The Golden Gate

Tragic. The US government nationalizing and bailing out major financial institutions it helped to destoy...

I am a libertarian. To contrast this with Democrat and
Republican: we might say that the Republicans (at their core) want the
government to stay out of our financial lives, but control what we do in
our bedrooms (morality/religion). Democrats (at their core) want the
government out of our bedrooms, but control how we manage our financial
affairs (welfare/regulation/wealth redistribution). Libertarians want
the government out of our financial lives and out of our bedrooms.
Libertarians stand for the individual rights to life, liberty, and
pursuit of happiness according to our own conscience. They believe that
the purpose of government is to protect the freedom and rights of
citizens through a police force to protect us from the initiation of
force by other citizens, court system to protect us from fraud (enforce
contracts), and a military force to protect us from foreign invaders.

The libertarian stance on foreign aggression is: commerce with all
nations, alliances with none.  Libertarians not only want us out of
Iraq, they want us out of Japan! (and our other 800+ military bases
around the world!)  Let them hate us for our freedom and wealth, without
the military presence/force that forces that freedom and wealth down their
throats.

My reasons for being libertarian are simple. I believe that history has
demonstrated (in every time. and in every part of the globe) that the
more power you give to government, the more those who hold the power
will be corrupted by lobbyists (business, religious, bankers, racists,
populists, etc.).  As PJ O'Rourke put it, "When buying and selling are
controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are
legislators."  The more money and favors/regulations the government
controls, the more money and favors the lobbyists can afford to spend to
buy them, because (although it is somewhat of a gamble) the return on
investment for lobbying is typically 10 to 1. As a lobbyist, I can spend
$50 million dollars influencing various politicians in order to get a
$500 million dollar annual contract, and $1 billion to get $100 billion
contract. Smart business always follows the clearest incentives, and
competing for government largess is clearly incentived.
People/politicians are corruptible (especially through blackmail, which
money buys easily), and so governments become corrupt. The solution is
to reduce government power to reduce the scope and destructiveness of
its corruption and keep it maximally accountable to its core functions.
Hence, Libertarianism.

The American Constitution/experiment, was created by men whom, by todays
standards, are radical Libertarians, for the exact reasons stated above.
I believe that they created the most beautiful social contract in human
history, and I find it tragic that it is being increasingly ignored and
distorted. I am patriotic in this sense: I believe that the ideals and
values of life, liberty/freedom, protection of our right to use our
property according to our own conscience (as long as we are not
violating the identical rights of others) are worth cheering about and
if necessary, fighting to maintain.

Some of you may have seen the post by Deepak Chopra about Sarah Palin, in which he psycho-eviscerates those who find value or some type of agreement with the positions she takes. 

Upon reading it several times, I became progressively dismayed, although fascinated by the clarity with which it typifies “green/Boomeritis” arrogance, including the hypocrisy and self-refuting logic at its heart. This article examplifies a common stance taken by those whom I consider the most politically active people in my life. My opinion, which I offer reasons for below, is that it expresses a fundamentally dishonest and destructive perspective that is at the heart of much of the “transformational” community’s conversation about politics.

Specifically, it is built on a narrative that claims/implies that it is inclusive and integrative (2nd tier, in Spiral Dynamics terms) , but is deeply self-absorbed and parochial (1st tier), and hence blind to its blindness.

It is written as if it is the only rational perspective possible, as if Deepak (and by extension Obama, or the reverse) are so right that there is no need for conversation about the accuracy of their propositions and conclusions, only about how to deal with them. This marginalizes all the values of people they disagree with - the very thing that their stance accuses all other perspectives of.

Deepak (and those who agree with and write similar pieces) pretend as if the “ground” that he is standing on and writing from represents an “enlightened/superior/higher” perspective BECAUSE it includes more information than its competing perspectives (in this case, conservatives like Palin). However, he demonstrates no understanding of the people he is critiquing. In place of understanding, he creates a straw man that burns so easily they he feels the need to apologize for how cruel he must seem to destroy his opponent so utterly. It is as if his opponent is so obviously wrong he doesn’t even need to establish the verity of his points, all there is left to do talk about their consequences…

Examples: In almost every sentence, he speaks an an unquestionable authority, and with a tone that indicates that disagreement is a sign of the stupidity that he is decrying (and, as it is said, you can’t argue with a sneer):

- Impulses that are different than those He (Barack and Deepak) promotes are “their worst impulses.”
- BECAUSE He calls people to “higher impulses,” Palin’s responses and values (and others who disagree with Obama’s policies) can by DEFINITION be simplified to “anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other” , and hence written off as unworthy of consideration or inclusion.
- “Small town values” become “a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.” - (What the hell?)
- “Family values” become “anti social justice.” (Huh?)
- Patriotism becomes “a fallback from a failed war.” (I know my patriotism is sourced from this…)
- her political position, including all of the changes she wants to make becomes “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.” - (of course, to disagree with someone who wants a specific change is to be against change in general. I knew that…)

He says: “there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. ” Well, if it is so obvious, why can’t they see it? because they are stupid? because they are victims of patriarchal bourgeoisie values (which they are too stupid to go beyond)? How about because they believe that feminism is a postmodern movement that is nihilistic in nature, substance, and rhetoric, and proposes ideals that conservatives like Palin believe are destructive and soul-deadening to living, breathing people? Such a response is simply not a possible legitimate stance to take in this article. It does not exist as a possiblity in Deepak’s world.

This is the hypocrisy. Lack of understanding leads to projection of the enemy onto Palin - against which Deepak establishs his hero stature, which stature is supposedly integrated, compassionate, and wise.  All bullshit.

AND, the intellectual elite of the country and the political left do not even question or challenge him. This article has been sent to me by 4 different people - more than any other political article yet this election cycle. All of them have included positive or self-congratulatory introductions to it. None have mentioned its utter arrogance. So, here I am…

Jason Alexander (the philosopher of capitalism, not the actor), used to chide me, saying “Remember, people get the government they deserve. If the people are unWholeSum, the government will be unWholeSum.” I have spent the last decade losing my will to try to prove him wrong.  Welcome to election year 2008.  

This article is even more painful for me because I have severe concerns about the conservative side of this issue as well. However, an enemy of my enemy is rarely my friend, just as two wrongs don’t make a right, and someone disagreeing with someone who is wrong is not thereby correct.

Sad times for the most beautiful political experiement/culture in history - the American Revolution of Self-Responsibility and Individual Rights.

Over at EU Referendum we see the Director’s Cut of Qana.

The narrative here is of how the combination of Hezbollah’s media management and modern photo-journalism has turned the recording of a tragic event into theatre, in the best tradition of Michael Moore.

As best we can, we have pieced together the jumble of evidence which surrounded the production of the iconic photographs which were published around the world, and put them in perspective. Many of the photographs have been used before, some are new to this site and others are video “grabs”. But it is not the pictures, per se, that tell the story, so much as their ordering and analysis. Make of this what you will, but I can assure you that you are not supposed to see them in this light.

The “story” - for that is what it is - starts here, in the wreckage of the buiding at Qana which is performing the temporary and unwholesome function of a morgue. It is from here, that the bodies are extracted, the essential props of this theatre. And standing on the left of the frame is one of the two star characters of our story, Mr “White Tee-Shirt”. With equal accuracy, though, we could call him Mr Hezbollah, for reasons which will become apparent [...]

Captain Ed has a great post about Yale’s courtship and eventual rejection of Hashemi, the Taliban’s former diplomat at large. Quotable:

It’s odd that Yale would have trotted out the diversity argument, considering the regime that Hashemi represented. Let’s recall that the Taliban beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe and men for shaving their faces. Ancient Buddhist carvings, considered artistic and historical treasures, exist no more thanks to Taliban tolerance. The Taliban also reintroduced the lovely Islamic tradition of tolerance by crushing homosexuals to death or throwing them off of towers.

The latter point seems especially germane when it comes to Yale. After all, they have taken the position that the American military cannot stage ROTC classes at the campus due to their “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuals in the military (which I also oppose, for several reasons). Yale’s students and faculty argued that the university would benefit from having Hashemi’s diverse viewpoint represented on campus, but they kicked out the military for a much milder viewpoint and action than that of Hashemi and his colleagues.And while they argue that Hashemi would have benefited the Yale community by his inclusion, no one appears to wonder whether Yale students might benefit from having the ROTC on campus and the diversity of political opinion it might create.

Yale invited Hashemi — he didn’t just show up and fill out an application. They went out of their way to get him to choose Yale, because as their admissions office stated, they didn’t want to lose another “high profile” candidate to Harvard. Regardless of all the arguments about diversity and openness, all of which get belied by Yale’s policies towards the American military, Yale obviously chose Hashemi as a tweak at the Bush administration. They thought that Hashemi’s presence would embarrass the White House and give Yale some sort of moral authority.

Instead, they have demonstrated themselves to be hypocrites, and still do with this decision.

Most disturbing about all this, however, is the initial observation made by the WSJ’s editorial writers:  “A single liberal retirement from the Court would thus put Hamdan‘s reasoning in jeopardy.”

How can this be?  How can it be that we’ve reached the point where highly-charged SCOTUS decisions often break along partisan / ideological lines?  (And before you go noting Kennedy’s break, note, too, that Kennedy defected on Kelo, as well, expanding “public good” to mean “whatever a local municipality can justify by arguing that it will bring in more revenue”.  And to be fair, I think Scalia guilty of the same flawed “reasoning” in Raich).

The answer to why this is now so, I think—how “reasoning” become so completely relativistic—is that we no longer have a unified strategy for how to interpret, with the idea of a Living Constitution often acting as a judicial shortcut for failed legislative initiatives, which has the practical effect of codifying a strained (and logically problematic) idea of interpretation and how it is made to work, allowing its proponents to move back and forth between readings that cite legislative intent and readings that deny the importance of that intent in new and different “contexts.”

Be sure to read the whole thing

Great video that sums up my sentiments, to be sure. Woo-hoo!

Oh, man:

Bloomberg has become so used to being chaffeured about that he’s either forgotten (or never knew) that there are times when acceleration is necessary for passing, merging, etc., and that preventing people from speeding on occasion will likely create more safety hazards than simply continuing to police speeders as the city presumably does now.  That such nannystatist programs—proferred always in the name of public safety but used, primarily, as a way to increase revenues—continue cropping up, leads me to believe that what we really need is a device placed on Mayors that light up everytime these bored petty tyrants do something other than, say, cut the ribbon at some mall opening, or fire up the Bat signal, should the Penguin get all uppity.

That way, at least people will have time to hide their wallets.

Indeed.

It is a long-ish article using Detroit as the American problem model, but any City could learn from it, including my own San Francisco:

[...] It needs to be said at the outset that no government in the U.S., not even Detroit’s, has ever imposed the kind of crushing regulations that the Indian government imposed during the height of the notorious License Raj in the mid-’50s. Key industries—steel, telecommunications, airlines—were nationalized, but even more harmful was the Kafkaesque web of regulations that the remaining private businesses had to endure in the name of ensuring a “rational allocation of resources.”

Every move of private industry, big or small, was subject to licensing. Forget setting up a new plant or a factory. If an enterprise wanted to buy or import equipment, change its product mix, or even produce more than its allotted quota for a product, it had to first obtain permission from the Directorate General of Technical Development, a process that could take years and a small fortune in bribes, points out Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound and former CEO of Procter & Gamble, India. “Large business houses set up parallel bureaucracies in Delhi to follow up on files, organize bribes, and win licenses,” he recalls.

Confronted with a massive fiscal crisis and the prospect of defaulting on its international debt obligations, the Indian government dismantled much of this ridiculous licensing regime in 1991. In a bid to boost exports to replenish the country’s empty foreign exchange reserves, it also eliminated all import licensing and slashed tariffs on capital goods. Both were relics of India’s import-substitution days, when manufacturers were discouraged from buying equipment from abroad in order to build the domestic industry. This jacked up production costs and made the country’s exports hopelessly uncompetitive.

Trade liberalization was a boon for the I.T. industry, which already had escaped many of the stultifying controls that other industries faced simply because the architects of India’s industrial policy had failed to anticipate its birth. [...]

read the rest on your own.

The Department of Homeland Stupidity is a site I just discovered a couple of days ago. Most of it good, some of it a little off–like their running debunked stories being recycled by Rolling Stone. Debunked. Anyway, more interestingly, by coincidence I ran accross a web developers blog who mentioned the Tempus Fugit Blog who has a post [now we are getting to it] about his first post to The Dept. of Homeland Stupidity. And in his excerpt of his own post, he is spot on:

On paper, Republicans are easily more favorable than Democrats to a libertarian-minded person such as myself. On paper, they support lower taxes, less socialism, limited government, a rigid interpretation of the Constitution, property rights, parental rights and gun rights. In practice, they do little to permanently relieve the tax burden, they support wealth redistribution in a variety of forms, they’ve bloated the government to an unprecedented degree, they’ve made a mockery of Amendments One, Four, Six, Eight and Ten, they’ve been slow and inadequate in their response to the Supreme Court’s eminent domain decision. That leaves parental rights and gun rights. So if all you want to do is to teach your kid that God created the world in seven 24-hour periods or shoot empty beer cans for fun, the Republican Party has your back. Otherwise, it’s time to wake up and realize you’ve been duped.

*sigh*

Too much to say on this that others have already said.
That said, I think this is brilliant. Citizen enforcement.

Great piece here — over at Real Clear Politics. It begins thusly:

The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as “racist.” And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill “xenophobic.”

Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.

One-word put-downs of opponents’ ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual — their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors — liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.

This is easy to demonstrate.

Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ: [...]

It is an efficent and compact piece and is well worth the 4.27 minutes to go read it now.

“Our freedom is not inherited. It’s been earned and it has been by each new generation, as it must be.”

“You may find people who will contend that patriotism is something to be a little bit embarrassed about or that honor is somewhat outdated as a notion and that concentrating on America’s imperfection makes you a realist. Not so. That’s the sign of a cynic. Being a cynic is easy. You can just sit back, heckle from the cheap seats, while others serve, storm beaches, build nations, meet their destinies. Idealists write history’s stirring chapters; cynics read those chapters and seem not to understand. Choose to be an idealist. There have always been those who contend that what’s wrong with the world is America. Don’t believe it.”

“It is the power of freedom that has helped each successive generation of patriots prevail over every form of tyranny, even when success seemed unlikely, and that was often…”

Donald Rumsfeld 

As I was preparing to sit down for a nice brunch with my wife today before we made our way over to the ballpark for the Sunday afternoon Giants game, I read this article by Al Saracevic in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. Essentially, Al’s point seemed to be that oil companies are making lots and lots of money, and also that the response thus far from politicians has been less than inspiring.

I don’t disagree. But I was left feeling like there was a great deal of GOOD news that Saracevic had ignored in his column. So I wrote him the following email:

“Thought provoking stuff today.

There is an upside to the higher gas prices, of course, part of which is simply that people will be driving less (as the Chronicle reported on Page One this week.) More carpooling and public tranist use will result. People will weigh fuel economy more heavily when considering their next vehicle purchase. Those are GOOD things, right?

Also, as gas prices rise, alternative energy sources become relatively more attractive. So, there’s another benefit: powerful stimulus to the development and use of (greener) alternatives.

There may be frustration in some quarters that market forces will accomplish what endless TV pieces, Op-Eds and Public Service Announcements so far have not been able to achieve — making a real, widespread change in American behavior. But let’s face it, many of us make a change when we feel some pinch of discomfort, not when it vaguely “seems like a good idea.”

Oh, and one other thing: the numbers you quoted in todays column about oil revenue seem huge. Heck, they ARE huge. But one needs some context to properly understand them. I’m not sure your readers got that context from your piece today (perhaps in a follow-up piece?)

I think the following speaks powerfully to the questiton of “oil profiteering”. (Via Instapundit):

‘ From 1986 to 2003, using 2004 dollars, the real national annual average price for gasoline, including taxes, generally has been below $2 per gallon,” noted the Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 report absolving the industry of collusion. “By contrast, between 1919 and 1985, real national annual average retail gasoline prices were above $2 per gallon more often than not.”

In other words, gasoline prices were lower than at anytime since 1919 for much of recent history. Some conspiracy! Maybe somebody should have been investigating consumers for “gouging” the oil companies.

And just who is the profiteer here? While the average profit on the sale of a gallon of gasoline is nine cents, the average state and federal tax on that same gallon of gasoline is about 45 cents (and 52 cents in Michigan). And if we must have an investigation, how about investigating the extent to which government regulations drive up prices and block new production?

Management guru Peter Drucker once remarked, with his usual drollery, that profit is “whatever government lets a company keep.” But most folks have a vastly inflated view of corporate profits. One regular survey of Americans found that the majority believes the average corporate profit is between 30 percent and 40 percent of sales, while the real figure is closer to 4 percent.

Washington should cool its carburetors. The pursuit of profit is one of the main engines of Western progress and prosperity. And as people in my neck of the woods are fast learning, it is only out of profit that we can afford to pay for a comfortable retirement. As profits in the steel, airline and auto industries erode or even vanish, so do pensions and health care benefits, not to mention jobs. ‘
I encourage you to read the entire thing here. ”

JASON ADDS: it is not just that higher prices make alternatives more attractive. Additionally, it actually makes them economically viable to explore. Not just greener energies, but also shale oil and other difficult [read: expensive] points of extraction and extraction methods for fossil fuels. Right now bio-diesel [that cool soybean/vegetable oil fuel] is still more costly than a gallon of gasoline. Supply and demand limited production.

Additionally, while record profits have been recorded for oil co’s recently, that is a gross number, rather than a percentage of revenue. As a percentage of revenue, profits have remained largely the same–at about 10% 9.4% recently [can't find source I read days ago]. When oil companies raise the cost of gasoline, it is because _their_ costs have increased. Article on basic economics of price controls [that far too many are ignorant on and of] here. If gov’t really wanted to do something about gas prices rather than just grandstanding, they would relax environmental regulations on building refineries and expanding that capacity, they would do away wth boutique additives and mixtures of same that require certain regions, states, and municipalities to sell specific mixtures — they would _standardize it_ or repeal it altogether and they would forget about enthanol [it is more expensive as an additive than MTBE], but again, environmental regulations and exposure to liability drove the oil co’s away from MTBE. AND the Senate would permit drilling in ANWR and our costal areas. Canada and Cuba are doing it anyway in areas we will not allow ourselves to.

If they were serious, they would have these items as a to-do list and educate the public after [probably and sadly] educating themselves about basic economics. A politician making decisions about economic policy is the equivalent of a professional wrestler making decisions for the NFL’s competition committee; they might watch the game, but they have no real idea about what is happening and how.

UPDATE JASON further adds: a great piece on perspective and profit here comparing Exxon [9.4%] profit to GE/NBC [60%!!] and adds a few others for good measure. My conclusion? PRICE GOUGING FOR ADVERTISING BY NBC. Let’s call for immediate investigations!

A-fucking-men. Hear here. And all that. What? you’ve no idea what I am aligning with?

Read THIS. Sample:

I did not see every second of it, but my wife did, and she joins me in noting that there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace — as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving, not one prayer or moment of silence for the dead and maimed.

Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars’ ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

If you are not reading Ed Driscoll’s blog on a regular basis, well, you ought to be. And there is really no reason I am linking to this post other than you gotta dig a conservative who references a prince song subtly in the title of a post.

That’s not exactly true. I think this is a good time to get away from the left-right thinking and once again plug a more comprehensive political map. Take the test.

Somehow “dumb idea” doesn’t quite convey the scope of this decision by the Bush Administration:

WASHINGTON - Two Republican governors on Monday questioned a Bush administration decision allowing an Arab-owned company to operate six major U. S. ports, saying they may try to cancel lease arrangements at ports in their states.

New York Gov. George Pataki and Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich voiced doubts about the acquisition of a British company that has been running the U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World, a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates.

The British company, Peninsular and Oriental, runs major commercial operations at ports in Baltimore, Miami, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia.

“Ensuring the security of New York’s port operations is paramount and I am very concerned with the purchase of Peninsular & Oriental Steam by Dubai Ports World,” Pataki said in a news release.

According to the FBI, most of the funding for the 9/11 attacks came though UAE financial institutions. All it takes is this and Iran [with the shipped flagged UAE] floating a nuke into one of these ports on a cargo ship and we are fucked.

I am going to be generous and say that they just did nto think this through and they better fucking start thinking things through.

At least the governors still seem to have their wits about them. Jesus.

MAJOR UPDATE: Maybe I spoke too soon. Suddenly I am fascinated. This has become quite an interesting item with the President threatening a veto [it would be his first ever] of any legislation to bar this deal. Frist has spoken of overriding it. Hmmm.

Instapundit has a full round-up. Just go over there and keep on scrolling down this post.

More up-to-date UPDATE:

more at LGF.

This image of Pakistani protestors appeared on Germany’s TV station n-tv.de.

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.

I don’t know about you, but seeing this picture makes me want to go out and by some Danish products.

Last July 4^th I wrote a piece defending our Founding Fathers against the accusation of being equivalent to Terrorists. In it, I pointed out that to call American Patriots terrorists was to sabotage the meaning of the word “terrorism.” It might be semantically possible, but it is spin doctoring at its worse.

Now, I would like to point out a similar dilution of language around what have been called “protests” by Muslim fanatics who are burning Italian embassies for Mohammed cartoons about that were published in Denmark. To call these acts “protests” is both to dignify them beyond their due, and to cast a pall on the
great tradition of social protest. These acts of vandalism and destruction are not organized attempts to raise the consciousness of a culture, but pointless and chaotic expressions of hate, fear, and frustration.

I can hear the liberal revisionists screaming at me even now – who am I to determine what is or is not a legitimate protest? Didn’t our Founding Fathers destroy property and kill to communicate their sense of injustice? Aren’t these protests the equivalent of our own revolutionary beginnings?

Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I suggest that rebelling against your government for political freedom is fundamentally different than mindless vandalism against innocents out of a desire to control the world. American Patriots were not rebelling against the British to force the British to believe their beliefs but fighting so that each person could have their own. They were not offering million dollar rewards to quell the speech of (murder) the cartoonists that dared to disagree with them, but fighting for the freedom of speech for all.

To highlight the difference between considered social protest to further the rights of all and mindless rioting against innocents to silence the rights of others, I suggest we spin the language to its limits and elevate these “protests” to the status of rebellion – The Cartoon Rebellions. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Only these aren’t rebels without a cause, only rebels without a clue.

The Cartoon Rebellions – a world-wide swath of destruction so absurd that we would think it was a bad comic strip. Cartoons causing people to act like cartoons, while cartoon apologists strive to find politically correct ways to appease the rioters. An elaborate joke that would be hilarious if it were not so tragic, unbelievable if it were not so real.

Over at the Jawa Report.

For those of you who do not know, it was Flynt, Hustler Magazine’s Publisher, in the landmark Supreme Court case Flynt v. Falwell [yes, that Falwell] that forced this Country to decide that offending religious sensibilities was protected speech.

That was only 30 years ago folks.

Flynt:

Freedom of speech is only important if you’re gonna offend someone; if you’re not gonna offend someone, you don’t need free speech.

No shit.

Read the rest of the interview here.

The University of California @ Santa Barbara just completed a study of the costs of turnover associated with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military.

The Captain has a great post on this topic. Here is a sample:

In short, it appears that the UCSB study considered the costs in the same manner as any corporation would when reviewing its turnover. Hiring costs always include recruitment, orientation, and all training conducted to bring a new hire to a fully functional level. When employees get culled out for any reason, the cost of replacement includes all of those tasks, and whether one accepts the GAO number or the UCSB number, it adds up quickly.

Interestingly, the number of people drummed out of the service during the ten years under review, around ten thousand, is less than half of the number of those who leave due to pregnancy, and less than a third of those who can’t make weight. The commission that conducted the study use the data to argue for an end to the current policy and the rejection of homosexuals in the service, but I do notice that they do not use this same data to argue for an end to the induction of women. Nor do they mention any endorsement for tightening weight requirements for new recruits.

Nevertheless, I think the panel has a point about gays in the military. As Barry Goldwater remarked in his later years, the only requirement for soldiers should be whether they shoot straight. It seems like a foolish and irrational burden for the armed services to carry, one perhaps understandable when homosexuality was considered a mental disorder but hard to justify now.

Indeed. Be sure to read it all.

Read the whole thing.

Sample:

We are being pissed upon

I think it was the long departed H.C. Hansen, one of the great Danish statesmen of the last century, who – as the communists were demonstrating in front of Christiansborg [the Danish Parliament] – cast his gaze across the palace square and remarked: “I will not be pissed upon.”

Then he did what was necessary.

I feel that currently my beloved country is being pissed upon rather too much. Denmark has not been neglecting its duties on the international stage. We have supported poor people with acts and advice, we have worked for peace, we have sent soldiers, policemen and experts to all the far flung corners of the world. We have democracy, a rule of law and a welfare state. Not all is perfect, but we harbor no malice towards our fellow men.

And yet Denmark is being pissed upon. The spokesman of the US State Department is pissing on Denmark, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs is pissing on Denmark, the President of Afghanistan is pissing on Denmark, the Government of Iraq is pissing on Denmark, other Muslim regimes are pissing on Denmark. In Gaza, where Danes for years have provided humanitarian aid, crazed Imams encourage people to cut off the hands and heads of the cartoonists who made the drawings of Mohammed for the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Excuse my choice of words, but all this pissing is pissing me off.

What is going on? I am not referring so much to the threats against Danish citizens and Danish commerce. Nor to the burnt down Embassies. I am thinking of a word that keeps popping up whenever the Mohammed cartoons are mentioned.

That word is BUT. A sneaky word. It is used to deny or qualify what one has just said.

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, the Opinion Makers and others say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

Can I get a fucking “amen”?

I say again, be sure to read the whole thing.

Hubris has joined the fray. You remember Hubris. Now, Hubris is not back, he’s just posting now and then. And this now and then is a doozy:

Dick Cheney Goes On Accidental Seven-State Shooting Spree.

Just go read it. And see the pic of the VP’s vehicle in action.
And welcome not back, Hubris. Glad you’re not back, but just posting from time to time. Or not…err, ummm, yeah.

Oh–and Hubie, you owe me a fucking Keyboard. That shit was so funny I spit up on mine.

Oops. 

That had to hurt a bit. Glad he’s okay. And since he’s okay, LET THE HUMOR BEGIN!
The Corner already has a couple of zingers:

Since the 78-year-old lawyer is in ok shape: Three jokes to be on the look out for, off the top of my head:

• Since wholesale Social Security reform failed, Cheney is taking a retail approach.

• Afterwards, Cheney said two words: “tort reform.”

• Clearly, this is further proof that the administration needs to work harder providing adequate body armor.

And, Three of the Top Ten Things He Said Afterwards:

• “I thought it was Pat Leahy.”

• “Let’s have no more talk about independent counsels.”

• “Pull!…Oh, that was the last lawyer?”

Heh.

Hat tip: Silent Running

No really. In New Zealand.

On the face of it you have to say that Labour did in fact buy the election. The results as anyone who followed it can tell you were knife edge. Indeed we had to wait for the special votes to be counted before we knew who had won.

That winning margin? Just 2%

So when we find that Labour has overspent their campaign budget by 17% you don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to do the maths.

Labour has now taken the position that the laws regulating spending are “outdated”. Which is a bloody arogant way of saying they don’t suit Labour so they’ll ignore them.

Which isn’t all they ignored. National protested at the exclusion of Labours “Pledge Cards” from the budget and the Electorial Office advised PRIOR to the election that they were indeed part of the expenditure. Labour simply ignored this and kept on spending.

Spending our money. Thats right, more taxpayer dollars added to the complusary Union Fees and the free pool a workers for the “Labour Letter Factory” as they called where state servants were used to stuff envolopes. Added to this having been caught out with hospitals handing out political material in waiting rooms and having been instructed to remove it by the SSC it is very clear that there are NO rules that Labour will recognise when it comes to grasping onto power.

This is just one of the reasons that I felt that all of the American Left’s cries of stolen elections was more about projection than anything else. When you are willing to do anything just for the sake of winning, you think everyone has the same inclination.

After weeks of harping on the emerging Jack Abramoff scandal as an example of the Republican “culture of corruption” and debating for the last day about the proximity to George Bush that Abramoff had, Democrats may find the investigation hits too close to home to continue celebrating. The AP reported earlier today that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid intervened on four separate occasions on behalf of Abramoff clients and that Reid coordinated on legislative efforts with the lobbyist’s office

Oops.

Read the rest from the Captain.

Tom Paine over at silent running thinks that this is unacceptable.

I disagree. And I say:

I actually think it is not only perfectly acceptable–but a good thing.

The islamofascists are showing the world it is not the American “imperialism” or our “irrational” support of the joooooos, or our foreign policy of the past, but rather the fevered mentality of a religiosity filled with hate and edicts to force all to submit to the will of Allah.

Perhaps now the appeasers and softball MSM will actually see the truth and begin to call an islamofascist an islamofascist rather than a “militant”, “dissident”, etc.

Maybe they will actually use “terrorist” to describe an attack on Paris. An attack, that while would be horrifying, may actually be needed to wake up the appeasers of all appeasers–the French.

No, I fear this is not only acceptable, but necessary to wake up the Left in America and the Europeans in general to the true threat we face. I hope they wake up quickly and join us in joining the enemy in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

Sad, but true.

See Tom’s post here.

The CATO Institute has one of those posts that I just love. This one dismantles the conventional wisdom about rent control and its benefits.

Here is just a small sample of a rich piece:

There can be no doubt that rent control creates housing shortages. For almost 20 years, national vacancy rates have been at or above 7 percent–a figure generally considered normal. Cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, where development is welcomed, have often had vacancy rates above 15 percent. In these areas of the country, there usually is a surplus of housing rather than a shortage. Landlords commonly advertise “move-in specials,” where rent is reduced for the first month or even where they pay moving expenses.

In rent-controlled cities, on the other hand, vacancy rates have been uniformly below normal. New York City has not had a vacancy rate above 5 percent since World War II. (The state’s rent control law, supposedly temporary, would automatically expire if it did.) Before giving up rent control, Boston’s vacancy rate was below 4 percent. (There are no figures as of yet on the rate since rent control ended.) In rent-controlled San Francisco, the vacancy rate is generally around 2 percent, and in San Jose the rate is 1 percent, the nation’s lowest. Meanwhile, comparable nonrent-controlled cities, such as Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Seattle have normal vacancy rates at or above 7 percent.

If you know nothing of what shortages do to prices that is well covered. Here is a taste:

It is also striking how affordable housing is in most free-market cities. In Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth largest city, the most common advertised rent, the mode, is between $450 and $500–below both the advertised and census medians. (See Figure 1.) In Chicago, the mode was $500 to $550, also below both medians. Unregulated cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix, and Seattle seem to have almost perfectly competitive housing markets, with housing available at every price level but clustered at the low end.

The two cities with strict rent control are glaring exceptions to this pattern. In both New York (see Figure 2.) and San Francisco, advertised rents peaked at $2,000–more than triple the U.S. Census median rent for each city. The median advertised rent in New York was $1,350, in San Francisco, $1,400–both more than double the census median. More important, there were almost no rental units available at the low end of the market. In both San Francisco and New York, less than 10 percent of advertised rents were below the census median. (The New York figures also included listings from the Daily News and the New York Post, which are slanted toward the lower end of the market.) Rent control in both these cities appears to make housing spectacularly unaffordable.

Go read the whole thing here.

…and atrocities that have a Bush family member at their source.

The cause of the tsunami has been discovered.

Glad they figured that out.