Western Hero

State Sponsored Suicide

2012-02-12T05:00:00.001-07:00

We've lost the concept of shame. Or more rightly put, we're only allowed to use it in socially-approved ways now

The President and the left can scold their greedy conservative enemies about social justice, The First Lady can lecture us on eating our vegetables, but woe to those who enter the public square and preach time-tested, millennia-old Judeo-Christian morality like hard work and being true to your spouse and children.

We can no longer shame "men" who would rather mooch off of the rest of us than get a job, or those serial impregnators who have fun and run, leaving us to foot the bill. We can no longer shame people for out-of-wedlock births that produce litters of children in single-parent government-provided apartments that could more rightly be call gang-controlled cell blocks. Irresponsible adults condemn children to a life of poverty, crime, ignorance and social dysfunction, and the responsible adults who work hard and pay the bills simply keep their mouths shut and go about their business.

MTV’s Sixteen and Pregnant is damn near the only entity publicly calling out bad behavior. Unfortunately, it is swimming in a sewer of sin and societal decay, diluting its effectiveness. Despite this, Sixteen and Pregnant shows the consequences of irresponsibility, and does so gently, by example, without preaching.

But we need to start preaching and getting in people’s faces over their behaviors.

"Wanna act like a stupid cracked-out Hollyweird pig? Then get a job that provides you enough money to do it on your own damn dime and you won’t have to put up with the rest of us excoriating you for staggering through life brain-dead and tapping the rest of us to pay for your mistakes. Pull your head out!!!"

That's what I want to say, and others bigger and smarter than me are saying it as well, only in nicer terms.

Klaus Schwab, whom I gather is some kind of international plutocrat and a Davos Man, ventilated this lament at the latest global cognoscenti conclave:

"We have a general morality gap, we are over-leveraged, we have neglected to invest in the future, we have undermined social coherence, and we are in danger of completely losing the confidence of future generations," said Klaus Schwab, host and founder of the annual World Economic Forum.

"Solving problems in the context of outdated and crumbling models will only dig us deeper into the hole. (Breitbart)

A Moral Morass

We are in a moral morass, and the elites have led us here. By their own venal behavior in the world's marketplaces of business and finance, but also by their tacit approval of destructive behavior. Throwing state money at the poor may have salved some consciences, but it's done nothing to help the poor pull themselves out of poverty.

State-sponsored social projects have resulted in a split between Belmonters (the haves) and Fishtowners (the have nots), according to the central thesis of Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart.

Murray notes that before the 1960's, the rich and the poor shared many demographic traits, common mores and shared American values. Now, they are miles apart. Percentages in both groups were comparable for marriage, out of wedlock births, unemployment, crime, and church attendance. All of these social indicators have gotten much worse for Fishtown, while the Belmonters enjoy stability. Both groups are in a feedback-fed spiral, one virtuous and the other corkscrewing ever downward.

Preach What You Practice

Progressives have generally accepted Murray's observations, but they disagree vehemently with his conclusion:

The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices. (WSJ - Murray)

Progressives want more redistribution and government programs. Niall Ferguson explains why this is folly:

So what is to be done to heal the rift between Rich America and Poor America? There are two obvious problems with the standard liberal prescription of increased welfare spending, financed by higher taxes on the rich. The first, as Murray points out, is that the welfare programs of the Great Society era were in many ways the cause of the breakdown of social order in working-class America.

The second is that this is a very strange time to want to import the European welfare state, with its aspiration to provide everyone with comfort and security from the cradle to the grave. In case you hadn’t noticed, that system is currently on the brink of fiscal collapse in its continent of origin.

Murray’s conclusion is that Americans need to steer clear of Europe and instead get back to their roots. We should scrap the institutions of the New Deal and Great Society and replace them with the system of guaranteed basic income he first proposed in In Our Hands (2006). And we should pin our faith on the four traditional pillars of the American way of life: family, vocation, community, and faith. These, Murray argues, were the true foundations of the American project, from Kennedy all the way back to Washington. (Ferguson)

If You Love Someone, Set Them Free

A little shame wouldn't hurt either. The fear of shaming myself and my family is what kept me from stealing when I needed more money, or from engaging in other behaviors that were fun at the time but could end in destruction, tragedy or... shame...

My parents also taught me that the bird with the broken wing and the sick fox I captured and nursed back to health had to eventually be let go. We are financing societal dysfunction that has condemned millions to crime-infested neighborhoods and failed schools.

More money and more government has only made things worse for the poor. For the tens of millions on the bottom, The War on Poverty has been lost, and it's not a Great Society. It's time to try something different.

See Also (Walter Russell Mead is especially thought-provoking):

The Welfare State is Destroying America

David Brooks - The Great Divorce
Walter Russell Mead - Crisis of the American Dream, Pt 1
Walter Russell Mead - Crisis of the American Dream, Pt 2

Progressivism's Pernicious Holy War

2012-02-10T05:00:00.001-07:00

A Church - State battle is now engaged...

Obama declared jihad on the Catholic Church by decreeing it must pay for birth control and abortions of its employees, and the Holy Roman Empire is striking back.

This is not just a Catholic issue, it is a religious freedom issue. Make churches pay for stuff that violates their doctrines and bedrock beliefs, and you can next force them to perform gay marriages or declare their doctrine hate speech under pain of losing their tax exempt status.

But wait, there’s more! Once the federal government establishes the precedent that it can violate this First Amendment right, it is then free to violate the free speech rights of individual citizens. First Amendment gone. All for the greater good, dontcha know...

Libertarian Steve Chapman recalling the church's losing battle against birth control pills back in 1960's, comes to liberty's defense:

But many of those who think it's wrong to forbid Americans to buy contraceptives think it's just fine to require them to buy contraceptives. In this group, unfortunately, are President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who are hell-bent on enforcing that mandate on nearly everyone. (Chapman)

Statist Toady Joan Venocci argues for the constitution shredders:

But not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That’s the Obama administration’s argument, and it makes sense. (Boston Glob)

The obvious answer is, of course the Catholic Church is not denying them these things. Employees of the Holy Roman Empire are free to go out and purchase them. No inquisitions, no fear of being burned at the stake, just a free decision... Paid for with their own damned money!

All Your Cookies are Belonging to Me!

Venocci's argument encapsulates the progressive long march. As government increases, we decrease. They lure us in with favors and suborn private institutions with government money until the individual becomes indistinguishable from the state. Take government money and not only must you dance to their tune, you become government property, bought and paid for.

That is what the progressive argument hinges upon: If you take from the government pot (which consists of money confiscated from you), you surrender your rights to the state. The linchpin of this nefarious government plot is getting every little doggy's paw to reach into the pot. Progressive mission accomplished. Checkmate. You are bought and paid for. With your own money.

* - For a deeper explanation of the legal justification progressives use to defend Obamacare and other similar incursions on our liberties, see this: WH - Of Course Government Can Put a Gun to your Head...

An Ebbing Tide Lifts Obama’s Boat

2012-02-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

Giving up is the key to Obama’s reelection. Giving up on looking for a job, that is...

4 million Americans are so disgusted with Obamanomics that they have permanently abandoned the nation’s tattered workforce since the president took office, helping to keep the unemployment rate out of scary double-digit territory where it more properly belongs.

The simple calculation for unemployment before all the seasonal adjustments and so forth, is:

Unemployment Rate = Number of Unemployed / Total Labor Force

So the easy way to get unemployment down is to reduce the numerator in proportion to the denominator, and the easiest way to do that is to declare that the greatest number of unemployed workers are no longer looking for work, and therefore no longer “unemployed.” This shrinks the numerator relative to the denominator, making unemployment go down.

Obama is on track to be the only president to lose jobs during his term

This impressive feat beats even Herbert Hoover. He produced this horrible historic milestone by stopping drilling, shutting down pipelines and plane factories, and liberally slinging shovel-ready bureaucratic manure all over the place. His economic record is abysmal.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to talk about just how catastrophic Obama’s job destruction record is. Here’s the wrong way:

Looking at the U-6 unemployment rate, which includes the discouraged and part-time workers, really doesn't tell us anything, because the ratio stays pretty much the same in good times and bad, so it’s a comparative wash to point out that “real” unemployment is closer to 16%.

The same goes for trying to point to statistical tricks like seasonal adjustments, which explain how the economy could shed 1.5 million jobs between December and January yet still claim that unemployment fell from 8.5 to 8.3 and added 234,000 jobs. All administrations have played by these rules, so it’s not really a good point of criticism.

Here’s why Obama is a horrible president...

The absolute number of total jobs in the US has shrunk since President Obama was inaugurated; a catastrophe considering our population continues to grow. The shrinking participation (taking frustrated job-seekers out of the equation) is the key to masking Obama’s jobs destruction. Just this past month Obama's regime sliced off 88,000 job-seekers, sending them to statistical oblivion and improving his bottom line.

If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7 percent then vs. 63.7 percent today—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.0 percent.

As an analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies concludes, “Most of the shift of the past year is due not to the improvement in the labor market, but the continued drop in participation in the labor force.” (8.3 Unemployment Rate is a Phony Number)

Here’s the bad news for Obama:

If the participation rate does level off at its current rate, according to HPS, the economy would need to generate 231,000 jobs per month to get below 8 percent unemployment by Election Day (8.3 Unemployment Rate is a Phony Number)

Now for the good news for the hopium smokers:

If the participation rate continues its downward slide, however, that number would be much lower—perhaps as low as 131,000 jobs a month (8.3 Unemployment Rate is a Phony Number)

So as long as the overall number of jobs continue to shrink and the government continues to kick more and more workers out of the statistical labor force, the jobs picture will continue to look up for Obama, even as the economy sags and the number of Americans out of work increases.

And they say the GOP field is unelectable?

See also: O-Man the Destroyer

Attack on Catholic Church is an Attack on the Constitution

2012-02-08T05:00:00.001-07:00

President Obama has decreed that the Catholic Church must provide birth control and abortifacients in the health care plans it offers to its employees

Here’s a statement from government suckerfish Planned Parenthood:

“This is good health policy and good economic policy,” said Dawn Laguens, vice president at Planned Parenthood. “It increases access to affordable birth control, but it is up to an individual employee to choose it or not. That’s very much the American way.” (El Lay Times – Contraceptive Mandate)

No. It's not the American Way, as if a statist trained monkey raised and sustained on free taxpayer money would even begin to understand the concept. This is a terrible idea because it is a federal government telling private citizens what to do when it has no authority to do so. A true free choice is one you make on your own and then pay for on your own without picking someone else’s pocket. That’s the American Way. The constitution was written to prevent such abuse.

Kevin Drum wrote that if you take government money you march to the government’s tune. It's a valid argument. However, the violator here is not the Catholic Church; it is the US Government that is charged by We The People to be the guardian of our God-given rights. By ensnarling every last person in its tangled web, it has created a hopeless situation for anyone wanting to order their own lives and business free from the unblinking government gaze.

What gives the federal government the right to issue such dicta to churches? What gives it the right to command any organization or business in this way? What part of the constitution sanctions this?

The federal government is in bald-faced violation of the first amendment

You see, our rights are innumerable and bounded only by those outer limits where they interfere with the rights of others. Government’s rights are enumerated and limited; restricted by what that mandate from the people to their elected government, the US Constitution, says. This is what we need to be telling our politicians, our kids, and our family, friends, neighbors and coworkers who may have forgotten it. We also need to say it loud and proud when the smartass statist gargoyles in the press shove microphones in our faces at tea party rallies.

The US Constitution protects our God-given rights to life, liberty and property and it limits the actions the federal government may take against them. The very idea of mandating such everyday minutiae of our personal lives makes a mockery of our constitutional form of government.

Even Liberty's Defenders get it Wrong...

Oxymoronic ObamaCatholic Doug Kmiec proposes a speech Obama should give that admits the government was wrong. This phrase stuck out at me:

While the constitution doesn't mandate religious exemptions from general laws, I believe we should accommodate as many beliefs as possible and to the greatest extent possible without jeopardizing the purpose of the law. (Tim Reidy)

Firstly, we have no more general laws, as great jurists of England and the United states from centuries past would understand them. Our government no longer operates under the constitutional Rule of Law. Rather, it now barrages us with stern commands and dictatorial edicts.

Religious Exemptions are a Warning Sign

Were our government’s lawmaking still in conformance with the constitution, there would be no requirement for “religious exemptions,” since the First Amendment bars government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The fact that our discussions of law and regulations are now so shot through with talk of exemptions is an indictment against our government and the craven batwinged legislators and bureaucrats who haunt its once-hallowed halls.

Federalist 84 eloquently expresses this concern, as Publius argues against a Bill of Rights. He saw the danger to all our rights that would be caused by enumerating certain of them. Hamilton proved to be quite prescient:

They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?

Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?

I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. (Federalist 84)

Back when the constitution still mattered, honorable lawmakers would observe that this or that proposed legislation protrudes into the private lives of citizens, and thereby abandon the project. Our post-constitutional government suffers no such scruples. And the ignorant subjects stand up on their hind legs and applaud.

Tuesday News Day

2012-02-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

So much news and so little time...

Liberal Outrage forces Komen Kollapse

Nothing outrages lefties like taking their free money away. Just look at how the public union leeches turned things upside down in Wisconsin and Ohio at the prospect of having to pay for their own pensions and health care like the rest of us.

The New York Times called Komen cutting off Planned Parenthood "a painful betrayal." Liberals, accustomed to other people’s money, were outraged, Outraged! At the Susan G. Komen decision to cut off funding to the abortion mills.

It only took a couple of days for the Komen people to surrender to The Sisterhood of Burning Rage. They will restore the funds even though Planned Parenthood does not perform breast cancer screenings. They've managed to piss off both the right and the left in the span of three days. I predict Komen's demise.

As usual, Mark Steyn has the absolute definitive take on the issue, The Liberal Enforcers.

Holder says there was no cover-up

…and I believe him. He’s not smart enough to hide anything, and why would they need to? There are enough genuflecting servile subjects in this country who believe government can do whatever it wants, so if Obama wanted to give Mexican drug gangs free guns, who are we to question it?

Vampire Capitalism

Mitt could be the nominee, so we will be hearing more about Vampire Capitalism from the Marxoids of all parties. The New Yorker has an excellent and concise article not about Mitt Romney, but Venture Capital, and surprise of surprises, takes a very even-handed view. Their beef with it is the same as mine: Government tax policy and perverse incentives encourage the demons of the venture capitalist's nature:

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don’t need tax loopholes to make money. If we capped the deductibility of corporate debt, and closed the carried-interest loophole, it would not prevent private-equity firms from buying companies or improving corporate performance. But it would reduce the incentives for financial gimmickry and save taxpayers billions every year. (New Yorker)

Hillary Guns for Syrian Dictator Basher Assad

The Brits wonder if Hillary is styling herself as a classic Bond villain, and this right after she unleashed a blistering tongue lashing to Basher Assad at the UN.

Assad had better watch his back. Hillary made a similar statement about Ghaddaffi and look what happened to him. If recent history is any basis, I predict Assad will be dragged from a rat infested sewer pipe and sodomized with a piece of rebar as Hillary stands laughing maniacally at how she came, she saw, he died. And before the election season is all over, Obama will be bragging how he shot Assad like a dog in the street, just like he single-handedly parachuted into Pakistan and took out Usama bin Laden as Joe Biden circled watchfully above in the batcopter.

Buffett Rule: a $50 billion loogie in a multi-trillion dollar ocean

The Congressional Research Service estimates that the Buffett Rule, requiring millionaires to pay at least the same rate as most middle-income taxpayers, would affect about a quarter of all millionaires, or 94,500 taxpayers. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal policy group, says the bill’s 30 percent rate would bring in about $50 billion per year. (NY Times)

So for the $4 trillion annual federal budget, that’s about a 1.25% savings; a rounding error for our profligate federal money wasters. And this meager savings depends on millionaires just sitting there as government plucks them like chickens. I’m offering 50-1 odds they don’t…

This Explains the Obama Vote ...

Professor Jonathan Zimmerman explains that universities have no way of measuring success or failure, and when independent studies attempt to, the results are not encouraging:

My New York University colleague Richard Arum and the University of Virginia's Josipa Roksa recently tracked several thousand undergraduates as they moved through two dozen U.S. universities. They found that almost half of them didn't significantly improve their reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college.

And after four years, subsequent research showed, more than one-third of students still showed no significant gains in these areas. (Are College Students Learning?)

But I bet their self-esteem is high…

Obama Declares Jihad on the Catholic Church

2012-02-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

Obama Cult "O Loko Haram"

Obama’s Holy War

Two years ago when Obamacare ordered the Catholic Church to include birth control and abortions in its health care plans, the nation’s Catholic Bishops threatened to shut down or sell off all hospitals, and it appeared that the threat had staved off our imperial government.

Catholic hospitals are an important component of our nation’s health care system, providing the only source of medical care in some areas, and only a fool would want to see them shut down. That was the prevailing wisdom at the time.

Now, I believe that thinking was wrong, and it appears that the Obamistas do want them shut down, provoking a crisis and providing a pretext for more government intervention. This is about the state breaking one more private institution to its will. Progressivism is an inexorable march to absolute state control, and this is just the next step.

What’s Obama’s end game?

Employers that furnish health insurance have to cover it. But employers don't have to furnish health insurance -- and some of those with a religious mission may decide not to. When the District of Columbia passed a law that forced Catholic Charities to provide medical insurance to the same-sex partners of its employees, the agency elected to simply drop coverage for spouses.

Anyone left without health insurance under the administration's rule can go to new state-run health insurance exchanges to buy individual policies. But here again, the administration rejects freedom of conscience. The only policies available will include coverage for contraceptives -- including those the church regards as "abortion drugs" -- and sterilization. (Steve Chapman)

The end game is to herd more human cattle and sheeple into the Obamacare box canyon, while trampling our old fashioned morals and ushering in a new era of progressive utilitarianism, freed from fusty shibboleths like human dignity and sanctity of life.

And the Catholic Church, which snuggles up to big government at every opportunity instead of preaching the Catholic doctrine of Subsidiarity, should learn a lesson from all of this:

Get in bed with Uncle Sam and don't be surprised if you get more than a good night's sleep -- Ronald Reagan

Contraception Mandate Outrages Religious Groups

O-Man the Destroyer

2012-02-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

We conservatives get queasier by the day watching the slow-mo car wreck that is the GOP primary. We don't all agree on who the nominee should be, but that's OK. That's what primaries are all about. I want to take a break from the internecine rock throwing and refocus our attention on what a dismal failure President Obama and his Obamanomics have been for this country.

Obama is a Jobs Destroyer

Thanks to the usual partisan government statistical manipulation, the unemployment rate supposedly inched lower, but the Obama economy remains a wreck. Maggie at Maggie’s Notebook smells cooked books as well. Check it out to understand the statistical games the Obamacrats are playing to hide just how bad the unemployment crisis really is.

Zero Hedge does an excellent job breaking it down it down as well. The secret to Obama's jobs numbers is that the workforce has shrunk by millions, keeping the official unemployment rate artificially low.

Obama is a job destroyer, and he is on track to be the first president to have a net job loss during his tenure. An impressive feat given the Democrat presidencies of FDR and Jimmy Carter. The press will try to talk up the still sagging Obama economy, but that will only get him so far. People out of work can't eat hope and change, although the OWS'ers are rolling it up and smoking it...

It’s no wonder Gallup’s electoral projection map that is based upon Obama approval reveals a vast sea of red dotted on the fringes by a few small blue islands of ignorance.

What’s Obama going to run on?

Wasting billions on green energy failures?

Stealing $23 billion from taxpayers to reward failed Detroit Automobile tycoons and their Union Cronies?

Maybe he can run on giving us the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression, and we can all sing “Crappy Days are Here Again!”

For even more evidence that Obama is the Worst President in the History of The United States, see Daniel J. Mitchell's Obamanomics vs Reaganomics. Reagan had America on a skyrocketing trajectory by this point in his presidency, and the reason is simple. He did the opposite of what our Bumbler in Chief Obama is doing.

If you're still hungry for more evidence that Barack Hussein Obama is Caligula on Crack, read Quin Hillyer's His Abominations Accelerate.

Yes, Newt is a Republican progressive who makes my ears bleed, Romney and Santorum are big government statists, and Ron Paul is playing to the OWS rabble, but it's even worse for the Democrats. Obama is all they got.

Weekend Humor

2012-02-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Why? Because we need it...

I know I do. If Romney vs. Obama doesn't make you want to gouge out your eyes, light yourself on fire and run screaming off of a cliff, I don't know what will...

Nuthin' some Jack Daniels, BBQ and playing music with friends won't solve. One of my buddies is bringing over a banjo he just inherited from his grandpa.

My new favorite thing is Cracked.com. I remember Cracked from my childhood as the alternative to Mad Magazine for the discriminating pre-teen boy, and I didn't realize until the other day that they had a web site. Who doesn't, I guess...

Anyway, here are a couple of snippets that had me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes, and that hasn't happened for a long time. It's a little racy, but nothing too over the top. As a bonus, since it has Cher in metal underwear I can tag this as a Rule 5 post!

What follows is all from Cracked, not my cracked brain. I only wish I were this inventive. Chime in and let us know which were your favorites ...

The 19 Most Hilariously Failed Attempts at Sexy Album Covers

# 6. Whitesnake - Love Hunter

There's a lot going on in this album cover, and all of it is awesome. But what you can't see is what happened moments later. The snake actually got this woman pregnant. Nine months later, she gave birth to a full-size 1978 Ford Econoline Van with an airbrushed picture of a Viking riding a fire breathing dragon through the night sky on the side of it.

# 10. Cher - Take Me Home

Nothing turns on a man like metal lingerie that, by our count, has 13 different points capable of tearing open your scrotum if she makes an unexpected move.

8 Impressively Sarcastic Amazon Product Reviews (Part 3)

#5. Ready America 77100 Cat Evacuation Kit

Your first thought might be, "Is this a joke product?" No, you asshole. Some people, when faced with a fire or earthquake, might want to leave the house with their cat safely restrained and well-supplied instead of releasing it into the street to be run over by an arriving emergency vehicle. Maybe this product isn't for you if you like to throw your cat into the path of approaching fire trucks, but some people can make use of it.

Sorry, I'm supposed to be presenting sarcastic reviews, not writing them. As you can guess, most of the jokes come from misunderstood instructions, although each of these reviewers decided to go a different direction.

Globalism Comes Home

2012-02-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

Globalism's next stage could actually be good for America and the world

Like the proverbial blind squirrel, every once in awhile ChiCom fanboy Thomas Friedman rises above his simplistic pseudointellectualism and mixed metaphors to produce a column that makes sense.

His latest outing is full of CEO quotes about how the global economy continues to evolve, and how America is uniquely poised to take full advantage of it.

The Global Elites are losing their Grip

Continual fragmentation of ideas, manufacturing, and tastes, along with markets fracturing into micro-markets and specialty niches all conspire to make it harder for the global elites to homogenize every last aspect of our lives.

Fellow New York Times columnist, David Ignatius, a liberal who passes for a conservative over there, notes that the Davos Men are more disconnected than ever from us normal people, but he is instead pessimistic. I discount his gloominess because he himself is disconnected, a man in awe of the world elites.

Ignatius is cheered only because the ranks of the elites now include the red and yellow, brown and black, slowly wrenching global thought leadership from the Western White Man's oligopolistic grip. Reading it makes me long for times past when reporters hated the rich and powerful.

What you see here are some of the smartest business and political leaders in the world gathering to discuss common problems. It's a heady feeling, to see so much global talent in one place.

It's an inclusive elitism: The magnet draws the rising tycoons from developing countries and fuses them with the once-dominant Americans, British, Germans and French. That's the most likable feature of the forum, the way you see Chinese and Indians and Egyptians and Pakistanis shuffling down the streets in their snow boots, along with the Swiss hosts. They are part of the connected world, just as much as the old-line bankers and CEOs from the West. (David Ignatius)

What Ignatius fails to realize is that the global geniuses may have outsize influence, but its the ingenuity of the locals that powers an economy, and we have plenty right here in the good ol' US of A.

Ignatius rightly laments the societal destruction globalism has wrought, but he's singing yesterday's tune. Friedman has the forward-looking view on this one...

Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere.

These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. (Friedman)

He cites a Hong Kong CEO...

Now, said Fung, the rule is: “ ‘Source everywhere, manufacture everywhere, sell everywhere.’ The whole notion of an ‘export’ is really disappearing.”

Words from other CEOs:

Mike Splinter, the C.E.O. of Applied Materials, has put it to me this way: “Outsourcing was 10 years ago, where you’d say, ‘Let’s send some software generation overseas.’ This is not the outsourcing we’re doing today. This is just where I am going to get something done. Now you say, ‘Hey, half my Ph.D.’s in my R-and-D department would rather live in Singapore, Taiwan or China because their hometown is there and they can go there and still work for my company.’ This is the next evolution.” He has many more choices.

Just like Toyota and other foreign firms manufacture products here for our consumption. That is the future. Less import-export of final products, and more build and sell in place when it makes economic sense.

America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate” in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.

The world is on the cusp of an information age equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, and America above all others is best positioned to take full advantage of this decentralize future.

Few deny that technology fuels economic growth as well as both social and lifestyle progress, the latter largely seen in health and environmental metrics. But consider three features that most define America, and that are essential for unleashing the promises of technological change: our youthful demographics, dynamic culture and diverse educational system. (The Coming Tech-Led Boom)

We don't need no stinking national strategies

As usual with the rare Friedman column I agree with, he closes with a conclusion so absurd that I end up wanting to tear my eyes out in frustration...

"If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to enhance and expand all of our natural advantages..." (Friedman)

Poor Progressive Tommy, always longing for the Strong Man to make the trains run on time...

National Strategy? How about a low tax, low regulation environment where you can manufacture things again in this country without 200 government bureaucracies crawling up your ass? That's the strategy we need.

Restore the Rule of Law and give the American workers and entrepreneurs a stable, predictable environment to invent, create and be free, and they will lead this nation again to the sunlit uplands of economic greatness and personal liberty. Personal liberty and economic freedom: You can't have one without the other.

Made in the World

Politics is Dirty Business

2012-02-01T05:00:00.001-07:00

Mitt Romney won Florida, and Newt fans are throwing rocks at Marco Rubio for taking sides. Some are also accusing Mitt of politically offing Rep. Allen West by urging the Florida GOP to turn his district blue. Heads are getting hot, and the GOP contestants have barely limped out of the gate...

Conservative fans of Allen West are becoming aware of his redistricting woes. He will be running in a district that is much more liberal this fall. Did he get crossways with the Florida political establishment? Did he not kiss the right *ahem* rings?

Others are convinced that RINO Mitt Romney is behind it all, but I doubt it. Dark speculation about Mitt’s nefarious mitts in all of this is a little overblown.

These are state matters, and usually more parochial issues are what drive stuff like this. Redistricting is fought over tooth and nail, and an outsider presidential candidate who barely has a 50-50 chance of being president is not going to swing that much weight. Somebody wants to carve out a district for a favored politician, or trade it for a political favor, or something like that. There is a lot of “go along to get along” in state politics, and a state politician is not going to expend political capital to satisfy a weak national candidate.

I’m an occam’s razor guy, so I gravitate towards the least convoluted answer. Also, it is most logical to go with the answer or opinion that explains the most data

Sean Trende has the best explanation I have seen. West’s district is already jerrymandered to the max; a patchwork of small conservative enclaves in a sea of urban liberal blue. He’s boxed in by redistricting rules and other districts that cannot be encroached upon. This may be the best they could do for him. Trende does a good job illustrating what he is talking about with color-coded maps. Go read it all here: The Trouble with Saving Allen West’s District

H/T to Bunkerville

See also: The Shark Tank - Redistricting Goes Awry?

Religion or Culture?

2012-01-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

I have little patience for people who sing from the catalog of Christianity's sins but brook no criticism of Islam. When defending Islam, their favorite argument is that it's not the religion, its the culture

Sir Charles, OM, QC, OFM, Knight of the Queen's Girdle and all that, (Peace Be upon Him), charges to the rescue any time someone casts aspersions upon the Religion of Peace. (See this thread at Leticia's)

He and fellow Defenders of the Faith have excuses from now to doomsday explaining away the horrors that Islam has spawned:

It's not the religion but the national culture...
... religious conservatism...
... women like being swaddled head to toe when it's 120 degrees outside...
... and they don't like driving anyway...
... but it's only a small stick ....

OK, I added the last three, but I have heard variations of them at other forums...

The Christmas day killing in Texas where a man gunned down his entire family as they were gathered around the Christmas tree spurred my fellow Right Blogistanis to yet another gang attack on Islam, but it actually caused me to back up and reconsider. Mr. Yazdanpanah was obviously mentally distraught and emotionally anguished due to bankruptcy, family problems and a marriage breakup.

The Yazdanpanah's were not Muslim Fundamentalists

This is a man who reportedly enjoyed happy hour cocktails with men and women after work. Look at family pictures and how the women dress. This is not a fundamentalist family. They were celebrating Christmas (albeit secularly), with a Christmas tree for Pete's sake! Religion probably did not motivate him. But did his native culture? And what shaped that culture? He's Iranian, so I'm waiting for an apologist to suggest Zoroastrianism...

Every time a Muslim man decapitates someone or kills his (always female) family members, a "Religion vs. Culture" argument breaks out. It's a silly argument over a false choice. Religion and Culture, you can't have one without the other. Cultures are informed by their dominant religions, and a religion accepts what is not objectionable from the surrounding culture.

Grand Ayatollah Imam Shirazi explains it better than I ever could:

So in the case of Islamic religion and its followers, Islam does influence the culture, but culture does not generate the religion; for all the teachings of Islam are generated or inspired by none other than the divine entity. Inherently every aspect of the teachings of Islam is based on a reason and wisdom for the good of mankind - [whether or not the reason happens to be known to him.]

On the other hand if a practice or a particular aspect of culture does not contradict the system that is brought for the good of mankind, i.e. it does not contradict the teachings of Islam, or it is good for mankind, then it is accepted or endorsed by the Islamic religion, since anything which is considered good or is not considered harmful for mankind is declared permissible and therefore accepted and endorsed by Islam. And this is the kind of relationship Islam harbours for faith and culture. (Imam Shirazi)

So why are some practices absolutely prohibited (drinking), while female genital mutilation is AOK? These are religious judgement passed on cultural practices.

Ducky, Jack and other ably proffer evidence to bolster the "culture, not religion" argument. Places like the United Arab Emirates, though ruled by Sharia, are relatively free from stonings and head chopping. The Emirates are very rich, and they bribe jihadis to leave them alone, and they deal harshly with public fundamentalist outbursts. Ducky has pointed out that various religions in Africa perform female genital mutilation, and the practice pre-dates Islam.

So, we have some evidence that prosperity tamps down a religion's most repugnant rituals, and we find that some practices are shared among various religions. Neither observation answers the culture or religion question definitively, and that's because the two are inextricably entwined.

All I can offer in response is a different attempt at disaggregation. What about those non-Muslims living in Muslim-dominated cultures?

* Number of bombings carried out by Christians compared to Muslim-inspired explosions. A quick glance at the news or some googling will reveal Islam beating Christianity 10-1, or greater.

* Since Pakistan is proud home to over 600 honor killings annually, I'd like to see the Christian/Muslim breakdown of the statistics. Again, some googling will reveal it is approximately, oh... 100% Muslim and 0% Christian, unless it is a Christian who is on the receiving end of an angry wielder of the Flaming Sword of God.

An additional comparison that would be interesting would be the annual number of per capita Old Testament-style punishments meted out in Israel over the past decade compared to surrounding countries.

So is it really the culture?

Even an intellectually dishonest redefinition of honor killing (carried out by apologist feminists, no less), cannot snatch first prize in body count from Islam's bloody grasp. They still outnumber even Catholic Latin American husbands who kill their wives in a fit of jealous rage.

So, I don't condemn Islam or its practitioners; I simply view it with eyes wide open. I appreciate the contribution my fellow Americans of the Islamic faith make to this nation in the fields of industry, medicine, the arts, and defense. I thank God we are spared the darker aspects of their faith here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Maybe culture and national character have something to do with it after all...

Daily Mail
WFAA.com
PEW Survey - Muslim Attitudes
Imam Shirazi - Teachings of Islam

Socialism's Sad Propagandists

2012-01-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

The entire Class Warfare agenda collapses under serious scrutiny

President Obama's demagoguery surrounding wealth, taxes and everybody paying their "fair share" (what the hell ever that is) has passed its freshness date, but still it sits there in the public square, rotting like a sack of bloody fish heads in the harsh noonday sun.

Progressive hopium smokers say things like this...

"We have very little progressivity in our tax code, we have among the world's worst wealth disparity, and when compared to income and wealth, the wealthy pay much less in taxes than do the rest of us." (Jersey McJones)

This is the propaganda that Obama's willfully-ignorant toadies will regurgitate in response to a perfectly good blog post written by blogger buddy Jack Camwell.

The Rich already pay more than the rest of us

The effective tax rate of the median income taxpayer, (due to exemptions, deductions, etc) is 7.4 %, according to the New York Times, and not 15% or 25% as some have alleged.

Romney, a typical rich man who, like Warren Buffett, makes most of his money off of investments, had an effective rate of 13.9% in 2010. Rich men Obama and Gingrich paid 26.8% and 32.2% respectively. So rich people are paying at least twice the rate as the median income taxpayer, with some paying four times that.

Make the rich pay more? Even taxing the 1% at 100%, essentially confiscating their entire paycheck every two weeks would yield only another $900 billion or so, a band-aid to Obama's gushing deficits. Think about that for a moment. Even complete confiscation would not solve our government's deficit problems.

Earned Income and Capital Gains are taxed at different rates

It is also useful to distinguish between earned income and capital gains. They are taxed at different rates. So the Warren Buffett's secretary argument is one of apples and oranges. And btw, she's not a school secretary earning $30,000 per year; she reportedly makes over $300K/year, which puts some of her income all the way up in the 33% bracket. So yeah, Warren pays a lower effective tax rate, but he gets his money from captial gains, not salary. Maybe she should ask to be paid in Berkshire Hathaway shares...

Wealth distribution" rhetoric betrays an anti-liberty, socialist mindset

Who distributes it? Based upon what criteria? Where does the wealth come from? Who owns it? Do they really believe Uncle Obama has a stash? These unabashed socialists are talking about confiscating other people's money and redistributing it as they see fit, plain and simple.

The capitalist form of redistribution is going to work for a rich man in exchange for some of his money.

The US tax code is the most progressive among developed nations:

But a new study on inequality by researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris reveals that when it comes to household taxes (income taxes and employee social security contributions) the U.S. "has the most progressive tax system and collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population."

[...] the U.S. tax system is far more progressive—meaning pro-poor—than similar systems in countries most Americans identify with high taxes, such as France and Sweden. (The Tax Foundation)

Socialist Propaganda

Jersey's quote at the top of this article is a beautiful slice of sly socialist propaganda:

"...and when compared to income and wealth, the wealthy pay much less in taxes than do the rest of us."

See how Jersey sneaked in "and wealth?" We do not tax wealth in this country! We tax income! And did you notice the tautology? The wealthy are wealthier than the rest of us because they have more wealth...

Here are the bare facts, and they are nowhere near what Jersey would have you believe: The Top 5% of income earners pay over 50% of all taxes, while the bottom 50% pay just 2.25% Source: National Taxpayer's Union

Always be sure to carefully parse progressive propaganda. They can't stick to the simple numbers, but must invent categories and sly formulations to make their propaganda points.

So, in summary, the poverty pimps and the class warfare hustlers on the left are full of crap

Yes, social issues and crony crapitalism contribute to wealth disparity, but so does lazy people sitting on their asses all day while entrepreneurs are out finding ways to make money by serving their fellow man. An efficient market does not distribute rewards equally; it distributes them by merit.

The rich pay the overwhelming preponderance of taxes in this country, and almost 50% of Americans pay no federal income tax whatsoever. Some even get Earned Income Tax Credit, where the government pays them! Thank President Gerald Ford (a republican) for enacting it, and President Ronald Reagan (a republican) for expanding it.

So put that in you hopium pipe and smoke it!

Fear-Driven Economy

2012-01-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Wiz Kids took a whizz on us all and destroyed the economy to boot. Dodd-Frank will only ensure that there is a bigger crowd of clueless government bureaucrats in the bleachers when the next spectacular crash happens...

Jeffrey Snider is a smart man who understands the murky world of modern-day global finance, and he has a gift for explaining it. His articles are not short, and they are complex, but arcane artifices such as Gaussian Copulas do not lend themselves to shorthand. Still, he does a good job helping the ordinary Joe understand very complex financial subjects.

In The Fed is Actually Bailing Itself Out, he explains Credit Default Swaps.

“It all worked so well, until it didn't.”

“Since credit default swap trading had been growing in substance and depth since their first use in the 1980's, this market-based correlation assumption fit nicely into the expectations of structured credit investors and traders, offering real-time pricing of the previously illiquid asset class.

The proliferation of securitization came directly from this complex math, which itself was nothing more than a shortcut of circular logic (the market needs estimates of future default correlation to price assets, so the assets get their correlation estimates from the market).”

They constructed mathematical models to price previously-unquantifiable tranches of securitized debt. The models relied heavily on recent history, violating the simple truth, “Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.”

You don’t need to be a math genius to see the tragic flaw to all of this: Hubris. And a naïve credulity and blind obeisance to mathematical modeling, all at the expense of common sense, human nature, and financial history. The greedy bastards chucked it all over for the fantasy of an eternal fountain of wealth.

The Loop: “correlations of greater than 100%”

A rush of demand for default swaps pushed many idiosyncratic instruments in the same direction at the same time. Since the Gaussian copulas interpreted similar moves as correlation, this meant that the mathematical indication of correlation "measurements" rose with these new fears. And of course, as interpretations of rising correlations made their way into the math of pricing models, tranche pricing became even more problematic. That forced incrementally more demand for credit default swaps, feeding back into estimates of correlations rising even higher, further heightening fear and the need to hedge, and so on.

[…] it was not uncommon for traders to quote various mortgage bond tranches in correlations of greater than 100%. Of course that makes no logical sense within the confines of what correlation is supposed to confer or what mathematics actually defines, but the market realities of the period introduced by David Li's shortcut undercut the ability of the marketplace to make sense of itself.

This is the result of the folly that government-funded central planning and sophisticated modeling can replace human nature and common sense. More insidiously, it takes away our economic freedom and erodes our savings and buying power through monetarism’s manipulation of fiat currency. It is the antithesis of the free market.

Ron Paul's Anti-Exceptionalism

2012-01-27T05:00:00.004-07:00

I'm getting sick of Ron Paul asking us in his tinny, plaintive whine how we'd like it if Iran (or insert your favorite evil regime here) treated us the way we treat them. It makes self-loathing lefties stand up and cheer, and a disturbing number of conservatives nod their heads as well.

We Helped Our Enemies

Sure, we meddled in Iran during the cold war with the Soviet Union. My aim is not to discuss the merits of cold war policy, but to bring some clarity. When we took out Mossadegh in 1953, we did the bidding not just of the Shah, but of the same Islamists who later toppled the shah and brought about the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Similarly, we put the Taliban in the power seat by helping them and their Saudi-funded Arab confreres chase the Russians from Afghanistan. We refused to intervene as Islamists toppled dictators in Libya and Egypt. We spilled our own blood to save Balkan Muslims from slaughter. These are all actions that helped Muslims, but Islamists refuse to give us credit; our actions have only stoked their anger against us.

Our worst sin, according to Usama bin Laden himself, was to trample Islam's holy lands of Saudi Arabia as we protected them from the secular Arab Stalin Saddam Hussein. No good deed goes unpunished.

It's a chess game, not checkers, and the pieces are not black and white.

Ron Paul asked how we would like it if Iran (or any other belligerent) surrounded us and threatened us. Of course we would take exception! But he draws a naive equivalency. Iran killed 241 servicemen, mostly marines, in Beirut in 1983. We had no business there? Neither did Iran! What made their incursion any nobler than ours? Proximity is a naive answer. We were both trodding ground that was not ours.

Iran's proxies have blown up Jewish centers in South America, a continent blessedly free of such prejudice until the mullah's mad Muslims showed up. They also sponsor terror groups all over the Levant, Middle East and South Asia. They threaten to close the Straits of Hormuz, which they do not own and which other oil producers also use to the benefit of the global economy. We vow to keep it open, for all to use. There is no moral equivalency between us and them.

We anger them because we're standing in their way

The argument that we've angered the Usama Bin Laden's of the world by trampling their holy ground is also simpistic. I will concede that I'm sure they are angry, and not just at us, but at the rotten regimes we do business with. But what's the alternative?

By necessity we have to do business with people around the world, and all of those people, good or bad, will have enemies. Do we retreat every time someone with a grievance wields a knife or bomb? Of course they hate us! We're standing in their way!

If we only did business with good people, we coulnd't even do business with ourselves and we'd have to shut down DC. You think the Europeans are clean? Ha! Besides, bowing to threats is no way for any self-respecting nation to behave. It will only bring trouble.

Between strict non-intervention and endless war, there is a broad field of legitimate, constitutional foreign policy options, to include patrolling sea lanes and allying with like-minded nations to peacefully put on notice those with malevolent intentions.

Democrats Follow Soviet Model

2012-01-26T05:00:00.001-07:00

Here's what's scary: Liberals are so damned confident that they have the lapdog press under their thumbs that they can make ridiculous pronouncements like this:

Pelosi Aiming to Snag 35 Seats

It’s a meme of pure democrat invention. They throw it out with the supreme confidence that their Pravda propagandists in the state-controlled press will report it as a sure thing, planting it in the minds of the American voters.

Don't believe me? Look at how Obama's propaganda media arm is already talking up the economy. Despite record debt and continued unemployment, Happy Days Will Be Here Again by summer, regardless of reality. They gotta get their hero reelected come hell or high water...

“The Republican voters are discouraged, dontcha know…” and “The tea party is at a dead end, nobody’s out protesting.”

All I can say is, keep thinking that you dim dems. We're pissed off, and we vote. And that hopey changey crap ain't gonna work on the mushy middle this time. You can only sacrifice people down the Obamanomics volcano one time. They've returned safely to Realityville, and they're not going on any more liberal joyrides to fantasyland. Those fortunate enough to still have a job gripe about Obama to one another at work, and we cheerily welcome them to our side. You know, the side that deals in facts and reality.

Oh, the Democrat Socialists will do good in the failed states…

Pelosi predicted that Democrats will fare well in her native state of California, as well as in Illinois and New York. (Rollcall)

Of course they will, there are enough stupid voters in those states to put them over the top. These are people who stand still while progressive politicians and public unions pluck them like chickens. Chicago machine democrats have robbed the public pension funds dry in Illinois, but yet they roll on untroubled, unmolested and eternally reelected.

All states that are on track to lose congressional seats because they are bleeding out jobs and voters to the sunny, conservative South are democrat-dominated. See the connection? The vampiric democrat party is playing a loser’s game.

With GOP Help, Obama Confident of Reelection

2012-01-25T05:00:00.001-07:00

I'm not talking about the the president's STFU speech that kicked off his reelection campaign last night. Someone pulling a Joe Wilson by shouting "You Lie!" would have been gratuitously stating the obvious.

Yeah, he got off some good one-liners, like how he wants to create jobs, and his deadpanned "everyone plays by the same set of rules" jape had 'em rolling in the aisles. Believe it or not, there still are some boobs on the left who actually believe that crap...

But critics believe he was serious when he rolled out his proposal to squeeze the nation's wealthy non-liberals in giant California wine presses until every last drop of filthy lucre is drained from their lifeless husks.

So far the GOP is on track to reelect Obama...

Newt’s now like one of those nuked Japanese film creatures that not only was not destroyed but is back, bigger, badder and more cheesed off than ever.

Gingrich alone finally figured out that if it’s red meat that’s wanted, you might as well rip chunks of it from the flesh of the unctuous moderators and throw it right at the ravenous studio audience. (Michael Walsh)

Many of my conservative friends are dying to see Newt take apart Obama face-to-face in a presidential debate but it aint. gonna. happen.

If Newt wins, which is what the press wants, and if Obama decides to debate him (No rule says he has to, and it's easy to invent a few crises as a dodge. Hell, Obama's entire administration has been one long crisis)...

OK, to start again, if there is a debate, the rules will be so gentlemen's kabuki, no looking at one another or addressing one another, it will be a big flop, a Newtus Interruptus that leaves rightwingers deflated, Newt looking his old churlish self, and Obama emerging more presidential than ever.

Newt is a volatile admixture of kooky ideas, phony conservative populism and outsize self-regard. He is a rambling, voluble mountain of operatic bloviating rhetoric, with hot steam and progressive demiurges straining just below the surface, building up pressure at the certainty of an eventual explosive escape.

Newt is an over-inflated hot air balloon, and the fire is raging. Team Obama is just waiting for the opportune moment to needle him and enjoy the spectacular explosion.

Romney is a board-stiff middle manager full of platitudinous twaddle and Ron Paul's coalition of neo-nazis, dope smokers, AOW rabble and the curiously confused will never hold together. Oh, yeah, and then there's that Santorum guy, what's his name...?

But still...

We may end up saddled with a half-assed presidential candidate, but the dems’ problems are legion. First and foremost, they are stuck with the worst president in the history of the United States. Having Gaffmaster Joe on his crew doesn’t help matters. Everybody hates Obamacare, and finally people are waking up to his using the constitution as toilet paper. Even legal scholars in his fan club think his recess appointments could be overturned by a judge.

So, we're facing a craptacular election year, and we'll all be sick of politics and we'll all hate each other by the time it's all over. That's what politics does, and state-sponsored progressivism that confiscates it all, throws it in a public pot and encourages us to fight over it just makes the rancor extra spicy.

Legalize Drugs? What are You Smoking?

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

When private behavior costs fellow citizens money, it is no longer a matter of personal sovereignty

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson wants to end the war on drugs, but his plan merely declares a truce in one battle zone of a muli-front war. He proposes to legalize pot, but the bold talk dissolves into wishy-washy vagueness as he addresses harder drugs, saying over-simply that hard drug use should be treated as a health issue.

Half-Baked Hash Brownies

Does he realize that the rampant criminality and drug gang wars are driven by other drugs besides marijuana, like cocaine, meth and heroin? What about those? Legalize only pot, and all the criminal pathologies he lists will shift away from marijuana and converge upon the remaining illegal substances. The criminality and societal damage will not go away just because you reclassify illicit drug use as a "public health issue,"

So unless he proposes we stand aside and quit trying to stanch the torrent of drugs entering our country, he won't really end the "drug war" at all; he's just using leftwing rhetoric to make dope smokers happy and get their votes, if they can remember to go vote on election day.

Legalization will not eliminate criminality

Even if we decriminalized all drug use, meth heads and other shiftless dopers will still commit crimes to pay for their habits. Also, decriminalizing something doesn't magically make any trouble around it go away. People do violence over legal items all the time, from sneakers and XBoxes to carjackings. Moreso over addictive substances.

Legalization will not necessarily prevent a black market. Taxation and regulation could raise the price so high that a black market could be lucrative. Also, gangs could still war with one another over who provides raw material and finished products to legalized American manufacturers.

Can we live with the libertarian consequences?

If you want libertarian laws, you've got to be prepared to live with the with libertarian consequences. Do you really want to pay unemployable dopers to sit at home and use drugs? When a father breadwinner cracks himself out, do you want to foot the bill to save the kids from living on the street after the house is repossessed?

The only way drug legalization works is if we first eliminate the welfare state, and good luck with that...

In fact, Johnson wants us to pay for dopers' rehab as part of his treating it as a health issue. This is as wrong as wrong can be. He is incentivizing drug use. To implement this in a truly libertarian way, there would be no taxpayer money to drug users.

Hayek points out in Chapter 9 (Coercion and the State) of The Constitution of Liberty, that the state is right in restricting human activity where there is a collective responsibility. Welfare is a collective responsibility. A person blowing the top of her head off with drugs and rendering herself unemployable and an unfit mother places a burden on the rest of us. And not an elective moral burden, but an involuntary, mandatory one, as the state takes money from us to take care of this drug user and her children.

Taking libertarianism to its logical end...

If man is free to smoke dope, why isn’t he free to drop acid, smoke crack cocaine or use meth? Why isn’t man free to cook his own meth? Why can't two people engage in the free exchange of drugs for money? If Gary Johnson wants to run as a Libertarian, how can he countenance restricting this private behavior? Why does he stop at marijuana?

Why does Johnson and other libertarians suggest libertarian laws, but then backstop them with confiscatory progressive statism?

http://www.globalissues.org/article/755/illicit-drugs
http://www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion19.htm

Carter Disappointed He Was Passed Over for Dear Leader of North Korea

2012-01-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

Do to North Korea what you did to the US and I'll smack the crap outta ya!

(Yonghap - Pyongyang) Jimmy Carter expressed his disappointment last week at not being chosen as the new Dear Leader of The Hermit Kingdom. Still, he wished The North Koreans well and urged the international community to stop discriminating against the "misunderstood" country, whose government is dedicated to mass starvation of its people and continuous nuclear sabre rattling.

Here's an excerpt from Carter's Statement:

"Kim Jong-Un, as his name suggests, is the Un-dictator, and we should give him a chance," argued the former president. "Un is the Un-Jong, the refreshing crisp and clean no caffeine 7Up uncola to the former dictators's oppressive caffeine-laden cola. The people here are well-fed, the lights are on, and I've never seen such happy, well-choreographed dancing in the streets as I have in Pyongyang. It reminds me of those cheerful kids in those old Dr. Pepper commercials..."

Not all North Koreans agreed with the decision to pass over the former US President. "We are a militarily impotent economic basket case," a Communist Party food taster remarked off the record, "Carter would have been perfect for the job."

A wathcally wathist behind evwy Twee!

Back on US soil, Carter lost no time leveling charges of racism against any republican whose name he could remember. Newt Gingrich made the fatal mistake of mentioning foodstamps, which the tens of millions of tea party klan members know is secret racist code. That inspired an anonymous MSNBC news presenter to call Mitt Romney a racist for giving a poor black woman cash as he met her on a campaign event rope line.

If Mitt Romney is a racist for giving a black woman 50 bucks, then the US Government is a hateful bigotry machine, running the biggest progressive plantation in the history of the planet. It’s neo-slavery! Progressives are the new slave masters, trapping poor blacks in crime-infested ghettos, locking them in crumbling union-dominated schools that the liberal elite would never even think of sending their own kids to, and lying to them every few years to harvest their votes.

Jimmy Carter, the ideal democrat, would fit equally well in either the US or North Korea, as would the obedient propaganda toadies at MSNBC...

Obama in Fantasy Land

2012-01-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

President Richard Milhous Obama went to Disney World this past Thursday, and the make-believe setting was apropos. But even the magical castle and fantasy surroundings couldn't erase the colossal failures and the intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy of this corrupt mental midget from Crook County. Only the little munchkins in magical munchkin land could believe Obama has been a good president.

"You'd better vote for for him, my little pretties, or his flying monkeys will swoop down and snatch your government-provided goodies, Heheheheheheee!"

While at Disney World, the President also paused to model for his wax figure which will be placed in the Hall of Failed Presidents, stealing the place of honor for worst president in the history of the United States from Jimmy Carter, who's sagging, peanut-shaped figure will be moved to one side to make way for the new number one.

Greece to Rent out Ruins

The bankrupt Greek government has announced that is will rent out its ruins to raise money. Given the destruction President Obama has wrought, that would be a more appropriate setting to launch his 2012 campaign...

See also: Obama's Magic Kingdom of Joblessness

Nutballs From Hell

2012-01-20T05:00:00.007-07:00

All religions have their problems and suffer the sins of their fools and Grand Inquisitors. Islam, like its fellow faiths, has earned the obloquy heaped upon it.

It should be nobody's business how a religion conducts its affairs, but its influence on society is everyone's concern. If a religion advances the culture and is a boon to the society, all the better. Even those who don't practice it benefit from it. It works in reverse also. A religion can drag a culture down, keeping its people shrouded in ignorance and society mired in misery.

I'll leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on the differences between Christian-influenced cultures and those under the spell of Islam.

One major difference between Islam and Christianity is the nature of their spectacular sinners, the ones who make the news in some big way. Christians make the front page almost always by acting in violation of the teachings of Christ. Muslims trigger news updates usually by taking their teachings too far or too literally in defending faith and honor. I must give Islam credit. It's followers are much more fervent than Christ's.

We Christians bear the shame of a minuscule percentage of pedophile priests or flock-fleecing evangelists whose grave sins are not some weird perversion of the faith, but rather a bald-faced repudiation of it. The sin of slavery was ended in large measure by appeals to Christianity, and that faith powered America's civil rights movement. That is an important distinction between Christianity and Islam. While Christian crimes and atrocities spring from a rejection of the Gospel, and are ultimately ended by appeals to the same, Islamic horror shows stem from "misinterpretations" of their sacred texts, or turbo-charging some passage.

"A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike."

This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be "phobic." A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational. (Christopher Hitchens, Slate)

Islamic Extremists: Taking it Too Far

All religions that reach back to antiquity have some barbaric aspects to them. Judaism and Christianity have gotten past them (how many stonings happen nowadays in Israel, or Utah?) Islamic societies cling to ancient brutalities and bring them to new heights of horrible culmination.

It is also true that all religions have their kooks and practitioners on the fringes who, when God asks them to take one aspirin, decide to go him one better and gobble the whole bottle. Mormons condemn those "Jack" Mormons who go outside the church and practice polygamy, which often includes teenage girls. All Christians condemn the murder of abortionists and the bombing of their clinics. We are near unanimous in our condemnation of Revrund Phred Phlapps and his First Church of God Hates Fags. There is no way the teachings of Christ can be twisted out of shape enough to call these actions righteous.

About all I can say in defense of Christianity compared to Islam is that our kooks are less spectacular and have a harder time making the news than their flamboyantly violent Islamist rivals. Violent criminal acts in the name of Christ are so rare as to make each one a singular and memorable event, while Islamic violence has metasticized into a global miasma so routine that it has lost its shock value.

Biofuels Bomb

2012-01-19T05:00:00.001-07:00

Supporting Obama Pays Off...

Navy's Big Biofuels Bet: 450,000 Gallons at Four Times the Price of Oil

The Navy just signed deals to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels — arguably the biggest purchase of its kind in U.S. government history. The purchase is a significant step for Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ plans to transform the service into an energy-efficient fleet. But at approximately $15 per gallon — nearly four times the price of traditional fuel — the new fuels won’t come cheap. (Wired)

There is so much wrong with that statement. First, if Bush and Rummy had handed a lucrative deal like this to Halliburton, liberals would be screaming "fraud, waste and abuse!" Second, biofuels are less energy-efficient than fossil fuels, and this big purchase is not a "bet;" it is flushing taxpayer money down the toilet. Finally it is an expensive payoff to the FOOs (Friends of Obama).

This doesn't even rise to the level of Crony Crapitalism. It is bald-faced political patronage. Chicago Democrat Machine politics practiced by the crooked politician from Crook Country, Barack Hussein Obama. He's an upscale Richard Nixon for the 21st century. Bebe Rebozo - Tony Rezko...

Obama does have one up on Nixon. Tricky Dick's corruption did not make him a millionaire.

But Wait! There's More!

As they say on those cheesy tv commercials, "but wait, there's more!" Progressives are continually drooling over the prospect of grabbing other people's stuff. You can now add land grabbing to their long list of confiscatory lust that includes liberty limitation, money confiscation and gun grabbing...

Green Energy's Manifest Destiny

The rapacious Big Biofuels industry, world governments firmly in it's back pocket, is now taking direct aim at the little brown people standing in its way.

Covering a full decade of land deals from 2000 to 2010 in the global south and considering the acquisition of more than 200 million hectares of land over that period (equivalent to more than eight times the size of the UK), ILC’s new report suggests that 78 per cent of deals were for agricultural purposes, of which three-quarters were for biofuel production.

The new research also indicates that national elite firms play a greater role in the process of land-grabbing than previously indicated. While large land deals can create opportunities for developing countries , they are more likely to cause problems for the poorest members of society, who often lose access to land and resources that are essential to their livelihoods. (Biofuels Grab Half of Land Deals in Developed World)

So, you sanctimonious green progressives, consider this the next time you're tootling around in your green hybrid crapbox, all puffed up with satisfied self-righteousness...

“Under current conditions, large-scale land deals threaten the rights and livelihoods of poor rural communities and especially women,” says report lead author Dr Ward Anseeuw of the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development, CIRAD. (Biofuels Grab Half of Land Deals in Developed World)

All of this deforestation, destruction and theft of poor people's land is brought to you by your progressive federal government teamed with like-minded global progressives. With progress like this, who needs enemies?

The value of money

2012-01-18T05:00:00.002-07:00

Pity the poor statists. They got their global crisis, but by the time it arrived they had squandered all the public trust. Yeah, we know it’s broken, but we sure as hell don’t entrust the solution to the people who broke it.

Big Government a Bigger Threat to Us than Big Business

Recent Gallup polls show a fall to barely 41 percent in the number of Americans who see their county as divided into “haves” and “have-nots.” Some 64 percent of Americans -- and 48 percent of Democrats -- see “big government” as a greater threat to the country than “big business,” a number near record levels. (Clive Crook – A Crisis of Leadership)

It's a pretty good article Clive Crook has written, but he stumbles in a few places, such as when he questions free markets (why do people like him never question government interventions?)

Orthodox economics, according to recent reports, says markets are always right. Really? (Clive Crook – A Crisis of Leadership)

Yes, really. The market was right when house prices crashed. Free money stoked rampant speculation and irrational exuberance, and the walls came tumbling down. The markets are "right" in the same cruel way that the grocery store cash register says the groceries you bought add up top $210 when you only have $200 in your pocket.

It's no different with money and its market price. The only thing keeping the dollar from crashing is that the Euro is even worse. We are the least dirty shirt.

Theft by Government is Still Theft

Since the abandonment of Bretton Woods, the dollar has lost 77% of its value against the GDP deflator and 97% of its value relative to gold. In October 2011, real wages for ordinary workers were 6.7% lower than they had been 39 years before. This is all the cumulative effect of 1% lower growth rates for decades.

How can we reverse course? A modern version of a link to gold for the dollar is known as the “price rule.” That means the Fed is to be guided in its monetary policies by the market prices of a basket of price sensitive commodities, such as gold, oil, silver, copper, and other precious metals and minerals. When those prices start to rise, that signals inflation, and time for the Fed to slow down the money expansion. When those prices start to fall, that signals deflation and recession, and time for the Fed to step up money expansion.

The Fed would then be guided by markets, rather than by progressive bureaucrats who think they know it all and should rule over the rest of us in their wisdom (see, e.g., disastrous inflation/recession cycles of the 1970s). That would have the added advantage of enabling the Fed to dismiss most of its troublemaking staff, which could mostly be replaced by a few interns monitoring market prices. (The Monetary Foundations of Economic Prosperity)

The US Government is devaluing our savings and purchasing power while food and energy costs have risen around 10% over the past 18 months. That's why you're feeling poorer despite the lollipops and sunshine being peddled by the Obama hallelujah choir in the press. Government theft is eating us alive.

The Smudge

2012-01-17T05:00:00.001-07:00

A hateful little gay leftist named Damned Smudge pulled quite a coup a few years back, essentially linking Rick Santorum with gay sex in Google searches.

Here’s Smudge’s definition of “santorum”: “The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” (Mark Judge - The Deceit of Damned Smudge)

This is illustrative of much of the left. Vile hatred and not much else. The joke's not even funny, no word play or clever turn of a phrase or playing off of some trait. The name Santorum conjurs up perhaps a Latin dictate from a Pope, not the disgusting after-effects of a butt-plumber break-in.

How sick is it to smear another by imputing to them your own sickeningly foul practices?

Smudge has harmed his own cause, and that of his fellowtromboning tea-baggers. By employing such sordid gay sex imagery, he reminds live-and-let-live people of goodwill who normally do not ponder these things why they find such practices so repellent. "Maybe queers are deviant after all..."

It's a revealing peek into the mind of a flamboyant self-loather. A gay man who attacks a straight man by linking him to the messy byproduct of a common gay sex practice. Progressives, the supposed champions of human rights, oppose right to work laws, revel in the Caligula circus that is abortion, and gleefully "out" closeted gay people.

The backdoor burglar who pulled the Santorum prank is a smudge left on a bus station bathroom stall after a little tea room sex, probably with a closeted Republican. Worse, his vindictive unfunny smear harms his cause. Mark Judge probably speaks for quite a few people:

It took me a few years, a job with a lot of gay people, and an essay by Gore Vidal to disabuse myself of the notion I learned as a kid that gay people, especially gay men, are people who think constantly about sex, often filthy unhealthy forms of sex, and that they have no impulse control. I learned that gay people are just like everyone else.

Yet the visibility, indeed the celebration, of Damned Smudge in the media and the culture -- not to mention his demented and dehumanizing sex column -- has brought back that old stereotype. (Mark Judge - RCR)

What do you think?

Privatize Social Security?

2012-01-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been done. Successfully. In Chile. No, we can't do it here because we are broke.

Progressives in this country hate the Chilean privatized retirement model. The dumber ones try to call it a failure, backing their assertion with towering stacks of lies, but the smarter ones studiously ignore it, because the facts cannot be refuted.

Getting the Government out of the Pension Fund Business

The point of privatization is to get old age pensions off the federal government's books, but the transition is not cheap...

“For the U.S. right now it would be impossible,” said Alejandro Micco, who was the chief economist at Chile’s Finance Ministry until last year. To change to a private pension system “you either need to have a very big fiscal surplus to pay retirees without income from workers, or go into debt.” (Cain's Social Security Model)

We're already deep in debt, so I don't see how we would accomplish privatization. Regardless of the system, private or public, there will always be problems...

The bank found that exorbitant fees and other costs charged by private pension fund managers eat up as much as 15 percent of the contributions made by average Chilean workers, and even more for poorer workers. Investment returns have been far more modest than the hefty 11 percent return claimed by the private managers. The Chilean government's pension superintendent says actual returns for someone earning Chile's minimum wage were only 3.7 percent between 1994 and 2000.

A recent report by the Chilean government brought more grim news, forecasting that as many as half of all workers won't be able to save enough to receive the minimum pension when they retire—even after paying into their accounts for 30 years—and will therefore rely on government subsidies. More than 17 percent of Chile's retirees now continue working because they can't afford to live on their pensions, according to that study, and another 7 percent want to work, but can't find jobs. (Mother Jones)

All true, but misleading...

Returns were 11% during the boom times, and even at 3.7%, the Chilean model still beats our social security theoretical average return of 1-2 %. Also, we will always have the situation where some at the low end of the earning scale simply cannot save enough for their own retirement, especially when their savings is so small that the interest it earns is eaten into by flat fees that the big savers absorb much easier since those fees are proportionally smaller the more money you have in the account.

Finally, you need a lot of money to throw off the chains of wage slavery, and it's got to come from somewhere, regardless of the system. Far short of privatization, there are a few easy things government could do to help us all save money for our retirements: Stop taxing our money after we earn it, and stop inflating the currency, which is a silent, insidious tax on us all.

No Easy Answers

There are no easy answers, especially when standing in a deep chasm of our own making. This is not a sexy topic, but I find it interesting, and collected some links while researching this, so I thought I would share what I found for those who are interested.

More Links:
Freeman – How We Privatized Social Security
New American – Chile’s Privatized Social Security System is 30 Years Old
For Social Security, a Birthday Makeover
Social Security Administration – The Chilean Experience

The Pain of Bain Falls Mainly on the Insane

2012-01-15T05:00:00.001-07:00

Romney's time at Bain is the best, most defensible part of his record

Newt Gingrich, fresh off of making tens of millions as a DC insider access provider to the rich and famous, has a lot of chutzpah criticizing Romney, and by implication, capitalism. Operatic bloviator Gingrich sternly intones how Romney has some explaining to do, while laughably characterizing his gold-plated lobbying as "history consulting." Sure, DC is constantly clamoring for the services of historians.

Romney made billions and saved companies while Newt danced and sang on the Good Ship Freddie Mac, and we are still paying for the malfeasance that went on there while The Great Historian was collecting his government-funded fees. And only raw politics unencumbered by principle can explain why the inarticulate governor of America's free enterprise job engine would would join in on the gang attack.

Private equity is a route firms in trouble often take. Usually, the only alternative left is going out of business, resulting in everyone losing their job.

First, a brief explanation of private equity from economy reporter Robert Samuelson. I recommend the entire article. It is a dispassionate, fact-based examination with blessedly lucid explanations:

Private equity refers to groups of investors buying the stock of an existing company, thereby “taking it private.” Because most purchases use borrowed money (“leverage”), these transactions are known as “leveraged buyouts.” Once the investor group has control, it tries to improve profitability by lowering costs and increasing sales. The hope is to resell the business at a huge gain; this usually takes three to 10 years. In 2010, private-equity firms invested $148 billion in 1,234 U.S. companies, says the Private Equity Growth Capital Council. (WaPo - Samuelson)

For those leftists of all parties still bawling about Bain, investment banker and Obama man Steve Rattner comes to Romney's defense.

Bain Capital is not now, nor has it ever been, some kind of Gordon Gekko-like, fire-breathing corporate raider that slashed and burned companies, immolating jobs wherever they appear in its path.

Wall Street has its share of the “vulture capitalists” that Texas Gov. Rick Perry enjoyed mocking in South Carolina earlier this week. But Romney was almost the furthest thing from Larry the Liquidator. (Rattner - Politico)

Don't Blame Bain -- Blame Government Tax Policy

First, it’s fair game to question the amounts of debt that are sometimes used in leveraged buyouts. While higher debt usually means higher returns — because debt is cheaper than equity, thanks in part to its tax deductibility — it also means higher risk of bankruptcy.

Bain had less than its share of bankruptcies, but it had a few — it appears four — that are particularly troubling. In all those cases, when the portfolio companies initially showed signs of promise, Bain took advantage of their progress to borrow more money, which it took out as a dividend. Later, the fortunes of each company turned down, ultimately into insolvency.

When Bain “releveraged” those companies and took the cash out, the investment managers of course had no idea that the companies would later falter. But with the benefit of hindsight, taking a more conservative approach and refraining from squeezing these dividends out of the companies would certainly have been more prudent. (Rattner - Politico)

The liberal Rattner concludes...

It’s certainly fair game for any candidate’s opponents to dig into his record. But in Romney’s case, focusing on questions about his principles — and his current, staunchly conservative ones — could be more productive than trying to rewrite the firm’s history. (Rattner - Politico)

Indeed. Go after Romney on his liberal record and statist reflexes, but his Bain actions appear to be on the up and up. Upon comparison, Obama is clearly the superior job-destroyer and money waster.

Which is worse? Greedy Wall Street bankers making money by saving (or sometimes dismantling) sinking companies, or rapacious federal flying monkeys snatching tens and hundreds of billions from innocent citizens and blowing it on green energy failures and government-funded car fires?

Finance is only one part of capitalism. To put all of this in a larger context, I recommend Adam Davidson's excellent article in Atlantic, Making it in America, where he gives us insight into manufacturing in America.

Further Reading:

The Great Bain Diversion
The Truth about Bain and Jobs
The Battle of Bain Capital
Romney Doesn't Need to Apologize
Does Romney have the Right Kind of Business Background?

Profane Vulgarity and Swear Words

2012-01-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

The words vulgar and profane are often used interchangeably, but they each have a distinct meaning. We can be excused this minor infraction, because dictionary definitions for each word almost always reference the other. I did some research in the pursuit of clarity, and here is what I came up with.

Vulgarity

I remember as a young man seizing upon a book in an Asuncion bookstore with the title “Canciones Vulgares,” which means in English “Vulgar Songs.” My glee at the prospect of expanding my musical repertoire to the seamier side of The Castilian was deflated upon learning that the title employed the more traditional use of the word. It was a book of indigenous folksongs expressed in the local vernacular rather than formal Academia Real Spanish.

vul·gar
adj.
1. Crudely indecent.
2.
a. Deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement.
b. Marked by a lack of good breeding; boorish. See Synonyms at common.
c. Offensively excessive in self-display or expenditure; ostentatious: the huge vulgar houses and cars of the newly rich.
3. Spoken by or expressed in language spoken by the common people; vernacular: the technical and vulgar names for an animal species.
4. Of or associated with the great masses of people; common.

Here’s some interesting history on the word vulgar from The Free Dictionary:

The word vulgar now brings to mind off-color jokes and offensive epithets, but it once had more neutral meanings. Vulgar is an example of pejoration, the process by which a word develops negative meanings over time. The ancestor of vulgar, the Latin word vulgaris (from vulgus, "the common people"), meant "of or belonging to the common people, everyday," as well as "belonging to or associated with the lower orders." Vulgaris also meant "ordinary," "common (of vocabulary, for example)," and "shared by all."

An extension of this meaning was "sexually promiscuous," a sense that could have led to the English sense of "indecent." Our word, first recorded in a work composed in 1391, entered English during the Middle English period, and in Middle English and later English we find not only the senses of the Latin word mentioned above but also related senses. What is common may be seen as debased, and in the 17th century we begin to find instances of vulgar that make explicit what had been implicit. Vulgar then came to mean "deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement." From such uses vulgar has continued to go downhill, and at present "crudely indecent" is among the commonest senses of the word. (TheFreeDictionary.com)

Profanity

profane
adj
1. having or indicating contempt, irreverence, or disrespect for a divinity or something sacred
2. (Christianity / Ecclesiastical Terms) not designed or used for religious purposes; secular
3. (Christianity / Ecclesiastical Terms) not initiated into the inner mysteries or sacred rites
4. vulgar, coarse, or blasphemous profane language

So profanity is more of a taking The Lord’s name in vain or speaking irreverently about sacred things, while vulgarity is broader and includes speech that is boorish, distasteful, obscene or otherwise offensive. Bathroom humor, slang terms for human activity and body parts, swear words and so forth are more properly classified as vulgarities rather than profanities.

Swearing, Cussing and other Expletives

To swear has always meant to take an oath, but it now has negative connotations as well: swear words, swear at…

The secondary sense of "use bad language" (early 15c.) developed from the notion of "invoke sacred names." Swear-word is Amer.Eng. colloquial from 1883. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

For a quick history on “cuss” (probably came from curse) and “expletive,” as well as a short history on the the F-Word, see the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Why I Hate Politics

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

(AP/CBS News) WASHINGTON -- First lady Michelle Obama is challenging assertions she's forcefully imposed her will on White House aides, saying she's tired of people portraying her as "some kind of angry black woman," adding with a dagger-sharp glance at the unfortunate reporter, “and I’m going to start kicking some honky ass if it doesn’t stop.”

GOP Contest Suffers from Leftist Rhetoric Infestation

In other news, Mitt Romney is taking heat for his predatory capitalism, being called a “Vulture Capitalist,” not by poop-throwing OWS monkeys, but by big statist Newt Gingrich and inarticulate Texas Governor Rick Perry.

It’s helpful to remember that Bain didn’t swoop down in their flying Greedmobile and gobble up these companies. When a company or an investor group is in trouble (and everyone's job is in peril) they often turn to a capital group like Bain as their last chance. Sometimes they can save the patient, sometimes they can’t. Sometimes it takes an amputation. Bain’s job is to look out for the investors that hire them, not unfortunately, for the poor schlubs who have the misfortune of being deck hands on a sinking ship.

Capitalists do not enter the market to “create jobs” or destroy jobs. That doesn’t put food on the table; making money does, and that is the goal of a capitalist, or a cab driver for that matter. Asking why Mitt threw all those people out of work? You may as well ask why cab drivers don’t give rides to freeloaders, why restaurants insist on charging for their meals, and why retail stores don’t give away free stuff. Why don’t you work for free?

Yes, it's true that unlike some Republicans, Democrats don't "enjoy firing people." They enjoy "investing" your money in exploding electric vehicles, bullet trains and other highly unprofitable but morally satisfying economic misadventures. Venture socialism is certainly empathetic. (David Harsanyi)

Unlike Mitt, Obama’s Job Destruction has Cost us Hundreds of Billions

Romney beats Obama because Romney’s Bain actions didn’t cost taxpayers any money. Obama’s “job creation” programs have cost us hundreds of billions, and his job destruction programs even more, ending in solar panel company scandals, green battery factories closing down, and government-funded car fires.

The alternative to Schumpeter’s creative destruction is malaise-filled stagnation, where a society of government-protected betamax and rotary phone manufacturers goes down the economic tubes.

Finally, to wrap it all up and put it in Election 2012 perspective, I ask you this question: Which is worse, a candidate saying “I like to fire people who give me bad service!” while empowering ordinary Americans to choose their own health care, or a sitting Vice President declaring “The Taliban is not our enemy?”

Jim Manzi has a cogent summation in his National Review Article, Romney and Bain.

Can America Achieve Avocado Independence?

2012-01-11T05:00:00.001-07:00

As Jersey is fond of screaming in ALLCAPS, "ENERGY IS A GLOBALLY TRADED COMMODITY!!!" And he is right.

But we shouldn't let that keep us from extracting our own gas and oil. I'd rather put our own people to work and have a dependable supply system on hand in case of global emergency. Also, the Canada pipeline, while not giving us energy independence, does allow us to purchase more oil from a friendly neighbor and therefore less from people who hate us.

Jonathan Thompson explains the folly of pursuing energy independence. He's a green energy liberal, but he doesn't resort to the usual tendentious tactics. His article is firmly grounded in mainstream economics that comprehends the global market:

The base premise of energy independence is the notion that we started importing oil because we didn’t have enough of it here at home. That’s about as accurate as the idea that Walmart fills its shelves with China-made items because the U.S. is unable to produce those things.

In fact, we get oil from all over for the same reasons we get tomatoes, avocados and cheap electronics from all over the place. It’s not always pretty, and it doesn’t always make sense on some levels -- shipping apples from New Zealand to Colorado just seems wrong -- but it makes sense to the market. Chesapeake says that spending $400 billion per year on foreign oil is “fiscally insane.”

Yet the U.S. will also spend $400 billion on a variety of exports from China this year, not to mention the billions more we’ll spend on food, clothing, cars and electronic devices from a myriad of other countries. No one calls that fiscal insanity, nor do we hear politicians calling for iPhone independence. (High Country News – Circular Logic of Energy Independence)

So green dreamers like Jersey take a free-market principle and use it to argue against drilling for more oil. The same argument could be made for ceasing all manner of activity, from making our own cars to growing our own food. We could still get cars and food from other nations, but the diminution of supply would drive up prices and a lot of Americans would be unemployed.

The author goes on to explain how us pumping oil like crazy can make a difference in the market, and eventually make prices come down... Which will then make drilling in difficult sand and shale formations less lucrative, slowing operations there, resulting in less supply and higher prices, again making extraction profitable... And around it goes.

This is market economics 101, and it is no reason to forgo our own extraction that puts Americans to work

So free market forces are not “right” or “wrong.” The free market is an organic entity sending and receiving myriad internal and external signals every day, and as such is self-correcting, so long as central planners keep “rescues” and “protections” to an essential minimum.

Also, there are no magic bullets or perfect solutions; only tradeoffs. Until someone comes up with a viable alternative, oil and coal is here to stay.

Save us from the Anointed

2012-01-10T05:00:00.001-07:00

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics. -- Thomas Carlyle

Our problems stem from the fact that we are waiting for salvation from our politicians, in both senses of the phrase. DC apparatchiks will not save us, and nothing will save us from them. We must deliver ourselves. We should resolve this new year to begin wrenching our lives from the cold, bony clutches of the state.

The problem is […] that our economy and our society have outrun our political ideas. (WRM – Another One Bites the Dust)

Indeed they have. Our politicians are fighting yesterday’s battles, with century-old armaments.

How much of the progressive state must, can or should we carry into the future? What if anything do we put in its place? How do we deal with an entitlement crisis that will burst upon us sooner than we had hoped? How do we rethink our educational, health and legal/governmental systems so that we can get more done with less friction and less economic cost?

The Great Recession has exposed the strains in many of our systems — including the systems that regulate and organize the financial markets — and we are having to address complicated and difficult issues on an accelerated timetable at a time of economic hardship and straitened budgets. (WRM – Another One Bites the Dust)

Dems and Repubs stand equally flat-footed…

The Democrats stand mostly for defense of an order that is passing away. They seem to have no idea how to do anything other than try to slow the decline of the blue social model; this is a party that has been out of ideas since the 1970s.

Republicans seem mostly divided between those who hearken back to the pre-progressive 19th century past and others who know change is needed but are less sure about what to do. (WRM – Another One Bites the Dust)

Big Government solved some big problems common to us all in the 20th Century; but now it produces only failure

The Great Government Crusade needs to pack it up and go home. It has won the victory, but each year of occupation sees the conquering army trample and besmirch all it has gained. Public education hit the arc of its trajectory over 45 years ago and is now inflicting friendly fire.

The new frontiers of well-being and happiness are hundreds of millions of little ones that exist in each of our lives. Government cannot make you happy because government doesn't know what makes you happy, and thank God for that, because it would be pretty creepy if it did.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself. --Thomas Carlyle

For further exploration, I recommend two essays on Thomas Sowell's "Vision of the Anointed:"

Independent Institute - Vision of the Anointed Book Review
Drafty Manor - Vision of the Anointed Essay

Or watch this short video of Dr Sowell discussing one of the ideas in his book...

Caught Between Libertarianism and Conservatism

2012-01-09T05:00:00.001-07:00

My Stupid Shirts

I have vowed that I would vote for the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man over Obama, and if Newt gets the nomination, I'll get my chance to do so.

The only reason I can give for favoring Romney over Gingrich is that Romney is a capitalist, and Gingrich has been at the levers of governmental power his whole adult life. I get the sense that at least Romney would know how to put the economy back together, even if his lustful statist urges worry me.

Santorum is qualified to be president, I think, but he worries me as well. He's not just a statist, but a moralistic one. And I share his moral values. The difference between Santorum and I is that my Christian faith rules my life, but when discussing government and law, the US Constitution is my guide. Nowhere does the constitution give government the right to dictate morals.

Libertarian-Conservative: an Unstable Amalgam

Libertarianism and strict conservatism are not really compatible, and that explains much of the current GOP muddle. Lured by the libertarian siren song, we've finally spat out the GOP's neither-hot-nor-cold conservative big government statism.

Modern-Day Republicanism is just progressivism with flags; moralistic we-say-so-ism dressed up in war and patriotism and religion. In fact, it is damned near indistinguishable from Woodrow Wilson's Progressive conception of almost a century ago.

So now we find ourselves in a political cul-de-sac, heaping scorn on everyone who isn't Ron Paul, and yet unable to embrace the cranky small-government John the Baptist who has been crying out in the wilderness all these years. Libertarianism lured us out of our ideological trenches, but now we are caught half-way, unable to embrace Paulism, which looks to conservatives almost indistinguishable from OWS.

There is a way out. Conservatives are on solid footing so long as we allow ourselves to be just as libertarian as the founding fathers. Any more than that, and we fall off of a cliff into a pit of incoherence and clashing incompatibilities.

Constitutionalism: The Founders v. Ron Paul

Dr. Paul's constitutionalist claims strike me as trying to be more Catholic than the Pope.

George Washington invaded Canada, and as president he donned his military uniform to lead a militia army in putting down the Whiskey Rebellion. His protégé, Alexander Hamilton (one of the Federalist Papers authors) set up our nation's first central bank, and when a later congress voted against renewing it's charter, President Madison (another Federalist Papers author, and Father of the Constitution) established the Second Bank of America, another central bank. President Thomas Jefferson sent US Marines to the shores of Tripoli, and "The Last Founding Father" James Monroe's famous doctrine declared that any act by any European power to colonize any part of North or South America would be considered by the US government as an act of aggression to be met with military force.

Ron Paul is on the far side of the men who wrote the constitution and founded this nation. Conservatives, like the founders, believe in an enduring moral order, and they are guided by custom and convention. Libertarians clamor to tear down the wall; conservatives seek to know why it was put there in the first place before deciding to demolish it.

So its a tricky balancing act with a new equilibrium. Some small government libertarianism of the founding father variety mixed in with a rediscovery of Russell Kirk Conservatism will put us back on solid footing. Too bad no candidate fits the bill...

Russell Kirk - 10 Conservative Principles
Gingrich: The Anti-Conservative
Gingrich vs Obama
My Stupid Shirts

America Condemns Itself to Guantanamo

2012-01-08T05:00:00.001-07:00

Today I offer you a few news snippets you can put in the handbasket our government is going to hell in...

Picture this...

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the federal government secretly encouraged angry bomb throwers to engage in irresponsible and incendiary language in the hope of using the ensuing violence to argue for controversial new speech restrictions.

That didn't really happen. I made it up. I wish someone had made this up, but it's all too true...

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation "Fast and Furious" to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales. (CBS News)

The ATF is a rogue organization and should be disbanded, along with the entire Heimatlandsicherheit, and Janet Napoleaonitano should be exiled to the island of Elba, along the Minister of Injustice, Eric Holder.

Government actions to steal our 2nd Amendment rights are un-American because they are unconstitutional. The people and the states promulgated the US Constitution to charge the federal government with protecting our natural rights. It is now consciously doing the opposite.

Imagine if a government conspired to take away your 4th Amendment rights... Wait, that's already happened...

You see, such plots and false flag operations (real or imagined) can only work if our constitutional rights are no longer held sacrosanct. The fact that nefarious progressive forces see our rights as debatable and ripe for the snatching tells me we are already in danger.

CBS News - Government used Fast and Furious
IBD - Just as we suspected

New York Police State of Mind

A US Marine combat vet faces 15 Years in jail for bringing a gun to New York city. He thought he had the law straight, and freely surrendered it when entering a pubic building that had a sign posted stating no guns allowed. That's when he was busted. Since our law enforcement at all levels no longer cares about criminal intent, they are simply making the world safe from responsible gun owners who voluntarily surrender their weapons when asked.

Feel safer, you bed-wetting gun grabbers? Now, if cops could only figure out how to get criminals to give up their guns...

ICE Deports American Citizen

Customs officials deported a teenage girl, while MS-13 gang members here illegally roam free like they own the place. So how will more government fix this? The cheeky young lass gave false information to ICE agents, so they sent her to Colombia, even though that country has never in its history had anyone named Jakadrian...

This is what an inept and dysfunctional government does when it can no longer catch real criminals: It turns on its own citizens.

Here’s a simple test: Does a law result in more liberty for citizens, or less?

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who would expand and defend personal liberty, and those who would circumscribe it. Emperor Obama belongs in the latter category, but discussing Obama rolling up the constitution and smoking it is getting old...

HR 1540 gave us a clear view of who the liberty-lovers are, and who the stone-cold statists uber alles are. Posse Comitatus is out the window.

There was a time not too may years ago when I would look to certain politicians as a litmus test or shorthand for right and wrong. "If Allan West voted for it, it must be OK!" Well, not anymore.

Are our politicians really so intellectually bereft that this is all they can come up with?

Hundreds of billions spent on intelligence and national law enforcement agencies, and we have to resort to declaring the United States a war zone with US citizens as enemy combatants, subject to indefinite detention and military tribunals?

This sickens and horrifies me, moreso because it does not sicken and horrify good conservatives like Allen West and others. The enemies of the people who voted for this police state nightmare should be shipped off to Guantanamo. Or better yet, put them on Castro's side of the fence so they can see the result of such laws.

And I am pissed that I find myself in agreement with Al Franken.

Al Franken – Why I voted Against NDAA
CATO – NDAA Still Troubled
Emperor Obama Trashes the Constitution
NDAA House Vote
NDAA Senate Vote

Finally, on the lighter side...

Chevy Dolt: It's Not a Recall, It's a Reunion!

Artistry of Chicago Ray

Government Motors (GM) is launching a customer service campaign, which is similar to a recall, on all 8 of the Chevrolet Volts it has sold in an effort to address possible battery fire issues.

We don’t like the word, “recall,” said a GM Spokesman. "We prefer to think of it as a reunion. Come back to the place where you took your financially foolish but morally superior stand! Relive the excitement while we perform some minor enhancements that could keep you from dying in a car fire!"

Ron Paul's popularity with young people is legend…

...If they would only put down the bong and go vote he might have a chance…

When Liberalism Stood for Something

2012-01-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

Billy Jack was a badass liberal, fighting for the poor and oppressed and administering spectacular martial arts beatdowns to their oppressors. We didn't have a lot of blacks out west in the 60's and early 70's; Indians were the oppressed minority, and Billy Jack kicked big-time bigot ass in their defense. I love his reverse crescents to the face and his leg sweeps were awesome. As a youngster in the mid 70's I wore a black hat and a denim jacket because I wanted to be just like him...

Tom Laughlin, the actor, writer and independent producer who wrote and starred in the Billy Jack movies, is himself an impressive man; a Jungian who lives out his faith in God and who independently produced his movies. Before he became ill, he wrote extensively on some pretty deep stuff. He is also a liberal icon who has been a sincere champion of the people his entire adult life.

Like progressives before him, he fought the fights that needed to be fought. Today, the movement lacks big causes like civil rights or women's sufferage, but it keeps fighting anyway, not with fists and guns like Billy Jack, but with bullhorns and 1960's retro hippie agitprop and tired chants. And in a Marxian tragic farce twist, liberals now fight for the government establishment, not against it.

Liberalism writ large is Dead

The only big issue left is to pull the rug out from under the corporate welfare queens and the corrupt DC grandees who rail against them by day and then slip in through their back doors at night.

Self-described liberals would do well to focus on the root of the word they stole: Liberty. Defend it in each person's life. Freedom for each of us to pursue our own happiness, to let our freak flags fly without 15 government permits.

If Americans cannot sell raw milk to willing buyers without risking a SWAT-team raid, then what area of life is left to individual choice? (Scrooge-Like Predictions)

Imagine an independent neighborhood economy based upon barter. Governments hate that, and pear-shaped regulators spill over with sadistic glee at punishing independent daycare providers, home-churchers and free-lance food vendors. Imagine abolishing imminent domain and creating a nation where corporations cannot bribe politicians to seize the property of free citizens.

Marry 15 gay lovers, smoke dope all day, own 100 guns. I don't care what you do with your life so long as it doesn't impinge on my liberties and the government doesn't confiscate my money to pay for your mistakes. Buy raw milk, sell raw milk. Start a business this afternoon based upon a brainstorm you got this morning. Do it without teams of lawyers, and hire people without the bureaucratic red tape.

Already, most Americans hand over about half their income to government. Just for fun, try to name a few areas of life that aren’t taxed or regulated by the government. The government can take away your children based merely on assertions of abuse, or take your property and give it to a developer. You cannot build anything or remodel anything in your home, start a business, hire someone, drive anywhere, buy a firearm, make a political donation or do much of anything without being subject to myriad rules, regulations, taxes, fees, inspections, permits. (Scrooge-Like Predictions)

So my liberal friends, if you want to attract people to your cause, drop the big government statism, stop begging for "free" crap, and start walking and talking like Billy Jack. Like those wild horses galloping across the western plains, people gotta be free.

The NDAA and You

2012-01-05T05:00:00.004-07:00

by Hugh Farnham

The National Defense Authorization Act. A seemingly innocent enough defense funding bill, until Obama and his henchmen had their way with it.

Buried deep within this bill is the authority for the military to declare anyone as a domestic enemy who engages in "hostilities" and can be arrested without trial, a lawyer, or the right of Habeas Corpus. The bill was passed 220 years to the day of the adoption of our Bill of Rights.

This language, found in Sections 1031 and 1032 of the bill, has a sordid and salty history worthy of an Ian Fleming novel.

While this bill was slithering through Congress the Obama Administration was distancing itself from the detention language - but as admitted by Senator Carl Levin it was Obama who demanded the detention wording be included in the bill - with no provision for exemption for citizens. That's you and me, folks. But don't worry, children, Obama has signed a signing statement he won't abuse his authority.

There was evidence of an Internet psychological operation regarding these sections. I recognized this as I am trained in similar arts in the military. When the issue was first brought to light, suddenly several different erroneous wordings of the bill were being posted - within minutes of the expose. Somebody was watching, ready with disinfo at hand. Even my own Senator was deceived about the language and what it meant when I contacted him about it. Now legal scholars are beginning to agree on the destructive nature of these sections on our liberty.

I wish to make it quite clear that as a member of the military, I will not obey any order that is unconsititutional. Indeed, I will work to actively subvert any such order and will encourage the junior officers and senior NCOs who report to me to do the same.

Odd that the bill was supported by a company that makes police night raid equipment...

It gets only better. Now a Congressman from Pennsylvania has introduced a bill to strip people of their citizenship for engaging in "hostilities". Please, define hostilities? Could it eventually be what I'm doing now, Charles Dent, you tyrant?

I encourage you to read Jonathan Turley's excellent expose of this. Meanwhile, be entertained with a cartoon about your (now) lack of human rights by Ruben Bolling (click to embiggen):

Liberscarianism

2012-01-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

Why I Cannot Support Ron Paul

The old progressive model is creaky and on the verge of collapse. Even some liberals will admit it is financially untenable. The orthodox statists scream for more taxpayer money, but everybody else realizes we can’t tax our way out of this.

Libertarianism is gaining a hearing from a populace that had previously viewed it as the milieu of nudist dope smokers, anarchists, and bow tied theorists. People are looking for solutions, but raw libertarianism is still too scary even for many small government types. It will take time, and the right people, for libertarianism to gain mainstream currency. Paul Ryan is not a libertarian, but he’s the kind of guy that will be needed: Smart, articulate, and able to deliver it all with a smile.

What's Wrong with Gary Johnson?

Gary Johnson is an affable guy with a solid small-government record as governor of New Mexico, but his talk of legalizing heroin scares people. And libertarians shouldn’t accuse those folks of fearing liberty. Reasonable people are afraid that mainstreaming drug use will unleash deleterious effects, just like blasphemy, pornography and hundreds of other societal poisons did once we stopped combating them. So the fears, while debatable, are well founded.

Retreat will not bring Safety

Ron Paul's foreign policy is naive and dangerous. His rEVOLution rhetoric warmly unites liberty loving libertarians, leftwing Kucinichites, Neo-nazis, 9-11 Troofers, Isolationists, and sensible small government conservatives, but it is folly to believe that "If we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone."

Just because the gunslinger hangs up his spurs and spends evenings by the fireside doesn't mean old rivals won't still be gunning for him. And "them" is generally understood to refer to practitioners of a religion that split into two rival teams after the founder died and then set themselves to the grim task of slaughtering one another. 1500 years later they are still at it. Is Ron Paul really so naive as to believe that people who nurse thousand-year-old grudges will let The Great Satan go gently into that good isolationist night with fresh sins yet staining his unrepentant soul?

Sunni terrorists are not fighting for deposed Iranian secularists

Then there is the ridiculous contention that our meddling in Iran in the 50’s has spawned Sunni Islamists.

Our CIA deposing secular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh has been proffered by hoarse-throated lefties as the reason "they hate us." I am dismayed to see many of my fellow conservatives hoist this Noam Chomsky banner, because there are several problems with such simple-minded thinking. First, “they” are Islamists, and they have always been set in opposition to the leftwing intellectual professoriate class that Mossadegh represented. Had we not removed him, his fate would have been that of the secular intelligentsia who teamed with the Mullahs to topple the Shah in 1979: The Islamists slit the throats of their revolutionary partners of convenience, and the rest is history.

Blowback!

I am also dismayed to see some of my fellow conservatives pick up the blowback banner. Iranians didn't carry out the string of terrorist attacks bookended by the WTC bombings. The people we defended from Saddam Hussein carried out those attacks; and they are Sunni extremists who hate the Shia Persians!

We stopped aggression when we chased Saddam out of Kuwait, as we did when we went into The Balkans. Was the Kosovar Muslim who murdered US Air Force personnel at Frankfurt Airport blowback for our defense of his kith and kin against the bloody predations of Orthodox Christians?

The problem with the blowback argument is that world history is full of chain reactions. Blowback is nothing but the physics of human and societal interaction: humanity's equal and opposite reaction. We’d be wise to remember that good men doing nothing will also cause the dreaded blowback.

A Tower of Babble: False Dilemmas upon Logical Fallacies

In addition to Paul’s historical mis-readings and the logical fallacies they have spawned, we also must suffer breathless false dilemmas from his hard-core followers (thankfully, I don't hear these memes from my fellow Right Blogistanis who Support Dr. Paul) :

* Ron Paul is a constitutionalist -- If you don't vote for him you hate the constitution.

* If you aren't with Ron Paul on Israel you are a neocon.

* If you disagree with his foreign policy you are in favor of endless wars.

* If you agree that the CIA has done bad things then you must support dismantling it.

I don’t believe we should intervene everywhere; but we should never tie our hands and forswear intervening anywhere. I can concede that yes, the CIA has done some bad things, but it does not follow that the entire intelligence apparatus must be dismantled. Do Paulistas really want to gouge out America’s eyes and plug our ears? I don’t want us pulling dirty tricks on countries that do us no harm, but I do want us spying on enemies.

More "Constitutional" than the Founders?

Ron Paul supporters call him a constitutionalist, but nothing in our constitution prevents us from forming alliances with likeminded people around the world or taking action when authorized by congress.

George Washington invaded Canada, and as president he donned his military uniform to lead a militia army in putting down the Whiskey Rebellion. His protégé, Alexander Hamilton (one of the Federalist Papers authors) set up our nation's first central bank, and when a later congress voted against renewing it's charter, President Madison (another Federalist Papers author, and Father of the Constitution) established the Second Bank of America, another central bank. President Thomas Jefferson sent US Marines to the shores of Tripoli, and "The Last Founding Father" James Monroe's famous doctrine declared that any act by any European power to colonize any part of North or South America would be considered by the US government as an act of aggression to be met with military force. Would Ron Paul call these actions by our founders wrong?

Ron Paul rejects the isolationist tag while throwing up smoke screens about no more endless wars (a lefty trope), but he also thought we should have stayed out of WW II and his stated philosophies would have prevented us from winning the cold war. Western Civilization would look much different today if Dr. Paul's views had held sway. Forming military alliances, providing military assistance, and securing landing rights in other countries is a far cry from war-mongering. On the contrary, those actions, carried out prudently, save lives and money by deterring war.

The world is a messy place, with unprincipled actors brandishing horrible weapons capable of murder on a mass scale. Those who stubbornly stand upon principle will end up standing upon rubble. Between Ron Paul and the trigger-happy statists, there exists a sensible middle, and it is on firm constitutional footing.

I understand the Paulist urge of impatient libertarians and those disgusted with our statist federal monster, but Ron Paul ain’t the guy and America ain't ready for the libertarian full monty just yet.

Nick Gillespie - Ron Paul (a defense)
Yes Virginia, Ron Paul is a 9/11 Truther
Statement from former Paul aid Eric Dondero
Tim Daniel – Ron Paul
Proof Positive - Ron Paul's Foreign Policy
Jeffrey Kuhner - Ron Paul's Moment
Dorothy Rabinowitz - What Ron Paul Thinks of America
Ron Paul’s Mischief Voters
PJ Media - Ron Paul, Troofer

Freedom!

2012-01-03T05:00:00.001-07:00

"Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred." -- Vaclav Havel

Matt Welch's piece in Reason Magazine on his visit to the Czech Republic to celebrate the life of Vaclav Havel is a beautiful tribute the man, and also provides a caution against believing that electing a philosopher king will solve everything. There is no salvation in politics, even when a beloved hero of the people takes the reins.

Havel spent 5 years in jail as a dissident against the state dictatorship and led his country through the Velvet Revolution, a playwright turned president breaking down tyranny's barricades and wedding his nation to Western Europe. As president, he remained a champion of freedom and moral clarity, but could never gain the whip hand over the new republic's rumbustious politicians.

"Many ridiculed Havel for his words about truth and love," Schwarzenberg said. "Yet it is the essence of the human struggle. And we must never give up that struggle....Only love makes us listen to the truth of others."

The Bureaucratic-Industrial Complex is Crushing Us

There's some wisdom there. Even the OWS crowd is onto something, if in a one-eyed, twisted way. As they scream for the death of bankers and corporations and demand free college and a minimum wage for doing nothing, they fail to realize that it is government that has enfeebled and impoverished us.

Government told us to stop working so hard, don't worry, it's not your fault... It's a nice sentiment, to remove a burden from the downtrodden (albeit with other people's money), but government also ended up snuffing self-sufficiency and rewarding failure and ignorance as it shouldered its way in to every last corner of our lives.

Meanwhile the Government-Corporate Complex continued building great bureaucratic bulwarks against competition, protected by concertina wire tangles of laws and regulations preventing the little guy or gal from challenging Walmart and Microsoft, or from even selling food on a street corner. And forget about manufacturing; too fraught with legal liability. Better to take your investment cash to China, or Vegas.

Our politicians are not listening to us, and the bureaucratic class is out of control. We want our lives back.

Truth without Love...

Truth without love is like facts without context, like music without passion, like a sermon without faith. That is to say, it is finally not truth at all. Parsing words to gain momentary self-advantage at the expense of deeper understanding spreads a kind of moral rot, one that inhibits development and blunts joy.

Havel found kinship with and inspiration from crazed rockers who insisted on living according to their own code despite an all-smothering state, which is how Magor probably intended the phrase that Havel would take and run with. Here, ultimately, is where truth fuses with love–love for music, for life, for Prague, for getting your drink on, and for taking advantage of every cracked-open door to bloody well do something with your life.

Can we all resolve, in this upcoming year, to evaluate the sausage coming out of Washington, DC not by our partisan lights, but based upon whether it advances or destroys personal liberty? Don't try looking for love there. You will not find it.

Instead, look for politicians like this...

Vaclav Havel’s Funeral: Why Truth Needs Love
The Welfare State’s War on Religious Liberty
Scrooge-Like Predictions for the New Year

Soft Secession

2012-01-02T05:00:00.004-07:00

by Hugh Farnham

"...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

Our relationship with the States' created agent, the Federal Government, is much like a marriage gone sour as Walter E. Williams points out. What was once a beneficial relationship has turned to one of spousal abuse, a nightly beat-down by the one in a wife-beater. As domestic victims, we have a choice: quietly leave, endure, or take drastic and violent measures.

President Lincoln tyrannically shut down the option of States outright divorcing the Federal Government. So what about a peaceful separation? If a spouse can't live in the same house without receiving abuse and scars, why not live apart? Separate beds, separate houses, but the same last name. Not a double espresso of Neo-Federalism, but a cup of Federal decaf, thanks.

Recently, Congress suspended Habeas Corpus and undermined the entire Bill of Rights - on the exact 220th anniversary of the adoption of the same Rights! Time would fail me to describe the myriad ways the Federal Government has overstepped its bounds and violated the 9th and 10th Amendments. Because of this train of abuses, America at this point is being described as "pre-revolutionary".

The idea of a Soft Secession has been building for some time. No wonder, the very foundation of this movement is enshrined in the Constitution itself. The idea of checks and balances, State's Rights, and limits to authority are all described in the Constitution.

O ver 40 states have either passed or are in the process of passing state sovereignty resolutions and legislation.

So how could a State keep the Federales at arm's length? Vast swaths of the Federal Code unenforceable within freedom-loving States?

Isolate the Feds:

- Constitutional Sheriffs: Sheriff Mack has done great work in this area with his Constitutional Sheriff initiative. Is your Sheriff a Constitutional Sheriff?
- Fully Informed Juries: What if the jury members refused to convict because federal law is unjust and unconstitutional?
- States need to pass 10th Amendment Resolutions - with bite: Violations of State's Rights need to have mandatory jail time. Wyoming has this.
- Concealed Carry Rights: No permit needed concealed carry.
- States Rights Model Legislation: A poor man's Amendment process. If a plurality of states pass counter-federal legislation it is practically an amendment to the Constitution.

Cut Off The Coercive Financial Arm:

- State Banks: similar to North Dakota's State Bank
- Gold and Silver currency laws: Utah has just passed one
- A return of the concept of Allodial Property
- Federal taxes collected by, and potentially withheld by, the States themselves

Organization:

- Broadcast a common vision of what a Soft Secession would look like, and the benefits thereof to the citizens of that State
- An independent press that are not apologists for the police state
- County by county activists who would share this vision and stir up the people to make this a reality

I would encourage you to read two pieces by Walter E. Williams on this: Time for an Amicable Separation and Parting Company. If we don't act our future will closely resemble the fall of Rome - Martin Armstrong provides an excellent financial / historical analysis of this. They say history doesn't really repeat, but it does rhyme.

"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." -- George Orwell.

We are entering into a new phase with our abusive Federal spouse. The lies that once held us together are being exposed; all that is left now is naked force.

Crappy New Year!

2012-01-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

... The old order is rapidly fadin'... *

This New Year will bring us another BS-filled presidential campaign, expected to be the dirtiest and most expensive on record as we are napalmed with lies, damned lies and poisonous partisan rhetoric. We'll all be wanting to pull an Elvis on our TVs before it's all over...

The Euro will most likely collapse; Iraq will descend into a barely-controlled chaos; Afghanistan will remain unchanged, as it has since the dawn of time; the denouement of China’s Potemkin economy will be the centerpiece of a new global recession; and our politicians will continue to promise us lollipops and rainbows, unicorns and free money forever…

A Reasoned Look Back

Ducky has wondered aloud at the rightwing Christian fascination with Christopher Hitchens. And rightly so. My short answer is that Hitchens did not wear ideological or partisan blinders. He was a lover of truth and liberty and those were his guiding lights. We relished it when he took a rhetorical flamethrower to our enemies, but oh how it stung when he turned his rapier intellect on us! But even then, he was just so damned witty and well-reasoned! He made me change my mind on a few things, and caused me to view other things in a whole new light or with a more jaundiced eye.

I can say the same of libertarian magazine, Reason. They will skewer or defend people, politicians and movements based not upon partisanship or ideology, but on liberty and truth. No intellectual exercises to try to rescue a political hero or a cherished program, just cold-hard analysis that is also hip and funny. As they say, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll burn with rage, but you’ll never be bored with the content at Reason.

I tire of all the year end “best of” and “worst of” lists, but Reason's The Five Worst Op-Eds of 2011 is worth reading. It starts off with a delicious lambasting of full-of-himself progressive pontificator Thomas Friedman, lampooning his famous and fulsome false-mixed-metaphor-dilemmas. Gene Healy riffs on the headline to one of Friedman's billowy intellectual fluff pieces, "Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?"

If you think about it, we can do both.

You know, Friedman's standard fee is $75,000 a speech. It almost makes you want to go join a drum circle in McPherson Square.

He uses Peter Beinhart’s defense of Anthony Wiener to remind us why we should eschew any sympathy and instead rejoice when a rat fink politician is caught …

Bah, humbug. Political sex scandals are entertaining and edifying—they remind us not to cede power to the political class, whose members are often less responsible and more corrupt than those they seek to rule. Why not kick them when they're down? They kick us when they're up.

I love this anti-establishmentarian slam to the New York Times (moderate) House Conservative, David Brooks’ call for “Service to our Nation.”

This piece from the Times's resident "National Greatness Conservative," won largely on the strength of one line: "Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation." What can you say? Sounds better in the original German?

Strap it on; it's going to be a challenging year...

* - Bob Dylan, The Times the are a changin'

Flamethrowers, Street Skiing and Tree Fishing

2011-12-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

Colorado is one of the healthiest states in the nation. We love the outdoors.

Sanders, my long-haired former-hippie neighbor turned libertarian, is one of those people who could look 50, or 25, depending on how you turned your head and what frame of mind you were in when you were looking at him. He acts like he’s 15 and sometimes wears funny hats or severe-looking heavy framed tortoise shell eyeglasses, which produces in me an odd combination of fear and amusement.

“Dude, you gotta get one of these!” he shouted as he cranked up the flamethrower he was wielding.

We were standing on his deck imbibing 471 Small Batch Double IPA's from Breckenridge Brewery, and when the blast hit his Weber kettle grill, I had to admit it did an admirable job catching the coals on fire. I also noted the singed branches overhanging the deck, and I made a mental note of the blackened portion of his guttering and soffits. He caught my casting glances and chuckled in spite of himself.

Of course I ignored his advice. I’ve got a gas grill anyway. The guy just ain’t all there. He’s got a medical marijuana prescription due to an injury he sustained when he hit a parked car while skiing. How did that happen? It wasn’t up at Monarch, where if you got really, really wild coming down Gunbarrel it could be technically feasible; it happened (appropriately) on Race Street here in town. His girlfriend (or ‘old lady’ as he refers to her), got him a nice pair or Rossignols for Christmas and he just couldn’t wait to try them out so he strapped on and headed down the street, in boxers, a ski jacket and WW II pilot aviators goggles an uncle had given him.

I can’t really knock him for it. I’ve done some dumb stuff myself. Every spring I test out my fishing rods by casting down the street with a one ounce weight attached. Almost put out a mail truck’s windshield once, and I accidentally tore a birdhouse out of a neighbor’s tree with my Eagle Claw open-face. I use the extra heavies to get the bale to completely unwind, but it can have negative and far reaching consequences.

My friends and I did some street skiing back when I lived in Denver. We were supposed to take a day trip up to Keystone, but ironically, a blizzard hit and all the snow closed I-70. I don’t remember anyone wracking themselves up like Sanders did, but I do remember us falling down laughing when Dave did a nice kick turn off of Jamaica Street onto Colfax and passed a snow plow that was diligently chugging along. Jim from next door came out with one of those huge bottles of Jack Daniels. After some generous chugging, one of us, can’t remember who, slid into a neighbor’s house, causing her to poke her head out the front door and threaten to call the police. That’s when we decided to go back inside.

If we weren't suppose to eat animals, how come they're made of meat?

Anyway, I started out wanting to post on grilling, and I guess I got sidetracked. If you enjoy grilling, smoking or BBQing, The Ugly Brothers have some pretty good tips on their web site. Their Grillosophy Page is a treasure trove of outdoor cooking wisdom. Whether you’re new to the grill or an old hand, you’ll find some worthwhile stuff there.

I’m grilling beer butt chicken and smoking ribs for New Years, how about you?

A Gentle Answer Turneth Away Wrath

2011-12-29T05:00:00.001-07:00

The most interesting and intelligent thread of the Year

I have read threads that are more interesting, usually in a weird or twisted way; and there are threads that contain conversation more intelligent than this one. But this thread over at Z's excellent blog, GeeeeeZ!, is an effective combination of the two, and it is a testament to Z’s always excellent topic selection and commentary as well as her patience.

What is it about Ron Paul that makes the crazy train go off the rails?

It started out on the subject of Ron Paul, and slowly degenerated into an angry, snarky shouting match, with Z having to step in to bank the fiery passions. She’s quite a moderator as well as a gracious host, proving true the passage from Proverbs about a gentle answer turning away wrath.

I could see that the thread was causing our beloved Z much anguish, but I’ve got to congratulate her for stimulating such a conversation. Beamish can be insulting, but he’s also very logical and he brings the supporting info for his arguments (which I suspect is what steams his rivals more than the insults.) I tangled with him once, but I’ve got to give the man credit. He knows how to argue his point, and other than the barbed ad-hominem, I was with him all the way on his anti-Ron Paul comments.

Anyway, Beamish ended up insulting everyone, to the point of driving some commenters away. After some behind the scenes e-mailing between Z and some commenters, Z elicited an apology from him for turning the thread into a barroom brawl, which is no small feat. He sincerely apologized to Z without conceding the point of his argument.

A rare conversation on race that makes sense

The best part of the thread came at the end, when a liberal black man named Net Observer stepped in. I apologize for the labels. I use them only to provide a frame of reference. Mere shorthand tags do not do justice to this wise man, and although a Democrat, he says he is personally conservative, and I believe him. Go read his comments and it will all make sense.

He said some pretty profound things about race in this country. I had heard the different pieces of his comments from various different people, but he synthesized them and stated them quite eloquently, readily offering that the thoughts were not wholly his own. He displayed a rare quality of being able to put oneself outside the debate, dispassionately analyze it, and then honestly put it back together. He is the rare person who can really see both sides, and articulate it. Go down towards the end of the thread and check out the dialog between him and Kid (a wise man himself). They are decidedly not the cowards that Eric Holder referred to.

Net Observer points out that it is not damning to incidentally share some non-racist views with people who are racist:

Whenever I talk about conservatives sharing common ground with white racialists on various race-based issues, you and other decent conservatives take strong offense. For the record, I don't blame you for taking offense. Frankly, I like the fact that you DO, because it so underlines your seriousness about the ugliness of racial prejudice.

To whites who ask why President Obama, or responsible black men like himself do not straighten out the gangbanger black youth, Net Observer says…

What if said to you, "Z, what are YOU and the other good conservatives doing about those white racialists you share common ground with? Why don't you guys speak out against it more?"

If I did that, ultimately, I think I would be placing an unfair burden on you. Because pragmatically, there's not a whole lot you can do about some independent white racialists having a few conservative opinions. Bottom line, despite the similarities, you have no real connection to those guys.

And like most blacks, I don't have any real connection to those lawless, prison-bound idiots whose skin looks like mine.

He nails the issue here, but does not damn white people with his comments; he is just describing what he sees and hears. It is an excellent explanation...

But the conflicts between blacks and conservatives are mostly based around not the basic facts, but a lack of trust. African-Americans are solid Democrats; which means they lean left. Conservatives don't trust the left.

Conversely, conservatives, unfortunately, share common ground with racialists and racists on issues like immigration, profiling, etc. So, from the point of view of a left-leaning black guy, conservatives look kinda racist.

There are some lessons in all of this...

First, Z did not respond in kind, but kept her head and calmed things down without resorting to wielding a censorious meat ax. Beamish, although enjoying an extraordinary gift for debating and being in possession of the facts, turns people off with his pin-prickish manner. Finally, a black, liberal Obama voter shows up and displays a cultural insight, eloquence and understanding that are so rare nowadays, and conservatives warm to him.

It was an excellent dialog between Net Observer and Kid, full of Socratic intelligence, candor and goodwill, and Z is to be congratulated for hosting such a forum, even if it does at times cause her to become distraught.

Comment Thread – Geeeez: Uncle Onyango and Ron Paul

Is Christopher Hitchens Roasting in Hell?

2011-12-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

A distasteful subject...

... especially during Christmastime, when we celebrate the birth of our savior. It is made only slightly more palatable by the though of Hitch decking the Korean pot-bellied pig upon the face to face encounter, while Saint Peter busily checks the rolls in front of the pearly gates.

I do not enjoy such speculation. I have my own salvation to work out "in fear and trembling," but Bill Bennett started it by going out of his way and off topic during a CBS interview, to say this...

"He was left and I was right. We had great debates, great drinking bouts... And I hope that, being the big atheist that he was, he's in for a big surprise."

Pretty ungracious for a man who extols the Socratic virtues of intelligence, candor and goodwill.

Granted, Christians have a duty to rage against the slouching, pablum-powered It's-all-good-universalism that completely ignores The Bible, but that statement was particularly harsh.

Bennett's apparently premeditated outburst sparked Allahpundit to explore three possible fates for our beloved writer:

1) He's damned.
2) He secretly converted, which he pegs as an insult to a man of strong and clear atheistic convictions who made his deathbed and unblinkingly laid down upon it.
3) “well, maybe God will cut him a break.”

Allahpundit marvels at how many Christians who loved Hitch's work fall into the third category. He concludes...

"... he’ll go down in history as a blasphemer of world-beating vehemence — and yet there are still millions of believers who so love and admire him for his art that, in spite of it all, they’re straining to somehow get him off the hook with God anyway. Now that’s a legacy." (Allahpundit)

Ross Douthat explores the third possibility in Hitchens and Hell, giving us a thumbnail sketch of theological thought that supports the salvation of Christopher Hitchens, concluding...

Rather, the point is that we just don’t know. As Henry James had it: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” Or in the words of Saint Paul: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.” Both the goats and the sheep are surprised by God’s judgment. And even for the most confident believer, the plain words of the New Testament suggest that Christopher Hitchens’ ultimate fate will count among the least of the next life’s many surprises. (Douthat)

Doctoral candidate in theology Kevin Considine asks a provocative question about the eternal fate of Kim Jong Il, a rapist dictator responsible for the death of millions. It could just as easily be asked about the fate of Christopher Hitchens, or any one of us...

So, we are forced to live in ambiguity. We have no way of knowing. So maybe the better question to ponder is this: should we want there to be salvation for such a brutal man, even if justice is somehow achieved as a prerequisite? And what does it say about me (and us) if I prefer a “pound of bloody flesh” to trump God’s ridiculous love for all human beings? I’m not sure I want to answer that question. (Considine)

If that statement intrigues you, follow the link and read the short article. Also, read the comment threat; it contains some thoughtful responses.

But more importantly, what do you think?

Link: Considine - Is there salvation for Kim Jong Il?

Save Your Computer

2011-12-27T05:00:00.001-07:00

Is it right to harbor hate-filled thoughts of people burning in hell?

I know it's Christmastime, but I couldn't help it. One of my computers caught a particularly nasty virus. It was the one that looks like an antivirus program. It ended up attaching itself to critical Windows 7 processes, so it could not be removed and it tore up the firewall in the process.

I may have picked it up investigating naked women riding scooters, or it could have been the kids downloading time-wasting games. Regardless, I got it and couldn't get rid of it.

I went out to some on-line forums looking for a solution, and all I ended up doing was wallowing in the cries of the angry and frustrated. Here's a few of my favorite comments...

"I'd like to get my hands on the son of a bitch that did this. I've removed it three times and it keeps coming back."

"Murder is forefront in my mind."

And I agree with them.

Fortunately, I was prepared. I recommend everyone own a 500 GB to 1 TB external USB drive (They go for around $100) to back up anything you care about. I do. That way, worst case scenario happens and you still have your family pictures and important documents. I own four of them because I have a lot of music and video

A Cheap Insurance Policy

I could not clean my computer, but I did not despair. Why? Because I made a complete system image when I first got my computer. Here is how I do it, and I recommend everyone do something similar. A little advanced planning can get you back up and running when disaster strikes.

In addition to an external drive, you will also need another hard drive, and a blank DVD. Here's what I do when I get a new computer:

1. Decrapify the computer. Remove all the trial versions, crapware and other useless stuff.
2. Install good stuff. Spybot, Windows Defender or AVG Free Edition, and all your other software
3. Do a Spybot scan, virus scan Disk scan, Defrag
4. Use Control Panel/Backup and Restore to Create a Rescue Disk
5. Use Control Panel/Backup and Restore to Create a System Image and put it on your external USB Drive
6. Take the hard drive out of your computer, label it, and set it aside. Install the brand new hard drive
7. Boot your computer using the rescue disk you made, and when prompted select 'restore system image'
8. Point the restore process to the USB drive where your system image resides
9. Windows will create a clone on the new hard drive and then boot up to Windows 7.

Once the process completes and Windows starts, you are done. You now have the exact computer you had before, but on a new drive. You also now have an emergency hard drive ready to go if disaster strikes.

If you don't want to spring for the second drive, you can still follow these steps to make a system image, and if heaven forbid something goes wrong with your computer, you can boot up using the the rescue disk and restore your system. Be sure to save off any files and settings first! This process completely wipes your disk, eradicating any spyware, viruses or other useless stuff junking up your computer.

Doing this faithfully for each of my computers has saved me more than once.

Happy computing!

My Favorite Santa

2011-12-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

Ilya Repin: Saint Nicholas
saves three innocents from
death

A two-fisted Santa who was strong enough to take a beating for his faith, and could also dish one out, is my kind of Santa...

Depending on how you roll, theologically speaking, this is either the First Day or the Second Day of Christmas. While Christ is the reason for the season, Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas, has taken a prominent role.

We've all heard various legends surrounding St Nicholas, as well as the different traditions. Professor James Parker of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has written an interesting article that brings out some of the lesser-known information about the Proto-Santa, who most historians agree was a real bishop in what is now modern-day Turkey.

"He's making a list and checking it twice, he's going to find out who's naughty or nice."

We're familiar with the Nicholas who grew up rich and apparently enjoyed giving away his inherited wealth to help those less fortunate. But as the late Paul Harvey would say: Now, for the rrrrrest of the story...

He was jailed and beaten by the Romans for worshiping Jesus, emerging from prison bloody and scarred, but unbowed. Legend has it he administered a beatdown to Arius at the council of Nicea for the heresiarch's assertion that Christ was mere creature. Probably apocryphal, but it's entertaining to think about, and as legends do, it most likely reveals a "Santa" that is anything but happy and fluffy, but rather and strong man willing to fight for his faith.

So let those who care not for Christianity continue with their secularized Santa. Join in on the fun next year without so much as a pang of guilt! We know the truth...

The Real Santa Claus is Worth Remembering

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

* - Hector Garrido's "Jesus, Light of the World"

I wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

Snoopy's Christmas

2011-12-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

One for the children, big and small...

Now put away the computer and go celebrate Christmas!

Season's Greetings!

2011-12-23T05:00:00.001-07:00

What do "The Holidays" Mean to You?

"Tenderness for the past, vapid generalities for the present, evasive abstractions for the future," (Mark Steyn - Merry Christmas from Satan Claus)

Zuzu's Story

2011-12-22T05:00:00.001-07:00

I love the movie, It's a Wonderful Life. We watch it every year at Rancho Silverfiddle. Grandpappy Silverfiddle is sick of the movie, because once the copyright expired it looped endlessly on public TV because stations didn't have to pay for it

The Washington Post published an article back in November entitled, For Zuzu of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ it wasn’t such a wonderful life afterward.

They tell the story of Karolyn Grimes, the child actress who played Zuzu. She had more than her share of tragedy in her life, and she never saw the famous movie she acted in until well into adulthood:

“I never saw movies I was in because my mom told me that would be prideful, being stuck on yourself,” said Grimes. [...]

Working full time and raising seven children, the 39-year-old Grimes had no time to spare, much less to sit around watching television. But something tugged at her as she saw snatches of snow-clogged streets of small-town America and people she thought she knew.

"Then it hit me,” said Grimes. “I was in that movie. I was Zuzu.” (WaPo)

George Bailey is a Capitalist

Liberals claim a monopoly on George Bailey, and cast all of the sins of capitalism upon Mr. Potter, but it's not quite so simple. George Bailey is a capitalist, bravely fighting the well-connected crony crapitalist who uses his DC connections in his campaign to shut down market competition and lock up the town as his own personal fiefdom.

Jon Corzine is a modern-day Mr. Potter

In the movie, George Bailey is driven to the brink of suicide by the prospect of his savings and load going bust because a few thousand dollars cannot be accounted for. Meanwhile, here in real life, we have actual Mr. Potters who are democrats. Uber lib democrat contribution bundler Jon Corzine lost billions, and you can bet he's never entertained the thought of jumping off a bridge into an icy river. And he shouldn't. It's all good! He's rich and well-connected, just the opposite of Jimmy Stewart's humble character.

Politics aside, it really is a wonderful movie. The courtship and honeymoon scenes are beautiful, and the underlying messages are timeless and non-political. The actress who played Zuzu observed...

“Oh, it was fresh and dark, about as relevant today as it was when it was made,” said Grimes, quieting a moment. “Think of all the people out of work, losing their homes, hungry kids worried about their parents. What’s so different about today and 60 years ago?” (WaPo)

No Magic Bullets, Only Trade-offs

2011-12-21T05:00:00.002-07:00

Recently, when conversation here turned to the bounty of fossil fuels North America enjoys, Ducky asked some excellent questions...

How much of these presumed reserves are tar sands and what are the costs of extraction?

Are we certain that fracking isn't going to have negative effects on the water supply?

Is there any reason we shouldn't hedge our bets and invest in renewable energy rather than assuming we can just go on burning coal?

Nothing in Life is Certain

Solar panel and battery manufacturing requires mining for rare earth and common minerals, damaging the environment. Also the manufacturing process for these products produces trace chemical runoff and other toxic byproducts. Nothing against them; nothing is perfect.

Even forsaking all modern technology and returning to the land like Grizzly Adams or the Engels family would end up destroying our environment. Burning wood and building log cabins would cause extreme deforestation, and 200 million outhouses could not be good for our groundwater. As we all returned to growing our own food, sewing our own clothes, with global transportation grinding to a crawl, we would lose the synergistic efficiencies brought to us by free market specialization.

"...the following logic does not work: something bad happens when frakking is done therefore we must halt frakking. The reason this logic does not work is that whenever anything is done something bad happens: and there’s not much point in our all being around if we’re therefore to ban absolutely everything." (Worstall)

Poisoned groundwater is not a cheery prospect. We need to ask more questions like Ducky. What are the chances of contamination? To what extent? Are some formations more vulnerable than others? Can we use technology to mitigate the effects or decrease the chances of contamination?

Tim Worstall walks us through these complex issues in Fracking Contaminates Groundwater. He says drill anyway, but he gives a fair treatment to the argument. We pollute our air everyday using automobiles and generating electricity for our homes and workplaces, and we are living with it. Could a similar happy medium be found for fossil fuel extraction?

Merry Redneck Christmas

2011-12-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Redneck Santa and Mrs. Silverfiddle.

Now that the North Korea Pot Bellied Pig has been banished to the land of wind and pointy-tailed demons, we can all relax and enjoy our Christmas.

I am a redneck. I hunt and fish and drive a pickup. I have guns and pocket knives passed down from grandpas through my dad to me.

More importantly, I love redneck jokes, greatly enjoyed Blue Collar TV, and I have the complete DVD collection of Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

I got this in an e-mail from a fellow redneck named Redneck Ron...

We have enjoyed the redneck jokes for years. It's time to take a reflective look at the core beliefs of a culture that values home, family, country and God.

You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God..'

You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.

You might be a redneck if: You still say ' Christmas' instead of 'Winter Festival.'

You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays.

You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem

You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag, nor intend to.

You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.

You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and raised your kids to do the same.

You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend.

You might be a redneck if: You believe in God & Jesus and believe that others have the right to believe in whatever God they want, or no God at all, so long as they don't make themselves a pain in the ass about it!

Be of Good Cheer!

2011-12-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

Truth Never Dies...

We spend our time blogging about how horrible things are, and they are. We get all wound up and going on an anti-Obama thread, and then some realist goes and blows it by asking, "what can we do about it? How can we fix it?" And that's when the dark pessimism sets in. How do you get the powerful to relinquish their power and return it the people, the rightful owners?

Fausty, a UK libertarian blogger, wrote a nice blog post awhile back entitled simply, Truth. In it, he puts the impending great global collapse in an optimistic light, rejoicing that the rotten edifice of lies will groan under it's own weight and eventually come tumbling down.

"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is." -- Winston Churchill

Fausty celebrates truth, the increasing lack of which is discrediting the official commentariate and the lying liars in the political and business class that they report upon. We proles have educated ourselves, he notes, and we've learned much over these past few years, so much so that we smell their stinking lies as soon as they are unpacked, we no longer uncritically accept the propaganda.

Even as we get smarter, the mouthpieces have gotten more brazen with their tenuous twaddle, straining credulity to the point of breaking...

In 2008, for instance, the authors of most of the top-rated comments in national newspapers like the Telegraph would have been dismissed as "swivel-eyed loonies", had they expressed then what they express now, with such passion.

He's right. We're caught in a slow-rolling avalanche of debt and despair, but they continue spinning fairy tales with a determined seriousness that sometimes has me thinking that maybe they really believe what they're saying. Man's capacity for self-delusion is stunning.

Real Hope and Change: Progressivism's End

The global progressive money-manipulating, freedom-stealing scheme is at its end, yet the practitioners continue spinning tarradiddle-stuffed fantasies to buy themselves more time. But like a losing gambler with a cocaine jones, they can only stave off the inevitable for so long. The jig will be up.

This is the part of Fausty's post that completely flipped my thinking around, wiped away my pessimism and gave me hope:

The funny thing about truth is that once it's out, there's no way of stuffing it back into its box. Once born, it lives and nourishes.

Lies and spin, on the other hand, must be constantly tended and patched up. To achieve that aim requires an enormous expenditure of effort and resources. The greater the lie, the greater the stakes and the harder the fall for its proponents. The web of lies eventually destroys itself via its own mass of contradictions; it ceases to make sense. Once born, the big lie ensures its own destruction.

That's where we are now - truth gaining on the lie. People are waking up in ever greater numbers.

Yes. The truth will out. Humankind has survived for millennia, and Americans in particular have a gift for reinventing ourselves. To quote a song from the wonderful musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, "Up from the ashes grow the roses of success."

No One Gets Out Alive

2011-12-18T05:00:00.001-07:00

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens has died, and it saddens me. I loved his work, with the exception of his atheistic screeds, but even those served a purpose in making us Christians reexamine the fundamentals of our faith.

The 21st century is sorely lacking bold thinkers, loud polemicists and skilled communicators like Mr. Hitchens. His prose was beautiful artistry in written word. I will miss his mordant wit and always interesting take on anything and everything. He was an Orwell for our time, giving hell to "Bastards HQ" daily. Liberty lovers everywhere should follow his example. The bell has tolled, and his death indeed diminishes us all...

Suffering and Dying in Luxury

One of the many paradoxes of modern life: Medical care has advanced to the point where everyone, regardless of station, can now outlive their money.

In one of his last essays, Christopher Hitchens, himself enduring a long and very public death watch, reflected wryly upon the demise of atheist philosopher Sidney Hook:

Toward the end of his long life he became seriously ill and began to reflect on the paradox that—based as he was in the medical mecca of Stanford, California—he was able to avail himself of a historically unprecedented level of care, while at the same time being exposed to a degree of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford.

Hitchens concludes:

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

He describes not his fear of dying, but his fear of losing that which makes his life worthwhile:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true.

Tyranny Lives Forever

Today, we receive word that Eastern Europe's champion of freedom Vaclav Havel has died. With each light of liberty snuffed, the world grows a little darker.

Young or old, we all must become dissidents and contrarians if we want to save our nation. Final words from Christopher Hitchens...

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. (Christopher Hitchens -- Letters to a Young Contrarian, p. 140)

Further Reading:
Christopher Hitchens: Most Memorable Bon Mots
Vanity Fair – Christopher Hitchens Tribute
Slate – Christopher Hitchens
Matt Labash – A Hitchless World
American Spectator – Hitch-62
Christopher Hitchens: A Thank-You, of Sorts
Johah Goldberg Remembers Christopher Hitchens

Dude, Where's My Drone?

2011-12-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Our babe in the woods president is really playing hardball with the Iranians, who managed to get their grimy mitts on one of our high tech drones. His statement:

"Let me be clear. Bla bla bla..."

The Iranian response demonstrates that The Wages of Appeasement is humiliation...

On Tuesday, with Putin-like contempt, Iran demanded that Obama apologize instead. “Obama begs Iran to give him back his toy plane,” reveled the semiofficial Fars News Agency.

How did Iran get our drone?

I don't believe an America-hating mole in the CIA did this, as some of the more conspiratorial-minded have suggested. It is possible that Iran Hijacked Our Drone, as a chest-thumping Iranian is now claiming. They are not backwards people and they have help from China and Russia.

Add in our complacency (remember learning that Al Qaeda in Iraq had tapped into our unencrypted Predator drone feeds?), and it is a real possibility. We are just about stupid enough to fly such advanced technology naked, believing no one is smart enough to take our toys away from us. I don't know anything about our drone programs, but what the Iranian in the CS Monitor said sounds feasible if the aircraft's networks were not encrypted or if we failed to equip it with safeguards against GPS meaconing.

When will we start punishing complacency and incompetence?

Will anyone in our government or congress investigate this? Does anyone get fired anymore? General McChrystal is the only person I can recall getting fired for anything, and that was because he was stupid enough to invite a Rolling Stone reporter in on his staff's bull sessions where they trash talked the president (who the general voted for).

Another Plausible Scenario...

There could be a simpler, low tech answer. A perfidious Pastun in the Afghan Army or some other group who is ostensibly "on our side" more than likely recovered the craft inside Afghanistan and trucked it over to Iran.

The CIA’s RQ-170 “Sentinel” drone captured by the Iranians last week may have gone down in Afghanistan and then transported to Iran by friendly forces on the ground, a former officer in the elite Quds Force branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards told The Daily Caller. [...]

However, photographs and video footage released by the Iranians on Dec. 8, several days after they announced the drone’s capture, clearly show that both wings had been neatly severed and then reattached.

“This suggests that the drone landed safely and that its wings were cut off so it could be transported by truck,” the former Quds Force officer said. “I believe it was captured by the Taliban inside Afghanistan and transferred to the Iranians, who then reattached the wings,” he added. (Daily Caller)

I don't know what happened, but that seems the most likely scenario. We have no friends over there. The Afghan soldiers we train end up shooting at our soldiers, and the billions in cash we lavish on that hopeless land is split between Karzai's gang of bandits and the Taliban...

Truth be known, neither the Karzai regime, nor the Taliban warlords, want the Americans out of Afghanistan. The treasure we pour into that country sustains the ruling cabal and the Taliban alike. We are the straight man at the bazaar, the stranger fleeced by the locals. (Fouad Ajami)

We are suckers. We're being played for fools. We are throwing our technological pearls before swine, and we are shedding American blood for people who hate us. Obama needs to wrap up Afghanistan in the same manner he did Iraq. We'll take our drones away and let them get back to shooting down kites.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Here's a story from Aviation Week with lots of technical details: Iran UAV Will Not Expose Latest Technology

We are the New Saudi Arabia

2011-12-15T05:00:00.001-07:00

No, we're not going to start caning people (although I could think of a few public figures who richly deserve it). We won't be punishing women for leaving the kitchen and driving, or charging them with sorcery. We certainly won't follow Saudi Arabia's footsteps by killing homosexuals or funding Islamic terrorists.

We are the new Saudi Arabia, only with blessedly liberated women, loud and proud gay people, and pork BBQ. We are sitting on top of a bountiful cornucopia of energy:

How vast are these resources? Here are some numbers:

Coal Resources
The United States has 486 billion short tons of recoverable coal. This is enough coal to provide 464 years of electricity at today's current rate of coal consumption.
While this is an incredible amount of coal, it is actually a very conservative estimate. This is because the estimate does not include Alaska's coal resources and Alaska holds more coal than then entire lower 48 combined.
Oil Resources
North America has nearly 1.8 trillion barrels of recoverable oil. That is twice as much as the combined reserves of all OPEC nations.
In oil shale resources alone, the United States has 1 trillion barrels of oil. This is nearly four times as large as Saudi Arabia's proven oil reserves. But due to regulations, these resources are essentially locked up.
Natural Gas Resources
North America holds 4.2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas. That is enough natural gas to satisfy the United State's current natural gas demand for 575 years.
This is more natural gas than the combined proved natural gas reserves of the next five nations (more than Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan combined). (Debunking the Myth)

Imagine you've been driving a little crapbox of a car that gets poor gas mileage, is expensive and only works half the time. If that's all you had, you'd just have to live with it and be thankful for what you've got.

Now imagine that a much better vehicle had been available all along, for a cheaper price, better gas mileage and ironclad reliability. Imagine that the government had been keeping this vehicle a secret from you. You'd be pretty upset, wouldn't you?

Well, that's what government is trying to do to us with energy. We are spilling over with oil, natural gas, and coal, yet the green corporatists insist on cramming down our throats wind, solar and battery powered toy cars that catch fire. Worse, these immature technologies are unreliable and much more expensive than their time-tested rivals. Forcing them upon a free and prosperous people requires government intervention!

That's what the green agenda is all about: Tax and restrict and regulate and harry the fossil fuels industry until it is just as expensive as the green dreams. If you can't gain the pinnacle on your own merits, just drag everybody else down to your debased level.

That is the difference between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism raises a society up through competition. The "Robber Barons" lowered the cost of lighting our homes and traveling as they competed for our business. Socialism levels everybody flat in the name of equality.

We need to kick Obama and the Pelosicrats to the curb before they destroy the nation. We have cheap and abundant energy; we'd be crazy not to use it.

Stabbing Westward

2011-12-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Europe is Between Decline and Fall, the World is Flowing East to West...

In a rare Obama administration success, we pulled off a major diplomatic offensive a few weeks back in Asia, setting China back on its heels, diplomatically speaking. We’re standing up a new beachhead in Northern Australia, Opening up Burma (Myanmar) and China’s neighbors are cosying up to us, encouraging our involvement in the region.

Looking across the Atlantic, things ain't so great...

“The nose of the British Bulldog has been slanted backwards so that he can breathe without letting go” -- Winston Churchill

Meanwhile, Europe is in its death throes, with member states lacerating and devouring one another. First, irresponsible governments loaded up on free money, incurring crushing debt and demanding others pay, and now this …

“BRITAIN last night faced a revenge attack for David Cameron’s EU snub when a senior Brussels bureaucrat promised a new deluge of damaging red tape on UK business.” (EU Plots Revenge against Britain)

What a slice of reality. Europeans no longer fight wars. They now threaten one another with onerous paperwork. Britain was smart to keep its own currency, and it is now distancing itself further from the imploding EU experiment, incurring the wrath of the unelected Continental Poobahs in Brussels. The British Bulldog, however, is not backing down…

Conservative MP Douglas Carswell said: [...] “If he is such an economic genius, why is the continent that he helps to preside over heading down a debt vortex? He should be worrying about his own maths, not ours.”

Stephen Booth, of the Euro-sceptic think tank Open Europe, said: “The threat of EU regulation on the City of London remains.

“The British Government must continue to push to prevent any further unnecessary and unwanted regulation from Brussels.” (EU Plots Revenge against Britain)

Britons are tough, but it worries me that we have a Great Britain hater in the White House. Our closest and most trusted ally may need some backup if it is to survive the continental collapse...

Meanwhile, wild-eyed practitioners of the Religion of Peace bombed and shot up the city center of Liege, Belgium, killing or wounding almost 100 people. It was all a matter of "honor" with links back to *Surprise!* Pakistan.

It’s the Decline and Fall of Rome on a continental scale...

Lest anyone on this side of the Atlantic give vent to a schadenfreude-induced chortle, let us recall that we ourselves teeter on the brink.

So the Olde Continent is in economic collapse, and its once brave societies have turned “weak and effeminate*.” The barbaric invaders have overwhelmed the decadent hosts; the 7th century obscurantists who Europe invited in will finish the job, just as the Vandals and the Goths finished off Rome, picking through the ruins and hauling off the marble. A darkness of ignorance will fall upon the continent, as it does anywhere civilization cedes ground to Islam.

So the US is right to turn our attentions away from the Middle East and Europe. They deserve one another. The Western Hemisphere has enough gas, oil and coal, there’s no further need to spill our blood and treasure on ungrateful bastards. Vietnam (yes, that Vietnam) and it’s neighbors are welcoming us because China is an imperial bully.

China's Hu tells all the Hu's in Huville to prepare for war

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday urged the navy to prepare for military combat, amid growing regional tensions over maritime disputes and a US campaign to assert itself as a Pacific power.

War with China is not inevitable. Neither is the fall of Europe. Our destiny is in our hands. Do we have the wisdom, strength and courage to grasp it?

* - Gibbons’ observation on Rome’s decline

London’s Bankers Tell EU to Get Bent

From Jekyll Island to Hyde Park

2011-12-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Federal Reserve cartelizes the banking industry, allowing individual banks to inflate together, earning them and the government enormous profits, while making sure that they are never held accountable for their fraudulent practices. (Origins of the Fed – Ron Paul)

We elect politicians who don’t know what they are doing. They are naifs in the financial arena, and so they are easily fooled, hoodwinked and cowed into sitting down, shutting up and doing the bidding of the bankers. Just as Satan will use someone’s strengths against himself, Wall Street swindlers especially love ensnaring intelligent politicians who have an overinflated self-esteem and dragooning them into the latest banker bunko scheme. Who’s smarter than Barney Frank? And who knows more about finance than the former Democrat Senator from Countrywide, Chris Dodd?

At least George Bush just read his script with his typical deer in the headlights look and spared us the charade of pretending to understand the economic tsunami engulfing his presidency. Mercifully, he confined his remarks to killing capitalism in order to save it because too many credit stink bombs had clogged the banking toilets, or whatever he said at the time. He should have grabbed a plunger and beat Dirty Hank Paulson and his coven of cronies with it, and kept the treasury shut tight.

Ron Paul is perhaps the only politician alive who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to our money and our banking system.

There is one reason why we have a Federal Reserve System today, and it has nothing to do with what the Fed's publications say. The Federal Reserve exists to give a special privilege to the banking industry. And they have profited greatly from it. But at what expense? The banksters have diluted the value of the 1914 dollar to about eight cents. And its value is still shrinking.

As the Federal Reserve expands the money supply, it reduces the value of all existing dollars. The process happens, though, unevenly because not all prices rise at the same time. The first party to get the new money can spend it at its old purchasing power. Only after filtering through the economy does the money bid up prices for goods. (Origins of the Fed – Ron Paul)

The economic emperors have no clothes, and they have destroyed our currency, which is delayed from a final crash only by the Euro’s even greater peril.

See also:
Ron Paul – The Case for Gold

Shooting Inconvenient People

2011-12-12T05:00:00.001-07:00

The professional left in America and their chattering-class useful idiots have followed a consistent pattern for a century: sympathizing with tyranny in their musings over how to implement policies fueled by jealousy and an undying fear of economic liberty. (Ross Kaminsky – Stern Idiocy)

Never met a dictator he did not like

Add Andy Stern, former SEIU Kommisar, to the list of Communist China admirers

Inside of every good progressive is a very illiberal goose-stepper longing for the strongman. Planning committees and central control send a thrill up the legs of those who disdain the individual liberties enshrined in our moribund constitution. Bold action! Intervention!

Stern waxed poetic about China’s bold central planning:

China's 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development. (Andy Stern – I Love Communism)

That’s nothing. Tom Friedman’s ardor swells and his breast heaves as he gushes forth his paeans to the burly, bossy, ever so muscular Chinese Communist Politburo. If only the power elites here in America could snatch such willy-nilly decision-making from the ignorant clutches of workaday rubes! Why can’t we do away with all this messy democracy and have a dictator state like China, ask the ChiCom fanboys.

Jonah Goldberg knows how to puncture the balloon:

China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty.

Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.

Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three choices: move, jail, death. (Goldberg – China Envy)

Here’s the reality that the progressive toadies don’t want to face…

Now comes the hangover. The public works projects are winding down, unleashing a wave of unemployment and an uptick in social unrest. The banks' nonperforming loans are rising, and local governments are insolvent. The country is littered with luxurious county government offices, ghost cities of empty apartment blocks, unsafe high-speed rail lines and crumbling highways to nowhere. (WSJ – China’s Hard Landing)

This last statement could also describe the US just as well…

A financial sector that allocates credit based on politics rather than price signals led China into this mess. Popular pressure to dismantle crony capitalism is building, and the Communist Party would be wise to get in front of it while it can. (WSJ – China’s Hard Landing)

For an entertaining and excellent and critique of Stern and Friedman’s corporatist mindset, see Matt Welch’s The Simpletons.

It's Not a Free Marketplace...

2011-12-11T05:00:00.001-07:00

... when government restricts freedom of action

It's not a free marketplace when a union can cry for government to use its coercive powers to tell a company that it can't open that new airplane factory it just built. That is exactly what happened in the Boeing case that was just resolved.

The National Labor Relations Board has dropped its controversial case against airline manufacturer Boeing, which had become a lightning rod for conservatives.

The labor board argued for much of the past year that Boeing decided to locate a new plant to build its new 787 Dreamliner jets in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, in retaliation for strikes by unionized workers at its existing facilities in Washington state. (The Hill - NLRB Withdraws Boeing Case)

"Retaliation" is a natural reaction to market forces

What if Boeing decided to lower all wages by 10 dollars per hour and workers quit because of it, going to a company that pays more? Why isn't that worker retaliation against the company? A better question is, why would government prevent employers or employees from "retaliating?" Retaliation is just a dirty word for a reaction to a previous market force. If Starbucks jacks up the price of a vento to $10 dollars a cup, I ain't buyin' no more coffee there.

Coercion is the Key to Progressivism

This also reveals the coercive mindset of progressivism. There are still people in America today insisting that our economic decline is due to the decline of unions, despite the lack of evidence to support their contention. The only way enforced unionism works is if you chain down businesses and take away their free agency.

This is why Detroit, a once-thriving union dynamo, collapsed into a liberal junk heap. Union Labor bid its prices up too high, Big Business foolishly accepted, and government failed to protect them from the free market "retaliation." Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs headed south to non-union climes, and foreign imports further impinged upon the Big Labor-Big Business fantasy land of price-setting insulated from market forces.

Progressives would use government power to prevent such free-market reactions, setting up trade barriers that would spark trade wars resulting in higher consumer prices, tying down companies and forcing them to "take it," which is what the big three pretty much did voluntarily, to their ultimate detriment.

Communism, Fascism, Corporatism

Back in the bad old days, raw communism would do this by expropriating the capitalists' property, eventually running the confiscated enterprises into the ground, murdering those who resisted, and miring their societies in misery.

Fascism, communism's little leftist cousin, was more sophisticated, adding some sweeteners in for the bourgeoisie. Fascists were smart enough to leave the means of capital in the hands of the business owners; it was more convenient and efficient to just shake down everybody at the factory door as they left for the day.

The modern-day way of chaining down a corporation is with state-sponsored corporatism. Businesses will stay put so long as they are protected by an archipelago of government regulations, protections, exemptions and other formidable barriers that protect them from competition, giving them free rein to continually jack up prices with government-sanctioned impunity, making consumers a captive audience.

As an added bonus, they can freely dip into the government coffers to the tune of tens of billions when their unsustainable business model inevitably fails.

Welcome to Corporate America.

Further Reading:
Rothbard - Power & Market, Ch 6

Privatized Gains, Socialized Losses

2011-12-09T05:00:00.003-07:00

Serious financial people are "Thinking the Unthinkable," and shocked to find themselves doing so. They're late to the game. Many liberty lovers have been thinking our own unthinkable thoughts for quite awhile now...

PIMCO CEO Mohamed A. El-Erian, calls the bank bailouts "Socialism." He rightly observes that the US government...

"privatized massive gains and socialized massive losses." Growing numbers of people throughout the world are beginning to "believe the capitalist system is not fair."

El-Erian identified politicians and policymakers as major barriers for economic growth. He noted that American society has "transferred enormous power to the politicians and policymakers." And unfortunately, "politicians are driving." He said it is like policymakers are driving the car without a map on an "unfamiliar road and all of us are sitting in the back seat." "They haven't told us where we are going" nor have they provided a "vision for the U.S. economy." Instead the politicians are "arguing amongst themselves;" there is "no clarity." (When Economic Unthinkables Become Reality)

Should the FED Save Europe?

Hell no! They would do this by printing more money and laundering it through the IMF, which means in reality they are assessing a tax on each of us, further destroying our savings and our spending power, and handing our money over to Europeans. Money is not wealth, it is a measurement of wealth. Printing more money is like redefining the length of an inch or how much a pound is. You change the perception, but not the reality.

Feed the Progressive Beast!

Meanwhile, intellectually-dishonest crapweasel Paul Krugman has, Surprise! found more things we can tax. What this stubborn statist won't mention is that government already blows the dollar equivalent of one-quarter of all US economic output, while collecting only around 17% of GDP. See the gap? Libs do, and they want to close it by confiscating an unprecedented amount of personal earnings. Government hasn't spent this much since WW II, but tax collection has always averaged around 17% of GDP. It's the spending, stupid!

A Government of Goldman Sachs, by Goldman Sachs, and For Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street pigs, flush with taxpayer money, are the rosy cheeked picture of health. Now, the story is out about How "Dirty Hank" Paulson took care of his cronies. Is anyone surprised? The Goldman Sachs mole who penetrated the US Treasury did what he was supposed to do.

These Wall Street vermin have infested our government and they are sapping the foundations like the termites and rats that they are. Worse, they do it shamelessly, in broad daylight. And they get away with it. Our banking system is rotten, and the parasites have almost killed the host.

"The World" goes in debt to "The Banks"

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

[...] It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year. (Secret Fed Loans)

Instead of bailing them all out, our government should have let them go bust and then clapped them all in jail for irresponsible lending and concocting financial stinkbombs.

The King's "New Socialism" Speech

2011-12-08T05:00:00.003-07:00

President Obama is a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen.*

In Kansas, Obama railed against nefarious forces …

“They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years,” Obama said of the GOP. “And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Just who are the people who believe this? I don’t know any. Playing by your own rules is perfectly ok in your own domain, but it has no place in a free marketplace. Free market capitalism is predicated upon a known set of rules that everyone must follow. You can’t steal from others or murder your opponents, for example. You can’t lie to your business partners or customers. And what specific policies “stack the deck against middle-class Americans?” Give us specifics!

Mickey Kaus (America's smartest liberal) homed in on Obama’s attempt to shame corporations into what Kaus calls patriotic charity: staying here and hiring people even if you have to lose money or forgo greater profits or productivity gains to do it:

A patriotic Charity Economy is a conveyor belt to corporatism!

After all, what happens when the factory of celebrated businessman X who recognizes his patriotic obligation to employ Americans at $20 an hour is faced with competition from uncelebrated, selfish businessman Y who employs Chinese ex-peasants at $2 an hour? Businessman X is going to need a “partnership” with government, sort of a pre-bailout bailout. Obama doesn’t seem to have a problem with this sort of cozy arrangment. (Kaus – Obama’s Charity Capitalism)

An Unfair Presidency

Obama compared capital gains tax apples to personal income tax oranges, excoriating greedy CEOs for paying less taxes than their secretaries (a blatant lie).

He decried a system of laws that does not treat everyone equally, as his administration favors certain companies (Solyndra, GM) over others.

He hectored companies for using modern technology like ATMs, digital phone switches and that newfangled contraption known as the internet, while his armed agents raid workplaces and he shuts down job-creating factories and pipelines. And then he taunts his pornographic lover Big Biz for not hiring. The man is a walking, talking BS machine.

But by Obama's own measure, the country has gotten more "fair." The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels. (IBD)

Here’s the kicker:

the only winners since Obama took office have been corporations (profits are up 68%) and Wall Street investors (the Dow's up more than 45%). The rest of the country has gotten the shaft. (IBD)

I’d like to see him try to get reelected running on that...

As Socrates would say, let’s define our terms

Just what exactly is “fair?” Or a better question, what specifically is unfair here in the US? Wage disparity? Unequal outcomes? Can it be traced back to a root cause?

East coast Massachusetts kids named Kennedy have about a 100% chance of going to an Ivy League school, regardless of how dull they may be. Silverfiddle kids have about zero chance. Is that fair? Who knows? Who cares? It’s all a waste of time. We are individuals, our needs and wants are unique, and our efforts produce disparate and varied outcomes.

Now, if we find that a certain class of people is rounding up other people and kicking them and their progeny down a hole so as to keep them from pursuing their American dream, that would be unfair. I don’t see that happening in this country. We are not all born into identical circumstances, so equalization would be quite a task. Everywhere it’s been tried, those on top were dragged down, rather than those on the low end being elevated.

Rather than all this inflated fascistic rhetoric designed to whip the proles into a revolutionary frenzy, how about restoring the rule of law? Forcing Big Banking and Corporate America off of the government teat? How about getting the federal government’s snout out of every corner of our lives and allowing us to solve our problems at the lowest level?

Even the venerable bastion of corporate statism, The Washington Post, gave Obama’s Robespierre acid trip flashback in Kansas three Pinocchios for its bald-faced dishonesty.

* - William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith

Further Reading:
Harsanyi – Obama vs Capitalism
NY Times – Obama Tongue Bath
IBD - A Lesson in Fairness for Obama
Obama Urges Fair Play

Barry Plays Dress Up, Again

2011-12-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

We're all laughing at Obama

First, Obama wanted to be Abraham Lincoln when he grew up. Then he laughably compared himself to Ronald Reagan. Now he’s playing dress-up again, this time as the Rough Rider, Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt was a tough, self-made man who was forever seeking out ways to challenge himself physically and mentally. He was a conservationist, a crime fighter and war veteran. Barack Obama is an effete metrosexual who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter.

A banker grandmother who funded his private schooling, an Ivy League education paid for by others, a political career in the corrupt Chicago sewer, where well-connected crooks took care of the competition for him…

Teddy Roosevelt, born into wealth, went out west to toughen himself up, fought in the Spanish American war, and once sparred with a professional prizefighter, damaging his eyesight in the process. The closest Obama has come to matching TR’s impressive tough guy record is occupying a bank lobby and fighting for more government money for the various agitation groups he was a community organizer for.

Obama’s only accomplishment is hoodwinking enough Americans to vote for him by promising billowy nebulae of Hope and Change and promising transformative leadership. He hasn’t led and he hasn’t been transformative. Those on the disappointed left will tell you he's George Bush without the flight suit.

Obama and the Pelosicrats serve up these absurd and ridiculous comparisons because it’s all they’ve got. No economic freedom, no hope, no change, no jobs; just more of the same with a corrupt Chicago spin.

Gingrich: That Pig Won’t Fly

2011-12-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

While GOP voters are in the irrational grips of Newt-mania (he's the least conservative candidate in the race), good columnists are reminding us about Newt Gingrich. You read them and go, “oh, yeah… I forgot all that…”

On Paul Ryan’s budget plans, Rich Lowry explains that many on the right had questions, but Gingrich had to bombastically dismiss the plan as “rightwing social engineering.” It took a vigorous scolding from conservative elder statesman Bill Bennett to force a Newt climbdown.

Only Gingrich, though, felt compelled to take a rhetorical flamethrower to the document endorsed by almost every House Republican.

He can’t help himself. Gingrich prefers extravagant lambasting when a mere distancing would do, and the over-arching theoretical construct to a mundane pander. He is drawn irresistibly to operatic overstatement — sometimes brilliant, always interesting, and occasionally downright absurd. (Rich Lowry – Newt the Unreliable)

And there’s also the little matter of Gingrich having a long history of his own social engineering experimentation, from Fannie and Freddie to global warming and health care...

Mr. Gingrich’s ability to reach leaders like Mrs. Clinton was a selling point for the Center. A PowerPoint presentation for prospective members advertised its “contacts at the highest levels” of federal and state government. Paying $200,000 a year for the top-tier membership, it said, “increases your channels of input to decision makers” and grants “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government.” (Commentary - Gingrich was an Influence Peddler)

Gingrich needs to come out singing “I Saw the Light” if he wants to remain credible in the face of his substantially statist record. As a warm up, he also needs to face up to his DC power player past and stop the ridiculous “outsider” pose. His Center for Health Transformation, while perfectly legal, was a classic milk-the-taxpayer beltway bonanza.

I understand that people can change, and politicians more than most, since they compete for power under constantly shifting ground. Maybe Newt’s changed, who knows? How would we know? His promiscuous mind has produced flamboyant government plans by the wagonload. Grandiose agendas and melodic musings are his imperial domain. Is there anything he hasn’t thought of?

A Lust for Ideas

My problem with him is that he is an egghead, more enamored of shiny new ideas than with governing from a core set of well thought out principles. We don’t need an intellectual thrill seeker in the White House, and Newt has shown himself to be an edge junky looking for the next cerebral high.

He belongs in the lofty forums of Davos and Aspen, not in the White House, where he would morph into an intellectually aroused Anthony Wiener, taking pictures of his tumescent ideas and flashing them, unwanted, into the homes of unsuspecting citizens. We don’t need that.

We don’t need theoretical experimentation and thought titillation from a president; we need principled conservative leadership, and Gingrich has no track record of that.

Further Reading:
George Will - GOP's Front Runners
Ramesh Ponnuru makes a convincing case for why Mitt’s the One.
Charles Krauthammer sizes it up: Krauthammer – Newt vs Mitt
Bill Bennett Schools Newt Gingrich

Moonday

2011-12-05T05:00:00.002-07:00

Obama: I Need another Term to Finish Us Off

Concerned that the damage will prove to be neither lasting nor complete, the president pressed his case…

"I'm going to need another term to finish the job," he said.

Not Even Barack Hussein Obama can destroy a 235 year old country in just four years. Progressives of all parties have been softening us up over the past 100 years, to the point where a critical mass now believes our rights come from government and the states work for the federal government. Are we citizens or subjects?

Biden 2016!

Gaffmaster Joe could make a play in 2016! Maybe he could run on his embarrassing honesty. He’s too dumb to be crooked.

Liberal Logic: Requiring voter ID is “rigging an election.”

Debbie Washerman Schultz (is she married to Ed Schultz? They’d make a perfect couple) says voter ID laws disenfranchise voters.

So you need an ID to buy a pack of cigarettes, but not to protect the citizens' greatest exercise of power over government? Democrats counter that voter fraud is not a problem, but how do they know that? With such lax rules in place, all but the most blatant fraud would be almost impossible to detect.

It takes a village of idiots…

As this fecund human playground reminds us…

"Somebody needs to be held accountable, and they need to pay."

We all pay, whether we want to or not. Everyone pays but the serial empregnators who score with these stupid women and then leave them with the trophies. The liberals whose policies have destroyed the American family need to be held accountable. Create a nanny state and you will end up with a nation of infants, wards of the state, crying for mommy and daddy to clean up their messes.

Clash of Civilizations

2011-12-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

Did Nostradamus predict 9/11?

No, but Samuel P. Huntington did. Dr. Huntington of "Clash of Civilizations" fame, died back in December of 2008, but his work lives on. As Mark Steyn points out, this Harvard professor of Political Science championed the idea that culture trumps all. Steyn gives us an example of his own:

in Bradford, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins. As to the seductive assimilatory charms of time, 30 years ago the percentage was half that. A victory for culture over economics. (Mark Steyn)

The Australian has an interesting article on this great man who foresaw this current age of terrorism back in 1993:

The Clash of Civilizations was a hard-headed look at what political scientists had traditionally dismissed as a soft subject: culture. Originating as a 1993 article in the policy journal Foreign Affairs, and published three years later as a book, it argued that the key sources of post-Cold War conflicts would not be national or ideological but cultural. It was Huntington's riposte to those who thought the fall of communism meant the universal triumph of Western values. The West's arrogance about the universality of its own culture would blind it to the ascent of "challenger civilisations", particularly Islam and China.

Shot through with cautions about Western decline, the book counsels Europe and the US to unite: "The prudent course of the West is not to attempt to stop the shift in power, but to learn to navigate the shallows, to endure the miseries, moderate its ventures, and safeguard its culture." Exporting American pop culture and trainers was easy; exporting values of freedom and democracy far harder.

"Somewhere in the Middle East," Huntington wrote, "a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner." (The Australian)

"Brilliant" minds and miscellaneous critics poo-pooed his thesis at the time, but 9/11 and its aftermath brought a sad vindication.

We really are undergoing a clash of civilizations.

To understand Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, follow these three easy steps. If you care about the future of Western society and culture, it's worth it:

1) Read Huntington's famous essay. It is a scholarly work yet easily readable by ordinary folks. It puts the current global struggle into focus. Unfortunately, it is locked up tight, inaccessible unless you pay a fee to Foreign Affairs Magazine. They should be ashamed of themselves for sequestering such a seminal work. Some Googling can usually find it clandestinely posted somewhere. Even better, go get the book.

2) Scholars and other thinkers often pitted Huntington's thesis against Francis Fukuyama's "End of History." You can read Stanley Kurtz's commentary on the subject at Policy Review.

3) Finally, Professor Fouad Ajami, himself an imminent scholar and brilliant writer, wrote an insightful piece on Huntinton's essay the January after Huntington's death.

Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision. (Fouad Ajami - The Clash)

I pray we at least pause to contemplate Dr. Huntington's thesis. A self-ashamed society that stands for nothing will fall for anything; and angry fire-bearers from the East really could burn it all down.

Green Dreams, Economic Nightmares

2011-12-02T05:00:00.001-07:00

California continues to serve as an object lesson to the rest of the nation.

That most blessed land of Queen Calafia, that could be an economically and geographically viable nation in its own right, is stumbling and staggering under the weight of progressive statism. It's latest woe, like all the others, is of its own doing.

The state has mandated that one-third of its energy must come from renewable sources by 2020.

California's increasing use of renewable power will come at a price, pushing up electricity bills across the state.

And while it's impossible to tell how big the cost to consumers will be, some experts fear the total cost of renewable energy in California will be in the billions of dollars.

"You're going to see significant price increases over time from renewables," said Aaron Johnson, director of renewable energy policy at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. "As you add it to the system, it is going to result in higher costs for consumers." (SF Gate - California Renewable Energy)

Eschewing cheap and bountiful gas and coal for green pipe dreams is suicidal, but suicide is California's specialty. The only thing that keeps such governmental action from being criminal is the fact that people can escape, and they are. The ones that are still there voted for higher energy bills, so I don't feel sorry for them.

Meanwhile, in China, a Boom Goes Bust...

Jersey (I think it was Jersey, if not, it was one of the statists that comment here) was complaining last week about China subsidizing it's solar industry. I told him we should thank the government of China for chipping in to make solar panels we buy cheaper. Our government would be stupid to do the same.

Now comes news that China's solar industry is collapsing...

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Losses for China’s largest solar manufacturers, including Suntech Power Holdings Co. and JA Solar Holdings Co. may continue through next year as declining shipments prompt them to slash prices and liquidate inventory.

“Liquidation is leading to suicidal pricing.” Polavarapu said in an interview today. "There are too many solar companies in China, he said, and they are cutting prices to maintain share."

Once freed from government intervention (bad money always chases out good), solar will make technological gains and perhaps be economically viable someday. For now, it remains the energy of the future.

Meanwhile, as Obama's venture socialists still talk of stimulus multipliers and lust for the opportunity to dump even more money down green job sinkholes, the gas and oil industry is creating real jobs and providing cheap energy to an America mired in high-unemployment Obamanomics.

The petroleum industry has done more for this country than Obama could ever dream of.

WRM - Chinese Solar Industry Goes Belly Up
The Fraying of China's Guilded Age

Why Orwell Matters

2011-12-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

"Thus he faced the competing orthodoxies and despotisms of his day with little more than a battered typewriter and a stubborn personality." -- Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters

Christopher Hitchens is very much an Orwell for our times, only more caustic and with sharp edges. He wrote a book back in 2002 entitled, Why Orwell Matters. It's a great introduction to Orwell for those who may only be familiar with his two greatest works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.

George Orwell was many things: A brilliant essayist who was considered a mediocre novelist who ended up writing two of the 20th century's most gripping novels; a socialist who was an anti-communist; a hater of war who warned his fellows about the dangers of pacifism; a champion of the poor and benighted who could suddenly provide uncanny insight into the mind of the overlord.

George Orwell was completely unencumbered by received ideology and orthodoxy, a rare genuine freethinker. He faced life as it presented itself to him, and that's what makes him such a compelling and authentic figure even today.

He was a truly independent man, holding views anathema to both left and right. Disdained by both, until the other side deploys one of his arguments, then they fight over who the true Orwellites are. Truth is, nobody owns him. Like God, he is not on anyone's side; we can only hope to be on his side, because he was unwaveringly on the side of liberty over tyranny, humanity over bureaucratic mechanization, natural beauty with warts and all over ginned up fripperies packaged by elites and sold to the rubes.

Best of all, he was a keen analyst of life, using his experience and the light of reason to draw logical inferences that bore themselves out with frightening accuracy. Yes, communism really was slaughtering millions. Orwell knew it, years before the truth slipped out, even as useful idiots on both sides of the Atlantic sung the praises of Uncle Joe Stalin and wrote glowingly of strong men making the trains run on time.

If you're looking for a short and well-written introduction to George Orwell, Hitchens' book is just the thing.

Hayek’s Revenge

2011-11-30T05:00:00.001-07:00

The European ruling elites are struggling to hold the whole project together...

But the real problems emerge from the technocratic mind-set, from the arrogant gray men who believe they can engineer society, oblivious to history, language, culture, values and place. (NY Times - Brooks)

Nobody has all the answers. And no single person or body needs all the answers. That’s the fallacy: That government must be omnipotent and omniscient. It is neither, and vesting it with power and control as if it were is crazy.

The more concentrated power and decision-making becomes, the more information is needed to feed into the power center. Free markets make decisions and evolve solutions organically; static control centers cannot.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Also, as you make one-size-fits-all decisions for larger and larger groups of people, discontent can only grow among those you are trying to help. We argue over everything because government has pushed everything in to the collective, making your rights negotiable and subject to snotty bickering.

For example, imagine a Friday night alone. You’re going to settle in for a night of movie watching and you decide to order pizza. Easy. Now imagine you’re snuggled in with your loved one. The decision on movie-night fare is now a shared one. Take it a step further and imagine a houseful of people. They cannot decide on the toppings, or even which takeout place to order from. Worse, some are on a gluten-free diet and want BBQ, while other clamor for Chinese food. The bigger the crowd, the harder it is to reach a decision.

So we are better off making our individual decisions for ourselves and allowing the spontaneous economy to bloom. It works. Don’t believe me? There are literally billions of people in this world who know nothing of growing crops or killing animals, yet they do not want for food.

People and nations can capitalize on specialization, making things that others want, while not worrying about making necessities they know they can buy from others. And governments' involvement is limited to providing some infrastructure and mediating trade agreements.

How We Got Here

Every emergency has been used by the federal government as an opportunity to take another bite out of our liberties, with expediency as the excuse. As Hayek predicted, "our freedom" has been "destroyed by piecemeal encroachments."

Hayek was a big proponent of governing from broad principles where possible rather than from narrow, specific laws.

"The argument for liberty, in the last resort, is indeed an argument for principles and against expediency in collective action..."

He foresaw the "fatal weakness" of government leaving free people alone with their liberties: Uncertain outcomes and glaring inequalities would scare us off our freedoms and into the arms of big daddy government. Liberty cannot compare to concrete promises and "definite gifts offered to particular individuals" in exchange for some "curtailment of freedom."

That is the fatal seduction. Not treating freedom as the "supreme principle..."

"...would inevitably prove a fatal weakness and lead to its slow erosion."

Meanwhile, here in America, where Obama ignored the rule of law and saved GM from a richly-deserved bankruptcy...

The Treasury Department yesterday revised its loss estimate for the Government Motors bailoutfrom $14.33 billion to $23.6 billion, thanks to the company’ssinking stock price.

Add in the special tax breaks, and...

This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own abouta quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. (Reason)

Europe is playing a shell game, and they're running out of suckers. Here in the US, we're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The elites have stolen our freedoms in the name of expediency and progress, but their promises of equality and prosperity are just chaff in the wind. They've led us to the brink of collapse. As Peter, Paul and Mary used to sing, "When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"

Or, to Paraphrase Ben Franklin, "Those who trade liberty for security end up with neither."

Quotes Taken from Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty," pp 129-130.