Current Events

Statists applaud death of unarmed mother amidst faked Gov’t shutdown

L. A. Repucci Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Bedlam in Goliath.

Commentary by:  L.A. Repucci

Shots were fired in the Capitol today after a lone female fled a checkpoint in her car.  A child was in the woman’s vehicle, now presumably orphaned by law enforcement fatally shooting her dead outside of the black sedan, used to ram a newly-erected ‘Barrycade’ in Washington, DC.

House Majority Leader John Boehner praised the courage of the Fed’s security for gunning down the unarmed woman with an infant on the threshold of the halls of congress.  Shoot-to-kill seems to be increasingly the only tactical response for law enforcement, from the unarmed Tsarnaev brothers now to a weaponless, unstable mother, clearly outside of the vehicle she was driving.

Could ‘shoot-to-kill’ be a federal-level directive aimed at preventing the voice of dissent from surfacing in the media?

Police have yet to confirm rumors that the suspect is Miriam Carey a 34-year-old Stamford (CT) Dental Hygienist with ‘mental health’ issues.  It would seem the political landscape is saturated with partisan rhetoric to the point that the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost in the Capitol faster than ever before.

Ultimate Party Hacker.

The partisan theater that is the current government shutdown has apparently struck a chord with a public increasingly suspicious of government, rather than one party or the other.  The abuse of power and authoritarian statism may have finally hit a pitch pushing the electorate from the customary partisan vitriol to a new, holistic hatred and mistrust of not just a particular government, but of governance in general.

This blog isn’t intended to assign blame to the ham-fisted-yet-impotent GOP or to the openly manipulative Democrat party — there are the usual pundits and party hacks more than willing to play the left-right game on this (and every other issue), and point the finger across the aisle.  In fact, it’s probable that the usual partisan coverage of one national crisis after another likely whipped the woman into the frenzy that resulted in her behavior and subsequent public death-by-firing squad.  Looking at the current national political climate of deepening partisan divides, it would seem this sort of thing is indeed inevitable.

From a libertarian perspective, it is evident that whether the woman is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist or a red-blooded conservative, the simple truth is that it is the false dichotomy of the two party system within the larger construct of a Goliath Government* that is fueling the schism among the current American political zeitgeist.  Libertarian ideals have found more support within the GOP than the Democrat party, but with the political landscape quickly evolving with left-leaning progressives increasingly autocratic and hawkish, and the right continuing to be the party of ‘smaller’ behemothic, socially-oppressive government, libertarian-influenced politicians may need to re-evaluate their alignment with the GOP and assert their own space on the political spectrum.

*The Mars Volta do not endorse this blog, the US Government, or governments anywhere, so far as I know.

By distancing themselves from the GOP, this current crisis could be the moment at which the principles of limited government and personal liberty fix in the minds of the electorate as the sole territory of the libertarian philosophy.  Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul…the nation awaits your voices.  Use this opportunity to point out the stark failure of the current junta to fix problems with the force of statism.  Point out the fact that a ‘government shutdown’ seems to consist of closing parks and monuments that require little if any state management to simply exist as they do, and furloughing non-essential personnel easily replaceable with simple automation and elimination of redundancy.  Draw attention to the fact that of the 700,000-or-so suspended government functionaries are eligible and filing for unemployment benefits, drawing income from the same stolen tax revenues which are used to ‘pay’ them usually — and paying them not to work may be preferable than paying them to do their jobs, if the goal is shrinking the size of the state.  Be sure to reference the 1.2-or-so million bureaucrats that continue to serve the public by stealing their wealth and threatening their lives and safety with the full force of a statist totalitarian regime and a monopoly on violent oppression.

Government employees carrying firearms aren’t furloughed, nor are the three-letter agencies that spy on the public unconstitutionally and ‘appropriate’ our money as taxes.  The IRS isn’t really furloughed, despite reports to the contrary — they are needed (including their 16,000 gun-toting new recruits — yes, IRS agents carry firearms) to run Obamacare as ‘navigators’, who are paid on commission per signup to the new compulsory, unconstitutional insurance law.

In conclusion, if the Authoritarian government continues to fan the partisan flames with more political theater, they can expect a multitude of Miriam Careys to continue to go postal and throw themselves against the bulwark of the evil machine that has wrested liberty away from a free people.  You called down the thunder, politicians — now you will reap what you’ve sown for decades.  US foreign policy has been breeding terrorists for decades, and now it’s domestic policy will begin to do the same.  Maybe it’s time to rethink the ‘shoot-to-kill’ mentality…

Pax Humana,

–L.A. Repucci

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Franklin D Roosevelt’s America: A Progressive’s View

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , , ,

Matt Yglesias is shocked that Americans think the 1940-1949 was one of the best decades of last century. His description of the presidencies of FDR and Harry Truman is the best concise version I’ve ever read:

Some salient facts about the 1940s: There was a big war. One participant in that war had an active policy of targeting enemy civilian population centers for wholesale destruction as a battlefield tactic. Initially they did this with large-scale bombing raids designed to set as many houses ablaze as possible. Eventually they developed nuclear weapons in order to massacre enemy civilians in a more pilot-intensive way. The country in question was allied with a vicious dictator whose political strategies included mass rape, large-scale civilian deportations, and the occasional deliberate engineering of famine conditions. And those were the good guys! We’re all very happy they won!

Indeed. Let us never forget that the “victory” of the US over Germany in World War 2 was a savage one. Let us not forget that if the tables had been turned, and Germany and Japan had somehow been able to conquer the United States, Washington would have been found to be guilty of horrific atrocities both at home and abroad.

The German people have largely been implicated in the crimes of the German state. The logic behind this goes as following: yes, some Germans may have been forced to do things for their state that they would not have otherwise done, but for the  most part, most Germans were happy to oblige Berlin and commit crimes in the name of the state. I tend to subscribe to this view. In fact, it is this view that makes me a libertarian. Americans today seem far too comfortable committing crimes in the name of their government. They point to Roosevelt’s administration as proof of America’s wholesomeness.

They are far too comfortable committing crimes in the name of their government that they would never, ever commit by themselves. How many of you would be comfortable bombing Syria? What if Washington bombed Syria under the auspices of humanitarianism? Of an undefined national interest?

A Glimpse into Ottoman Syria

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One must not lose sight of the fact that, historically speaking, and contrary to prevalent belief, the Alawites wanted no part of the “Unitary Syria” that emerged out of Franco-British bickering in the Levant of the interwar period. Indeed, when the French inherited the Ottoman Vilayets (governorates) of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Alexandretta in 1918, they opted to turn them into six autonomous entities reflecting previous Ottoman administrative realities. Ergo, in 1920, those entities became the State of Greater Lebanon (which in 1926 gave birth to the Republic of Lebanon), the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo, the State of the Druze Mountain, the State of the Alawite Mountain (corresponding roughly to what the Alawites are reconstituting today), and the Sanjak of Alexandretta (ceded to Turkey in 1938 to become the Province of Hatay.)

But when Arab nationalists began pressuring the British on the question of “Arab unity,” urging them to make good on pledges made to the Sharif of Mecca during the Great War, the Alawites demured. In fact, Bashar al-Assad’s own grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, was among leading Alawite notables who, until 1944, continued to lobby French Mandatory authorities to resist British and Arab designs aimed at stitching together the States of Aleppo, Damascus, Druze, and Alawite Mountains into a new republic to be christened Syria.

From this long-winded (but useful) article by Franck Salameh in the National Interest. What would be interesting to research is how long it took the Ottomans to figure out how to best govern such a diverse set of peoples. God forbid anybody let them govern themselves. Also interesting to note is the “Arab unity” canard that ultimately created the state of Syria. From what I recall, Arab nationalism was largely pushed by a hodgepodge of urban liberals with connections to British and French businesses and rural aristocrats hailing from the Gulf and promised land and power by the British for turning on the Turks.

What a mess. The liberals, by the way, are long gone. They were swept away by the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. The Islamists are largely a reaction to the military dictatorships. Islamism as we know it today only came into being in the late 1950s, when the leaders of the Middle East were all puppets that had been installed by the last vestiges of European colonialism. Arab nationalism was still strong in the late 1950s, so the Islamists lost out in popularity to the military dictatorships (which operated under the guise of “Arab socialism”). Twenty years of Arab socialism – guided by Generals and Colonels – paved the way for the Islamists and their internationalist rhetoric to become the voice of the Arab street.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing Syria dissolve back into six independent states. If the international community could get them to bind their economies together in a free trade zone of sorts, the region would heal quickly and set an important precedent: political decentralization and economic integration work well no matter where they’re applied.

Update: the Economist has more on the ethnic angle in Syria’s civil war.

All’s Quiet in the West

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links

Hello all,

Is it just me or is there not a whole lot of major events going on right now?

I mean, the economy still sucks and cronyism is rampant, but it just seems like everything is cool, calm and collected (to borrow a phrase from a Ghanaian friend of mine) at the moment. At least in the West.

Update: there is a “looming government shutdown” in the works? Yawn. I’ve seen and heard this trick-and-pony show before.

Ludwig von Mises’s birthday was yesterday. He would be 132 years old.

Is Syria about to see a horrific bout of ethnic cleansing?

Bad News Bruins (Pac-12 football in ya mouth)

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links ,

Southern Cal fired its head football coach after losing to Arizona State yesterday. I was looking forward to the Trojan’s big game against national powerhouse UCLA in November. This is awful news for everybody in Los Angeles.

I’m surprised Washington beat Arizona as hard as they did. Either U Dub is better than I thought, or Arizona is a little overrated.

I’m no fan of Cal, but “ouch.” That’s what they get for losing to a BIG 10 team last week (making us all look bad in the process).

The Pac-12 has five teams in the Top 25, and four of ’em are in the Top 15. ASU (ranked #22) can play with anybody in the nation. Why isn’t Oregon State back in the rankings? They’ve finally got their QB situation figured out, so if they can win some big games in conference play we might see them crawl back into the national picture. The Pac-12 is the best conference in the nation. Oregon, Stanford and UCLA could all beat Alabama, LSU and Georgia any day of the week. Washington and ASU would smoke A&M and South Carolina, and our bottom-feeders are better than their bottom-feeders.

I am still pissed off that the Pac-12 admitted Utah and Colorado into the conference. These guys suck. It would’ve been better to pull in BYU and UNLV. In terms of talent, the latter are about as good as the former, but the latter have way more monetary potential to the conference: BYU with its Mormon fan base and UNLV with its location. Whatever.

Eleven Myths about Obamacare.

Government is responsible for soaring inequality.

Around the Web: PoliSci edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics

Libertarianism is often associated with the discipline of economics, but here at the consortium we try to bring a variety of libertarian-ish views to the table. Here are a few political science blogs that I frequent:

  1. Crooked Timber. This blog is largely considered to be the standard-bearer for political science blogs. Recommended.
  2. Pileus blog. This is the polisci blog with the hardest libertarian slant, although I still haven’t found any anarchocapitalists lurking about.
  3. Mischiefs of Faction. This is a new blog and I really like what I’ve read so far.
  4. Duck of Minerva. International relations blog. IR is not explicitly associated with political science, of course, but in traditional undergraduate programs it often falls under the polisci rubric.
  5. The Monkey Cage. “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.” – H.L. Mencken.
  6. The Reality-Based Community. A humble blog composed of mostly political scientists, but it has some economists and lawyers on board as well.

Political science, of course, is one of the many disciplines that is fairly hostile to libertarianism, although most political scientists I’ve studied under have still been liberals. This is in contradiction to other scholarly disciplines like anthropology and sociology – as well as all of the humanities disciplines – which still embrace classical and post-Marxist arguments in their undergraduate programs.

There are a ton of blogs around the web that are manned by consortiums of political scientists, but these six can be counted on to be fairly balanced and well thought-out most of the time. I learn from them every time I visit.

Cruz Barn Burner: Strawman or Paper Tiger?

L. A. Repucci Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

Commentary

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) burned the barn to the ground with his 21 hour ‘fauxlibuster’ this week on the Senate floor.  Supporters of Cruz’ increasingly libertarian voice relish his statesmanship and clarity, and conversely, no doubt detractors and skeptics dismissed much of the material content addressed due to Cruz’ rhetorical devices, not limited channeling statist icon Darth Vader while lampooning Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).

The usual political hay has already been spun by the  pundits, including Limbaugh and Coulter, providing color commentary and cold shots alike.  Senator Cruz’ profile is quickly rising, and he is being touted as a quill for the young libertarian porcupine within the halls of congress — alongside the likes of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.  Indeed, Cruz is more than likely positioning himself for a cabinet post in potential Paul campaign 2016, bidding the GOP base against New Jersey’s increasingly progressive Chris Christie.

It is assumed Hillary Clinton will be the ochlocratic candidate.

Rafael Cruz (Ted’s father) makes impassioned appeals to the ideals of Americana-brand liberty for large crowds of supporters, evoking support from the base of the GOP with the family’s brand; scathing indictments of our Republic’s current state, drawing parallels to Bautistas’ fascist, then Castro’s communist Cuba and the horror of living under a totalitarian regime two times over.  Rafael Cruz escaped Castro and fled to the liberty and free markets in Canada, then here in the US, finding success through a technology connection to the petroleum industry — a familiar Horatio Alger-esque tale — Millitary Fascism to Communism and to Corporate Fascism in less than a generation..

…and then there is  Mrs.Heidi Nelson-Cruz, the senator’s wife.  Ted and Heidi met in the Bush White House, while she was working for Condi Rice.  A Claremont-McKenna and Harvard Business grad, Heidi Nelson-Cruz currently works for Goldman-Sachs as a Vice President.

Texas seems to have a GOP senator with strong ties to petroleum, the Bush White House and good ol’ Goldman-Sachs through his wife.  These observations, coupled with the current political landscape may provide insight the origin and intent of the Senator from Texas’ dazzling libertarian all-nighter.

Cruz may need to spend another 21 hours in an attempt to burn down his own straw man — free markets or corporatism?  If his wife works for the self-same Goldman-Sachs that profited from the TARP bailout rammed through the halls of Congress at the tail end of the Bush regime and spilling into the Obama regime; the Goldman-Sachs that boasts both parties’ presidents and cabinets in their pockets going back to (at least) the Clinton administration, would that not be a conflict of interest?  Cruz made open comment about the excellent health insurance provided Heidi’s Vice-Presidency with Goldman-Sachs.  The banking cartel’s involvement in  and subsequent manipulation of the political sphere is a common link between both ends of the popular political spectrum, and to assume that a politician’s libertarian common sense would be immune to the pressures and normalcy bias of the human condition would be naive.

Ted Cruz talks a good game.  He offers the concepts and economic pedigree libertarians have been waiting to hear from a GOP Senator other than Ron Paul, and presents these concepts in a clear and relatable way.  His voting record as a Senator approaches perfection.  Unfortunately, many of the Tea Party Rockstars* who held great promise for the cause of liberty have proven to be paper tigers.  However liberated Ted Cruz’ economic policy could be, the rigor of skepticism cannot be abandoned by liberty-minded citizens just yet.

As Patrick Henry, liberty lover and skeptic of government, famously remarked of the Constitutional Convention, I smell a rat…and hope on the bones of Lysander Spooner for our Republic’s sake, that I am wrong about the Senator from Texas.

*Rockstar Brand Tea flavored energy beverage is not endorsed by publisher or any so-called Tea Party Rockstars.

Qui Bono,

L.A. Repucci

A Warm Welcome

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , ,

Hello all,

Please welcome Louis Repucci to the blogging consortium.

Chef, YMCA Camp Director and Philosopher Louis Anthony Repucci is a firebrand advocate for the cause of individual liberty, ecumenical egalitarian ideals and a voluntary society. Steeped in the classically liberal tradition of enlightenment ideals, L.A. Repucci pulls no punches in the struggle for economic and social freedoms. Originally from Southern California, Repucci is a student and active member of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) on the Cabrillo College campus in Aptos, California. A true renaissance man, Mr. Repucci boasts an eclectic background including radio broadcasting, internationally-acclaimed culinary luminaries, and leadership development through his work with the YMCA. Anticipate unapologetic commentary and blistering indictments of everyday statism and petty tyranny via scathing wit, euclidean reductive logic and lampoonery. A fire in the dark, L.A. Repucci is perfectly comfortable adopting wildly unpopular positions in the name of liberty, and challenging the foundations of opposing perspectives. Expect to have your paradigm challenged by every word.

I myself am an alumni of Cabrillo, so it’s nice to have a fellow Seahawk on board. Please bear with us as we get all the aesthetic kinks figured out, and join me in welcoming Louis on board.

A close encounter with a black hole of church/state derp

muricaderp Current Events, Politics, Religion

Some collisions of civic and religious forms of asshattery are just that powerful. Many approach the fray, but few who enter it ever leave. The stupid, it sucks. Literally. It’s a black hole. Abandon all brain ye who enter here.

Amazingly, this stuff is almost mainstream. Speakers who spout this kind of garbage at official events under the auspices of the Republican Party, one of the two major US political parties, are not banned from future events on grounds of moral turpitude, mental defect, or general embarrassment. They’re hardly even marginalized, except in rare cases of exceedingly clumsy language, as Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin can attest. The real sin for which the GOP’s kingmakers tried to bully Akin into falling on his sword wasn’t misogyny, but undue candor. Basically, dude fucked up the talking points pretty severely. It takes a special person to make Claire McCaskill, mediocrity of Blue Dog mediocrities, look like a beacon of principle. Todd Akin, authority on women who probably wanted it because they didn’t psychosomatically shut off their wombs while being raped, had what it took for Claire McCaskill to point at his train wreck of a platform and shut that whole thing down.

I totally heard a bird of Akin’s feather squawk at the nation on “Christian” radio this afternoon. He was a bit subtler than Akin, after a fashion. Akin was foolish enough to accuse women, a majority electoral demographic with above-average turnout rates, of being a bunch of tarts who enjoy the illegitimate kind of rape. Today’s speaker, whom I’ll introduce in due time, had the good sense to go after illegal immigrants, a constituency that by definition is disenfranchised. A cohort of foreigners working in a country under dodgy circumstances after having evaded normal immigration channels rarely has its host country’s sympathy. It’s the kind of demographic that a savvy asshat scapegoats if he doesn’t want to get beaten in his next electoral campaign by a charisma-challenged triangulator.

But what I heard on the radio today wasn’t just any screed against illegal immigration; it was a screed against illegal immigration in the name of Holy Scripture. Pretty brazen stuff.

Usually, when I get vulgar ideas in my head, I try not to justify them with scriptural references. If I muse about Tijuana’s de minimis regulatory approach to massage parlors and its huge potential client base, it isn’t because I learned about any of that from the Book of Leviticus. (Leviticus is merely an exhaustive list of licentious suggestions framed as prohibitions). Rather, it’s because I am, in Disraeli’s parlance, ape and angel, or, as Robin Thicke would have it, an animal.

In other words, a TJ massage parlor isn’t religion, but business. Similarly, immigration policy isn’t religion, but civics, although business interests certainly like to infest the debate, the better to concern-troll it. Business, civics, religion: these are nonoverlapping magisteria.

Not on the Bott Radio Network, they aren’t. I tuned in while I was on the road between Fresno and Merced this afternoon, just in time to hear some dude with a thoroughly neutral accent and affect calmly but sanctimoniously intone about illegal immigration and the Bible. Hoo boy.

I had no idea who this guy was, but I was transfixed. The biblethumping was exquisite. Defenders of illegal immigration, he told us (I paraphrase), often cite scriptural references to being a friend to the foreigner. What they don’t realize is that that there are three Hebrew words for foreigner, two of them referring to foreigners who have permission, and this scriptural reference in Leviticus refers to foreigners with permission, not those without permission. This was why Moses made a special effort to lead the Israelites around a kingdom that was blocking their way to the Promised Land, so that they wouldn’t illegally stray into its territory. (Forgive us our trespasses? Eh, never mind. And maybe the detour had something to do with not getting massacred? Again, never mind.) Furthermore, calls for amnesty ignore the Apostle Peter’s exhortation to submit to civil authority, which includes immigration authorities. Besides, if we provide amnesty to all illegal immigrants, how is that fair to the illegal immigrants who are waiting in line to be legalized under the current process? (Huh? He actually said something like that.) Now, people can have different opinions about illegal immigration (passive-aggressive-smarmy much?), but they shouldn’t use the Bible to defend the amnesty bill currently before the Congress. It just isn’t in there. It isn’t biblical.

It wasn’t until the end of this ridiculous authoritarian pastiche that I heard who was behind it: “I’m Kris Kobach, and this has been Kobach’s Commentaries.” The crazy had just gone into overdrive. I’d heard of Kobach before, usually in reference to his being an extremist Republican kook, and here he was carrying on about illegal immigration and the unfairness of amnesty on an aggressively “Christian” “family” radio station in the name of the Word of God.

Notice that he concern-trolled illegal immigrants who had allegedly found their way into some regularization process (despite having entered and worked in the United States illegally) and were waiting their turn in line, because WAAAAHHHH FAIRNESS. I was baffled by whom exactly he was trying to describe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the story was some kind of hard-right nativist myth.

To be clear, Kris Kobach does not give a damn about the welfare of illegal immigrants for the duration of their presence in the United States. He is a professional immigration policy troll who has worked in multiple states to litigate against policies benefiting illegal immigrants and to draft legislation to hound them out by any means necessary. He has also been involved in Voter ID campaigns, again on grounds of “fairness,” the fairness including vile arguments that if one can’t buy Sudafed without a government ID, one shouldn’t be able to vote without one. The obvious purpose of Voter ID laws is to disenfranchise the poor, i.e., mainly blacks, because they vote heavily Democratic.

Kobach has the evil, classic right-wing conception of fairness as a zero-sum commodity that is cheapened if someone else somewhere got more of it than you got or got it more promptly. By his reasoning, if all the prisoners are released in a mass pardon, this is unfair to the old lifers, and the lifers should be seething with resentment that the younguns got more time off than they did. If the 3:45 train is delayed by mechanical problems and its passengers are transferred to the 4:45 train, they should all be angry and resentful that they had to spend an extra hour in the depot because TEH FAIRNESS. If the layabouts who showed up in the vineyard an hour before sundown are paid the same amount for their work as the diligent squares who showed up at daybreak, the squares should be resentful–hey, that’s not what Jesus said, now, is it? Yeah, we’re Christians, so let’s ignore that buzzkill, what’s-his-name….

Basically, if there’s any kind of dysfunctional or cruel policy that finally gets fixed, but only after one has spent years trying to navigate the former, broken system, one should be angry at anyone who didn’t have to put up with just as much grief for just as long. If you were waiting in a checkout line at Safeway for half an hour only to see people in a nearby line get through in ten minutes because the backup cashier finally arrived, maybe you should go deck the backup cashier and hurl eggs and canned goods at his customers, you know, just as a matter of equity. That would even things out for you and everyone else who got in line before the backup cashier arrived, right? It might be a good idea to brandish a can in front of the lead cashier, too, in case she calls all available associates to checkout and lets some lucky bastard get through in five minutes.

That, folks, is hardline Republican policy in a nutshell: everyone will be reduced to the most degraded level of existence that I, resentful shit, have ever had to endure. Kris Kobach has words of encouragement for the whole barrel full of crabs.

Oh, and he’s the sitting Kansas Secretary of State. What’s the matter with Kansas, indeed. Once the spiritual home and nerve center of grange socialism, and now this. It’s a long way down.

By the way, I have very serious, visceral objections to current immigration policy in the United States. It’s a systemically corrupt clusterfuck, one that keeps many immigrants perennially in limbo, under constant threat of detention, deportation and separation from their families, and allows unethical employers (especially farmers) to run their recruitment and personnel operations as criminal cartel rackets. It badly needs to be reformed. The problem is that people like Kris Kobach will happily trash civil society in the process if they’re given free rein.

Good God, y’all.

Why Would Somali Militants Attack A Kenyan Shopping Mall?

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , ,

I was going to write up a small essay on this topic, but economist Joe Salerno beat me to it. I’ll just reproduce it here:

The U.S. government and the establishment media are in a quandary.   How are they to explain  the heinous attack on a Kenyan shopping mall by Al Shabab a militant Somali group with links to al-Qaida which  left 59 innocent civilians dead and another 175 injured, with the victims ranging in age from  2 to 79 years old?  After all, since the horrific events of  September 11, 1991, U.S politicians of all stripes have repeatedly hammered home the message that  ”fundamentalist” Islamists  hate us and want to kill us simply because we are free and prosperous.  But Kenya is neither.  According to the  Index of Freedom in the  World that attempts to measure economic, civil, and political liberties, Kenya ranks 91 out of the 123 countries included in the index.   As for prosperity, based on the CIA World Factbook 2012, Kenya’s per capita GDP was estimated to be $1,700 per year which ranks 192 out of 225 countries.

Could it be that Al Shabab was telling the truth about the reason for its murderous assault yesterday when it tweeted: “For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now its time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land.”  After all 4,000 Kenyans troops invaded and have been occupying part of Somalia since 2011.  But then this raises the uncomfortable possibility  that terrorist attacks by militant Muslim groups on the U.S and its interests throughout the world were not motivated by envy and hatred of our freedoms and high standard of living.  Maybe, just maybe, Ron Paul was right and they were provoked by incessant U.S. meddling in the Middle East since World War 2  through numerous wars and economic embargoes including on  food and medicine and  the billions of dollars sent to payoff and prop up tyrannical and oppressive regimes that do U.S bidding, e.g., the Mubarak dictatorship in  Egypt.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

I don’t know if I can echo Andrew’s prodigious output, but here’s my own reading list for the weekend:

  1. Modesto Junior College, bureaucracy and censorship: Haughty arrogance edition. Ken White explains Weber’s ‘iron cage’
  2. Liberty after Lehman Brothers: What have we learned? Peter Boettke muses about the infamous bailouts
  3. Who were the anti-Federalists, and why do they still matter? Trevor Burrus of the Cato Institute explains
  4. The Christian Exodus. Another disaster in the Middle East

PS I just got in to Santa Cruz. Wish me luck!

Несколько слов про Сирию

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events , , , ,

Не знаю как у вас там, а у нас, у большинства населения, вполне четая позиция по этому вопросу. Лично я считаю, что не надо вообще туда к ним лезть, в их закрытый мусульманский мир. Пусть живут по своим законам и сами решают свои проблемы.

Далеко за примерами ходить не надо. Достаточно вспомнить военные вмешательства во Вьетнам, в Ирак, в Чечню, в Афганистан. Попытки железной рукой пресечь конфликт вылились в многолетнюю затяжную войну с бандформированиями, в партизанское движение, в террористические акты по всему миру. Возникает вопрос: надо ли оно нам дальше? Я конечно понимаю Обаму, для которого Сирия – это как болячка на демократическом теле, которую постоянно расковыривают, и которая не дает покоя. И, казалось бы, если влезть туда “всем миром”, можно террористическую заразу подавить. Ха-ха-ха. На словах все получается гораздо радужнее, чем в реальности.

“Война это плохо. Поэтому мы вторгнемся в Сирию, как великие демократы и покажем им всем огнем и мечом, что убивать друг друга – это грех”. Окей. Если такая позиция кого-то устраивает – пусть так оно и будет. Только после того как очередные террористы взорвут очередные торговые центры – не надо плакать. Сами виноваты.

В России, повторюсь, позиция по Сирийскому конфликту весьма четкая, так как мы до сих пор пытаемся решить собственные конфликты с Чечней. И каждый год мы теряем солдат, которые подрываются на очередных минах, расстреливаются в засадах, погибают где-то в горных лесах, преследуя очередной бородатый отряд партизан-горцев.

У нас в России весьма двойственное отношение к нашему президенту. Его вроде как и любят и не любят одновременно. Однако его письмо в New York Times с разъяснением позиции России по поводу Сирии вызвало у нас в стране волну одобрения. Применять силу нужно лишь для самообороны, для отстаивания независимости СВОЕГО государства, и для охраны его границ. А вторгаться в другие страны и насаждать там свои порядки – это неправильно. Каждый живет как умеет.

Предвижу некоторое количество комментариев на тему того, как русские вторглись в Осетию в августе 2008 года и принудили Грузию к миру в коротком вооруженном конфликте. Так вот, там была слегка другая ситуация. Прочитайте статьи на Википедии об этом конфликте, прежде чем набрасываться меня с обвинениями в двойных стандартах.

How I met your G-20

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events , , ,

Приветствую сообщество Свободы.

Давно ничего не писал, так как трудности на работе и отсутствие свободного времени не позволяли мне структурировать собственные мысли о последних событиях в России. Но сейчас я наконец заполню этот досадный пробел в ваших светлых головах.

Как вам известно, недавно в России состоялся саммит G-20. А если более точно, с географической точки зрения, то в моем родном городе Санкт-Петербурге. С одной стороны, приятно почувствовать себя “в ручье” мировой истории, где-то недалеко от центра, где вершатся важные дела. С другой стороны, тотальная серость людей вокруг не позволяла по достоинству оценить масштаб проводимой акции, так как многие вообще понятия не имели, что у нас в городе происходит.

Саммит – это серьезное мероприятие, которое коснулось не только людей на руководящих постах, но и простых жителей. Причем последнюю категорию граждан все эта каша коснулась весьма негативно. Большинство главных дорог было перекрыто, и многие не могли нормально добраться до работы или вернуться вечером домой. Большое количество полиции в метро и на улицах, с одной стороны позволяло вздохнуть свободнее, так как заметно уменьшилось количество неадекватных людей, а с другой стороны – постоянные остановки по требованию полиции, проверки документов и сумок изрядно действовали на нервы.

Основная часть мероприятий, посвященных саммиту G-20, прошла все-таки вне территории города, а в пригороде, в Петергофе. Так что от неудобства в большей степени пострадали жители того района. Но все равно даже после окончания встречи, в Санкт-Петербурге еще несколько дней оставалась напряженная атмосфера.

Что я хочу сказать: важные политические события, затрагивающие жизнь простых жителей, воспринимаются в большей степени как “досадные осложнения”, нежели чем что-то действительно важное.

Why Roe v. Wade isn’t nearly as relevant as you’d like if you’re a grating ideological drone

muricaderp Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics, Religion

Titles like that are why I don’t cater to ideologues, except to troll them. One side swears that the least regulation of women’s access to abortion throughout their pregnancies is the work of the bastard love child of Anthony Comstock and Jack the Ripper, the other side swears that women’s lawful recourse to abortion as individuals under the post-Roe regime is tantamount to the gas chambers of Birkenau (often with helpful illustrations of the Nazi genocide infrastructure), and the silent majority has another pint of Franzia, since any other response would be futile. 

How does one even try to reconcile competing, irreconcilable policy interests? How can the self-determination of women facing unwanted pregnancies be squared with the welfare of the babies they are carrying or the demographic health of society? Maybe by attaching felony penalties to Godwin’s Law (everything else is already a federal felony, after all). If nothing else, we can remember that even in times of darkest derp, demographic statistics abide, although maybe not so much in the debate about abortion itself, because that frothy milkshake brings all the braying nuts to the yard.

To wit, from a Nazi-allusion-free article not about abortion at the Demo Memo: 

Baby Bust Update: 8% Birth Decline

 
According to preliminary estimates for 2012, the baby bust continues but the decline is slowing. The nation’s 2012 fertility rate was 63.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the lowest on record and 9.4 percent below the 2007 high of 69.5. The fertility rate of women under age 30 is at a record low, but the rate among women aged 30 to 34 climbed slightly between 2011 and 2012 as those who had been postponing childbearing played catchup.

Overall, 3,952,937 babies were born in 2012. This was 8.4 percent below the 4,316,233 born in the peak birth year of 2007. So far, the Great Recession baby bust is not as deep as the 10.7 percent Great Depression bust, and it’s not likely to reach that level because the decline is slowing. For some perspective, keep in mind that the decline in births from the peak year of the baby boom in 1957 to the trough year of the baby bust (Generation X) in 1973 was a much larger 27 percent.

Did you notice that? It was subtle. In the course of not yelling about misogynistic sex scolds or murdered babies, Cheryl Russell mentioned that dreadful watershed year of 1973. That was the year in which American women started killing their own flesh and blood en masse with the government’s blessing and disposing of it as medical waste, except for the part about their finally starting the next year to carry more babies to term after nearly a generation of deliberate barrenness. 

It appears that what Roe really did as a policy (in contrast to its excellent service as a lodestone for acrimonious derp unto ages of ages) was to regularize a common medical procedure that had proven impossible to eliminate, even with criminal penalties. There aren’t reliable records of abortions in most states for several decades prior to Roe because no prudent physician would have documented a procedure that could have subjected him and his patient to felony prosecution. As birth records from 1957 show, sex was invented at some point prior to 1973, and for purposes of demographic analysis, it’s reasonable to assume that a constant, and very high, percentage of women of childbearing age was sexually active. That’s why Russell used data on live births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44.

These are rough bounds, but they’re accurate enough for demographic purposes. In demographic terms, the celibate minority of adults is static, mere background noise obstructing the thumpy signal of the rumpy-pumpy. The clerical celibates (sic?), of course, are especially noisy. The vulgar truth is that you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, although personally, I prefer Nature documentaries, and I find bears to have the most dignified and heartwarming mating practices this side of the quaking aspen. 

That paragraph was kind of gross. So is pretty much the entire debate on abortion in the United States since 1973. It takes a special kind of person to insist that late third-trimester abortions present no ethical or existential concerns and are totally cool. It takes a really special kind of person to march down the National Mall with a sign showing a photograph of a fetus next to one of Dachau. Centrists do not enjoy hanging out with such people. Bring out the grrrrrrlll power wimminz in shoddy crew cuts and Randall Terry with a gas chamber picture, and the substantial portion of the silent majority that doesn’t have a prurient interest in the macabre spectacle, the people who should be asserting themselves as policy stakeholders, shrink into the woodwork at warp speed. 

To a great extent, this four-decade abortion shouting match is a major front in the war between K-strategic libertines and r-strategic authoritarians for the demographic soul of the nation. Neither of these factions should be given a voice as stakeholders in the childbearing decisions of individuals. Granting legitimacy to either faction as an arbiter of individuals’ reproductive decisions is collectivist madness.

Both sides have developed a habit of becoming insufferable concern trolls. The barren libertine left concern-trolls women who genuinely want to raise families on the basis that they aren’t devoting enough time and energy to the stuff of feminist liberation. The authoritarian breeder right concern-trolls poor, defenseless babies, and at its shrillest extremes unimplanted embryos, with no thought to the gruesomeness of the alternative means of population control that eventually will assert themselves: consistently some combination of war, disease and famine. (If they think American women’s attitudes towards their infants in utero are amoral, they should consider a famine afflicting a burgeoning population. A failed wheat crop never cares.)

Neither extreme really wants competent individuals to make their own free, informed decisions, because have it all/children are annoying and le hard/baby murder!/invading proliferative Muslim hordes. Do it in the name of Carrie Bradshaw, or do it in the name of Charles Martel, but whatever you do, don’t make your own decision; make ours. 

The Eagle wept. 

Bête et méchant et bête.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

“La dégradation de l’environnement favorise la logique du profit.”

Je continue à éprouver du mal à prendre les Français officiels au sérieux, sérieusement.

J’ai entendu la phrase ci-dessus, exactement, prononcée par un présentateur français de TV5, la télé francophone. C’était il y a environ une semaine. L’occasion: L’annonce qu’un vaisseau commercial chinois avait rejoint Rotterdam par le Nord, par les mers qui longent la Sibérie. (l’océan arctique, la Mer de Barents, le mer norvégienne). Il avait profité du fait que ces mers septentrionales paraissaient dégagées, libres de glace.

Le problème c’est que cette phrase ne veut rien dire, je crois, rien du tout. (Cela parait vaguement marxiste mais seulement pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien lu de Karl.) Ou bien je suis plus con que les autres, ou bien les francophones (et les Français) possèdent un immense réservoir, un réservoir inépuisable de non-criticalité.

Je penche pour la seconde réponse.

Le problème en dessous du problème ce n’est pas que les Français racontent des trucs qui ne sont pas vrais. Le probléme c’est qu’ils ne sont plus exercés à reconnaitre le non-sens, qu’ils distinguent mal les affirmations vérifiables du simple bruit de fond. Cela permet à des commentateurs sans qualifications évidentes de proférer des conneries bêtes et méchantes, (malveillantes sans objet) à tous bouts de champs. Ils pullulent aux informations de TV5 et dans les documentaires que présente cette chaine francophone inernationale mais lourdement française.

La compagnie de transports maritime chinoise avait donc tenté le coup de profiter de la fonte des glaces polaires pour emprunter la route la plus courte, pour économiser, le fuoule, entre autres choses. Fieffés salauds de Chinois!

A propos, en fait, il y avait beaucoup plus de glace polaire dans le Grand Nord cet été (2013) que l’année derniére, 30% de plus selon le Wall Street Journal du 11/9/13, encore plus selon d’autres sources.

Je me demande ce que va dire Le Monde à ce sujet. Je me demande si je vais comprendre.