chinese was the most common native language on the planet (74% thought it was English); 48% thought China was the world's largest exporter when it's actually the U.S.
  
• 75% didn't know Indonesia had a majority Muslim population and 75% couldn't even point it out on a world map
  
• 65% were wrong when asked to identify the nation (Pakistan) affected by the massive October 2005 earthquake which killed more than 70,000 people; 29% thought it was Sri Lanka, probably confusing the earthquake with the tsunami of the same year
  
• among those surveyed who had taken a specific class in geography, 21% couldn't find Australia; 19% couldn't find the Gulf of Mexico
  
• 6%, 8%, and 12% couldn't find the U.S., Canada, or Mexico on a map
  
• 33%, 48%, 50%, and 57% couldn't find the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, or Ohio on a map of the U.S., respectively; 80% cannot find all of those and California, Texas, and Nevada
  
• 50% said being able to read a map is "absolutely necessary"; 24% couldn't find a port city on a fake map even with hints such as road convergence and waterfront location; 34% couldn't tell the direction from Japan to Australia is south; 34% couldn't utilize a map to find a city northwest of a port city in the event of a evacuation; 32% couldn't calculate the concurrent times in New York City and Los Angeles
  
• 31% said they knew "the same" as the average American in geography; 28% said they knew more

Outrageous. And to think these people (whom are not that much younger than I) are the next generation of voters.

*shudder*

Posted by drizzten at 02:37 PM | Permalink

A falling coconut will kill any human standing underneath it. Water will kill you if you're stuck in it. It'll also kill you if you don't have any. The most dangerous thing about marijuana is that you can get shot by people with guns who have the license to do so by the people that haven't extended their political approval to certain plants.

GB1Kenobi in this MySpace thread

Posted by drizzten at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After reading this from Matthew Bryan and remembering that I hadn't checked my Sitemeter details log in some time, I gave it a shot.

The Treasury Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF) administers the Treasury Forfeiture Fund (TFF). The TFF was established in 1992 as the successor to what was then the Customs Forfeiture Fund. It is the receipt account for the deposit of non-tax forfeitures made by the following member agencies:

• Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI), U.S. Department of the Treasury;
  
• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (U.S. ICE), Department of Homeland Security;
  
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (U.S. CBP);
  
• Department of Homeland Security;
  
• U.S. Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security;
  
• U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security

The creation of the TFF brought together all then-Treasury law enforcement agencies. Although some bureaus were subsequently transferred to the Department of Homeland Security by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Public Law No. 107-296), they remain participants of the Treasury Forfeiture Fund.

Effective law enforcement actions against criminal enterprises, from drug cartels to terrorist organizations, require depriving them of their enabling assets and profits that support or stem from their existence. The TFF is derived from the forfeited assets of criminal enterprises. The TFF is a �special receipt account�, i.e., a resource account that provides funding to the participating law enforcement agencies to enhance their capabilities to conduct successful investigations and forfeitures.

The Mission of The Treasury Forfeiture Fund is to Affirmatively Influence the Consistent and Strategic use of Asset Forfeiture by Participating Agencies to Disrupt and Dismantle Criminal Enterprises.

The Treasury Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF), through the provision of leadership, guidance, and stewardship, works to maximize the impact of forfeitures performed by the participating agencies.

As the administrator of the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, TEOAF performs the following functions:

• promotes the use of proceeds from asset forfeitures to fund programs and activities aimed at disruption and dismantling criminal infrastructures, in particular major case initiatives and activities enhancing forfeiture capabilities;
  
• manages TFF revenues to cover the costs of seizure and forfeiture;
  
• trains law enforcement personnel of the participating agencies in various aspects of asset forfeiture;
  
• promotes cooperation among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies through funding of expenses including equitable sharing, as well as the development of task forces;
  
• promotes financial stability and vitality of the TFF;
  
• coordinates TFF policy among the participating agencies;
  
• through the precepts of risk management, identifies and initiates action to address program risks.

The TFF�s enabling legislation was first published in Public law 102-393, enacted October 6, 1992, 106 Stat. 1729, and is codified under Title 31 U.S.C. � 9703.

There are two types of forfeiture available to the government: civil forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. A civil forfeiture is intended to confiscate property used or acquired in violation of the law; a criminal forfeiture is imposed on a wrongdoer as part of his/her punishment following a conviction. The procedures involved in these two types of forfeiture are very different; however, the results are the same, which is the transfer of rights, title, and interest of the property to the United States.

Anyway, learning about the TEOAF was a good exercise. Now I know of a good agency to reference when talking about the entrenched, methodical, and routine federal theft of private property.

Posted by drizzten at 08:42 PM | Permalink

The Financial Times: Anti-Muslim cartoons 'will fuel terrorism'

Muslim condemnation of the European media campaign to reprint controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed spread on Thursday, with leaders warning the controversy could play into the hands of extremists.

� Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2006

One ideology asserts literal submission by all to the word and will of the ether. One ideology asserts the group ought to be given precedence over individuals. What makes this the most interesting is the sincerity each side has in their belief.

Fireworks like these are rare to watch: the fresh impact of two fundamentally incompatible philosophies who have not collided so sharply and so openly in some time.

Posted by drizzten at 08:29 PM | Permalink

The AP via the Washington Post: Women Sue Wal-Mart Over Contraception

Backed by abortion rights groups, three Massachusetts women sued Wal-Mart on Wednesday, accusing the retail giant of violating a state regulation by failing to stock emergency contraception pills in its pharmacies.

The lawsuit, filed in state court, seeks to force the company to carry the morning-after pill in its 44 Wal-Marts and four Sam Club stores in Massachusetts.

� 2006 The Associated Press

Under threat of government force, of course.

Posted by drizzten at 04:38 PM | Permalink

Now taxing the hell out of the Malibu Mafia to pay for improving healthcare for the poor emotionally hits the all the right notes for me (I'm the Armed Liberal, remember). But I'm grown-up enough to notice that what feels good emotionally doesn't necessarily make for good policy.

Posted by drizzten at 03:30 PM | Permalink

There could be no Google without an Internet. It's interesting to note that many of the public or pseudo-public layers, such as HTML and LINUX, arose in a European context, where the ideal of the Agora is more influential than in the USA.

-Jaron Lanier in The Gory Antigora: Illusions of Capitalism and Computers

Given that, consider the current state of European politics. I think Mr. Lanier has some 'splaining to do if he really thinks the broad European polity prefers the voluntary social interactions implied by an agora over the coercion necessary to maintain state functions and authority. It is true that the difference between Europe and America on this subject is one of ever-dwindling degree. However, I don't think the facts point to his conclusion here, unless he was trying to quietly reference utopian communism.

In which case, Mr. Lanier has bigger problems.

Posted by drizzten at 01:42 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

The AP via the Tucson Citizen: Gun-wielding middle school student shot by SWAT team

A suicidal eighth grader who pulled a handgun in class and briefly took another child hostage was shot by a SWAT team member today when he later threatened deputies, Seminole County officials said.

Sheriff Don Eslinger said the 15-year-old boy brought the gun to Milwee Middle School in his backpack and briefly took a fellow student hostage during a classroom scuffle.

The student then ran from the classroom and was pursued by deputies into a restroom and isolated there, Eslinger said. The school was evacuated, and no one else was injured. Officials with the sheriff's office said they had not confirmed whether the gun the boy had was real or a toy.

Identifying it as a real gun should take anyone familiar with firearms less than a minute. Weight, materials of fabrication, presence of ammunition, a functioning hammer and action...these are the sort of things that can be checked and verified right there on the spot. Unless someone thought it would be best for the media to not get all the information or unless the info had just not been passed to the public relations staff, I don't any justification for not knowing and confirming whether the object was a real handgun or just a toy.

UPDATED 1/14/2006 8:41pm
Christopher Penley has died.

A reportedly suicidal teenager who was shot by police while brandishing a pellet gun in his middle school has died of his injuries, his family's spokeswoman said Saturday.

Kelly Swofford, a neighbor who had been with the family all morning, stood outside their home and confirmed that 15-year-old Christopher Penley had died.

"They want to donate his organs because that is what Chris would want," Swofford said. "The family is devastated, just devastated."

Penley, of Winter Springs, was accused of pulling the pellet gun in a classroom Friday and pointing it at other students before forcing one into a closet, then leading deputies and SWAT team members on a chase that ended in a school bathroom.

When he raised the gun at a deputy, a SWAT team member shot him, authorities said.

Officers who had responded to the 1,100-student school in suburban Orlando believed the gun was a Beretta 9mm, and didn't learn until after the shooting that it was a pellet gun.

[...]

At a news conference following the shooting Friday at suburban Orlando's Milwee Middle School, authorities put the pellet gun side-by-side with a Beretta. It appeared to have black paint covering the red or pink markings on the muzzle that may have indicated to officers that it was a nonlethal weapon.

"As you can see, it doesn't take a professional to see how close this looks to the real thing. I would not be able to tell the difference," said Joyce Dawley, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent in charge of the investigation.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All right reserved.

There's the pellet gun ( WXIA-TV Atlanta)

Posted by drizzten at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

AP via ABCNews: Cafe Stirs Debate Over Kids' Behavior

Too often, though, our cultural emphasis on freedom and individual rights gets taken to the extreme, becoming "a kind of selfish entitlement that undermines our ability to function as a civil community," says George Scarlett, a professor of child development at Tufts University in Boston.

I don't see it in the United States...in fact, too often is it the case where freedom and individual rights are violated, repressed, denied, and infringed.

Do you think Professor Scarlett is the victim of bad editing and reporting? From the article, it seems he thinks collectivistic altruism ultimately trumps individualistic egoism. Such a moral code wouldn't surprise me. Digging around, I find the following: his mentorship/sponsorship of a "Part-Time Lecturer: Rights of Children to Social Services Spring 2006" position at Tufts University. I have little doubt the "right to social services" isn't fundamentally questioned in that class.

"The rights of any one individual whether he or she be a parent, child or stranger do not negate the rights of others."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Certainly that last bit about rights-negation sounds good. But isn't such a dogmatic, hard-liner, extreme position too hard on poor Civil Community?

Posted by drizzten at 09:45 AM | Permalink

Professor Balkin's analysis strikes me as the most pessimistic possible view of the case. It is true that Mr. Padilla has already been deprived of his freedom for three years. On the other hand he was not thrown in an oubliette and forgotten.

-nk over at Balkinization

Posted by drizzten at 04:10 PM | Permalink

Gold price approach 18-year high of 500 dollars

Is it accurate to say that while it is certainly possible more people value more gold more than in the recent past, it is more likely the primary reason gold is growing more expensive in dollars is because the dollar itself is growing more worthless?

Posted by drizzten at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Constitutional Right to Privacy

I've long thought that Democrats could benefit from making "privacy" a plank of their platform. People instinctively don't like government meddling in their private lives, and "privacy" is a broad enough notion to encompass everything from reproductive freedom to the Patriot Act.

How about starting an effort to enshrine a right to privacy in the Constitution? Maybe it's time to make it explicit, rather than continue the tedious debate over whether the Constitution really guarantees such a right.

Posted by drizzten at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Holy shit.

How is this true?

Am I crazy?

The AP via ABC News: House Rejects GOP Leaders' Budget Cuts

House Rejects Cuts to School, Health Care Programs, Part of GOP Campaign to Reduce Deficit

By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON Nov 17, 2005

Republicans suffered a startling setback in the House on Thursday, losing a vote on cutting spending for education and health care programs. A broader budget-cutting blueprint targeting the poor, college students and farmers also was in danger.

Both bills are part of a campaign by Republican leaders to burnish their party's budget-cutting credentials as they try to reduce a deficit swelled by spending on the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, GOP moderates balked.

The 224-209 vote against a $602 billion spending bill for health, education and labor programs disrupted plans by the Republican leaders to finish work on 11 spending bills that would pay for government operations and freeze many agency budgets through next September.

Democrats were unanimous in opposing that one-year appropriations bill. "It betrays our nation's values and its future," said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md. "It is neither compassionate, conservative nor wise."

A companion deficit-reduction bill that would slice $50 billion from the deficit through the end of the decade, also faces unanimous opposition from Democrats, as well as from many moderate Republicans who are unhappy with cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and college loan subsidies.

It would cut from so-called mandatory programs whose budgets increase automatically every year. The proposed savings are modest considering the $14 trillion the government is set to spend during the five-year period.

What was that?

The proposed savings are modest considering the $14 trillion the government is set to spend during the five-year period.

I read that and my mind went into overdrive.

I've seen a good number of AP/Reuters/etc wire reports. I've never attempted to conduct or have digested an authoritative accounting of wire news political bias, but I know crap when I smell it. And the news media produces no shortage of crap.

I cannot recall a wire story that published words of its own as quoted above. Not in the literal sense, because I'm certain I've come across news articles that talk about the exponential difference between the total federal budget and some government program. No, I mean look at what is being described as "modest": "Medicaid, food stamps and college loan subsidies."

Imagine that! A moderately negative comment about the defeat of a bill that cut bread-and-butter big government programs.

Then there is this at the end:

The deficit-reduction bill is the first effort in eight years to take on the automatic growth of mandatory programs like Medicaid, which make up about 55 percent of the budget. By comparison, the annual appropriations bills fund about one-third of the budget.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I chuckle here, however, to note that even if you classify this as some sort of "victory" for the individualist liberty camp (as I nearly did), this merely represents a nanoscopic lessening of the momentum of a truly staggering mass.

Posted by drizzten at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

English speakers are 5% of the global population and we believe in "one person - one vote" which means "Houston we have a problem."

-Bill White at tacitus.org

Posted by drizzten at 08:06 PM | Permalink

jomama knows the crucial aspect of the concept "secession." Do you?

Posted by drizzten at 02:56 PM | Permalink

AP via ABCNEWS: Bush Stung As Miers Withdraws Nomination

There were fresh problems at mid-week, including the disclosure of a speech Miers delivered in 1993 that touched on the issues of abortion and voluntary school prayer. "The underlying theme in most of these cases is the insistence of more self-determination. And the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes the most sense," she said, remarks that sparked fresh criticism from conservative groups.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Because if the life someone chooses, if the actions taken by a person, if these and an individual's values are and ought to remain self-determined, you kick out a leg from the government justification tripod...the one carrying the most weight.

Posted by drizzten at 12:57 AM | Permalink

Financial Times: Pause celebre

The semicolon "signals that you're not expressing a singular thought", explains the prolific cultural critic, Chris Lehmann. "It signals that there's tension, that there is some contradictory evidence - and you [have to] sort of trust readers to be able to deal with that, which most editors don't and many writers don't." Menand locates this fear of complexity in the idea that language should do no more than hold up a mirror to the world. "If you subscribe to linguistic transparency, there's a bias in favour of simplicity," he says. And the thing is, millions of Americans do subscribe to linguistic transparency having studied The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell, and The New Yorker writer E.B. White. As Yagoda notes in The Sound on the Page, Strunk and White's "implicit and sometimes explicit goal is a transparent prose, where the writing exists solely to serve the meaning, and no trace of the author - no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style - should remain."

Lehmann connects this impulse to realism, "the most stolid literary innovation that Americans can claim in modern fiction, which is all about the faithful representation of reality without ambivalence, self-doubt, without writerly flourishes really of any kind".

"It's more a distrust of ornament," says Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? - How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. "[The Victorian] period is so discredited and the semicolon is an automatic marker of a disgraced genteel style."

It may seem bizarre to read so much into a stop on the page, but the semicolon is a pause for ambiguity, amusement, complexity, doubt, and nuance. If writing lacks these "genteel" qualities, can we be all that surprised if it is either as dull as a computer manual, or as demagogic as a soapbox on Hyde Park Corner? Perhaps it is not a surprise that stylish writing now has the whiff of radicalism - or, more aptly, that radical writing, in a stunning rebuff to the theory-bearing academic left, is now self-consciously stylish. Thomas Frank's book has sold more than 500,000 copies in hardback - an astonishing feat for a progressive political screed that was mocked in the dourly mainstream New York Times. For his muse, Frank turned to the sumptuous prose of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution.

"If I were linguistic emperor," says Michael Tomasky, who recently took over as editor of the unabashedly liberal The American Prospect, "not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we'd all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I'm on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas."

� Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005.

If language isn't supposed to reflect reality and truth, then what the hell ought it reflect?

Quotes from the current Wikipedia entry on Carlyle:

[Carlyle's] Sartor Resartus was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical...Sartor Resartus was initially considered bizarre and incomprehensible...For Carlyle, chaotic events demanded what he called 'heroes' to take control over the competing forces erupting within society...As soon as ideological 'formulas' replaced heroic human action society became dehumanised.

[...]

This dehumanisation of society was a theme pursued in later books, such as Past and Present, in which Carlyle contrasted life in a Medieval monastery with modern society. For Carlyle the monastic community was unified by human and spiritual values, while modern culture deified impersonal economic forces and abstract theories of human 'rights' and natural 'laws'. Communal values were collapsing into isolated individualism and ruthless laissez faire Capitalism, justified by what he called the "dismal science" of economics.

These ideas were influential on the development of Socialism, but aspects of Carlyle's thinking in his later years also helped to form Fascism.

Posted by drizzten at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It occurred to me why all this "price gouging" nonsense enjoys so much popularity.

The people promoting the idea, encouraging it to spread elsewhere for some as-yet-undefined action to take place in response to it, have a concept of humans at odds with reality. They see consumers as essentially being thrown on pikes against their will, forced to pay prices higher than normal. They think consumers cannot avoid these prices and are thus doomed to be gouged without recourse to self-defense.

This mindset sees the individual human as a simple robot governed by immediate needs, unable to think ahead and weigh current values with future expectations. This concept holds humans as mere inertia, incapable of changing course.

While some of the more honest "price gouger!" banner wavers might admit that some people will face stark choices between some taken-for-granted essential product in their lives...or ten gallons of gasoline, they never rest on that point to consider what it means, preferring to jump directly to their next point: blaming, insulting, and injuring the people who "force" them into that choice. Outraged by observing their favored group of people under stress, they condemn without aim.

I don't see humans as robots, unable to adapt to their environment. Some may well be unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, but it doesn't follow from that fact to say or imply everyone else is like that.

My girlfriend, currently hunting for a job, has coped with the situation by combining more trips and errands together. She asks her roommates if they need anything while she's out. My best friend's girlfriend does the same when she's on her way home from work. If the weather isn't the usual soul-sucking humidity combined with mid-90's, I roll down my windows and let the breeze in rather than use A/C. The vast majority of the people in my predominantly lower-class neighborhood keep their windows down. I wonder how the sales of electric lawn mowers, weed eaters, hedge trimmers, edgers, and other yard maintenance equipment are doing these days. I've noticed an increase in the number of small moped scooters around town. The people of Austin are already big into bicycles; I have no doubt some have switched to them for commuting. I know of people who cancelled travel plans for the summer.

And of course there are the near-ubiquitous public transportation services. Though I want to see the entire system replaced with private organizations, there is no doubt in my mind such systems act as alternatives to paying for your own gas.

That is what this is about: alternatives. Rational people deciding for themselves what is in their best interest, freely picking amongst a field of choices that no politician or bureaucrat could effectively lay out for them in time for those choices to be made. Humans using their minds to solve their own problems.

Not robots.

Posted by drizzten at 12:43 PM | Permalink

We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not.

-Hunter, on DailyKos

Hunter doesn't realize, however, that it is the nature of governments to fail like this because that is the nature of any system predicated upon collectivized coercion.

Posted by drizzten at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Oh yes, and we'll be tying up billions, perhaps as much as a trillion dollars in resources that could otherwise have been spent on, for example, defending the homeland, what the name "Department of Defense" implies in the first place.

-Radley Balko

$1 trillion is a wack-job, activist-inflating-the-inflated-statistics-from-other-activists number. That's 10% of the US economy. Our total military expenditures on everything are between 3-4% of GDP right now. You're positing more than a doubling of US forces & equipment. 25-30% of that number is closer to the mark, over a period of 10 years, which discounts back to a modest blip on the US economy, partially offset by lowered geopolitical risk on oil contracts, expanded oil supplies, and a surge in consumer confidence.

By LINDA BILMES Published: August 20, 2005

Cambridge, Mass.

THE human cost of the more than 2,000 American military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is all too apparent. But the financial toll is still largely hidden from public view and, like the suffering of those who have lost loved ones, will persist long after the fighting is over.

...$250 billion already spent on military operations and reconstruction...running costs of the current conflicts are $6 billion a month...more than $2 billion a year in additional foreign aid to Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and others...repairing and replacing military hardware is $20 billion a year...[disability claims for Iraq and Afghanistan vets] are likely to run at $7 billion a year for the next 45 years...[extra interest payments on additional federal debt] will total $200 billion or more...

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001, teaches budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

So, Ms. Asymmetrical Information, what's your prognosis now?

Posted by drizzten at 04:37 PM | Permalink

What interest does the government have in monopolizing mail delivery? I understand that the Constitution specifically assigns government this role, but why persist?

-asked on my Anarcho-Capitalism MySpace group

• The USPS employs thousands of federal workers. An instant constituency for the status quo.
• The USPS supposedly attempts to deliver mail to everyone equally, evenly, throughout the country. Another instant constituency: "How will the poor get their mail?!?"
• Chipping away at a massive federal monopoly is likely to raise questions regarding other state monopolies, even if that chipping is limited in extent to rhetorical questions aimed sarcastically at the proponents of privatization: "So after FedEx buys the Post Office, I bet you want Caterpillar to buy up our interstate highways!"
• Sheer, institutional laziness and apathy.
• The desire to maintain some control over some of the communications networks in the US.
• Because every other "modern, industrialized, civilized, western, advanced, cultured" nation does it.

Posted by drizzten at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Associated Press via the Boston Globe: Lutherans move toward key vote on gays

Delegates to a national meeting of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted Friday to remain unified despite their differences over homosexuality, and prepared to take up contentious proposals on the role of partnered gays in their denomination.

The unity resolution was approved by an 851-127 vote following a short debate and was the first of three measures before the churchwide assembly Friday.

"Our job is not to judge one another, our job is to love one another," said Patrick Monroe of the Central/Southern Illinois Synod, speaking in favor of unity.

� Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

From the Biblical perspective (and I am not a "faith-based" person!), even though the argument starts from false premises, there are good rationalizations for Christian judgment of others' actions. The question of the soul is supposedly left to gawd.

This seems even clearer to me when you consider the function of priests, clergy, preachers, and the like. What do they do? They help people with problems with faith and morality. They attempt to provide a truthful answer to those asking questions. In other words, they evaluate a given situation and attempt to decide if it violates what gawd says ought to be done. Spiritual faculty are supposed to and do judge others and their actions. When the laity ask for facts (ignoring the trouble one can encounter when using faith to find fact), the clergy are supposed to, at the least, act as a proxy for gawd's word. And gawd does a lot of judging.

So I find it simply astounding that a profession widely recognized to be a source of judgment can have people who renounce it on principle. But that isn't the most annoying part of Mr. Monroe's announcement. Here it is again:

Our job is not to judge one another, our job is to love one another.

What does it mean to love someone? What differentiates the thoughts I have for someone I love, someone I hate, and someone I'm indifferent towards? What separates those whom I think positively of and those of whom I think negatively?

My judgment! I compare the hierarchy of values of that person to the hierarchy of values I hold, I discriminate amongst good and bad choices and motivations. I think.

Furthermore, the very act of loving someone is itself a judgment. Even if you accept the "unconditional love" stuff and think everyone deserves the emotion (or will obey gawd's command that they do), you still have to summon the emotion, make choices, and act as if you love the person. Love is not the emotion of default. It requires judgment as well, for when you see a child-raping serial killer, you have to overcome your revulsion at the deed in order to love him. It is not an instantaneous process; there are steps involved.

By renouncing judgement, you renounce the process and purpose of judging others. Since both of those are tied intimately with the human mind, I consider calls to forego judging to be calls to stop thinking.

Posted by drizzten at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Christian Science Monitor: Canada inches toward private medicine:

"There is no political support for American-style healthcare," says Michael McBane, coordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition, a healthcare advocacy group. He says he hopes provinces will toughen laws to prevent private insurers from entering the market.

Allowing people to buy private health insurance violates fundamental rights, McBane says, because not everyone will be able to afford it.

Posted by drizzten at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

onelittlebrother asked me the following:

I consider myself an agnostic but I wonder if I'm an atheist. Does my being unconvinced of 'God's or gods' existence logically default me to agnosticism or atheism. I guess what I'm saying is...Is there a distinction between saying 'I don't believe in God/god' versus 'I believe there is no God/god.' I've always seen atheism as a claim holding a burden of proof but does it?

I consider someone to be agnostic when they straddle the line. They think it is possible for a gawd to exist but view the current state of evidence as being seriously tilted against the deist position. I was in this category for a long time until I read about the Objectivist-based argument I summarized above (more can be found here). However, the more common definition of agnostic is one who suspends judgment either way.

I do think there is a distinction between the two questions. One implicitly accepts the concept of the divine ("I don't believe in...") and one rejects it ("I believe there is no..."). Unfortunately, given that so many people don't pause to consider the words they use when speaking, lots of atheists say the former when they probably mean the latter.

One way I look at it is the same way I look at the state. A state is not something that exists independent of man; it must be created. Therefore, it is the defenders and advocates of the state that have the burden of proof in the anarchist-statist arguments. This is the "burden of proof principle." Similarly, deists have the burden of proof by their assertion, "gawd exists." Atheists, on the other hand, do not. I don't posit something...because I deny their assertion. Properly speaking, I reject the divine concept as absurd. Atheists like me aren't claiming anything, per se.

But, should even that notion be decried as flatly false, the atheist's case isn't weakened because the atheist has an advantage: it is logically impossible to prove the negative existence of something.

Posted by drizzten at 10:26 AM | Permalink

He - or she - will let nothing get in the way of their wars!

Case in point: the Constitution.

Via Hit & Run, I hear of U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour speech in the courtroom during the sentencing of wanna-be Millenium Bomber Ahmed Ressam. The juicy part:

"The message I would hope to convey in today's sentencing is twofold:

"First, that we have the resolve in this country to deal with the subject of terrorism and people who engage in it should be prepared to sacrifice a major portion of their life in confinement.

"Secondly, though, I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.

"I would suggest that the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart. We can deal with the threats to our national security without denying the accused fundamental constitutional protections.

"Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.

"Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.

"The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism.

"Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.

"It is my sworn duty, and as long as there is breath in my body I'll perform it, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We will be in recess."

THE TERRORISTS' LITTLE HELPER...Reckless judicial arrogance... a Reagan appointee who is an embarrassment to conservatives and an impediment to winning the War on Terror...nitwit...The man is a fool and a threat.

-Michelle Malkin

Judge Coughenour: Your arrogance is exceeded only by your contempt for the lives of your fellow citizens...Whatever the message the judge hoped to send, the one he in fact did send was to Islamicists all around the globe: Come to America. Try and kill us. Either you succeed and get to your version of heaven, or you'll get a second chance 22 years later after spending a couple of decades setting up networks that can help you with round 2...The arrogance of this renegade judge's lecture is simply beyond belief. Congress should summon the judge to testify as to his inane remarks, but precede and follow his appearnce with panels comprised of vitims of terror and the families of military killed in the war...a judge who seemed more intent on lecturing Americans than protecting them...a blusterer from way back, the perfect example of what life-time tenure does to the ego...Coughenour is obviously a product of cronyism, and cronyism gets you this sort of decision-making...My guess is, though, that most terrorists attempting to cross into America will be reworking their travel plans on the chance that, if arrested, they get hauled before Judge C.¹

...if you are feeling the need to make a symbolic statement concerning the judge's absurd decision and even worse reasoning, send an umbrella, the universal symbol of appeasment, to Judge Coughenour...his self-serving sentencing statement and found it the sort of timorous sophistry that encourages more attacks rather than sending any sort of message of resoluteness to the terrorists.²

-Hugh Hewitt (1 and 2)

this travesty of a sentence... to add insult to injury, Judge Coughenour took the opportunity of his sentencing statement to lecture us... I see this insanely brief sentence and judges like John Coughenour as precisely the reasons that we need military tribunals and detention centers like Gitmo...the part that really got me thinking about impeachment (alas, not possible)...I rest my case for military tribunals: at least if they were secret, we wouldn't have to listen to boneheaded lectures by buffoons in black!¹

I endorse everything Dafydd said...this case got highlighted by the Kerry campaign during last year's election as the model for handling terrorists, as opposed to the wartime approach favored by the Bush administration. This shows that our first instincts were correct, and that the only advantage of using civilian courts to fight international terrorists will be to highlight the damage that Presidents can do when they pick idiots to sit on the federal bench... I will point out something that Judge Coughenour seems to have forgotten in his zeal to hold himself up as a Constitutional protector...It's all well and good to sit on one's high horse (or bench, in this case) and proclaim one's devotion to the Constitution. It's quite another to understand the proper application of law in wartime and the nature of the enemies arrayed against us. It comes as no surprise that Judge Coughenour displays his expertise at the first and his absolute incompetence at the second, especially given the laughably light sentence²

-1 Dafydd and 2 Captain Ed

... this isn't resolve -- it's stupidity...It is absurd to think we can or should offer 'constitutional protections' to enemy combatants in matters of national security...winning a war has nothing to do with obtaining justice.

-Brain Droppings

Disgusting beyond words...we have a JUDGE lecturing about American WAR POLICY...How dare he. HOW DARE HE? American citizens would have been slaughtered if not for the sharp eyes of a border guard and this FUCKING TERRORIST APOLOGIST is sitting in a POSITION OF TRUST and he is more interested in scoring POLITICAL points than in protecting the CITIZENS of the United States.

If ever a person needs to be impeached, this ASSHOLE, does.

When the TERRORIST gets out in about a dozen years and attempts to MURDER again, it'll be too bad that Coughenour won't be hauled before the bar as an accomplice.

-Darleen's Place

The Runaway Jurist...Coughenour’s tirade...it seems to me that Judge Coughenour got a little caught up in crafting his Solomonesque judicial masterpiece...his lifetime sinecure as he metes out his fairy tale version of justice...Much as the there was a public outcry following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo, there must be an even more sustained outrage in the wake of this milestone in the growing history of judicial incompetence...we can’t allow our strength to be undermined by such unscrupulous men...Might it be time that we start considering laws limiting federal judges to ten or fifteen year terms?

-Josh Britton

Ressam's sentence was unbelievably short and he'll be out in less than 20 years to bomb again. What an ignorant judge! Oh, he may be brilliant. He may have been summa cum laude (or not), but this ruling was blantantly ignorant...this errant judge...the leftist judge

-Isn't It Rich

Reckless judicial arrogance...

-Mudville Gazette

Activist Liberal Judge States Agenda From Bench...What the hell is this ?...Just another Liberal Activist Judge taking the moment in the spotlight to spew Liberal anti-Bush B.S. and allowing terrorist to go free.

-Jonathan and Wanda Rantings

...Judge Coughenour's appalling decision to give the Millenium bomber a measly 22 years. The Judge decided to pontificate in dicta about how constitutionally pure he is...the arrogance of this Judge

-Sue Bob's Diary

Leftist judge...Typical condescending arrogant leftwing jackassery...What scintillating brilliance, and all utterly irrelevant to the case he was adjudicating. I guess its too much to ask that judges simply do their job, and save the arrogant moralizing for personal time?

-Obviously Right

When a judge uses a conviction to send a political message about national security to the President of the United States - no one was served justice...impeach the idiot for using our laws to send political messages...why do these opinionated jerks always see things as ‘either-or’...old rogue Judge Coughenour...this fool...Impeach him for being just plain dumb!

-The Strata Sphere

Judges are not to engage in political activity, period. For a federal judge in his judicial capacity to render irrelevant editorial criticism of the president's conduct as commander in chief is an extraordinary abuse of office.

[...]

It is almost beside the point -- almost, but not entirely -- that the judge's comments were stupidly ignorant of the most basic legal distinctions. Given the judge's poor use of his own powers in sentencing a man who sought to kill thousands of Americans, the judge should worry less about the president's use of his constitutional powers and more about his own. And he should leave the editorials to the folks with egos equally as large as his in the fourth branch.

-Scott Johnson

All italices and bolded portions are in the original posts.

Posted by drizzten at 02:30 PM | Permalink

It'll be gone in a day or two, but I wanted to point out something on the News8Austin news frontpage:

AUSTIN
Perry signs renewable energy bill
Gov. Rick Perry signed a new bill into law that will increase the production of clean energy.
FULL STORY >> 8/1/2005 5:18 PM

Posted by drizzten at 09:30 AM | Permalink

Man, it's hardly after midnight over here and I've found a quote that rings my cynical humor bell so melodiously, it gets "Of The Day" status.

You can�t intelligently discuss the role of unions without distinguishing between public-sector and private-sector unions. The former are all about government by the government, of the government, for the government. For them, pouring money into electoral politics makes so much sense it should be illegal.

- "Steverino" in this QandO post

Posted by drizzten at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The more I think about Libertarian political philosophy, the more aware I am of its incredible destructive potential. Brad makes a joke of it in his post, but there is a radical root to the Libertarian ethos that quite like the Marxist ethos, is quite dismissive of human suffering. Results are seen as besides the point. Freedom comes before the citizen in this world view and it is quite sure of itself.

Neo conservatism and religious paternalism are on the way out. They've over reached and are being discredited by the War. My concern is that when the GOP fractures the hard core libertarians will get a crack at running the show and imposing their liberty on us.

Freedom without democracy is tyranny. Period.

-"Northern Observer" in this Brad DeLong post

Posted by drizzten at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In other words, if we only forgot about the 8 million people who risked their lives to vote and turned the country over to those who consider that vote illegitimate, we could have solved the problem. But silly us, we actually think that power should come from the ballot box and not from the barrel of a gun.

NO TO IRAQI VOTING NULLIFICATION

Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.

-Mao Tse-tung, Problems of War and Strategy

On the other hand, there is certainly no shortage of Americans who follow the law because their lives will be ruined through the legal system. They adhere to the law because they see fines and prison time levied against them if caught and convicted. Even if not convicted, one cannot underestimate the level of disruption that can be created when forced into a court or a holding cell at Police HQ.

Mao, the mass-murderous thieving tyrant that he was, recognized this clearly. For political power to be effective and therefore desirable, it cannot rely alone on popular support and the sense of obligation to obey from those who disagree with it. Those who wield the power know this...otherwise they wouldn't demand punishment against those who break the law. Without the threat of a gun in the hands of a police officer aimed at your center of mass, the myriad laws imposed on a nation would have to stand up to individual scrutiny.

The choice between the Ballot Box and the Barrel of a Gun is a false alternative. Choosing the ballot means you're choosing someone else to hold the gun you want to point at others. Choosing the gun means you're comfortable doing the dirty work yourself. The real choice is between being an aggressor (or hiring someone to be an aggressor for you) or being peaceful.

Posted by drizzten at 01:47 PM | Permalink

I quote:

The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) is a program of the U.S. Department of Energy assigned to develop and manage a federal system for disposing of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from national defense activities.

Our mission is to manage and dispose of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel in a manner that protects health, safety and the environment; enhances national and energy security; and merits public confidence.

"But, Drizz, what about this?"

In 1982, Congress enacted a law called the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA). The NWPA created the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) within the Department of Energy to develop a comprehensive national program for the permanent disposal of high-level radioactive wastes and spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear utilities and national defense programs. [...] The NWPA directs the U.S. Department of Energy to site, design, construct, operate, and close a deep geologic repository and affirms the responsibility of the generators of the wastes - the nuclear utilities and the federal defense nuclear program - to pay the costs of disposal.

What about that? Well, I don't know to what extent private companies pay for the disposal of the waste they generate. However, dig this:

The OCRWM Program includes:

• Program Management - Program management activities are administered from Washington, DC. Responsibilities include oversight of quality assurance, program planning and administration, program management and integration, external interactions, human resources, and the OCRWM budget.
  
• Yucca Mountain Project – The Yucca Mountain site is located in Nye County, Nevada, approximately 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. For two decades, the OCRWM conducted scientific and engineering investigations at Yucca Mountain to determine its suitability as a nuclear waste repository.
  
• Science and Technology Program – The program explores technological improvements that could enhance the performance, safety, and efficiency of the repository at Yucca Mountain, and/or reduce the costs of the civilian radioactive waste management system.
  
• Waste Acceptance and Transportation – Headquartered in Washington, DC., responsibilities include development of waste acceptance, storage and transportation systems. Activities also include interactions with other waste owners, generators and international waste management programs.

It, in fact, is not.

Customers who use nuclear power pay for the disposal of spent fuel. The federal government collects a fee of one mil (one-tenth of a cent) per kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity from utilities. This money goes into the Nuclear Waste Fund. In addition, Congress makes an annual appropriation from the General Fund of the Treasury to pay for disposal of defense-related high-level radioactive waste.

How much does all this cost? An answer (PDF): the congressional budget request for the 2003 fiscal year was more than $590 million. The agency got more than $457 million. The Department of Energy, for the 2006 fiscal year, asked for more than $651 million (PDF) in taxpayer cash for the OCRWM (agency request here).

It does not matter to me that this would represent roughly two bucks per living American in taxes, if egalitarian means were used to distribute the burden. Ultimately, we are forced to pay for the hefty costs of figuring out how to safely and effectively transport tons of radioactive waste materials created by companies that have part of this cost outsourced to the federal government. Since the companies created them, it is their property and therefore their responsibility, not mine or yours.

Going back to a previous link:

The law is based on the principle that the generation benefitting [sic] from nuclear materials is responsible for safely disposing of the nuclear wastes it creates, rather than leaving a potentially dangerous environmental hazard to future generations.

I am not a creator of nuclear waste nor power and neither is anyone in my immediate family nor is anyone within my circle of friends. However, we are all in the "generation" of citizens this supposed principle subsumes. The creators (and by extension, owners) of nuclear waste are people who produce it. This means plant owners and operators have the responsibility of owning potentially lethal nuclear waste. Ideally, this nontrivial cost would be prominently factored into the initial plans for building these plants. However, these costs are mitigated and are lessened because the feds have involved themselves (sometimes at the urging of the nuclear industry).

How am I responsible for something I had nothing to do with, located hundreds of miles away, and done without my knowledge, input, or consent? Even more frustratingly stupid: how does an entire GENERATION get sucked into this broken chain of causality?

Posted by drizzten at 01:42 PM | Permalink

I heard the following story on NPR this morning: The Humble Baguette's Return to Glory:

[Baker Eric Kayser] cares so much about his art and profession that he was part of a group that successfully lobbied the French government to regulate what could and couldn't be called a bakery. To win that appellation, a business must do every bit of its baking on site. Otherwise, the government's Repression of Frauds department will have something to say about it.

Copyright 2005 NPR

1. A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
   
2. A piece of trickery; a trick.
   
3. 1. One that defrauds; a cheat.
      
   2. One who assumes a false pose; an impostor.

1 a : DECEIT, TRICKERY; specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right b : an act of deceiving or misrepresenting : TRICK
2 a : a person who is not what he or she pretends to be : IMPOSTOR; also : one who defrauds : CHEAT b : one that is not what it seems or is represented to be

Eric Kayser is a baker. He takes what was mere grain, transforms it into bread, and sells it from a store attached to the ovens. My mother has baked bread before and I've done it as part of my cooking duties in the Boy Scouts. It is not hard to meet the conceptual requirements of being a baker. A bakery is little different: a facility that bakes and sells bread products.

The details or measurements one might make of such a place are not important when qualifying what is and what is not a bakery. My house has been a bakery in the past and will likely be one in the future because I have an oven and sometimes unbaked dough is placed in it to dry, harden, heat up, and occasionally rise. I've participated in Boy Scout camping trips where the "kitchen" includes a bakery. Certainly neither of these places has or had the capability (or experience) to produce world-class tourte, le Feuillet� Citron, le P�rigourdin, or Monge b�tard. In addition, neither the inhabitants and visitors of my home nor the people on my camping trip wanted all their bread products baked on the spot. There are times it is easier, safer, faster, and cheaper to buying bread products from other people.

I don't know what the letter of the law is in France regarding what can be legally called a boulangerie. All I'm going off of is the NPR quote above and a little I learned from searching for Directorate General for Competition, Consumption and the Repression of Frauds (La Direction g�n�rale de la Concurrence de la Consommation et de la R�pression des Fraudes [DGCCRF]). Is it is punishable by fines to run a business in France that calls itself a bakery when that business does not bake 100% of every bread it sells at the counter? Is it fraudulent to call yourself a bakery when not everything you sell is from the ovens in the back?

Posted by drizzten at 09:41 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

The London bus and tube bombings took place less than 24 hours ago and the calls for killing/deporting/arrresting/interrogating all Muslims/Arabs/Leftists/Dissidents have already been made in the comment sections of Little Green Footballs:

If there are no Arabs there are no attacks

-#17

No Islam no Terror.

-Rune

Hey, better start wanding all those British grandmothers, Tahitians and American Eskimos. We wouldn't want to unfairly profile Muslims, now would we? Pathetic. I say round them all up and send them back home. An oath of fealty is worthless because of their almost universal adherence to taqiyya.

-Hankmeister

Know is-slum,
Know terror.

NO is-slum,
NO terror!

-paxnhymn

Hang the terrorists at Gitmo.

Throw out the muslims.

Fill the buses and the subways of Michael Moores ("There is no terrorist threat") and Durbins, and make them run until some islamofascist explodes them.

-Poitiers-Lepanto

Waiting for the LLL to play the 'Blame the Victim' card - 'This wouldn't have happened if Bush didn't lie and go to Iraq'.

Damn these whining people to hell - this is a war of Civilization. Good vs Evil. Freedom vs Tyranny. The left are Quislers, and enemies of America. Deport them now.

-kstagger

Maybe they'll take out that Finley Park Mosque with a jdam, during prayers hopefully!

-Jakester

He said he was "very concerned about a backlash" and called on British Muslims to "remain vigilant and calm and stay indoors".

How about remaining calm indoors....in a plane heading to the Mideast holding revoked UK passports?

-coulterclone

To world leaders:,

Invade the entire ME now! Get it over with!

-'Nam Grunt

Yeah, I DO lump them all together. Why not? The make little real effort to distinguish themselves from each other that I can see.

The solution is simple. Outlaw Islam. It's not a religion. It's a cult. Janet Reno every mosque in the country.

-jaybird

If any mosque or Islamic center can suddenly churn out these types of sociopaths, and it becomes more obvious every day that they can, what are our sworn defenders going to do about it?

-Beagle

What really shocks me here is footage of London hours after the attacks. Scores of Muslims in full garb- hijabs, burkas, men in nightie-pyjamathingies,just strolling around! You never see that after an attack in Israel so it just shocked the sh*t out of me. These Brits are living in a true lion's den.

-T.A Tiger

89 Jaybird

The solution is simple. Outlaw Islam. It's not a religion

yes

-Poitiers-Lepanto

London will stand again...

But I really hate and despise muslims and their cult of death and destruction...

-Pitiricus

Morning Charles, LGF family. Such a sad day. A grown man, sitting alone in his office, tears streaming down his face. I should be out driving my CAT, but I can't seem to leave this site. This is bigger than work, bigger than all else.
Please Nations of Liberty.......win this war. NOW.

I have no tolerance left for muslims. God forbid I should see one today. He or she would not like my sentiments.

May God bless the Brits and be with them today, on their day of awakening..........

May those that follow Islam find NO PEACE from those of us who believe in FREEDOM.

-Owl

105 PK

You know editors and producers are scrambling their troops to get the sympathetic muslims as victims angle.

I'd like to give them a story to write about.

-loppyd

It is now time to force muslims to make a choice: Live peacefully or die. I prefer the latter.

-RickZ

Where's the damn football?!

MUST...PUSH...BUTTON....

(deep breaths)

-aRedPhishHead

It wouldn't hurt my feelings if we nuked mecca, got all the filthy muslims out of their mosques and burned them all to the ground. This isn't about religion, it's about a death cult that kills innocent people. enough is enough.

-Owl

I think there are very few options as to how to deal with these people...

I think we may need to rid the globe of another religion...

-tfc3rid

The more the War of September 11th goes on, the more I find myself agreeing with Ann Coulter's initial reaction to the 9/11 attacks.
I hate these sons of fucks for making hate necessary.

-BeerDrinking_VictoryMonkey

Yes, I'm afraid "Democrat" is now synonomous with "Traitor."

-TalkinKamel

THE FUCKING LAMO WANKERS HAVE BLOWN UP MY CITY!

THIS IS LONODN'S 9/11.

GET THE MUSLIMS OUT NOW!

-Jwarrior

Yhe news is being reported, the story, however,is currently being played out in the Mosques of the West. The news crews should be at these dens of subrefuge, recording their gleeful celebrations and not hovering at the bomb sites trying to capture more gore. We have already seen gore for far to long. It is now time to address the problem. Anyone with any recon or intel experience shoild be all over their local mosques and Islamasist owned buisinesses and quietly observing and making notes to prepare for the enevitable. The goverment has failed again. It may be time for some ad hoc grassrooots direct action along the lines of the phoenix program. It's kill or be killed folks and your leadership is knitting. They should inter them all, sort out the assholes, then put them on barge in the South Pacific and sink it. Short of some kind of pro active measures (perhaps some less dramatic and short sighted than the barge scenario are in order first) by the goverment, expect more gore to follow, all dutifully reported by some bimbo with a communications degree. If the media and the pols do not get on board now and this occours in th US (and it will given our ostrich posturing) EXPECT THE INNER REDNECK TO ARISE OUT OF NORMALLY DECENT CITIZENS.

-Ackomanyuki

#321 Buckaroo, we don't need finger prints. Just send every koranic person on a one way Hajj for a life time of bliss in Mecca.

-Roger

#328:

"Ein aravim, ein piguim!"

Yes.

-Golden Jerusalem

#344 Ed:

In English:

"No arabs, no [terrorist] attacks"

It's a graffitti you see around here.

-Golden Jerusalem

There is only one way to stop it. When the world has the stomach for that, it'll be over.
It may be un-PC, and it may be insensitive, and it may even seem a little crazy...but if we are to stop the muslim death cult there is only ONE way....

KILL.THEM.ALL.

-Owl

All cell phones should have GPS that cannot be disabled w/o destroying the device. All locations should be monitored. If these locations dissect known mosques/terrorist locations they should be flagged. All cell phones should routinely be disabled in cities above a certain side. We lived w/o them for a long time as strange as it seems.

-David2

I'll tell you how. There is only one way to get rid of this monster.

We have to ban and reject islam in our societes.

I would personally declare war on the entire ideology - a worldwide civil war, but I guess it would be hard to gain support for that strategy.

I see no other way. I don't believe the religion will reform itself, and 1400 years of history proves it will never assimilate to our values.

-GreatDane

In the end, radical Islam will have to be eliminated, one way or the other. It's just a question as to when Western civilization reaches the tipping point, where they have the stomach and will to finish the job.

Seriosly, one thing we easily, without too much force or pain involved, could do in the near future is to CONFISCATE THEIR [EXPLETIVE DELETED] ROCK!

-Killian Bundy

Ceterum censeo Islam delenda est

-Rocket Rod

You get the idea.

UPDATED 7/11/2005 11:25am
Charles Johnson of LGF:

Chris Bowers at MyDD attacks LGF readers today, for verbally expressing their anger at the mass murder in London: Why Right Wing Blogs Don’t Allow Comments.

This is a great example of how far the left has devolved; London suffers the worst terrorist attack in her history, with more than 50 dead and as many as a thousand injured, and people like Chris Bowers are just horrified that anyone would react to such an atrocity with rage.

In other words, react like human beings.

What is so human about demanding that an entire religion be banned or an entire race of people be expelled from a country?

Mr. Johnson, is is possible to be more disgusted and angered by the terrorist attacks in London and still take the time to show what a substantial chunk of your readership wants to do to the people they dislike. Rage can be appropriate in reaction to wanton death and destruction. It isn't when formulating the response to it, especially when you include people WHO HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT VIOLENCE in that response.

Some good examples of the delusion in play here, from the very thread Mr. Johnson created:

They're angry at us, and not the Islamic terrorists who committed this latest atrocity.

That says it all.

-Spiritualized

what a maroon.

the people who CRITICIZE the terrorists are evil, not the terrorists themselves.

-blue_like_jazz

Islamic fundamentalists blow up innocents in London, and according to leftists, we are not supposed to express any anger, emotion or outrage.

[...]

At least the anger LGF posters express IS directed at THE ACTUAL PERPETRATORS of the bombings and murder.

-Free Speech Is Only For �ber-Libs

# 74 Mycroft:

The truth is there is an element here that routinely expresses some very ugly thoughts, and that's damaging to the credibility of the rest.

Oooh, ugly thoughts. As compared to deliberately targeting civilians just going to work, or children just going to school, or blowing up vacationers on holiday, or hostages beheaded and replayed all over the internet for a vicarious thrill? Hmmm, ugly thoughts vs. actual acts of brutality. Now which one is worse, I wonder . . . . From your post, I can really tell that you do wonder, to your shame.

-RickZ

Back to Mr. Johnson:

For Bowers, there’s apparently no difference between spouting off on a comment system and actually committing genocide. And if you dare to imply that Britain may have a problem with immigration from Islamic countries, the day after a bloody demonstration of that fact, why, you’re an evil racist!

Shine that light all you want, Chris. Anyone who bothers to actually follow your link will also find a vast majority of thoughtful and well-reasoned comments, of course; on the day you cherry-picked your 10 statements, there were almost 5,000 comments posted here.

Mr. Bowers does leap dramatically overboard, however, when he declares the reason why big traffic right-wing blogs don't allow comments:

There is a reason why blogs like Instapundit and Powerline do not allow comments, and why Time magazine would give its "Blog of the Year" award to Powerline even though Free Republic actually "broke" the CBS story. There is a concerted effort on the part of the right to prevent this sort of overt racism and fascism on the right from being given any sunshine.

Posted by drizzten at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Slate: Who Is a Journalist?

In the Valerie Plame case, two well-known reporters have been sentenced to jail for refusing to rat out a confidential source or sources who told them the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent. Lawyers for the two journalists, Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times, are asking the courts to recognize a right for reporters to decline to testify about their newsgathering activities. Failing such a ruling, media outfits including the Times insist on the need for a federal "shield law" that would create a privilege for journalists akin to privileges for lawyers, doctors, and priests.

Posted by drizzten at 04:28 PM | Permalink

Updates below.

I'll be working around my house, drinking some beer, hanging out with friends, and generally having fun and being productive.

I won't spend my time celebrating the birth of a nation that has long ago ceased to exist in the form and through the intent that created it.

Besides, I can't freely celebrate the independence of a nation that was supposed to respect the rights of man because the subgovernments of that nation have infringed upon those rights in the name of my interest. The sale, possession, and use of alcohol and fireworks (to name just two prominent examples) have long been regulated and in some cases, prohibited. I'll let the reader connect the dots on that one.

UPDATED 7/4/2005 9:15pm
Some quotes I've found while browsing around. I don't endorse the viewpoints of them all, but I do sympathize with the feelings that inspired them:

There's no particular reason anymore to celebrate this country over any other. It's just another meaningless day off.

-Sandy

The government gives us a day off to celebrate what a wonderful goverment it is.

-js

When raising our glasses at times like this, there is one thing to which we must raise them before all others: our ability to endure.

-panurge

But let's look on the bright side: I am still far better off than I would be in North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Too bad "We're better than a brutal dictatorship" doesn't have quite the same ring as "We're the land of the free."

-Jennifer

I'll attend a fireworks display celebrating the collapse of the state.

Koko

Nobody celebrates the actual founding of our government, on September 17, 1787. Interestingly, that's the day that something called the Constitution was signed, which created the government that later destroyed the Constitution (kind of like the robots/nanoparticles humans create will supposedly destroy the human race.)

Ammonium

On this Independence Day, I call attention to the middle passages of the Declaration of Independence, which often go unremembered in the shadow of the document�s stirring introduction and statement of first principles.

-Skip Oliva

The fight against Al Qaeda and any who ally with them must go on but the greatest threat to liberty (and in the long run that inevitably means life) facing the people in the United States comes not from without but from within.

-Perry de Havilland

This is not America anymore, Perry. Who knows whether it ever will be again? Maybe, on some distant day. As it stands right now, however, I find this day to be the single most dis-heartening and appalling of the year.

-Billy Beck

1. Smuggle things into public squares when you�re watching fireworks. Booze, drugs, and your own smaller fireworks are classics, but immigrants work just as well in a pinch...The Fourth is not about the military, it�s not about the flag, it�s not about how much aid we can give to authoritarian third-world governments. It�s about flipping the king the bird and running your own life.

-Randall McElroy

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." We obviously haven't been vigilant enough.

-Radley Balko

Posted by drizzten at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Seen on the rear bumper of a smoky old 300-series Mercedes sedan on my way home from work yesterday:

Read through a link on Jay Jardine's blog, the disclaimer from the TERMINATOR: 2029 AD website:

T2029AD, as a website, has lasted for many years now mainly because this website offers something that the other Terminator websites do not: a fresh look at one possible world of the Terminator, a view that is free from compromise. T:HK and by default, T2029AD, is an extrapolation of the original ideas presented by James Cameron, ideas that are taken in a totally creative and wholly new direction. It is a view of the darker side, the less popular side, and displays the true terror of a world where technology has gone wild. This website offers an in-depth examination of the wonderful death dealing technology presented in the two films as well as the two novels and subsequently theorizes what that technology might become, how it might evolve, how it might be used, and what it might look like. T2029AD is therefore a completely original interpretation of the concepts found in the Terminator series, concepts that have been freed from having to follow anything other than the original vision as presented by director James Cameron in 1984.

[...]

T2029AD makes its own history, its own units, and it explains these in a large amount of creative detail that not even the canon material can match for depth, consistency, or logic. T2029AD draws upon canon as well as factual information found in the two movies and the two novels and expands heavily upon that information.

[...]

T2029AD is a website that doesn't have to accept that everything that is officially endorsed has to be canon material or that such material automatically has to be included in the overall vision in order to somehow be correct. T2029AD can pick and choose, accept or reject, tear down or build upon anything it may desire. That is the overall prerogative of this website or to put it simply; the smart stuff that represents the original vision of Cameron gets included, and the ridiculous stuff will be thrown out with no excuses made.

[...]

The poor fan is left with having to make a decision. Either accept everything that has the Terminator logo on it as official and canon, or pick and choose what they like and what they don't like. There is also a third option, which takes its initiative from the old saying of "if you want something done right then you have to do it yourself."

[...]

As for T-850 205 [whom inspired the author to write this Disclaimer], I wish him well on his endeavor to create a canon, factual Terminator fansite and his desire to create perhaps the best canon, factual Terminator site on the Internet. When he brings it on line, if he ever does, then I'm sure that it will probably be a very nice site full of correct, factual information, but the content of the website won't be his information. None of the material found on his proposed site will be of his creation; it will all be someone else's information and hard work and he will merely be the caretaker, or curator if you will, of that online museum.

The distinction is valid and worth noting.

I'm a fan of the Terminator series (haven't seen #3, though) and have a nit-picking mentality when it comes to technology. After reading through Christopher T. Shields' fictionalized account of SKYNET and how it turned on the humans who controlled it, I was impressed. I love thinking about how to fill in the gaps and holes left by the creators of work I admire and Mr. Shields has come up with a credible and arresting version of events.

Best of luck to you both.

Posted by drizzten at 04:20 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

...yet they can't quite reach the final conclusion.

Do a text search for "libertarian" and see what pops up. Assuming you take the consequences of ideas seriously, hilarity does not ensue. A few quotes (all emphasis in original):

Sorry Markos, but "abortion" IS the whole ball of wax. It is, for those of you who've read their "Art of War" our "dying ground," it is one of the 'must defends' if we're going to survive. Why? Because far from some cute little women's issue deserving lip service and to be refiled under some more palatable heading, abortion is autonomy. We lose abortion, and we've lost the most basic ownership of our own bodies and lives, no matter what gender you happen to be.

Perhaps no one has ever concretely, and theoretically explained strategically, why abortion, and abortion providers, and women who have abortions must be stood beside and actively supported if you have any intention of living anywhere other than a fascist snitch culture of State-ist and vigilante control.

I can only add that autonomy is arguably the defining value of modern liberalism. You can't get more central than that. It is the value of autonomy that makes liberals anti-authoritarian. It is autonomy that makes them argue for the bottom-up social contract view, and "consent of the governed" as opposed to the old, theocratic "divine right of kings." It is autonomy that makes them argue for the separation of church and state. It is autonomy that makes them argue for limited (as opposed to absolute/absolutist) government, with separation of powers, due process, rights against self-incrimination and the like.

I could go on and on. Autonomy crops up again and again and again in liberal theory and practice. It's also at the core of the welfare state. After a couple of decades of laissez-faire, and the ghastly results chronicled by Dickens, liberals came to see that a good many people would never be able to attain autonomy on their own, and that "free markets," for whatever reasons, only made things worse, rather than better, for many of them. There had to be other mechanisms created to support the development and exercise of autonomy.

A quick note: monsterofNone seems to be attempting to calm the waters of the "Democrats value individual autonomy" nonsense. He surfaces in several places.

I don't think "autonomy" works as a fundamental right. It runs into the same problem as libertarianism does: we're not just individuals but are all in this together.

Your subject says "Autonomy: Ownership of your own LIFE". In the context of what you write, I've got no problem. But what happens when my autonomous decision is to pee in the water upstream of where you get your drinking water?

Autonomy covers both privacy and opportunity, which Kos had as two seperate values. It also covers internationalism, as it is common among liberals that it is more important that nations be given autonomy -- shy of situations like genocide -- than that they behave in manners we approve of (this certainly is a core value of the United Nations!).

Autonomy appeals greatly to privacy enthusiasts, individualists, and entreprenuers alike, not to mention those who support gay marriage and generally the rest of the liberal social agenda. And yet, unlike mere "individualism", it cannot be used as an excuse to be mad about paying taxes. Autonomy goes beyond mere economic freedom, and even addresses the core philosophical value of OBJECTIVITY, which is one of the clearest polar opposites to conservatism; objective liberals, basing their philosophy in the Age of Reason axiom that nobody can have a monopoly on Truth, are often criticized for not putting America's interests first (necessarily). But the thing is, we're going to support what's RIGHT regardless of whether it's good or bad for us personally.

Libertarians love to invoke Locke, but actually reading him is deadly to their belief system. The whole point of the social contract is to secure liberties which are always in danger in the state of nature.

The so-called "right to own guns" actually perpetuates the state of nature, continuing the condition of rights being insecure. The autonomy it provides is utterly illusory...

...if we can show libertarians that they have more in common with us non-conformist, autonomy-obsessed Democrats than they do with those goddamn snake-handler Republicans, we'll have knocked the stool out from under those corrupt bastards and 2006 will be a Blue Year.

But freedom is more than autonomy: taken too far autonomous freedom, untrammeled by any obligations to another, becomes the freedom to let the poor starve, the freedom for men to impregnate women without any financial or emotional support, the freedom to live by the law of the jungle, as long as one has enough money to buy one's own protection. That sort of freedom is slavery itself for the rest of us.

UPDATED 6/7/2006 6:07pm
The Myth of the Libertarian Democrat

Posted by drizzten at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you�re okay.
Money, it�s a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I�ll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I�m all right jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it�s a hit.
Don�t give me that do goody good bullshit.
I�m in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.

Money, it�s a crime.
Share it fairly but don�t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it�s no surprise that they�re
Giving none away.

-Pink Floyd, "Money"

Guitarist Gilmour says, "Like most people I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the third world.

"Any squabbles Roger and the band have had in the past are so petty in this context, and if reforming for this concert will help focus attention then it's got to be worthwhile."

But the financial demands of the Live 8 organizers and supporters won't be quenched by the leaders at the summit.

What it's about

This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 an end to poverty.

The G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history. They will only have the will to do so if tens of thousands of people show them that enough is enough.

By doubling aid, fully cancelling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children.

LIVE 8 is part of a day of action across the world which kick-starts The Long Walk to Justice that calls on the leaders of the world�s richest countries to act when they meet in Gleneagles on 6th-9th July. On July 2nd in London, Edinburgh, Washington, Berlin, Paris and Rome millions will be coming together to call for complete debt cancellation, more and better aid and trade justice for the world�s poorest people.

Live Aid raised over $100 million. But 20 years on poverty, famine and disease is still a major problem in Africa. The public have shown how important this is to them now it is time to get governments to act.

Every single day, 30,000 children die, needlessly, of extreme poverty.

On July 6th, we finally have the opportunity to stop that shameful statistic.

8 world leaders, gathered in Scotland for the G8 summit, will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and made the trade laws fair. If these 8 men agree, then we will become the generation that made poverty history.

But they'll only do it if enough people tell them to.

That's why we're staging Live 8. 5 concerts, 100 artists, a million spectators, 2 billion viewers, and 1 message... To get those 8 men, in that 1 room, to stop 30,000 children dying every single day of extreme poverty.

The Live 8 website cites the American The ONE Campaign as an affiliated "Global Call to Action Against Poverty" organization to speak with for more local information. TOC says

What is the goal of The ONE Campaign?
The ONE Campaign seeks to give Americans a voice, to ring church bells and cell phones, on campuses and in coffee shops, for an historic pact to fight the global AIDS emergency and end extreme poverty. We believe that allocating an additional ONE percent of the U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like health, education, clean water and food, would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation of the poorest countries.

[...]

How does ONE link to international agreements to fight poverty?
ONE links directly to the international effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. 1% more of the US federal budget would help save millions of lives and be a major commitment towards achieving the internationally agreed upon United Nations Millennium Development Goals. If it is delivered, we would achieve 0.35% of national wealth going to Official Development Assistance - half way to the international commitment to achieve 0.7%. Longer term, so long as we can prove the money is working, the goal is for the US to continue to increase effective assistance until it meets the international commitment to give 0.7% of the national wealth. This is an appropriate goals for ten years time, or 2015, the deadline for achieving the Millennium Goals.

What I'm not for, however, is the use of a government's power to tax it's population in order to provide for others. Even if TOC is perfectly cool with reducing spending elsewhere in the federal budget to free up the $25 billion they say they want, I still wouldn't support it. There may be millions of Americans who are OK with being taxed to have some of that wealth redistributed to others. I am not and opting out of the tax system (i.e., just ignoring the IRS) means facing some nasty consequences. A fraction of my income is either taken without my permission or handed over under threat of violence; in these circumstances, I'm pretty pissed at anyone who wants more.

In this case, I'm even more unhappy with the message being fronted by Live 8. I quoted text from their website above. Now, I'll quote a few more sentences.

LIVE 8 is calling for people across the world to unite in one call � in 2005 it is your voice we are after, not your money.

[...]

LIVE 8 is about justice not charity.

[...]

We don't want your money - we want you!

Governments acquire their resources from the people they govern. Without non-governmental production, states wouldn't be anything like what they are now in power and scope. The Live 8 organizers aren't being honest with you. They do want your money; they just consider it to be the state's cash, available to hand over for a worthy purpose. The organizers are attempting to spin this as something we individually won't have to sacrifice for, when it is that very act of voluntary individual donation and effort that would make this more than charity.

I don't consider something justice when unjust means are used to obtain justice. Would any of the organizers or supporters condone stealing from their neighbor (the cranky guy next door who hates taxes) and then giving that money to pay for the economic harm inflicted by American cotton subsidies on poor farmers? Where is the justice in that? I say far from taking the proper steps to compensate legitimate victims, it creates new victims.

When I hear that a band whose music I really enjoy is bringing back the original lineup primarily to bring more attention and pressure on the "leaders" to cough up more of their budgets, I don't react with a compassionate "aww!" I react with a tired sigh, one of many in a long string exhaled each time some human jackals in benevolent clothing want "us" to be more generous.

I might be more generous, if I was allowed to keep more of my own fucking money and didn't have it squandered on the whole spectrum of pointless, counter-productive, and corrupt shit the United States does with our tax money. As it is, I'm raw enough from the automatic generosity conducted in my name and without my consent.

Posted by drizzten at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thought experiment:

Has the Supreme Court, through the 6-3 ruling in Gonzales v Raich subjected itself to Congressional authority?

1. The Supreme Court, by tearing down or upholding legislation, can have and has had a significant, substantial, and material affect on commerce in the United States.
   
2. This affect is felt on commerce that remains within state boundaries and commerce that crosses state boundaries.
   
3. The SCOTUS was established by the Constitution, the primary law of the land.
   
4. Congress and the President can pass whatever law they please and it cannot ultimately be abolished, torn down, dismantled or upheld, affirmed, protected until it reaches the SCOTUS. (I ignore civil disobedience.)
   
5. The SCOTUS just said it stands by the precedent that an act or an object that doesn't economically cross state lines can be ruled as interstate commerce.
   
6. Doesn't this mean SCOTUS rulings can be subject to the power of the Commerce Clause?
   
7. If so, doesn't that mean Congress and the President can pass a law that limits the power of the SCOTUS in certain cases, because that power can interfere with interstate commerce?

For a much lighter take on this joke of jurisprudence, see Fafblog's Fafnir and associated commenters, who manage to skewer this dumbass ruling in so many obvious and amusing ways I get even angrier thinking about it.

When you hold a ball in the air it has POTENTIAL commerce. When you let it go the potential commerce turns into KINETIC commerce, which makes it faaaaalllllll through the air! It is caught by Congress or gravity. Classroom Learning Challenge: Levy a tariff on the ball before it hits the ground!

Posted by drizzten at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"The current chaotic state of affairs where small to medium scale enterprises operated outside the regulatory framework and in undesignated and crime-ridden areas could not be countenanced much longer," he said.

• New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer
• Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany
• SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson
• President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
• Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley
• Executive President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe

What I find most interesting about the statement is its broad applicability. It really could come from any government agent. It certainly would not be stretch of imagination to picture a state representative from France, Russia, or Egypt saying it. In the United States, there are countless state agents who, if they said that, it would go without comment because that's the reputation they've earned. However, this statement's context (as you'll eventually see) is more immediate, violent, and worrisome than your typical appointee complaining about a few sole proprietorships ignoring the minutiae of OHSA, IRS, or ADA requirements.

Should a modern society begin to break down, I'd expect nearly every bureaucrat to sing the same song. Should there be a strike along the lines of Atlas Shrugged where individuals increasingly refuse to submit themselves to government rule and micromanagement, I'd expect to hear comments along the same lines.

The person who said that was Robert Mugabe. Apparently, there are quite a few people in Zimbabwe who aren't following his orders.

Posted by drizzten at 10:18 AM | Permalink

The next time I hear someone talk about NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, and all the other "FTA" possibilities out there, I'd like to present them with the following questions:

1. Would I be allowed to move anywhere within the agreement's boundaries to find employment without any hindrance from any of the various governments?
   
2. Would I be allowed to open a marijuana growing, curing, and packaging facility in one country in order to distribute, advertise, and sell my catalogue of pot products to anyone for any purpose within those other countries party to the agreement?
   
3. Would I be allowed to place a phone call from one country to someone else in another and have zero taxes, tariffs, and other government fees imposed on anyone in the chain of connection?
   
4. Would I be allowed to import any livestock and any plant across national borders without dealing with taxes, licensing, registration, quarantine, or other state intervention?
   
5. Would I be allowed to buy a motorized vehicle from any producer in one of the signed countries and have it imported to my country for my use without running afoul of anystate-mandated environmental, safety, or performance standards?
   
6. To be perfectly clear: would the various governments engaged in this agreement remove all barriers thrown up in the inter-trade-area and get 100% the hell out of my way and let me conduct any peaceful economic exchange I wanted? In short, is this an actual "free trade" area or just a weakening of state controls?

I suppose questioning their commitment to reality is something they'd frown upon.

Posted by drizzten at 01:39 PM | Permalink

I reproduce this in its entirety because I want it saved for future reference.

BBC: Doctors' kitchen knives ban call

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

[picture of a kitchen knife, with the caption: "Doctors say knives are too pointed"]

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.

The researchers said a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault - but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs.

In contrast, a pointed long blade pierces the body like "cutting into a ripe melon".

The use of knives is particularly worrying amongst adolescents, say the researchers, reporting that 24% of 16-year-olds have been shown to carry weapons, primarily knives.

[picture of cut wounds on the right ear and side of someone's face, with the caption: "Kitchen knives can inflict appalling wounds"]

The study found links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established.

French laws in the 17th century decreed that the tips of table and street knives be ground smooth.

A century later, forks and blunt-ended table knives were introduced in the UK in an effort to reduce injuries during arguments in public eating houses.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime.

"The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime.

"We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect."

Government response

Home Office spokesperson said there were already extensive restrictions in place to control the sale and possession of knives.

"The law already prohibits the possession of offensive weapons in a public place, and the possession of knives in public without good reason or lawful authority, with the exception of a folding pocket knife with a blade not exceeding three inches.

"Offensive weapons are defined as any weapon designed or adapted to cause injury, or intended by the person possessing them to do so.

"An individual has to demonstrate that he had good reason to possess a knife, for example for fishing, other sporting purposes or as part of his profession (e.g. a chef) in a public place.

"The manufacture, sale and importation of 17 bladed, pointed and other offensive weapons have been banned, in addition to flick knives and gravity knives."

A spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: "ACPO supports any move to reduce the number of knife related incidents, however, it is important to consider the practicalities of enforcing such changes."

I really fail to have the appropriate words for these "doctors." I feel a mixture of deep disgust, amusement, and anger...but those responses have been dulled from overuse. For the moment, I'll say the world is happily prancing towards self-imposed oblivion, led by safety, health, and risk nannies who don't give one shit about individual freedom and personal responsibility, who view those two concepts as dangerous to the public at large, concepts to be pushed aside with the power of a policeman's drawn gun.

This very example of banning knives used to be the comfortable realm of those freedom-lovers who employed slippery slope and reductio ad absurdum arguments to show people who wanted to ban firearms the necessary implications of their stance. Now, it's being proposed, FOR REAL, by people who are normally considered respected members of an important profession.

What's really frightening is that there simply aren't than many cultures on the planet that have the principled backbone to stand up to this shit and loudly, clearly, reject it without caveat. I have no doubt there are local governments in the United States that have already done something like this because laws against "switchblades" and the public possession of certain kinds of knives has long been in place. In the UK's case, there isn't much left to steal from the individual in terms of defending himself.

What a great way to ruin my morning.

Posted by drizzten at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's not a contract with America anymore...it's a contract on America.

-madpad, over at Hit & Run

Posted by drizzten at 09:17 AM | Permalink

Newsview: Politics Goes Extreme in D.C.

The showdown over President Bush's judicial nominees reflects the raw nature of modern-day politics: Senators pulled to their political extremes by special interest groups, with a dwindling few clinging to a semblance of moderation and tradition.

Compromise, while possible, is more painful than ever because of changes in media, technology and politics.

Special interest groups are richer and more powerful than a few years ago. New technologies make it easier for these groups to rally partisan voters who, because of C-Span, 24-hour cable TV news, the Internet and other communication innovations, are more plugged into politics than in times past. Closely fought presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 have raised the stakes, and tensions, in Washington.

This judicial nominations/filibuster thing is a symptom of something larger than nearly everyone in this country either refuses to recognize or does recognize and simply blanks it out.

Posted by drizzten at 04:55 PM | Permalink

"I wish heroes didn't exist...[w]henever we need a hero, it's because there's a problem that needs to be solved; it's because two groups of people, or two countries, are hurting one another, so a hero is needed to save us. If everyone were at peace, if everyone were happy, why would we need heroes? The world is better off without heroes."

-Jet Li

From the angle Mr. Li is arguing, it certainly makes sense. A hero is someone who has the courage to face a problem and at least attempt to resolve it, even it if means great danger to that hero's life and loved ones. A conflict that begins to take a life of its own, consequently consuming adjacent human lives in process, can be the genesis for one person (or several) to emerge with the purpose of ending the conflict.

There is at least another way to look at a hero, though. It doesn't involve some life-ending conflict between nations or warring gangs. I think it is legitimate to define a hero as one who simply strives to be better, to do more, and to accomplish at a higher level ethically against the twin tides of "it's good enough" and lowest-common-denominatorism that permeate society. Perhaps Li sees this individualistic approach as a bad thing in addition to the above. It certainly seems possible given his comments elsewhere in the article. However, to me, a hero isn't limited to someone who pushed himself to the breaking point in order to save millions of lives and the fates of nations; a hero can also be the student who will not allow himself to be limited by expectations and mediocrity, who chooses to improve himself and his surroundings for the better despite the costs he may endure. It is our ability to extend our limits that makes humans so damn interesting.

Enjoy your weekend.

Posted by drizzten at 02:50 PM | Permalink

The AP via MyWay Germany unveils haunting memorial to murdered Jews

"You can argue with how they went about it, but no other country has erected a monument to its misdeeds. It's courageous," said Michael Cullen, a Berlin-based U.S. architectural historian who has written extensively about it.

He thinks the nation of Germany committed misdeeds during World War II when clearly only a movement of individuals did.

He thinks the nation of Germany is atoning for the Holocaust when the only ones who ought to apologize today for that senseless slaughter are those who participated in it.

It may be carelessness, but it means something. If "Germany" must apologize for Hitler, it means German Jews, dissidents, and saboteurs must apologize as well. If "Germany" must apologize, it means citizens who weren't even alive at that time should apologize.

The people that made up the Nazi government were responsible for the overwhelming aggression against non-Aryans and they are either gone or in their final years. I see no justice in making others rhetorically responsible for what they did.

Posted by drizzten at 12:36 AM | Permalink

The man leaves to work out of the country, gets hardly a day's rest, and then proceeds on the attack.

First target:

I will, however, point out that anyone who took Stalin at his word was a functional retard who deserved whatever he got. The tragedy of history, of course, is that the people who lived and died under the Soviet yoke didn't deserve what they got.

Yalta was an abominable disgrace to a nation that went to war under the auspices that America did in World War II. In a rational culture, it might be enough to say that this fact should never be forgotten. What's worse is the truth, which is: it is a fact that would have to be learned before it could ever be forgotten.

To begin with, I say that it is an outrage -- prima facie -- to talk about the "freedom" (let's keep the importance of concepts, ladies & gentlemen) of tens of millions of people in terms of a "bargain". Try it like this: who would have "bargain[ed]" with Adolph Hitler? Even after that animal was dead, it had to be pointed out to Karl Doenitz that there would be no negotiated terms of surrender. Once more, with feeling: a "bargain" implies an exchange of values. What could Stalin have offered us? Peace, or something like that, for not pressing the rights of the people of eastern Europe? Was that the value at issue? Zoom this look back out to the big picture of general principles: was "peace" less valuable in 1941, and if so, then why? What was the difference between, say, France and Poland versus the Baltic states and Hungary? The "facts" were "on the ground" of western Europe right up until the audacity of Normandy, no less than they were in the east after V-E Day, and if the difference is that it was Hitler on the ground in France instead of Stalin on the ground in Poland, then there was no difference at all, all while The Grand Alliance was making all its vaunted noise about "freedom".

[...]

Make no mistake about it: there was a "bargain", and it was struck at Yalta. And let me tell you what got traded away.

Posted by drizzten at 02:47 PM | Permalink

Another item discovered whilst reading Samizdata: Morocco answers Zapatero by supporting Paris 2012

Paris's candidacy for the 2012 Olympic Games has received the support of the sports ministers of 39 Francophone countries and regions. Among them was Morocco, represented on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which despite its good relations with the Zapatero administration did not hesitate in giving its support to France. The participants in the 30th Conference of Sports and Youth Ministers (CONFEJES) "unanimously supported" Paris's candidacy, after Mauritanian sports minister Ahmedou Ould Ahmadou introduced the motion. Mauritanian head of CONFEJES Youssouf Fall explained support for Paris's candidacy by stressing "France's important experience in organizing sports competitions, as well as Paris's excellent quality infrastructure." Paris's official commission said in a press release, "This decision is a major international push for Paris's candidacy, which is now guaranteed of strong support in the final vote on July 6 in Singapore." The choice of the site of the Games is not voted on by the countries as such, but rather by the members of the IOC, who can vote as they wish. Nevertheless, among the 39 countries that support Paris, there are many whose representatives have a vote, including Morocco, Canada, Egypt, Cameroon, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Guinea, and Tunisia, and the Paris 2012 committee stresses that "the Francophone community of Belgium and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and new Brunswich have also given their support." Among other countries at the CONFEJES meeting were Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Greece, Haiti, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, N�ger, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rumania, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Chad, Togo, and Vietnam. In addition, French sports minister Jean-Francois Lamour stated yesterday that this vote shows "one additional proof of the support and determination Paris's candidacy can count on. The more chances we have to explain our project, the more support we get, both inside and outside France." Meanwhile, Madrid mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallard�n presented the Madrid 2012 project to prime minister Rodriguez Zapatero.

� Copyright Libertad Digital, S.A.

After reading that impressive list of countries, I decided to do a brief search of their modern history.

Out of those 27 CONFEJES-appearing countries, 20 were under French rule and three more were under Belgian control. All information taken from the CIA World Factbook, the Lonely Planet guides, or Wikipedia.

Remarkable, isn't it? The end dates for those colonies indicate the general unwillingness of nations to continue ruling foreign lands, a positive trend in the history of individual liberty. Perhaps that unwillingness will one day devolve from the international sphere to the intranational. And then the interlocal to the intralocal.

It took centuries for the first step to be taken. Hopefully, the next steps won't linger about so.

Posted by drizzten at 02:08 PM | Permalink

Billy Beck: Church of the Space-Alien Control-Variables

Jim Henley: the Federal Reserve's Countdown to Infinite Discount Rate Adjustments

Mike, at The London Fog: Bananada

Anthony Gregory, at the LewRockwell Blog: But if it came to two choices--shutting down the Senate or approving Bush's nominees--I know whom I would root for.

Scott Scheule at Catallarchy: To wit, if you want to save the birds, come up with a recipe for a good spotted owl gumbo.

jomama: What happens when the Cosmic Nipple runs dry?

Posted by drizzten at 03:16 PM | Permalink

Given the choice between making their own moral decisions, or having Tom DeLay make them for them, most people will choose the former. Between that and corruption, we probably have 75 percent of the Democratic campaign for 2006.

-Markos Moulitsas Z�niga

If I had hair, I'd be tearing it out right now. Kos's hypocrisy continues to shine. If he seriously meant what he said in that first clause, he'd back down from his unwavering support of using the state to make moral (in the form of economic) choices for people, whether they want the help or not.

To fully illustrate this, here's a comment from Kos's post by The Truffle:

It would make a great ad!

And we wouldn't need to invoke poor Terri Schiavo directly.

Picture the ad...

"They say they're the party of personal freedom..."

(Cut to footage of Bush, Delay, Frist, et al.)

"They say they're the party of small government..."

(Cut to more footage of more republicans)

"But they want to insert themselves into your home."

(Show a montage of suburban homes, apartment buildings, etc.)

"They want to insert themselves into your family life."

(Show footage of a couple with a newborn baby.)

"Into your most private moments..."

(Show footage of an elderly woman in a hospital bed, surrounded by her children)

"Your home...your family...everything you've worked for...is THEIR business...

"The Republican Party. Saying one thing and doing another."

Care to expand on that?

Unfuckenbelievable. I visit his blog community as a sampler of what his far end of the spectrum is saying and I come away utterly disgusted each time. The more he squirms into this apparent quasi-libertarian position, the more I want to just slap him.

More from the past: The Democratic Party: The Party of Personal Liberty?, Daily Kos Wants It All, Fiscal Responsibility?, Meteor Blades Needs Economics, The Hypocrisy of Daily Kos, Kos Continues to Amaze, Economic Ignorance, and For the Privatization of Freedom.

UPDATED 5/9/2005 9:35am
Yes, I changed my mind: The Additional Tyranny - The New Austin Smoking Ban Passes

Posted by drizzten at 10:12 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Class: please be seated. Today, our subject is reductio ad absurdum, Internet edition. Turn your books to page 2. Please read along with me:

Terrorists have acquired a nuclear weapon.

Someone seen among the terrorists has been caught.

Should the captured person be tortured if he won't divulge what it is we assume he knows?

Part of me always wondered if 24 would reach this point. From the standpoint of a television action-drama, each season must at least keep the heat up on the suspense. Each season of the show has managed to increase the stakes and in order for this one to continue propelling the series forward, it must continue to increase the shock value of the ongoing terrorist threat.

So why not have prominent CTU characters openly advocate the torture of a suspect? Why not have an "Amnesty Global" lawyer notified and enter with a court order demanding immediate release? Why not have Jack Bauer actively seek out ways to torture the suspect, up to and including the submission of his resignation in order to pursue the suspect once he is released from CTU custody?

I'm not particularly angry at this point. My anger crested several hours in the past of the show. The viewers have been led to this moment by the previous displays of torture. I actually chuckle because it reminds me of so many other times in the past where the mask is dropped and what lies beneath is revealed for an instant. For example, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's infamous 6/28/2004 statement in San Francisco quoted by Matt Drudge:

"We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

One wonders what the director and the producers are thinking at this point. This is just about identical to every Doomsday Scenario that has been bitterly, bitterly argued over for nearly four years. I am imagining the various law-and-order tendencies within conservative fans of the show going immediately to war with the foreign policy hawk tendencies. Among the majority of these people and their fellow political travelers, the emotional reaction to seeing

1. an Arabic family terrorist cell conducting fatal operations on U.S. soil;
   
2. the kidnapping and attempted execution of the Secretary of Defense as a distraction;
   
3. the attempted meltdown of nuclear reactors and the actual meltdown of one in California as distractions;
   
4. the theft of an Air Force stealth fighter;
   
5. Air Force One shot down and the President seriously injured;
   
6. the loss of critical nuclear weapons information;
   
7. the loss of a nuclear weapon;
   
8. the detainment of a person who must know something to aid CTU;
   
9. an international human rights lawyer immediately and cynically retained to secure the release of the "suspect" because he hasn't formally broken a law and been charged with a crime;
   
10. the better than average performance of torture for CTU agents in the past;
    
11. and merely that lawyer, the U.S. Marshall, and a judge's order standing in the way to that information;

Jack Bauer is the most righteous, most badass guy in the American government. He has nothing - nothing - but the best interests of the United States and her citizens in his mind. He is the very embodiment of someone who we have hired to Do The Right Thing. The man has literally died for his flag. Why he hasn't simply buzzed through the Amnesty Glboal lawyer (a stand-in for Amnesty International?) and put the U.S. Marshall down is beyond me. He really is an admirable guy, respecting the Constitution like that in this most "extreme of circumstances."

Honestly, I cheered along with my friends. We knew the guy was a liar and a direct conspirator in the terrorist plot and so did the appropriate agents of the state. I couldn't repress my instant agreement because I knew Bauer had treated the man to the very beginning of what he deserved. He was no mere man of knowledge who accidentally knew was what going on. According to the set-up by the episode, he was an important player with very serious information.

But there's the rub.

In real life, we aren't likely know these things so clearly and without doubt. In real life, there are few Jack Bauers indeed to act as the vigilante angel, saving the day because no one else understands the stakes. In real life, it takes time and evidence to conclude who did what at what level of knowing involvement. In real life, torture means putting society/results over the individual, the most important step towards the complete disregard of morality.

The inclusion of the Amnesty lawyer really does the trick, though. It exposes the craven cowardice of the CTU operation. It's personnel feel just fine torturing young adults, women, and men...as long as no one knows about it who might raise a legal stink. Really, does the libertarian view of government-as-criminal-aggressor have any greater power than when we are presented with a state agency that ignores The Law, treats humans as it's own property, and only stops the moment when bad press coverage by indignant civil libertarians start holding press conferences is possible? Wait hardly a news cycle these days and you'll hear about some arm of the state doing this. Commonplace in realms where the consequences are a few mere million tax payer dollars, this is the realm of direct human life. Nothing else is more serious.

Now Jack Bauer has resigned from CTU and the preview shows him getting into direct conflict with law enforcement over his treatment of Prado. Bauer, rather than violate the Constitution and get his co-workers in trouble, has fallen back on what he can rely on: himself, as an individual. For that tenacity of purpose and rugged pursuit of Evil, I commend him.

For his willingness to do use any means to satisfy his ends, I condemn him.

Previous posts on : 24 and Torture, Fox's '24': A Libertarian Nightmare, and The Jack Bauer Power Hour, Inner Outrage; The Enslavement of Behrooz Araz, and The Total Erosion of the Fourth Wall.

UPDATED 5/2/2005 10:56pm
Humanity Revealed in FOX's 24

UPDATED 5/17/2005 2:07pm
Quickie '24' Blog Items with an Emphasis on Richard Heller

UPDATED 3/13/2006 9:45am
My Take on FOX's '24' Ethics

Posted by drizzten at 10:52 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Incidentally, I'm not a Feingold supporter for president. Anyone who attempts to regulate blogs -- like he has -- is instantly on my shit list.

-Markos Moulitsas Z�niga

But what about the owner of a health care company getting angry with nearly everyone for wanting to regulate his industry?

What about the commercial developer who is pissed at the forest of red tape from all levels of government when he wants to build a shopping mall?

What about the people wishing to donate to any politician or consulting group in order to get their views bigger play in the media who see campaign finance reform laws standing in their way?

I can go on for hours.

Don't Tread On Me, but I Feel Free To Tread On Thee.

More on my complaints with and observations on DailyKos: The Democratic Party: The Party of Personal Liberty?, Daily Kos Wants It All, Fiscal Responsibility?, Meteor Blades Needs Economics, The Hypocrisy of Daily Kos, Kos Continues to Amaze, Economic Ignorance, For the Privatization of Freedom.

UPDATED 4/19/2005 10:16am
Kos Strikes Again

Posted by drizzten at 03:49 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Sir:

You said "Willing buyer. Willing seller. It's called liberty..." in the context of a pharmacist declining to fill prescriptions for morning-after birth control pills and various people getting pissed about it. It is quite obvious from your comments you support the right for a property owner to reject an offer to sell from a potential customer.

Later on, once you read the post by Mr. Silber and changed your mind regarding the specifics of the case, you said, "Of course, that means we have to strike at the real problem: the state's creation of a monopoly." You also "agree completely" to statements Mr. Silber made that said

...we must work ultimately for the day when the state removes itself from areas such as the licensing of pharmacists altogether (and doctors, and lawyers, and every other profession you can name)-and leave men free to engage in transactions as they choose, according to their own best independent and individual judgment.

So here are my questions.

1. Is your ultimate political goal the abolishment of the State or is it similar to minarchism's "night watchman state"?
   
2. Given your rejection of natural rights theory, what do you mean when you repeatedly refer to "right" in your Liberty or Compulsion post?
   
3. When you say you favor "[a] policy of using US military force solely at the discretion of the US, but only in circumstances where American interests are directly affected," do you refer to a centralized state-funded defense force organized roughly as it is now or a loosely-aligned alliance of (for example) independent defense contractors and insurance agencies who agree to work together to protect their interests?
   
4. Since you have come out against state-created monopolies, does that mean you'd support the rise of competing court and law systems?
   
5. If the Federal Reserve system was abolished and the US reverted back to a pure gold/silver-backed currency standard that would not be under the control of the government, would you support or oppose it?

UPDATED 4/10/2005 1:02pm
Dale Franks responds once and a second time. I'll reply to his second response Monday or Tuesday.

Jim Henley is also asking questions, though they are aimed at Neolibertarianism (something Mr. Franks ascribes to) in general.

Posted by drizzten at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Says Sploid:

Sploid is a news site with a tabloid mentality -- top stories up top, played big, as fast as they break. If there's a political line, it's anarcho-capitalist: sniffing out hypocrisy and absurdity, whether from salon left or religious right.

One, the editors (being the Gawkster Media hipsters they are) are simply fusing an irreverent take on each work into one idea. They, by anarchist, mean they have little respect for rules, tradition, etc. They, by capitalist, mean they are in this for the money and anyone who complains can suck it.

Two, they actually mean they adhere to anarcho-capitalism's stance on politics: the abolition of the state, the support of private property and voluntary exchange, etc.

I've got enough webpages to keep track of these days, but I'll try to stop by Sploid to see how it goes. From what I see, browsing as of 2:45pm:

• Shift Change Memo: The Liberal Fringe, "Ken: Gotta motor outta here if I�m gonna make it to the Pope�s funeral. Eh, who am I kidding, those crowds are totally out of control, given the cafes hiring security guards for their bathrooms. Speaking of which: Fox News would like you to know that authorities are �playing down the possibility of a terror attack� in Rome. Well� isn�t that what European authorities do?

  [...]

  Also, please be extra cruel to the liberal fringe today because I got an email accusing me of being a liberal. That was excruciatingly painful. Evidently some people don�t understand that concerns of freedom from an intrusive government and stupid politicians is the one place where the right and the left meet. Well, there and over the love of a good dimebag. I�m out, homeslice. � Choire
  

• Meddling Congress Even Screws Up Time
  
• Fewer Teens Excited About Dying In Iraq
  
• DoE: Sorry, Gas Prices Will Keep Going Up, "Worthless �Energy Department� delivers grim yet obvious news: Gas prices will just rise and rise for as long as anyone can figure. Demand in the USA will also rise this summer, by about 2%. Global demand will never slow down."
  
• Cops Smell Pot On Money; Arrest Dummy, "Tales from the Drug War"
  
• Dingbat Sen. Byrd Sick Of �Horseradish�, "Ancient Democratic Senator Robert Byrd sputtered and fumed in a CNN interview today, dismissing GOP charges that he�s �too liberal for West Virginia� as �horseradish.� Horseradish? Is this condiment an acceptable substitute for a quaint word for �nonsense� such as �horsefeathers�?
  
• Explosive Teathers: Imminent Threat?, "Two 16-year-old girls are being held in a federal detention center, suspected of suicide bomber plans. After a minor complaint by one girl�s parents, wildly over-zealous feds searched their home without a warrant and confiscated one of the teen�s computers, which contained an essay on Islam and suicide bombing. The idiot FBI will probably deport the foreign-born girls. Update: Fox News goes nuts at 11 a.m.: �Do we have any details on what they might have been targeting? Where they might be targeting? Was it in New York City?�"
  
• Congress Porkers Waste $27.3 Billion
  
• Potheads Rejoice: Weed Helps Hearts, New Study Proves It

Posted by drizzten at 03:01 PM | Permalink

Prensa Latina : Globalized Capitalism Blamed for Increasing Famine in the World

Globalization of neoliberal capitalism and its resulting injustice is the main cause of the expansion of hunger in the world, said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler.

In a report presented to the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) here, Ziegler said than in less than a year, 10 million people have joined the planet�s army of starving people.

At least 100,000 people die of lack of food every year, and one of every four is permanently blinded due to lack of vitamin A, he said.

Ziegler told Prensa Latina that his performance as UN official and his re-election to the post have been rejected by the US, a country whose delegation votes almost solo against his term at the UNCHR.

"I have not fabricated these figures, he said. "They have been provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)."

"All governments in the world should be concerned that there are 852 million people starving while a program to address the scourge is in existence."

"FAO itself has stated that world agriculture could currently feed twice the world�s population. Thus, we can say that every person who dies of hunger has been assassinated," the Swedish jurist and sociologist stressed.

"What this is all about is a daily genocide against people who are starving amidst rich countries�silence," he said.

Copyright � 2004 - All Rights Reserved.
Prensa Latina

I could not find other news sources reporting these statements, but I did find Mr. Ziegler saying other things:

"In Brazil, where there is fertile land, wealth and a tropical climate," said Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, after a recent visit there, "hunger is not a destiny." Rather, it is "the product of a totally unjust order. Those who die of hunger in Brazil are assassinated."

-Dollars and Sense, May/June 2002, quoted in Seeing Red: "Brazilian Peasant Leader"

Ziegler also told the commission he was concerned about hunger in North Korea, Palestinian areas, Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region, Zimbabwe, India, Myanmar, the Philippines and Romania.

Worldwide, he said, more than 17,000 children under 5 die daily from hunger-related diseases.

"The silent daily massacre by hunger is a form of murder,'' Ziegler said. "It must be battled and eliminated.''

-The Guardian, March 30, 2005: "Expert: Malnutrition Affects Iraq Kids"

Ahh, well, now I see.

This means that, given the existence of both hungry and food-possessing humans, every single person who does not give away all of his or her wealth beyond the exact point what is necessary for his or her own survival is, at the very least, party to repeated mass murder. At the most, those people are directly responsible for daily mass murder.

I - by my inaction - am to blame for the deaths of people who starve.

You, dear reader, are a filthy moral stain because you perpetuate genocide by not stopping it.

Yeah, that makes sense. No perversion of causality, responsibility, or anything. It is entirely reasonable to say someone is a murderer when that person didn't actually kill anyone. It isn't outrageous at all that Mr. Ziegler compares dormancy in the face of a hungry child with the deliberate liquidation of an entire race of people.

If sneers could kill, the one distorting my face right now would be engaged around the throat of this utterly hideous idea.

There is no "right to food." By asserting there is, you imply that it is permissible for anyone who owns no food to use force in order to possess food. That is what the concept of a "right" demands: universality and enforceability. Without either, the purpose of rights - the nature that makes it different from other concepts - falls apart. But this means that every human's wealth that crests over the level of bare subsistence would be at the mercy of anyone who is starving and does not own the means to procure nutrition for him- or herself.

It would be a permanent global hall pass for larceny, a "right" that one could conceivably have one minute; but upon feeding himself after walking into a grocer and taking the materials for lunch, that "right" would no longer apply. But wait! It would return as soon as that man was hungry and simultaneously didn't own any food of his own. This flip-flop could happen a dozen times a day. A right does not have that kind of nature.

It should be obvious the kinds of problems this supposed "right" creates and this is directly related to my previous post, William J. Bennett and Brian T. Kennedy Need Slaves. In order to enforce a "right to food" you would have to enslave people to provide your food if you possessed none.

Posted by drizzten at 12:43 AM | Permalink

National Review: The Right to Life

But does Terri Schiavo have a natural right to life?

Yes. She is a human being. She has committed no crime and therefore she has forfeited not one of her natural rights. Our American faith teaches us that, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." And the purpose of all American government is "to secure these rights," not destroy them.

What then is to be done?

The "auxiliary precautions" of Florida government � in this case the Florida supreme court � have failed Terri Schiavo. It is time, therefore, for Governor Bush to execute the law and protect her rights, and, in turn, he should take responsibility for his actions. Using the state police powers, Governor Bush can order the feeding tube reinserted. His defense will be that he and a majority of the Florida legislature believe the Florida Constitution requires nothing less. Some will argue that Governor Bush will be violating the law. We think he will not be violating the law, but if he is judged to have done so, it will be in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., who answered to a higher law than a judge's opinion. In so doing, King showed respect for the man-made law by willingly going to jail (on a Good Friday); Governor Bush may have to face impeachment because of his decision.

How would the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (or whichever state police agency would be used) accomplish its ordered goal of reinserting Terri Schiavo's feeding tube? Using coerced funding (taxation) to pay for the wages of employees and equipment, the FDLE would request the feeding tube's reinsertion. Notice here what the two National Review authors conspicuously left out. If the owners of the hospice refuse, the FDLE would then order the owners and their employees to step aside so a government or government-hired physician or nurse could reinsert the tube. If the owners and employees refuse this, they'd be detained or arrested. If the employees and employees resist, they could be shot. And on, and on, and on.

This, I submit, is naked authoritarianism. This is the denial of the ability to enjoy one's life in the name of supporting that life.

By asserting a "right to life," Mr. Bennett and Mr. Kennedy have implicitly subjugated a far more fundamental and important right: the right to self-ownership and the right to one's property. They reject one's right to ownership as long as that owner refuses to use his or her property in order to nurse a "culture of life" or something similar. This is then, no fundamentally different from the environmentalist or welfare statist or unionist (i.e., collectivist) claim that it is our duty to help others live unfouled, healthy, materially fulfilling lives...even if it means doing it against our will and at our expense.

Figure this: can anyone else point out the absurdity of simultaneously asserting a "right to oil changes" or a "right to food" or a "right to underwear" while claiming to be proponents of freedom and liberty? All of the above, by their explicit meaning, demand corrective action if those "rights" are violated when individuals do not acquire their oil changes, food, or underwear. If they had none and none were donated, then the nature of rights theory demands forceful action be taken to provide justice to those "victims," which would mean stealing the right to property one person has and giving it to another.

The right to self-ownership avoids this potential and actual tyranny by not creating the problem of collective duty in the first place. Upholding this right would create just two issues to resolve: who is the legitimate owner of what resource and if the right to that resource was violated, what is the just response to the violation of that right? The fundamental right is what should always be protected and enforced, not something made up on the grounds of theology or emotional appeal. My right to self-ownership makes it a crime to kill me so there is no need to have a separate right to protect life.

The specific problem of how to delegate that right in the event of death or incapacitation is a personal, private matter. Given that human beings are fallible, there will be cases of dispute like this. It is not up to the state to decide who owns what in such cases because, as we see happening today, the state screws it all up my making all of its citizens partly involved.

I have little doubt Mr. Bennett and Mr. Kennedy would dispute a person's right to self-ownership. Why openly advocate slavery? But they are disputing a very important corollary to that right: the ownership of property external to the human body. In this case, it is Woodside Hospice's land and equipment. Furthermore, assuming Terri's husband, Michael, has a contract with the hospice to follow his instructions, these two want to violate the contract as well. Governor Bush and his police force do not have the right to tell them what to do. For the governor and Florida's law enforcement are not the rightful owners of that property.

And neither is Bill Bennett or anyone else who advocates the force of government to solve this problem. What they want are slaves to keep this woman alive.

Posted by drizzten at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The AP via ABCNews: 14 Dead, 1 Missing in Texas Refinery Blast

Wenceslado de la Cerda, a 50-year-old retired firefighter, said the blast shook the ground, rattled windows and knocked ceiling panels to the floor.

"Basically, it was one big boom," he said. "It's a shame that people have to get killed and hurt trying to make a dollar in these plants, but that's part of reality."

On one hand, I recognize the inherent dangers of working in an industry that deals with flammable, explosive, and poisonous materials. This danger is greater when working within the compound where those materials are harvested, processed, and distributed. The very nature of the work means the unresolvable tendency for humans to screw up results in harsh consequences. Therefore, one way to spin the comment is to simply nod your head and agree. I don't think it's a "shame" that petrochemical employees chose to work risky jobs, but I do think it is a shame that once an accident (or irresponsibilty on the part of the business owner) occurs, people trying to make a living get injured and sometimes die. Diligence in the name of safety can stem this number, but it will never remain zero forever.

On the other hand, I tense up at another implication: "the brutal demands of the free market system driving people to work deadly jobs against their will." The crucial aspect of this is in the "people have to get killed and hurt trying to make a dollar" portion of the Mr. Cerda's statement. It speaks of an inevitability the economy imposes upon workers. This is not the same as what I mentioned above, where I acknowledge the fact that accidents happen and people suffer due to them. This is something different. This takes the first for granted and then posits the hapless, lower-class laborer as a tool forced into work because he wants to eat. Therefore, reality forces man to work and get killed.

I posted on a large explosion at a BASF facility in the Houson area back in 2002: Explosion at BASF Plant in Texas, Update on the BASF Explosion, Why isn't the Texas BASF Explosion Getting More Coverage?, BASF Freeport Explosion Update.

Posted by drizzten at 08:46 AM | Permalink

Italicized emphasis is mine:

EUGENE VOLOKH has changed his mind on the advisability of painful punishments -- or at least on the ability of the legal system to mete them out fairly as opposed to their abstract fairness.

I think that's right. I feel somewhat that way about capital punishment. I'm utterly unpersuaded by the argument that there is something uniquely immoral about state-sanctioned killing. (At its core, the nation-state is all about killing; everything else is window-dressing). But I'm quite persuaded, as I've written before, by what Charles Black called "the inevitability of caprice and mistake" in the application of the death penalty.

UPDATE: Some readers wonder what I meant about the nation-state being all about killing. That seemed pretty obvious to me: We have nation-states because they're more effective at focusing violence against those who threaten their authority than other human organizations. That's why nation-states have pretty much taken over the game of doing things via violence. They don't have a monopoly, of course, but they owe their preeminence to their success in this regard, not to their other characteristics. As I say, this seems quite obvious to me.

If he can idenify this and do it so openly, there perhaps may be hope for him yet. Of course, I expect blank-out to occur once you confront him with the simple reality of everyday violence in the form of 99.99% of what the state does regularly, things that he has openly supported in the past.

Posted by drizzten at 11:11 AM | Permalink

The AP via NewsChannel 5: Cookie Monster Steals From Girl Scouts

The leader of a Girl Scout troop in Columbus said the girls won't be selling cookies from a booth anymore after being robbed of $320.

Five girls from Troop 4180 had set up shop in the foyer of a Kroger store on Saturday. At about 2:30 p.m., they sold a box to a man who reached into their cash box and grabbed an envelope with the money in it and ran.

Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Posted by drizzten at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From a recent blog entry by "A View to Kill" on MySpace:

Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Goddam capitalism!
Current mood: angry

Damn you capitalism! All I want to do is go to school and study and get drunk and stoned, but no, now I gotta get a fucking job! And you know what? There aren't any jobs where I live! Fuck you very much!

Posted by drizzten at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jim Henley identifies an essential point that is regularly forgotten and ignored in nearly all the debate about torture.

Posted by drizzten at 10:40 AM | Permalink

Ayn Rand Institute Op-Ed: The Ten Commandments vs. America

In sum, the first set of commandments orders you to bow, fawn, grovel and obey. This is impossible to reconcile with the American concept of a self-reliant, self-owning individual.

Posted by drizzten at 02:08 PM | Permalink

I've always found it glaringly odd that what is transmitted from FOX NEWS CHANNEL can often be so much at odds with what is transmitted from the general Fox television programming network. I'm fully aware that both are nominally different entities in the sense they are different operating units. But it still gets me every time a social conservative or some nanny-state "fix society's culture" liberal get on there.

Because, while they are railling against open sexuality and consumerist mentalities, any number of shows deeply offensive to them are on the air:

1. The Bernie Mac Show (consumerism)
   
2. Cops (violence)
   
3. Family Guy (just about everything)
   
4. Quintuplets (shallow sexuality, crass)
   
5. That '70's Show (drugs, overt sexuality)
   
6. The Simpsons (just less than Family Guy)
   
7. Method & Red (drugs, rampant consumerism)
   
8. Totally Outrageous Behavior Caught on Tape (self-explanatory)
   
9. The World's Craziest Videos (ditto)
   
10. And all the various gimmick reality TV shows with gorgeous women, envelope-pushing relationship thems, etc.

TV trash sells.

So, since social trash sells, why shouldn't political trash?

It's all about the profits, isn't it Mr. Murdock?

*laughs at the obviousness of it all*

NOTE: I like Family Guy, The Simpsons, and That '70s Show. Just using them for reference!

Posted by drizzten at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Updates below.]

The AP via ABCNews: Canadians Stunned Over Mounties Killings

The slayings of four Canadian police officer have stunned a nation that prides itself on far fewer acts of gun violence than its neighbor to the south.

I logged in to Yahoo just a few minutes ago and this is the first I heard of the shootings. What a nightmare.

A bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" and flags flew at half-staff Friday as Canadians grappled with the deadliest attack on police officers in 120 years. The four Mounties were slain during a raid on a marijuana farm in a rural western hamlet on Thursday.

"Canadians are shocked by this brutality and join me in condemning the violent acts that brought about these deaths," Prime Minister Paul Martin said.

That is the crucial distinction here: self-defense and aggression. Protesting all violence opens you to the dangers of grossly negligent self-annihilation; if you are morally prohibited from repelling attackers with force, you place your life in the hands of any random stranger to do with as they wish.

"The loss of four police officers is unprecedented in recent history," said Bill Sweeney, commanding officer of the Mounties in Alberta. "I'm told you have to go back to about 1885 � during the Northwest Rebellion to have a loss of this magnitude."

The Northwest Rebellion was an unsuccessful attempt by indigenous rebels to establish an independent nation in the northwestern frontier.

The four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers had been investigating a farm in Mayerthorpe, a small hamlet of some 1,300 people in western Alberta province.

Spokesman Cpl. Wayne Oakes said the four Mounties and the suspected gunman were found in a Quonset hut on the farm late Thursday. A government source told The Canadian Press the suspect killed himself after shooting the officers.

[...]

The suspect was identified by police as 46-year-old James Roszko. Authorities said he had a long criminal record, including the use of illegal firearms and sexual assault.

Oakes said the Mounties were investigating reports of stolen property and marijuana on Roszko's property.

Families and police planned the funerals Saturday for four Canadian Mounties murdered in a raid on a marijuana operation, as more details emerged about the suspect, a man notorious in the area as a police-hater who stockpiled weapons.

In one of the bloodiest incidents in the history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, officers were investigating stolen vehicles and an illicit marijuana growing operation near the town of Mayerthorpe, Alberta, Thursday when they were gunned down inside a large metal shed.

The shooting has sparked debate over the government's plans to decriminalize marijuana possession, but town residents and criminologists say they do not believe the suspect, James Roszko, 46, opened fire to protect a pot crop.

[...]

"Jim has been developing more and more hate and anger against the police," said his father William Roszko, 80. He said his son "probably is in Hell already."

Family and neighbors described his short temper, angry encounters with police and bailiffs and his firearms cache.

Police said the young Mounties were armed with handguns and wore light body armor when the entered the shed. They were shot with what was described as a "rapid-fire, high-powered rifle."

"The RCMP were out-powered...," George Roszko, James' older brother, told the Edmonton Journal newspaper. "This is not your average hunting rifle-style kind of situation. There were numerous searches there, they tried to find his automatic weapons numerous times. But he's not stupid."

Even Roszko's lawyer was quoted as saying he was frightened at times by the repeat-offender, who was also convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy in 2000.

Residents of Mayerthorpe, a town of 1,600 people about 90 miles (140 km) northwest of Edmonton, described how the farm was equipped with heavy gates, booby traps and security cameras.

"Everybody knew he was nuts," said Tanya Madigan, a gas station clerk, whose boyfriend owns a nearby property.

� Reuters Foundation 2002. All rights reserved.

From this, which will rapidly become the Conventional Wisdom, people shall conclude James Roszko posed a severe danger to everyone around him and therefore had little right (if at all) to continue living as he did. I know nothing about the sexual assault charge, which, if true and actually constituted assault, would make him a rights-violator. However, the fact that he engaged in activities that the state deemed illegal doesn't necessarily make them morally criminal; nor does the fact that he engaged in activities that some or even many people disapprove of and fear automatically make him a evil person. How many guns is it OK to have before you are considered a monster? At what point does it make you insane when you attempt to set up defenses for your property?

Assuming Reuters didn't miss other things on his rap sheet, it can be said that Mr. Roszko placed a very high value on his property and decided it was worth investing considerable time and resources to defend. Given that the Canadian government repeatedly attempted to confiscate and control his property against his will, he had legitimate concerns.

Back to the Associated Press article:

"This is something that happens in Hollywood, but it never happens here," Albert Schalm, the town's mayor, told CBC TV. "I think it will change the community. It will just make everybody more aware that there are drug problems, even out here in rural Canada."

As documentary filmmaker Michael Moore pointed out in "Bowling for Columbine," there are few reasons to lock your doors across this vast nation.

There were 152 homicides by firearms in Canada in 2002, according to federal statistics, compared with 11,829 homicides by guns in the United States for that same year. Canada's population is about 32.5 million people; the U.S. population is about 293 million.

A 1995 federal firearms law in Canada requires every firearm in the country be registered and each gun owner licensed.

Be on the watch for this fallacy in the coming days. It is not so hard to point out that the causes of gun homicides are not restricted to the ownership of firearms. Crime has many fathers.

But Canada is grappling with an increase in organized crime behind the multibillion-dollar marijuana industry.

"It is an unprecedented and unspeakable loss," Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli said in a statement. "We know that these are the most serious challenges, made complicated by the involvement of organized crime, the availability of weapons and the risks posed by individuals who choose the path of violence and destruction over peace and good."

"He loved the RCMP and all it stood for," his family said in a statement. "Our country is hurting. We have lost four dedicated citizens who were willing to do something about it."

The slow moves towards more and more pot decriminalization in Canada do not mean cannabis-related crime will cease. On the contrary, since it is still somewhat illegal to own, produce, distribute, and consume marijuana and at the same time lesser sanctions are levied against both producers and consumers, it is likely the Canadian marijuana market is seeing a boom, pushing against the remaining strains of government criminalization. Meaning, since potential users and dealers who are not already in the market now have fewer government-imposed costs to risk, more people are entering the market. And since that indicates a growth industry, more opportunities for profit are emerging. But marijuana in Canada does not have the same status as, say, toothpicks. There are still legal boundaries that can be crossed even by relatively meaningless activity. For example, laws that restrict consumption and possession to under certain weights and volumes and to certain uses.

Further background at CTV.ca: Roszko killed officers and himself, RCMP says

Presumed cop killer Jim Roszko ambushed and killed all four officers in his Quonset hut, say the RCMP.

"None of our officers were struck by friendly fire," Supt. Marty Cheliak told reporters Saturday at a briefing outside the Mayerthorpe RCMP detachment.

"James Roszko was hit by return fire from our officers. Those strikes did not result in his death. James Roszko took his own life."

This was based on preliminary results from medical examiners, he said.

[...]

RCMP Cpl. Wayne Oakes added that it isn't known yet whether Roszko was waiting for the officers inside the Quonset or whether he entered it from outside.

"That's something the investigation's going to have to definitively clear up," he said.

An affidavit signed by a bailiff and made public Friday night says Jim Roszko would most likely shoot on sight anyone he found on his property.

"The debtor is quite dangerous, has a long history of assaults, is in possession of a number of firearms ... and is known to have booby-trapped land," it read.

Alberta Mounties first went to Roszko's farm on Wednesday to assist with the bailiff's request to obtain property from the farm.

In addition, the police found evidence of stolen property, namely auto parts, and about 20 illegal marijuana plants plus a few pounds of leaves.

Initial reports indicated this event was triggered by a marijuana grow operation raid.

"It started very young. We tried to let him know we'd help him. But he couldn't overcome it. A lot of people played a part in that.''

A criminal profiler offered this explanation.

"This is the type of person who will either commit suicide by cop or he'll take everyone else out," said Pat Brown.

"He's not going to be jailed. He's done that before and didn't like it, so he's not going to let that happen again."

� 2005 Bell Globemedia Inc. All Rights Reserved.

1. This will slow down progress in marijuana decriminalization.
   
2. This will strengthen calls for more firearm regulation.
   
3. This will be used as a means to scare people into following the lead on the above.
   
4. Even more pressure will be brought to bear on those people who follow a rights-based, individualistic ethic.

The results as of 9:55pm, Central Standard Time:
Yes...5693 votes...(58 %)
No...4143 votes...(42 %)

My mother is Canadian and I have a considerable portion of my extended family residing there. For their sake, they hopefully will recognize the issues at stake and help prevent another wave of restrictive legislation and regulation.

UPDATE 3/7/2005 9:02am
See related comments at The London Fog ( Reefer Madness, The Liberal Way and Witch Hunting and Political posturing), Colby Cosh (How high to hang them? and ColbyCosh.com assignment desk), Jay Jardine ( Reefer Madness, Canadian Style), and the British Columbia Marijuana Party (Tragedy in Alberta Being Used By Opportunists and Prohibition Claims More Casualties, as well as others).

Posted by drizzten at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sometimes it seems like there is an inner totalitarian lurking in every libertarian breast. It comes out whenever one is REALLY annoyed.

-raf

Corrected, of course, means "a hefty carbon tax [and] a tax on vehicle height."

I expected more resistance to the idea and other forms of state ownership of your property in the comments, but I assumed wrong. Most of them choose to academically whittle at the details of imposing new use and purchase restrictions on what is not rightfully theirs.

Posted by drizzten at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At the extreme, imagine a group of individuals who have similar tastes and who live together in a local community, each one of whom places a zero benefit on tennis courts. In such a community, under decentralized, local collective decision making, an election to consider government provision of such a good would receive no votes. In fact, it would be unlikely that any resident would even propose that such an issue be put up for a vote, because a locally provided tennis court would benefit no one in town. If, however, the number of tennis courts per town were decided in a national election, with given tax shares under majority rule, the outcome would be the national median most-preferred number of tennis courts per town.

If the preferred number of tennis courts per town in other communities is greater that zero, the resultant equilibrium is likely to be some positive number of tennis courts. This means that residents in the town where no one wants tennis courts, even at zero price, would be forced to submit to construction of tennis courts in their town and to pay taxes to finance those tennis courts. Such an outcome is not efficient...

However, despite that, I still find it remarkable that Professor Hyman's objection to government forcing people to pay for tennis courts they don't want is based on shaky and necessarily incomplete calculations of "social benefit" and "social cost" resulting in "efficient" outcomes. This is the textbook I'm using in my Public Finance class at St. Edward's University and I'll have more quotes from it in the future.

Posted by drizzten at 10:21 AM | Permalink

The AP via the San Fransisco Chronicle: Thousands in Lebanon Protest Government

"It is my civic duty as a Lebanese to take part in this uprising," said Youssef Mukhtar, a 47-year-old engineer. "Enough bloodshed and disasters. It is the 21st century, and people should be able to govern themselves. The situation has become unbearable and we have to regain our country."

Unfortunately, Mr. Mukhatr goes from a welcome idea straight back into collectivism with the "our country" bit, revealing a contradiction that plagues most people to this day.

Posted by drizzten at 01:12 PM | Permalink

Why?

Reuters via ABCNews: Lead in Environment Causing Violent Crime - Study

"When environmental lead finds its way into the developing brain, it disturbs neural mechanisms responsible for regulation of impulse. That can lead to antisocial and criminal behavior," said Dr. Herbert Needleman, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Needleman's team, using a technique called X-ray fluorescence, found very low levels of lead in the bones of children.

Needleman cited several studies that associate crime with high levels of lead either in the bodies of those accused or in the environments they came from, including one that showed the average bone lead levels of 190 juvenile delinquents were higher than those of adolescents not charged with crimes.

On a more serious note:

He said the U.S. government needs to do more to lower lead levels in the environment...

"Exposure to lead, at doses below those which bring children to medical attention, is associated with increased aggression, disturbed attention and delinquency. A meaningful strategy to reduce crime is to eliminate lead from the environment of children."

Copyright 2005 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved.

I'd like to see some chimp in the EPA attempt to run a cost-benefit analysis on replacing all the soil in the US with astroturf.

Posted by drizzten at 03:37 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

One other thing American society as a whole could do that would really help -- and this will never happen -- is to agree collectively and simultaneously to stop working so goddamn hard.

-The Termite, at Daily Kos

UPDATED 4/19/2005 10:19am
The Democratic Party: The Party of Personal Liberty?, Daily Kos Wants It All, Fiscal Responsibility?, Meteor Blades Needs Economics, The Hypocrisy of Daily Kos, Kos Continues to Amaze, For the Privatization of Freedom, Sacred Cows and Kossack Hypocrisy, and Kos Strikes Again

Posted by drizzten at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In relation to the previous post, we have something via Kausfiles that upsets my apple cart.

USA Today: Poll: Tap wealthy on Social Security

Two-thirds of those surveyed by USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup last weekend say it would be a "good idea" to limit retirement benefits for the wealthy and to subject all wages to payroll taxes. Now, annual earnings above $90,000 aren't taxed. (Related: Poll results)

[...]

Six in 10 oppose raising Social Security taxes for everybody, a step Bush has ruled out.

1. I support raising the payroll tax on workers earning an income over $90,000 from 0% to 15.3% (12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare).
   
2. I do not support increasing the payroll tax for workers.

[President Bush] hasn't made it clear whether that also includes boosting the cap on wages that are taxed. "We don't want to raise taxes as a solution," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Tuesday when asked about that issue.

Posted by drizzten at 02:54 PM | Permalink

One of the sources of the inhuman 'strength' of the Left is its refusal to acknowledge the existence of anything smaller than a mass noun. Rhetorical service to the people, masses, workers, peasants; the poor and the downtrodden are objects worthy of the Left; but love, pity and sorrow for individuals is sentiment beneath contempt.

-wretchard

Posted by drizzten at 11:10 AM | Permalink

Under the current system, without any changes to it, you aren't paying for anyone else's retirement. The U.S. Treasury is cutting the checks. And no� the treasury isn't drawing the checks from your personal checking account.

You might like to think the money collected under the payroll tax is somehow "yours" but it isn't, and it never was.

-some asshole named "s9" on Wizbang

One who strains to break the bounds of reality as ardently as this fool ought not to be graced with a reply, but I'll point out one thing that should have, at the very least, given the moron pause before posting the comment: If you are going to assert the income I earn from any employment is not mine, if you claim that my productive work does not belong to me, then what right do I have to use what I earn without the consent of the state?

Posted by drizzten at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Austin-American Statesman: Austin suddenly ununique

David Bolduc, the owner of Boulder Book Store in Colorado, which has distributed about 10,000 "Keep Boulder Weird" bumper stickers, said, "It's about democracy and the concentration of power in large corporations. Most people who buy a T-shirt aren't willing to take it that deep."

Copyright 2001-2005 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P. All rights reserved.

News8Austin: Sam's Boat to surrender liquor license

The owners of Sam's Boat have agreed to surrender their liquor license. The popular North Austin bar has 20 days to turn it over.

The bar lost its license over charges it sold liquor to an intoxicated man.

Copyright �2005TWEAN News Channel of Austin, L.P. d.b.a. News 8 Austin

Sellin' booze to someone already drunk? There ottabea law!!!

Posted by drizzten at 10:21 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

The AP via the Austin-American Statesman: Study: MTV Delivers a Diet of 'Sleaze'

His group favors requiring cable and satellite companies to offer "a la carte" programming, giving customers a chance to pick and choose which networks to buy. MTV is generally included in basic cable packages that most customers get whether they want it or not.

"The incessant sleaze on MTV presents the most compelling case yet for consumer cable choice," [Parents Television Council president Brent Bozell] said.

Two sides of the same coin, you prick.

UPDATE 3/2/2005 5:15pm
Glenn Reynolds also needs slaves.

Posted by drizzten at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I wish to take the time to mourn the end of what might have been an interesting experiment in self-government. Now, on the weak, undefended, morally reprehensible and irrational basis of democracy, Iraqis will now have to deal with a majority rule government. I had the slimmest of hopes that the people over there would reject aggression, reject moral compromise, and reject violence. Instead, they have embraced it in the form of the state.

The degree of government imposed on them will likely be less than during the era of Saddam, but that doesn't justify it. When I see Iraqis happily going to the polls to vote for who will rule them, I see people happily imposing their will by passive means on others. How very, very sad.

Posted by drizzten at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Erik asks a good question.

As I commented in his post, for my philosophy of individualism (of which ethical egoism is a part) to make any sense, individuals must exist. This means that no matter how similar I may appear and act compared to others, those others and I are fundamentally different entities and therefore ought to be treated that way. What actually differentiates these "human units" is something I cannot explain clearly, but the term "soul" works well enough for me and is better than "personality," which is what I used in the past.

Posted by drizzten at 11:08 AM | Permalink

Ladies and Gentlemen, Steve Gilliard: Those damn rappers

As Chris Rock says "You don't have any investments, but you got rims." That, to me, is a lot more insidious that the abuse of women, which is bad, but nothing new. The celebration of greed, however, is. The RyanKenny $7000 shirt, the $300 throwback jersey, the $150 hoodie sweatshirt, that sends a message far worse than calling a woman a ho.

[...]

I'm not discounting the mysoginy in rap, any more than I would in rock, but it's the celebration of materialism and greed which should frighten people.

Posted by drizzten at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Updates below.

This Russmo cartoon hits it perfectly. It is a depiction of a US soldier in Iraq reading a letter from his father. It describes the situaton back home with either the most sarcastic clenched-teeth anger I've read in some time or with the all-too-common complete naivete on display by so many of the war's supporters:

Dear Jimmy,

Hope all is well in Iraq. We are so proud of you for going over there to fight for our freedom. A lot has happened since you left...

Our home was taken by the feds for back taxes we owed, and then the family business was condemned by the city so they could build a football stadium.

Mom was arrested for carrying a gun in her purse and your brother is in prison for smoking a joint. At least your sister is okay, though she has to go to court for not wearing a seatbelt.

We wish you were here to help pay for all the legal fees, but just knowing you are over there fighting for the liberties we cherish makes it all worthwhile.

Love, Dad

This is why I inwardly sneer at the bumper stickers that proclaim "Freedom isn't Free." Yeah, apparently it isn't.

Russmo's also got good ones on the 2004 election cycle schematic and the direction of the Republican Party.

UPDATED 9/8/2009 10:11am
Not My Problem

Posted by drizzten at 11:06 AM | Permalink

The AP via News8Austin: UT: Legislature hasn't kept pace with enrollment

SAN ANTONIO -- The University of Texas System chancellor says the system needs more state money to accommodate higher enrollments.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press, All rights reserved.

This shyster and his crew were able to pry the state's hands off the controls for setting the System's tuition rates and now they want the best of both worlds. What bastards.

Posted by drizzten at 03:27 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Speaking of undeveloped land...

Associated Press via ABCNews: Tsunami Reverts Beaches to Natural State

Many believe the tsunami that devastated this tourist hotspot and killed thousands had one positive side: By washing away rampant development, it returned the beaches to nature.

Greg Ferrando glistened with sweat and sea water as he went for a barefoot jog up the immaculate white sand beach, where the tsunami has wiped away almost all signs of humanity.

"This whole area was littered with commercialism," said the 43-year-old from Maui, Hawaii. "There were hundreds of beach chairs out here. I prefer the sand."

[...]

"Everyone is talking about it. It looks much better now," he said. "This looks a lot more like Hawaii now, where vendors aren't allowed on the beach."

You can prefer the sand all you want. I love walking down clean and sedate beaches, but I find it disgusting you'd think this is a good thing, even without the context of far more than 150,000 dead silently staring back at you.

The beauty of Thai beaches is the stuff of folklore: pristine, clean and untouched. That was 10 or 20 years ago. More recently, they have been swamped by development.

Phanomphon Thammachartniyom, president of the Phuket Professional Guide Association, said when tourists return to Thailand for their second or third visits, he has to recommend new beaches.

"They will complain, 'Why has this place changed so much? I don't like it anymore. I want it to be like it once was,'" Phanomphon said.

Phanomphon fears politicians and organized crime will steer development in the wrong direction and hopes care will be taken when the area is rebuilt. "Nature has returned nature to us. I want it to be this way forever," he said.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the tsunami swept away unplanned and possible illegal building, creating an opportunity to regulate growth.

"I have sent a team to collect information on damaged buildings, including hotels, resources and guest houses," he said. "We need the quick restoration of the tourist facilities there, but we also have to establish restrictions for building."

Some on Phi Phi Island agree.

"They were just building and building and building. It was too much. You couldn't even walk around," said Moriel Avital, a 24-year-old Israeli who lived on the island for four months.

"It was all gone in one wave it's telling people not to mess with nature," she said. "Paradise should be paradise and should not become this civilized."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

UPDATE 1/10/2005 4:33pm
...and Radley Balko agrees, though in a more, uhm, direct, way.

UPDATE 5:07pm
Add Jesse Walker to the Camp of the Disgusted, with particular emphasis on the choice of title for the Seattle Times article: Tsunami wipes out tourist beach clutter. These people are depraved.

Posted by drizzten at 01:06 PM | Permalink

Something In Your Living Room Wants All of Your Money

Someone in Washington, D.C. Thinks They Own You

• Don't support wars fought over economic interests...I don't support state war at all, especially when it's over two groups of thugs fighting over someone else's property.
• If We Aren't Supposed to eat Humans , Then Why Are They Made Out of Meat?...Support your local cannibalist!
• revolution begins with an individual...Very true.
• i buy beer for minors....Even better is the caption on the website: "A great way to advertise for your little business on the side. Making some money for yourself and helping out kids in need."
• Keep Corporations Out of Politics...and I'd start by keeping politics out of corporations...
• You Cannot Trust the Government - Just ask any Native American...Or anyone screwed by the FBI, ATF, FDA, DHS, FCC, IRS, USDA, CIA, DoD...
• The military state is the burden: not the welfare state....So close, yet so far.
• End Corporate Welfare Now!...And scrap the other kinds of welfare while you're at it.
• Chemicals Make Our Lives Better...Indeed they do. Couldn't have the bumper sticker without chemicals, could we?
• Wrench in the Gears...No text, but it is the thought that counts!
• Privitization of The Fire Department...Why not?
• First Amendment....You'd wonder what part of "Congress shall make no law" Congress hasn't understood for the last 200 years.
• To Serve and Protect? We live in a police state....We've a few more steps to take before it gets really bad, but we're certainly headed in the wrong direction.
• WARNING: In case of Rapture, I'm going to steal your car...There's a whole symposium of capitalist thought just waiting to occur regarding the delineation of individual property rights during the Tribulation, but I'd rather just laugh at Christians who have the "In case of Rapture, this vehicle will be unmanned" bumper sticker.

Posted by drizzten at 02:15 PM | Permalink

We've become accustomed to talking about all kinds of abstract capital in recent years - human capital, social capital, intellectual capital - but Bush's definition of political capital makes the metaphor particularly inapt. For one, you don't spend capital. You invest it. But Bush's understanding of the idea dictates that it be spent rather than saved. As Karl Rove put it in 2001, "If you don't spend it, it's not like treasure stuck away at a storehouse someplace. It is perishable. It dwindles away." What kind of economic message is that from a president who wants to encourage an ownership society?

-Chris Suellentrop, in America's New Political Capital on Slate

Bonus points for mentioning the Review of Austrian Economics and "hyper-inflating cash that has to be spent before it becomes worthless"!

Posted by drizzten at 10:08 AM | Permalink

Associated Press via ABCNews: Court Declines to Hear Gay Marriage Case

Critics of the November 2003 ruling by the highest court in Massachusetts argue that it violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government in each state. They lost at the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Their attorney, Mathew Staver, said in a Supreme Court filing that the Constitution should "protect the citizens of Massachusetts from their own state supreme court's usurpation of power."

Federal courts, he said, should defend people's right "to live in a republican form of government free from tyranny, whether that comes at the barrel of a gun or by the decree of a court."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Which entity is pursuing the legalized initiation of force (tyranny) against other people:

1. the courts of Massachusetts, which have allowed gay people to marry, or
   
2. you, who want to prevent - ultimately with the threat and use of deadly force - gay people to marry?

But in this case, you and your "pro-family" and "pro-marriage" cohorts are the ones advocating the greater tyranny. And let's be clear about this: you often talk about the majorities of Americans who don't want gay people to get married, as if that is some mandate to impose their opinions on others. Where's your defense of freedom of association in the face of this open attempt to have a tyranny of the majority?

Then, of course, there is the curious fact that someone is arguing for the most powerful court in the country to decree the ruling of lesser court invalid...on the grounds that court decrees can be tyrannical and against the republican system of governance.

Statists can sure be confusing sometimes.

Posted by drizzten at 11:19 AM | Permalink

From a Town Hall e-mail notice:

Dear Friends:

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of our 2004 annual Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom Awards.

But the news gets better yet, you are each invited to join with us and with His Excellency Martin Palous, Ambassador of the Czech Republic, at a reception at the Embassy of the Czech Republic December 1 to honor the recipients: The Honorable John M. Shimkus, Congressman from Illinois; Major General John Singlaub, U.S. Army (Ret.); and The Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Your presence would not only honor the awardees, it will support the important work of the Foundation. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a non-profit organization, was established by an Act of Congress to build a memorial in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the more than 100 million victims of communism; to pay tribute to those who helped win the Cold War; and to educate current and future generations about communism's crimes against humanity.

Even if you cannot attend, please consider making a donation. A generous donor has pledged to match your support dollar-for-dollar.

Tickets for this wonderful evening, which will feature food, wine, and beer from the formerly communist-ruled Czech Republic, musical entertainment, and a silent auction, are available now.

To purchase tickets, contribute, or to learn more details, please visit our website at http://www.victimsofcommunism.org or you may call Ms. Anne Meesman at (703)-525-4445.

Sincerely,

Dr. Lee Edwards, Chairman
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

• If you have to receive permission to do something, you don't have real freedom in that sphere of activity.
  
• If you have to apply for a license to own or operate something, you don't have real freedom in that sphere of activity.
  
• If you are told you must hand over some amount of your wealth on a regular basis or you'll be assaulted and detained, you do not have a fundamental realization of your freedom.
  
• If your life and property are at the mercy of legislatures, governors, regulators, and politicians, your life is fundamentally no different from the horrors suffered by the Cossacks.

However, the very essence of communism is the doctrine of collectivism, which elevates "the needs of society" over the "petty and selfish objections of the individual." You can see that fact buried within most socialist literature and argument. But anyone who pays attention can see that very same principle in action all over the world, 'round the clock, each and every year.

The differences are ones of degree, intent, and honesty. The victims remain.

Posted by drizzten at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Capitalism Magazine: Defending the Separation of Church and State: A Call to Liberals

At an emotional level, there are many liberals who would bristle at the claim that the separation of Church and State is but an empty slogan -- yet unless one rejects the Archbishop's root premise, there is no argument against his conclusion. The premise is that majority rules, or as the Archbishop puts it: "Lawmaking inevitably involves some group imposing its beliefs on the rest of us. That's the nature of the democratic process."

In fact, this nation was founded on the opposite idea: that each individual is sovereign, and that no tyranny, whether it be by king or democratic mob, can breach his sovereignty nor impose its beliefs on him.

Very soon after the Treaty of Peace, by which the Independence of the United States was recognized by the Government from which they had effected their separation, the want of a general superintending power over commerce, with the correlative power of taxation, was almost universally felt, and very generally deplored by the inhabitants of all the States, though not to the same extent in all.

It was easier to see the defect, and to feel the evils which flowed from it, than to provide the remedy. Intelligent citizens, however, soon busied themselves in devising the means of forming a Union, which should possess the requisite authority, and become the foundation of certain and durable prosperity.

And just what did those masses think would necessarily occur when that "superintending power over commerce" would be imposed? Were they concerned with an individual's right to engage in business transactions provided they were peaceful and honest? I'm sure they felt as equally sanguine about the "power of taxation."

What about George Washington's letter to the public?

In Convention, September 17, 1787

SIR:
We have now the honor to submit to the consideration of the United States in Congress assembled, that Constitution which has appeared to us the most desirable.

The friends of our country have long seen and desired that the power of making war, peace, and treaties, that of levying money, and regulating commerce, and the correspondent executive and judicial authorities, should be fully and effectively vested in the General Government of the Union; but the impropriety of delegating such extensive trust to one body of men is evident: hence results the necessity of a different organization.

It is obviously impracticable in the Federal Government of these States to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all. Individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. The magnitude of the sacrifice must depend as well on situation and circumstance, as on the object to be obtained.

That Constitution contained:

• Exemptions for Senators and House Representatives from arrest or questioning during their official activities.
  
• The Congressional power to "lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises;" to "provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;" "to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several States and with the Indian tribes;" "to coin money, regulate the value thereof;" "to establish post offices and post roads;" "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing, for limited times, to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" and the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus "when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it;" and so on.

To ensure the individual's sovereignty, the Founding Fathers established a constitutional republic whose governing principle was the protection of individual rights. And though its representatives were elected democratically, democracy in its root sense was not a characteristic of this form of government. Rather its essence was the strict limits imposed by the principle of individual rights on the purview of the government and its elected officials.

[...]

Moreover they understood that individual rights are absolutes; you either have them in their entirety (regardless of anyone's vote), or you don't have them at all (e.g. if they can be forfeit to the "democratic" impulses of the mob at any time).

Copyright 2004-1997 Capitalism Magazine. All rights reserved.

This doesn't even get into the very serious and very important problem of unanimous consent raised by Lysander Spoonder:

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living [more than two hundred] years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but "the people" then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves.

Posted by drizzten at 02:16 PM | Permalink

Via Arawak City:

The Destruction Of Society

by: Heretic

I write on fire inside
Stupid words, stupid words
A wish to move beyound words
Engulf this society in fire
CRUMBLE!
FALL!
BURN!
These fires
Outward fires
Of a molotov spittin'
Kerosein soaked rage
Rage at your commodified death
Rage at your human shooting "justified" by a badge
Forest felling cause it is good for the economy
Civil society

Posted by drizzten at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the Austin Chronicle's Postmarks Online for 11/11/2004:

Date Received: Tue., Nov. 9, 3:27PM

BOYCOTTING EXERCISES REAL POWER

Dear Editor,
Your government is dead. Corporation has become your real leader. Boycott! Voting is dead. Protest is dead. Political redress is dead. Boycott! Striking is dead. Rallying, demonstration, and appeal are dead. The airwaves are dead. Exercise your real power. Organize and boycott!

Stanley Gilbert

Date Received: Mon., Nov. 8, 2:29PM

WE WILL BURY YOU - A BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN THOUGHT

Dear Editor,
I may be swimming upstream here but I have never been more proud of the American people as I was after this election. For two years we read articles from professors, who can't get real jobs, claiming to know how to fight a war and run an economy. We were lectured by rock stars and actors, who know more about drugs than politics. We got to see the merger of the so-called mainstream media and the DNC in an effort to bring down our president. And of course we were reminded daily how the cowards on the European continent felt about us and our president. The American people responded to these pressures in typical American fashion. We gave them the middle finger and the Bronx cheer. That is precisely why we are unique and the greatest country the world has ever known.

As for my suicidal liberal brethren, please keep cozying up to people like Michael Moore and Eminem. Keep on trying to legalize drugs and pornography. Don't stop making fun of religion and attacking institutions like marriage. Continue with your stupid "die-ins" and loony MoveOn.org Web sites. Because you know what? You are not the majority! And the majority hates this kind of shit. You think this election was an aberration? Go look up how long the GOP has controlled both houses of Congress. Continue to label us stupid and unsophisticated and we will bury you. Then you really will know darkness and winter.

Greg Solcher

Now imagine there are millions of people like this living in the same country, same states, and same cities. Some are even in the same households.

Just some supporting anecdotes for Billy Beck's bleak vision.

Posted by drizzten at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Washington Times: Blue states buzz over secession

The idea [of "blue states" seceeding from the US] isn't just a joke; one top Democrat says, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government."

"Some would say, 'Oh, poor Alabama. It's cut off from the wealth infusion that it gets from New York and California,' " said Lawrence O'Donnell, a veteran Democratic insider and now senior political analyst at MSNBC. "But the more this political condition goes on at the presidential level of the red and blue states, the more you're testing the inclination of the blue states to say, 'So what?' "

Mr. O'Donnell raised the subject of secession on "The McLaughlin Group" during the weekend. "Ninety percent of the red states are welfare-client states of the federal government," said Mr. O'Donnell, who was an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat.

In a telephone interview, Mr. O'Donnell said the red states that went to Mr. Bush "collect more from the federal government than they send in. New York and California, Connecticut — the states that are blue are all the states that are paying for the bulk of everything this government does, from ... Social Security to everything else, and the people in those states don't like what this government is doing."

Copyright 2004 News World Communications, Inc.

What a great way to end the work week. I'm laughing at these welfare statists who cannot understand the irony of their complaint. When did they start getting huffy about wealth redistribution?

Via The Last Ditch

Posted by drizzten at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Washington Post: Lawyer Facing Terror Charge Cites Need for Violence

A New York lawyer facing charges of supporting terrorism told a federal jury that she viewed violence as essential to dismantling institutions that perpetuate "sexism and racism."

As a federal prosecutor questioned her statements and support for a "people's revolution," Lynne Stewart, 65, testified that her lifelong philosophy included fighting "entrenched ferocious capitalism that is in this country today."

"I believe that entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence," Stewart said. "I believe in the politics that lead to violence being exerted by people on their own behalf to effectuate change."

� 2004 The Washington Post Company

Would it be wrong to say the inherently violent institution known as government has been attempting to dismantle social pathologies like sexism and racism for decades though the use of violence, direct and implied? I wonder if Ms. Stewart would support the dismantlement of the reverse racism of affirmative action.

Posted by drizzten at 02:30 PM | Permalink

TheKCRAChannel.com: Woman Drops Sunflower Seed, Pays $185 Fine

An Oklahoma City woman was still angry Thursday after she received a hefty fine for discarding a sunflower seed.

Police cited Tricia Morgan for littering after she dropped the seed at an intersection about five months ago. The Oklahoma City Municipal Court upheld the fine after she challenged it.

� 2004, Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc.

Via Hit & Run.

Posted by drizzten at 09:28 AM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

National Review Online: Capitalism Beats Socialism, Once Again

When Jackie Gleason played the character of Joe the Bartender, one of his famous lines was, "Mmmmmmm, how sweet it is!" For Republicans, the outcome of the 2004 national election couldn't be any sweeter. Same for investors. The bull market in stocks is now likely to resume, and it should sustain for some time to come.

Why? Once again, capitalism triumphed over socialism.

The confirmation that the 2004 election was a victory for capitalism was reflected in the unexpected victories of Republicans running for the Senate. The split will now be 55 Republican, 44 Democrat, 1 independent. The defeat of obstructionist Democrat Tom Daschle, minority leader in the Senate, signals a "fresh new start" for the Senate minority party. President Bush's ability to get more from a Republican-dominated Senate should not be underestimated - especially by investors.

In contrast [to President Clinton's fiscal approach], today we have a confirmed capitalist as our president and a capitalist majority in the Congress. By the middle of 2005, the Iraq war should be winding down, oil prices should be moderating, lower tax rates will be in effect, and global prosperity will be on the rise. The stock market should be moving higher and eclipsing the record highs of the year 2000 as a result of these changes.

Finally, President Bush will be in a position to nominate a number of Supreme Court justices during the next four years, an important factor in keeping capitalism the driving force in America. Ironically, even the beaten socialists will benefit from the capitalist system they detest.

*puke*

• drugs
  
• labor
  
• wages
  
• firearms
  
• steel
  
• health care
  
• retirement accounts and pensions
  
• person-to-person association
  
• Canadian lumber
  
• South Korean computer chips
  
• Vietnamese catfish
  
• Chinese and Pakistani textiles
  
• Chinese and Vietnamese shrimp

How fucking sad is it that the superficial differences between the whiny Democrat statism offered this election and the abusive Republican statism that won this election are so beyond being taken for granted that columnists have to resort to baldfaced stupidity to feel good about winning an election.

UPDATE 11/12/2004 3:50pm
Anthony Gregory has some related things to say, as well as a rather convoluted free market anarchist argument for George W. Bush.

UPDATE 11/17/2004 10:28am
Buzzflash contributor Marc McDonald also gets it, even though I have suspicions that if pressed, he wouldn't be as ardent a defender of capitalism as he comes off in this article. Notice how not a word is spent on economic regulation.

Posted by drizzten at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I paraphrase:

People don't want to be told how to vote and live their lives by people like Michael Moore.

-Cliff May, today on News from CNN

What about the people who don't want anyone to tell them how to live and then bring the threat of government force against them if they fail to comply?

Posted by drizzten at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Business Report & Independent Online: Ryanair lays bare anarchy of individualist capitalism

The notion that Nationwide Airlines would charge a wheelchair-bound passenger for assistance in accessing the plane represents individualist capitalism taken to its brutal and logical extreme.

At this extreme, the cost of everything is deconstructed and allocated to individual consumers and you either pay or don't get access to the service or product.

I'll give Ms. Crotty a nod of appreciation for recognizing that this is a logical extension of capitalist rhetoric.

The most famous proponent of this extremism is Michael O' Leary in his management of Ryanair, one of the most successful budget airlines in the world.

In a bid to offer the cheapest flights on any route, Ryanair has identified a cost structure in which a price is attributed to every aspect of a plane trip.

One of the airline's near-term goals is to discourage passengers from using luggage that needs to be put in the hold as Ryanair knows precisely how much this costs.

Encouragement will be done in the free market manner, which is to charge passengers for any luggage they want stored in the hold.

The traditional frills that have been done away with include free refreshments, free newspapers, allocated seats and free transport of golf bags.

This is remarkably efficient and ensures that passengers who don't play golf are not subsidising golf-playing passengers.

This cost deconstruction does, however, have its limitations as it only includes costs identified by management.

To be absolutely pure, the airline should also be charged for the externalities it generates, such as damage to the environment. This additional cost could then be allocated to each traveler.

Why are passengers charged to "consume" a seat on a plane? Because they want the privilege of using that airline's property for a defined period of time and they don't own the seat or the plane. Since the airline must pay for the costs it incurs for running the company, the best way to recoup those costs is through airfares its customers must pay. At the heart of this economic exchange are two things: the voluntary choices each side makes and the private property each side possesses that the other wants to have.

So what about the externality of pollution? Well, look back to the above. Who owns the "environment"? Assuming we are talking about your typical nation, we might expect to hear that "the people" own the environment. But that isn't true. In reality, the government claims and exercises actual ownership of the environment. Unfortunately, the notion of "public property" is thoroughly contradictory, as I mentioned in that post. Ownership of the environment only makes sense when individuals are the owners.

So, in that case, the damage done by the airline's operations is determined by each property owner that is physically impacted by those operations. Therefore, only the land owners who have a legitimate claim should ask for remuneration for damages. Though it is entirely possible the landowners would band together to increase their bargaining power with the airline, it is similarly possible several landowners would negotiate by themselves. Throughout this process, something crucial is achieved: the very subjective value of the cost of the damage done to the surrounding property is defined by the stakeholders of that property. Expecting a government agency or some commission to magically set a price of pollution per square foot per fifty yards of distance from the airline's path of operations may sound reasonable, but it neglects the fact that each landowner values different parts of his or her property differently. Thus, the just value of the damage is much closer to what the owner wants.

Furthermore, it isn't the traveler who creates these external costs. The airline is responsible for them, so the traveler shouldn't be forced to pay them. Of course, since the airline must earn the money to pay for any legitimate costs, the traveler will end up paying for at least part of them anyway. For a more technical analysis of externalities, see Why Externalities Are Not a Case of Market Failure (PDF).

Anyway, Ryanair believed that wheelchairs also represented a frill. Until a year ago, the airline charged passengers for wheelchairs.

At the end of last year, a London court ruled that Ryanair had acted unlawfully by not providing a wheelchair free of charge after the British Disability Rights Commission brought an action on behalf of Bob Ross, who suffered from cerebral palsy and arthritis.

While travelling from Stansted airport to France in 2002, Ross was charged �18 (R205) for the use of a wheelchair to take him from the check-in desk to the plane and the same fee on his return trip.

This represented a substantial addition to Ryanair's one-way fare of �10.

Ryanair said the airport's owners, British Airports Authority (BAA), should pay for wheelchairs. "We fly to 86 airports and at 80 of them wheelchairs are provided free of charge," said a Ryanair spokesperson at the time.

BAA replied that it did provide them free up to the check-in, but the cost of the airside movement had to be met by the relevant airline. It said all other carriers complied with this policy.

Lawyers acting for Ross told the court that Ryanair had tried to categorise the use of a wheelchair as a frill. In the year to March 2002, Ryanair carried 6.6 million passengers, of whom 7,296 had requested wheelchairs. If the costs of the wheelchairs had been shared by all passengers, it would have added 2p to each fare.

In response to the ruling, Ryanair said it would charge a e0.73 (R5.80) levy on all passengers to meet the costs of providing wheelchairs at Dublin, Shannon, Stansted and Gatwick airports.

Although the principle appears to be the same, the situation at Nationwide is a little different. Passengers who need a wheelchair to access the plane have to pay R650 for each one-way flight to cover the cost of the passenger aid unit that Nationwide has to borrow from another airline.

Apparently, the other airlines do not charge for this facility as they own aid units and presumably don't charge for depreciation and replacement costs.

Ryanair's wheelchair policy and its response to the ruling have been enthusiastically endorsed by free market extremists who reckon it throws open an important issue.

"Interest groups often press for special treatment at the expense of others. People often agree to give it because they think the group is deserving and because they have not thought through how the service is to be paid for," writes one fundamentalist.

"By making the charging transparent, as Ryanair has done, people will be forced to think about whether the interest group really is deserving, and if they decide that it is, face up to supporting that view with their own money."

Searching around, it appears Geoffrey E. Wood wrote that in the abstract to his article "Who Pays for Wheelchairs?" in the June 2004 issue of Economic Affairs. I say Mr. Wood has it right. People all to blithely demand others should sacrifice for the needy without seriously considering just what is being sacrificed and who is doing the sacrificing. For example, imagine the gut-churning horror politicians would experience if everyone had to pay their taxes on election day...all at once and in full. The electorate would face the stark reality of what their government demands of them in response to their demands of government. I see nothing wrong with this. It is certainly the most open and honest way of conducting things. Hiding costs through withholdings and paycheck deductions obscures the real transactions going on.

Essentially, this view suggests we should query deserving claims and in satisfying ourselves that each claim is or isn't deserving, ignore any human sensitivities.

How completely sad is that idea? As though most of us don't enjoy a better life through an accident of birth rather than any appropriate recompense for personally honed attributes.

Again, being crippled or ill or disabled does not entitle you to some special realm of rights that others cannot have. The concept of rights doesn't bend that way.

It is great that Ryanair's cheap flights have enabled a lot of people to travel, but by encouraging consumers to take an individualised view of life, the airline has highlighted the destructive anarchy of individualist capitalism.

�2004 Business Report & Independent Online (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved.

This is the elevation of the collective over the individual and that desire is responsible for more death, destruction, chaos, and theft on this planet than anything else.

Ann Crotty was unable to show how the policies of these airlines are destructive. What I suppose she wants (the state managing how much the airlines should pay for the disabled) is. She wants an arbitrary amount of resources forced into the service of a customer need that will not remain static and predictable. Those resources will then be wasted as will the manpower to implement and manage them.

Finally, she obviously has a disdain for systems without formalized and enforced rules, otherwise popularly known as the turbulent demon Anarchy. But she refutes herself earlier up in the article:

At this extreme, the cost of everything is deconstructed and allocated to individual consumers and you either pay or don't get access to the service or product.

[...]

In a bid to offer the cheapest flights on any route, Ryanair has identified a cost structure in which a price is attributed to every aspect of a plane trip.

One of the airline's near-term goals is to discourage passengers from using luggage that needs to be put in the hold as Ryanair knows precisely how much this costs.

Encouragement will be done in the free market manner, which is to charge passengers for any luggage they want stored in the hold.

[...]

This is remarkably efficient...

Posted by drizzten at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Via John Lopez of No Treason, I hear of something that should surprise no one who understands that stakes of what is involved: King County Council OK's controversial limits on developing rural land

The King County Council approved rules last night that would restrict development on rural land, over objections that the changes are draconian and would entangle the county in lawsuits.

[...]

The most controversial of the changes would require rural residents to leave between one-third and one-half of their land in a natural state, depending on lot size.

[...]

"I'm getting calls to recommend attorneys every day," said Rodney McFarland, president of the Citizens' Alliance for Property Rights. "What kind of society would we be if we let this go through without a legal challenge?"

But opponents yesterday said that argument -- and the scientific studies cited by King County -- were too weak to withstand a court challenge.

They contend the county hasn't shown that the public benefit from the sweeping regulations would outweigh the harm done to private property owners by requiring them to leave the majority of their land untouched.
�1996-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Because the county is bound by the state Growth Management Act to update regulations based on the latest scientific studies, doing nothing is legally and morally unacceptable, said Councilman Dow Constantine, D-Seattle.

"For generations to come, this legislation will help prevent flooding and erosion and protect our drinking water, streams and wetlands from being degraded by new development," said Constantine, who authored compromises on the legislation.

Posted by drizzten at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Updates below.]

Jay Jardine points out an example of turning the jackasses in government against themselves. In Fight Every Ticket, he proposes "Costly to Govern" as a fitting epitaph for his gravestone, thus providing the title of this post.

The biggest problem with resolutely standing your ground, middle fingers pointed skyward and aimed at The Law and Its Enforcers, are the liabilities the state has assumed you owe it once you break its rules:

1. Permanent criminal records that most employers might check, thereby possibly making you less attractive as a future hire
   
2. Court fines, legal fees (assuming you don't represent yourself), and the uncountable opportunity costs of spending your time resisting the state
   
3. Revocation of any or all the "privileges" the state grants you; for example, in the case of Texas that means prohibitions against driving on anything other than private roads
   
4. Warrants issued against your name allowing the police to arrest you at will
   
5. Incarceration and/or property seizure, if convicted.

I'm driving home from a friend's house after having three Lone Star beers and a few bong hits over a period of two hours. I'm driving home at my usual velocity, which is to say 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit. I'm spotted by a cop and pulled over. Imagine what I face now:

1. A misdemeanor (< $200) for not getting my car re-inspected
   
2. A misdemeanor (< $200) for not getting my car re-registered
   
3. The cost of the speeding ticket which varies depending on the mood of the officer and whether or not I've taken the safety course in a year:
   • Driver Safety Course: $95.00
     
   • Speeding - up to 25 MPH over speed limit: $236.00
     
   • Speeding - up to 10 MPH over speed limit: $146.00
     
   • Failure to respond on or before court date: $191.00
     
     1. Arrest warrant fee charged for the above: $50.00
        
     2. Denial of driver's license renewal DPS fee for the above: $30.00
   
   
4. If the cop smells beer on me and asks me to take a breathalyzer test, I am "subject to an automatic 180-day driver's license suspension" if I refuse to comply
   
5. If the cop decides to bust me for "intoxication" due to detecting marijuana on me, I face the following possible penalties for a first DWI offense:
   • up to a $2,000 fine
     
   • 72 hours to 180 days in jail
     
   • driver's license suspension: 90 days to 1 year

Would it be worth fighting these charges in the parallel hopes of getting them either dismissed or reduced and imposing extra costs on a government grown used to having its way with us? That's up for each of you to decide. Personally, an episode like the one above would be disastrous for me if I were convicted of everything and handed even the minimum punishments. I don't have the financial leeway to dabble in legal proceedings and no lawyer would want to take up my real argument against the whole affair; I'd have to settle with a lawyer who fights the case on technical grounds or appeals to my status as a good citizen.

*choke*

But the costs imposed on the State of Texas would far outweigh the costs imposed on me. The grinding machine of justice would have to accommodate my presence in the system. State employees would have to allocate resources to prosecute me, judge me, punish me, detain me, and file me. I guarantee their real, absolute costs would far exceed mine. Would it make a difference?

Probably not. I'd be a speck of a percentage in the general budgets of the City of Austin, Travis County, and the State of Texas. The coerced taxpayer foots the bill for these services, so it isn't like they respond to costs like a normal entity would. Nothing would be repealed unless I found a continuous line of astoundingly sympathetic judges and juries willing to overturn long-established laws and practices on principles that would threaten the government's ability to manage our lives.

In the end, I'd be out at least hundreds of dollars I don't have and hundreds of hours better I'd rather spend on...drinking beer, getting stoned, and hanging out with friends. For all that inconvenience, the governments involved would barely burp. Would the satisfaction of knowing I decisively won the battle of absolute costs while utterly losing the battle of relative costs be enough to justify the resistence? Not for me.

It doesn't seem fair because it isn't.

UPDATE 10/28/2004 10:22am
Related thoughts from Billy Beck.

UPDATE 1/28/2005 11:51am
Hypocrisy or Consistency?

UPDATED 6/8/2005 2:51am
An Austin Parking Ticket

UPDATED 7/24/2007 4:36pm
Jury Duty

Posted by drizzten at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Apparently, many people believe I don't have the right to complain about the state of the country and its political direction if I don't vote. Well, I don't intend on voting for any candidates this election, so on November 3rd, will I have the right to complain? Two questions:

1. If I were to assume that the act of complaining takes the form of voicing, writing, or otherwise communicating my complaint, does that mean I should be silenced? If not, then how would losing that right translate into me being allowed to complain after an election?
   
2. If my complaints were based on my refusal to endorse the political process because any serious candidate for office explicitly endorses and advocates the existence of government and its associated functions against the will of countless individuals and therefore since no candidate will ever fulfill what I want, what am I supposed to do? Voting for Bush, Kerry, Badnarik, Peroutka, or anyone else means violating a fundamental oath and prinicple of mine to never impose my will on others by force, and that is the purpose of voting.

Posted by drizzten at 03:12 PM | Permalink

Should a Christian Join the Military?

The larger question of whether a Christian (or anyone opposed to the federal leviathan) should work for the state is not at issue. Someone employed by the state as a teacher, a mailman, a security guard, or a park ranger is providing a lawful, moral, non-aggressive, non-intrusive service that is in the same manner also provided by the free market. Thus, it might be argued that working for the BATF, the CIA, the FBI, or as a regulation-enforcing federal bureaucrat is off limits, whereas these other occupations are not.

Mr. Vance, you are entirely incorrect.

Teachers, mailmen, security guards, and park rangers (the kind we'd see in private facilities, NOT these guys) employed in a free market are indeed providing a non-coercive, non-aggressive, moral service. Why?

• Because their employment is based on voluntary agreement with their employer;
  
• because they choose to accept the wages and benefits offered by the employer in exchange for their labor and time;
  
• and, more importantly, because their employers operate in the context of a free market themselves.

Someone employed by the state as a teacher, a mailman, a security guard, or a park ranger is providing a lawful, moral, non-aggressive, non-intrusive service that is in the same manner also provided by the free market.

Taxes are theft, wealth taken from citizens through the threat of violence against them and their property. The state does not and cannot respond to market demand for the services it offers (or forces on us) the same way a private entity can and does. Funding levels for the park service are based at least as much on political expediency as the reality of the service's needs. Anyone paying attention to the public school financing debacle in Texas knows how teachers are funded is utterly divorced from their value. Assuming Mr. Vance is euphemistically referring to the state's law enforcement officers as "security guards," I have to point out that the very important service they are supposed to provide (securing us from crime) is all-too often engaged in of violating the very basic crimes of aggression, coercion, theft, and fraud. I've yet to meet any state-employed mailmen because the United States Postal Service is a federal agency. Regardless, I'd be just as opposed to a Texas Department of Postal Service as I am to the USPS. By what right do these entities operate at the expense of everyone else?

Which brings me to the final point.

The larger question of whether a Christian (or anyone opposed to the federal leviathan) should work for the state is not at issue.

Of course not. They are all governments and they are all actively engaged in forcing us around, taking away our time and wealth, and attempting to substitute their judgment for ours on an ever-expanding set of issues. I don't bestow upon the governments of New Mexico, Wisconsin, or Ohio any more legitimacy or benevolence than the USG. Why should I? They all operate on the same principle: the individual should be subordinated to the collective for altruistic, utilitarian, and pragmatic reasons. Sure, Americans have the choice of living in one of 50 states and a number of sub-units throughout this country. That doesn't mean there is a free market of government in action. It just means you get to pick which bureaucracy gets to tamper with you and the things you value.

This is the first time I've encountered Mr. Vance's writing so I'm unfamiliar with his political philosophy. But if what he has revealed here is any indication, I think I'll have some problems with it in the future.

Posted by drizzten at 03:50 PM | Permalink

The recent much-admired Mark Steyn article contains something worth pointing out that cuts straight to the heart of the Iraq Affair: The Quality of Mersey

If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that's the way to go: If you're kidnapped, accept you're unlikely to survive, say "I'll show you how an Englishman dies", and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you're a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq - so say yes, you're an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley's word, "enough". A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.

I found the article in a number of blogs, but decided to comment on the Samizdata thread featuring it. Here's what I said:

A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.

Now there's some ugly collectivist sentiment. Consider its implications, people.

Now there's some ugly collectivist sentiment. Consider its implications, people.

The implications? Sure, in a war, some innocent people will get killed and whilst that is regrettable, it is also inevitable. That is the reality of war. Get over it.

Also, like so many of the brain-dead variety of libertarians, you probably think you have a right to leave your lights on at night during an air raid... but you do not because what would be a right under normal conditions is trumpted by the right to life of others when there is a war on.

snide,

You think it "brain-dead" to point out statements that implicitly advocate the government (that entity which wages war) being more important than the individual (the government subjects caught up in it)? I'm unsure of your political leanings, but I find support of suppressing my freedom at ANY time contemptible. Rights don't just go away when you want them to.

I'll leave my lights on when I damn well please to and if a neighbor wants to try and strop me, he'd better at least have the balls to force me in person to turn them off rather than have the state to it by proxy. My rights come into clear view at that moment when the aggressor in the situation becomes apparent.

They must be called on it.

Posted by drizzten at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's self-interest that's bringing us together.

-Executive director of the League of Conservation Voters Deborah Callahan

It is self-interest that drives and sustains economic growth. All actors within a system will tend to seek outcomes that improve their standing, based on their own subjective values and standards. Self-interest means Wal-Mart expands operations, environmentalists seek to clean the air, and large numbers of high school graduates quickly enroll in college. My desire to improve my life leads me to engage in economic exchanges every day.

And note to self: the next time you hear someone claim the League of Conservation Voters is "non-partisan," call bullshit right there and mention this.

Posted by drizzten at 10:37 AM | Permalink

Reason: You May Already Be A Winner

These calculations suggest that, contrary to John Kerry and other critics, the Bush income tax cuts have in fact put real money in the pockets of typical American families.

No.

The Bush income tax cuts have in fact left more money in the pockets of typical American families. Cutting taxes means the government takes less of our wealth. Furthermore, the government cannot put money into our pockets without stealing or coercing it from someone else. That's one reason I feel queasy about accepting my income tax return check.

But both Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Snell still right regarding the intent of the article. Because the wealthy pay an exorbitantly large percentage of federal taxation, when taxes are cut for all income brackets, they will save an exorbitantly large amount that would have otherwise been taxed. See: How US Taxes Work.

Posted by drizzten at 02:03 PM | Permalink

Who "won?" Entropy, my fellow Americans. The Democrats offer no challenge to the fundamentals of Republican foreign policy. Republicans no longer present any philosophical objection to Democratic economic policy.

-Jim Henley

Here's what I heard and saw for most of the debate:

We need this much government!	No, we need this much government!

This goes back to what I wrote in The Democratic Party - The Party of Personal Liberty?:

Economic liberty (ostensibly proposed by the GOP) and social liberty (ostensibly proposed by the Democrats) are merely offshoots of the same concept: individual liberty. Neither party supports individual liberty without contradiction. Conservatives wish to preserve tradition and a kind of social morality, often at the expense of liberty. Liberals wish to improve socio-economic conditions for the lower rungs of society and for the overlooked/disadvantaged/etc., regularly at the expense of personal liberty.

Which isn't and shouldn't be surprising. It's a direct result of attempting to be the most popular representative in your district and when so many districts comprise a diverse ocean of people the only way to survive is to abandon principle and jump on pragmatism.

At least the Veep debate was entertaining. The first Bush-Kerry matchup wasn't.

Posted by drizzten at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wall Street Journal: Found in Translation

I remember one evening in Damascus this summer. Normally the streets would have been packed well past midnight with young couples and Gulf tourists taking advantage of the cool desert breezes. But that night the streets were deserted. Indeed, for two hours every summer Sunday and Monday night, countless Arab communities across the Middle East and North Africa sat huddled around their sets to take part in "Super Star," the Arab version of "American Idol."

The format of the Lebanon-based program is similar to its prototype: Aspiring pop stars compete their way through ever-winnowing rounds, this time singing a modern and classical Arab favorites, until a winner stands alone. To decide who moves on, audience members cast their votes through the Internet, an automated telephone service and cell-phone text-messaging.

[...]

If the Arab people cannot choose their political representatives free from coercion, at least now they can select a cultural representative to champion their musical tastes.

What is the point of being able to uncoercively choose your representatives when those very representatives will be coercing you and your neighbors through their laws and regulations?

Link via Andrew Sullivan, who calls his post "Idolizing Democracy." Unintentional humor, I must assume.

Posted by drizzten at 12:38 PM | Permalink

CNNMoney: Socialism is on the run in the NFL

Capitalism is coming to the most successful socialist state the planet has ever known: the National Football League.

The league has turned revenue sharing and parity on the field into the core tenets of its business religion. But in recent years, it has been quietly taking steps to give teams greater ability to go after sponsorship dollars on their own.

In March, the NFL made little-noticed moves, such as allowing teams to sign deals with local sponsors that allow use the team logos. Teams also can go after local beer and soft drink sponsorship deals that compete with NFL national sponsors Coors and Pepsi.

But those changes, while they seem minor, will mean tens of millions to the larger market teams. Those are dollars they won't have to share with the other owners, and money that will be out of reach for some other smaller market owners.

� 2004 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Part of the problem is just what is meant by socialism. I view it as any social system that uses coercion and force in the form of the collective state to accomplish goals. That's a very broad, but accurate description. I view capitalism as the opposite: a social system that relies on voluntary mutual interactions for individuals to accomplish goals. Obviously, that is a explicitly anarchist society.

But let's assume that by socialism, Mr. Isidore means a common-knowledge sort of governmental entity, the kind that is immediately summoned in one's mind when it's mentioned. Say, somewhere between Cuba and Canada. The official goals of each state, of course, are benevolent and intended to help people who need it and correct what are perceived as social injustices. Cuba embodies the nastier side of socialism with it's harsher direct control over individual Cubans while Canada still allows a good deal of individual freedom for Canadians to employ.

Does that "middle-ground socialism" mean that the people under it are more equal than in more capitalist countries? That more sharing occurs? I'd like to see some evidence to support this. The talk must be backed by the walk, so to speak. Are wage disparities smaller in socialist countries? Is there a higher level of charitable work and donation? Are living conditions homogenous throughout the land? Do the rulers of these countries exist on the same economic level as their subjects?

Posted by drizzten at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Hit & Run an article from the New York Times Magazine: Is Voting Worth the Trouble?

Why does voting in a presidential election feel at the same time both terribly important and utterly pointless? There is a paradox here, and it is not easy to make it go away. On the one hand, casting a ballot on Election Day strikes us as a kind of civic obligation; neglecting to do so is perhaps not so serious as neglecting to file a tax return, but it is still something you feel guilty about. On the other hand, nearly half of those Americans who are eligible to vote evidently don't think that it's worth the bother. And, in a sense, they're right.

Some nonvoters, no doubt, couldn't care less about which candidate wins. (The ancient Greeks had a word for a person who is indifferent to public affairs in this way: idiotes, or idiot.)

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

From SearchGodsWord:

Definition

1. a private person as opposed to a magistrate, ruler, king
   
2. a common soldier, as opposed to a military officer
   
3. a writer of prose as opposed to a poet
   
4. in the NT, an unlearned, illiterate, man as opposed to the learned and educated: one who is unskilled in any art

Translated Words
KJV (5) - ignorant, 1; rude, 1; unlearned, 3;

NAS (5) - ungifted, 1; ungifted man, 1; ungifted men, 1; unskilled, 1; untrained, 1

Idios, Greek, of an individial, peculiar to one person; compare idiotes Greek, a private person. Idiot and idiocy obviously contain this root. They derive from idiotes which was the word for a private person, as opposed to a person of rank and influence holding public office in ancient Greece. Hence, it was supposed, an idiotes was ignorant and stupid. The ancient Greeks were rather free in their putdowns of common people.

Jim Holt ends with this, emphasis in the original:

The moral, if there is one, is to vote out of duty, not self-interest. Why duty? For the simple reason that (as the Marquis de Condorcet once suggested) the more people who vote, the greater the chance of a happy result -- provided that each person is more likely to vote for the superior candidate.

On the other hand, perhaps I can now feel at home being called an idiot. I certainly don't like voting: The Austin American-Statesman, Voting, Free Speech, and Information...A Libertarian for Bush?...Whom to Vote For?.

Posted by drizzten at 10:09 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

I can't recall when this first started appearing on the front page of the Statesman's website, but it is absolutely noteworthy:

Want your voice heard? First you have to register.

If I want my "voice" heard, I have an uncountable number of options available to me:

• I can make a sign and place it in my window at home.
  
• I can put a bumper sticker on my car.
  
• I can literally speak my mind into a voice recorder and put it online for others to download and listen to.
  
• I can operate a blog (hell, any kind of website) and write as many thousands of words as I want.
  
• I can go to any local pub or bar and start up conversations with strangers.
  
• I can write articles to the thousands of newspapers, news magazines, periodicals, and journals around the world.
  
• I can write letters to the editor of just about any publication.
  
• I can start a band that focuses on what I want to say and tour the music scene.
  
• I can buy or make a T-shirt that says something with which I agree.

What I don't need to do is register with the state. That term alone should send chills up your spine. It should make you rethink the entire enterprise. The idea of having to register for anything should scare you, be it a car, a handgun, a marriage, or your very birth.

We are repetitively exhorted to believe that our votes are our way of "talking" to politicians in the one manner they cannot ignore. I call bullshit on that. What kind of message do you think you send with a vote? What information are you trying to convey? What data does a vote contain? And how are politicians and their staffs supposed to decipher this?

Let's say I'm a good-hearted Austinite lefty who wants Bush out of office. Let's say I think we need immediate Kyoto ratification, higher taxes on the rich and corporations, and much stronger restrictions on international trade in order to protect domestic industries and workers. So I vote for John Kerry because he's more likely to replace Bush and enact the policies I want pushed. What happens?

Living in Travis County, that means I get to record my Presidential vote on Hart InterCivic's eSlate electronic voting system. My precious few bytes of data are then recorded and tabulated with the rest of the county. The result is passed on to the Secretary of State and confirmed. Of course, since Texans will give the majority of their votes to Bush, Texas's electoral college members will very likely vote for Bush when their time comes. But my vote is still recorded in the final count.

Does John F. Kerry get my message? Does George W. Bush witness my displeasure with his actions and reconsider them? What about their respective advisors? Will they say, "Looks like Charles Hueter doesn't like Bush and wants Kerry instead. Better recalibrate a little" and tweak their campaigns in the future?

Furthermore, how would they tweak their campaigns? My vote isn't a list of things I want done. It's a statement of support for two people to become President and Vice President over other choices. It doesn't explain my positions and recommendations on welfare, taxes, the environment, workers' compensation, terrorism, Social Security, campaign finance reform, property rights, the war in Iraq, civil rights, medical marijuana, obesity, economic growth, morality, or abortion. Sure, there are general trends one can discern by picking one team over another, but you cannot tell what my actual positions are on those and hundreds of other issues. You can't tell how I rank them in importance. You can't tell the degree I want them implemented. You can't tell the specific details of what I want to happen. You can't tell if I loathe John Kerry but loathe Bush even more. You can't tell if I just barely pass Texas's standards for mental competence. You can't tell if I'm lying and doing this as a joke. You can't tell if I'm drunk and accidentally picked the wrong guy and wasn't sober enough to realize it.

*scoff*

You can't even tell if I'm alive or dead:

• Officials: Man Dead For 20 Years Registers To Vote
  
• 1,000 cases of suspicious voter registrations
  
• Voter rolls may lose 190,000 names
  
• Why is Florida's voting system so corrupt?
  
• Voters Invalid: registration records questioned

In essence, all the crucial information that your opinion contains on a host of political issues - the technical elements that make your voice unique among others and truly differentiate you from your opponents - is stripped bare by the voting process, leaving the candidates and public with a vague and generalized sense of what they think you want. This applies with no less magnitude towards local elections. In their case, you've got a range of problems that usually have immediate and close impact on you and your neighbors. By voting, you become another cog that simply says "yes" or "no." And then you leave all the details up to your representative...assuming you were lucky enough for that person to get elected. In the opposite case, your beliefs are simply ignored.

By voting, your voice loses it's ability to argue, to persuade, to change minds. It loses it's power. And the vote advocators end up twisting in knots trying to get an outcome that doesn't suck; an example would be a libertarian voting for Bush.

Contrariwise, all that vital information is left intact though the methods I listed above. Communicating that way allows more to be transmitted...even if it's restricted to asinine sloganeering and recklessly ignorant action. At the least, you can approach me and find out more. That is fantastically difficult for most politicians to do.

So I react with deep horror when I read something that says:

Want your voice heard? First you have to register.

UPDATE 10/4/2004 8:29am
The herd handlers are getting excited.

News8Austin: Marathon voter registration rushes to beat deadline

Time is running out for non-registered voters wanting to vote in the Nov. 2 elections. Midnight Oct. 4 is the deadline to register.

Posted by drizzten at 05:14 PM | Permalink

In "I'm Proud to be an American", the protagonist is proud to be an American because "I have God to watch me".

I'm surprised that the National Reconnaissance Office would mention the competition like that.

-Hit & Run Commenter "Trey"

Posted by drizzten at 04:44 PM | Permalink

Courier-Journal: Doctors prepared to do face transplant

Even as ethicists and others raise concerns, a team of doctors from Louisville and the Netherlands says it is ready to perform a face transplant.

"There arrives a point in time when the procedure should simply be done. We submit that that time is now," the researchers wrote in an article scheduled for publication today in The American Journal of Bioethics.

The article, by the team from the University of Louisville and the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, explores the ethical and psychological issues, and physical risks, involved in a transplant that would attach the face of a dead donor to someone with a severely disfigured face, such as the victim of a serious burn or accident.

Although researchers will not say when such a transplant would be done, they are taking steps toward the first operation, which would be considered clinical research.

"Previous research and current understanding indicate that the psychological risks are more complex and extensive than the Louisville team suggest," [Nichola Rumsey of the University of the West of England] wrote. "I have no wish to minimize the distress experienced by many people with severe disfigurements, but to my mind, the current risk/benefit ratio ... is dubious at best."

[...]

"Our position is that face transplantation could now be performed," wrote three surgeons from Henri-Mondor Hospital in Paris. "The switch from 'could' to `should' depends on the ethical conditions surrounding the procedure."

Copyright 2004 The Courier-Journal.

Posted by drizzten at 05:03 PM | Permalink

Associated Press via ABCNews: Haymarket Memorial Marks Ill. Labor Rally

For years, visitors at the troubled site of Haymarket Square left disappointed: Only a plaque marked the spot where a bomb thrown during an 1886 labor rally killed seven police officers and led to the executions of anarchists unjustly convicted of the crime.

Police viewed it as a place where their fellow officers died in the line of duty. Social activists went there to honor the memory of those wrongly convicted. Union supporters considered it a crucible in the labor movement's history.

Anti-labor hysteria gripped the country after the bombing, and the site's legacy in Chicago was too contentious to support a memorial. Now, a large sculpture has been dedicated there, and text on the memorial acknowledges that Haymarket's significance "touches on the issues of free speech, the right of public assembly, organized labor, the fight for the eight-hour workday, law enforcement, justice, anarchy and the right of every human being to pursue an equitable and prosperous life."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Chicago Sun-Times: After 138 years, Haymarket memorial to be unveiled

The story of the Haymarket Incident is rich in themes that resonate to this day.

It was a time when Americans felt threatened by terrorists. When suspicion fell heavily on certain groups of immigrants. When basic civil rights, such as free speech, were under attack in the name of national security.

On May 3, 1886, two men were killed by police outside a McCormick reaper factory on the Southwest Side, where striking workers were demanding an eight-hour day.

The following night, several thousand protesters, outraged by the killings, turned out for a rally at the Haymarket, west of today's Loop. One flier promoting the rally -- and this really alarmed the police -- called for "revenge" and encouraged workers to fight back with weapons: "To arms, we call you, to arms!"

The rhetoric at the rally was just as fiery, with anarchists calling for not just an eight-hour day, but the complete overthrow of the capitalist system. The rally was otherwise peaceful, however, so much so that Mayor Carter Harrison, who had stopped by to observe, walked home early.

But as the rally was winding down, when only a few hundred protesters were still present, about 180 police officers marched to the makeshift speaker's stand -- the bed of a Crane's Co. wagon. An officer ordered the crowd to disperse and, at that moment, somebody threw a bomb into the cops' ranks.

One officer was killed almost instantly. Gunfire and general panic broke out. At least four workers were killed. Six more officers would die of their injuries in the coming weeks.

Precisely what else happened that night remains a matter of intense disagreement, but what followed is indisputable -- a shameful travesty of justice.

Copyright 2004, Digital Chicago Inc.

(Tribune photo by Chuck Berman)

I do find it ironic that a memorial in part to anarchists (whom allegedly desired the absence of government) was erected in part by state action.

Chicago Tribune: Haymarket riot not forgotten

The monument was built with a $300,000 Build Illinois grant secured by state Senate President Emil Jones (D-Chicago).

[...]

It sits near Randolph and Desplaines Streets, on the very spot where a Methodist lay minister was making a speech atop a wooden wagon to a dwindling crowd of about 200 labor protesters when someone hurled a bomb, said Bill Adelman, professor emeritus of labor history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Chicago artist Mary Brogger depicted the wagon in 3,200 pounds of rust-colored bronze. The wagon, with a faceless human figure apparently orating atop it, is coming apart. More faceless figures are beneath and beside it, holding, pushing or pulling the wagon.

"These figures are engaged with either building or dismantling the wagon," Brogger said.

"So it gives us the duality showing that the truth in any movement is complicated."

Copyright � 2004, Chicago Tribune

Posted by drizzten at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Updates below.]

My own hope a year ago was that the sheer amount of reconstruction money that would be spent in Iraq would surely win over the population.

-Andrew Sullivan

ADDED LATER:

On a related note...

The increasing popularity of laws that allow doctors and pharmacists to opt out of certain practices or even certain kinds of patient is a worrying trend. It was designed in part by the religious right to prevent gay people from having access to good medical care, and also to protect doctors from being forced to perform abortions. Now, its effects are being extended to the birth control pill, which some believe can be a form of abortion. The slow and fitful attempt of the far right to control others' sex lives continues. If you approve, vote Republican.

Mr. Sullivan then apparently wants people within the medical profession to be forced to treat patients they don't want to treat. Why?

We reserve the right to refuse service.

Of course, when Mr. Sullivan says something like "The desire to control other people's lives is a universal on both right and left. And universally deplorable." just a little while later, I have to give up and move on. He's clueless.

UPDATED 9/28/2005 9:59am
Andrew Sullivan Needs Slaves

Posted by drizzten at 12:57 PM | Permalink

Terry Frye protects his home against possible looting in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley in Port Charlotte, Florida early August 14, 2004. Frye scrawled a note on the wall behind him to protect his home and scare off looters. Rescuers raced into southwest Florida Saturday to search for victims and help survivors of Hurricane Charley, a devastating storm that leveled buildings and left up to one million without power. As a weakened but still powerful Charley headed toward the South Carolina coast, search teams with heavy equipment set out for Fort Myers, Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte, the Gulf Coast towns hit hardest when the storm made an unexpected turn south and struck with 145 mph (233 kph) winds. REUTERS/Marc Serota

Posted by drizzten at 02:17 PM | Permalink

Like any good politician, [President George W. Bush] feeds off people.

-Rich Lowry, editor of National Review

The context of the quote was a discussion of how President Bush would do during his acceptance speech and Mr. Lowry obviously meant the way a good speaker takes the energy from his or her audience and uses it to enhance the speech.

Of course, I hear a totally different thing and think to myself Why, yes, Mr. Lowry, that is exactly the standard by which all good politicans are judged.

As for Bush's speech itself, I caught the last third of it. The VCR recorded the rest and I'll watch it sometime later.

Posted by drizzten at 09:05 AM | Permalink

Associated Press: Producer Won't Release Tiger Attack Video

The company that produced the Siegfried & Roy magic show said Wednesday that it won't give federal investigators a video of the tiger attack on illusionist Roy Horn because it's protecting the performer's privacy.

Feld Entertainment Inc. said it's offered on several occasions to show footage of the October attack to the U.S. Department of Agriculture but the agency has not accepted the invitation.

"Feld Entertainment is cooperating with the USDA and will continue to provide the agency with the necessary information to complete its pending investigation, while also protecting Roy Horn and his family's privacy," the Vienna, Va.-based company said in a written statement.

Agriculture Department spokesman Jim Rogers declined to comment Wednesday, after confirming Tuesday that the agency is investigating possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

Horn was mauled by a 300-pound tiger [this is probably a typo as I've seen the weight described closer to 600 pounds] during a performance at a Las Vegas Strip hotel. The tiger bit Horn in the neck and dragged him off stage. One of the show's employees was able to break the animal's grip by hitting it with a fire extinguisher.

Horn, 59, survived the attack but suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and his long-running show with Siegfried Fischbacher closed.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

This AP report mentions:

Amy Sherman, who was sitting in the front row with her mother about 10 yards away from the stage, said the attack happened right after Horn introduced the tiger.

"Right after that, the tiger kind of turned its head and bit him on the arm," Sherman said. "Roy started taking a microphone and started whapping the tiger on the head."

The tiger, who was on a short leash, then dragged Horn to the ground and they struggled before the tiger dragged him behind a curtain by his neck, she said. Trainers on stage rushed to aid Horn, trying to subdue the tiger.

"We just heard all this commotion behind the curtain and you could hear Roy scream," Sherman said. "Everyone at our table was kind of looking at each other, like 'Oh my God,'" she said.

Crew members backstage sprayed a fire extinguisher at the big cat to force him to release his grip, a tactic they are trained to use in such an event, Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said.

Siegfried & Roy Tiger Sprung
Oct 14, 2003
The question still on everyone's mind is: What caused the usually mellow Montecore to lose his cool?

Siegfried & Roy buddy Steve Wynn told People that Siegfried believes that Montecore was bothered by a woman seated in the front row with a freakishly large hairdo.

Roy tried to get Montecore to focus, and the tiger growled at him. Roy told the tiger "no," and bopped him on the nose with his microphone. Montecore responded by grabbing Roy's sleeve in his mouth. According to audience members, Roy then stumbled and fell back, at which point Montecore went for the kill.

Or maybe not. Siegfried believes the cat was trying to help Roy, protecting him from danger after he fell.

"If the animal would attack Roy, Roy would be no more after that. 10 seconds," Siegfried said on CNN, in defense of the tiger. Animal experts have disputed that claim, and animal-rights group PETA has called on the duo to retire their big cats.

Copyright � 2004 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All rights reserved

Siegfried & Roy's Roy Still Critical
Oct 6, 2003
On stage alone, Horn introduced the sold-out audience of 1,500 to Montecore the tiger. As is his shtick, Horn announced that Montecore was making his stage debut. In reality, the big cat was a veteran of the show and was, in the words of a source in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "a favorite of most of the handlers."

But on Friday, Horn and Montecore experienced a nearly fatal failure to communicate.

"Roy tugged the tiger to get him into the middle of the stage, but the tiger didn't like that so much and came up and bumped him with his head," audience member Jonathan Cohen told the New York Post.

Horn responded by tapping Montecore with his microphone. Montecore responded by biting Horn in the arm. Horn tried to fight off the animal with his mic.

"Then the tiger just went for him," Cohen said in the Post. "He bit him in the neck and literally picked him up and dragged him [off the stage] as if he were a wild animal attacking his prey."

Away from confused audience members' sight lines, crewmembers sprayed the tiger with fire extinguishers.

Copyright � 2004 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All rights reserved

Siegfried & Roy Video Mystery
Aug 25, 2004
All along, Roy's reps have maintained that the attack was simply an accident, but the USDA has kept open an investigation into possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Abuse of the act could result in a fine and suspended or revoked licenses. "But an investigation doesn't mean something bad's going to happen," said USDA spokesperson Jim Rogers. "We just need to determine if any of our regulations were violated."

Copyright � 2004 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All rights reserved

The show is over for good, a human is in a difficult phase of physical therapy, and the world has been reminded that even the most highly trained animals are still animals and cannot be fully trusted to do what we want them to do. The USDA should back off.

Posted by drizzten at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[Updates below.]

In this Daily Kos post:

Some people think we should have more Open Threads. They remind me of the people who argue that the solution to urban traffic congestion is to widen existing freeways and build more new ones.

But every time that's done, all the extra pavement fills up with cars in half the time it was predicted.

You guys are like that. Give you a shiny new pavement, and the next thing happens is you're driving on it bumper-to-bumper with your Links and Rants, Complaints and Praise, Worries and Hopes. When will you ever get enough?

So what's going on? It's a combination of the Tragedy of the Commons and the Free Rider Problem. Even though the owner of Daily Kos has "� 2004. Steal what you want." and "...everything I do on this site I do for the benefit of my readers." noted on his website, the idea of an "open thread" falls victim to the two problems mentioned above, particularly when the thread is stored on such an active server.

An apt quote from Professor Garrett Hardin, the author of the tragedy of the commons article above:

Congestion on public roads that don't charge tolls is another example of a government-created tragedy of the commons. If roads were privately owned, owners would charge tolls and people would take the toll into account in deciding whether to use them. Owners of private roads would probably also engage in what is called peak-load pricing, charging higher prices during times of peak demand and lower prices at other times. But because governments own roads that they finance with tax dollars, they normally do not charge tolls. The government makes roads into a commons. The result is congestion.

Meteor Blades and others should keep that in mind whenever they propose further socialization of goods and services, such as they've done in regards to health care.

The answer to Meteor Blade's question is: probably never. When provided a free or near-free service, people will flock to it as long as it meets their needs. Given the value the blog's users see in Daily Kos and its continued climb in popularity, it is obvious those needs are being met and then some. People will use it more often and spread news of the service's usefulness to their friends, building a network effect that strains the infrastructure of the service.

As long as the costs don't outweigh the benefits, people will tend to consume goods and services at whatever rates they desire. This isn't complex capitalism. It's basic economics.

UPDATED 4/19/2005 10:26am
The Democratic Party: The Party of Personal Liberty?, Daily Kos Wants It All, Fiscal Responsibility?, Meteor Blades Needs Economics, The Hypocrisy of Daily Kos, Kos Continues to Amaze, Economic Ignorance, For the Privatization of Freedom, Sacred Cows and Kossack Hypocrisy, and Kos Strikes Again

Posted by drizzten at 01:57 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

Evening Standard via Thisislondon.com: 340 killed in inferno

Hundreds of people were left to die inside a blazing supermarket after security staff locked doors to prevent customers from running out without paying, it emerged today.

Initial reports suggested as many as 340 people were killed when the fire tore through a large shopping centre in the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion after an industrial propane tank exploded.

Police have charged the store's owner Juan Pio Paiva and his son Daniel with homicide after they allegedly ordered security personnel to lock down every exit. Firefighters had to batter down the locked main entrance to the complex before they could reach hundreds of trapped shoppers.

�2004 Associated New Media

President Nicanor Duarte, who rushed to the scene of the disaster, has promised a full investigation.

Witnesses have said that people had to escape through the windows because the doors within the centre had been deliberately closed to prevent people leaving without paying.

One survivor told reporters: "They closed the door in our face."

The shopping centre owner, who is being questioned by police, told local television that he did not believe he was "the least bit to blame".

Juan Pio Paiva added that he "greatly regretted" the tragedy and "shared" in the victims' sorrow.

� BBC

Survivors of an inferno in a crowded supermarket said Monday that locked doors slowed their escape from a fast-spreading fire that killed at least 311 people Paraguay's worst disaster in more than half a century.

[...]

Authorities said they had detained two owners of the supermarket for questioning about reports by some survivors that doors had been locked. A statement released by the management denied doors were locked after the fire broke out to prevent looting.

Juan Pio Paiva, one of the detained owners, also dismissed speculation that doors had been deliberately locked.

"The security guards confirmed that the doors weren't closed by them," he said, angrily. He said he "lamented" the disaster and said the building met safety standards.

One survivor, Celeste Silva Hermosa, told Paraguayan television Canal 13 that she found her way blocked as she tried to escape. "The door was closed," said Silva Hermoso, adding that she was not sure how she made it outside. "The people just kept pushing me along."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Investigators in Paraguay are searching for evidence that security guards might have trapped shoppers in a burning supermarket by locking the doors to stop looting, while the death toll in the country's worst tragedy in decades rose to nearly 300.

President Nicanor Duarte Frutos called for a rapid investigation into Sunday's blaze "so those responsible are punished with the full force of the law."

"There are several witnesses who saw how they shut the doors to the supermarket and we also confirmed that the emergency exit was welded," Paraguay's Police Chief Humberto Nunez told Reuters on Monday.

Three owners of the Ycua Bolanos supermarket and three security guards are in police custody, but main shareholder Juan Pio Paiva said no orders were given to lock the doors.

"The company has insurance against vandalism," he told a news conference. "It does not make sense in a fire of this magnitude for security guards to close the doors and stay inside."

� Reuters 2004. All rights reserved.

"There are several witnesses who saw how they shut the doors to the supermarket and we also confirmed that the emergency exit was soldered," Paraguay's police chief Humberto Nunez said.

� 2004 Independent Online. All rights strictly reserved.

Paraguayan authorities have arrested the owners of a supermarket that caught on fire over the weekend, killing almost 300 people and injuring another 300.

ABC Color newspaper reported Monday that Juan Paiva and his son Daniel were taken into custody on charges of negligible homicide. According to eyewitness testimony, the doors to the Asuncion supermarket were locked when the blaze broke out Sunday, as the owners did not want customers to leave without paying.

Copyright � 1998-2003 Big News Network.com. All rights reserved.

"Most of the people were killed by asphyxiation because they breathed in toxic fumes. If they had been allowed to get out they would not have died," said fire chief Hugo Onieva.

Prosecutors have said Juan Pio Paiva, owner of the supermarket, will be charged with second degree homicide.

[...]

Firefighters believe a spark hit an industrial-sized propane gas tank in the food court of the complex, which also housed offices and a parking garage. Witnesses said they heard several explosions.

The fire started just before midday when the supermarket was at its busiest with between 500 and 700 customers. The complex was destroyed in less than half an hour.

[...]

"By some miracle I got out before the doors closed. After me no-one got out," said 23-year-old student Juan Morinigo, who was in shock.

Another survivor, Rosa Resquin, said she heard someone ordering the store doors closed, yelling "no one gets out of here without paying."

"When they arrived, the police and firemen opened the doors, but it was already too late," she told reporters.

Copyright � 104 MCN International Pte Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Prosecutor Edgar Sanchez, in charge of investigating the blaze, told reporters that shopping centre owner Juan Pio Paiva will be charged with homicide for blocking the doors. Paiva surrendered to the authorities, but denied ordering workers to close the shopping centre doors.

� 2003 Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd. All rights reserved

Police are questioning Juan Pio Paiva, owner and president of Ycua Bolanos SA, and the rest of the six-member board to determine whether they authorized locking the doors of the center to prevent looting after the fire began, Manuel Sarquis, director of the government's national emergency committee, said in a telephone interview from Asuncion, Paraguay's capital.

�2004 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved.

Theft is a clear-cut case of immoral behavior and should never be dismissed, rationalized, or ignored. Any business owner is right to condemn it and want it reduced as much as possible. Anyone caught, no matter what the value of the loot, deserves punishment.

However, does that mean the owner of the property can do whatever he or she feels is necessary to do to keep that property safe? Assuming Mr. Paiva did order the doors locked, I'd say no.

Given the swift and chaotic nature of the fire, it would require an almost Herculean effort to identify the potential thieves and detain them in the window of time available. Only individuals act and capitalism demands respect for individual rights, beginning with the right to one's own life. Detaining hundreds of people, innocent of theft or not, within a ferociously burning building is an open-handed slap in the face of those rights. It is within the realm of possibility that every rational human tried to flee with something tucked under their clothing but it is far more likely that upon seeing the situation deteriorate, most people dropped what they were doing and anything not critical to their lives. Locking the doors would be an act of collective punishment, condemning hundreds to injury or death for the actions of a few.

Furthermore, by ordering the guards to close the doors, their lives are placed at risk as well. No man has the right to order another to his death.

For those few who might have attempted to steal, Mr. Paiva's own statement is instructive:

The company has insurance against vandalism. It does not make sense in a fire of this magnitude for security guards to close the doors and stay inside.

What would the store's owner, assuming the doors were ordered closed, expected to accomplish with that course of action? Would these people have returned to the checkout isles and waited in line to pay at the cash register while a blaze eats up the building around them? Would the clerks working the checkout lines stayed behind to conduct the transactions knowing the same? It would be flatly stupid to try this. The fire would have destroyed the money anyway a few minutes after changing hands.

Accusations of greed for the purpose of defaming the free market are sure to follow this. But greed isn't just about wanting money. It's about lusting after it at the expense of all other values. This would be greed heightened to insanity and entirely different from the charges of greed we hear about every day.

Given my ignorance of the situation and the people involved, I assume nothing about this incident. Hopefully, what started out as a tragedy won't get worse.

UPDATE(8/6/2004 9:02am)
A quick scan of the news reveals some new info.

Taipei Times: Forensics team analyzes Paraguay market fire site

An international forensic team examined the charred interior of a Paraguayan supermarket to determine the cause of a weekend blaze that killed more than 400 people, many of whom were trapped inside by locked doors.

As the specialists from Argentina, Colombia and the US took burn samples from the building, Interior Minister Orlando Fiorott said the investigation "clearly points" to an accidental gas leak that ignited. He said that it didn't look as if Sunday's blaze had been intentionally set, but cautioned that the findings were preliminary.

The death toll was revised to 426 on Wednesday, down from 464 a day earlier; 520 people remained hospitalized with burns and other injuries. The attorney general's office said 153 were reported missing.

Copyright � 1999-2004 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved.

Children across Paraguay returned to school Thursday after a three-day national mourning for the 45 youngsters and nearly 400 adults killed by a weekend fire at a supermarket in Asuncion.

Teachers at the Uruguayan Republic school, just blocks from the destroyed Ycua Bolanos market, opened the day with a prayer and hymns as some teary-eyed children stood quietly during a ceremony remembering six classmates who died in the blaze.

At least 25 parents of children who attend the school in a middle-class neighborhood also died in Paraguay's worst disaster in decades.

[...]

Rescue workers said they found the bodies of about 45 children, a few still in the arms of their parents. The store was inaugurating a new play area at the time of the fire, and many families had come to shop with their children, officials said.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Officials charged a co-owner of the supermarket and four others with manslaughter Tuesday after a security guard said he was ordered to lock the doors to prevent people from stealing.

Officials have said they were checking reports that an exploding gas canister could have started the flames, which forced a floor to collapse, crushing cars and burning many bodies beyond recognition.

[...]

The charges came after chief investigator Edgar Sanchez said a security guard testified he was told via radio to lock the doors when the fire began. Sanchez said the guard didn't know who gave the order.

[...]

Paraguayan officials said they've begun reviewing leading shopping centers in the capital and their emergency preparations.

Angel Villalba, the president of the Paraguayan Association of Supermarkets, told a radio station that initial findings have been alarming.

"Almost none of them have emergency exits," he said.

� 2000-2004 Arizona Daily Sun

Paraguayan president said Thursday that irregularities existed in the construction of the building, in which 504 people were killed in a weekend blaze on the outskirts of Asuncion, Paraguay's capital.

"Bribery prevails," Nicanor Duarte said during his second visitto the site of the fire that destroyed Ycua Bolanos supermarket.

Construction regulations were breached, and the buildings lack an efficient security system, the president said, adding there were not enough emergency exits and extinguishers.

Bolanos said the incident, considered as the worst in the history of the country, must lead to reflections among people so as to avoid the repetition of the "terrible vices."

[...]

The supermarket owner Juan Pio Paiva and his son Victor Daniel Paiva, accused of manslaughter, were held in preventive detention on Tuesday, as eyewitnesses said the son ordered supermarket guards to close doors to prevent people from leaving without paying.

Copyright �2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.

Xinhuanet: Investigation on cause of fire in Asuncion starts

"We don't rule out any hypothesis because the investigation has just started," Teresa Sosa, the prosecutor for the case, told the press at the coordination center set up by the parking lot of the destroyed Ycua Bolanos supermarket.

[...]

Agent Benedicto Perez of the Argentine province of Formosa, in the border with Paraguay, assured that the possibility of an attack was ruled out and, in principle, the fire could be an accident.

His views echoed those of Paraguay's Interior Minister Orlando Fiorotto, who labeled the incident that has left 504 dead and 500 injured as "accidental."

[...]

Nine agents of the United States Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency (ATF) arrived Thursday in Asuncion to join the team of investigators, which added the number of agents from that country in Paraguay to 12, according to information released by Paraguayandaily ABC Color.

Copyright �2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.

News24: Short-circuit caused blaze

An electrical short-circuit apparently caused the Asuncion supermarket blaze last Sunday, Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte said on Thursday, blaming locked gates for many of the more than 400 deaths.

"Initial information shows it probably was a short-circuit," the president said as he surveyed the aftermath of the fire.

"People were locked in. That is why the number of victims was enormous," said Duarte.

The president also said there were not enough emergency exits.

The owners of the shopping centre and four guards have been arrested and charged with ordering the gates locked during the blaze so shoppers would not leave without paying.

Even children said security personnel prevented them from leaving as flames engulfed the shopping center,

Firefighter Juan Carlos Valiente recalled the horror of seeing the lifeless bodies of children who died in each others' arms.

As the fire raged, guards used rifles to hold back the fleeing crowd, said Valiente, adding that one of them threatened him with a pistol and fired it in the air.

Paraguay's President Nicanor Duarte has said Sunday's deadly fire at a shopping centre exposed a serious failure to enforce building regulations.

Mr Duarte made a second visit to the scene of the blaze on the outskirts of the capital, Asuncion, in which more than 420 people were killed.

[...]

President Duarte said: "If buildings are put up and corners are cut, so that instead of 15 fire extinguishers there are eight or five, and instead of seven emergency exits there are three, and very narrow ones at that... then someone has been bribed, there are bribers and bribe-takers."

� BBC

Newsday: WORLD BRIEFS

The co-owner of a supermarket and four security guards were charged with manslaughter for a fire in Asuncion, Paraguay, that killed 464 people on Sunday. The charges came after a guard testified he was ordered to lock the burning store's doors to prevent looting, trapping shoppers inside. Owner Juan Pio Paiva rejected the allegations as he was brought to jail Tuesday, shouting, "My conscience is clear." Paiva's son, Daniel, was under investigation.

Copyright � 2004, Newsday, Inc.

UNICEF backs emotional recovery plan for child survivors of Paraguayan fire

In an effort to help grieving Paraguayan children cope with their emotions and begin resuming a normal life after the disastrous supermarket fire earlier this month that killed some 400 people, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is supporting a programme of psychosocial assistance called 'Return to Happiness.'

The programme, involving play-related activities in which youngsters aged between 6 and 14 share their stories, games and music, is intended to benefit 1,500 children under the direct supervision of professional psychologists, with 150 young volunteers helping to carry it out.

The Herald Press: Rotary sending 'team' to help in Ecuador

City officials and local Rotarians will be making a trek to South America to help prevent tragic deaths and suggest formulating safety standards.

Rotary Club members John Forneris, John Parker and Al Santostefano will be traveling with Forneris’ son Stephen to Guayaquil, Ecuador in an effort to aid in the possible initiation of building codes within the city. The foursome will be leaving for their week-long trip on Aug. 31 and work with officials and Rotary Club members from Guayaquil.

"We’re there to help," Forneris said, adding the officials will be looking at high-profile buildings, give analyses and look at what threats there may be to life safety. "We’re applying technology and engineering in a humanitarian way. It’s a unique approach."

[...]

The Rotarians said they believed building and fire codes may have more attention brought upon them following the fatal mall fire in Paraguay earlier this month.

Nearly 300 people were killed and several hundred were injured when a fire swept through a shopping complex in Asuncion, and the doors were blocked by security personnel to prevent shoplifting.

Parker and Santostefano said they will be showing how they perform inspections, such as why doors should not be locked in public places and the need for emergency lighting in case of a fire.

"We’re kind of excited. We’re getting involved in this to help another country and community," Forneris said.

"I’m looking forward to it," Parker said, adding the project has been in the making for nearly a year. "John Forneris made this thing come together."

Parker, in turn, brought the idea of the trip to Santostefano’s attention.

"I thought it’d be interesting," Santostefano said, adding it would be a learning process for him of what it is like with no building or fire safety codes. "It makes me think more about why we have codes. I’m excited about going."

"It should be very educational. I think it will be very well received," Parker added. "I hope the government takes this (information) and builds on it."
�The Middletown Press 2004

A private initiative with the goal of increasing public intrusion.

Xinhua: Paraguayan supermarket fire affects 1,000 families

The fire in a supermarket on the outskirts of Asuncion, capital of Paraguay, left at least 1,000 families affected for the death, disappearance and injuries of their relatives.

The incident, which occurred on Aug. 1 in the Ycua Bolanos supermarket, left 417 dead and 55 charred human remains, plus 49 missing, according to Director of the National Emergency Council, Aristides Gonzalez. In addition, 477 injured were hospitalized.

The Mental Health Direction of the Public Health Ministry is providing psychological assistance to 376 people affected in one way or another in the fire, said the official.

The fire broke out when the supermarket was crowded with Sunday midday shoppers. Reports said nearly 1,000 people had been inside the shopping center, which is part of the complex that also houses offices and an underground parking lot.

The supermarket owner Juan Pio Paiva and his son Victor Daniel Paiva, accused of manslaughter, were held in preventive detention. Eyewitnesses said the son ordered supermarket guards to close doors to prevent people from leaving without paying.

Copyright �2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.

Posted by drizzten at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

... the closest approximation an adult can have to being in the ninth grade.

-Jonathan Chait

Posted by drizzten at 04:08 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

MSNBC: Capitalism spoils trip to wine country

I’m no expert in oenology. But I do know this: I enjoy tasting a good glass of wine. So when I headed out to California wine country earlier this summer, I stopped by my favorite vineyards for a taste and a chat with the wine makers and experts (oenologists, as the fancy people call them).

And you know what they did to me for the privilege of tasting, and sometimes purchasing, their wine? They charged me! Five bucks! Five lousy bucks.

Capitalism has taken hold of California wine country, thanks to the mandatory $5 tasting fee. The green of cold hard cash now matches the brown of fertile soft soil. The almighty dollar is there to stay, unlike the pests and bugs that wine makers have been beaten back over the years.

Surely, many wineries have long charged a fee to sample their wines in tasting rooms. But not all. In previous trips to Sonoma, Napa, and other regions I’ve been able to pick and choose which wineries I tried based on whether there’s a “cover charge.” Taste had something to do with it, but so did frugality (re: free-loading). Now, no more. Everywhere I went on my most recent trip (Buena Vista, Ravenswood, Gundlach Bundschu), there it was that f$5 fee.

The tendency to ascribe to the market economy the characteristics of being something other than the events caused by the choices and actions of individuals is incorrect. The market arises as a result of the willingness of individuals to interact. Every development in the market is the outcome of purposive actions on the part of individuals who are seeking to improve their own state of affairs.

- Thomas C. Taylor

Presumably, the charge covers the cost of wine, wine servicing, and helps deter excessive and potentially dangerous drinking (for that matter, so does forcing someone under the influence to spell “Gew�rztraminer”). On paper, I can understand the argument, if not embrace it. But as a true-blooded believer in free-market democratic capitalism unencumbered by government regulation and taxation, I have serious gripes over the grapes:

The last sentence is a lie. If he was being truthful, he wouldn't be bitching about the voluntary actions of businessfolk doing what makes economic sense for their enterprises. It's also contradictory, because the moment you introduce democracy into free-market capitalism, it becomes encumbered by government regulation and taxation.

He then proceeds to lay out three reasons he feels justify his complaints, ending with:

Bottom line: Visitors pay a fee that benefits the winery, but get no discernible benefit in return.

� 2004 MSNBC Interactive

UPDATE(7/29/2004 12:55pm)
It's possible I've made a mistake regarding what Mr. Mortman may or may not be advocating. He's done some writing for Reason and for National Review, which might not make him a politically consistent defender of individual freedom but does shed a different light on his politics in general. I have never heard of him, so I took what he wrote at face value. If it was satirical or sarcastic, then I apologize right now.

It didn't seem like that when I read it, however.

Posted by drizzten at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"I'm disappointed he feels that way because I think that somebody that did 20 years in the Army ought to be able to recognize that there's a greater good than the individual...I wish we didn't have a situation that required us to have this level of sacrifice, but we do."

-Army Chief of Staff General Pete Schoomaker

I cannot think of a single political issue, contemporary or not, that does not revolve around the two basic choices we have to make. Either you stand for the individual sacrificing himself, his property, and his values to a collective or you don't. This is a binary, black and white choice. It cannot be avoided.

The collectivist spectrum is vast and allows them to infinitely dance and shift among "nuanced" positions; positions different only in degree from their neighbors, unfortunately leading so many to believe there are substantial variations in the philosophies of Socialists, Greens, Progressive Democrats, Moderates, Conservative Republicans, and Limited-Government Constitutionalists. There aren't. The differences consist of disagreements over what parts of society to run and how hard to run them into the ground.

The elevation of the collective above the individual remains the greatest poison to liberty and General Schoomaker and his type are the malignancy's peddlers.

Posted by drizzten at 04:27 PM | Permalink

The environment is the most important, the most fundamental, civil-rights issue.

-Bob Kennedy

The environmental movement is a struggle over the control of the commons -- the publicly owned resources, the things that cannot be reduced to private property -- the air, the water, the wandering animals, the public land, the wildlife, the fisheries. The things that from the beginning of time have always been part of the public trust.

Environmentalism didn't begin on Earth Day. It's been recognized for thousands of years as a basic human right.

If you were a citizen of Rome, you had an absolute right to cross a beach to catch a fish. The emperor himself couldn't stop you.

In England, in the 13th century, they had a clean air act. It was illegal to burn coal in London. It was a capital crime and people were executed for it.

When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages, a lot of the feudal kings began reasserting control over the public-trust resources. For example, in England, King John began selling monopolies to the fisheries and he said the deer belonged to nobility. The public rose up and confronted him at the Battle of Runnymede and forced him to sign the Magna Carta, which of course was the beginning of constitutional government. In addition to having virtually all of our Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta has two other chapters on free access to fisheries in navigable waters. And those rights descended to the people in the States when we had the revolution. And virtually every state constitution says the people of the state own the waters and the fisheries, the wildlife, the air. They're not owned by the governor, the legislature, the corporations. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others.

[...]

Really all environmental injury is an assault on democracy, because the most important measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it distributes the goods of the land, the commons. Democracy must ensure that the public-trust assets stay within the hands of the people.

• 507 million acres of United States surface land
  
• 476 dams and 348 reservoirs
  
• 1.76 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf
  
• 3,300 recreational sites

It's the political system that allows corporations to have so much influence in the political process. We've got to get the money out of politics. It's overwhelming the Democratic process. Campaign finance reform is hands-down the most important environmental bill.

Here is the crowning hypocrisy:

Grist: So is the culprit free-market capitalism?

Kennedy: No! The best thing that could happen to the environment is free-market capitalism. In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. In a true free-market economy, you get efficiencies and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So in true free-market capitalism, you eliminate pollution and you properly value our natural resources so you won't cut them down. What polluters do is escape the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy -- a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.

Grist: So you're saying free-market economies have to be controlled by regulations and strong central government?

Laissez-faire capitalism does not work, particularly in the commons. Individuals pursuing their own self-interest will devour the commons very quickly. That's the economic law -- the tragedy of the commons. You have to force companies to internalize costs. All of the federal environmental laws are designed to restore free-market capitalism in America in this regard.

[...]

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketeer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market and I say, "We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you are internalizing your profit." That's what the federal environmental laws allow us to do: restore real property rights in America.

(c) 2004, grist magazine

Posted by drizzten at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

[Updates below.]

Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Capitalism makes lives better (Wednesday, July 7, 2004):

A Guest Viewpoint column by George Haeseler claims we should be clamping down on "corporate power and greed (which) lie at the root of most of today's injustices." He believes that unions should be strengthened and that we should vote out of office politicians who "do the bidding of corporations."

In the last hundred years it has been demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that capitalist countries, particularly those where government interference in the free enterprise system is least, have provided the highest standards of living in history for their people.

With this kind of history to guide us it is not at all clear to me why we would want to charge down the path of another half-baked socialist scheme, almost all of which have proven in the past to be economic disasters.

ROBERT A. STREVELL

ENDICOTT

� 2004 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin

The letter "Capitalism makes lives better" expresses some naive viewpoints. To view the history of capitalism as a loving, blissful stroll through history is to ignore over 100 years of oppression and resistance. To forget the sweatshops and terrible factories of this country's history is sad, but to ignore the slave labor and oppressive conditions involved in today's Third World factories is worse.

The benefits of capitalism are easy to laud when you are a middle-class American, but millions of us don't have health care and struggle in abject poverty. Despite living in the land of plenty, it gets harder and harder for the poor in this country.

JESSE HARASTA

JOHNSON CITY

� 2004 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin

He shouldn't be angry towards what he believes is capitalism.

He should be angry with the slobs and morons who educated him.

UPDATED 5/22/2006 1:15pm
Mr. Harasta contacted me last week expressing his desire to respond to this post. Since I've closed comments and since my time is presently occupied with collegiate matters, I'll link to the reply he posted to his Upstate Anarchist blog here for the moment and compose a reply of my own in the next few days.

This could get interesting.

UPDATED 5/25/2006 11:22am
Part II

Posted by drizzten at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Presidential Economics: What Leaders Can and Cannot Do about the State of the Economy, by Russell Roberts

John Kerry will focus on the mediocre performance of the economy, particularly the job market, in the first part of the Bush Administration. Bush will tout the performance of the economy over the last year or so as long as the job numbers continue to be rosy through the fall. Implicit in this discussion are two strange assumptions. The first is that the President "runs" the economy. The President hardly even runs the government. He certainly cannot direct the fortunes and failures of millions of workers, managers, investors and entrepreneurs. The second implicit assumption is that the success or failure of the President depends on his ability to "stimulate" the economy, as if the economy were an engine that simply needed a different setting for its carburetor or as if it were a lazy steer that needs prodding to speed its way on a cattle drive.

Those are what people demand of Presidents these days. Rarely do they demand "leave us alone to succeed and fail as necessary."

I once heard a story that helps explain the problem with these views of the economy. Imagine coming across a young boy who is standing at the edge of the shallow end of a swimming pool. He holds a bucket in his hands and he looks crestfallen. What's wrong, you ask. Well, he explains, I'm doing a science experiment and it's not working. What's wrong? For the last hour I've been emptying water into this pool with this bucket. But the water level hasn't changed a bit. The pool hasn't gotten any deeper. It's a big pool, you explain. A few bucketfuls of water aren't going to have much of a visible effect. The boy redoubles and retriples his efforts. A week goes by. You come back to the pool and he looks no happier than he did before. What's wrong now, you ask. I've been doing the same thing eight hours a day for a week and I still don't see any change. Is there a leak in the pool, you wonder. No, he says, no leak. I checked that out.

The boy shrugs his shoulders and gets back to work. You watch as the boy goes to the deep end of the pool, scoops up a bucket of water, walks the length of the pool and empties it into the shallow end.

What would you tell that boy? It would seem fairly straightforward to explain that taking money from your left pocket and putting it into your right pocket doesn't make you any richer. So it is with water in the pool. The total amount is unchanged. But if it rained each night of the boy's efforts, he might actually come to believe that moving water from the deep end to the shallow end actually leads to making the water deeper. You might find it difficult to make your case.

Anyone want to dispute Professor Roberts here? Wealth isn't created by stealing from one and giving to another and certainly not when that wealth is partially wasted on bureaucracy in the process. It also isn't created when the naturally arising incentives and disincentives resulting from free market prices and choices are perverted by political will. What does he say Presidents can do?

A President can no more stimulate the economy in the short run than you can make a child grow a foot in a week. Genuine growth takes time. The most a President can do is to help create an environment for that growth to take place by unleashing the creativity inherent in a nation's people and those they trade with in other countries.

Copyright �: 2004, Liberty Fund, Inc.

Posted by drizzten at 09:31 AM | Permalink

ABCNEWS: Demonstrators Protest U.S. Polices on AIDS

Hundreds of demonstrators marched Thursday to protest U.S. policies on AIDS, demanding that President Bush do more to treat and prevent the disease.

In Johannesburg, about 500 angry AIDS activists, many wearing red and white T-shirts that said "HIV Positive," criticized Bush, saying he had hurt the global fight against the disease by spending billions of dollars on war.

They also contended he undermined the global fight against AIDS by limiting access to condoms, reproductive choices and generic drugs.

[...]

"The effect of the U.S. government's unlawful war in Iraq has been to divert international attention and resources away from global health and poverty," [Mark] Heywood said, reading from the memorandum.

In the memorandum, the activists demanded that Bush cut military spending and earmark more money for the fight against AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition and poverty which they called the biggest threat to human security today.

The memorandum noted the United Nations estimated that 2.5 million to 3.5 million people died of AIDS last year, 1 million died of malaria and 2 million died of tuberculosis. It said the U.N. estimated 800 million people suffered from malnutrition and that it contributed to half of the 10 million child deaths in the developing world.

The activists also demanded that the U.S. ensure the success of the World Health Organization's plan to treat 3 million people with AIDS by 2005.

They also accused the United States of undermining public confidence in generic anti-AIDS drugs, and demanded that it stop limiting access to condoms and reproductive choices through family planning. They also demanded that the United States give the promised $15 billion for AIDS prevention and treatment to the Global Fund.

If they did, they'd understand they are publicly demanding that Americans have more of their wealth stolen and redistributed to the needy around the globe. It's bad enough we have to contend with Bush's bogus AIDS initiative, but we don't need more demands we sacrifice ourselves for others. Why don't these animated, motivated individuals put their energy into enterprises that are honest and do more immediate good?

Furthermore...

"We promote choice, we don't dictate like George Bush. His policy is killing people, it is making the problem worse," said Mark Heywood, a leader of the South African activist group Treatment Action Campaign.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Posted by drizzten at 02:33 PM | Permalink

I would argue that any society that needs to use coercion (which is what law is) as its primary organizing principle is a society that is already unhealthy to the point of failure.

Posted by drizzten at 08:44 AM | Permalink

Rotten Tomatoes is a fun and useful site to get quick opinions on films. It also has a number of sponsorships/affiliations with other websites that sell and promote movie-related items. One of them is Allposters.com.

I was checking out a rather cool Fight Club poster (#409944) and wanted to see if the company had other good offerings. Moving up a few levels, I discovered their "college section" and underneath it, their "Peace / Activism Posters" section. Curious (and apprehensive) to see what this contemporary business might have, I peeked inside.

It has sixty-six posters. Of them:

• Far more than half have the peace signs of the dove, V-fingers, or some other instantly recognizable symbol of peace or opposition to war
  
• Eight posters are pictures of Earth from space
  
• One explicitly anti-Bush poster ("Start Wars")
  
• One Che Guevara

Anyway, I'm not going to go peruse the other possibilities and pass judgment on them. I have an idea of what to expect. Just as the word "liberal" has been utterly perverted into meaning the opposite of it's core concept, being an activist for anything other than socialism, unilateral peace and tolerance for all, and environmentalism is seen as being a novelty. Being an activist for capitalism is either unheard of or relegated to those vile "right-wing oppressor think-tanks."

It certainly doesn't have the wide recognition as being an activist for other causes.

Posted by drizzten at 08:29 AM | Permalink

The Socialist Disease: More Education Money Won't Solve Problems, written by the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Michael Quinn Sullivan, doesn't quite come out and be honest about what needs to be done. It does, however, say this:

Consider this: we've tripled real-per-student spending in less than 30 years, and built monuments to fiscal mismanagement with athletic and administration complexes rivaling college facilities; we have superintendents with multi-year contracts valued in the millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, scores on the SAT, ACT and other national indicators of academic achievement have shown no improvement in the quality of education for kids surviving the system. Drop-out rates, especially for minorities, are an embarrassment.

[...]

Let us set aside reason and pretend more money might actually, finally, for the first time, make a positive difference. Why not prioritize state spending? Is there nothing to cut in the state budget to provide more money for education? Nothing less important?

We have a commission to encourage government employee productivity; there are at least a dozen river authorities with billions in assets. Texas has a commission on acupuncture. There is nothing to cut? Nothing to change? No way to save money?

In the religious pantheon of the left, government agencies and programs are wrathful gods to be fiscally appeased - never questioned - on a regular basis, regardless of the economic effect.

Posted by drizzten at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via QandO (via Beckster), I came across this Atrios post that led me to this Rude Pundit post.

*breath*

Mr. Rude says:

It'd Only Be Cooler If Saddam's Lifeless Hand Was Attached To It:
In the realm of the "Ya gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me" is this: apparently our President keeps Saddam Hussein's gun, the one he had when he was captured from the "spider hole," in a study off the side of the Oval Office. Bush shows it to visitors; he is "proud of it" because, it seems, or so it is said, it reminds the President of how "proud" he is of the troops.

[skipping past some bile]

One does wonder if Bush is following D.C. laws in reference to the ownership of a working handgun - Does Bush get around registration laws? You know, it's illegal to own a handgun in D.C. unless it was registered prior to 1976. Licensing laws? And if he's breaking the law, isn't this like Capone and tax evasion, and we can finally, at last, jail this petty tyrant?

And What About Those Other Little Firearm Laws?:
See previous post for more about President Bush's ownership of Saddam Hussein's handgun - a gift from the troops, allegedly. Exactly how may laws, federal and D.C., might the President be breaking with his possession of that firearm? Did he receive a background check for the transfer of ownership? Is Bush licensed to possess a firearm in a federal facility? The District of Columbia prohibits firearms to be gifts. How many people are implicated in Bush's firearm possession?

And, of course, ignorance of the law does not excuse the potential crimes.

Let me first dispense with any notion that I think President George W. Bush is not a tyrant. He is, just like every President I can think of, a tyrant to some degree. Whether it's designating an American citizen an "enemy combatant" and indefinitely detaining him with the military, nationalizing industries, or imposing price controls, Presidents throughout history have used their power to push Americans around. Dubya is no different, though better in most objective respects to other tyrannical luminaries such as FDR or Nixon.

However, the solution to the problem of petty tyranny is not more petty tyranny. Gun controls and regulation are forms of direct tyranny of the government over the people. They restrict our freedom to make choices for ourselves in our interest. Their proponents and supporters want to take away my right to armed self-defense, currently embodied in the form of a Browning Hi-Power. I possess a Texas Concealed Handgun License not because I want the government to grant me the privilege of carrying a firearm, but because I don't want to get arrested if carrying one. That, having to conform to the wishes of others due to the threat of violence against myself and my property, qualifies as tyranny in my book.

Bitch about Bush all you want. I do, in many ways. But don't advocate fighting fire with extra gasoline.

Posted by drizzten at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Updates below.]

Some of the discussion in this Instapundit post is thoroughly disheartening. The most common complaint about libertarians is that they are "absolutist." This is a direct attack against being principled and against strong logical stands on every issue.

Let me explain a few things to those who complain about someone who strictly adheres to the principles of individual liberty, private property, and non-agression. Being unprincipled has led to:

1. The income tax.
   
2. The welfare state.
   
3. Gun control.
   
4. Prison terms for drug users.
   
5. Unjust detainment and political criminals.
   
6. Restrictions on your right to speak and publish your mind.
   
7. Economic regulation that rewards the incompetent and punishes the skillful.
   
8. The abrogation of national sovereignty to unaccountable international institutions.
   
9. The horrors of the military draft.
   
10. The protection of some groups of people at the expense of others.

UPDATE(12:35pm)
In case anyone wants to know what I'd like an honest-to-goodness Republican to do when in office can read about what real limited government means. I'm not going to help elect Bush - or Kerry - if they aren't willing to go at least that far.

Posted by drizzten at 10:14 AM | Permalink

[Updates below]

It's Democrats that now stand for fiscal responsibility.

-Markos Zuniga

Equally possible is a reduction in the amount of money spent. I could cut out some or all of my pub appearances and stop buying books and CDs.

But the government's budget isn't exactly analogous to an individual's. They share the essential characteristics: adding inputs and subtracting outputs. However, individuals earn their income by working for someone else. That income is rightly theirs because the working relationship was offered and accepted voluntarily.

Government's "revenue" doesn't work like that. It comes primarily from taxes and taxes are the result of coerced theft. Government, far from earning the money it spends, quite literally threatens society with jail and fines and property seizure if they don't fork over their "fair share." Millions of Americans choose each year to hand over their tax money because they feel they get something back for their pain.

The entire debate about fiscal responsibility has lost much of it's importance on me. I certainly agree it's better for a government to not run a deficit. I'd much rather have annual refunds of surplus tax money given back rather than a tsunami of red ink and the subsequent levels of government borrowing. Still, the debate rings hollow when you consider my point of view above: the argument is based on the assumptions that

• A percentage of my wealth isn't actually mine, but the state's.
  
• There exist people who are capable of handling that wealth without outrageous degrees of mismanagement, corruption, (further) theft, waste, and inefficiency.

UPDATE(6/3/2004 1:09pm)
Can't Cut the Budget; Politicians Will Eat Me!

UPDATE(6/18/2004 5:06pm)
Whom to Vote For?

UPDATE 1/18/2005 9:40am
Kos continues to amaze me.

UPDATED 4/19/2005 10:27am
The Democratic Party: The Party of Personal Liberty?, Meteor Blades Needs Economics, The Hypocrisy of Daily Kos, Economic Ignorance, For the Privatization of Freedom, Sacred Cows and Kossack Hypocrisy, and Kos Strikes Again

Posted by drizzten at 11:47 AM | Permalink

Some times, Reuters can prove to be useful. Link via Marginal Revolution.

I've now got the perfect term for explaining the twisted and immoral logic behind income taxation: Pagare tutti, pagare meno. It's Italian for "everyone pays, everyone pays less."

The good news is that the Sicilian Mafia has slashed the rates it charges "clients." The bad news is that it has vastly expanded its client base.

"Pagare tutti, pagare meno," roughly translated as "everybody pays, everybody pays less," is the new slogan Sicilian magistrates and mayors are using to describe what the Mafia is doing these days.

� Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

By spreading the reach of taxes to more people, you can reduce the amount taken from each individual so as to appear "revenue-neutral" or as a way to "save taxpayer money." Legitimate economic entities can charge less for their goods if they can get them sold on a larger scale, so you often see this kind of free market thinking utterly perverted by statists and anti-capitalists. From fraudulent programs like Social Security to publicly funding political campaigns, you find a spectrum of people - Democrats and Republicans - supporting an increase in the breadth of legalized theft in order to be "fiscally responsible" and in order to keep that damned important safety net up off the concrete floor.

Pagare tutti, pagare meno = taxing income = let's screw everyone so each of you is screwed a bit less

Posted by drizzten at 01:09 PM | Permalink

No new schools for Wimberley

The Wimberley ISD won't be getting any more money from taxpayers, at least for now.

Sixty percent of Saturday's voters said no to a $45 million bond proposal.

The district won't be getting new schools to replace the ones school they say are at capacity.

"You have to pass a bond if you're talking about a new facility, because you're looking at something in the magnitude of anywhere from $15 to $25 million," Wimberley ISD Business Manager Randall Rau said.

A successful bond would have meant a new elementary and high school, and renovations to existing schools. The district expects enrollment to double in the next 10 years.

"I felt like it was really important that it pass, and I'm disappointed that it didn't," bond supporter Brenda Cusack said.

"What we're doing is just kind of sitting and trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong," Rau said.

Copyright �2004TWEAN News Channel of Austin, L.P. d.b.a. News 8 Austin

But, no. The very consideration of seperation of school and state is tantamount to treason.

Posted by drizzten at 04:46 PM | Permalink

Is best expressed by Billy Beck:

He saw the room where he died in a way that none of us ever will. Surrounded in a strange place by malevolent strangers, that must have been obvious to him with continuous shocking wonder. I haven't seen the entire video. (I've seen what's being broadcast, but I saw the one of the Chechens carving up a Russian soldier some years back, and that was enough for me to get the picture.) However, I have the impression that he was not aware of what they were going to do to him until they did it. He certainly knew the camera was there. I wonder what (if) he really thought about it. Was there anything at all hopeful about it to him?

Did it ever flash through his mind that it was the last thing that would ever connect him with home?

Regardless of my opinion of the state of things in Iraq and the actions the United States government has taken against international terrorists, it must be said that the people who are willing to do this sort of barbarism and who have done it are utterly unworthy of any label other than inhuman.

Posted by drizzten at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)