Liberrants

Will Ron Paul Destroy the GOP?

2012-01-04T15:26:00.000-05:00

I just have to pitch Tom DiLorenzo's latest article on LRC today in which he responds to a Beltway politocrat columnist's hysterics about Ron Paul "destroying the party of Lincoln." To echo Tom's response, let us hope so (though I'm not holding my breath)!

It Gives Me No Pleasure to Say I Told You So

2012-01-04T13:22:00.000-05:00

So Ron Paul came in third in the Iowa Caucuses when all advance indications were that he would come in first. Well, what else is new? Despite optimistic after-the-fact analyses such as this one from Business Insider , all circumstantial evidence (probably soon to be backed by hard evidence) indicates that a desperate, terrified GOP Establishment pulled out all the stops in the eleventh hour to ensure that someone else, anyone else but Ron Paul came out ahead. I mean, Rick Santorum, for crying out loud? When was the last time this clown came out ahead anywhere outside of Pennsylvania, the only place where he has been given the time of day, much less any votes? If that doesn’t set off rodent odor alarms, I don’t know what does. But again, why would this outcome surprise anyone?

Let me repeat what I’ve been saying, ad nauseum, for as long as I can remember: the Reigning Establishment is not going to let Ron Paul win the GOP nomination and is going to do everything in its power (and I do mean everything) to prevent it, the clear wishes of the voting majority be damned. As far as my libertarian readers are concerned, all of you know by now the nature of Amerikan politics. So many of you libertarian pundits have written of the futility of elections, the fact that the entire system is a piece of theater, carefully scripted and corrupt to its very core. That being the case, why would you believe that somehow this hopeless farce would cleanse itself of its impurities simply because an honorable man like Ron Paul is involved in it? To believe this is to believe in fantasy, something I would think is above most thinking libertarians.

Don’t misunderstand; I want to see Ron Paul in the White House as much as any of the rest of you. But I believe that we must look to something other than political solutions to our nation’s problems. For anyone, Ron Paul included, to attempt to work within that corrupt system will only mean being co-opted by it and being rendered ineffective. Even if Ron actually were to win the presidency, he would not survive long enough to make any headway against the tide of corruption and crime (if it were possible to just visit the afterlife, I would recommend that someone ask JFK how far a U.S. president can go in swimming against the Establishment current). It would be business as usual, but with a man of integrity neutered and destroyed.

Our only hope is to simply let the system implode, as the rot from within that is eating away at its foundations guarantees will happen. This might take more time than the next election cycle, but as current events make clear, that day of reckoning is not far off.

If Ron Paul Wins Iowa Tomorrow…

2012-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

…it will be due to one of two things. Either Iowa’s Secretary of State will have banned the use of Diebold™ voting machines in the state’s elections, or the Reigning Political Establishment will have decided to be generous and allow a “clean” election under the delusion that Congressman Paul and his followers will wither up and blow away before the general election in November. Since neither of these two scenarios has any realistic chance of playing out, we will just have to think like grownups who live in the real world and assume that Ron has no chance in hell of actually winning tomorrow, despite the early indications that he is well ahead of the other bloodthirsty, warmongering dolts pretending to the imperial throne.

Let me state for the record, as a committed non-voter, that the very idea of Ron Paul winning a primary, let alone the Oval Office, is pure fantasy. Given that most of my fellow libertarians will readily admit in candid conversation that the entire “election” process here in Amerika is a rigged sucker’s game, a piece of theater controlled lock, stock, and barrel by the RPE that I mention above, it simply astounds (and disturbs) me that these same people would assume that Ron has any chance of winning this rigged game. Unless they assume that Ron has merely to wave his hand, putting those who control the ballot boxes into some sort of benevolent trance under which they will guarantee a clean, fair, and honest election (the first in at least 150 years, if not of all time), common sense should dictate that tomorrow’s political farce will result in the same result as every other election in the modern era, that being the reinforcement of the status quo.

Grow up, people!

(Editor’s note: You’ve probably noticed that this is my first entry in over a year. My apologies to those who still care, but between my father’s death back in the summer, followed by resulting family and estate settlement issues, there has been little time for blogging. Also, to be quite honest, there has been little worth writing about of late that hasn’t been better and more quickly covered by other bloggers with more time and resources at their disposal. That said, you’ll hopefully note from my latest contribution that the old bitter cynicism is still very firmly intact. As 2012 appears to be shaping up to be every bit as dismal and disastrous as is being predicted, count on extra helping of this cynicism sporadically throughout the year. Enjoy!)

Arizona, You Need to Apologize...

2010-11-19T17:57:00.001-05:00

… for fobbing that fascialist bitchtard Janet Napolitano off onto not only the rest of the country, but onto the rest of the traveling world. Really, folks, our sorry excuse for a state has already gained a well-deserved reputation both at home and abroad for being populated by brainless, useless, xenophobic morons. We really don't need to have an imbecilic oxygen thief like “Big Sis” confirming that viewpoint as being spot on.

Why, you might ask, am I bringing this up now?

As you are acutely aware, a well-justified insurrection by fed-up travelers has erupted in the wake of the new and highly invasive “security” theater implemented by the knuckle-dragging minions of Big Sis's TSA. Having greased all the right pols' palms, Big Sis's criminal scumbag predecessor, the despicable Michael Chertoff, has managed to get the new x-ray porno-scanner machines, conveniently manufactured by his firm (can anyone spell C-O-N-F-L-I-C-T—O-F—I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T?) installed in a growing number of the nation's airports, the goal being to have them installed at all U.S. airports within the next calendar year. However, the public is having none of it. FINALLY, the sheeple are growing claws, fangs, and horns and are letting Big Sis and the rest of the thieving, murdering “elite” inside the Rome-on-the-Potomac Beltway know that they've gone too far. The campaign that I urged back on July 19th of this year is now in full swing. Even state and local politicians are jumping on the outrage bandwagon, with the District Attorney of San Mateo County, California and the New Jersey State legislature already threatening to arrest TSA agents for sexual assault and to pass legislation barring groping and porno-scanners, respectively.

But Big Sis is having none of it. In this absolutely jaw-dropping example of official condescension published in USAToday, the Grand C*** from the Grand Canyon State who misgoverned us for seven miserable years and who couldn't even secure her own state's borders, let alone the entire nation's, pedantically lectures us unwashed mundanes on why all of this state-sanctioned sexual assault is for our own good. I'll let you read it for yourself, but it prompts the following question: can a more hubris-filled and clueless species of humanity exist on this planet than Amerika's fascialist ruling aristocracy? I think not.

So, Arizona, this is your one prove to the rest of the nation and the world that they're wrong about you. It's your chance to tell the rest of the nation and the rest of the world “we are profoundly sorry for the damage that our former governor, Janet Napolitano has caused, not only to national air travel, but to the fundamental liberties that make America America. We should have kept this dangerous cretin at home where we could limit the damage to our own state. We had no right to unload her on the rest of the nation.”

But of course it won't happen, because the bulk of Arizona's population is just like Janet Napolitano. Why else would the votards of this state have elected her in the first place, much less kept her in the governor's mansion for a second term? To expect Arizonans to appreciate liberty and respect for the dignity of others is akin to expecting a concrete cinder block to do a back flip on its own power. It's simply not going to happen.

So, Grand Canyon Staters, I'm glad that you're happy with being pariahs. I'm glad you're enjoying the economic deprivation that you've earned as a result not only of the fallout from SB1070, but from the fact that huge swathes of humanity have come to realize that you and your shitpile of a state are not worth anyone's money or attention. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Political Masturbation Day

2010-11-02T16:05:00.000-04:00

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past several months or have been in a coma, you know what today is. As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing other than the first Tuesday in November and no big deal at all, a day like any other that came before it and that will come after it. But to a huge number of deluded, gullible morons without meaningful lives and real priorities with which to occupy them, it’s “Election Day.” To these pathetic souls it is a day on which they get to choose a new set of masters, a new gang of thieves to pick their pockets and bank accounts, a new gang of bullies to regulate their lives and force them into doing things that are against their best interests and that deny them the right to live their lives as free, independent, self-sufficient, responsible adults. Or maybe they’ll just “rehire” the existing masters and enforcers who are currently filling that role.

It truly boggles the mind that so-called “adults” would take this sickening charade seriously. P.T. Barnum, George Santayana, and H.L. Mencken were all absolutely right (I’m sure I need not recap the reference points here). If there ever was a living demonstration of the fact that “the public” has no collective long-term memory at all and that it is an organism devoid of independent, critically thinking individuals, “Election Day” is it. To the pathetic, lazy, shiftless, helpless, brainless masses it’s an exercise in “feed me, clothe me, lead me, and protect me. Take away all my cares and worries, and if that means stealing from someone else and taking away any freedoms that I have or that anyone else has, that’s fine with me.” That really is “voting” in its most basic essence.

Having long ago lost faith in humanity’s ability to reason and having long ago been sated by evidence that humans are a stupid lot that function mostly on a sort of auto-pilot, I’ll make the following predictions that have come to pass in every past election and will certainly do so this time as well:

1. There will be much cheering and rejoicing by the GOP (that’s “Gullible Ovine Proles”) once all the nasty, evil Democrats have been tossed out of office. After all, the Republicans are the party of liberty and small government who are going to undo all the nasty, wallet-draining, tax-hiking, job and wealth-killing laws that the Obamacrats have enacted. Right?

2. Within 90 days, after all the White Knight Republicans have ensconced themselves in office, not a word will have been uttered since 11:59 P.M. tonight (Tuesday, November 02, 2010) about following up on all the hot-air promises made during the heat of the pimping, er, campaign season. But the GOP will have long forgotten the election, having refocused their attention on Amoricon Idol, WWE, the Superbowl, Dancing With the Stars, the loss of their shitty, minimum-wage jobs as what little is left of Amerika’s domestic services economy collapses, and other more pressing “distractions.”

3. Sometime before the end of 2011, a series of very nasty legislative measures, carryovers from the days of the Obamacrat Pelosi and Reid Congress, will become law. The net effect will be like a combination of a tsunami, gang rape, and home invasion upon the household wealth of each and every American. Boobus Americanus and the rest of the Amoricon GOP will be caught completely by surprise. “What the f***?! We elected you guys to stop this!” After a brief interlude of loud caterwauling, blustering, threats, and ad hominem attacks on the recently elected (think: Winter of 1995 and “Contract With [on?] America”), all of which will be completely ignored by the new Republican majority (“What’re you gonna do, bring the Democrats back?”), Boobus and the rest of the GOP will crawl back into their caves, bend over, clutch their ankles, open their wallets, grunt a little louder, and go right on living.

4. Fast forward to 2012. The GOP will bifurcate, as it does every two to four years. Half of the body will insist that the Rethuglicans, by now having proved themselves to be nothing but “Obamacrats Lite,” are doing a splendid job, saving us from the threat of a Democratic resurgence to power, despite the fact that within the last two years they’ve done nothing but continue Obamacrat policies that have caused the national economy to all but collapse and the average middle class American household, what few there are left, to be brought further to the brink of destruction. The other half of the GOP will be itching to see the Democrats regain both a legislative and executive majority, they too having forgotten how badly the Obamacrats betrayed their ‘liberal” philosophical base and ignoring the fact that the Rethuglicans have done their master’s bidding in going forward with every single piece of legislation he demanded.

Sure, the particulars will change, but the scenario, the same dismal, ugly, destructive scenario, will be the same. And the entire cycle will have started today.

So if political masturbation, in the form of voting, is your thing, then have at it. I’m staying home. As the late, great George Carlin put it, “at least after I masturbate I have a little something to show for it.”

For Christ's Sake, People, STOP FLYING!

2010-07-19T15:28:00.000-04:00

That's my immediate reaction after reading this on the LRC Blog today. Really, people, until we stop thinking that we HAVE to fly anywhere, the Totally Stupid Assholes will continue to treat us like the human cattle we insist on being treated like by giving the airlines sufficient business to justify this gang of oxygen-wasting thieves-thugs at our nation's aviation bus terminals. It's like the guy who gets beaten up every time he walks into a certain not-so-nice bar in a certain not-so-nice part of town. As long as he insists on returning for repeated helpings of abuse, there is no reason for the abusers to change their behavior.

While the example I just cited is not a perfect analogy, I think it can be said that if enough of us simply refused to partake of air travel for the foreseeable future, the precipitous drop in air travel and the attendant catastrophic effects on the airlines' bottom lines would eventually put an end to the current security theater nonsense and the attendant assaults on our rights and human dignity that it has engendered. After multiple airline bankruptcies, which would hopefully result in nearly empty airports across the nation (and hopefully a few airport closures as well), the justification for spending money on armies of unproductive pseudo-cop goons to protect against non-existent passenger threats would evaporate. Even more beneficial would be the message a boycott on air travel would send to the already non-competitive domestic airlines, a message that would read something like this:

Not only has your service degenerated over the last three decades to absolutely execrable levels, making travel on your airborne bus lines an intolerable experience equivalent to a one-way trip on the Reichsbahn Railways to Auschwitz, but you insist on further degrading us by allowing federal goons to co-opt your own responsibilities for passenger safety by letting them treat us like convicted felons during their bullshit security theater performances, performances that are transparently not only expensive, intrusive, and ridiculously unnecessary, but that also actually PREVENT the exercise of legitimate, common-sense security measures and further ENDANGER us passengers.

So until you do the following two things:

1)Start treating your passengers like human beings , CUSTOMERS who are paying you large amounts of their hard-earned, inflation-eroded money to get them from Point A to Point B and whose business you must EARN, rather than like prisoners or cattle bound for the slaughterhouse, practices that would put you out of business in 24 hours if you were anything other than a federally-subsidized commercial failure,

AND

2)Tell the federally-”employed” special education dropout assclowns who pretend to provide you with security to go fuck themselves and go somewhere else and get real jobs at which they are actually competent (crash test dummies, medical school cadavers, and compost heaps are suitable alternatives that come readily to mind), that YOU will take over responsibility the corporate level for passenger security (ever stop to think that passengers that are afraid to fly your airlines probably won't be passengers again after the first time and that making flying on your airborne bus line a pleasant experience would actually help perk up your saggy bottom line?)

We, the Traveling Public, will drive, hitchhike, swim, walk, craw, run, dogsled, bicycle, or hop steamers or freight trains to get to whatever destination we need to reach, ANY alternative, even under the worst of circumstances, being better than suffering the increasingly hazardous or even fatal indignity of your “services.” While it will take some time, we will stand by and gleefully watch as your profit margins drop to desperate, bankruptcy-inducing levels, to the point where even another “bailout” from your sugar daddy, the bankrupt federal government, will do nothing more than postpone the inevitable, and that not for very long. Simply stated, we think we can hold out for longer than you can.

So shape up, or be shut down!

So, folks, what'll it be? The cattle treatment that we've been putting up with for the last decade, or a wake-up call? Unless the Police State starts forcing us to fly on a regular basis, confiscating money out of our bank accounts just to prop up the collapsing domestic airline industry (and in this bizarro age in which we live, who would put such a thing past the Powers That Be?), is there ANY reason to continue to subsidize our own dehumanization?

Abraham Lincoln: Tyrant

2010-07-16T17:57:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Tom DiLorenzo (and to Lew Rockwell for linking it from the LRC Blog) for this short, superb YouTube video that reminds us of the tyrannical violence set in motion by America's First Executive Dictator, who reigned from 1860-1865 until a Southern patriot's bullet mercifully removed him from our midst. His ideological descendant who occupies the Federal Imperial Palace today will no doubt try to launch a redux of Uncle Abe's War in the near future, once the national economy collapses and the sheeple finally awaken from their slumber and decide that they've had enough. While it doesn't go into detail, for obvious reasons, and won't change any minds by itself, the video will almost certainly prompt the curious viewer to further educate themselves on the subject (I recommend that they start with Tom's The Real Lincoln and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's Freeing Slaves and Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War). Let us hope that this video is only the beginning. It's past time someone counteracted the propaganda tripe of Ken Burns' The Civil War.

A “Thank You” To Will Grigg For Spreading The Word About Arizona

2010-07-09T19:53:00.003-04:00

I cannot thank you enough for exposing the unmitigated disaster that is Arizona, a state that ranks down at the bottom with Mississippi and Louisiana on the "hope" index. Sadly, the picture that you paint is actually even grimmer than you describe, for none but a tiny minority in this state (one that I'm proud to be a member of) can even conceive of Arizona being anything other than a combination of saharan nursing home that relies on the bankrupt social security system and a giant open-air subsidiary of the prison-industrial-police-state complex. Even if the political will and wisdom existed to slash the size of the state government and repeal the onerous taxes and regulation that are strangling anyone with entrepreneurial aspirations and to foster economic growth (most of which is in the "underground" economy of goods and services offered by "illegal aliens" the redneckleptoplutocratic ruling classes are targeting) through benign neglect, the state's demographics work against it.

In addition to having a geriatric majority, Arizona, as I've mentioned here and elsewhere, is plagued with a school system that has been ranked third worst in the nation for the last decade, each year turning out thousands of high school "graduates" unable to fill out a simple job application or make proper change for a five-dollar bill (this is NOT an exaggeration - come visit me in Tucson sometime and accompany me to the local convenience store or fast food joint to see for yourself). Also, the percentage of the adult population, particularly in the Phoenix-Tucson corridor and the surrounding counties (including Pinal) that is incapacitated by chronic substance abuse is astronomical compared to other economically-developed parts of the nation. This precludes most from ever becoming part of a pool of skilled, educated, dependable labor that is essential for any genuine economic development or recovery. Thus I believe that it is no accident that state-corporate parasites like Wackenhut Security so eagerly recruit here, given the massive pool of uneducated and otherwise unemployable creatures who have no other options but to starve or go on the rapidly vanishing dole.

It's small wonder, then, that Arizonans have so willingly enthralled themselves to the military-prison-welfare-pseudo-industrial complex that is destroying the socioeconomic fabric of the state and perpetuating the power of bumbling criminal vermin like Sheriffs Joke Arpiggo and Paul Baboon, Governor Jan “Walking Blonde Joke” Brewer, and Senator John McInsane. Needless to say, there are NO viable freedom candidates to oppose these creatures in their quest for eternal power; there simply does not exist a sufficiently educated, liberty-conscious majority to sustain a candidacy for such people. The candidates currently challenging both McCain and Brewer, respectively, are just a repackaging of the same. The cycle will continue.

I won't even get into the Russell Pearce-esque racial issues in this state. Suffice it to say that Pearce is the more moderate expression of the undercurrent of racism that permeates the snowbird-retiree-biker-unemployed cowboy demographic here. It's ugly, and counterproductive too. But that's a lesson (one of many) that will remain lost on the benighted inhabitants of this place.

Finally, while other states will be hard-hit by the coming socioeconomic apocalypse, Arizona is going to be completely devastated by it, probably beyond hope of recovery. But it will be a purely self-inflicted devastation. It cannot be otherwise. Just remember the old saying “you can't fix stupid.” Arizona is “stupid” on steroids, and to the one-hundredth power. To say this pains me to no end, as this is a state of unrivaled natural beauty. But it's one whose inhabitants do not deserve to have such beauty wasted on them.

Again, thank you for your continued coverage of this mess. I just wanted to let you know that there a handful of us here trying to fight the good fight.

Is Arizona's SB1070 Really Unconstitutional? (Updated)

2010-07-08T16:49:00.004-04:00

As the effective date of Arizona's controversial SB1070 draws near and in light of the recent decision by the Obama [In]Justice Department to sue the state of Arizona over the law, a great deal of discussion has arisen as to the law's constitutionality. Given the fact that 1) neither this state's nor the Obama administration's “legal” minions have demonstrated even the slightest knowledge or comprehension of the Founding Document and 2) fewer people still will bother to research it themselves to find the answer to this question, I decided to TRY to answer that question for myself. Granted, I'm the farthest thing there is from a legal expert, but I decided to see what I could find within the Constitution that would either uphold SB1070 or strike it down.

The first place I looked was in Article I, Section 8, which enumerates the powers granted by the Constitution to the Congress. The closest provision I could find here that addresses the issue central to SB1070 is in the first part of the third clause of the article, which states:

[Congress shall have the power] To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization...

Now naturalization isn't really the issue at hand in SB1070; the issue at hand is migration (or importation, if you will) of persons, not the establishment of their citizenship.

Section 9, on the other hand, bars Congress from prohibiting “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit” until after the year 1808. This clause has been universally understood by historians, political scientists, and jurists to mean that Congress could enact a ban on the importation of slaves into the United States after that year, but was prohibited from enacting such a ban for the twenty-year period beginning from the Constitution's ratification leading up to that year. I suppose that if we are to consider the term “such Persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit” devoid of any context whatsoever, one could conceivably make the case that Congress has the authority to ban states from admitting ANY immigrants, or even American citizens migrating from others states, under some convoluted interpretation of the Interstate Commerce clause. While this argument is absurd on its face, we must admit that Congress has stretched and contorted the ICC in other ways equally ridiculous and absurd, so it's not inconceivable that the SCOTUS could at some point use this clause as justification for the fedgov's interference with Arizona law and thus overturn SB1070. But let's let this remain within the realm of the preposterous and far-fetched for the time being.

Section 10 of Article I enumerates certain activities prohibited to the legislatures of the several states, activities that the Founders considered the responsibility of the federal government, specifically the Congress. These include:

Entering into treaties, alliances, and confederations with other states or foreign nations

Granting Letters of Marque and Reprisal

Coining money

Emitting Bills of Credit or making anything but Gold and Silver coin an instrument of legal tender in payment of debts

Passing Bills of Attainder, Ex Posto Facto laws, laws hindering obligations of contract, or granting of titles of nobility

Laying imposts or duties on imports or exports

Laying duties of tonnage, keeping troops or ships of war in time of peace, entering into agreements or compacts with other states or foreign nations, and engaging in war unless actually invaded or in imminent danger or invasion

While some of the more extreme immigration control advocates who also are ardent states' rights defenders might argue that this last item on the list, particularly the “invasion or imminent danger of invasion” applies to the current immigration situation, the likelihood of any federal court holding such a view as legally valid is remote, to put it charitably.

Article IV, Section 4 states that the United States shall “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government and shall protect each of them against invasion [emphasis mine]; and, on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.” This would seem to address exactly the issue of responsibility for defense of the nation's borders. But again, the question arises as to whether the Founders would have ever considered large numbers of immigrants, rather than armed troops in the service of a foreign government, to be an “invasion” as the meaning of the word is understood in the context of this constitutional clause. Given the definition of “invasion” as understood by all governments at the time, the answer, again, would have to be a resounding “no.” As for the term “domestic violence,” this term as used in the Constitution should not be confused with its contemporary meaning. Within the context of the Constitution, “domestic violence” means either an insurrection against the elected state government by rebellious citizens, or, in a more unlikely scenario, the invasion of one state by the militia forces of another. Neither one of these would seem to address the illegal immigration scenario. The closest scenario I can imagine would be an organization like, say, La Raza organizing an overthrow of the state government of, say, California (yes, I know, a most unnecessary act on La Raza's part, but that's fodder for a whole 'nother rant). Otherwise, there's nothing in this clause that touches on the immigration issue either.

Nothing beyond Article IV of the Constitution, both the original seven articles and the subsequent twenty-seven amendments, in any way, shape, or form even mentions, let alone addresses, the subject of immigration or who is ultimately responsible for enforcing immigration law. Going back to Article I, Section 8, Congress is responsible for setting up the process by which aliens are naturalized, but otherwise says nothing about enforcing immigration control. Apparently this was not an issue that greatly exercised the Founders. Indeed, why would it have been? During the period of this nation's infancy, the nation was sparsely settled and underpopulated. For this reason it made perfect sense to assume that there was plenty of room for all comers. More importantly, there was little basis for a national policy on immigration for the simple reason that, in those days when true freedom governed the land, the presence of immigrants had little or no impact one way or another on the freedoms or property of native-born citizens. There was no welfare state and no basis of taxation to support one. Therefore, an immigrant from Germany or Ireland in 1795 would not receive money from the government coffers to “establish” himself, and therefore did not cost his fellow citizens any money. Johann or Seamus either set up a business or worked for someone else who was willing to hire them, or they starved and went back to their native lands. Immigrants were expected to be self-sufficient or to rely on voluntary support or contributions from ethno-religious groups in their American communities. Therefore, since they didn't cost the public purse anything or put a strain on (nearly non-existent) “public resources,” the federal government didn't consider the movement of immigrants to be among its concerns.

So in absence of any specific guidance from the Constitution on the immigration enforcement issue, on what side of the argument does that put Arizona? To answer this question, let us refer to the oh-so-despised-and-neglected Tenth Amendment:

The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It's really that simple, folks. Because the Constitution does not enumerate immigration control as one of the federal government's specific powers, it cannot be logically held to be within the federal government's constitutional purview, period. No, we might not all like that fact, and no, I do not agree with the motivation behind Arizona's passage of SB1070 or the manner in which the state intends to enforce it. But where states' rights are concerned, we take the good with the bad. After all, it's much easier to to fix “the bad” at the state and local level than to deal with centralized leviathan evil, a concept the Founders clearly grasped. They also seemed to have grasped, if not specifically stated, that the presence of “ferners” among the general population was a matter to be addressed by the states and localities in which such people lived, in response to specific local circumstances as they arose, not by a disinterested remote body hundreds or thousands of miles away. As with all things constitutional, the idea was decentralization, leaving the solution of practical matters to the lowest level of government or to the people themselves. Why should immigration have been any different from any other issue?

If anyone disagrees with my assessment, I'm all ears as to alternatives.

Update:

J.D. Tuccille has posted on his blog an analysis of what SB1070 is really all about. Essentially, it's about Arizona's ruling redneckleptoplutocracy attempting to scapegoat "brown people" for the state's economic implosion that is of the ruling classes' own making. I highly recommend that everyone give it a read.

Oh, and f*** the snowbirds!

An Old Kleptoparasitic Pol Bites the Dust

2010-06-28T16:43:00.001-04:00

West Virginia Senator-for-Life and Pork King Robert “KKK” Byrd is dead at age 92. I'm strongly resisting the urge to add “and a good damned riddance too,” as this would seem to fly in the face of simple human decency. But lets consider the fact that not only did this corrupt parasite keep his snout in the public trough for half a century, he also came to effectively control access to that trough. Through this control, he selfishly and criminally funneled billions of stolen dollars to his home state, conferring a false (if razor thin) facade of economic viability upon that backward, corrupt, dysfunctional, hopelessly sterile place. Not for nothing was he called “the King of Pork.” Citizens Against Government Waste estimates that Byrd stole almost $5.2 billion dollars for West Virginia during his twenty-year tenure as both a ranking member and later head of the Senate Appropriations Committee (that's “Thieves Guild” in layman's terms).

As of this writing, I haven't seen comments from the general public in sufficient volume to make a determination of how “the little people” outside of Byrd's kleptocratic fiefdom of West-by-God-Virginia are responding to his death (or expressing their views of his political life). So far, however, the Pols and their kept Establishment Press have already kicked into high gear with panegyric praise over one of their own's passing. If the tone is to be characterized by the following gem of pure, intelligence-insulting nonsense from Byrd's fellow Senate kleptoligarch Patrick Leahy, it's going to be a very painful week of eulogies to endure:

“No senator came to care more about the Constitution and be a more effective defender of our constitutional government than the senior senator from West Virginia,” said Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy. “In many ways, he was the keeper of the Senate flame, the fiercest defender of the Senate's constitutional role and prerogatives.”

In response to the above quote, follow the link to the source and note my comment in response to it. I won't repeat it here (unless ABC News blog takes it down, in which case I'll repost), but suffice it to say that only Byrd's fellow Polscum like Leahy could possibly make that comment with a straight face.

Now two questions:

1.What stellar example of humanity from West Virginia will replace Byrd in the Senate

2.How long before Byrd's constituents demand that Senator Jay Rockefeller take over Byrd's sticky fingers operation, Rockefeller being the only West Virginia senator with sufficient seniority to pull it off?

Hey, Mom, Maybe Your Church Is One of the Few That “Gets It” - When Will You?

2010-05-31T19:58:00.000-04:00

My neocon, military-worshiping mother writes in a “Happy [??!!!] Memorial Day” email:

We were SO disappointed there was NO recognition of Memorial Day at church yesterday. I don't know what's going on. Our Troops display is also the ONLY effort not afforded a place on the patio in front, or out back, with no mention in the bulletin. I don't get it!

Well, Mother Dear, maybe the new pastoral and lay leadership of your church has, unlike you and the rest of the congregation, actually read the Four Gospels – you know, those pesky missives that tell us what Jesus Christ actually commands of His followers. Things like, oh, say, loving your enemies. Which means, no matter how you try to stretch into something else, that you should show actual love to them, an act that clearly doesn't involve taking up arms against them. Yeah, I know, loving your enemies, especially those who don't worship Jesus, speak funny languages, dress funny, and don't like nosy, arrogant Americans invading their countries, destroying their property, and murdering their loved ones is not as much fun as killing them. But I think Jesus was pretty clear on where He stood when it came the idea of people who follow Him dishing out acts of deadly violence against others. Even the most “modern” translations of the Gospels make it clear that He didn't like it at all; as a matter of fact, He made it pretty clear that anyone who used violence in His name was no better than the Godless enemies He made equally clear would earn eternal damnation.

So, Mom, since the troops you claim to so adore and the organization they represent are dedicated to committing acts of murderous violence against people who never threatened the country you claim to love, an act transparently and unquestionably un-Christian, maybe your church's leadership has decided that “the troops” deserve none of the “support” you would give them. After all, the purpose of the church is to spread the word of Christ and, through prayer and study of the scriptures, lead others to live their lives in accordance with His message. That being the case, “the troops” are doing the exact opposite of what Christ would have them do. Small wonder then that no one wants your “Troops Display” anywhere near the church. As a matter of fact, they are probably being more polite and tolerant than they should, given what “the troops” do in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon in Pakistan and Iran.

So, Mom, where do you stand? Are you willing to be a missionary to those parts of the world where “the troops” you so love are doing everything that the Jesus you claim to worship condemned, or are you really a worshiper of Amerikan Empire who seeks to apply an illegitimate veneer of “Christianity” on the abominations that are anathema to everything Christ stood for? I think I know the answer to that question. I just hope you and your fellow warmongers have an adequate explanation ready for Judgment Day.

Meanwhile, instead of whining about your church's resistance to your warvangelism, why don't you go find another church (or start one of your own) that makes it clear that it values War and the State over the Christian Gospel? As insipid as such a church would be, it would at least have the decency to be honest about its true aims and would stop perverting the real Gospel to advance unholy aims. It would also leave those Christians hungry for the real message of the Lord free to pursue that message without perverse distractions.

Oh, and “Happy Memorial Day.” Enjoy the temporal holy day that you clearly value over the real holy days.

Arizona's Moronic Electorate Lives Down To Its Reputation (As Usual) – Enacts Proposition 100

2010-05-19T19:18:00.001-04:00

Surprise, surprise. The functional and political illiterates that make up the majority of the Grand Canyon State's registered voters have decided, apparently by a very large margin (said to be 64 percent) to pay money they don't have --”temporarily”, of course-- to fund programs they don't need and can't afford. That's right, folks - as expected, Proposition 100 passed.

I just scratch my head at the idea that the intelligence-insulting TV ads that ran for weeks leading up to yesterday's election exhorting us to “pay up or face loss of services” (none of which, once again, are needed or the proper province of government) somehow convinced the broke inhabitants of a bankrupt state that they should pay MORE of what little money they have left in their pockets to a corrupt and inept government that has failed them abysmally. But then again, most of this state's population lacks intelligence to insult. The bulk of this state's population, after all, consists of retirees and underemployed or unemployed blue-collar laborers whose jobs have gone south of the border or overseas, or have disappeared altogether in the housing bubble implosion. Why such people believed it would be a good idea to add to their already exorbitant state sales tax rate to fund “programs” that either don't serve them at all or are so dysfunctional and broken as to be beyond salvage is simply beyond reckoning. So too is the apparent inability of the majority to grasp the idea that if the politicians are mismanaging (read: wasting) the money they're getting now, how is giving them MORE money going to bring fiscal discipline? That such an obvious question could apparently be so completely ignored speaks highly of the spin-masters retained by the state and the interests that control it to create and spread the propaganda. The reason 100 passed, of course, is that a growing percentage of this state's “working” population consists of “public sector 'employees'”, represented by loud and politically muscular unions, who would be the beneficiaries of these new taxes.

While not one person with whom I have spoken in the past 24 hours voted for Prop 100, those who did vote for it and appeared on local “news” programs or in the local dead-tree state mouthpiece articles all spewed forth one common theme: “It's only a penny, and it's only for three years.” Not having seen any substantive responses to this fallacious way of "thinking", let me offer some of my own.

First of all, leaving the fundamental immorality of any tax aside, let's face the fact that, state media bullshit to the contrary notwithstanding, there is not and NEVER HAS BEEN any such thing as a “temporary” tax! Does anyone remember the telephone tax repealed five years or six years ago that had been in effect since 1898 in order to fund the frigging Spanish-American War? This tax would never have been repealed at all had it not been for the discovery of its purpose by an interested citizens group that had the resources to pressure Congress to get rid of it (and, fortunately for us, the fact the Dubya, already in the throes of an unpopular foreign war, wanted to create a smokescreen for by making himself out to be a “tax reliever”). While this is an egregious example, it demonstrates the “ratchet effect” of taxes, which works in the same way as the “ratchet effect” of laws: once enacted, taxes, like laws, are never completely and permanently repealed, even after the ostensible reason for them no longer exists.

Second, it's not “just a penny” we're talking about here. While graduates of this state's abominable and dysfunctional “publik skoolz” can perhaps be forgiven for swallowing the propaganda BS at face value and regurgitating it as ignorant twaddle, let's look at the facts. The real impact of Proposition 100 is best summarized by this paragraph published on the Americans For Prosperity web site:

Changing the state sales tax rate from 5.6 cents per dollar to 6.6 cents per dollar is a rate increase of 18 percent. Further, all things equal, it would result in an 18-percent increase in the dollars you pay in state sales taxes. If the average family in Arizona buys $40,000 a year in taxable goods, the taxes paid at a 5.6 cent rate are $2,240. If the rate goes up to 6.6 cents, the taxes paid would be $2,640. Pull out your handy calculator and divide $2,640 by $2,240, and you'll see that the average family is paying 18 percent more in taxes than it did before the rate change. That's an increase of $400 a year, or $1,200 during the three years of the Brewer Tax. (Now, the reality is that the rate increase will cause many taxable transactions to not occur--what the economists call the "deadweight loss" caused by a tax increase. Faced with the higher tax rate, the average family would probably end up buying less than $40,000 in taxable goods, meaning that the government will get less than $2,640, and the effective increase in taxes paid will be somewhat less than 18 percent.)

Hopefully even those who are arithmetically challenged will see that the “one penny” line of reasoning doesn't wash. Indeed, I can hardly wait for all of the caterwauling about “high prices” to spew forth after June 1st (the date this abomination takes effect) from the mouths of the very same morons who voted in favor of this abomination. My readers can guess what my response to their bitching will be.

Finally, the always-useless (aren't they all?) Arizona Libertarian Party says not one single word about this critical issue on its web site. But then again, that shouldn't surprise us either, since its web site, like those of all of its county affiliates, hasn't been updated in months or years. Can someone please remind me again why the LP continues to be irrelevant to the cause of liberty?

Oops! My Bad...

2010-05-11T15:40:00.000-04:00

No sooner had I posted my latest "rant" this morning accusing Chuck Baldwin of dropping me from his mailing list, his latest editorial arrived in my inbox. For anyone who happened to read my (now deleted) post this morning, I can only, in old Navy parlance say "belay my last!"

Oh, and apologies to Chuck for jumping the gun, although my email criticisms of his position on the Arizona Immigration Reform Law still stand.

Sure, A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, But What Story Is This Picture Telling Us?

2010-04-29T16:18:00.000-04:00

The photo above made its way into my in-box this morning as an attachment of one of those touchy-feel good chain letters and bore the caption “Compassion.” Devoid of any real context, that caption appears to be accurate. But considering what we know about what's going in the twin war zones in which the Amerikan Imperial Legions are now most heavily concentrated and how the legionnaires have been behaving toward the natives, I have to ask: what are the circumstances under which this soldier is holding this child? We would all like to imagine that this is one of those “nation building”-related exercises in “humanitarian outreach” in which the Pentagon would have us believe that “our troops” are extending olive branches to the locals. But based on what we know to be the norm in both theaters, common sense dictates that our hopes that this is the case are probably misplaced.

The quality of the photo is such that I can't make out any details, which leads to me to believe that there's a strong possibility it has been “Photoshopped.” Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to make some assumptions based on what I see. First, I'm willing to bet that this little child is one of a handful of survivors, if not the only survivor, of an Amerikan bombing attack on an Afghan village (I'm assuming from the green combat dress of the troops that this is Afghanistan, not Iraq, where the troops usually wear desert camouflage dress). The child (I can't really tell from the photo if it's a boy or a girl) appears to be in a state of shock, probably traumatized by some recent event. The soldier appears to be a senior NCO, either a Sergeant First Class, First Sergeant, or Sergeant Major (if Army) or a Gunnery/Master/1st/ Master Gunnery Sergeant (if Marine Corps; again, I can't tell from the photo which service he is). He might, given his apparent age, also be a National Guardsman dragooned onto active duty. If this is the case, it would lead me to believe that, being a “weekend warrior” who has found himself yanked away from home, family, and day job and dispatched halfway around the globe rather than to somewhere within his own state, he is less than enthusiastic about his circumstances. He also probably, despite the danger around him, has yet to be fully desensitized and dehumanized, unlike his “regular army” comrades.

Note too the seeming indifference of the soldier's comrades in the background to the child's plight. Either they are “regular army” or have been “in country” for so long that they regard the lone soldier's compassion for a native as an anomaly worthy of ridicule or contempt. In fact, I seriously wonder if these soldiers launched or guided the attack that might have wiped out the child's family (a My Lai or Fallujah “redux?”). If this is the case, one wonders what miracle of God led to this child's life being spared. One also wonders what happened to the child after the picture was taken. Orphaned Afghan children cannot exactly look forward to the prospects of a happy, nurturing, carefree childhood even under the most benign of circumstances. This little war orphan's future is almost assuredly a dark one, even assuming he or she is lucky enough to find someone to raise him or her in a stable environment. Maybe someone familiar with the circumstances under which this photo was taken will someday shed more light.

So why am I crafting this conjectural narrative around a photo the circumstances surrounding of which I am utterly ignorant? Because the imperial propaganda machine delights in having us all believe that Amerikan troops manning the imperial outposts abroad are saviors, beneficent dispensers of Democratic good will, when in fact they are seen by the locals, and justifiably so, as brutal invaders and foreign occupiers. A camera snapshot captures only a single microsecond in time, very often under circumstances and conditions that are ambiguous without portrayal in a larger context. This makes the photographs easily manipulable for political and ideological purposes (and to be perfectly fair, this is true of both pro-war and anti-war individuals and organizations) that obscure rather than reveal truth.

So in closing, I will say that if I were to take this photograph at face value, the soldier holding the child is indeed a compassionate individual who merits our praise for “doing the right thing.” If this is indeed the case, my greatest hope is that the true horrors of war have manifested themselves to this lone soldier through his lone act of compassion. I also hope that if he still lives, he might influence his comrades to the point that they begin to realize the destructive role they have been duped into playing in the bankrupt, collapsing Amerikan Empire's desperate last-ditch attempts to save itself through foreign conquest and theft. If this can be accomplished, the thousand words this photograph equates to may have been among the thousand most precious words of the early 21st Century. Let us hope and pray that this is so.

Polizeistaat Arizona

2010-04-27T16:42:00.003-04:00

Will Grigg, with his usual literary brilliance, has just published another article describing the latest stomach-turning events in the metastasis of the Amerikan Polizeistaat. This refers of course to Arizona's enacting into law the state's odious Immigration Reform Bill, a sickening, but absolutely unsurprising development, one fully anticipated by us lonely liberty lovers. Governor Jan Brewer (the separated Siamese twin of former governor and current DHS Head Thug Janet Napolitano, despite their contrived partisan political differences), a typical politician affected with the hubris, ignorance, and ADHD that precludes her from actually reading a bill's contents or taking time out to think about both its short-term and long-term unintended consequences, has a habit of putting pen to paper and signing anything from the legislature that comes across her desk. While such imbecilic indolence benefited us a few weeks ago with the signing of the Concealed Carry Reform Bill, her signing of the current Immigration Bill is going to spell the end of her political career as the political, legal, and economic fallout from this monstrosity spreads like plutonium dust over an already barren landscape.

As I've stated before both here and elsewhere, Arizona is one of the reddest of the Red Fascist states, and nowhere is this fact more evident than in Maricopa (or, as I've come to call it, "Maricona") County, the state's most populous, which is under the iron "law enforcement" thumb of the notorious "America's Toughest Sheriff", whose name I need not mention in polite company, and the "legal" thumb of said sheriff's corrupt, constitution-shredding stooge, state's attorney Andrew Thomas. But the crimes of these two reprobates are of little concern to the geriatric gringo bigots who constitute the politically powerful majority in the county, and to whom the likes of the state's political hacks like John McInsane pander. As far as these people are concerned, "brown people" exist only to mow retired white people's lawns, repair and clean their houses, tend their gardens, and cook their fast food, and they had better damned well remain unseen and unheard while they do so. Brown people are, in the typical "snowbird's" view, tools to be used, not human beings with rights, property, aspirations, and dignity. (By the way, did I mention the minimum wage travesty that makes these “brown people” so ubiquitous in these jobs once held mostly by native-born teenagers?)

Additionally, there is among the state's uneducated, unskilled, un/underemployed, substance-addicted (Arizona could easily earn the moniker "Substance Abuse Capitol of the American Southwest") white majority the entrenched assumption that “brown people” are “stealing” both jobs and “public services.” The sad fact is that even a cursory survey of the economic landscape here with one's own eyes and ears reveals that it is the “brown people”, both legal native-born residents and illegals, who are to thank for what little service economy there is left here that still functions. It is the “brown people” who are doing jobs that the “white redneck” majority will not do, either because the illegal and unconstitutional unemployment and social service benefits that they complain about when “brown people” draw them but that they freely draw themselves are too generous compared to the “low” wages offered at prevailing rates, the jobs are “beneath them” (i.e., they actually have to WORK for the pay they earn and do things that actually satisfy customers – and stay sober while doing them), and that, last but not least, “brown people” are demonstrating the work ethic for which America was once famous, but which has now all but disappeared in most sectors of what little is left of the economy as the entitlement mentality has thoroughly corrupted all segments of society. (My own personal experience in this state has been that “brown people” in the building and repair trades, in particular, are courteous, prompt, hardworking, meticulous, reasonably priced, and provide lasting value for the money spent. My experiences with “Native” [i.e., “white” native] businesses in the same sectors, on the other hand, have been characterized mostly by slovenly, overpriced, indifferent, and attitudinous “service” in which I was made to feel that they were DOING ME A FAVOR by providing me with goods or services for which I was parting with my hard-earned money). This, I feel, is the crux of the matter: immigrants from “El Sur” create much-needed competition in certain “protected” monopolistic sectors of the economy that put the majority on notice that the status quo is no longer business as usual. This, in turn, threatens certain well-connected and well-patronized political interests., a disruption that of course cannot be tolerated. Hence the passage of a very destructive law that will drain what little liberty or market economy remains in this state while protecting the entrenched fascist corporate-state interests that reign from Phoenix.

So what is most ironic about this travesty of a law that is putting the finishing touches on the Southwest's model Prison-Industrial-Police State? The fact that the law elevates the enforcement of a federal immigration policy that the federal government itself shows only tepid interest, at best, in enforcing, and only then when it is politically expedient to do so. Remember here that Arizona is one of a handful of western states that has been flipping the proverbial bird to the feds on a number of recent issues, the just-passed Concealed Carry Reform Bill and RealID Non-Cooperation resolution being only two examples, in order to flex its flabby “sovereignty” muscles. Whatever local motivations the state's ruling classes have for wanting to turn the state into a fascist fortress, using federal law as a justification does nothing more than undermine its “state sovereignty” rhetoric (or perhaps that's really the point?). Will mentions the “good of second intent” in his article, a concept that is, sadly, quite alien to Arizona's majority. I now find myself among those wondering just what good a “state's rights” movement yields if the “rights” that the several individual states exercise include the “right” to rule their residents with a tyranny mirroring that of the federal Leviathan, if on a somewhat smaller scale.

All of the above said, the saddest aspect of this sorry mess is that Arizona is a state of unrivaled natural beauty and climate (even in Summer!), one that could easily attract and retain hard-working, innovative, industrious residents dedicated to building a better society through respect for liberty and free markets. Tragically, this is almost certainly not to be. The welfare-warfare mentality, with all of its toxic side effects, has gripped the residents of the Grand Canyon State --whether they are middle-class retirees at death's door, blue-collar whites, Native Americans, or multi-generational Mexican-Americans alienated and dispossessed by the “global economy”-- like it has few others. The result has been an atmosphere hostile to commerce, innovation, liberty, property rights, and stable communities with viable futures, along with the inevitable economic stagnation, political corruption, social fragmentation, and fiscal collapse. For this reason I see me and my family leaving this state within two years and returning to the East Coast. I do not undertake this decision lightly, as I invested everything in creating a new life here for my family and myself. However, the Northern Sonoran Desert appears to be a place where the seeds of liberty and prosperity will simply not take root and flourish, no matter how much one waters and tends them.

God help the Grand Canyon State, and the rest of Amerika.

(Sorry for the long-winded speech. I'm getting off my soapbox now).

Let's DEMAND That We ALL Be Added To Their “Patriots List!”

2010-04-21T18:29:00.002-04:00

Chuck Baldwin points out in his latest newsletter that the federal government's quasi-official snitch organization, the criminally corrupt Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has placed him and 39 other prominent advocates for liberty and limited government on a “hit list.” Actually, Chuck's at the top of the list, something that certainly gives him a certain dark sense of pride. I don't know why they stopped at forty (and, as Chuck points out, they claim only 36 are listed, meaning that they can't count any better than they can do anything else). How come Lew Rockwell isn't on that list, or Pat Buchanan, Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Gerald Celente, or several dozen other prominent pundits, economists, business leaders, or public figures who share Chuck's views? If I were these guys, I'd feel offended!

Come to think of it, I'm offended that I'm not included on the SPLC's “hit list.” Heck, I'm every bit as much of a “patriot” as each of the rest of these guys, even though I don't have the “name and/or face recognition” they do. Why does the SPLC think that their hit list targets love liberty and limited government more than I do, or that I'll do any less than they'll do to preserve what little of both are left and to reinstate them when the socioeconomic collapse (that the SPLC is cheering on) hits us? It just ain't fair!

I think I'm going to email them and demand that they put my name on their list. I recommend that my readers do the same and encourage their liberty-loving friends to do so as well. After all, the Stasi, er, DHS can't keep everyone under surveillance, now can they? At any rate, it would be intriguing to see what kind of “data overload” Mo and his buddies would suffer if we all demanded to be cataloged. Perhaps the sheer number of those demanding inclusion on the list would make Mo and Company realize that the number of true patriots is greater than they imagined. Maybe, just maybe, the realization that they've bitten off more than they can chew will lead to a “realignment” of their priorities. As the old saying goes, I can dream, can't I?

The Latest Act Of Theft By State Governments: Internet Access Taxes

2010-04-13T14:24:00.000-04:00

My ISP's customer service home page contains an announcement that several states, effective yesterday, have enacted a new series of taxes on Internet Service Access. I hadn't heard that these were imminent (fortunately my state isn't among those that have enacted this monstrosity – yet), but I'm not surprised. As more and more states continue to suffer the consequences of their years of fiscal irresponsibility during the FED-induced technology and housing bubbles, we will see more and more of these economy-destroying taxes enacted.

Stand by: The ride is gonna get rockier!

Arizona State Government Does Something Right (For Once), Respects Second Amendment

2010-04-09T12:47:00.002-04:00

My day has just been brightened by the news that the Arizona House of Representatives has approved a bill allowing residents to carry concealed handguns without a permit, enabling all of us in the Grand Canyon State to exercise our Second Amendment rights unhindered. All that is now required is Governor Jan Brewer's signature, which I expect will happen soon without much further ado. (As an aside, I hold no love in my heart for this moronette of a politician, but even a stopped clock is right twice each day.)

I won't speculate at length as to how and why this common-sense bill passed so easily through a usually dysfunctional and tyrannical political body. My first guess, however, is that gun ownership is so widespread in this state that any move to further restrict gun ownership or carry would meet with truly massive popular resistance. I also have to believe, though I can't prove it with direct evidence, that nullification and secession fever are on the rise here (let us hope!) and that the legislature is beginning to realize that it had better tread carefully.

As for “concealed carry”, I've always been hard-pressed to think of a good reason for it under ordinary circumstances. When I carry I want my gun to be clearly visible to everyone. After all, it is the display of arms that sends notice to would-be assailants that I am able, ready, and willing to defend myself with lethal force. But I digress.

The important thing here is that yet another state has asserted its sovereignty in the face of federal intimidation and overreach. While I am of course mercilessly critical of this state's government, as I am of all levels of government, I will also recognize it and commend it when it does its job, that being the protection of citizens' rights and property.

So hats off to the Arizona legislature, and, we hope, Governor Brewer. May your courage and upholding of the law of the land serve as an example for all other states to follow!

Pro: They're Antiwar; Con: They Don't Know Squat About Libertarianism

2010-03-29T19:58:00.000-04:00

This entry on the antiwar.com blog from last week about a Michigan man fired by WalMart for using medical marijuana to treat his nasal cancer is a must-read, particularly the responses from readers. I say “must-read” because the article and the responses show, as well as any other example I can point to, the width and breadth of the absolutely medieval ignorance of libertarianism so rampant among people who claim to hold it as their guiding philosophy, but who in reality don't have a clue what that philosophy is. The responses from the readership, in particular, show just how deeply entrenched the entitlement mentality is across all segments of our society. As I mention in the post I made in an attempt to correct misconceptions (as usual, an exercise in sheer futility), I don't know what on earth this topic has to do with that site's purpose, but let's get one thing straight: Walmart is not the problem. It is the government so beloved by so many, even many who claim to be “libertarians,” government that interferes constantly in a free market that can include medicine just as it can anything else, that is the problem.

If anyone else out their can make that point any clearer than I can to AWC's regular readers, feel free to give it a try. If you succeed, you're a better person than I can ever hope to be.

Local Congresscreature Suffers Blowback From Her Vote On Obamacare

2010-03-23T16:55:00.000-04:00

Tucson Congresscritter Gabrielle Giffords apparently got a wake-up call from one or more unhappy constituents over her vote to endorse Obamacare. It seems that her Tucson office was vandalized last night, someone having smashed the glass on the office's door and windows and causing some undetermined amount of damage to the office's interior. Apparently dear Gabby made it known in advance that she intended to ignore her constituents' wishes on the subject of Obamacare and vote in accordance with the Dear Leader's decree.

Let me be clear: I do not in any way, shape, or form advocate vandalism or violence or destruction of property as a form of political protest. In addition to the fact that it violates the libertarian principle of private property rights (Giffords is almost certainly renting this office, which means that it belongs to someone else), such protests are counterproductive. To resort to mindless violence, a typically reflexive reaction of both the extreme Left and extreme Right, is indicative of an unthinking mind, a lazy brain stem-driven approach to problem solution. All this act of vandalism will accomplish is to enable Giffords and her fellow statist kleptoplutocrats to point fingers at anyone who dissents from the Dear Leader's party line and claim that such people are nothing but violent terrorist extremists. (Given the propensity for federal “law enforcement” [sic] agents to deploy agents provocateurs in an attempt to make all dissidents look like violent extremists, I would not be the least bit surprised if we were to eventually learn that the attack on Giffords' office was the work of some alphabet state or federal agency).

That said, I can understand why (but do not condone the fact that) someone did this, assuming, once again, that it was not the work of some fedthug(s) attempting to caste the freedom movement in a negative light. Ordinary working Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated and fed up with their “representatives” (HAH!), who are less and less conspicuous and subtle in flouting the wishes of those they purport to “serve.” If the bankster bailout acts of 2008, in which Congress ignored the clearly stated wishess of 95 percent of the electorate on the subject, didn't once and for all open the eyes of the people to where Congress's real interests are focused, nothing else will. For this reason it is reaching the point where some people (think Joe Stack), desperate to make their anger known to those in power who are all but unreachable, are resorting to extreme measures, however fruitless and counterproductive these are. We can rest assured, however, that such measures will backfire. Gabrielle Giffords will not only not modify her voting to accord with both the U.S. Constitution and with the majority of her constituents' wishes (insofar as these are compatible with one another) as a result of this actof vandalism, but will probably be more determined than ever to serve the cause of her Establishment owners at her constituents' expense.

As for the vote that resulted in the destruction of Gabby's office and the legislation it has enacted, there's a silver lining to that too. I've predicted the following publicly before and will repeat that predication again: None of the full measures of this law will ever come to pass. By the time the 2014 rolls around, the nation will be completely bankrupt, its currency collapsed, and in a state of all-out civil war.

The Reason Only Eleven Percent Of Republicans Support Ron Paul...

2010-03-19T16:28:00.002-04:00

… is because, well, they're Republicans. According to poll results posted on Public Policy Polling blog (thanks to Brad Funkhouser, courtesy of the LRC blog), a recent nationwide sampling of Republican voters indicates that 28% of them favor Mitt Romney as the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, followed by Mike Huckabee at 24% , Sarah Palin at 23%, and Ron Paul at 11%. Nine percent say they're undecided, and six percent say their preference would be someone else (unspecified). I think these results say it all.

Frankly, I'm surprised Ron Paul even made it into the double digits. Given the Repugnant Party's complete, absolute, and irreversible collapse as an organization of political principle, I would think that Ron would be lucky to get even five percent support. Given also the waffling and pandering to political expediency that is hard-coded into both GOP voters and party "leaders," I expect Ron's percentage to dwindle to about one or two percent among registered Republican voters come November 2012. After all, this is the party that re-nominated and re-elected George W. Bush in 2004 despite his trampling upon every so-called “principle” this party pretends to hold sacred, behavior that should have had the GOP faithful calling for his impeachment and replacement with someone who better represents the GOP's principles (I know, dream on!). Had the GOP actually done so, as well as right some other obvious wrongs, it would have distinguished itself as a true party of principle, and it is much less likely that the African Virus would be occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue today. Of course the fact is that these things did not happen, because the GOP is not, never has been, and never will be a "party of principle."

We must also remember the flagrant and deliberate disrespect shown to Ron Paul by the party nomenklatura before and during the 2008 election, along with the abysmal ignorance of, if not outright contempt for liberty displayed by the party's mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging “base." Given these, I must say that only a deluded fool would seriously expect Ron to succeed at the polls next election if he has to depend on the GOP for victory. That's not even taking into consideration the orchestrated character assassination campaign that the GOP hierarchy and MSM will mount, together with the Democratic “opposition” (HAH!) to derail Ron's campaign in the almost impossible event that he gets the GOP nomination.

No, the only “Republicans” who will vote for Ron in 2012 are going to be ex-Republicans who either re-register as Independents or with a third party such as the Libertarian or Constitution parties. Given the GOP mainstream's utter obliviousness to the national collapse around them, coupled with their blind militarism and amoral politics, it would be far too much to expect the mass eye-opening necessary to get Ron elected the presidency* and to begin the restoration of liberty.

(*Am I the only one who thinks that in the absolutely otherworldly event that Ron does get elected president that both parties will suddenly "rediscover" their respect for the Constitution and decide that the Executive Branch has too much power? That there will be a concerted bipartisan effort to neuter the imperial presidency? What better way to undermine any reforms Ron envisions than to emasculate his office to the point that he has no power!)

Misrepresenting libertarianism (small “l”) and Avoiding Personal Responsibility

2010-03-18T15:02:00.001-04:00

Just as people seem unable to differentiate between the concepts of “capitalism” and “state-corporatism”, so too is there confusion over the meaning of “libertarianism” among the statist hordes.

I accidentally stumbled upon this piece by Megan McArdle published in yesterday's Business Insider in which she blames “libertarianism” for the scams perpetrated upon gullible, underemployed Amoricons by private colleges and trade schools that promise lucrative careers in exchange for exorbitant tuition for a nine-month to two-year cram course in some vocation or other. My response to the article in the comments section under the user name “AnotherTucsonLibertarian” sums up my response to McArdle's drivel, so I won't expand on it here. The bottom line is that I am sick and tired of 1) the attempt by statists to co-opt the term “libertarian” for their own selfish and nefarious agenda, and 2) the idea that government is responsible for saving people too stupid and lazy to make informed decisions for themselves.

Lysander Spooner: Essential Reading For Anyone Who Treasures Liberty

2010-03-17T02:09:00.000-04:00

A hearty thanks to Lew Rockwell for posting Lysander Spooner's The Constitution of No Authority on LRC. While I had previously read excerpts of this magnificent expose of America's founding document, I had never taken the time to read it in full. I urge everyone to do so, for Spooner is unrivaled in his ability to tear the vale of sanctity off of this piece of unduly elevated parchment. In simple prose, Spooner demonstrates that the nation's founding document has no legal or moral standing as a governing document. The Constitution, like any other document, can be legally binding only upon those who give their expressed written consent to its terms by way of signature or seal, and that it is of no legal or moral consequence as an instrument of law or governance upon those who have not granted such consent.

A few years ago on this blog I began a series of posts in which began rewriting and posting, in installments, sections of the Constitution that I believed lacked genuine libertarian underpinnings and substituted the original text for what I believed would be content more in harmony with the principles of liberty. I abandoned this exercise after only a few posts for two reasons. The first was based on Spooner's own reasoning that any document which purports to represent or bind individuals who have not expressed their consent to be party to it with signature or seal is without legal standing and thus null and void, and the Constitution, as Spooner points out, makes not even a pretense of being such a document. Second, the exercise revealed to me that the Constitution, both as originally written and subsequently amended, was so fundamentally full of flaws, loopholes, and omissions that subverted it as the instrument for preservation of liberty that it has historically (and falsely) been portrayed as being that any attempts to “improve” it were both counterproductive and a waste of time.

So why bother with the Constitution at all? Why do so many American libertarians turn to it as the primary hope for the restoration of liberty, despite its very obvious failure? I believe there are two answers that apply equally to both of these questions. First of all, many people, including many libertarians, see no other immediate hope outside of a state-centered framework for liberty's return because the idea of a stateless, anarcho-capitalist system in which liberty is upheld through voluntary exchange and cooperation among individuals is just too radical of a concept. Also, many libertarians adopt the minarchist view that at least some rudimentary level of government is essential to a functioning society, although they differ widely in their ideas of just how much power such a government should have. I'm inclined toward a third answer, which is that far too many libertarians reject Spooner's assertion that the Constitution (any nation's constitution, not just America's) as a legal document must conform to the standard Common Law requirements for a legal document. This includes the requirement that all individuals who are to be bound by the documents terms give their expressed legal consent in the form of a signature or seal and that the terms of the document are set within specific time frames in order to be valid (in other words, no “perpetual contracts”). The conventional, historic –and statist-- view is that constitutions, as national charters, supersede standard contracts that bind individual corporations. Spooner convincingly rejects this view in Constitution of No Authority, which probably explains why his treatise has been systematically ignored by historians and law professors alike ever since its publication.

Once again, read Constitution of No Authority for yourself. While Spooner offers no specific solutions or substitutes for the Constitution, the libertarian reader will likely come away with the feeling that none are either desired or beneficial to the nurturing of freedom.

Secession? Sure, But Only If The Result Is The Restoration Of Liberty

2010-03-15T21:19:00.001-04:00

It is heartening to see serious secession movements gaining momentum in several states as the Amerikan Empire and its ruling classes inside the Rome-on-the-Potomac beltway lead the United States on a collision course with socioeconomic disaster while turning the nation into the world's deadliest Police State. This trend assumes various forms. Some organizations, such as the Tenth Amendment movement, don't necessarily call for the full-blown secession of states from the Union, but merely a reassertion of states' rights vis-a-vis the federal government's enumerated constitutional powers. Other organizations call for outright devolution, citing the federal government's out-of-control size and power expansion. However, as essential as the success of these organizations and their goals are to the restoration of liberty, it is equally essential that we pay attention to the “state of our state.” After all, the tyranny and criminality that we see emanating from Washington, D.C. is in most cases replicated at the state and local level, albeit it on a smaller scale. If true freedom is ever to be restored, it does us no good to break free from Leviathan's shackles only to leave the local ones intact.

As J.D. Tuccille so brilliantly points out, local tyranny is as bad as, or more often even worse than, the federal kind. Local tyrants, whether in the form of city or county councils or state legislatures, have a much more immediate and lasting negative effect on our lives than do distant bureaucracies half a continent away. As J.D. points out, local bureaucracies can inflict pain and suffering much faster and with a much shorter reach and the battles tend to be uglier, more immediate, and more personal. For this reason it is essential that liberty lovers work together at the local level to not only educate their neighbors and family on the principles of liberty, but to roll back the most tyrannical impulses of those who would exercise local political power.

So what will need to be done? The specific answers to this question will vary from state to state, as each state is unique in its demographic makeup and economic potential. In order for any state to secede and succeed on its own, however, here are three generic suggestions that apply across the board to all states that reassert their sovereignty:

A free market economy: Unconstitutional federal regulations,taxes, and administrative laws alone do not adequately explain the economic desert that is characteristic of most states today. In addition to federal job-killing and profit-killing statutes, most states have imposed a plethora of petty laws and regulations that make life hell for entrepreneurs – you know, those people whom the political class credits for creating “small businesses that create the bulk of the nation's jobs.” I recently spoke with a friend who was trying to start up his own roofing and tile business and he tells me that in addition to federal tax, occupational health and safety, and licensing laws, he is battling a barrage of Arizona State statutes that repeat and even amplify these intrusive, pointless, counterproductive, and, most importantly, prohibitively expensive impositions on his attempt to be a productive and self-sustaining citizen. The fact is that states can no longer afford these toxic restrains on trade, which, far from keeping the consumer public “safe”, do nothing but destroy economic opportunity while robbing the public of goods and services that they desire and that resourceful, entrepreneurial citizens are willing and able to supply. It should be remembered, however, that the point of most of this regulation is NOT to keep the public “safe”, but to extort tax monies from the productive classes or to limit the supply of goods and services in favor of certain business owners, otherwise known as “state-corporatists”, who buy or otherwise influence the political classes to grant them special favors that give them de facto monopolies on the sale of certain goods and services and that increase costs while decreasing the quality and quantity of the good or service sold. The fact is that any state that has broken its bonds with Leviathan will have to be self-sustaining, and the only way to do this is by encouraging the free flow of commerce, unmolested by government interference, regulation, or taxation, and with the consumer deciding which businesses survive and prosper.

Extremely limited –-indeed, as close to none as possible-- government: This success of the free market described in the previous paragraph absolutely depends on this. Remember, it is runaway government at all levels that is responsible for bringing the various U.S. states to their fiscal and political knees. As an anarcho-capitalist, I would prefer no government at all, with most functions now considered the province of state and local government to be assumed by the private sector, with individuals and groups composed of voluntary associations among individuals paying for goods and services as they choose. Unfortunately, this is probably unreasonable to expect of a population that has been steeped in statism for generations. Still, it is essential that any state government be given only very minimal authority or power and that ordinary citizens of the states exercise due diligence in ensuring that their government helps itself to no more than that. We can only hope that the horrors of runaway criminal government that have been the experience of post-1865 America at both the federal and state level and that was the driving force behind any state's secession from the federal Union will be enough to keep state government in check.

Private property rights: Last but certainly not least, this is essential to not only the prosperity, but the survival of any free, self-governing state. One very encouraging trend is the manner in which many states quickly undermined the SCOTUS's Kelo vs. New London decision five years ago by enacting state laws that banned the misuse of eminent domain. While this is a very good start, it needs to go much further. No level of government in any state must ever be allowed to exercise eminent domain for any reason. Whether by omission or by intent (I strongly suspect the latter), the founding fathers, as Tom Mullen points out, neglected to construct the U.S. Constitution in a manner that ensured the sanctity of private property. Without this safeguard that is fundamental to human freedom, liberty and prosperity are impossible!

My goal here is to point out that states' rights and secession are meaningless if the only result is to localize the tyranny that is now characteristic of the federal leviathan. Only by restoring the freedoms to which the founding fathers at least paid lip service, if not actively defended, will the acts of secession and the reassertion of state sovereignty have any meaning. Devoid of the preservation of the liberty for the individual, the entire exercise is pointless.

Is This The Kind Of Picture That a Christ Follower Would Email to Someone As a Joke?

2010-03-11T12:39:00.002-05:00

Apparently the photograph below is what passes for visual humor among today's State-worshipers masquerading as “Evangelical Christians.” It pains me to say that my own mother sent this. I hope she and anyone else among her self-deluded “Christian” friends who passed this on and who thinks it's funny can get the Almighty to let loose with a big belly laugh over this when she's standing before Him on the day of judgment.

Is Joe Stack a Harbinger of Things to Come?

2010-02-19T16:25:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's kamikaze-style attack on the IRS building in Austin, Texas by a light aircraft piloted by a desperate and angry tax rebel has me deeply torn. On the one hand, as a libertarian I am firmly against the initiation of aggressive force that results in the loss of innocent lives or property. On the other hand, can any honest American claim that the IRS's depredations upon us working taxpayers are anything other than aggressive force and that anyone who “works” for that organization is truly innocent? Apparently Joe Stack, the 53-year-old pilot of the aircraft, a software engineer who owned his own independent contracting business and who was a current target of the IRS, firmly believed the latter to be the case.

The facts surrounding Stack's attack are still being gathered, so I'm not going to comment at length at this time. I also have yet to download and read a copy of the full manifesto that he left behind as a suicide note, so I won't address that here either. I did, however, receive an email copy today of Chuck Baldwin's latest editorial in which Chuck laments the fact that Stack killed himself. Stack, he says, would have been much more valuable to the cause of liberty had he remained alive and united his fellow countrymen to help take action against this armed gang of predatory mafiosi who are the reigning establishment's fiscal enforcement arm.

On biblical grounds alone, Chuck is correct. I wonder, however, if we will one day look back at Joe Stack's lone act of desperate defiance and recognize it as the final starting salvo in the Second American Revolution. Did this one man become so desperate, did he feel such a sense of hopelessness at his plight, did he see no light at the end of the tunnel that he felt that his only recourse was to end his own life by striking back at the common enemy? What little I have read of excerpts from his suicide manifesto seem to indicate that this was the case. If indeed it is, then Joe Stack was not alone. Literally hundreds of thousands, if not MILLIONS or Americans are on the receiving end of the IRS's terror tactics each year. This lawless agency, one that can crush an American citizen and his family on a mere whim is the epitome of the word “terrorist.” Apparently Joe Stack decided that enough is enough and that he was going to do something about it. True, he didn't put enough power behind his attack to make anything other than a symbolic dent in his evil target's power, but I have no doubt that his symbolic defiance will have far-reaching impact on the movement to restore liberty to this land.

Meanwhile, the MSM, terrified at the implications of Stack's act, is already amping up the propaganda spin machine in what will surely be a futile attempt to deflect attention away from the growing unrest that is tearing the nation apart. Texas congresscreature Lloyd Doggett, one of the Obamunist's loyal lapdogs in the Lone Star State, has already referred to Stack's attack as “a cowardly act of domestic terrorism.” Like most of the ruling elite, Doggett thinks that the use of terrorist force by the State in against Us the People is all well and good as long as it advances his own selfish agenda. But let him and his fellow parasites get a taste of their own medicine, and it's the end of the world (by the way, fuck you, Doggett!).

Again, I'll revisit this subject later. Until then, it's time to dig a little deeper.

Comment Moderation

2010-02-16T14:22:00.000-05:00

This is just a quick administrative note to let my readers know that I've just enabled comment moderation on the blog. Let me be clear that I am NOT doing this to annoy my readers or to make posting comments difficult, nor do I have any intention of "censoring" unfavorable comments. I'm doing it to eliminate some non-English comments like those in Chinese that have been posted in response to two of my recent entries.

Let me also be clear that I am certainly NOT biased against foreign languages or readers from other nations and cultures whose primary language is one other than English. Being to some degree fluent in a few foreign languages myself, I certainly can appreciate the desire to communicate in one's native tongue if that's the one in which one can best express one's point. But since I do not read, write, or speak Chinese*, this means that I am unable to verify whether or not the post is a legitimate one or if it is simply spam. Furthermore, if I cannot understand a comment, that means that I cannot respond to it, either to clarify, answer, or rebut a point made. It therefore serves no constructive purpose.

If I've offended or alienated anyone with this move, please accept my apologies in advance. Feel free to post a complaint (preferably in English, but German, French, Spanish, or Arabic would work too) and I'll give it due consideration.

(*This certainly puts me at a great economic disadvantage as the Amerikan Empire implodes.)

Good News: Some Tucsonans (Other Than Yours Truly) Are Sick And Tired Of Military Jet Noise

2010-02-11T16:32:00.000-05:00

I was elated to have my attention directed to this Arizona Daily Star article that originally appeared on February 4th. It seems that some of the city's citizens are growing very weary –nay, fed up-- with the sonic booms and other noise from USAF, Arizona Air National Guard, and “other” F-16s, F-18s, and A-10s from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base that have been engaging in a seemingly interminable series of “exercises” over the skies of Southeastern Arizona for the last several weeks.

Count me among those in the “sick and tired” crowd. Sure, the roaring zoom-whiz-bang of airborne deathcraft was the shit when I was an impressionable twenty-something full of hormones and with no direction in life who thought that all things military were sacrosanct, the ideal of how a man's life should be lived. Now, however, with the passage of years and the knowledge and wisdom that comes with them, I find it just flat-out irritating, an eardrum-ravaging exercise in boondoggle. These deathjets serve no purpose other than to waste stolen tax dollars in a propaganda exercise, the goal of which is to make the gullible, unemployed (and unemployable) welfare sheeple believe that fighter aircraft are in some way relevant to “defense” against the real problems that plague what little is left of this nation. And please do not start with the “you should be grateful for these brave airmen who defend your freedoms” bullshit. As someone who wasted two decades of his life on active duty, nearly six years of those decades as a U.S, Naval air crewman, I can state emphatically and categorically that “defending freedom” has nothing whatsoever to do with the turning of JP5 into thick black smoke and the punching of holes in the sound barrier that is taking place over our desert airspace. It does, however, have EVERYTHING to do with the burgeoning militarist police state that is shaping up everywhere around the nation, at a particularly accelerated pace in “red states” like this one.

Not surprisingly, there have been more than a few locals who welcome all the intrusive noise and pollution. This online letter to the editor by a typically clueless Tucson ovine named Bradley Craig Mylan, no doubt a graduate of this area's peerless publik skool sisdumb and almost equally certainly one of the unemployable dolts who populate this city in massive number, is a perfect representation of that view. Note that Brad, typical of most Amoricons, is completely unfamiliar with the economic concept known as “the broken window fallacy”, as evidenced by his statement that the jets “create jobs and security.” But this is to be expected, since Brad is a resident of a city largely devoid of private-sector jobs, a situation caused in no small part by 1) Tucson's abysmal public school system, most of whose “graduates” are functional illiterates incapable of gainful employment, and 2) a city and county government that is openly hostile toward business (especially the free market), thus dissuading, in combination with reason number 1, any large businesses from setting up or remaining in the Tucson area. The result, of course, is that Tucson has become like many other “red state” cities: dependent upon some form of federal government entity for its “jobs” and tax revenue base, the most common of these entities being military bases and, to a lesser extent, contractor corporations that staff or support those installations. This explains why not only ordinary Tucson citizens, but their “representatives” in city and county government (and certainly also their congresscreatures) kowtow to and grovel at the feet of the military-industrial-corporate complex in hopes of maintaining an economic lifeline. Such lifelines are unsustainable in the long term, and with the impending collapse of the dollar are going to be lost sooner rather than later, but that's for another future rant.

Meanwhile, I hope and pray that the one move that could make noise levels here unbearable –the permanent deployment of the new and NOISY F-35 strike fighter to Davis-Monthan-- will never come to pass. I'm not holding my breath.

Fuck You, Audi!

2010-02-08T12:51:00.000-05:00

Having gritted my teeth last night and sat through the Superbowl for yet another year, I can say that I was not quite as disappointed in the commercials as I expected to be. However, this Audi commercial, which portrayed someone's dream of a “Green fascist” society, is beyond doubt the most sickening and offensive thing to hit the airwaves in living memory, a commercial that ought to have anyone who believes in liberty up in arms.

FUCK YOU, Audi! I have never had any desire to own one of your vehicles, but I can say with 1000 percent certainty now that I will never even consider owning one in the future, and I sincerely hope others share my sentiments. My sincerest hope is that you go the way of Studebaker!

As Good a Reason As Any To Secede and Reassert Their Independence

2010-01-26T11:15:00.000-05:00

Antiwar.com today linked to this New York Times article on the impact of the “War on Drugs” on the Tohono O'odham Nation, my neighbors in southern Arizona who are the only Native American tribe whose land straddles the U.S.-Mexico border.

For all practical purposes the Tohono O'odham reservation is under military occupation (by proxy, with the DEA serving as the occupying force), as it has become a popular transit route for Mexican drug smugglers bringing their wares into the Upper 48. The once pristine and peaceful community has become an unwilling battleground in Imperial Amerika's longest running exercise in prohibition, with residents afraid to walk the streets of their neighborhoods after dark due to fear of violence from either G-men or Mexican drug runners.

Once again, Native Americans suffer for the white man's sins. As conditions continue to worsen and as Leviathan sinks deeper into bankruptcy, corruption, and anarcho-tyranny, one can only hope that a leader (or leaders) will emerge among the Tohono O'odham people who will say “ENOUGH!” I cannot think of a better place for the secession movement to get rolling than among the indigenous peoples who arguably have suffered longer than anyone else under the depredations of the federal government.

Contributing to the “Wrong” Charities?

2010-01-22T13:26:00.001-05:00

On today's LRC Blog Lew Rockwell relays an email from a reader who bemoans the fact that his contribution to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) for Haitian earthquake victim relief has probably gone to waste due to the U.S. military-controlled Port-Au-Prince International Airport's repeated turning away of DWB's relief flights in order to give the occupying , er, sorry, “relief” forces of the U.S. military aircraft landing priority. He also mentions contributions that he has made to vietnamfriendship.org and freegaza.org.

Well, pal, I hope you haven't been flagged and placed on Leviathan's Watch List for having contributed to non-Establishment-approved charities. You know, of course, that means charities representing or serving people who resent Leviathan's gangster bullying, interference, and murder and who actually help people in need. After all, we can't have non-Establishment types showing up the all-beneficent, all-powerful, all-knowing State, can we?

Needless to say, I encourage anyone who wishes to voluntarily direct as much of their wealth as they'd like to any cause they consider worthy to freely contribute to these organizations, if for no other reason than that they meet with Rome-on-the-Potomac's disapproval. Now if only there was a practical way to take back the money stolen from our wallets and given to the Pentagram...

Shame On Ron Paul!

2010-01-20T12:36:00.000-05:00

It hurts me to the bone to hear Ron Paul's comments to independent journalist John Bush on this YouTube video (special thanks to Karen DeCoster for posting this on her blog). While I don't live in Ron's congressional district (in fact, I'm a non-voter), I have every intention of letting Ron know what a dreadful betrayal of his base and his supposed ideals his comments represent. I'm already composing a letter that I intend to send to Ron's congressional office via snail mail (most congressional offices get too much email to bother reading it). I'll post it here when it's finished.

While I certainly recognize that politics, by its very nature,is a filthy endeavor, I, like any other principled liberty lover, have long believed that Ron's ideals transcended career politics. It appears that we all might have misjudged Ron and misplaced our ideals.

Still, I'm willing to allow Ron the opportunity to clarify his remarks. While I hope that it's all a dreadful misunderstanding, I don't see how the video remarks could possibly be taken out of context. Judge for yourself.

Another Fiat From the Economically Illiterate Simian-in-Chief

2010-01-15T18:40:00.000-05:00

I was disgusted, but not at all surprised, to hear President Che Guobama yesterday demand that a “Responsibility Fee” (read: tax) be levied on the big U.S. banks that received bailout money over the last year. Declaring that he considered the seven and eight-figure bonuses that these banks are paying to their executive management “obscene”, the monkey-eared Socialist-in-Chief apparently believes that hitting Lloyd Blankfein, et al. in their wallets is the surest way to recoup all of the bailout money that these big bad banks have misused and otherwise spent in acts of bad faith. You see, in the Black Marionette's ideological universe, businesses are just like people and you can punish them just like a person and get the same results. That is to say, any punitive move taken against a business by “the law” will hurt only the big boys in the boardroom and the business's bank account. That'll show'em that they can't mess with the little guys without it comin' back on 'em!

What the Fatheaded Figurehead, like millions of other Amoricons fails to understand is that whenever a tax or other external expenditure is imposed upon a business, for whatever reason, that business responds to the additional burden in one of two ways:

1. By passing the costs of the expenditure on to its customers in the form of higher fees and charges.

2. By cutting back on services to its customers in order to bolster its profit margins to compensate for the increased cost of doing business.

Usually the business will do both of the above.

The point, one that any Austrian School economist will tell you is simple common sense, is that there is no such thing as a “business tax.” All taxes are ultimately “consumer taxes”, and the proposed “Responsibility Tax” will be no exception. The only effect that this “tax” will have is to leave the depositors and customers of these big banks, the vast majority of whom are ordinary working people like you and me, poorer by saddling them with new or increased service charges when the banks pass on to the customers the losses to their bottom line resulting from the “responsibility tax.” Also, banks facing hyper-taxation and regulation will find themselves suddenly with less capital. Less capital means, among other things, that loans to “little people”, such as entrepreneurs, homeowners, small business owners will become largely a thing of the past, or will be characterized by such steep interest rates as to be unaffordable. Look too for the banks to forgo improvement in services and infrastructure that would have made them competitive again, settlement of outstanding debt to repair their balance sheets, or other productive activities that might just help retard the current recession and represent small steps toward rebuilding the economy. The only “winners” that would emerge from such a tax would be demagogues like the Mulatto Messiah who could point to their parasitic constituencies and say “Look at me! I reined in the greedy capitalist banksters, just like I promised!”

But we don't have that to worry about, because all of this is pure posturing. Leaving aside the transparent and despicable attempt by a liberal ideologue to redefine “responsibility” in his own self-serving terms and to pander to his narrow (and shrinking) base, it is obvious to everyone by now that Obama, like every one of his predecessors in the modern era, is wholly owned by these very banksters he ostensibly wants to “punish.” It goes without saying that this latest eructation of mock indignation is nothing by scripted gas, a ploy by an already clearly failed president to salvage what little remains of his credibility by making mock threats against a particularly unpopular segment of the Establishment. The Wall Street gang, for its part, recognizes the need to throw (or make the appearance of throwing) a sop bone to the masses and has therefore gone along with this charade. The inevitable outcome will be a lot of loud blustering by the Obamunist and his cabinet, mock attempts at punitive legislation in the Lobbyist Chambers on Crapitol Hill, followed by the whole issue dying a quiet death as the Amoricon public's attention, in typical fashion, is diverted elsewhere. In short, business as usual. Meanwhile, the banks will continue to pay themselves fat bonuses and commissions while sweetening the Democratic Party's coffers with kickbacks and favors.

But what if His Holiness is serious in his threats to impose punishment on his Wall Street benefactors? Well, it's very likely that he will meet JFK's fate. Kennedy, after all, just happened to stop a bullet in Dallas a few months making moves to curb the Federal Reserve's power. As the banksters and the Fed are partners in crime, a move against one is a move against both.

So, in closing, look for business as usual between the Political Wing and the Wall Street Wing of the Establishment. The only “change”, if any, will be the smaller dollar figure associated with your bank account.

Just In Case You've Forgotten That Pat Robertson Is a Blithering, Ignorant Idiot...

2010-01-13T20:17:00.000-05:00

… he reminds you of that fact in a one-and-a-half-minute segment of a CBN news interview concerning yesterday's earthquake in Haiti. Calling the earthquake “a blessing in disguise”, Robertson demonstrates what can only be held by sane and sentient human beings as either senile rambling or zoological stupidity (both?) by claiming that the Haitians deserve the suffering they're now enduring.

And why do they deserve it? Because, Paddy claims, the Haitians “a long time ago made a pact with the devil” that they would become his servants if he would rid their island of the French colonialists and grant them their independence. Having done that, according to Paddy, they've been paying the price by suffering unending poverty, war, and oppression ever since.

What really made my jaw drop and my eyes roll back into their sockets was Paddy's utter ignorance of history in general and the history of Haiti in particular, something that certainly shouldn't have surprised me, coming as it did from an “Evangelical Christian.” For someone seeking to present himself as knowledgeable on Haiti, particularly the events surrounding that island's independence, one would think that Paddy might have a vague clue about who ruled France at the time of the island's formal independence in 1803. Instead Paddy carelessly tosses off the name “Napoleon the Third” as his guess as to who ruled France at the time (try Napoleon the First, dipshit!). I can only imagine the response he would have given if the interviewer or one of the network's viewers had tossed out the question “hey, Pat, can you tell us about Toussaint L'Overture's role in this 'pact with the devil?'” The response would no doubt have been a blank, drooling stare followed by a bewildered “who?”, then a stammer-filled stream of excuses and a statement along the lines of “well, we're here to talk about God's plan of salvation for our poor brown brethren, not Haiti's history.”

Paddy's second howler was his attempt to sound geographically erudite by explaining the division of the island of Hispaniola into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a geographical fact that someone with the Fifth Grade education Paddy lacks probably fed him just before he went on the air.

His third and greatest knee-slapper was the statement that the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor, is “prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.” Prosperous, healthy, and full of resorts? Good grief, Paddy, whoever is feeding you your current events propaganda needs to be fired, because he/she is making you look like and even bigger moronic asshole than you already manage on your own.

The Dominican Republic, Paddy, is an impoverished hellhole just like most of the rest of Latin America. Sure, it's “prosperous and healthy” compared to Haiti, but for God's sake, what country isn't any of those things compared to that dysfunctional hellhole? In fact, the Dominican Republic is one of the most backward and underdeveloped countries in the Caribbean compared to its neighboring islands and is kept afloat almost entirely by remittances from its world-class baseball superstars who are earning mega-millions of dollars in the United States. But those baseball bucks aren't helping most of the country's population, which has an unemployment rate averaging 15.5 percent and over 40 percent of the population living below the poverty level. So paradise it ain't, Paddy. Engage your brain next time before you open your mouth!

Notice that I haven't mentioned Paddy's display of economic ignorance, that being his enthusiastic endorsement at the beginning of the interview of the “broken window fallacy” as Haiti's “blessing in disguise” and its way out of its current predicament. I didn't dwell on this because so many other people (and not just Americans) share Paddy's economic ignorance that I cannot honestly say that his ignorance is any worse than anyone else's. All it does here is mildly compound his rank ignorance of every other subject (which includes the Bible, by the way).

So why does ANYONE listen to this hypocritical charlatan anymore? I have to assume that the answer is that his lies and ignorance resonate with a huge number of Amoricons who like to think of themselves as Christian, but who wouldn't know the real thing if it appeared out of heaven before them. These are people to whom Robertson and his fellow pseudo-Christian hucksters promise endless spiritual enrichment and even temporal wealth without asking them practice their faith. Indeed, Paddy and his fellow hucksters are easily able to convince the gullible Amoricon pseudo-Evangelicals that as long as they hate, bomb, invade, occupy, and kill people who don't resemble white, middle-class, neoconservative Amerika, all in the name of Jesus, they've proven their faith and can be assured a place in heaven. Couple that with the complete ignorance of the Bible characteristic of ordinary “Evangelical Christians”, and you have a fail-safe path to wealth and fame. For this reason you can bet a year's salary that every last one of Robertson's regular viewers lapped up his explanation of Haiti's plight as truth just as incontrovertible as the scriptures themselves.

Look for the persecutors of real Evangelical Christians in the future to come from the ranks of Paddy Robertson's brain-dead State violence worshipers.

The Economy Is So Bad That...

2010-01-11T14:38:00.000-05:00

Happy(?) New Year!

For the first post of 2010 I thought I'd just forward a little bit of humor, author unknown, courtesy of an email forwarded by my mother (most of which I delete without reading, but occasionally she'll forward something not only worth reading, but worth sharing).

The Economy Is So Bad That...

I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
I ordered a burger at McDonald's and the kid behind the counter asked "Can you afford fries with that?"
CEO's are now playing miniature golf.
If your bank returns your check marked "Insufficient Funds," you call them and ask if they meant you or them.
Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.
McDonald's is selling the 1/4 ouncer.
Parents in Beverly Hills are firing their nannies and learning their children's names.
A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.
Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.
Motel Six won't leave the light on anymore.
The Mafia is laying off judges.
Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.
Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal. Oh great!! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!

And, finally...

I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs,
my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the
Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told
them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive
a truck!

Why Military Enlistment Contracts Are Fraudulent, Unnecessary, and Null and Void

2009-11-20T13:47:00.004-05:00

I had originally wanted to post this over at Will Grigg's Pro Libertate Blog in response to his recent post on the Alexis Hutchinson case, but space and time make this impractical. My intent was to bring up the question of why enlistment contracts are even necessary for the defense of a free republic that is governed by the rule of law. The fact is that the rationale behind the State's criminalization of the breach of a military enlistment contract (this being a violation of the common law principles that separate civil from criminal law) by the enlistee is really quite simple: to defraud the enlistee through misrepresentation* and to coerce the enlistee into involuntary servitude to the State once the truly fraudulent nature of this "contract"** becomes apparent.

An aspect of this whole debate over military enlistment contracts that is rarely discussed, even among libertarians who consider the freedom of contract to be nearly sacred, is why such contracts, or indeed a standing military, are necessary in the first place for effective "national defense." (Yes, I know, the libertarian readers of this blog all know the answer to this, but it bears repeating for the newly liberty-conscious or uninitiated). When the thirteen sovereign states first declared their independence from Great Britain, the citizen militias that formed to drive the British out were NOT regular standing armies in the tradition European mold, but citizen militias. Their members signed no enlistment contracts, were not bound by any formal oath of service, and were not under the "command" of any formally commissioned officers. Indeed, they functioned very much like the 4GW forces Amerika has faced in every armed conflict it has embroiled itself in since the end of World War II. Only after the Continental Congress appointed George Washington supreme commander of the newly-formed Continental Army (and by what authority did they do this, one might ask?) did the rudiments of a formal army emerge, an event that foreshadowed the metastasis of the standing army that the founders (allegedly) tried to guard against and that we are burdened with today. (The late great libertarian sage Murray Rothbard wrote a fascinating description of the real George Washington, one certainly not taught in the Establishment's public indoctrination centers called public schools and state universities. His account details, among other unsavory things, Washington's ambitious campaign to turn the Continental Army into a carbon copy of the standing imperial armies then prevalent on the Old Continent).

Up until roughly 1779, the nature of the Continental Army was that of a loose collection of local militias, fluid in structure and composed entirely of volunteers, unbound by any form of formal contract. And why would they need one? These were men (and not a few women) committed to fighting for THEIR OWN FREEDOM, a commitment of the heart and soul that certainly does not require the organization of an oppressive gang or conscription thereinto. It was only after Washington and various allies in the Continental Congress succeeded in "Prussifying" the Continental Army, which after independence became the United States Army, that the rigid structures of imperial nationalist armies took hold, with all of the attendant corruption and abuse of power and authority. In other words, the federal Army was no longer, for all practical purposes, a volunteer citizens militia, but a formal institution of the central government, a recipe for creeping tyranny under any set of circumstances.

To summarize, neither an enlistment contract nor a standing army is in any way necessary for TRUE "national defense" if the government under which a nation's people live is one that respects and protects their lives, liberty, and property in accordance with constitutional and natural law, thus making it a nation worth defending in the first place.. Free people will not hesitate for a second to arm themselves and rush to their nation's defense when they know that it is genuinely and tangibly threatened. They certainly don't need any government to tell them this or force them into doing so when their homes, properties, families, and communities are under direct threat of assault, for it is mankind's natural instinct to protect that which he loves and in which he has a natural stake of ownership.

A standing army, on the other hand, is nothing but the State's armed muscle, a tyrannical force used to impose the State's will upon its subjects for its own narrow and selfish purposes, purposes that seldom ever have anything to do with the defense of the citizen's home, property, rights, life, and community. For this reason a legal ruse is required, backed by subterfuge and coercion, to mask the deceit and criminality behind the army's mission. True patriots, deceived into believing that their service in such body is an act of genuine lawful good, must be forced into a state of involuntary servitude to this monstrous organization once they discover the organization's real purpose: to serve the ends of the State at the citizen-patriot's expense. The enlistment contract is the instrument through which this is accomplished, and is thus a pseudo-legal perversion, a weapon of fraud and subversion of law, rather than a legal guarantor of institutional integrity or individual freedom of contract.

(*the misrepresentation being that the mark is enlisting to "defend the nation/Constitution/freedom)

(** The State's fiat declaring military enlistment contracts as exceptions to common law notwithstanding, any contract in which one party is allowed to violate or abrogate the contract at will is NOT a valid, legally binding contract)

Bill O'Reilly Is The Biggest Pinhead Of Them All (But You Already Knew That)

2009-11-18T19:28:00.000-05:00

Kudos to David Kramer for posting this link today on the LRC Blog of Bill O'Reilly's latest journalistic hit piece disguised as an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano. The fact that a loudmouth juvenile bully like O'Reilly, who hurls insults at those who exercise the poor judgment to appear on his show like cats gack up hairballs, even has an audience at all at Faux News says more about that outlet's viewership than any of its other programs. While O'Reilly's approach is insufferable on even his mildest days, his interview with the judge represented a new low, which one wouldn't think was possible with O'Reilly.

The first thing the viewer notices about O'Reilly, in addition to his habit of not even making a pretense of objective journalism, is his substitution of bluster and attitude for presentation of fact and ad hominem attacks on his guests for reasoned argument. Of course this is due to the fact that in 99 out 100 programs, O'Reilly has no argument on which to base his rants, something that quickly becomes apparent to even the most casual viewer of his program. Frequent libertarian guests such as Congressman Ron Paul and Judge Napolitano routinely rip O'Reilly's warped neoconservative screeds to shreds, which is why O'Reilly never lets any of his guests who disagree with him (i.e., most of them) finish a sentence; to do so would expose him as the acerebral bloviator that he clearly is. Think of him as the Morton Downey, Jr. of “serious” cable news networks (complete with occasional outbursts of profanity, as this off-air clip from May, 2208 shows). While this is not Judge Napolitano's first appearance on O'Reilly's program, it ought to be his last. To appear again on again O'Reilly's program is to confer upon it a respect and dignity it doesn't deserve.

The subject of O'Reilly's “interview” was the impending criminal trial in New York of the self-confessed “planner” of the 911 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and several of his associates, recently captured in Pakistan and extradited to United States. O'Reilly, like the rest of his neocon cohorts, is dead set against the idea of trying these men in U.S. civilian courts, quite possibly due to the fact that he, like the government he professes to hate but in fact worships, is horrified at the prospect of such a trial forcing the U.S. government to product evidence of the men's guilt that it doesn't have. Judge Napolitano, a man of great judicial experience, attempted to explain to O'Reilly why he thought that it was absolutely the proper course of action to try these men in civilian court. O'Reilly, true to form, and horrified at the idea of being made to look the idiot that he is, cut the judge off mid-sentence during each answer, liberally and patronizingly firing off his favorite term, “pinhead”, in an attempt to demean the judge. It didn't work, as the judge maintained the calm, dignified composure for which he is well known, making O'Reilly look again like the classless thug he is. While O'Reilly apparently shocked many viewers with his deprecatory dismissal of the Constitution and the rights that it guarantees everyone accused of a crime by the government (even neoconservative fascists who despise it and would deny its protections to those they hate), that really didn't alarm me at all, and shouldn't have alarmed anyone who has seen O'Reilly in action even once. Hatred of the Constitution is, after all, a key tenet of the neocon creed, their loud and belligerent assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. What should horrify every decent American who values liberty and the rule of law is that a crass thug like O'Reilly represents not only the reigning Establishment (whatever its partisan label), but a huge percentage of the compliant, belligerent, bigoted, ignorant television-fed sheeple who allow it keep its grip on and expand its power.

I truly look forward to the day when O'Reilly is compelled to appear on someone else's program and gets a taste of his own verbal medicine. Alas, that's unlikely to happen, and for two reasons. First, O'Reilly is far too much of an intellectually and morally bankrupt coward to allow himself to be given his own medicine, especially in a venue not under his complete control. Second, I'm hard pressed to think of a reputable talk news show host as classless and tactless on air as O'Reilly, which would be
a prerequisite to any such "medication." I guess we can always dream, though, can't we?

Meanwhile, let us all continue to support Judge Napolitano, who has apparently garnered such high viewer ratings on his internet Freedom Watch program that Fox is considering promoting his show to the Fox News channel (thanks to the Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger for this update). What a coup that would be! It would be even sweeter if O'Reilly's ratings tanked at the same time to the point where his show was canceled.

Again, we can always dream!

Chicago Reminds Its 911 Dispatchers That Agents of the State Get Special Privileges

2009-10-23T13:59:00.004-04:00

Two Chicago 911 dispatchers are in hot water for failing to promptly dispatch help to a Chicago cop under fire from (rival) gang members, forcing him to “fend for himself.”

Hey, Officer Oinky: Welcome to our world!

Note in the article how Chicago's Director of Emergency Management, Ray Orozco, recites the typical “nothing to see behind that curtain, folks” routine by refusing to identify either of the two dispatchers or disclosing the length of their unpaid suspensions (if they had been cops who had murdered a citizen without reasonable cause, they'd be getting a paid vacation). It never fails to amaze me how tenaciously the State's bureaucrats work to defend their own, even while claiming to “punish” them, usually with paid vacations (a.k.a. “suspensions”), verbal reprimands, or other insults to the public. Equally breathtaking is the idea that a system rife with systemic corruption, mismanagement, and incompetence can somehow change its stripes in a split second and act like a paragon of efficiency and valor when one of the State's privileged elite needs its services.

Just how inept is Chicago's emergency response system in answering citizen calls for assistance? According to the Chicago Sun-Times' Fran Spielman in an article published in March of this year, backlogged 911 calls have simply been “disappearing” due to “glitches” in the service's computer system, which the Midwestern Corruption Capital spent more than six million dollars to upgrade. Of course technology has not been the only culprit; human negligence has plagued the system in equal measure, with disastrous results. Just ask Brigitte Biver, who did the responsible thing by calling the city's 311 (non-emergency response) number to report dangerous and illegal fireworks exploding over her home, only to be transferred to the city's 911 emergency number, one of whose operators laughed hysterically at her before telling her to call back later, hanging up on her without even taking her information. Biver apparently never filed a complaint with the city about this dangerously unprofessional behavior on the part of the city's first responders. She probably learned through life's experiences that doing so seldom ever leads to any form of corrective action and in any case probably didn't think that the events surrounding her call merited the extra wasted effort. One can only imagine what would have happened had she been calling about a life-or-death emergency.

But Ms. Biver's case was indeed a joke compared to a 2001 incident involving the death of 19-year-old Douglas Gant, an asthmatic teenager whose mother called 911 three times to get help as her son was gripped by an asthma attack that was suffocating him. Each time, 911 emergency services either did not answer the phone or, finally, after 26 rings of the phone, refused to provide Mrs. Gant with emergency CPR instructions for her son, who was in a state of respiratory arrest. The Gant family sued the city for $50 million dollars, using as precedent a 1997 civil lawsuit against the city in which survivors of a 59-year-old man who bled to death from a leg ulceration after Chicago Fire Department dispatchers twice refused requests for ambulance response successfully sued the city for $3.06 million.

Chicago's emergency services are hardly the worst in the nation, nor are the incidents referenced here aberrations. Still, it's worth noting that the powers-that-be are always willing not only to tolerate, but even actively encourage the status quo until one of their own suffers. If this doesn't further illustrate the essential need for privatized emergency services, in which profit-seeking first-responders either satisfy their customers or go out of business, then I don't know what does. Meanwhile, Officer Oinky appears to have quite successfully “fended for himself” while being chased by rival gangbangers, apparently suffering nothing more than a couple of bullet holes in his cruiser. Would the average Chicago citizen, disarmed by the State of Illinois's gun-grabbing government, have been so lucky?

How Many Howard Unruhs Will Iraqhanistan Produce?

2009-10-20T12:28:00.000-04:00

Howard Unruh is dead. The man who set the baseline for spree killers in the second half of the twentieth century died yesterday at age 88 in the Trenton (New Jersey) State Hospital for the criminally insane where he had spent the previous sixty years of his life. For those unfamiliar with his story, Unruh, an army combat veteran of World War II, went on a rampage in his Camden, New Jersey neighborhood on Sunday, September 6, 1949, gunning down and killing 13 people, including three young children, and wounding 16 others in just 10 minutes before running out of ammunition. Here is a detailed narrative of Unruh's life and the killing spree that is about as detailed and accurate as you're likely to see anywhere. Reading it begs the question: How many Howard Unruhs, combat veterans of bloody and insane wars that have driven them to the point of madness, inhabit America today, their pathologies lurking just below the surface, awaiting the right trigger to set them off?

It is almost certain that Unruh suffered pre-existing mental illness that might have eventually led to a murderous outburst regardless of his life experiences (we'll leave aside the question of why the army didn't screen him out during its induction process, a question to which we already know the answer). It also seems obvious from reading his case history that his condition was aggravated by his military experiences and that his killing spree was the direct result of the trauma he experienced as a tank gunner in the U.S. Army's 342nd armored battalion. According to his military record, Unruh, a highly decorated soldier, saw action in Italy, France, and Belgium (including the Battle of the Bulge), all scenes of some of the bloodiest combat in the European theater of operations. By all accounts he was a loner, meaning that it would have been almost impossible for anyone to gauge the affects of his combat experiences on his psyche. Unruh's mother and brother reported, however, that after returning home at war's end he was “a changed person”, always tense and uneasy, not the person he was before enlisting. This is certainly typical of many combat veterans who re-enter civilian life, although very few veterans exhibit pathologies surrounding the readjustment process. Unruh's family also reported that he decorated his bedroom in his mother's home with all of his military insignia and that he had developed an obsession with firearms, even going so far as to set up a firing range in his mother's basement. All of these combined symptoms should have sent up proverbial “red flags.” While the term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” was unknown at the time, the term “battle fatigue” certainly was and Unruh was exhibiting classic symptoms of it.

So did Unruh receive any form of veteran's medical assistance? There's no evidence from any contemporary sources that he did, though it's likely that even if he had, his symptoms of mental illness would have been overlooked or ignored, standard operating procedure for Veterans Administration medical care both then and now. Even as advanced as psychiatric care is today compared with that available to Unruh's generation, veterans with PTSD or other forms of mental illness are routinely misdiagnosed, sometimes deliberately. Can we really expect that Unruh would have been given help that would have prevented the needless deaths of 13 people?

So what exactly has changed in sixty-plus years? The answer is, not much at all. It's very likely that the army doctors who examined Unruh at the time of his enlistment in 1942 saw signs of his mental illness, but chose to ignore them. After all, the United States Army needed cannon fodder and it didn't make any difference whether or not said raw material was of sound mind. In fact, a cynic could argue that the military powers-that-were very probably preferred recruits with a psychopathic edge, all the better to kill more krauts and nips. Just as today, with the U.S. Army lowering its enlistment standards to admit all sorts of human flotsam, including those with criminal records and psychiatric issues. All the better to kill more ragheads, blowback be damned. Let's see if anyone recalls Santayana's famous dictum the next time a recently-discharged Iraqhanistan Vet recreates the Battle of Falluja on Main Street USA.

Red(Neck) State Rethuglican Chickenhawks Volunteer to Shed the Blood of Others – Let's Have Them Lead The Charge

2009-10-08T17:49:00.002-04:00

It shouldn't surprise us that South Carolina Rethuglican Senator Lindsey Graham is at it again, waving his fist and flapping his gums about waging war against a country that poses no threat to America's national security (but that does pose a very tangible threat to the Amerikan Empire). After all, given the thorough and well-deserved thrashing at the polls and loss of the Oval Office that his party suffered last Winter, ol' Lindsey and his fellow Rethuglican warmongers have to distract the sheeple's attention from the economic misery that he and his fellow Bushtards helped bring about. Apparently he and fellow redneck Rethuglican Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia hope to do just that by demanding that Amerika, rather than Israel, have the “honor” of launching a first strike against Iran “if necessary*.” One would think that the Rethugs would've gotten the message in no uncertain terms last November that We the People are tired of playing their war games, but apparently Lindsey and Sax didn't get that memo. But now that they've anted up to fire the first salvo against their latest imaginary foe, let's see what assets of their own they plan to put on the line when the shooting starts and what they can do to carry their share of the burden they wish to impose on the rest of us.

In Graham's case, it might not be entirely fair to refer to him as a “chickenhawk”, since he did actually serve in the armed forces. We see from his official U.S. Senate biography that he served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force as a Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyer (not exactly G.I. Joe or a Top Gun fighter pilot who can claim actual combat experience) between 1982 and 1988, followed by service in the South Carolina Air National Guard in the same capacity until 1994 when he was elected to the House of Representatives. Graham's Wikipedia biography also reports that he served a brief (two-week) reserve stint in 2007 in Iraq, where he worked on “detainee and rule-of-law issues” and that he also served in Afghanistan during the August 2009 Senate recess. Both of these “deployments” make a mockery of the long (minimum of six months, maximum of indefinite and open-ended), arduous, dangerous, and unconstitutional overseas deployments of national guardsmen, who, unlike the junketing Graham who had full and open-ended authority to set his own agenda and terms of service, have no choice in whether or not they deploy or for how long. Indeed, the fact that Graham was no longer an active member of the Air Force reserve serves as sufficient proof that these “deployments” were exercises in tax-payer subsidized frivolity and hubris, political publicity stunts to provide him with cover for his role in the subversion of constitutional due process for detainees and his underhanded dealings on behalf of the military-industrial complex that no doubt contributes heavily to his campaign war chest. Now that Graham wants to spread the disaster that he and his fellow Rethuglicans started in Iraq and Afghanistan into Iran, Pakistan, and beyond, it's time to give him a chance to put his money where his mouth is.

So, Lindsey, if you want to see Amerika fire the first shot at Iran, I suggest that you resign your Senate seat, demand your way back onto active duty in the Air Force, and roger up to deploy to the CENTCOM theater of operations in advance of the first shots being fired. Better yet, demand to be given a front-line command of a combat unit that will be involved in leading the initial air strikes on Tehran or any other Iranian targets chosen by your MIC buddies. None of this REMF (rear-echelon motherfucker) stuff for you, pal. Just think: your posterity, should you not survive the first few days of hostilities, will have the warm and fuzzy feeling from knowing that, like great emperors of bygone eras, you donned your battle armor and led your troops into the battle you so desperately wanted to see fought, making the ultimate sacrifice along with them. Everyone will then know for certain that you fought for a righteous cause that you truly believed in, rather than a selfish, arrogant, imperialist adventure funded by special interest groups. Now's your chance to prove it, Lindsey.

Saxby Chambliss, on the other hand, has no such cover. Ol' Sax epitomizes the term “chickenhawk.” Like his fellow Rethuglican and Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Sax “had other priorities” when it came time to donning a blue or green uniform and answering his country's call. Sax was the lucky beneficiary of five student deferments during the Vietnam War era. Ultimately, Sax managed to convince his draft board that “an old football knee injury” while in college made him unfit for service and was given a sixth and final deferment, this time on medical grounds. Of course Sax conveniently neglects to mention any of this in his biography on his official Senate website. Go figure.

Given the unchecked and incestuous arrogance of Washington, D.C., particularly that club of elitist criminals known as the U.S. Senate, it completely stands to reason that someone with not only no military experience, but with a documented history of evading military service would be named to serve not only on the Senate Armed Services committee, but on the “Intelligence” committee as well. This goes a long way in explaining, among other things, why the events of 9/11/01 caught that element of the U.S. armed services responsible for domestic security totally off guard, even after several of the nation's intelligence agencies made it clear that an attack was imminent. In a real democracy, ol' Sax would have been tossed out of office on his ass, or at a minimum would have had some serious 'splaining to do.

But let's pretend to be generous and give ol' Sax another chance to prove himself and to put his money where his mouth is. Speaking of Sax's mouth, he apparently put his foot in it, big time, a couple of months after the 9/11 attacks by telling a group of emergency first-responders in Valdosta, Georgia that he though a great solution to America's new-found “terrism” problem, at least at the local level, would be "turning the Sheriff loose to arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line." Amazing, isn't it, how loudmouthed, belligerent rednecks who dodge the draft always love to play the role of tough guy from inside a phalanx of armed bodyguards or within a comfy Washington, D.C. office? Anyway, let's give Sax a chance to fulfill his fantasy.

We couldn't very well put Sax in a military uniform. Not only is he much too old, he very likely also couldn't shut his mouth long enough to listen to someone who would try to tell him something that will save his life and prevent others around him from getting killed too. Given his stereotypical redneck affinity for belligerent authority that hides behind a badge, I recommend that we make Sax the Sheriff of Iran after the imperial Amerikan troops have landed and the occupation has begun, much like L. Paul Bremer during the early stages of the Iraq occupation. “Sheriff of Iran” - that title sure has a nice fairytale-like ring to it, doesn't it? Imagine the fun Sax will have in arresting all of those Shi'ite Muslims that have had the audacity to cross the county line into his new fiefdom. He'd be the perfect person to fill the job: a draft-dodging coward who blusters loudly, never fights his own battles, and uses proxies to inflict pain, injury, and loss upon others (a perfect representative of the Amerikan Empire). Sax would have made the perfect small-town Georgia sheriff if he hadn't bribed his way into someone's law school five decades ago, so why not give him a job that makes the best (or worst) use of what little talent he has? Sure, it's likely that them-thar Shi'ite Muslims will shoot back at ol' Sax, probably eventually putting him in a pine box. But hey, if you have to go out, why not go out in a blaze of glory, especially as warrior in the holy war against terrism?

The General and the Sheriff – two new titles for Graham and Chambliss that match their arrogant imperial ambitions. If these two cretins wish to attack Iran, an act that will certainly result in destabilizing the entire Middle East and Southwest Asia region, causing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths and sending oil prices through the stratosphere while causing the dollar's destruction, then they need to feel the full effects of their decision personally. Since they wish for the rest of us to put our economic futures and our nation's survival at risk, not to mention asking more troops to put their lives needlessly on the line, asking them to put their own lives and fortunes where their mouths are is certainly not unreasonable. So how about it, guys? Are you still going to let them call you “chickenhawks?”

(*Would anyone care to wager just how loosely Graham and Chambliss would define the term “necessary” for their purpose in this context?)

A State-Worshiping “Evangelical Christian” Church Might Be Turning Over a New Leaf

2009-10-06T18:48:00.000-04:00

My mother reported indignantly in an email to me today that her church's new pastor and staff have prohibited her, my father, and some of their war-worshiping neocon fellow congregants from maintaining a “Support the Troops” booth in front of the sanctuary on Sunday mornings. I confess that I have no idea what is behind this. For all I know it could be that they're taking up too much space in the lobby, or maybe some fragile egos have been bruised (today's “churches” are chock full of such, to the same degree as society at large). Or maybe, just maybe (though I doubt it), the new pastor might have undergone a spiritual epiphany in which he came to realize that “supporting the troops” and by extension the immoral and constitutional war(s) they're fighting is not exactly in harmony with the messages contained in the Gospels (*Gasp!* Someone who actually reads and takes to heart the Four Gospels – say it ain't so!) Maybe the new pastor thinks that it would be better to reach out to the troops by telling them to lay down their arms and spread the message of Christ's love to those whom “their country” hates and who, to hear “their politicians” tell it, want to “destroy us and our way of life.” Did not Jesus, after all, command us to love our enemies? Maybe the new pastor believes that supporting people who want to love Arabs and Afghans is preferable to supporting people who want to kill them.

Well, Mom swears that she and her war-worshiping friends are “not going to go away”and that she'll take on anyone who tries to stop her.

Hey, Mom, why don't you and Dad just go find another church? The metropolitan area that you live in has thousands of them, at least one of which is sure to mirror your state-worshiping, warmongering beliefs. But that's right, I forgot: Neocons believe, like the “liberals” they allegedly despise (but whose direct ideological descendants they are) that their way is the only way and that all who dissent must be forced to follow. Besides, stirring up Scheisse is much more fun that doing the right thing.

While the odds are not good, I sincerely hope that what is happening at this church is the beginning of a return to a true scripture-focused mission, one that castes aside temporal politics and focuses on nourishing the soul. It's long past time that this happened. Let a few little trees sprout!

Could Iran Be Egging The U.S. Into War (And Can Anyone Blame Them)? (UPDATE: 10/2/09)

2009-09-29T19:51:00.005-04:00

The usual suspects inside the Imperial Capitol have been belching up a new round of belligerent noises against Iran this week following revelations –based on deliberate disinformation-- that Iran has constructed a “secret” facility for constructing weapons-grade nuclear material. I won't go into the details here of how this charge is transparently false (see the IAEA's official director's report for a debunking of this claim). I will, however, lay down the theory that the Iranian regime is capitalizing on and feeding the neocon-driven hysteria in hopes that Rome-on-the-Potomac will launch an offensive war against their country.

I can just hear the derisive snorts in response to that suggestion. “Are you insane? Why would Iran commit and act of national suicide by provoking the United States into a war that it can't possibly win?”

The answer is very simple: a war with Iran will hasten, if not quickly result in, the Amerikan Empire's collapse.

It is true that an offensive war against Iran would begin badly for the Iranian side, probably resulting in the bombing of major Iranian cities, ports, oil, and nuclear power facilities for starters, followed at some point by a full-scale ground forces invasion of Iranian territory, either from Iraqghanistan (do forgive me this humorously cynical synthesis of our current quagmires), amphibiously from the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf, or some combination of both. It is certain that hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of Iranians will suffer in the process and that U.S. tactical objectives will be met in a matter of weeks, just as they were in the Mess in Potamia next door before it became a second Vietnam. Following this, I expect that the Obamunist, he of no military experience and with a highly flimsy credibility rating among the American Chickenhawk Class, will exuberantly exploit what he will be led to believe is “victory!” Like his equally simian predecessor when he appeared on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the Obamunist will probably also equally enthusiastically declare “mission accomplished” after just enough troops have ensconced themselves inside Persia to make it look like another imperial outpost in the Fertile Crescent. But the Iranians have some insurmountable advantages over their Amerikan foe.

For all of the flatulence eructing from Rome-on-the-Potomac like gas after a chili cook-off about the possible first use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. or its Israeli master, both Iran and RotP (and surely Tel Aviv too) know that Amerika is completely without moral standing in the rest of the world's eyes to do this. For all of the head-bobbing by Pax Americana's European satraps, for all of their imitative chest thumping calling for the maximum sanction against the mullahs of Tehran, everyone knows that the nuclear option is off the table. This is especially the case when one considers that Russia and China, the emerging new superpowers of the post-Amerikan age, are so close to and so heavily invested in Iran's economy and infrastructure. Neither the Bear nor the Dragon, flush with a surplus of Amerika's fiat dollars (albeit of declining value), much of which they have put to work inside Iran, are about to see their investments go up in a mushroom cloud. Both will act very quickly to put the rogue Amerikan regime in its place should even a serious hint of nuclear “first strike” make its way into official conversation, and Iran knows this.

Notwithstanding all such talk from the neoconservative wing of the Amerikan warmongering faction, the response from neither Russia nor China is likely to be military. Unlike the belligerent pea brains inside the D.C. Beltway, who seem incapable of imagining (or respecting) any other kind of threat, both Russia and China realize the inherently uneconomic, destabilizing, and counterproductive nature of military action against the U.S. Holding all of the economic cards in the era of a collapsing U.S. economy, Russia and China's reaction to U.S. aggression against their interests in Iran will be economic, and very much more devastating than a military strike. China is very likely to finally dump the dollar and begin a series of trade embargoes against the U.S. in the form of export restrictions that will very quickly bring what little remains of the U.S. retail economy to its knees. Russia, though with much less economic leverage over Amerika, can still wreak havoc on Amerika's oil lifeline by possibly shutting off flows of oil from Central Asia and the Caucasus to the Black Sea or the Mediterranean, disrupting the international energy markets, sending petroleum prices through the stratosphere, causing a worldwide oil shortage and skyrocketing prices that might just deliver the coup d' grace blow to the U.S. economy (and certainly destroying what little of its industrial infrastructure remains). Once again, Iran benefits from the fallout while seeing the Amerikan bully castrated in the process.

Israel, Amerika's overlord, might very well blackmail or strong-arm the Obama Administration into letting it initiate hostilities against Iran, or might very well use an American “first strike” as cover to launch a nuclear first strike of its own. Either way, any gains from such a strike will be chimerical and short-lived. Dependent upon Amerikan taxpayer largesse (as well as Amerikan-subsidized oil) for its very existence, not to mention its regional military might, Israel's military muscle will turn to jello as soon as the dollar upon which such might is sustained collapses. Unless the Israeli government has invested in an alternate international currency or large quantities of precious metals, it is as doomed as its Amerikan vassal, and even if it does shift its currency away from the dollar (after abandoning it in the manner of a parasite that abandons its host's carcass after sucking it dry and to death), the idea that it will find another host to sustain it in the style that it was accustomed to while feeding off of its Amerikan host is ludicrous beyond belief. In short, Israel, once goading Amerika into initiating hostilities against Iran, perhaps even launching the opening salvo, will disappear, stand down, and sit on the sidelines, allowing its Amerikan vassal to absorb the losses, costs, and defeat before collapsing itself.

It is difficult to say when the final collapse of U.S. economic and military might will occur in the wake of an outbreak of war with Iran, but if events unfold as I've just described, Amerika will be incapable of even mounting the defense of its own borders from within its own territory, let alone projecting imperial power abroad. With the dollar reduced to something less valuable than Monopoly[TM] money, the ability of the Empire to maintain its legions, to equip them with technology, fuel, weapons, and supplies will vanish. It is entirely possible that the those serving in the imperial legions will find themselves in a predicament similar to that of their Roman antecedents of two millenia ago – stuck in a foreign and hostile country with no way to get back home. This assumes that there will even be a “home” to get back to, as the United States that they left might no longer exist, having broken apart or launched into civil war as the national economy collapses. Again, Iran benefits in every way.

Every aspect of this dismal scenario benefits both the mullahs who rule Iran and the Iranian people themselves. First they suffered for two and a half decades at the hands of an Amerikan-imposed tyrant. Then, no sooner did they throw off this tyrant's rule, they had their country invaded and ravaged by another Amerikan puppet who ruled their western neighbor (remember him, Mr. "Weapons of Mass Destruction?"). In the three decades since, they have been threatened, bullied, and sanctioned without letup. Like most of the rest of the planet, they're past sick and tired of Amerikan arrogance and are eager to bait Amerika into not only biting off more than it can chew, but into making it fatally choke on the ultimate geopolitical and economic bone. Given the egotistical demons that rule Amerika and the unwavering, if pathetically unrealistic and misguided faith that they place in its war machine, the Iranians are soon likely to get their wish and their vindication.

Go ahead, Amerika – make Iran's day. The Iranians will have the last laugh.

UPDATE, October 2, 2009: Apparently I am not the only one who envisions the scenario I describe above. No less a luminary than the incomparable Congressman Ron Paul sees the Chinese as the primary beneficiary of a U.S. strike on Iran, with an attendant collapse of the U.S. dollar as the Chinese dump it as the world's reserve currency. See this summary of Ron's interview with (the despicable, but sometimes cogent) Glenn Beck for his full analysis. (Thanks to today's LewRockwell.com for the link.)

Update to My May 3rd Post – Apparently Someone Ran With This Idea

2009-09-24T13:11:00.002-04:00

Back on May 3rd of this year, I suggested in this blog that we liberty lovers collectively “make 'Census Weasel' one of the most dangerous jobs in Amerika.” Apparently someone in Kentucky decided to jump the gun and do exactly that. I think I can say with reasonable certainty, and a sense of relief, that my readership of this blog doesn't extend to rural Kentucky, so it's likely that this is a case of “parallel thinking.” Although details behind the murder of 51-year-old census worker Bill Sparkman in Manchester, Kentucky yesterday appear still to be sketchy, it appears that he was going door-to-door in rural Clay County in an attempt to gather census data. While I find it unlikely that Mr. Sparkman used his official credentials in an intimidating manner, my own experience with “pre-census” agents leaves room for reasonable assumption that he also very likely made no secret of the fact that “co-operation” with the census bureau was compulsory on pain of punitive legal action.

Let me begin by repeating –and I can't do this often enough in the era of official disinformation-- that as a libertarian, I am absolutely and unalterably opposed to the INITIATION of aggressive force! While the agents of the census bureau are conducting what is certainly a needlessly intrusive and extra-constitutional “data mining” operation on behalf of Leviathan, it is inexcusable for anyone to initiate lethal force against another human being on that basis alone, regardless of their occupation. A reasonable person (yes, I know those are in short supply these days, but that's for another future rant and is neither here nor there) would simply tell the visiting bureaucrat “I will cooperate with you by providing the only piece of information you need to perform your duties in accordance with the constitutionally stated purpose of the census, and that is the number of people in my household for purposes of congressional enumeration. That number is [#]. Be sure that write that down. Good day to you, sir/ma'am.” If they attempt to elicit further information, one should gently but firmly refuse to cooperate and close the door. While it's possible that there will be legal consequences for refusal to complete the full survey, that is for addressing in the future. The bottom line is that you will have fully cooperated with the census bureau in giving it the information it needs to fulfill its constitutional duties.

I have no way of knowing how Sparkman conducted himself on his appointed rounds. If his mother's and his acquaintances' descriptions of his personality are accurate, he most likely was not forceful or officious in making his presence felt. The two “case workers” who visited my house back in late April to conduct an “address check”, while far from surly in their demeanor, still made it clear that “they were from the government”, as if that magical incantation somehow justified their intrusion onto my private property or their theft of my precious time away from work. Both of them struck me as being of the “middle-aged-males-with-graduate-degrees-in-humanities-who've never-worked-in-the-private sector” demographic who probably took the job only because local government budget cuts had forced them out of their sinecures and they had run out of unemployment benefits. It's very likely that they would much rather have been stacking books in the local library or processing applications for driver's licenses at the local DMV than slogging on foot going door to door in a rural Arizona community where guns and suspicion of officialdom are both ubiquitous.

No matter what the circumstances of the individual census workers, it's probably a good idea for anyone who would accept federal dole money to intrude into other people's business to realize that the resentment of the federal government's power expansion, and the police state that has accompanied it are at an all-time high. Simply stated, the majority has no more faith in the federal government and does not trust anything it does. Thus people justifiably see its agents as enemies. It's quite possible that whoever killed Bill Sparkman had been the victim of the federal government's crimes in the past, whether it was through an IRS audit, a federal law enforcement agency asset forfeiture, a BATF raid, or some other crime against person or property and that the murderer had no intention of ever cooperating with anything or anyone federal ever again, especially a campaign of intrusive snooping, which is exactly what the decennial census has become. Rural Kentucky is certainly not a haven for the rich and famous, so it's very likely that the person was unable to defend themselves against Leviathan's predatory power. Had I been in such a person's shoes, my life having been turned upside down or destroyed by federal lawlessness, I too would probably have snapped at the sight of a federal agent on my property, although an act of murder would certainly not be justified under any circumstances short of a display of unwarranted force by said individual.

I am also not at all discounting the possibility that Sparkman's death was a “false flag” operation, as Lew Rockwell has hinted on the LRC Blog. Given the level of paranoia the entire federal oligarchy must be feeling as more and more of the people are resisting anything and everything it attempts to do in its lawless grab for power, its back is against the wall. As was almost surely the case with the events surrounding September 11, 2001, the feds are exploiting the growing unrest as a means of further cementing their own power. In Sparkman's case, I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that the regional census office knowingly put him in harm's way, certain that someone in rural Clay County with a healthy suspicion or hatred of strangers, especially those connected to the federal government, would exercise lethal violence against him. Government needs sacrificial lambs from among the commoners every so often to justify the solidification and expansion of its power (the victims of the Oklahoma City and 9/11 World Trade Center bombings are prominent examples), and a man like Bill Sparkman fit the bill perfectly for this purpose. He was a simple and expendable creature who wouldn't be missed by anyone of real power or importance, but who could be used as an example of the ideal statist citizen doing his duty. In other words, he was the perfect patsy, a prop for painting a scenario in which backward, in-bred, government-hating rednecks who need to brought to heel are dealt with through well-justified armed government aggression. If this is the case, I can think of no more sickeningly cynical example of manipulation than this.

So for now we'll sit back and see how Leviathan deals with the Sparkman murder. Will it result in armed census agents deploying in rural areas? (If so, they'd better come in great number, because they will more than meet their match among most of rural America.) Regardless of the outcome, we can be sure of this: in the state's desperate campaign to assert itself, this will be one more piece of ammunition in its arsenal. It's up to us to be prepared to defend against it.

Hey, Monkey Ears, Read the Constitution – YOU Have No Authority to Impose a Tariff!

2009-09-12T17:43:00.003-04:00

In his latest defecation upon the Constitution he fraudulently swore an oath to uphold, President Monkey Ears has unilaterally decided to impose a 35% tariff on Chinese-made automobile tires, apparently as a sop to the labor unions that helped propel him to the imperial throne. I'm undecided as to whether or not this was a result of the African Imbecile's ignorance of the law, or merely an expression of his contempt for it. Either way, he has violated it.

So what exactly does the Constitution say about tariffs? Well, Article I, Section 8 specifically gives the Congress “[p]ower To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”, which is the very definition of a tariff. Looking at the rest of Article I, Section 8, it becomes clear to the reader that the founders intended that Congress, as the branch of the federal government closest to and representing the people, have control of anything and everything having to do with taxation.

Next, let's look at Article II to see what powers it authorizes the president. In addition to serving as commander-in-chief of the armed services (NOT of the entire population, as the totalitarian fascialist executive branch worshipers like to imagine), the president has the “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate [emphasis added], to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

“The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session”

Now unless I've overlooked something in those two paragraphs, I see absolutely NOTHING in that list of presidential responsibilities that even hints at the authority to impose tariffs, especially unilaterally. Now I'd be willing to give Monkey Ears a soupcon of benefit of the doubt if, and only if he had on record Congressional support for such a tariff in the form of actual legislation, approved by both houses of Congress, for imposing it. But I've heard and seen no indication whatsoever of anything hinting at even so much as discussion of such an act in Congress. Ergo, Monkey Ears is acting unilaterally and in violation of his oath of office.

I would like to say that if Monkey Ears were a Republican, both Houses of Congress would be screaming for his impeachment. However, I can't in good conscience make that accusation, given the fact that a Democratic Congress refused to impeach his predecessor for much more egregious crimes and violations of office.

This serves as yet another reminder of just how lawless this nation has become. Stand by; it's going to get much worse before it ever gets better.

Some Captive Children Spared the Obamunist's Propaganda Rant

2009-09-09T12:41:00.000-04:00

I'm elated to report that my six-year-old grandson and his fellow first graders were spared the traumatic agony of force-fed statist collectivist propaganda from His Holiness Saint Barack I yesterday morning. While I'm not sure if it was oversight or a deliberate (and rare and wise, for a publik skool) decision on the part of a school administrator, someone decided that there were more important things with which to occupy young minds (dare we hope that it included the “Three Rs”?) than a political PR session. Three cheers to whomever did the right thing! Now let us hope that the Secular Messiah's first sermon for kids was such a flop as to be never repeated.

Chuck Baldwin on America's Irrelevant Churches

2009-08-25T13:38:00.003-04:00

I've been waiting for it for a long time, but the latest opinion letter by the Reverend Chuck Baldwin finally states it in firm black and white: America's churches are, for the most part, completely irrelevant, both for the advocacy of liberty and natural law and, more importantly, teaching the truth of the Scriptures. I've been predicting the emergence of “underground” or “home” churches for quite some time now, as the state-worshiping, thoroughly co-opted, secularly saturated, pseudo-churches become more and more obviously facades for and tools of the temporal state-corporate Establishment. I strongly urge my readers to read Chuck's letter. In fact, if you haven't done so already, I urge those of you who consider yourselves Christians to subscribe to his email newsletters. They are completely free, published approximately bi-weekly, and never fail to contain delicious nuggets of liberty-centered education with a spiritual twist.

Shame On The Swiss!

2009-08-19T14:40:00.005-04:00

I read with thorough revulsion this morning the fact that Switzerland is going to compel its banks to grant the IRS full access to accounts held by American citizens. I simply cannot imagine what would compel a sovereign nation like Switzerland to abandon its own national sovereignty and kowtow to the authority of a dying empire like the United Fascialist State of Amerika. This, in my opinion, is a move that will in the long run hurt the Swiss far more than it will hurt American citizens seeking a financial sanctuary from their regime's oppressive and confiscatory tax system. After all, if they'll make an exception to policy for Amerika, why not for any other nation's tax collectors? The very purpose of having a Swiss account will be defeated, thereby rendering Swiss banks irrelevant in a major way. Definitely not good for business, this.
The first question that I would address to the Swiss government, a two-pronged one, is: why, and cui bono? The U.S. media, dutiful lapdogs of the reigning Establishment that they are, are mum on what type of pressure the regime exerted against the Swiss government to force this concession. I would have to assume that the primary consideration in submitting to Amerikan blackmail (and don't tell me that it was anything else) was that Swiss banks took stock of the extent of their holdings in Amerika and determined that non-compliance with the IRS's thuggish demands would result in sanctions, a move the effects of which would, in the banks' collective estimation, outweigh any benefit to preserving the integrity of Swiss law. This is, in my opinion, a very short-sighted view.
It is true that in the immediate term, Swiss banks would probably suffer hideous losses if their Amerikan operations were to be shut down by the Amerikan regime in retaliation for refusal to cooperate with the IRS. However, Swiss bankers are undoubtedly foresighted enough to know that the U.S. dollar is rapidly on its way to becoming a cousin of the Zimbabwean dollar due to the Federal Reserve's fiscal recklessness. In the long term, dollar-denominated holdings by Swiss banks will become nearly worthless, thus becoming not only insignificant, but perhaps even a liability.
I also cannot believe that a neutral, peaceful, federal republic such as Switzerland wants anything whatsoever to do with the empire-building, centralized, arrogant, megalomaniac, bellicose United States government and its imperial schemes. The fact that Switzerland continues to extend its assistance to the Amerikan Imperium in such areas as serving as an intermediary for U.S. persons in trouble abroad indicates that there is still a degree of quid pro quo despite the Amerikan regime's obnoxiousness. This of course prompts the question of what exactly Switzerland is getting in return for giving up some of its precious national sovereignty.
Is the Swiss government corrupt, at least enough to collude with the United Imperial State of America at the expense of its own national sovereignty? The first and most obvious response is thatall governments are inherently corrupt at some level. Whether or not Swiss politicians –or perhaps more accurately, the Swiss banksters who probably control them, as Amerikan banksters control the elected marionettes in Rome-on-the-Potomac-- have been offered some sort of sweet deal in exchange for selling out their customers and constituents is probably a question to which we'll never get an answer, at least not from the MSM. However, one certainly suspects that some form of carrot was extended by the Amerikan Imperium along with the wielding of a stick, for coercion alone, especially against an advanced Western nation like Switzerland, just doesn't adequately explain Swiss capitulation. After all, this is a country that stood up and flipped the bird to Adolf Hitler. We're not talking about Third World pushovers here. If anyone in my reading audience can offer a plausible theory, or better yet an empirical explanation, for Switzerland's about-face, I'm all ears.
Meanwhile, I intend to write to a representative of the Swiss government here in the U.S., through the appropriate office of the Swiss embassy, to express my outrage, sorrow, and displeasure. I'll be sure to post the contents here when finished. I encourage others to follow suit.

The Three Stooges: Alive and Well and Vacationing in a War Zone

2009-08-04T16:26:00.003-04:00

As a life-long fan of the Three Stooges, I have to occasionally remind myself that the last original member of this great comedy trio died in 1975, and that contemporary imitators of their unique brand of comic imbecility are just that – pale imitators, and very bad ones at that. Moe Howard (ne Moshe Horovitz), his brother Jerome (a.k.a. “Curly” to his millions of adoring fans and “Babe” to brothers Moe and Samuel, the latter a.k.a. “Shemp”), and their friend Larry Fine were clearly comedic geniuses who were able to don mantles of stupidity on stage in such a manner that audiences, while heartily amused at their characters, clearly realized that the three men behind the façades were anything but the pathetic stumble bums they portrayed on stage and screen. (Moe Howard, among his many talents, was a financial genius whose prescient investments of his own and his partners’ earnings saved them from bankruptcy when Columbia Pictures dropped them, causing their acting careers to come to a stand still in the late 1950s). The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the three pale imitators currently locked up in an Iranian jail after deciding to take a hiking vacation in a war zone.

Granted, there is every possibility that these three human speed bumps are not what they (and the government and press) claim they are, which is a gaggle of hapless college students on an innocent romp abroad who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given the United States government’s stomach-turning history of paying, blackmailing, or deceiving its citizens into becoming human pawns in international games of geopolitical chess, it is certainly within reason to assume that this trio may have been recruited, perhaps indirectly, by the USG to test Iranian border defenses for the purpose of planning incursions across said border by “special forces” in the near future. In absence of proof of such a scenario, however, I can only assume that the claims of the press and the government are accurate and that these unfortunate creatures are indeed “students” on a frolic, students with either a poor sense of direction, reckless disregard for their own safety, or both.

Let me begin by asking the following rhetorical question: What kind of people take a vacation in a region known to be a war zone? The answer, of course, is people who are not very bright, a category that includes most college students in today’s Amerika. While it is highly possible, even likely that the three — Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal — were, like most of what passes for college students, so zoologically ignorant of geography that they could have been in Hawaii for all they knew, it is more likely that they decided to throw caution to the wind and go exploring a dangerous and unstable region of the world in order to satisfy their wanderlust or to add some sense of purpose to their otherwise pointless and empty lives, which include jobless futures in a collapsing Amerikan Empire.

Whatever their motivation, one thing is absolutely certain: these three stooges deserve none of our sympathy or support WHATSOEVER! Unless they are living brain donors who have been on life support for the last six and a half years, they should have realized that the region through which they chose to so insouciantly travel is one of the world’s most unstable and dangerous. This is especially true for citizens of Pax Americana, which, like its Roman predecessor one and a half millennia ago, has done everything in its power to make itself hated and feared among its conquered subjects. But Shane, Sarah, and Joshua, being of a generation raised to despise critical thinking and common sense and to throw both to the wind even if they should recognize them, probably figured that if only they could show the poor, benighted, brown-skinned people of Mesopotamia that not all of the conquering hordes were bullying, murdering marauders that they would be welcomed with open arms, rose petals thrown at their Bass Pro Shops™-shod feet. That they were disabused of this notion by armed Iranian border guards, who are justifiably suspicious of anyone hailing from the Last Remaining Superpower, and detained should serve as a wakeup call to any other irresponsible would-be adventurers out there who would follow Shane, Sarah, and Joshua’s example.

Last, but certainly not least, there should be no official U.S. government intervention on the Three Stooges’ behalf whatsoever, unless it transpires that they were working on said government’s behalf (and even then the obligation is debatable). Unless this is the case, these three stooges chose to put themselves in harm’s way, meaning that they should bear the consequences for their irresponsible actions in full and on their own. The Ameri[k]an taxpayers, already bled dry by the regime’s wasteful and illegal misadventures in this unfortunate corner of the globe, do not need to bear the added expense of rescuing three spoiled, ignorant, and irresponsible adultolescents who should have known better than to be where they were in the first place. Even more to the point:

1) Iran is, despite Rome-on-the-Potomac’s Ruling Class’s opinion to the contrary, a sovereign and independent nation that has every right to police its own borders as it sees fit, which includes arresting aliens who trespass. (Could it be that Iran does a better job of policing its borders than the Amerikan Empire does of policing its own? Nah, impossible.)

2) A government “rescue” of Ameri[k]an citizens who have gotten themselves into trouble in a foreign country is wholly outside the federal government’s constitutional purview.

No, let Shane, Sarah, and Joshua and their families muster up help on their own dime, thank you. I, for one, had nothing to do with their foolish decision to go trekking through a war zone, and I should not be forced to bear the costs of rescuing them from their own stupidity. Harsh? You bet, but let this be a lesson to everyone about being an independent, responsible, and thinking adult who should be grown up enough to understand the world they live in and be aware of their surroundings.

Hey, Fellow Liberty Lovers: Let's All Make “Census Weasel” One of the Most Dangerous Jobs in Amerika!

2009-05-03T15:45:00.002-04:00

It's not even 2010 yet, but that's not stopping our fascist overlords inside the Rome-on-the-Potomac Beltway from unleashing upon us hoards of otherwise unemployable losers to pry into aspects of our lives that are, not to put too fine a point on it, none of ROTP's goddamn business. How about us freedom lovers making this clear to them in no uncertain terms?

For the edification of the sociopathic scum who are behind this naked attempt at domestic spying for selfish partisan and power-seeking purposes, the United States Constitution that they routinely spit upon, but which they do not hesitate to use as weapon to justify ill-gotten power over us, has exactly this and this only to say about on the subject of what has come to be called “the census:”

The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. --Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution

For the benefit of the historically ignorant (i.e., the Majority), this passage merits some explanation.

The first meeting of Congress1 took place in March, 1789 after a sufficient majority of States (nine of them, the two-thirds required as stated in Article VII) ratified the Constitution, making it Law of the Land. The first “Enumeration” took place the following year at the decade mark, well within the three-year requirement for the initial count. So far so clear, right? Now let's look at the definition of the verb “enumerate” as offered by both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary online (a convenient lexical aid for webitorialists).

From the OED's "Ask Oxford" Web Portal:

enumerate
/inyoomrayshun/
• noun 1 to mention one by one. 2 to formally establish a number
— DERIVATIVES enumerable adjective enumeration noun enumerative adjective.
— ORIGIN Latin enumerare ‘count out’.

From the MWOD:
enumeration
Main Entry:
enu·mer·ate
Pronunciation:
\i-ˈn(y)ü-mə-ˌrāt\
Function:
transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
enu·mer·at·ed; enu·mer·at·ing
Etymology:
Latin enumeratus, past participle of enumerare, from e- + numerare to count, from numerus number
1 : to ascertain the number of : count 2 : to specify one after another : list
— enu·mer·a·tion \-ˌn(y)ü-mə-ˈrā-shən\ noun
— enu·mer·a·tive \-ˈn(y)ü-mə-ˌrā-tiv, -ˈn(y)üm-rə-, -ˈn(y)ü-mə-rə-\ adjective

Note, if you will, that the Constitution's framers were careful to use the term “Enumeration” and not the word “Census”, which is defined here and here in the OED and MWOD, respectively. Also note carefully the differences in the definitions of the two terms: “enumeration” simply means counting, while “census” means surveying or assessing. This is not a trivial distinction. The founders intended for the “Enumeration” to be used exactly for the purpose of counting the population, nothing more. It was certainly not intended for gathering intricate demographic details about the citizenry for extra-constitutional partisan political purposes. A cursory glance at the original text of Article I, Section 2 reveals that the only demographic information of concern to the federal government was the number of slaves and Indians, and the only reason for this distinction (and the now-controversial enumeration of a slave as three-fifths of a free man) was to prevent the slave-holding states at the time from inflating the percentage of their citizens who held the franchise, thereby enabling them to gain Congressional representation out of proportion to the actual number of free citizens resident in such states and thus allowing slave-holding states to expand that institution through the Legislative branch. Otherwise, the only information sought was the number of persons in each state, period. Whether they were rich, poor, married, single, laborers, landowners, native-born, or naturalized was irrelevant.

All of which brings us back to the “Census”, a process nowhere even remotely authorized by the Constitution, that has been foisted upon us in an increasingly intrusive manner by Leviathan since at least the turn of the 20th Century and the dawn of the “Progressive” [sic] Era.”

So by what authority does Leviathan take a “census” of us, its hapless subjects? According to the Census Bureau's website, such authority is outlined in Title 13 of the United States Code. Reading the code, a typically long-winded pile of bureaucratic verbal excrement that is typical of its kind, you will note that while Section 1, sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) are written essentially in harmony with Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, it contains not one single reference to that clause. Fiats by federal courts or the Executive Imperium itself notwithstanding, any federal “code”, “executive order”, “instruction”, “policy”, “regulation”, or other executive fiat that does not contain a reference to or that is not based in substance upon an appropriate clause of the Constitution is null, void, and without force. In the case of Title 13 specifically, its substantive content beyond sub-paragraphs 1(a) and 1(b) actually violates Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution by authorizing mid-decade censuses for non-enumerative purposes and that such information gathered is not to be used for the establishment of Congressional districts or determination of Congressional representation. Such actions are, in fact, the only purposes for which the Constitution authorizes a census; it is not to be used for determining eligibility to feed at the unconstitutional federal slop trough that has become the bane of the citizenry. This alone is enough to drive a legal and moral stake through the current “census's” heart and render it legally null and void.

Last, but certainly not least, there is the issue of privacy. For those naïve and disconnected sheep who stilll believe tthat anything emanating from USG sources is anything but a lie, particularly the Census Bureau's official bovine excrement that census data is used only for the purpose of determining Congressional Districts, I have just three words for you: Japanese-American Internment. Yes, dear naïve fools, it was data from the 1940 Census that the government used to locate, dispossess, and intern, like common criminals, Japanese-Americans in the opening months of World War II. Is there any doubt in a reasonable person's mind that the fascist police state now evolving before our very eyes will have ANY qualms whatsoever about using the Census Bureau as just another weapon in its bureaucratic armory of tyranny tools? How many Americans (or is that Amoricons?) will follow in the footsteps of yesteryear's Nissei, and provide the State with the rope that will be used in their own execution? Most of these Japanese-Americans no doubt wanted to prove themselves “loyal and patriotic Americans” in the face of mass prejudice by obeying the State's diktat to provide personal information about themselves. The obviously never imagined that their demographic information would be used to strip them of both their freedom and human dignity, but that's exactly what happened. Contemporary Americans, having this history lesson as an example (whether or not they'll learn anything from it is another issue altogether), have no reason to be so trusting.

So to get back to the theme of this missive's title, what do we freedom lovers do when confronted by an officious busybody on the State's payroll who tries to pry into areas of our lives that are none of his employer's business? Montana businessman Gary Barnett posted this piece of advice on LewRockwell.com a little while back, and it's a great place to start. However, I propose some more direct action, consisting basically of the following three steps:

Providing nothing but the number of members of your household on the Census 2010 questionnaire.
Ditto the previous if visited by a census weasel. Tell them that you will provide the number of people living your household – nothing more! Cite Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution if necessary, reminding the weasel(s) that enumeration for the purposes of determining Congressional representation is the only legal justification for what they are doing and that therefore they need no other information than the number of residents in your household.
If said census weasel tenaciously refuses to accept this information and threatens legal action, tell him in no uncertain terms to GET LOST, that you too are invoking your legal rights under the Fourth Amendment. Yes, you read correctly: personal information is property and you are under no legal obligation to cede such personal information to anyone without your consent or just compensation (tell the census weasel[s] that if they want any additional information other than the number of residents in your household, it will cost them and that you're willing to negotiate a price). Crazy and illogical, you say? No more so than the idea that a “Census” is constitutionally sanctioned and that the federal government has any right whatsoever to use such a process to collect personal information about you for the purpose of using the State to steal your money to dole out to the undeserving.
If the census weasel attempts to use force to enter your residence or compel you to answer its questions, let them know in no uncertain terms that they are trespassing on your property and that if they do not leave your property within sixty seconds that you will employ deadly force against them. I, for one, intend to have such deadly force on my person and at the ready when making this promise just to drive the point home.

Dear readers, if every American takes this combination of approaches, these losers to whom the Census Bureau is paying a subsidy to commit identity theft against American citizens will think twice, thrice, or four times or more about taking the easy way to earning a living and will apply for jobs at the nearest fast food outlet, janitorial service, or some other private-sector business where they can earn their keep without robbing the taxpayers.

"Customer Service" From a Government Agency? C'mon Now!

2009-04-06T19:01:00.001-04:00

Over the last few months I have lived a lesson in how “customer service” is an impossibility from any government organization. Of course I know that this is axiomatic to any libertarian, but it is only on rare occasions that the lesson is truly driven home through experience. While one of government's (and I mean all levels of government) favorite ruses over the past couple of decades has been to camouflage itself as “customer friendly”, “responsive to the needs of its citizens”,or some other such hogwash, the truth is that this is an impossibility. Simply stated, no matter how much government attempts to masquerade as just another business, it is insulated from the market forces that hold real businesses accountable for their performance. Allow me to illustrate this using recent personal experience.

As an information security consultant who works (for now anyway; my ultimate goal is to freelance) for a Fortune 500 firm, a large percentage of my clients are federal government agencies, many of them "defense" organizations (which tells you that I have a huge reservoir of material for future posts). In the course of my attempts to satisfy the terms of my contract with the customer, I am required to deal with an organization that is responsible for hosting Deparment of Defense (DoD) information systems. This organization charges the various DoD organizations, consisting of the military services, organizations and commands within those services, or executive-level agencies within the Department, a sliding scale of fees for hosting and maintaining these organizations' information systems. These fees vary according to a variety of factors, such as the size of the information system being hosted, or, as is the case with many customers, the number of systems being hosted; data traffic volume processed by the systems, level of maintenance and operations support required, and the types or frequency of "non-standard" services needed. A standard Service-Level Agreement (SLA) is drawn up between the organization within the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), that is responsible for hosting DoD information systems, and the customer organization for whom they are providing service, an agreement that contains specific terms of service, rates charged for the services rendered, the frequency with which charges are applied, specific customer and DISA responsibilities, and other factors affecting the provision of service. In other words, these hosting centers operate, at least theoretically, like a web hosting service or data service center in the commercial private sector. But appearances are deceiving.

The major differences between the DISA hosting organization and its private-sector counterparts are sufficient to render any resemblance by the former to the latter purely coincidental and superficial. For starters, the DISA hosting centers are staffed by career civil servants and contractors hired by the DoD to handle certain specialized technical tasks. As is the case with all civil servants, those staffing the DISA hosting facility cannot be terminated if they fail to abide by the terms of the SLA concluded with their customers. Nor can the contractors working for them be terminated for failure to satisfy the customer, they having been awarded the hosting center support work through contracts not tied to customer satisfaction. Therefore, while these contractors work hard at keeping their civil servant bosses satisfied, they have no direct incentive to assist actual costumers of the hosting center.

Second, the DISA hosting centers (there are at least two dozen scattered throughout the continental United States and over a dozen others at U.S. military installations overseas) are woefully understaffed and underequipped, even as they charge their customers fees-for-services that ostensibly fund them to sufficiently provide the level of service for which the customers are paying. The problem is that the money that these DoD organizations pay to these DISA hosting centers is simply money allocated to these customer organizations out of the overall DoD budget and, once paid to the DISA hosting center, goes right back into the DISA's general budget. The fees paid do not necessarily go toward funding the immediate operational need of the customer agency that paid them. Can you imagine a private-sector commercial data center taking money from a customer to host an information system, but rather than using this money to purchase and install the customer's equipment or to hire system administrators to provide the customer's system with 24/7 support, the data center spends this money on another customer or puts the money directly into the center's operating capital account? Needless to say, the ownership of that data center would be in court in a heartbeat, possibly even subject to criminal charges of theft or misappropriation.

But not the DISA. Like all bureaucracies of its kind, the DISA is not bound by the laws or ethics that bind the private sector. As a result, DoD organizations are paying money --often an obscenely LARGE AMOUNT of stolen taxpayer money-- for services they are not receiving. This has the effect of negatively impacting the customer organizations, causing them to waste even more tax money than they otherwise already would under normal operating conditions by having to postpone or otherwise work around delays and outages caused by the inability of the DISA hosting centers to fulfill their contractual obligations. Because these DISA centers are accountable not to their paying customers, but to a remote bureaucracy that controls their budgets independent of their customers' satisfaction, they do not suffer the automatic negative feedback that the market would provide. Since all DoD organizations are required by policy to host their systems within a DISA hosting facility unless they justify an exception for operational reasons, there is no market pressure on these DISA hosting centers to shape up their act and start providing the services for which their customers have paid. Customers cannot cancel contracts or sue for breach of contract when their mission needs are not met, because there is no market incentive for this bureaucracy to do so.

In the last six months I have sat through innumerable meetings and conferences with senior representatives of this hosting agency in which its operations manager has essentially said "We don't do what you're asking us to do, even if what you are demanding is a term of service contained in your SLA." If this individual worked for a private data services center, she would most likely be fired on the spot for making such a remark and her employer would quickly find themselves in civil court for fraud and breach of contract. But since this individual is a government "employee", she can get away with such statements with impunity, because she and her organization do not face penalties for non-performance. Worse still, while my client expects me to prepare documentation for the Program Office detailing certain aspects of system operations security, I am unable to do this without input from the DISA hosting center because it is they, not I or my client, who control the system in its operational environment. For this reason I am required to obtain certain artifacts from them that will enable me to document the seamless integration of my client's system with their hosting facility, producing an artifact that they require as well as my client. Yet they consistently refuse to "play ball", even though they are contractually obligated to provide this information to all of the customer organizations that they host. Once again, if this were a private data hosting center, they would be in front of a civil couirt judge facing a breach of contract suit. The list of their transgressions goes on and on, but I think the reader gets the idea.

The amount of money that DISA's hosting center charges my client to host their system is simply grotesque (hint: it's in the low seven figures for annual service for just one system), especially when one of my colleagues whose brother manages a private data center tells me that any private sector data center can host the same system, with full 24/7 administration and service support, for less than a tenth of what it costs the government to do it in-house without being able to even provide the services they promise. Of course the government's excuse for not pursuing this course of action is that its information systems process "sensitive" or "classified" data that requires extra degrees of protection. No problem. Just put out a request for proposals inviting all data hosting centers in the United States to compete for DoD business, with the caveat that at least some of their employees must obtain appropriate DoD security clearances, that they must reserve a portion of their facilities (or construct new facilities) that must meet certain DoD standards set forth in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM) before they can host any DoD systems, and that their facilities must be subject to period DoD inspection (at least those portions hosting DoD systems). Problem solved, and at a tiny fraction of the cost incurred by the government's inefficient in-house resources, even with the adaptations required by the private hosting facility to meet the DoD's needs. Granted, my readers know that I'd like to see the DoD eliminated altogether, but until we obtain that distant lofty goal, this is a step in the right direction.

For all of the caterwauling about "customer service", "saving the taxpayers money", "total quality service", and "being responsive to customer needs", it is quite obvious that it's business as usual for the governmment and its labyrinth of bureaucracies: that is, money is wasted nothing of substance is accomplished. The moral of this tale is clear: If you want customer service for your computing needs, go to BestBuy. Otherwise, be prepared to get robbed and lied to.

Buchanan Misses the Mark in "Carcasses of Dead Policies"

2009-03-28T19:26:00.001-04:00

Pat Buchanan's latest missive bemoaning America's foreign and "defense" policy atavism, specifically its dedication to preserving and expanding NATO, leaves the libertarian reader with the feeling that Buchanan is either a liar or incredibly naive. Since Buchanan is a paleoconservative, the answer is probably "both." Regardless, many informed readers, especially libertarians, will find themselves irritated by this piece.

The upshot of the article is that America is foolish for not only preserving NATO, but actively expanding it twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years after the USSR's breakup and the end of the Cold War. Certainly this is a viewpoint that most, if not all libertarians share. We agree that NATO is irrelevant to today's geopolitical reality. Many of us will go even further and state that it never should have been formed to begin with, given its clearly interventionist intentions, albethey bathed in a veneer of "defense."

What the libertarian reader will take issue with is Buchanan's assertion that the United States' chief motive for maintaining NATO is a refusal to "giv[e] up its role as Defender of the West, [or to]...accept that the curtain had fallen and the play was closing after a 40-year run." Does Buchanan, who has spent most of his adult life wallowing in the filth that is Imperial American politics, really want us to believe that he does not know the real truth behind NATO's continuing existence? Does he really not know, and think that we do not see, that the real reason for NATO's continued existence and expansion is the undisguised goal of America's ruling class to rule the world, even if by partial proxy?

There is no lack of realization by the Powers That Be that the Cold War is over, nor is there a lingering fear of the corpse of the former Soviet Union. What there absolutely is, however, is a very deep resentment of the fact that the collapse of the USSR deprived the military-industrial-political complex of any rational raison d'etre. The arms industry that had been built up over the course of a quarter of a century could no longer be justified, since "the greatest enemy of democracy", the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was no more and therefore there was no longer any justification for mass productoin of armaments, even for export to "allies." The Establishment further realized that the obscene profits being made by perpetuating this pointless, freedom and economy-destroying arms race would come to an abrupt end unless a new enemy was manufactured from whole cloth. That new enemy, of course, became "Islamo-Fascism", later reduced simply to "terrorism", the Establishment having gone from fighting an ideology to fighting a tactic.

Buchanan's mock outrage at NATO's continued existence and his carefully crafted appeal to political common sense is pure windowdressing and has become a common feature of most of his recent work. As one of Richard Nixon's senior staff members (which by itself tells us volumes), one of Buchanan's functions was to spread disinformation about Nixon's political opponents, a job that enabled him to perfect this journalist art to new heights. He has continued to exist within the Beltway journalism subculture ever since and has gained access to every major political figure in the nation over almost the last forty years. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but Buchanan is for all practical purposes a member of the very Establishment that he would like us to think he opposes. Perhaps his greatest coup has been to

This is, alas, typical of far too many paleocons like Buchanan. While they at least paid lip servce to the idea of liberty and limited government in decades past, they have almost completely surrendered, quite willingly it appears, to the intoxicating lure of State power. Buchanan knows damned good and well that the unstated reason for NATO's continuing existence is to serve as a proxy legion for Amerika's global empire and the military-industrial interests that control it. But because he subscribes to the philosophy best described by the German phrase "Die Staat ueber Alles" {the State above all else), he either cannot bring himself to admit this, or, just as likely, has no qualms with it. Either way, his feigned frustration in print with the status quo simply is not convincing.

Perhaps one day very soon, Buchanan will come to truly appreciate the nation's founding principles as the current political establishment collapses from the rot within. Until then, look for him to simply continue shooting at shadow targets.

The Obamunist's Phony Electronic "Town Hall"

2009-03-26T18:49:00.004-04:00

President Monkey Ears, apparently realizing that the sheeple are awakening to the fact that he is full of bovine excrement after having broken every last one of his campaign promises, has decided to throw them a rubber bone by staging an "electronic town hall" on line. For those with precious life minutes to waste, this dog and pony show (NOT the first of it's kind, by the way), can be accessed here, at least for now.

But it turns out that the Obamunist isn't really all that interested in what the hoi polloi have to say, since he's already stopped taking questions after just a day of having the electronic town hall forum open. Of course it's not as if it would do any of us liberty lovers any good even if he still was accepting them. Glancing briefly at a random sampling of the questions submitted in several categories, I notice that ALL of them assumed that it was His Holiness, Emperor Barack I the Divine's sacred duty to fix their every imaginable problem. Of course, what else would one expect? Does anyone really think that this megalomaniac scumbag and his puppeteer staff would even for a second allow, much less answer, any hardhitting questions that question his legitimacy? Please.

Nowhere did I see any questions that I, or indeed any liberty lover would have asked, such as:

"Did you not take an oath of office, on January 19, 2009, to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?'"

"If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', then can you tell me exactly and verbatim where within that document you swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend that you are permitted to do anything on your current agenda?"

"Do you even have the vaguest clue what you're talking about when you stand in front of the entire nation and spew forth streams of noxious verbal diarrhea in which you promise to fix each individual's every problem?"

"Do you have even a gnat's grasp of the fundamentals of economics?"

"Where were you really born?"

"Why don't you just admit that you're really a narcissistic Marxist authoritarian nihilist who intends to destroy every last vestige of individual and economic freedom left in the United States?"

"Based on the assumptions behind the previous question, do you intend to openly embrace Zimbabwean president and World Champion Murdering Thug Robert Mugabe as the ideological brother to you that he is once the United States (or what's left of them) finally achieve an economy identical to that now "enjoyed" by Zimbabwe?"

"Do you honestly believe that even one of your proposed "reforms" will actually work? Could you really be that stupid?"

Would that the imperial media gatekeepers had the intestinal fortitude or constitution of character to allow such raw, gauntlet-hurling questions to be directed at His Most Saintly and Blameless Majesty. As it is, it amazes me that so many sheeple actually thought that asking His Holiness for his divine protection would actually yield any meaningful results. Then again, looking and listening around me to what constitutes "American civilization", it really doesn't amaze me at all.

When will they ever learn?

My Letter to Paul Craig Roberts

2009-03-11T14:13:00.006-04:00

It pains and irritates me greatly to see paleoconservatives either misinterpret or deliberately misrepresent libertarian beliefs in print. Paul Craig Roberts has done exactly that in his latest essay, reprinted on the VDARE.com web site today, titled "The American Criminal Injustice System." While I agree with 99 percent of Roberts' points in the article, he makes a statement about libertarianism and prison privatization that I simply could not allow to remain unchallenged. The full text of the email I sent today to Dr. Roberts is reprinted below.

Dr. Roberts:

Thank you for your latest contribution of another hard-hitting article on the continuing deterioration of the American Justice [sic] System (published as "The American Criminal Injustice System", reprinted on VDARE.com, Wednesday, March 11, 2009). While I agree with 99 percent of the article's content, you make the following statement about two-thirds of the way through to which I must take great exception:

"Libertarian free market types believe that the private sector can do everything better than the public sector. This ideology causes libertarians to be blind to the dangerous incentives created by the privatization of prisons."

While I would never presume to speak for ALL libertarians, I believe that I can say with a great degree of certainty that you misunderstand the commonly accepted libertarian consensus on imprisonment. Most libertarians are opposed the idea of imprisonment altogether, except for those who clearly and demonstrably pose an irremediable danger to society. The State, in judicial criminal prosecutions, habitually uses (or more accurately, abuses) imprisonment as a blanket form of punishment both for victimless acts that are not crimes against property or person, such as drug distribution and consumption, or prostitution, or for actual crimes against person or property for which restitution to the actual victim is the appropriate remedy. Worse still, and as you yourself have illustrated in a number of past editorials, the terms of imprisonment are often, if not usually grotesquely out of proportion to the actual offense.

To specifically address the issue of "privatized" prisons, if you look at a broad selection of libertarian writing on this subject (visit the lewrockwell.com archives for a cornucopia of such references), you will see that the prevailing libertarian view of "private" prisons is that these institutions, as currently constituted under the State's [in]justice system, are NOT "private" institutions at all according to the legitimate definition of that word. Rather, they merely represent the subcontracting of the penal system by the State to its preferred enablers in thestate-corporate sector (which, if you are familiar with libertarian economic philosophy, you will recognize as being not "free market" institutions at all, but "crony capitalist" entities that have co-opted the power of the State for their own monopolistic ends, at taxpayer expense). Under a libertarian market-oriented justice system, Persona A, the victim of crime (or their representatives) could not compel a disinterested third party, Person C, to pay restitution on behalf of or for the incarceration of Person B, the actual perpetrator. Under the current catastrophic tyranny imposed upon us today, the State merely transfers tax monies from the public treasury to one of its politically favored cronies, regardless of the fact that 1) the average taxpayer (Person C in the preceding example) has no personal stake or legal standing in the crime committed by Person B against Person A. This is the diametric opposite of "libertarianism" as you seem to envision it.

If you have not already done so in the recent past, I strongly recommend that you read the late Murray Rothbard's treatise "Punishment and Proportionality", an excerpt from his book "The Ethics of Liberty" (the treatise can be accessed here. This provides as coherent a summation of the libertarian view of justice, restitution, and punishment as anything of which I am aware. Note the clear implication in Rothbard's proposals that the idea of incarceration is a most unappetizing one to a genuinely freedom-respecting, market-oriented justice system that focuses on tangible restitution to actual victims of crime, as opposed to that undefinable abstraction called "the People", or "the State." Incarceration is prohibitively costly (remember, in a market system, there is no such thing as "tax dollars" or "socialized costs"), often counterproductive, seldom ever serves the cause of true justice or restitution, and is a punishment reserved only as a last resort, almost always for the crime of murder. By the way, and as Rothbard notes, it's no accident of history that governments in centuries past seldom ever resorted to imprisonment as punishment, preferring either to compel convicted criminals to make appropriate restitution to their victims, or to administer capital punishment for those convicted of murder.

Is the Rothbardian solution the ideal one? Probably not; is there any such thing as "ideal" in the real world? But in a world that respects liberty, one in which there is no State to play the role of omnipotent, coercive overlord, the "private prison" travesty which we now see playing out would cease to exist.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Sincerely,

[Liberranter]

Doing My Part to Starve the State-Corporatist Beast - Step One

2009-03-06T10:59:00.003-05:00

I've finally gotten off the stick and taken the first step toward doing what I should have done months or years ago: divesting myself of all Wall Street-related assets. My biggest fear to date has been the tax implications of doing so, but I've decided that this is something I will no longer let hinder me in doing what needs to be done. If the Establishment is going to steal my money, I'm going to make them do it at the point of a gun (i.e., through taxation) rather than under a ruse of "investment."

Yesterday afternoon I phoned my employer's HR department and told them to stop my allotment to my Franklin Templeton Growth Fund, to which I have been contributing regularly each month for the past twelve years. Not only has the fund lost fifty (50) percent of its value in the last two months, but the fee increases that the brokerage firm has recently levied are almost as much as the monthly share purchases themselves. Sorry, fellas, but I ain't gonna subsidize with more of my own hard-earned money your recovery from a decade of recklessly (mal)investing my money! You'll just have to eat that without any more of my direct, voluntary help!

I would like to try to sell my shares in this fund, but I'm not about to jump through the hoops set up by the Illegal Ripoff Service to avoid their confiscatory crapital gains taxes. Besides, I'd almost feel guilty pawning this increasingly worthless pile of "assets" off on anyone else foolish enough to invest in them. Therefore I'll just swallow my losses for now and hold onto the shares that I have, preparing to watch twelve years of hard-earned money disappear down the crapper once the dollar crashes and the fund is reduced to penny stock, if it even holds that much value.

I'm debating whether to invest the money formerly allocated for this fund's share purchases in gold or other precious metals or to put it toward paying down debt. I'm leaning toward the latter, as being debt-free at the point of the dollar's collapse will be just as important as having something to use as hard currency.

More to follow.

To Lew Rockwell: See My December 9, 2008 Post

2009-02-17T13:38:00.002-05:00

In your LRC article today, you correctly re-state the position of your book The Left, The Right, and the State that both the Right and the Left are equally toxic to the cause of liberty. You then make the comment that after eight years of Bush/Neocon right-wing insanity, the Obama administration should be anxious to avoid compounding the errors of their predecessors and not take their left-wing ideology too seriously. Near the end you make the following statement:

"It's not that [those on the Left] hate liberty as such; it is that they believe that it must always take a backseat to other social priorities like equality. "

Lew, I must strongly disagree with that statement, just as I disagreed, as my December 9th post makes clear, with the premise of your article of that same date that attributes the State's actions to economic ignorance. Let us be clear: The ideological Left, like its counterpart on the Right, despises liberty. Why? Because liberty undermines their vision of a perfect world, one in which they wield unchecked power over the people.

As I also make clear in my December post, the Left, like the Right, no more believes in the viability of its own ideology than do we libertarians. What both sides crave, about all else, is unconditional power and liberty is anathema to and an antidote against such power. The ideological vomitus that both sides spew forth to justify their political aggrandizement is mere window dressing, pap cooked up to feed the masses of frightened, gullible, and uninformed sheeple that make up the majority of the nation's population. It is a means to and end (that end of course being power), not an end in itself. It is equally certain that none of the senior leadership of either party, whether or not they currently hold power, have any intention of being enthralled by the suffocating totalitarian chains they intend to put upon the rest of us. Whether the State is dominated by fascists or communists, the ruling elite are never constrained by the chains they make the rest of us bear and never suffer from or for the harm they cause their subjects.

Once again, it goes without saying that I agree one thousand percent with you on everything of substance on which you've written. I simply think that it's time we recognized the evil that motivates those who rule over us and confront it accordingly.

Fred Reed Says "Farewell" to Blogitorials

2009-02-12T17:18:00.004-05:00

So, Fred, you're saying good-bye to blogging ("Goodbye! FOE Tits Up," February 10, 2009), citing personal and professional reasons for not wanting to continue to maintain "Fred on Everything."

Sorry, Freddie, but I don't believe you for a second. You said almost exactly the same thing just over two years ago ("Taking a Break", September 28, 2007"), claiming that FOE was history. But you came back. We, your readers, knew you would. You see, Freddie, you're a born editorialist, an opinionator, a storyteller. You can no more not write than not breathe. There is simply too much within you that you feel compelled to share with the rest of the world, too many readers with whom you feel a philosophical and intellectual kinship, and, I suspect, a nagging feeling within you that to retire now would be to concede to the forces of evil now devouring what little remains of human freedom. I know that railing intelligently against the current political, economic, and social decay feels like banging your head against a brick wall, especially when the solutions, as you've taken pains to point out, are right in front of the world's collective noses. Still, as you acknowledge in your farewell message, you know you're making an impact. To paraphrase California's idiot governator, you'll be back.

Meanwhile, I do hope that you enjoy the temporary hiatus, which I have no doubt will be much longer than your last one. Do take the time to travel and enjoy your time with Violetta, Natalia, and your own two daughters. You're right about one thing - family comes first, above all else, and I'm glad that you're putting your money where your mouth is on that.

So in closing, I wish you God speed and good health. I and all the rest of your devoted readers will be here waiting for you whenever you choose to return, be that in two weeks or in two decades.

P.S. By the way, you might want to restructure the FOE site at some point in the near future so that your works are archived on separate web pages. Many of us like to link to your golden nuggets of wisdom to provide precious additional fuel for our crusade to set the world free again. Unfortunately, the site is set up as one great big flat file, with all works on one page. This makes direct linking to specific articles impossible. I think you mentioned a while back that you were trying to fix this, but I guess that has sort of fallen off the priority list now that you're taking a (let us hope) temporary sabbatical. If you need help with this archival purposes, drop me a note. I'd be glad to walk you through the process or set it up for you.

Spreading the Truth About "Honest [sic] Abe" on the Occasion of His Bicentennial

2009-02-12T15:02:00.005-05:00

Fortunately, we seem to have been spared much of the insipid, platitudinous homilies many of us expected would erupt on this day, The Great Emancipator's (*bullshit!*) 200th birthday. Fortunately, and just as we expected he would, that brilliant "Lincoln Myth" demolisher, Dr. Tom DiLorenzo, has fired yet another powerful and destructive salvo into the "Lincoln the Great" facade created by the neoconservative court historians. I look forward to reading William Marvel's book Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, the existence of which I was unaware of until today.

I also greatly appreciate Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's contribution to today's Chicago Tribune that further punches holes in the Lincoln-as-national-redeemer-savior-and-liberator nonsense (a thank-you to Sheldon Richman for posting the link to this on his blog). If anything, Professor Hummel is too kind to Lincoln's memory, although he thoroughly grasps the magnitude of the destruction Lincoln wrought upon the constitutional government established by America's founders. He does, however, make one comment that I particularly took issue with, which is the statement that he had no reason to believe that Lincoln did not find slavery "abhorrent" as an institution, despite has transparently political motives for "emancipation."

The fact is that Lincoln's "abhorrence" of slavery was based solely on political and economic considerations, not moral ones. Indeed, Lincoln's own written and oral legacy make one thing perfectly clear: He didn't give a damn about blacks in general, or slaves in particular. In fact, he wanted all of them expelled from the United States to colonies in Africa or Latin America. This fact alone makes Barack Obama''s frequent citations of and self-comparisons to Abominable Abe so surreal*. Does he not realize that Abominable Abe is probably churning in his grave at the idea of a black president of the United States? Of course we know that Obama's Lincoln invocations are nothing but political grandstanding. Ignorant as he might be of real American history, Obama is well aware that the majority of the Amoricon people over which he rules is even more so, and that his platitudinous nonsense will be swallowed whole, paving the way for him to repeat and magnify the very abuses Lincoln perpetrated as president.

May my fellow Americans consider this day one of shame rather than celebration, for it marks the birth of the man who began the accelerated destruction of our liberty-based nation that is now approaching its apex.

(* For a truly nausea-inducing display of His Imperial Holiness's time-and-space-rending ignorance of American history in general and his "great white idol" in particular, see here)

A Message That Needs to be Repeated, Ad Nauseam, to All “Republichristians” (a.k.a. Constantinians) - Updated

2009-02-05T11:26:00.011-05:00

As always, the editorial contributors and bloggers at LewRockwell.com are the first to pounce on liberty-relevant news and commentary, and the link below is no exception. My sincere thanks to Mike Tennant, a regular LRC contributor, for finding this nutritious spiritual and intellectual tidbit cooked up by Christian radio host Steve Deace of station WHO 1040 AM in Des Moines:

Steve's comments here echo those I made in an email response to Chuck Baldwin's latest epistle in which he decries the utter lack of principle and personal integrity that characterizes today's American “Christians.” While I won't bother to reprint my entire response here, it can best be summarized by the following two statements.

American “Christians” are “patriotic” state-worshipers, first and foremost, and “Christians” a very distant second, if their faith even makes it that high on the priority scale. Even then they are American Christians. Ferners need not apply for residency in their version of Christ's Kingdom.

American “Christians” are addicted to their material comforts that the free (until now, anyway) society in which they've lived all their lives has made possible. By this I mean their lucrative jobs, nice houses, multiple cars in the driveway, fancy restaurants, nice vacations, etc. They're not about to give up mammon, even as a cost of exercising their alleged “faith” in the Lord. No First Century martyrdom for these people, oh, no siree; if it's a choice between poverty and even death as a price of being a Christ-follower or retaining their worldly goods, they'll reach an accommodation with the temporal world, thank you very much. If that means enthralling themselves to a political party that advocates authoritarian, amoral, extra-legal usurpation of citizens' rights and property and that requires "Christians" to compromise their supposed "principles of faith," then amen, so be it.

Positions such as Steve's are of course wildly unpopular amongst so-called “Christians” in America. The more “fundamental” or “evangelical” the “Christian,” the more vociferous the backlash against any exposure of the rank hypocrisy or even mild suggestion that their actual deeds don't match their pious platitiudes. I can imagine that by now Steve's email inbox is flooded with letters of denial and vituperation from the very “Christians” who must clearly have recognized themselves in Steve's descriptions. I can only imagine the insipid excuses they offer up for their un-Christlike behavior and their defense of the corrupt and Godless Republican party (I also wouldn't be surprised if these “Christians” have screamed for Steve's dismissal). Of course we've heard all of their excuses before and they're not fooling anyone, especially God Himself.

Let us hope that Steve's essay reaches the inbox of web browser of every “evangelical” pastor in America, as well as those of every lay leader in every church. Whether the message will sink in remains to be seen (I'm not optimistic), but if there's a chance that even one misguided soul wakes up and gets back on the path, it will all be worth it.

Update:

See Stan Warford's contribution to LRC today (February 5, 2009) on Christians and war for yet more food for thought on this subject.

Does He Really Just Not “Get It”, Or Does He Dare Not Speak The Truth?

2009-02-03T13:43:00.002-05:00

In reading Eric Margolis's latest article “Glasnost in London – War Fever in Washington”, linked from today's LRC, I note the following rhetorical question:

"Why is President Obama, who came to power on an antiwar platform, committed to expanding a war where there are no vital US interests?”

Margolis then goes on to postulate that the reasons could be either “oil” or the idea that “Americans still want revenge for 9/11.” Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. True enough, unfettered access to the vast natural reserves of oil beneath the soil of the former Soviet Central Asian republics is a long-term strategic goal of our overlords. It is equally true that many Americans still thirst for some form of ill-focused revenge for the events of 9/11. But these alone do not explain the sheer geopolitical bumbling and pointless wastes of non-existent human and material resources that characterize our Afghan misadventure.

I thought I knew Margolis better than this through reading his frequent contributions to LRC, antiwar.com, and the on-line version of the TorontoGlobe and Mail, but I'm beginning to wonder. He's astute enough to realize that there's only one reason why we're still in Afghanistan chasing shadows, and that this reason consist of one six-letter word: Israel.

A cursory look at Barak Ben Obama's cabinet reads like a veritable Who's Who of Establishment AIPAC agents and Israel-firsters. His appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as White House Chief-of-Staff by itself should have put to rest any questions as to where this administration's loyalty lies and who is controlling the marionette strings. Why an observant non-mainstream journalist like Margolis avoids this obvious fact, one as glaring as a boil on the face of a supermodel, is anyone's guess, but I'd have to assume that his primary employer has something to do with it. I'm guessing, though I haven't seen the link, that Margolis originally wrote this article for the G&M which, while demonstrably more open-minded than its MSM counterparts south of the border in Neoconland, is still susceptible to pressure from the organized Zionist lobby that owns the American MSM, lock, stock, and ink barrel.

My sincere hope is that Margolis follows this article up with an admission of the real truth. The maintenance of his well-known journalistic integrity simply demands it.

The Joys of the Word “'tard” (Updated February 2, 2009)

2009-01-22T19:18:00.004-05:00

Considering the ongoing decline of the English language, especially here in the United States, I'm generally reluctant to consider any new colloquialism to be a healthy development. However, there is a new twist on an old word that has grown in popularity over the last few years that I have found to have all sorts of tasty applications in everyday speech. That word is the noun “'tard” which, as readers certainly must know, is an abbreviation of the word “retard.”

Before anyone waxes indignant over their sensibilities being assaulted, let me be clear that this word in no way strictly applies to its parent's traditional definition, which is that of a mentally impaired individual who has suffered pre-natal organic brain damage, thus permanently “retarding” their full mental development. No, the word “'tard” is applied in a general pejorative sense to identify a person who lacks any semblance of the innate common sense that the Almighty conferred upon them before or at birth, despite having been nurtured in an environment absolutely conducive to the development of normal mental faculties and sane behavior. Unlike the “retard” of the pre-PC English language, whose condition and behavior resulted from circumstances completely beyond his or her control, today's “'tard” is almost always a person whose imbecilic demeanor is entirely their own fault.

The task of context and definition complete, allow me to have some long overdue fun with this blog by introducing the reader to some of my favorite applications of this delightful word. The following list is by no means inclusive, and readers are certainly encouraged to post additions as they see fit.

Accountard: A truly vile white-collar creature that pretends proficiency in matters financial, but that more often than not plunges the pitiful, hapless souls who (mis)place their trust in its abilities into fiscal chaos, even bankruptcy and/or foreclosure. This is especially true of Certified Public Accountards (CPa), nearly all of whom are sleazy, state-worshipping frauds who pretend to practice “tax law”, a pseudo-legal discipline with all the integrity of a soup sandwich. As a little proof of this hypothesis, try getting a CPa to give you a clear, concise answer, in the form of a precise figure, as to how much income tax you owe after giving said accountard all of your relevant financial and tax information. You'll quickly find out that you stand a greater chance of getting a clear and concise answer on the meaning of the universe from God Himself. CPas in particular are seldom ever capable of obtaining legitimate employment in the financial sector in jobs that actually add value to their clients' businesses. But why would anyone take that kind of risk when they can tell their hapless clients after they've been served with an IRS audit notice that “hey, tax law can change at a Congressional whim, so whaddaya want me to do? I can't read these people's minds, and besides, the law changed after I did your return.” If all else fails, acountards can always get jobs with the Illegal Ripoff Syndicate, which is always looking for shiftless losers with which to staff its fence operations
Advertard: Applicable to a 'tard who either designs and produces or stars in advertisements in print, electronic, or broadcast media that are so absurd, inane, mendacious, or insulting as to make potential customers wonder whether the sponsor's objective is to drive itself out of business. The most egregious examples of advertards are the people who produce or appear in government-sponsored propaganda messages, paid for with your purloined tax dollars, that belittle, insult, and threaten the reader-viewer as if they were a miscreant toddler. I think I speak for everyone when I say that this class of advertards, along with their sponsors, deserve to be doused with multiple layers of napalm and set ablaze on the Capitol Mall, with worldwide television coverage of the event.

Architard: A 'tard who designs buildings so hideous in appearance and so unstable in form or function as to make them uninhabitable and/or unsellable. Architards' works are most prominently displayed in the form of government or municipal buildings. or structures designed by non-profit organizations who beg obscene sums of money from the very people they despise, a fact represented by the structures in which they house themselves. I.M. Pei is, in this author's opinion, the epitome of an architard (his hideous structure in front of the Louvre in Paris is all the proof anyone needs), the praise bestowed upon his work by aesthetic ignoramuses notwithstanding.

Barristard: My British readers are probably intimately familiar with this creature. As an appellation describing an incompetent practitioner of law, this is a term that ought to be gaining popularity on this side of the Atlantic, since the population of such creatures is more numerous here than anywhere else on the planet. Barristards are even more dangerous and insufferable than the shyster variety of attorney for the simple reason that while shysters might be lazy, sleazy, selfish, backstabbing reprobates with the consciences of sewer rats, at least some of them are generally competent practitioners of their trade. Barristards, on the other hand, couldn't win a case even if it was handed to them on a silver platter through judicial incompetence or summary judgment. That still doesn't stop them from retaining their law licenses and, if in private practice, financially gouging clients for services not rendered. Public defender offices in the United States are perhaps the biggest havens for barristards. Heaven help the poor innocent (and usually indigent) soul whose life depends on one for defense in a criminal trial.

Bosstard: Described by a word easily generated by changing the initial vowel of and adding an extra “s” to the appropriate root word, bosstards are arguably the most dangerous class of 'tards in the United States today, if not the entire world. Bosstards are characterized by a toxic combination of cluelessness and unwarranted arrogance, often coupled with outrageous behavior that in a civilized society would get a person tarred and feathered. Bosstards are in control of the vast majority of businesses of any size and presence in America today, a fate in huge part explained by the nation's socialist economic and labor laws. Were the American economy a genuinely free one characterized by freedom of association and a genuinely free labor market, bosstards would not exist at all, or would at best be brief “flashes in the pan” before being unceremoniously dumped by their companies and thrown out into the street to beg change from passersby, as their fate would demand in a universe based on logical consequences. The pointy-haired boss in Scott Adams'Dilbert comic strip and now former president George W. Bush are both stereotypical examples of bosstards. However, I seriously doubt that readers need any examples at all. Anyone who does not work for a bosstard today is both a rarity and a person to be greatly envied.

Carpentard: Though now largely rendered obsolete by shoddy mass-produced furniture and wood products, mostly imported from the Third World, the carpentard still exists occasionally within construction projects and in wood products factories that cannot fully automate due to the unique nature of their products. Fortunately, most industries relying on woodworking skills to create quality products have little use or tolerance for carpentards and quickly weed them out.

Celebritard: The type of 'tard one sees or reads about when one decides to waste precious life minutes watching network TV or reading gossip magazines. No further explanation needed (think “Britney Spears” or “Paris Hilton”).

Computer Scientard: A specialized type of scientard (q.v.), this is one with which I have daily and always agonizing interaction. Computer scientards are the direct result of the explosion in technological evolution over the last two decades. This historically unprecedented proliferation in technology has led to such a shortage of actual expertise in the field that businesses and households desperate for help –any kind of help, from anyone within shouting distance-- in assimilating and properly using these technologies have come to rely upon these awful beings, often with tragic and expensive results. Even though these creatures' actual knowledge of information technology could fit inside a leprechaun grandmother's sewing thimble with room to spare, they have managed, again largely with the help of a competition-stifling socialist government, to establish a foothold in the technology services market that cannot be dislodged by mere competence or establishment of meaningful professional standards based on actual performance. Dispensing technical advice, software applications, and maintenance services that are often worse than useless (indeed that are often harmful to their customers), these techno-morons have been responsible for such abominations as the U.S. Government's National Infrastructure Protection Center, Microsoft, and an endless but perfectly avoidable series of information system compromises, malicious code outbreaks, and data thefts that could have been avoided had they (not to put too fine a point on it) paid attention, used common sense, and known what the f*** they were doing. The good news is that computer scientards will eventually go the way of Atwater-Kent radios, Ford Edsel cars, and Betamax Video cassettes as the last generation of complete techno-illiterates dies out and the market stabilizes by demanding actual competence from technically specialized professionals. Unfortunately, given the current state of technical education in this country and the semi-literate hordes attempting to partake of it, it's likely to be a long, bumpy, and costly ride.

Dentard; A relative of the doctard (q.v.), this 'tard delegates such mundane professional tasks as cleaning your teeth or putting in fillings, tasks which he/she is allegedly being paid to do, to a lowly hygienist who actually does all the work while receiving a pitiful fraction of the obscene amount of money that the dentard charges you. Dentards are famous for making such erudite statements as “you have to brush your teeth regularly in order to avoid having to see me so often”, apparently in the hope that you're one of the majority stupid enough not realize that tartar will build upon one's teeth regardless of the frequency of brushing, even if one were to consume nothing but water for months on end, or for asking such pivotal questions as “does this hurt?” as they stick a six-inch knitting needle into your unanesthetized gums. Like the doctard and accountard, the dentard exists mostly due to the socialized nature of the economy, particularly the “health care” field, and like the other professional 'tards listed in this post, would be out of practice, living in an abandoned cardboard box next to a gas station, and begging for fast food scraps if the economy were truly free.

Detectard: The investigative backbone of every police force, this breed of 'tard is most notable for simply being able to find its way to work each morning and back home again each evening without getting itself lost, injured, or killed. Detectards have become notorious in recent years in police departments across the nation for their uncanny ability to “lose” evidence in criminal cases the successful prosecution of which would reveal their zoological incompetence at anything other than stuffing their faces full of donuts and abusing unarmed citizens. Detectards also seem to possess a miraculous inability to solve even the simplest of cases involving damage to citizen lives or property, but somehow evolve into literal Sherlock Holmeses when it comes to uncovering “evidence” against citizens involved in victimless “crimes” or who have attempted to defend themselves, their families, or properties against the detectard's statist employer. While other cops seem to place promotion to detectard at the pinnacle of professional success, citizens know that the detectard is merely the equivalent of the first grader in the nursery full of babies. While the first grader is more evolved than the babies, none is capable of doing anything useful. Unlike first graders or infants, however, both the detectard and his less-evolved beat cop colleagues are capable of doing terrible harm.

Doctard: More dangerous by orders of magnitude than the barristard, the doctard is a product of the socialized medicine that has engulfed the planet's societies like a poisonous kudzu on steroids. Even more of a glorified guesser than the otherwise competent doctor whom he vaguely resembles, but with an infinitely less successful track record of correct guesses, the doctard is characterized by the robotic and proforma nature of the so-called “care” that he dispenses to those unfortunate enough to find themselves his patients. A doctard seldom ever actually listens to what his patients tell him in order to arrive at a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment plan. Instead he arms himself with a narrow template of symptoms and conditions that are considered the ailments du jour within the world of allopathic medicine on a given day and ascribes (bangs) the patient's symptom(s) (the square peg) (in)to the closest corresponding ailment(s) (the round hole) from the list. Although his actual knowledge of medicine, pharmacology, and human physiology are roughly on par with John Wayne's actual knowledge of or experience with modern battle doctrine, that doesn't stop the doctard from insouciantly playing with his patients' health and lives. If he's employed by the government, especially the military, he can enjoy full immunity from the possibility of a lawsuit and can practice happily ever after.

Instructard: This catch-all term describes 'tards who allegedly engage in transmitting knowledge or skills to alleged “students.” It includes employees of both public and private institutions of lower and higher learning and those of for-profit institutions of specialized learning (e.g., ITT Technical Institute). Instructards are notorious for their transparent inability to even form a coherent thought or sentence, much less transmit useful knowledge to anyone on any subject of import. Indeed, public schools of grades Kindergarten through 12 are home to the preponderance of instructards, although they are increasingly infesting post-secondary institutions of higher learning as well. Instructards are another toxic by-product of the socialist state, 'tards who by their own admission consist of the sub-basement level of the intellectual pyramid, the dregs of academia who were too intellectually stunted to have majored in anything mentally challenging or useful while in college, instead by default flocking to the pseudo-academic field of “education.” Instructards also admit to being profoundly incapable of doing anything marketable in the private sector and thus guard their state-enforced employment privileges (a.k.a “tenure”) with a zealousness bordering on murderous. Fortunately instructards tend not to last very long in private-sector institutions of learning once students (a.k.a. paying customers) discover their utter and irremediable ineptitude and reward it by withholding their precious tuition money.

Presidentard: This species of 'tard finds itself in charge of organizations, businesses, and, worst of all, sovereign nations despite the fact that it is clearly unqualified and unsuitable for the job and capable of doing incalculable damage to millions, if not billions of people if it is in charge of a sufficiently powerful entity and left to its own destructive devices to fully exercise its incompetence. American readers have just suffered through eight years of the most egregious presidentard this country has ever trusted with executive power and it's looking from all appearances as if we're about to suffer through at least four years of another one.

Reportard: The destructive power of reportards is one of the most inexplicable phenomena of human existence. Glance at any magazine or newspaper, or turn on any radio or TV and tune in to a news station and one is instantly assaulted by a barrage of pedantic, quasi-literate, mendacious stupidity so nausea-inducing and so intellectually insulting as to provoke demented homicidal rage. This prompts the question as to why any sane, intelligent human being would pay so much as a microsecond's worth of attention to, let alone any of their hard-earned cash to purchase these 'tards' intellectual vomitus, or allow anything that they say or write to influence any aspect of one's daily life. The answer of course is that there is a noticeable dearth of “ sane, intelligent human beings” among the general population. Fortunately the age of the Internet is finally beginning to render these sickening statist shills utterly irrelevant and reward them with the fate that they deserve in any market-driven society populated by educated and discriminating consumers.

Scientard: A growing blight on the face of human knowledge, these wretched creatures are responsible for more disinformation and impediment to human progress than any other breed of 'tard. While scientards come in many colors of non-expertise (see “computer scientard” above), they all have two things in common: 1) an unfathomable lack of intellectual curiosity about or in-depth knowledge of their ostensible fields of expertise, and 2) a callous and deliberate contempt and disregard for the truth when said truth kicks out from under them the assumptions and hypotheses upon which they've built their (usually unmerited) professional reputations. For evidence of the pernicious and still not fully inflicted damage that scientards have done to the planet, one need look no further than the twin frauds known to a gullible public as “global warming” and “planet green.” That these frauds have prevailed as the basis of social, economic, and political policymaking around the globe probably says more about the rest of us collectively than it does about these scientific charlatans. However, the fact remains that these creatures obstinately work overtime to obfuscate, deny, and stonewall the truth when it doesn't suit their or their benefactors' (usually the state) purposes. This above all else is what differentiates a scientard from a scientist, the latter of which is becoming an extinct creature. Something tells me that a possible reason for the extinction of such civilizations as the Anasazi and the Mayans is that they listened to the scientards of their day rather than the scientists.

Secretard: This 'tard infects organizations in an administrative capacity. Its key characteristics are an inability to communicate clearly (or at all) with others, organize or prioritize tasks even if its or its boss's professional life depends upon it, and a supernatural ability to lose important pieces of correspondence or forget pivotal pieces of information at the worst of times. Secretards remain employed largely because their bosses are even more incompetent than they are (see “bosstard”) and lack the common sense to seek more efficient and effective alternatives. Fortunately, secretards usually only cause immediate tangible damage to bosstards.

Well, that's all I have for now. I hope you've enjoyed reading this cynical rant as much as I've enjoyed writing it.

Update:

How could I have forgotten to mention two types of 'tard now so publicly poised to do so much damage to the country in such a short time? These are of course the Senatard and Representatard.

Senatard:This arrogant and elitist ignoramus is part of a body of one hundred of the most amoral criminals ever to convene under the guise of legitimate government. With its origins in the Republican Rome of some two-plus millenia ago, the Senatard is almost biologically insulated from the population of ordinary mortals that it purports to represent and whose interests it ostensibly serves. In reality, however, it is obvious to even a corpse that the Senatard serves solely to satisfy its own class needs and interests and that it concerns itself not one iota with the plebeian hordes. While this is certainly criminal in itself, the Senatard's toxicity to civilizational well-being is further compounded by its breathtaking ineptitude in matters of governance. This ignorance leads routinely to its wholehearted endorsement of laws that lead ultimately to its own undoing (think: TARP). The Senatard is also notorious for opening up and spewing forth verbal vomitus from its fetid cake hole prior to or without any intention of engaging what little rudiments of a cerebrum it possesses, thereby shattering its facade of cultured nobility. Current Vice Presidentard Joe Biden is perhaps the best example of a Senatard in the modern era. Other notable examples include Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Harry Reid, Trent Lott, and, well, etcetera.

Representatard: An even lower form of life than the Senatard and concentrated in an even larger (and thus much more dangerous) body, the Representatard spends all of its time pandering to the masses that elect it to office while simultaneously exhibiting undisguised contempt toward same. Representatards, while claiming the moral mantle of “direct representative of the People”, are just as selfish as the Senatards and usually represent the same class of elitist control freaks from among the academic and industrial interests that wield the real power in Amerika. Examples of representatards include – every single sitting member of the House of Representatards and all alumni within recent memory. The sole exception is Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the only principled freedom lover in the entire bunch. How he survives each day in a sea of representatards is one of life's greatest mysteries.

Obama Flubs the “Oaf of Office” - How Appropriate!

2009-01-20T16:28:00.005-05:00

How very telling it is that in his very first act as Prevaricator-in-Chief, His Holiness, with the assistance of Constitution-flouting Chief “Justice” John Roberts, tongue-trips over the Oath of Office (or “Oaf” of Office, as Senator Diane Feinstein slipped so Freudiantly). Now one would think that regurgitating verbatim a simple 35-word sentence wouldn't be an onerous exercise for an Ivy League law school graduate, but I guess the fact that one did ultimately speaks volumes about said institutions and the real qualities of their inmates. I can't help but shake the impression that this exercise was regarded by both participants as an annoyance, a piece of quaint ceremony that stood in the way of getting on with actually seizing the reins of imperial power.

It is altogether fitting that our new Caesar and his chief judicial enabler should so visibly bungle this simple utterance. After all, neither of these despicable creatures has demonstrated even the slightest true knowledge of or respect for the founding document that the Oaf of Office compels them to pledge to defend as the primary function of their respective offices, so why should we be surprised in the least when they not only fail to utter said oath correctly, but seem thoroughly bewildered at its content and meaning? Back in the earliest years of the Republic, an era when this nation actually was a republic rather than an anarcho-tyrannical empire and when presidents-elect were generally men with at least a modicum of actual integrity, the oath of office was the cornerstone of the inaugural ceremony. Indeed, it was really its only purpose, for the presidency was an office of extremely limited, even insignificant authority that certainly did not merit the lavish festivities that now accompany today's imperial coronations.

Obama's public bungling of this now quaint, irrelevant, and utterly meaningless oath serves as a clearer symbol than anything else of the true nature of this nation and the mindset of the criminal thugs who occupy its highest office. Will the oath be dispensed with altogether in the future, as what are now quadrennial coronations become less frequent as the office holders begin serving indefinite terms, in open conflict with the document they mendaciously pretend to uphold and defend?

The signs so far are not encouraging.

On the Occasion of Our New Caesar's Coronation – Will You Please Shut the **** Up Already?

2009-01-19T14:08:00.003-05:00

Please let me begin by offering a sincere apology for the crass flavor my post's title. As is the case with most other libertarians, the idea of anyone assuming the office of President of the United States is enough to induce nausea, so I'm not picking on the person scheduled to occupy it as of sunset tomorrow. I am, however, like most other liberty lovers of my acquaintance, sick to the point of feverish homicidal rage of all the undeserved, insufferable adulation being heaped upon our newest god-emperor, His Holiness Barack I. I am, I believe, suffering even more than most in that my wife, daughter, in-laws, and, most disturbing of all, even my six-year-old grandson continue to speak of this political hack as if he is Jesus Christ's younger brother come down from on high to save us all. The adulation is, of course, entirely race-based; they see one of their own at the slop trough and believe that it will somehow trickle down for their benefit, all common sense and practical experience notwithstanding. Yet these same people (minus my grandson, who is too young to know the difference) would treat any other politician of lighter skin shade who vomited the same stale, easily disprovable bromides as O'Bamma to the well-deserved verbal tarring and feathering merited by any of the criminals reaching the nation's highest political office.

But all is not entirely lost. I predict, with absolute certainty, that within 364 days of today, “Black America” will be as deeply disillusioned with His Holiness as they were with the nation's real "first black President," Emperor Slick Willy I. No, they won't directly express this disillusionment, at least not to white folk. But you'll hear rumblings of it nonetheless, as the Emperor's misguided, already-tried-by-his-white-predecessors-and-failed-miserably policies, especially economic policies, hit Black folk first and hardest, as any fifteenth-rate Austrian economist would have predicted.

I am not ordinarily an “I told you so” kind of person. However, because Amoricons as a whole are the world's greastest living, breathing exemplars of George Santayana's most famous statement in action, and because “Black America” is especially afflicted with a terminal dose of this condition, I am going to make an exception, if for no other reason than to enrage at least a small group of people into seeing the error of their ways and waking up to reality. I am currently in the process of composing an admittedly tasteless, even crass open letter to “Black America,” to be posted precisely one year from today, asking said community if it feels the same degree of mindless adulation for this fraudulent socialist huckster that it does today. I do this knowing that the national economy will be in infinitely worse shape one year from now, that Emperor Barack's promise to “create a million new jobs,” or whatever number his mendacious pie hole has spewed forth, will have failed miserably, and that no lasting, wealth-creating jobs will have been created. I also know that the handful of Black entrepreneurs most capable of and willing to create jobs and wealth in their communities will continue to be hamstrung by petty government regulations that smother their entrepreneurial ambitions in the womb, that impose onerous financial and legal penalties on them, and that serve no other purpose than to enrich and entrench those competing businesses that play the State's game, but who gouge their poor customers for shoddy goods and services and that contribute nothing to the community's betterment. I'll even go out on a limb and predict that these same people being strangled by big government will never see the connection and will continue to endorse Big Brother socialism, despite its malignant effects on their own economic health (or, alternatively, continue down the historic path of race-based hypocrisy by doing everything they can to avoid government big government while still loudly prescribing it as a cure for everyone else's ills).

In the end, Black neighborhoods will continue to stagnate economically and socially, especially as the Emperor's Establishment-dictated fiscal policies of Federal Reserve fiat currency generation, and attendant inflation, obliterate the value of the U.S. Dollar, thus destroy existing job opportunities for under-educated, under-skilled Blacks. Furthermore, his overwhelmingly anti-2nd Amendment position will foment a resurgence of crime in the inner cities as law-abiding blacks are further disarmed and left prey for criminals. This too will contribute to economic collapse in the inner cities, as would-be employers continue to abandon these crime-ridden communities for safer, less expensive locations – many of them overseas in the Third World.

Of course anyone who even asks such questions as I intend to ask, anyone who calls into doubt the infallibility of His Anointed Excellency, or indeed even mentions these un-PC subjects, will most likely be persecuted with every weapon in the State's legal arsenal. Give the unchecked adulation for O'Bamma among not only traditional constituencies, but among the erstwhile “conservative [sic] right” as well, count on the Unitary Executive to metastasize.

Nonetheless, whatever the risk, I shall ask the unpleasant, extremely un-PC questions in the most public of forums, beginning here. After all, what does a middle-aged white male have to lose, other than his job, home, family, self-respect, and life, all of which he's going to lose sooner rather than later given our accelerated rate of socioeconomic collapse.

At any rate, be sure to return on January 19th, 2010, if you don't come back sooner. I promise you a very entertaining read.

New Year's Predictions For 2009

2009-01-04T17:57:00.003-05:00

Those who know me will be surprised at the title of this latest missive, for I am notoriously averse to the idea that anyone can “predict” with certainty anything other than death and taxes (though sadly, never occurring in that order). Still, I think that I can extrapolate from current, long-standing trends to forecast with reasonable certainty the occurrence of the following at some point during the current year. Indeed, to any conscious human being with a functioning brain stem, concurrence with these predictions is literally a “no-brainer.”

As the economy continues its southward journey, government at all levels will re-evangelize and re-assert the Gospel of Saint John Maynard the Keynes and impose new taxes, new regulations, and new “public works” projects upon the nation's populace in a frantic effort to “revitalize” the moribund national economy. Utterly undeterred by the failure of this gospel and its works during the last century, the new generation of Keynesian disciples, like the disciples of their faith's Socialist and Communist cousins, will simply conclude that their forebears weren't aggressive enough in evangelizing and doing Saint John's works and that “this time'll be different, honest! We'll have the RIGHT people in charge!”

Directly related to the previous prediction, the millions of moral and intellectual ciphers that constitute the majority population of this once productive and prudent nation will open their figurative mental mouths wide, like starving baby birds and swallow, whole, the toxic drivel spouted by these Keynesian Apostles. Lacking even an embryo's grasp of the fundamentals of economics or praxeology, these pathetically acerebral creatures, who miraculously managed to get themselves out of bed, dressed, and to work and back home each day of their adult lives without fatally injuring themselves, all the while earning obscene and undeserved inflation-stoked salaries in quasi-private sector “jobs”, will suddenly find themselves back down on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Having been raised to believe that a middle-class lifestyle is a birthright, millions of these parasitic oxygen thieves will demand that the Keynesian ruling class “do something.” The “somethings” most popular with the unwashed masses are, of course, taxes on “the rich” (i.e., the few remaining segments of the population who have saved, invested wisely, and are capable of creating real wealth), protectionist tariffs on “non-American” (i.e., high quality and affordable) goods, and subsidies to “essential” (i.e., non-competitive) goods and services. Expect the Keynesian high priesthood to ensure that ALL of these measures are enacted at some point, with predictable results.

The cipher majority, already in darkly medieval ignorance, if not contempt of its legally protected constitutional rights, will heed the ruling elite's demand to cede even more of said rights to the State in exchange for “security” (which will of course never be precisely defined). Whether or not 2009 will be the year in which all remaining pretense of the United States being a “free and democratic republic” is dropped or not is impossible to predict with any certainty.

Libertarians will continue to naively believe in two seemingly indestructible fallacies, despite galaxies worth of evidence that they are no more viable than the existence of the tooth fairy or Santa Claus:

1. The ruling elite are simply ignorant of Austrian (i.e., free market) economics and the principles of liberty and will see the error of their ways and repent their authoritarian sins if libertarians make enough noise.

2.The masses just haven't been adequately exposed to the benefits of the free market and principles of liberty and will wake up and become critical thinking, freedom-loving respecters of private property once “the light” shines upon them in the right tint.

The United States military will continue to encroach further upon civilian government at home, with the marching moron masses continuing to praise “our troops” for defending “our freedom”, even as the Constitution and Bill of Rights are further eviscerated and American citizens at home are increasingly harassed, “renditioned”, or gunned down in the streets, often by a coalition of military and local “law enforcement” personnel.

“Black” America, the one demographic group proven to be especially incapable of learning anything from history, will continue to worship Messiah-Emperor Barack I as Jesus Christ's Baby Brother in the flesh even as he breaks every one of his campaign promises (“Change? What 'change'? Was I drunk when I said that?”) and begins to display his innate paternalistic contempt for working class blacks that he somehow managed to half hide during his campaign. Being even slower learners than the masses of white Americans (quite an accomplishment, that) and with an even shorter collective memory, black Americans will continue to lay roses at Obama's feet even as they are crushed mercilessly by economic collapse and bear the brunt of the brutality of the incipient police state that their beloved black messiah helps to further entrench. (Hey, I ain't writing this to make friends.)

The “underground economy”, a system that blends barter, cash transactions, and voluntary cooperative works, will become the unacknowledged backbone of the American economy as the “official” Federal Reserve-dominated system continues to collapse under the weight of its own criminal dysfunction and inertia, a la its Soviet older brother two decades earlier. Needless to say, the State will refuse to tolerate its thralls acting as free and independent citizens looking out for their own survival outside of the chaotic confines of the State's making. Expect the State to respond to this by engaging in anarcho-tyranny, brutally cracking down on peaceful citizens engaged in voluntary commerce at the expense of pursuing real criminals engaged in true crimes against person and property.

Evangelical “Christians” will pursue their quest for temporal power by proxy with a renewed vengeance. Look to groups such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition to make a desperate sweep of what little remains of the discredited Republican Party and dredge up the sleaziest, most unethical, most inconsistent member of the Republican establishment they can find and paint a “Christian” face on that person. Watch them then make a desperate, if comical attempt to pedestal this person as a possible 2012 presidential candidate, giving the Democratic “opposition” more than sufficient time to obliterate said individual's credibility. Meanwhile, look for more scandals to erupt within the “evangelical” community, as shady financial dealings and sexual peccadilloes come to light. It also goes without saying that “evangelical” support for the twin imperial debacles in Iraqghanistan will not waiver by a millimeter and that any new wars set unilaterally in motion by Emperor Barack I will meet with hearty “evangelical” approval, despite being declared by a Democrat. After all, Moloch has co-opted American “Christianity” and the lust for blood amongst this group outweighs mere partisan political considerations.

Well, that's it for now. If any other flashes of the obvious come to mind, you'll read it here first.

For The Last Time, It's NOT Ignorance of Free Market Economics; It's Lust For POWER!

2008-12-09T16:51:00.006-05:00

Allow me to post my first entry in over a year as a rant, a venting, or “getting something off of my chest.” As my title implies, I am growing not angry, but increasingly exasperated by the tendencies of my fellow libertarians to attribute intervention in the economy by the Reigning Establishment to ignorance of Austrian Economics. On this I must heatedly disagree. The Establishment is not ignorant of the Free Market principles that undergird the Austrian school; they are contemptuous of them.

I finally reached my boiling point after reading Lew Rockwell's article in today's LRC in which he excoriates the State for its toxic interventions in the economy as fruitless attempts to “stop” the business cycle. Allow me to be clear here: I do not in any way, shape, or form disagree with Lew's conclusions, nor do I fault him for his focus on the Establishment's predictably inept and futile attempts to “fix” what they've broken through predictably failed and harmful actions. What I do object to is the implication (and Lew is not alone in this) that this is due to a lack of knowledge of Free Market Economics. Even talentless government bureaucrats are not stupid enough to have learned nothing from history.

Academic economists have been “running away from” the Austrian School ever since its inception. Even those few to gain prominence who have not done so, or who indeed have at one time given serious support to it, have eventually renounced it in favor or more “mainstream” schools, such as the Keynesian or Chicago flavors. Economically literate libertarians (I'm probably repeating myself here) know of whom I speak. For those new to the light, I am referring to the “Maestro”, Alan Greenspan, the architect of much of the current economic meltdown, a man who in his younger years was an ardent devotee of the gold standard and other tenets of the Austrian School, but who, upon realizing the ridicule and professional ostracism that such adherence engenders, chose to apostatize and join forces with the economists of the Establishment. Clearly, the Maestro saw this as a ready path to riches and power, despite what he clearly knew to be the indefensible flaws of this “mainstream” school, as revealed during the 1970s era of “stagflation.” Other “mainstream” academic economists simply refuse to debate or even discuss Austrian School theory, considering it “fringe”, “kooky”, “unrealistic”, or “beneath discussion.”

This of course begs the question: If this is true, then why not use the forum of a debate to drive a stake through the Austrian School's intellectual heart, once and for all? After all, if this economic school of thought is “fringe”, “kooky”, or “unrealistic”, should it not then be easy to demonstrate this through exposition of facts, and thus shut down debate once and for all time?

We know the answer. Austrian School economics is the only provably viable economic philosophy, the only one adherence to which can guarantee stable money, sanctity of property rights, and perpetuation of liberty. “Mainstream” economists, almost all of whom are apologists for and enablers of the State and its ever-expanding power, fully realize this. But to admit this is to rob the State of its omnipotence, to render themselves irrelevant, and to butcher a number of long-sacred philosophical cows. This cannot be allowed to happen; ergo, the coercive suppression of any attempt to teach Austrian economics on campus and the deliberate shutting out of consideration for it in the political realm. The Establishment's focus is on one thing and one thing only – the perpetuation and expansion of its own power over those not connected to itself, and whatever it takes to ensure continuity of this process will be done.

So, to all who decry the State's retreading of history's paths to failure (George Santayana, your memory can rest in peace), I say simply, get real, and stop being so naïve. As far as the State is concerned, we can all drop dead and rot. We are allowed to produce only to the extent that the fruits of our labor enable the State to continue to exercise and expand its predatory power over us, and our permission to retain said fruits is contingent upon the extent to which we “play nice” and obey our masters' every command, including that to pay tribute from our daily bread in an amount and frequency of their determination. For examples of what happens to entrepreneurs (i.e., those who demonstrate the willingness and means to use their own resources and means of production to satisfy consumer wants and needs), free thinkers, and lovers of liberty who do not bow and scrape to Leviathan and who seek to keep the fruits of their labors in the face of State extortion, see here. For examples of “entrepreneurs” who defy Leviathan's plan for their wealth, but then capitulate and tow the official line after being threatened with punitive measures, see here, here, and here, respectively.

No, the bottom line is that we are all slaves to a government that is well aware of what economic liberty is, but that refuses to allow it to flourish for justifiable fear that it will lead to that government's destruction. Some of us are more willing slaves than others, but no one who lives a life of liberty in defiance of the parameters Leviathan sets forth will long survive. It is past time that libertarians stop pretending otherwise.

More Random Reflections

2007-10-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

Heartfelt congratulations to the Boston Red Sox for proving that “the Curse” did indeed end three years ago. While some might argue that they owed their victory as much to the Colorado Rockies’ offensive impotence as to their own skills as a team, it was obvious from Game 1 of the American League Division Championship series that this team was headed for the top. However, I must admit that my congratulatory tone here is largely self-serving. As a life-long New York Yankees hater, it always warms the cockles of my heart to see the Red Sox come out on top. Furthermore, having seen our Diamondbacks defeated by the Rockies, who definitely proved themselves not to be the powerhouse they or the media wanted us to believe they are, I was not about to “go with the herd” and cheer the Rockies on as “our National League brethren.” This attitude seems to have seized local Diamondback fans like a plague and it truly mystifies me. Why on earth would one want one’s division rival to win a World Series? It boggles the mind. This is why, during the late 1990s when the Yankees were winning yearly American League Championships as if it were pre-ordained, I always and without exception cheered for their National League rivals in the World Series, even though the rest of my fellow Baltimore Orioles fans were remaining “loyal to the league.” Nonsense! To paraphrase the old Arab folksaying, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

Speaking of baseball, let’s quickly revisit the free-market economics behind it. The news yesterday that Alex Rodriguez has opted out of his optional contract final year with the Yankees and is shopping for a new home has prompted not a little whining from self-styled “pundits” about “greed.” Apparently the opportunity for A-Rod to earn a couple of hundred million dollars over a five-year period has sparked the usual flames of socialist-statist envy, with the usual hue and cry about how “outrageous” baseball salaries are “destroying the game.” *SIGH* I grow weary of having to do this, but for the benefit of the many slow learners and economic ignorami out there, here it is, once again: No one will earn any amount of money that isn’t commanded by the market. The fact that A-Rod is being offered this “obscene” amount of money to play baseball is due to the fact that millions of fans out there are willing to pay lots of money to see him exercise his talents in a venue where they can be put to best effect. I personally think that A-Rod is grossly overrated and worth nowhere near this kind of money, as his post-season performance seemed to prove beyond a doubt. But apparently many other baseball fans and club owners think otherwise. We’ll soon see whose opinion prevails, since it is ultimately the owner of one team who will decide whether the cost of A-Rod’s salary and bonuses is more than offset by his on-field performance and with it the increase in profit his presence brings to their team. Either way, we’ll once again see that the market has an amazing knack for consistently bringing about results that are satisfactory to all stakeholders involved.
Once again, is anyone else as sick as I am of “God Bless Amerika” replacing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch? ENOUGH! BASTA! STOMATA! KHALLAS!
I’m afraid I can’t put the issue of home defense off any longer. By this I mean the investment in guns and security cameras and/or a burglar alarm. While I certainly regret having sold my handguns before leaving Virginia, it was easier than transporting them across country, the risks of doing so simply greater than I cared to undertake. So what prompts the urgency of purchase now? Well, last Friday had me doing what I usually do first thing in the morning, which is taking our two dogs for an early morning stroll around the yard, returning them to the house to feed them, then transferring them to the dog run on the east side of the yard for the day. I keep two padlocks secured to the chain link gates, just to allow the dogs to be locked up if I go away from the house for any appreciable length of time. Up until Friday, however, I seldom used them. It wasn’t until about 9:30 AM that I heard barking coming from an unusual angle of the house, making me think that someone’s dogs had gotten loose. Indeed, “someone’s dog-s" (plural) had gotten loose – mine. Imagine my surprise at both of them showing up at my side door! I immediately grabbed both by their collars and walked them back to the run, where I found both gates wide open. Now I know for a fact that I had secured both, as I’ve done every morning in the six months since we had the run built. Neither dog can jump high enough to push open the wishbone gate latches, so I’m convinced that someone had to have opened them. The scariest aspect of this is that if this had happened, I should have noticed it since I’ve made a habit of sitting at my kitchen table to work, with my kitchen dining window facing the east side of the yard, allowing me to see most of the comings and goings on the dirt road outside the property line. The fact that I couldn’t see who might have approached the run and let the dogs out really unnerves me. Why, in the fifteen months that we’ve lived here, has this not happened before? I’m not aware of any new neighbors or anyone with a grudge against us, so I can’t even make a short list of suspects. Still, the fact that someone could sneak up on us like that has me worried. It’s time to definitely reinvest in some firepower and, preferably, a surveillance system. If any readers can suggest something for external home surveillance that is both inconspicuous and affordable, I’m open to suggestions.

I finally got my daughter to open up about the speeding ticket that she received on here way to work in Oro Valley the other week and for which she has a court date on the 14^th of next month. From her description of events, it sounds like the uniformed extortionist, er, cop had the wrong car in his sites, but I still have to get her to take me out with her to retrace her commute path and explain sequentially what happened. Only then can I give her definitive advice. For my readers’ benefit, if you ever visit the Tucson area, beware the northwestern suburb of Oro Valley! This despicable little burg, inhabited by retirees and yuppies, is a notorious speed trap and the town government, apparently bereft of legitimate means of collecting sufficient revenue, has resorted to theft from motorists as its primary source of income. Tucsonans know what I’m talking about. More on this to follow.

Digging the debt ditch a little deeper. Not only did I trade my vintage Ford Escort wagon in for a more terrain-appropriate vehicle (a 2004 Nissan Frontier XE pickup) last week, but my dear wife also picked up a similar vehicle (a 2004 XE V6 crew cab) from the same dealer, with my full consent and blessing. Driving the eight-cylinder Yukon Denali SUV the forty round trip miles to and from work each day was becoming quite painful on the wallet. Also, since we ultimately want to use the Denali as a “family road trip” vehicle, the wife didn’t want to keep putting miles (and the attendant wear and tear) on it. I think it was a sensible decision, though one that will extend our accelerated debt payoff period for a bit longer than either of us would like. Still, it’s nothing insurmountable. On the current schedule I’ll have my truck paid off in seven months, hers in not much longer, so I think things will get back to normal shortly. Nothing onerous, especially with two income streams.

Speaking of debt and its elimination, I strongly recommend purchasing the book or audio CD equivalent of John Cummuta’s Transforming Debt Into Wealth. While John’s critics have pointed out that his methods are not original, I maintain that John puts a more human and approachable spin on the process than perhaps any other consultant out there. His methods truly do work and an investment of twenty to forty dollars for his book or audio CDs will more than pay for itself in the end. John, consider this a free plug from a sincere devotee!

Down (In Flames) Go the Diamondbacks

2007-10-16T15:40:00.000-04:00

Was anyone surprised? Did any of us fans who observed their performance on the field during the tail end of the regular season anticipate any other outcome? Did the revelation in the press that the D’backs clubhouse resembled a slumber party of high school boys come as a shock? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, congratulations on having spent the last year successfully living as a troglodyte. For those of us paying even the least bit of attention, let alone devoting much our free time to following the home team through every game during the end of the regular season and the post-season, this was the only end we could foresee.

This is a young team, one that obviously has tremendous potential. But with youth comes also a lack of maturity and a need for boundaries, guidance, and motivation. Bob Melvin, for all the praise heaped upon him and for all the calls to name him “manager of the year”, for the National League if not all of Major League Baseball, does not appear to be the man best suited to do this. I do not know what Melvin’s agenda for the team was after the end of the Division Championship games against the Cubs. It appears obvious from the quality of team play, however, that lengthy strategy sessions with the players to focus their strategy against the Colorado Rockies, a team with which they should have been by now intimately familiar, did not take place. Indeed, it would seem that the D’backs had Melvin’s blessing to sleep in, booze it up, and generally lay about during the five-day rest period. The Rockies seem to have put that same interval to much better preparatory use. Though I have no way of knowing what either manager did during the hiatus between the NL Division Playoffs and the NLCS, the Rockies' performance on the field certainly seems to indicate that they prepared themselves mentally, strategically, and physically for facing the D’backs, perhaps taking extra time to carefully study the offensive and defensive weaknesses of our lineup. The D'backs apparently didn't think such a thing to be necessary, to their evident detriment.

What disappoints me most of all is the attitude permeating the D’backs clubhouse that says “We don’t care if we win or lose, we just want to have fun.” Well, young sluggers, your fans expect you to both have fun AND play to win. While it’s true that you’re not commanding, among other things, the high salaries of some of your peers on other teams, your fan base expects nothing less than one thousand percent performance effort from you, including the dedication to winning as many games as possible, most certainly once you make it to the post-season. Anything less is unworthy of a professional baseball player.

So what to do? Well, for starters, Josh Byrnes, Jeff Moorad, and company need to kick BoMel in the ass and in the midsection and let him know that this “whatever” attitude permeating the club will not be tolerated and that if it takes “bedchecking” of his team to get them to play baseball like adults, then amen, so be it. (For my money they could also give him some pointers on managing his pitching staff. Leaving starters in the game after the fifth inning just ensure that they “get the win” has, in several key situations, led exactly to the opposite. The situations with Livan Hernandez and Micah Owings during the last two games of the NLCS are prime examples of what happens when starters show fatigue and start missing the strike zone and giving up runs. Having starters tough it out through six-plus innings during the regular season is one thing, but if you’re looking to win a championship or a World Series, you do what you have to do and go to the next available arm appropriate for the situation before runs are allowed and leads lost. Under such circumstances “get’em outta there!” needs to be any manager’s post-season motto where starters are concerned during the middle of the game, especially in the National League. Bullpens are there for a reason. That said, keeping closer Jose Valverde on the mound for extra innings and having him pitch thirty-five-plus balls is a common-sense no-no. What on earth were you thinking, BoMel?)

Second, send a few of the younger guys back down to Tucson and let them mature for a season. Justin Upton, for all of his star power as a hitter and right fielder when first brought up from AA Mobile, quickly lost steam as far as I’m concerned and really needs to get that final year of growth in the top of the minors before joining the mother team full time. Eric Byrnes, for all of the accolades heaped upon him by management and fans, is perhaps the most overrated player on the team. His post-season performance was pathetic, to put it charitably, and his top-of-the-ninth strikeout with two on last night in game four was the icing on the cake that sent the Rockies to the World Series. Get off your pedestal, Byrnsie, until you’ve done something to earn it. On the other hand, I hope that Mark Reynolds is given equal playing time at third next season. He has more than lived up to expectations, despite committing defensive errors that have proved costly at times. He has shown himself to be a quick study and will overcome these bad habits. Augie Ojeda has also more than earned a spot on the permanent roster and needs to be allowed equal playing time with Orlando Hudson at second base. My only gripe about Augie is that he displays at tendency to be overzealous defensively, moving into first base or right field territory to catch fly balls or grounders when they are clearly within the sights of the right fielder or first baseman. This has caused cross-ups and conflicts on a couple of occasions, with Augie “bumping out” Conor Jackson or Justin Upton, causing balls to drop in for base hits that should have been caught. Not quality play for major leaguers. Indeed, most players should be over this by the team they move up out of Advanced “A” league ball.

In closing, I expect better from the D’backs in 2008. Discipline and focus are what’s needed. Let’s hope that BoMel and coaching staff will step up to the plate and see it happen.

A Sad Side Note in Closing: Next season is scheduled to be the last for the Tucson Sidewinders, the D’backs AAA farm team. After thirty-eight seasons here in Tucson, first as the Tucson Toros, then as the Sidewinders beginning in 1998 with the establishment of the D’backs as an NL expansion team, they have been sold to a New York concern that is planning to move them to Reno. Apparently they have had the second lowest attendance figures for the Pacific Coast League for at least four seasons running, with only the Colorado Rockies’ AAA team, the Colorado Springs SkySox, having lower figures. The Sidewinders have always provided this city with quality baseball at bargain-basement admission prices, with regular appearances by current Diamondback stars. They were the 2006 Pacific Coast League champions and almost repeated their playoff success this year. Sadly, Tucsonans just don’t seem interested in baseball in significant numbers. The Sidewinders’ 11,000-seat stadium, Tucson Electric Park (affectionately known as TEP to us fans), rarely ever fills more than 5,000 of those seats, even on weekends. With baseline box seats going for just $9.00 each and general admission seats at $6.00, it’s hard to imagine cost being a factor in keeping the fans away. Personally, I suspect that it has more to do with the park management and the (abysmal) quality and exhorbitant prices of concessions (higher even than those at Chase Field in Phoenix, home of the D’backs) than anything else. Current owner Jay Zucker doesn’t seem to show any interest in reaching out to the fans, so I suppose that his team’s fate is largely his own fault. Anyway, the Sidewinders will be sorely missed, at least by this fan. Maybe we’ll be lucky and get an independent league team to set up shop in town. Till then, there’s always Cactus League (pre-season Spring training) baseball.

Pathetic (But a Sign of Times to Come)

2007-10-12T14:40:00.001-04:00

I had always thought that such claims were overstated, though given what I see around me every day I don’t know why. It is impossible, I always believed, for anyone who has sat through twelve years of formal classroom instruction to have learned so transparently little. The basics, the bare rudiments, simply have to have been picked up at some point, if only through osmosis.

I was wrong. Some, perhaps many more than I expected, learn absolutely nothing in twelve years of public school education that will ensure their survival in the real world. I met one such tragic young victim yesterday afternoon.

It happened when I stopped by a local gas station/convenience store down the road that is also home to an A&W fast food outlet. It was late in the afternoon, I had just picked up my grandson from school, and didn’t feel in the mood to cook anything for dinner. So, I decided to pick up some bacon double cheeseburgers for the wife, the kidlet, and me to nosh on while we watched the NLCS playoff game. I was greeted at the counter by a young lady of no more than eighteen, your stereotypical white suburban high school student. She took my order, which came to a total of $16.18. Needing to simplify the holdings of my wallet and unload some burdensome change, I promptly gave her $21.18 consisting of a twenty, a one, and change of a dime, a nickel, and three pennies. Expecting a five in return, I was instead greeted by a blank, confused stare.

"I can never figure out how this works when you guys do this,” came the plaintive reply.

“HUHHHH?” I wanted to exclaim. “COME AGAIN? What is it about this exercise in elementary arithmetic that you should have mastered, cold, in the third grade that you don’t understand?”

Quickly gathering my composure and realizing that this poor creature needed help and encouragement, not ridicule, I explained that the point was to receive change of an even, easily measurable amount, preferably in paper money. Using a simpler example, I said that if the total of my order had come to, say, $2.38 I might have given her three one dollar bills, in which case I would have received sixty-two cents back in change (or so I would hoped, assuming this wretched girl could count it out properly). However, because I did not want to be burdened with additional change, I might have instead decided to give her $5.38, consisting of a fiver, three dimes, a nickel, and three pennies. Simply subtracting the amount owed from the amount given would yield $3.00, meaning that I would be given three one-dollar bills in change and at the same time would have relieved myself of bulky coinage while providing the cashier’s till with desperately needed change. Simple, right?

Apparently not. The young lady returned the same confused look, clearly not understanding why anyone would undergo what in her underdeveloped intellect was an exercise in quantum abstraction. At this point I gave up, although I did convince her that I was not sticking my hands illegally into the till by having her give me a fiver in change from the original transaction. I wondered how many other customers she had interacted with who were both less honest and less patient and courteous with her as she fumbled her way through a simple transaction.

Dear readers, are your children like this poor, unfortunate young lady? Is this what you want to subject your children to by sending them to the State’s regimented enstupidation factories paid for by your stolen tax dollars? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and say that you love your children and have their best interests and their future at heart when you allow them to become dumbed down by an institution wholly unconcerned with their education, but fixated totally on turning them into mindless, compliant State-worshipping robots? Worse still, are you not guilty of NEGLECT by allowing this to happen? Have you completely abdicated your responsibility for your children’s education by dumping the burden for their intellectual development into the lap of the State? If so, I feel no compunction in telling you that your children’s failure to develop intellectually is your fault, and your fault alone. What must be done to further prove to you that a public school education will destroy your children’s desire to learn, will wring from them the ability to think critically, will alienate them from the essential nurturing that comes from the family, and will poison their minds against the very values you instill in them at home? Have the last four decades of proven failure of America’s public schools not registered with you at all? What more must be done to drive the point home?

I genuinely suspect that for most parents the answer, though they will never admit it even to themselves, is that they simply do not consider their children’s education to be their number one priority. Oh, sure, they’ll pay lip service to the idea that their children’s education is the most important family goal and will attempt to convince themselves that nothing is too good for their little precious darlings. However, when the heat hits the pavement they simply are not prepared to sacrifice what must be sacrificed in order to ensure that their children are given the best opportunity possible to learn. I do not mean to imply that these parents must sacrifice big money in order to provide little Johnny with a premiere private school education, although this is often the most desirable option. What I mean by “sacrifice” is parents giving of their time and energy to ensure that, no matter where their children go to school, they are receiving an education in what they will need to survive in the real world, be this a combination of “the three ‘R’s” and certain core values practiced at home, or advanced subjects in which they are interested and for which they aspire to study in greater detail. How many of you parents spend quality time helping your children with homework, or answering their questions about subjects they’re studying that you might have at least a rudimentary knowledge of, or, most important of all, seriously probing your children about what they learned that day, what their teachers talked about in class, and how they interact with their classmates?

For all too many parents, their childrens’ education is a “fire and forget” process. It is one that involves nothing more than shoving the kids off to school in the morning and, assuming that Mom and/or Dad aren’t working 15-hour-plus days in order to enjoy the lives of yuppie suburbanites, picking them up at school in the afternoon and then leaving them free to do whatever they please. More often than not Mom and Dad don’t even drop off or pick up Johnny and his siblings, instead letting state-controlled yellow convict transports deliver them to and from school. They also provide the kids with a key to let themselves into and out of the house in the afternoon, since nobody is likely to be at home. Mom and Dad then just hope and pray that Johnny and siblings pick up at least a few tidbits of what passes for knowledge (again, mostly through osmosis) during the course of the day. After all, if the schools can’t force knowledge down the kids’ throats, then the schools aren’t doing their jobs and, damn it, that’s what tax dollars are supposed to pay for.

That’s probably what the young A&W worker’s parents thought too. Let’s hope she learns a lesson from her experiences with change making and looks for answers that will help her avoid future embarrassment. I sincerely hope and pray that she won’t look to the source of her failure for the fix.

Bye-Bye, Joe (Smirk)

2007-10-09T12:12:00.000-04:00

I hope millions of you out there are, like I am, savoring last night’s defeat of the New York Yankees at the hands of the Cleveland Indians in the American League Division Championship. As an old Baltimore Orioles fan (and thus an avowed Yankee hater), the site of Joe Torre’s long, brooding, oh-my-god-I’m-so-screwed face both during and after the game as Cleveland “bitchslapped” the Bronx Bombers in their own backyard was especially gratifying. While some might quibble with George Steinbrenner’s dropping a dime on ol’ Joe before Game 3 in announcing to the press and the universe that Joe had better have his resume ready for circulation if he lost the series, I really think Joe had to have seen it coming. You see, when you lead a team that, along with its fans, believes that it has a birthright to a World Series slot and when you, your team, and the fan base act accordingly (i.e., Guinness record-setting smack talk), you set a high bar for yourself. You lay mines for yourself to stumble on. You let loose a giant petard to hoist yourself up with. You piss in the well that you know you’ll probably have to drink from. In short, the sympathy lamp cannot possibly be lit for you among any reasonable gathering of human beings.

New Yorkers in general are, for lack of a more polite term and as anyone who has ever lived or traveled in the Big Apple well knows, seven-star assholes. Seven-star assholes who believe that the universe revolves around them and their city. Seven-star assholes who believe that “the chip” that makes them who they are (and surgical removal of which would probably kill them) also serves as a magic magnet to give them what they want, when they want it. Seven-star assholes who, for all of their façade as the most cosmopolitan of people, are remarkably out of tune with the rest of the country. The goodwill extended toward New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 was as ephemeral as soft-serve ice cream in July, with New Yorkers, just by being themselves, doing as much to erase that precious goodwill as quickly as possible. This is now reflected in the rest of the nation’s attitude toward the Wormy Apple’s baseball prima donnas. Like the city they represent, they are still milking the residue of that vanished 9/11 goodwill as hard as their crooked former mayor, whose smarmy, arrogant face graced both of the Yankee home games like an infected pimple on a zit-ridden teenager’s face. And by the way, for God’s sake, will Major League Baseball please put a stop to the insipid practice of performing “God Bless Amerika” during the seventh-inning stretch? While this was a very touching and understandable reaction to the events of 9/11 in the days and weeks following that tragedy, it's well past the point of having played itself out. This faux patriotism wrapped up in the most obnoxious strains of jingoism has grown extremely tiresome. Isn’t the playing of the national anthem before first pitch homage enough to the almight leviathan State? Bring back “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”, PLEASE! (And by the way, why in God’s name has Dr. Ronan Tynan of the Irish Tenors been named the de facto voice of GBA during the stretch? Is Dr. Tynan an American citizen? If not, why is he being asked to front for American jingoism at a baseball game? )

Anyway, now that the Bronx Bums have been put in their place and a “dynasty” (oh, please!) ended, those of us professional Yankee haters can rest in the smug satisfaction that King George’s firing of Joe Torre will have even wider repercussions than creating a management vacancy. Several players destined for free agency next year have already made it clear that if Joe goes, they go too (A-Rod apparently among them, hopefully to the Red Sox, the Indians, or the Tigers). The loss of these half-dozen players are unlikely to lead to replacements with other free-agent superstars in time to make a difference for next season, so it’s very likely that for the first time in a decade and a half we’ll see a Yankees team that rests at or near the AL East bottom for a season and that will not even by a factor in post-season contention in 2008. How sweet the music! Let it play loud and long!

Random Reflections

2007-10-08T17:03:00.001-04:00

It’s been nearly a year since my last post and much has happened since then. I’ve settled down into my routine of work (telecommuting for my company back East, with some local work to supplement it), getting the house and property into inhabitable shape (no small feat given its condition when we moved in), obtaining an important professional certification (Certified Information System Security Professional [CISSP]), losing a father-in-law to cardiac arrest, helping my wife transition into her new job, providing moral support and encouragement to my daughter as she trains and prepares for a new career in the medical field, mentoring and parenting my grandson during his mother’s trying schedule and his own settlement into a new pre-school, and just coping with the vagaries of life in general.

Some of you who’ve corresponded with me probably are aware that I’ve been a frequent contributor to the Copwatch forums. In fact, you may have also noticed that this has been just about my only web presence for most of the last year. I did not intend to neglect this blog as I have; it’s just that I see the mission of Copwatch as being one of the most important facing our nation today as “law enforcement” (I use this term sacrilegiously here) continues to spiral farther out of control and the police continue to ever more rapidly abandon any pretense of protecting and serving and continue to more brutally than ever assert themselves as what they always have been above all: the enforcement arm of the ruling elite. As the death of Carol Gotbaum at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport last week shows (and all credible evidence currently points to her death as negligent homicide at best and murder at worst), the Heimatsicherheitsdienst, an organism rapidly devouring and subsuming every local police force in the nation, has anything but our best interests and safety at heart. While I certainly do not expect Mrs. Gotbaum’s death to provoke a public outcry against police brutality from among the somnolent Amoricon masses, most of whom are of the “he/she-deserved-it-and-besides-it’ll-NEVER-happen-to-ME” mindset, I do hope that it will serve as a wake up call to those straddling the fence.

Those who have paid any attention to my rantings of late have probably also noticed a marked absence of references to God, faith, church, or worship. Since relocating out of the D.C. area, I have been unable to find a church to call home, or indeed any “Christian Church” worthy of the name that I would even consider joining. One of the most insidious signs of the success of the current Bush Regime in subverting, perverting, and destroying traditional American institutions in its quest to impose its unique brand of imperialist fascism has been the co-opting of formerly faith-based institutions. While this rot is currently pervasive throughout the nation’s churches in general, nowhere is it more glaringly obvious than in America’s evangelical Protestant congregations. Dear readers, I have yet to set foot inside an evangelical church here in the heart of Southwestern Red State Central that has not resembled a Republican Party convention. While politicizing churches under ANY secular ideology is absolutely odious and perverse beyond words, Amerikan “conservative” fundamentalism, “the Religious Right” in common MSM vernacular, is the most revolting of all. I cannot imagine Christ returning to our world and even recognizing his teachings in any of these so-called congregations. I can only imagine his utter revulsion at the perversion of his message and can also easily imagine a repeat of his driving the moneychangers from the temple act, manifold. Indeed, I’m quite hard pressed to think of the last such church I attended that delivered a message out of any of the Four Gospels (you know, those pesky missives that contain, like, the actual words spoken by Jesus that are the foundations of the Christian faith. Yeah, THOSE. I know it’s not very appetizing). The most popular cherry pickings appear to come from the Old Testament and Revelations, just the books to justify the current evangelical fascination with and addition to gratuitous statist violence. Revelations in particular seems to have acquired new popularity as the current candidate for anti-christ (no, not the Bushtard, but the movement he represents) gains an ever stronger stranglehold on Christian institutions, their congregations having sold out to the State in return for watery spiritual-political pottage. Anyway, all of this is simply an aggevating factor in one of the most severe crises of faith I've suffered in decades, one which I'll consider discussing at greater length later.

On the political front some might point to the ascendancy of the Ron Paul presidential campaign as a sign of brighter times ahead, a fresh hope for the future. Would that this were the case. My own view is that it is extremely naïve of libertarians to believe that Ron has any serious chance of getting past the primaries, let alone becoming the Republican (or third party) presidential nominee or of getting elected to the presidency. Any libertarian worth the name knows damned well that the entire election process in this country is corrupt and rotten beyond salvation and that the moneyed interests dominating the process and enabling the two major parties are not about to let an outsider gain the upper hand. It doesn’t matter if ninety percent of the unwashed masses support him. The gatekeepers of “democracy” are NOT going to let an independent upstart like Ron Paul anywhere near the Oval Office. Even in the unlikely event that the stars align in exactly the right order and Ron not only wins the Republican primary and the nomination, but gets elected to the presidency, he will not remain there long enough to have any impact whatsoever. As I’ve said in other venues, the powers that be undoubtedly already have “wet boys” on retainer to deal with the contingency of a Ron Paul presidency (taking care to make Ron’s demise look like “an accident”, of course, something that the organs of the MSM will regurgitate without question). More likely, however, there will be nothing so crude as the outright murder that PTB usually reserve for lowly, unconnected serfs like me and my readers. Much more likely is that they’ll orchestrate a scandal that will receive the full backing of the MSM and will prompt an absolutely hostile Congress to impeach Ron and remove him from office. Ergo, nothing gained except a renewal and reinforcement of the current sociopolitical rot and the power of those who continue to spread it. This is why I find myself both amused and enraged by libertarian (of both “L” sizes) calls to “get out the vote” for Ron. Silly people, hasn’t it been proved again and again that one cannot change a rotten system from within and that anyone who tries will just be co-opted by it?

Finally there is my utter disgust with society in general, unabated since my last series of epistles and indeed strengthened by my new surroundings. I won’t bore anyone with details except to ask rhetorically what one can say about a state full of acephalic creatures who have sent John McCain and John Kyl back to the Senate for an unforgivable number of terms and whose voters embraced, with enthusiasm, their California socialist neighbors' (whom they claim to despise) ban on smoking in privately-owned public establishments. You get the idea.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I realize that my old gathering of followers, all half dozen or fewer of them, has long since dispersed and lost what little interest they ever may have had in anything I have to say. This is entirely understandable. A moss-covered rock loses its appeal after all of the moss has grown over it and nothing else takes root. Maybe new moths will gravitate toward the fresh light. We shall see.

The Solution is Very Simple: Arm EVERYONE

2006-11-19T11:45:00.000-05:00

(LIBERRANTER’S NOTE: Yes, I’m back - sort of. To what few, if any, regular readers I have, I apologize for my nearly 12-week silence. Things have been extraordinarily busy here since September, with grueling work schedules and the process of FINALLY selling our house in Virginia, as well as my spending many hours studying for a professional certification exam for which I’m sitting in December. I’ll try to write as frequently as possible, but can’t guarantee that I’ll be a frequent contributor again until after the first of the year. Thanks in advance for bearing with me.)

This breaking news item caught my attention this morning, mostly because of what I know will be the inevitable fallout from it. Two teenagers got into a scrap at Annapolis, Maryland’s Westfield Mall, resulting in one opening fire with a gun, drawing an off-duty U.S. Secret Service agent into the battle, resulting in both his and teenage shooter’s injury. Fortunately, no deaths or other serious injuries were reported.

The inevitable response to this event will be vociferous demands from elements of the Left, who seem pathologically incapable of even noticing, let alone learning from, the unintended negative consequences of the policies they endorse, for a complete ban on guns.

This author has a better idea: rather than ban guns altogether, encourage EVERYONE to carry a loaded weapon in public, concealed or otherwise. Common sense tells us that there is no better way to test Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that “an armed society is a polite society” than by ensuring that a sufficient percentage of the population is armed for defensive purposes. Even the densest “gangbanger” will think twice or thrice before drawing on a crowd of people in which there odds are that 90 percent of them are armed and trained in the use of their weapons. The little teenage thug at the mall would no doubt have been far less eager to draw and fire had he been surrounded by men, women, and adolescents with side arms.

Leaving aside the benefits of deterring government employees from abusing their positions of authority, an armed citizenry would prevent the deaths of many innocents and alleviate the need of “law enforcement” (such as it is) to constantly have to defend itself against accusations (usually valid) of unacceptable response time or inaction. Police agencies would become mostly investigative organizations, as an armed citizenry would remove the need for armed police officers to respond to every violent crime; the armed citizen would have removed the threat well before the investigating officer(s) arrived at the scene.

Of course the State isn’t about to sanction armed citizens on a national scale, a concept that was simple common sense to our forebears in this nation’s first century and a half of existence. While the State will cloak its objections in patronizing, self-serving rhetoric claiming that free access to arms will lead to more incidents such as that in the above-referenced article (despite multiple independent studies over the last two decades indicating that exactly the opposite is true), the State’s real fear, and a well-justified one at that, is that an armed citizenry will zealously defend its rights and property against encroachment by the cornucopia of extra-legal law [sic] enforcement agencies that are the State’s arm of oppression. Better to have the plebian masses suffer violence at the hands of rogue elements of society than to sanction a threat to the Establishment’s power.

But there is hope. As violence, spawned by the State’s destructive meddling in the socioeconomic affairs of the citizenry, continues to escalate, more and more Americans are going wake up, re-read the 2^nd Amendment to the Constitution, and come to realize that a right guaranteed protection by the State requires no “permit” or “training.” Guns will proliferate among law abiding citizens, that majority element that the State hates with more of a passion than it does any violent street criminal. If nothing else, last year’s SCOTUS decision in the case Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, in which the high court affirmed precedent declaring law enforcement absolved of any responsibility to defend citizens against violent crime, has sent us a loud message that we are responsible for our own self-defense and that if the State will not assist us in this regard, they need to stand aside. Let us hope that Americans are smart enough to realize this.

Meanwhile, beware teenage gangbangers in public, as well as off-duty fedcops with itchy trigger fingers and poor aim.

Follow-Up to My August 27th Post: Lew Rockwell Agrees With Me

2006-09-05T19:14:00.000-04:00

My post on the 27th of last month takes the Arizona LP to task for being a superficial shell of libertarianism, ultimately indistinguishable from the Demopublican party. Lew Rockwell echoes this sentiment in an article published in today's LRC, although he focuses primarily on the Libertarian National Committee and its recent gutting of the traditional libertarian platform that served as the party's moral pillars. It is hardly necessary for Lew to have done so for the benefit of "small 'l'" libertarians, but he has probably done an invaluable service to fence straddlers who are debating the merits of abandoning their support of the Demopublicans.

Alas, the "service" Lew is performing is the sad task of informing would-be freedom lovers that the Libertarian (Big "L") party at the national level is no longer the answer to America's political degeneracy, said party having been infiltrated by what many of us can only consider a deliberate infection of Demopublican viruses in a not-so-subtle attempt to destroy the party's moral underpinnings. As I mentioned in last week's rant, the LP, once a "non-party party", is now obsessed with performing a fool's errand; to wit, playing the establishment's game in order to win votes and gain power in office, even at the expense of its moral compass. Small wonder it's continuing its voyage to nowhere, and fast.

It goes without saying that if America wanted more "mainstream" political parties, at least two dozen others would be fiercely competing with the Demopublicans for a hold on the Amoricon masses' loyalty and elections would be narrowly won, perhaps even bordering on violent and with participation being at nearly one hundred percent of the eligible voting base. As it now stands there is every indication that the Demopublicans are going to be lucky to draw even thirty-five percent of eligible voters to the mid-term elections, a heartening sign that perhaps the "moron" component of the term "Amoricon" is smaller than we all thought and that Joe and Jane Sixpack are finally letting the establishment know that they've had enough of the games. For the LP to play along with the Demopublicans' desperate and failed strategies, based on a transparent absence of principle or morals, hardly serves the cause of freedom. Better, as any dedicated libertarian knows, to stay home and watch the whole sickening fraud than to play a willing part in it. Too bad that the "freedom-loving libertarians" in charge of the LP, who should know better than to place faith in politicians or political office, don't realize that. The saddest part is that they'll mislead a great many people into misplacing hope and trust in an institution that has repeatedly failed them and will continue to do so again and again. That is the most unforgiveable part of the whole moral abdication aspect of the LP compromise.

So to Lew I extend a heartfelt "thank you" for seconding my bleak assessment of the status quo. To the "leadership" of the current LP, I say "shame on you. You should all know better."

Americans (Supposedly) Saying “NO!” to the Draft – But Are They Saying “NO!” to the Bushtard and His War?

2006-08-28T13:01:00.000-04:00

According to a recent SurveyUSA Poll, seventy percent of Americans are opposed to a military draft, thinking it unnecessary. While I always take public opinion polls with a pound or two of salt unless I can verify for myself their sampling and polling techniques, this poll’s results appear consistent with commonly expressed public opinion. But the real question that needs to be asked is: If the public does not support the draft, does this also mean that it does not support the neocons’ wars?

I am skeptical of the idea of a “yes” answer to this question. Amerika, after all, is a nation of remora. Amoricons are notorious for adhering to the idea that they can get something cheap and painlessly, or for nothing at all. Therefore it would stand to reason that many, if not most, probably support the idea of waging endless wars of imperial conquest around the globe, but only as long as they themselves don’t have to bear the direct costs, whether financially in the form of increased taxes, or personally in the form of having to fight said wars or sacrifice one of their loved ones to its waging. After all, this is a people that put George W. Bush into the Oval Office for a second term and that prefers to sacrifice all of its liberty for not even a convincing façade of a temporary measure of security. This is a people that can’t identify its own country on a world map, can’t remember the year the WTC was destroyed and the Pentagon damaged by hijacked passenger jets, and pretty much swallows, whole, whatever “news” the mainstream media stuffs down its throat. In short, this is a nation of people incapable of formulating an informed opinion based on rational, critical thought. Not a very good target for a “scientific” opinion poll, n’est-ce pas?

I think I’ll email SurveyUSA and recommend that they ask the follow-up question I recommended at the beginning of this rant. Being an MSM affiliate, however, I’m not holding my breath that they will adopt this recommendation anytime soon. Even if they did, I won’t put any stock in a majority “yes” response to the question until I see evidence of American flag and “Support Our [sic] Troops” stickers disappearing altogether from SUV bumpers.

Arizona LP and Its Chapters as Impotent and Irrelevant as the LNC

2006-08-27T16:24:00.000-04:00

I don’t know why I expected any other outcome. Maybe hope truly does spring eternal. At any rate one of the first minor chores I accomplished as part of moving in was to email the Pima County chapter of the Arizona Libertarian Party to inquire about local activities. I was hoping that said activities would include such things as outreach programs designed to spread the libertarian gospel among the seas of disenchanted voters trapped in the Demopublican fog. What was I thinking?

Reprinted below is the pithy response to my query from one Ted Louis Glenn, chairman of the Pima County Libertarian Party. While I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Glenn is sincere in his desire to make a change for the better in consonance with libertarian core values, I found his response disheartening:

Welcome to Tucson!

If you haven't already seen it, the county party webpage is at:
http://www.pimalp.org/

and it has the details for our next monthly  meeting.

If you haven't already done so, you should register to vote soon.

The registration cut-off for next month's primary election is August

14th.

David Nolan for Congress is looking for volunteers:

http://www.nolan2006.org/

Perhaps this message is an auto response to new inquiries. But assuming that this was a handwritten message, my first response is: As a matter of fact, yes Ted, I have seen the Pima LP’s webpage. That’s exactly how I got your email address. Didn’t that dawn on you? Anyway, I’m very surprised at the theme of your response to my inquiry, which is your insistence that I register to vote. A cursory look at history shows voting to be a less than effective tool for either spreading the libertarian message or getting libertarians ensconced into key political offices as a means of engineering change. As a matter of fact, it has become pretty obvious that voting is nothing but a Demopublican charade designed to bamboozle the masses into thinking that they actually have some influence over who will enslave them. As libertarians we should know better than to think that we can change the existing system from the inside by playing the voting game. While I’ve read statements from key libertarian figures at the national level to the effect that “evangelization” of the libertarian message “is not the party’s job”, I must beg to differ, particularly where regional and local party affiliates are concerned. There are so few organizations dedicated to the cause of liberty that the LP on any level must be proactive in spreading this message if it is to reach anyone in number or have any impact whatsoever on behalf of liberty’s cause.

I quickly found myself asking, what exactly does Ted think will be accomplished by my registering to vote? Does he really think that David Nolan (with whom I’m totally unfamiliar) is going to get any closer to being elected to congress with my being a registered Pima County voter? More important, does Ted really believe that even if pigs sprouted wings and took to the air and Mr. Nolan actually were to be elected to congress that, together with Congressman Ron Paul, he as one of a mere two libertarians serving in the legislative branch would actually make a difference in the way the country is governed? Verily, the only way the LP will ever make any difference will be the day they can ensure that there is at least one libertarian on the ballot in each district of each state and that said candidates get a plurality of votes to put them on the political map. However, we are a very long way off from that day, in large part because libertarian party organizations at the local level like the Pima County party do nothing/nil/nada/bugger-all/teepota/rien/goose eggs/squat during the rest of the year to spread the libertarian philosophical message to the people or even to give themselves visibility or viability outside of election time. If libertarians want to present a true alternative to the Demopublicans, they have to stop thinking and strategizing like them. The people have made it abundantly clear that they don’t need or want another “mainstream” political party.

Alas, I see a proactive libertarian party as an unlikely development. As the debacle of the Libertarian National Convention earlier this Summer shows, the LP, at least on a national level, seems hell-bent on proving itself to be an Orwellian creation of the establishment (incidentally, why is there a Libertarian National Committee? Aren’t we committed to government on a local level, the original vision of the nation’s founders?). Remember in 1984, where it is eventually revealed to Winston Smith that the Brotherhood, the shadowy organization in rebellion against Big Brother and the Party, and its leader Emmanuel Goldstein, whose works Winston looked to for inspiration, were both creations of the Party, a tool for trapping and liquidating dissent? I’m beginning to believe that the LNC, if not the creation of Demopublicans from day one, has been infiltrated by enough of them to render it ineffective and impotent to the point where it is a parody of its founding principles. I don’t know if Ted Louis Glenn is simply unaware of this or is a willing participant in the castration of his own movement, but it looks as if he differs not one iota from any of the other hundreds of local libertarian party leaders in being totally devoid of vision.

I came to Tucson with a modicum of respect for the Arizona Libertarian Party, which was basically “disowned” by the national committee several years ago for reasons I still haven’t been able to fathom. I’ve never put any faith in the national committee, considering that its very existence seems to violate one of the basic tenets of libertarian philosophy, which is a renunciation of centralized authority. I thought that perhaps the Arizona party would have worn this outcaste status as a badge of honor by doing things closer to libertarianism’s core values. Why I thought this I do not know, since political parties are, when one stops to think about it, fundamentally incompatible with the libertarian mindset. It is perhaps inevitable that any libertarian organization that adopts the garb of the statist system will be corrupted by that same garb. The Libertarian Party at all levels seems just such an example.

So to Mr. Glenn I shall, when I have time, send a response saying “thanks, but no thanks.” My time is precious enough as it is. To spend it spreading an ersatz libertarian gospel through a mechanism of the State would be the ultimate moral travesty and a criminally counterproductive waste of time.

Say “NO!”, Loudly and Clearly, to the Draft!

2006-08-24T19:19:00.000-04:00

The Bushtards seemed to have finally discovered that the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not only being lost, but that there is increasingly a dearth of “warriors” to fight them. It has at last dawned on those wretched souls populating today’s American armed forces, especially those in front-line combat roles, that they are not at all “defenders of freedom and the homeland” (as the ‘Tard-in-Chief and his lackeys love to propagandize endlessly), but unprincipled mercenaries enmeshed in global wars of conquest having nothing remotely to do with national defense and everything to do with hidden agendas and material gain for a handful of wealthy powerbrokers. It is further dawning on “our” fighting men and women that they themselves stand nothing whatsoever to gain by remaining connected to the “defense” [sic] establishment and everything to lose, especially given the abominable lack of support they will receive should they be unfortunate enough to become wounded or maimed in defense of the Empire. For these reasons a stampede for the exits has begun, even despite such heavy-handed measures as “stop-loss” orders or raw attempts at bribery in the form of exorbitant “re-enlistment bonuses.” The powerbrokers apparently now believe that the only way to reverse this trend is through a return to the draft.

Many quasi-libertarian “conservatives” argue that this is actually a blessing in disguise, that a draft will force accountability upon the Executive Branch of government, thus making it less likely to pursue unpopular wars lacking any rational defensive basis. They often point to the Vietnam War as an example, claiming that the war ended precisely because of its unpopularity and that because a draft was in effect, the average American saw himself directly affected by the war, either because he himself was subject to it or had a close relative or family member who was. However, no libertarian can really buy into this argument on a philosophical basis, since it condones the use of force by the State. What follows are three key reasons, though by no means the only reasons, to oppose institution of the draft.

Conscription is costly. Maintaining a bloated and ineffective (for the purposes of national defense) fighting force is already costing this nation more than it can afford. Instituting a draft will only worsen the situation. Because conscription involves forcing people to do what is not in their own best interests to do, the government must implement extra enforcement mechanisms to compel people to comply who would otherwise use every means at their disposal to evade military service. While more than enough has been written on this elsewhere, suffice it to say that the last thing that a beleaguered imperial mercenary force trapped in a losing quagmire of a foreign war (and this is exactly what the U.S. armed forces have degenerated into) needs is to be flooded with conscripts who have been forced into service against their will. Rates of desertion and rebellion with the ranks will skyrocket, requiring that the military allocate scarce extra personnel and resources to combating desertion and crime. Such wasteful misallocations will do nothing but detract from what little operational readiness the armed forces are able to sustain, thus even further eroding defensive capability that is already highly degraded through neglect and wasteful misallocation of appropriations and materiel.

Conscription is unnecessary for national defense. History has proved time and again that any nation suffering an unprovoked attack by a foreign aggressor will see its citizenry rally to action with all available resources to defend their homes, property and families. An excellent if tragic example of this was the response of the citizens of the USSR to the Nazi German invasion in June of 1941. While we can assume that the overwhelming majority of the Soviet citizenry, having just been on the receiving end of Uncle Joe Stalin’s purges, was less than happy with Bolshevik rule and would probably have preferred to see Uncle Joe and the entire Communist Party liquidated in a similar purge, they wasted no time coming to the defense of their home turf once the Wehrmacht rolled across the border. Clearly they were not confusing defense of the Socialist Motherland with defense of their homeland. If the Chinese (just to pick a hypothetical threat) were to drop paratroopers into the heartland of America or managed to somehow land naval infantrymen on the shores of California tomorrow, there is no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that American citizens, no matter how much they detest the fascist Amerikan regime now in power, will do everything in their power to resist the invaders.

What the Bushtards and their puppeteers realize but refuse to acknowledge is that Americans are simply not interested in being poorly paid and under-equipped mercenary occupiers of the entire planet. They also realize and refuse to admit that the odds against foreign invasion of American soil by a comparably armed force are precisely zero (or less) and that they cannot justify the size and mission of the armed forces as now constituted. Thus they must find a way to force the people to comply with their insane imperial goals through either propaganda or executive fiat backed by force.

Conscription is slavery. This simple statement is the most powerful argument against any form of military draft, or indeed, the use of force by the State against the citizen for any other purpose. It does not matter that the State’s premier judicial organ has issued fiats to the contrary; the fact of the matter is that the State is compelling the individual to do something that he or she would not otherwise do voluntarily. This constitutes the use of coercion, something that every true lover of liberty strenuously opposes as a violation of natural justice and the rights of man. The usual argument against this libertarian reasoning is “well, if we didn’t have a draft, no one would volunteer to defend the nation against aggression.” As I pointed out in the previous paragraph, such reasoning is utter nonsense. Individuals, alone or as groups, will always do whatever is necessary to defend themselves and their property against genuine threats. Nations full of individuals are no exception. To force an individual to do something against their will is to force an individual to do something at their expense for your benefit. This is the very definition of tyranny and is exactly what the Washington power clique intends to exercise. It cannot rationally justify the use of armed force for national defense, so it seeks to impose a form of slavery upon the population at large in order to benefit the few (i.e., defense contractors, oil company executives, and a handful of central bankers). Is there anything more insidiously anti-American or anti-freedom than this? I’m hard-pressed to find an example.

So next time someone urges you to support a return to the draft, or if you should hear your senator or congresscriminal argue for such a measure, tell them to spend their own money on a soldier of fortune to fight their pet conflict du jour. Better yet, tell them to go suit up in a uniform, pick up a weapon, and go off and fight it themselves. Just leave the rest of the nation out of it; we’ll fight when we see the foreign hoards actually landing on our shores and posing a direct threat to our own lives and property.

Made It Safely, Getting Moved In

2006-08-06T13:24:00.000-04:00

Arrived with the family in Tucson last Monday. Found the new house a pigsty, as I expected (Mrs. Liberranter lost a bet on this). We've spent the last week cleaning the place up and making it habitable, but are so glad to be here that mere words cannot express the sentiment.

The view from this property of Saguaro National Park and the surrounding environs is beyond breathtaking. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet couldn't begin to afford a down payment on the true value of such scenery. I'll upload some shots in the next few days as I get time to load and annotate them.

The HughesNet technician came out Friday morning and installed our broadband satellite dish. That's really our only option for broadband out here in the sticks. So far, the service has been good; a little bit of latency on upload, but nothing serious. The true test will come this week when I get stage one of my home office up and running. The real test is going to be the range of my wireless router, since I wound up having to install the satellite modem and router in the "guest house", where my daughter and grandson will be living, fifty feet from the main house. Since my home office is on the second story at the front of the house, this may be a reach for my three-year-old LinkSys router. I may need to upgrade. Anyway, we'll see how that goes.

Our cars are supposed to arrive by Tuesday and our household goods by week's end. Let's hope and pray that everything gets here in one piece.

Well, this should be the last "update" post I make. Hopefully I'll be able to get back into the "liberrant" mode by mid-month and contribute something worth reading again. Bear with me; moving is always an adventure.

Moving, At Last!

2006-07-29T23:44:00.000-04:00

Well, this is it. The move is under way. The Liberranter family has packed and dispatched all of the household goods (last week), shipped all three of the family cars (today), and is residing as I write this in an extended stay hotel for the weekend before our Monday morning flight to Tucson, via Phoenix. It’s been an arduous journey. If you had told me six months ago that I would be doing what I’ve been doing over the last two months, that I would be making the move west right now, this year, I would have labeled you insane. But, it’s happening, and I’m sure God’s hand is in it all, otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten this far.

First, let me give full credit to Mrs. Liberranter for handling the logistics of the move while yours truly was keeping it all together to bring home the bacon and make arrangements for his continued employment out West, at least for the near term. Without the Good Woman’s dedication, none of this would have gotten as far as it has. She is truly a magician, as she proved five years ago during our short-hop move from Maryland to Northern Virginia. The good news is that we don’t plan to move again if we can help it, so she can retire from this arduous, thankless, stressful position. Kudos, Sweetie! You’ve earned your reward in heaven, if not here on earth.

I can only hazard a guess at what the future offers us in our new home. It’s as if God has said “OK, you wanted move to Tucson, I’m granting you your wish. Now I have some things I want you to do in order to repay me.” My problem is not knowing at the moment what those things are, but I suppose that’s part of the journey. We’ll see, continuing to pray for guidance.

So, dear readers, it will probably be another couple of weeks before you hear from me again. I thank you for your patience these last couple of months as I’ve neglected this blog in favor of preparing for the move. Once I get settled I guarantee you I’ll be contributing more regularly. However, I have to wait until the end of next week for broadband satellite service to be installed (yes, that’s my only option in our rural neck of the woods). So stand by: I promise to “reward” (or punish) you for your patience and understanding.

I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks!

Liberranter--

A QUESTION

2006-07-22T17:41:00.000-04:00

I'm still too busy packing and preparing for the move to write at length, but in light of recent events in the Middle East, I ask just one (obviously rhetorical question):

When, oh when, will the rest of the world declare that they've had enough of "that shitty little country" on the Mediterranean littoral that has caused the world at large, and the U.S. in particular, such unending grief since its founding on May 15, 1948?

An equally important question might be: When will the rest of the world, particularly the "superpowers" such as China and Russia, start holding the United States accountable for its international crimes and actively intervene, militarily if need be, to stop our criminal nonsense?

We are, through omission or commission, responsible for heinous crimes against humanity, in the Middle East, at home, and around the world. It is past time we were held accountable. That will happen, dear readers; it's only a matter of "when." May God help us, even though we've done nothing to earn his mercy and everything to incur his wrath.

Another National Birthday, Entropy Continues Unabated

2006-07-04T09:50:00.000-04:00

It's that day again, the anniversary of national nativity in which we all set aside a day to pretend (or go through vague motions of pretending) that we are celebrating the birthday of the "most free nation on earth", or some similar nonsense. Another year has passed and to all but the most deep in denial (or those so braindead as to not know what planet they reside on), nothing has improved over the last 364 days in relation to freedom in this once-great nation.

For this reason, I'm simply going to reprint the link to the late, great Harry Browne's classic 2003 Fourth of July editorial, just as I did last year and will continue to do every year on this date until the United States is reborn as the constitutional republic of limited government envisioned by the founders and enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. So without further ado:

http://www.harrybrowne.com/articles/JulyFourth.htm

And if that's not enough to satisfy your intellectual stimulation, try this tidbit from Manuel Lora, published in the Monday, July 3rd edition of LRC:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lora/m.lora26.html

Enjoy!