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Around the Web: the underbelly of Portland

muricaderp Current Events, Economics, Law, Links

1. Trouble on the waterfront. White longshoremen, members of a union rife with open nepotism, go on strike at grain docks on the Columbia River, management brings in black strikebreakers, and racial nastiness ensues.

This is not a one-off episode. There is a huge amount of multigenerational animosity between longshoremen and port owners. It’s so bad and enduring that I’m inclined to think that the whole port industry in the US (and probably in many other countries, where it is at the very least corrupt) is deeply poisoned.

2. In which a tweaker named Axmaker stabs a man named Savage, then sings “Girl on Fire” over the dispatch radio from a stolen sheriff’s patrol car. The uncanny names of the parties only add to the righteousness of a scenario that was fated to someday happen somewhere between Tacoma and Medford.

3. Portlandia absolutely has to “honor” this bizarre tale from the Portland Police Bureau. The episode should be called “Nazi Behind the Bush.” Radley Balko originally brought Captain Mark “Ehrenbaum” Kruger to my attention when Kruger was controversially chosen to teach a leadership course to other police commanders, but the back story is even better, as it involves apparent collusion on the part of other city officials to hide evidence of Kruger’s scandalously Germanic extracurricular activities, an aptly named sensitivity course called “Tools for Tolerance,” a deputy city attorney named Manlove, and, Scout’s honor, a Cmdr. Famous.

4. Not quite the Majors-Cullen school of excellence in nursing, but still, smart money says that Jeffrey Neyle McAllister, RN, will be taking a long-term disciplinary assignment at Dr. Kitzhaber’s Big House.

There are at least two kickers to this story. First, the Oregon State Board of Nursing renewed McAllister’s license without disciplinary provisions while he was under police investigation for sexually assaulting patients. Second, a double kicker from McAllister’s employment history: before being hired as an RN, he worked as a hospital security guard and as a municipal police officer in the cities of Independence, Beaverton and Seaside.

Around the Web

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  1. Wasting the Golden Hour in America’s Iraq Meltdown. James Clad has a longish piece in the National Interest.
  2. Randy Barnett on Slavery, Libertarians and the Civil War
  3. Russian cinema trends: Biopics of Soviet stars
  4. ‘Invisibility’ wetsuits for Australian surfers. The LA Times reports.
  5. Matt Steinglass on race and juries in the US (and Europe). An interesting piece from the Economist.
  6. Miami Herald op-ed on the state’s bungling of the Zimmerman case

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. The Origins of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I didn’t agree with everything in this very long piece, but it’s definitely worth your time.
  2. Confronting Anti-Black Racism in the Arab World. The logic behind this piece is atrocious, but at least the problem is beginning to be acknowledged.
  3. Science Debunks Date Rape Epidemic, Cites Binge Drinking Instead.
  4. Photos of Ramadan in 2013. From the Atlantic.
  5. China needs a new ‘national story’ because playing the victim card gets old real fast. Especially in foreign affairs.

The Immigration “Reform” Bill: RINOs, Labor Unions and a Libertarian Alternative

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Nobody is happy with the current immigration reform package being shoved through Congress at the moment. I don’t know too much about the specifics of the bill, or even about immigration itself (except that immigrants make good drinking buddies), so I’ll just outsource some ideas and arguments I’ve read elsewhere. First up is our very own Jacques Delacroix, an immigrant from France, who writes:

The main objective of the bill is to install in this country an unbeatable Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. The intent is to turn this polity into a one-party system. Everyone assumes, of course, that the electoral benefits of the bill will redound to the Democratic Party. If you don’t believe it, conduct a simple mental experiment: Tell yourself under what circumstances the implementation of the present bill, or of one similar to it, would cause a net increase in the number of Republican voters?

At best, at the very best, the admission of ten million formerly illegal immigrants and of their dependents would have no effect on American electoral politics. There is no scenario whereas it would help the conservative cause.

New immigrants vote Democrat. Immigrants from societies with authoritarian traditions vote Left unless their societies have gone through violent purging convulsions such as happened in “communist” Eastern Europe in the nineties. The idea that the government should leave people alone is a sophisticated one. It does not grow naturally out of the experience of oppression.

Indeed. Is this analysis wrong? If so, feel free to elaborate why you think so in the ‘comments’ section. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Angelo Codevilla, an immigrant from Italy (and one of Dr Delacroix’s fellow academics), also elaborates on the bill:

Beginning in the 1960s, increasingly dandified native youths shunned agricultural and service jobs. So did the new legal immigrants. This made room for a growing number of laborers from Mexico who came and went freely and seasonally across a basically un-patrolled 2000 mile border. These were not “immigrants,” but rather mostly young men who yearned to get back to their families. They did not come to stay, much less take part in American politics. America came to rely on them to the point that, were a magic wand to eliminate them, whole industries would stop, including California agriculture.

US labor unions however, supported by the Democratic Party, pressed the US government to restrict this illegal flow. While until the 1980s, the US-Mexican border was patrolled by fewer than 1000 agents – nearly all at a handful of crossing points – that number has grown to some 25,000 in our time. As the border began to tighten, making it impossible for the Mexicans to come and go, many brought their families and stayed put in the US between work seasons […]

The controversy over illegal immigration did not touch the core of the immigration problem, namely the Immigration Act of 1965 and our burgeoning welfare system. Nor did it deal with the fact that the illegal flow of Mexicans was really about labor, not immigration, because most Mexican “illegals” had not come with the intention of staying. A well-crafted guest-worker program would give most of them what they want most [emphasis mine – bc].

Hence the “illegal immigration problem” is an artifact of the US political system: The Democratic Party wants the Mexicans as voters, the labor unions want the Mexicans as members rather than as competitors, and the Chamber of Commerce wants them for as low a wage as it can enforce.

Codevilla has much, much more here. Codevilla attributes the US immigration system to the corporate state, but I am unsure if Dr Delacroix feels the same way.

Delacroix’s piece, like Codevilla’s, also brings attention to an alternative guest worker program. Delacroix, in an article for the Independent Review, points out that the guest worker program has worked extremely well in the pre-central bank European Union (I am unsure if this is still the case).

A guest worker program would eliminate the political implications associated with “illegal immigration reform” and, as a result, enhance the economic benefits of seasonal labor flows coming from Mexico. The Cato Institute has recently come out with a policy report detailing how a guest worker program might be implemented. As I’ve stated before, the Cato Institute is one of three think tanks I actually trust (the other two being Brookings and Hoover).

Around the web: Casual Friday

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

1. How to reduce absenteeism by monitoring the help instead of maybe abusing it less.

2. The Great Australian Sickie: “People taking a sickie are more reluctant to fake it to a kindly nurse on the other end of the phone line.”

If you’re thinking that of course you wouldn’t fake it with an Australian nurse, remember:

3. Men can be nurses, too.  See also Exhibit 3B.

4. Another reason not to give your son the middle name of Lynn. Some of this stuff just can’t be made up: “On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader’s employment for failure to report to work or to call in.”

Because RULES. But it’s fitting. Rader has always believed in them, at once too much and too little.

5. Don’t believe me? Ask my buddy Kasper. D. Lynn Rader is much more of a model prisoner than some of my people are. The Roths left some real scuzzies behind.

Around the Web: Rumpy Pumpy

muricaderp Liberty, Links, Politics

Just one link tonight, since I have to be onsite at a vineyard in less than five hours for work tomorrow.

Here it is, in all its sharp English glory. What does Mark Steyn find so compelling about an almost unheard-0f British politician named Nigel Farage? Here’s a taste:

The wobbly boozer turned out to be the steady hand at the tiller UKIP needed. He was elected (via proportional representation) to the European Parliament, which for the aspiring Brit politician is Siberia with an expense account. Then, in 2010, Farage became a global Internet sensation by raining on the EU’s most ridiculous parade — the inaugural appearance by the first supposed “President of Europe,” not a popularly elected or even parliamentarily accountable figure but just another backroom deal by the commissars of Eutopia. The new “President” was revealed to be, after the usual Franco-German stitch-up, a fellow from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy. “Who are you?” demanded Farage from his seat in the European Parliament during President van Rompuy’s address thereto. “No one in Europe has ever heard of you.” Which was quite true. One day, Mr. van Rompuy was an obscure Belgian, the next he was an obscure Belgian with a business card reading “President of Europe.” But, as is his wont, Nigel warmed to his theme and told President van Rompuy that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” A few days later, having conferred in their inner sanctum, the Eurocrats ordered Farage to make a public apology. So he did — to low-grade bank clerks for having been so ill-mannered as to compare them to President van Rompuy. He was then fined 2,980 euros (about $4,000) for his impertinence, since when he has referred to the European president as Rumpy-Pumpy, a British synonym for a bloody good shag.

I have to say, I like the guy. Nigel Farage is why we need Englishmen in Congress. But please no Belgians.

I’d round out this piece with some topical porn links or other suitable rudeness (autoerotic asphyxiation figures in Steyn’s piece), but I have  to be up before dawn. I’m the Help these days.

On the plus side of the ledger, the site where I’m working tomorrow is beautiful, and the grapes don’t talk back.

Around the Web

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  1. The Reality of Feel-Good Government. James Bovard on “federal service” programs
  2. Will Wilkinson says “I smoke pot and I like it” (there’s more to the piece than just a confession)
  3. Map of police officers per 100,000 people in Europe
  4. Filming North Korea’s Film Industry
  5. Stephen Walt weighs in on the Snowden affair: What, me worry?
  6. Sex in the Arab World. An interview with Shereen El Feki

Yo, bro, suck it up and pray!

muricaderp Law, Liberty, Links, Religion

It’s time for the libertarian discourse to get rude again. Stephanie Drury called attention yesterday to a donnybrook over a Family Research Council prayer campaign graphic, a graphic one indeed, that has been construed to depict a man performing oral sex on one of his fellows.

Did that coalition of family men after God’s heart in fact publish such an obscene image? You be the judge. I suspect, however, that this is an instance in which Potter Stewart would have known it when he saw it. Ignore, if you wish, the civic mind rot in the preceding link about the Family Research Council having been “officially designated a ‘hate group.'” It’s unfortunate that such a bigoted organization’s opponents aren’t suggesting that its members get in line for the coming Sunday’s “services” instead of insinuating that their free speech be chilled merely because it offends a lot of people, especially since it’s so easy to demonstrate that the FRC’s modus operandi is to misuse concern about the health of American families for the purpose of censorious asshattery pending the nationwide implementation of Comstock-style theocratic government. Thankfully, it’s also an organization that tries too hard to be hip and ends up with slogans like this:

call 2 fall 

On our knees for America.

June 30, 2013

I’m in. 

Or, as General Petraeus said to Colonel Broadwell, “Yeah, baby, I’m all in.”

The whole thing has to be seen to be believed. I’ll note without further commentary that “I’m in” is written in white lettering on a smeared blotch of red.

For a counterpoint in defense of family values, prayer, and all that, let’s now turn to Drury’s “Facebook comment of the day”:

“Thanks for pointing this out. I did not know about the call to prayer which I certainly will join. The group that wrote this article would think a Christian sleeping is daydreaming of homosexual activity. They are mean, biased and christian-haters. That is rather obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of objectivity or integrity. Only a perverted mind would see a man praying and construe it as this article does.”

Project much? This “call 2 fall” is, of course, in response to Wednesday’s  Supreme Court rulings invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act and California Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds. A summary layman’s explanation of why these laws were properly held to be unconstitutional is that they denied numerous civil benefits to committed cohabiting partners on account of their sexual orientation, many of these benefits having nothing whatsoever to do with childrearing.

In other words, this is a national call to prayer for the sole purpose of reversing court decisions expanding equal protection under the law. It’s bigotry and bad civics. At the risk of causing further hurt to already tenderized religious right fee-fees, I should add that bigotry and bad civics are the stock in trade for much of the religious right. At rock bottom, much of the religious right’s agenda is the soft subversion of the United States Constitution.

To return to the subject of sexual purity, no prominent, Bible-teaching evangelical pastor has ever regularly consorted with a male meth whore and partaken of the crank pipe. That kind of thing is obviously the province of liberals: secularists, pluralists who are against religious tests for public office, low-class people who are too busy having unsanctioned sexytime to make it to church on Sunday morning, those of us who get a bit rattled or disgusted when the in-your-face nutters take over our congregations, those of us who find that morning services conflict with some combination of sleep and Face the Nation, those of us whose attitudes towards whores are at least as favorable as St. Augustine’s. We, not sexually repressed evangelicals in Colorado Springs, are obviously the ones with impure inclinations. We’re the ones who kick girls off football teams because they’re fixing to cause lust among teh boyz. It must have been a freak like Ron Wyden who publicly told an unsubstantiated story about bathroom privileges being restricted for high school girls in Southeast Oklahoma in response to an epidemic of lesbian sex, because it couldn’t have been a pious, conservative man of God like Tom Coburn.

If I dare say so, I have reasons for being all in for the return of the Victorian gynecological day spa, as well as an increase in the number of its manly counterparts. In fact, I haven’t come close to providing a comprehensive survey of these reasons. I just know that Senator Coburn is itching to get in on that action, no matter what he says. Methinks the doctor doth protest too much. Switzerland, with its sixteen-year-old age of consent and distance from the power centers of the Northeast Corridor, will be an appropriate jurisdiction for him and Chris Hansen to ply their new trade.

Ladies, don’t get any dirty ideas, but in an ideal world I’d be available for outcall massages in the Salem area. In the real world, I’m doing stoop labor with Yamhill County felons. There’s no sexual angle to that pathetic situation, so I don’t expect any intercession from the Family Research Council.

Blow me.

The Decline of the State?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

From the Atlantic:

Health care for the world’s poorest and human rights for the oppressed as private-sector businesses? Where there’s money to be made, a commercial alternative will emerge. But core state enterprises are subject to increasing non-commercial competition, as well. Many in southern Lebanon willingly receive social services and other incidents of modern government from the terrorist group Hezbollah rather than from the official government. Al-Qaeda presents many Islamic radicals with an even more extreme — and arguably more effective — non-territorial alternative to the nation-state for purposes of waging war.

The whole thing is interesting throughout, though I don’t agree with the author that virtual states are somehow replacing traditional states. I don’t think we’ll see the disappearance of the state anytime soon either. What will happen, I think, is that governments will become more minarchist in nature as markets simply overwhelm the crummy services that governments essentially force on people using their own extracted money.

Around the Web

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I apologize for the dearth of posts lately. I have been reading a lot of books the old-fashioned way, chasing girls down so that I can  smell their hair and generally just enjoying life post-graduation.

  1. Will Wilkinson blogs about the drug war’s inherent racism at Democracy in America.
  2. Rebecca Liao writes about Democracy in China for Dissent.
  3. Randy Barnett on the future of federalism after the “gay marriage” SCOTUS decision.
  4. Uganda versus South Korea. An interesting take on development by Andrew Mwenda.
  5. The Economist has a great piece on the violence in Turkey.
  6. Fascinating ‘comments’ thread on Hayek and Pinochet. I am going to dedicate a long piece to this thread shortly. American Leftists are just classical liberals who have come to think of themselves as superior to their neighbors. Leftists in Europe and Latin America are murderous.

Leon Hadar on Obama’s Syria Decision

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , ,

President Obama, unlike his predecessor, is not promoting democracy in Syria. He is instead pretending to play the game of power balancing, hoping that neither side in the war there wins, and instead allowing both to lose.

Read the whole thing. There is not much new information in the piece, but then again hawks in the US have known about the situation in Middle East for decades and have still advocated stupid policies. Nevertheless, Hadar’s account contains some brilliant rhetoric that I think may be of use to readers and writers that fight for liberty.

I’m Done

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Whew. Finals are over. Expect a lot more from me over the next little while. Nothing tonight, of course (I’m gonna sleeeep), but more is coming.

Thanks for all of your thoughtful comments and criticisms. I’ve got a link for the evening, and it’s an old article (2001) from the Economist. An excerpt:

The affinity of totalitarianism and economic isolation was obvious in the case of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe; it is still plain today in the case of North Korea, say. But democracies are capable of oppression too. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that integration is undesirable merely because it limits the power of government, even if the government concerned is democratic. One needs to recognise that some constraints on democracy are desirable, and then to ask whether the constraints imposed by markets are too tight.

These issues are rarely, if ever, addressed by the critics of globalisation: it is simpler to deplore the notion of “profits before people”. The sceptics either insist, or regard it as too obvious even to mention, that the will of the people, democratically expressed, must always prevail. This is amazingly naive. Even the most elementary account of democracy recognises the need for checks and balances, including curbs on the majoritarian “will of the people”. Failing those, democracies are capable of tyranny over minorities.

The sceptics are terribly keen on “the people”. Yet the idea that citizens are not individuals with different goals and preferences, but an undifferentiated body with agreed common interests, defined in opposition to other monolithic interests such as “business” or “foreigners”, is not just shallow populism, it is proto-fascism. It is self-contradictory, as well. The sceptics would not hesitate to call for “the people” to be overruled if, for instance, they voted for policies that violated human rights, or speeded the extermination of endangered species, or offended against other values the sceptics regard as more fundamental than honouring the will of the majority.

Read the whole thing. I don’t agree with everything in it, but in my opinion it is a damning indictment of the anti-globalist movement. A return to the good old days of yesteryear would have catastrophic consequences for the world. See, especially, Dr Delacroix’s writings on the virtuous benefits of globalization and the self-defeating measures of protectionism.

Around the web: other civil libertarian perspectives on privacy

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1) Scroll back through Umair Haque’s Twitter feed to June 10 for a series of salty, pointed critiques of David Brooks’ recent hatchet job-cum-subsidiarity Jeremiad.

2) Three essays from Jacob Bacharach:

A) “Peeping Thomism,” an accidentally timely call for, among other things, hiring managers to grow up and cut out their censoriousness about stuff that their applicants post on social media: “But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.”

B) A calm but firm call for his own demographic to stop falsely denigrating the less educated (Bacharach is a novelist by trade).

C) On David Brooks, his “conservatism,” and the amazing entitlement of certain posh people.

3) From Karen Garcia, a week-in-review summary of the PRISM bombshell. Garcia is a top-notch blogger whose archives I’ve been combing since discovering a link in one of her comments on Brooks’ “unmediated man” column. Other essays especially worth reading, on tangential but related topics, include her back story about Cornwall-on-Hudson homeboy David Petraeus and her evisceration of the covert classism of the Obamas’ 2012 Christmas message to the nation.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,
  1. Letting Nelson Mandela Go
  2. Nothing New About China’s New Grand Strategy
  3. Cambodia’s Orphan-Industrial Complex
  4. The Rise of Nullification

Just Testing…

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…the new link to our Facebook page. You guys can check it out here.

PS: How Companies Learn Your Secrets.