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I think of the untold, unpublished, unrecognized, uncountable mountains of "no" built up over the decades, a mute chain on human progress.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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by drizzten at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fla. Church Probes Priest Tied to Foley

This mental image must be purged!

Posted by drizzten at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

[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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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

Posted by drizzten at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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 | Comments (0)

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