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Know your enemy, and how he gets his way. One day after agreeing to host the American Renaissance Conference, and pledging to stand firm against the Red thugs, the Capitol Skyline Hotel, in Washington, became the fourth hotel to renege. This account at the site for the Orwellian-named Responsible for Equality and Liberty group (R.E.A.L.) describes how our enemies succeeded: "American Renaissance Conference Canceled (Again) by Rubell Hotels — Why We Challenge Hate." The byline is "R.E.A.L. Organization," which I assume means either Jeffrey Imm or one of his munchkins, assuming he has munchkins.
Reading R.E.A.L.'s account, a longtime friend of TLD characterizes it, colorfully but accurately, as a nauseating mixture of sugar and b.s. Amid the fecal treacle about R.E.A.L.'s "counter-message of diversity, hope, and love," you will find claims that Imm has been threatened in some way but no direct mention of the death threats issued by the Left against the hotels and their employees.
For those coming to this story late, I should explain that Jeffrey Imm ramrodded the attack on the AR Conference, alongside the outright commies of the One People's Project.
In a 2009 article at RightSideNews, "Saudi Strong-arm Tactics in Virginia," neocon Daniel Pipes approvingly quotes Imm as a fellow Fighter against Terror, and describes him as "a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Federal government, with work for the FBI, DHS, and TSA."
In 2008, Agent Imm took part in a Homeland Security Policy Institute panel discussion, "Words Matter: The Role of Lexicon in Counter-Terrorism Communications Strategy." One of three participants, Agent Imm was described as "research director for the Counterterrorism Blog and former analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation." HSPI is a part of George Washington University.
Articles by Agent Imm, who is credited with founding something called the Anti-Jihad League of America, are posted at United States Action and the Counterterrorism
Blog.
February 19, 2010
I'm so glad to be able to link to this one on Presidents Day: "Obama Making Plans to Use Executive Power," by Peter Baker, at the New York Times. Baker begins:
With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal, and other domestic policy priorities.
The farsighted wisdom of Our Sainted Founders in inventing that whole president thing becomes more evident with every passing year, doesn't it?
February 15, 2010
Lysenko, Lubchenco — let's call the whole thing off! According to the following AP story, this new exercise of Executive muscle will eventually require the approval of a congressional committee. How reassuring: "New federal climate change agency forming," by Randolph E. Schmid (posted at Yahoo! News).
I first learned of the regime's new "Climate Service" on Saturday morning while listening to a money-talk panel on Fox News. Ex-actor Wayne Rogers, now an investment guy, is a regular on the panel, and he was urging his fellow market-oriented panel-members to relax: the new agency will be scientific, and will depend on science, and will settle the pesky question of modern climate change once and for all. Scientifically.
I tried hard, but I detected no sarcasm. So that has to be some of the worst naiveté and utopianism I've ever heard on Fox News, and we're talking here about the imperial-wars-for-democracy channel. If Comrade Stalin had established a special agency to investigate the truth or untruth of Lysenkoism, would anyone operating a live brain have expected it to conclude that Comrade Lysenko, though a favorite of Stalin, was actually a hopeless loon?
According to the AP story, Comrade Gary Locke, minister of commerce, and Comrade Jane Lubchenco, commissar of NOAA, decided on February 8 that no pro forma delay was necessary in announcing what the new political-science agency in their bailiwick would eventually conclude. Locke: "Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat." Lubchenco: "Climate change is real, it's happening now."
Onward, then, with the government's fearless, objective scientific inquiries!
February 15, 2010
We can only hope that this is for real, and in spades: "Family feud: Nancy Pelosi at odds with President Obama," by Mike Allen and Patrick O'Connor at Politico.com.
February 15, 2010
Our left-totalitarian enemies in Washington may be feeling a little ouchy and frustrated at the moment, but elsewhere in the country their arrogant swagger continues unrestrained: "Stealth Unionization," by Michael D. Jahr and Patrick J. Wright, at the Weekly Standard (December 2009). Subtitle: "How 40,000 home day care providers in Michigan were forced to start paying union dues."
Senior editor Ronn Neff, who tipped me to this article, comments: "Once again we see that the only way to remain free (and it is obviously not an infallible tactic) is not to take the money. No sympathy from this quarter for what happens to people who do take it. No, sir."
February 15, 2010
Dark Suits and Black Guards — and is any other comment on this article really necessary?
"In Black Caucus, a Fund-Raising Powerhouse," by Eric Lipton and Eric Lichtblau, at the New York Times.
February 15, 2010
When it comes to Sheldon Richman's writing, I'm tempted to say, "Just read it all," and not bother alerting you to specific pieces. But I can't help myself. His February 12 essay at The Freeman addresses an issue that I like to hammer away at myself: "Corruption in Government? Shocking!"
Want to minimize corrupt influence over government? Richman offers a broad hint about how to do it: "If there are no privileges to sell, there are no privileges to buy." His closing line packs a punch, too.
February 15, 2010
Thanks are due to the Rockwell site for featuring this thoughtful assessment, at Washington's Blog, of conspiracy theories and how the System treats them differently, depending on whose ox is being gored: "Ridicule of Conspiracy Theories Focuses on Diffusing Criticism of the Powerful," by "Washington." (The editor in me suspects an error in the title. Should that word really be diffusing? Or was defusing meant? Better to have steered around the ambiguity, I'd say.)
February 15, 2010
Who is Sarah Palin, and what does she want to do to us? People are still asking, though I don't think it's too hard to answer in light of the scary things she said about foreign and war policy during the 2008 campaign. It is precisely when pols say wild-terrible-scary things that I suspend my prevailing skepticism about their sincerity. And now the fact that Palin has bonded with the Tea Partiers helps answer any question we might have about where they, or their recognized leaders at least, stand on war and peace.
• Karen Kwiatkowski, the antiwar ex-military officer who has interviewed Steve Sniegoski on four occasions, may be a little soft on Palin in this piece at Campaign for Liberty — but it's still very much worth reading:
"C.S. Lewis and Sarah Palin." Subtitle: "Why Does Sarah Palin Want More War?"
• Writing at Reason, Steve Chapman focuses more closely on the Tea Partiers:
"Palin Exposes the Tea Partiers' True Colors." Editor's intro: "Why trading liberty for security is not consistent with a limited government philosophy." (Not to quibble, but what it's actually not consistent with is the anti-statist philosophy.)
So let's see. We've got Palin and the Tea Partiers supporting further militarism, imperialism, and foreign adventurism, as well as (willy nilly) more police-statism here at home, owing to the "requirements" of the Terror War. And we've got liberal Republican Scott Brown supporting the same things. And the same goes for almost everyone in between, too. Plus the Obamunists over on the War Left, of course. How auspicious.
February 15, 2010
Whatever happened to Polite Totalitarianism? The Left has mounted an unprecedentedly fierce and effective attack on this year's American Renaissance conference, due to convene later this month. Our common adversaries have intimidated two hotels into abrogating their contracts with AR, effectively forcing the race-realist conference underground.
According to Jared Taylor's February 1 update on the struggle, "Authoritarians Remain True to Form," a certain Jeffrey Imm is ramrodding this year's assault. But there's more to the story. A comment-leaver on the AR site provided a link to a 2004 piece in the Cleveland Jewish News in which Imm's name pops up: "We report; you respond," by Stephanie Garber.
Garber identifies Jeffrey Imm, of Baltimore, as "a former FBI employee who does outsourcing work for Homeland Security"!
If the Jeffrey Imm in Garber's story is the same Jeffrey Imm leading the smear-and-fear campaign against AR — well, needless to say, it's a big, big story. Of course the established media will never touch it, but I urge you to do whatever you can to ignite a firestorm about it on the Net.
What is Imm's current relationship with the Organs of State Security?
What did Eric Holder know, and when did he know it?
American Renaissance home page
February 11, 2010
Admen go all out in crafting commercials for the Super Bowl, but this year their creativity tested the limits of the politically correct in a couple of cases.
• I was interested to see what I call the Great Male Recession serve as the theme for one spot, "Dodge Charger: Man's Last Stand." It's accessible at the Frisky: "5 Super Bowl Commercials about Women Emasculating Men." The Dodge commercial is the second one in the chain. The other four are much more ambiguous or don't qualify at all, in my opinion. The final one, from the Dove soap people, merely seeks to reassure chaps that a manly masculine macho man can use a skin-conditioning bath lotion without risk of emasculation.
Remember the "Wendy's Fashion Show," airing during Reagan's second term, several years before the fall of the Wall? It was the first anti-Soviet TV commercial that I'd ever seen, and it signaled not only the weakening of the Soviets per se but also a deterioration of their prestige among the American intelligentsia and the sub-intelligentsia in our media and entertainment. It was a declaration that making fun of the Soviets was now acceptable. (That's not to say that our intelligentsia was really becoming much less Marxist.) Similarly, I propose that it's significant to see the Great Male Recession emerge as a theme in the popcult — as something that popcultists may be expected to understand, or at least explicitly recognize, in the glowering presence of their supervisors.
• The second commercial that caught my eye was Audi's instantly infamous Green Police spot. The first of these two links, at the Christian Science Monitor, accompanies an article. The second, at YouTube, has attracted comments from viewers.
"Audi's 'Green Police' Super Bowl ad controversial"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml54UuAoLSo
As you'll see, the commercial is a bit of a mind-bender. Is Audi all for the Green Police or not? Are we meant to have any sympathy for the ordinary people who are portrayed as victims of Stalinist police-statism, or not? Do we really want to be good, ovine, Audi-driving comrades? Even some Green totalitarians have denounced the thing, for making them look bad. Whatever premises underlie the commercial, I find its mad cheerfulness highly offensive.
The CSM article points out that all the victims of the Green Police are white men.
The ultimate significance of both commercials — Dodge Charger and Green Police — could be just this: the Revolution was, fem-boy. Accept it, relax, and have a giggle. Or a nice quiet cry.
February 11, 2010
Speaking of the Green Police, the anti-humans are running rampant, and the future is now, as far as some Maryland property-owners are concerned: "Cliff residents might lose homes to save endangered beetles," by Christy Goodman, at the Washington Post.
February 11, 2010
As this piece in the Telegraph (of London) makes clear, modern Germany is emerging ever more explicitly as the Fourth Reich, with all the badness that that implies: "German homeschoolers' political asylum in America exposes the EU Gulag," by Gerald Warner. Warner does not mention the German police state's other gross violations of freedom of thought and of expression, but that may be just because he's keeping his eye on the ball. In any case, his closing line is a classic.
February 11, 2010
The German political refugees obtained asylum in America, but I hope they don't think they're now living in some sort of libertarian utopia. I refer them, and you, to this piece by Paul Joseph Watson at Prison Planet.com: "Time Magazine Pushes Draconian Internet Licensing Plan." Editor's intro: "Establishment mouthpiece calls for web ID system that would outstrip Communist Chinese style net censorship."
And they're using the old "We license drivers, don't we?" slogan. What a fruitful "commanding height," in Leninist terms, government control of the roads turned out to be!
Ronn Neff comments: "I suppose you noticed that the proposal was put forward from the private sector — a Microsoft exec.
"But did you notice that a similar proposal was rejected by the Chicoms?"
February 11, 2010
Sheldon Richman knows about what I call "political gravity," as is evident from this essay at The Freeman, "Obama and the Public":
For those in power today (and their patrons and clients), compromise is the great good. Unsurprisingly it seems to run in only one direction. In the case of medical care, for example, it requires people who want less or even no government interference to accept more. The compromise lies in the fact that it won't (initially) be all the intervention that the staunchest interventionists want. Compromise never consists in the interventionists' moving in a noninterventionist direction. That can't be an accident.
Writing a few years ago of the "trade-offs" that statists are always telling us we have to accept, Ronn Neff asked, "Has there ever been a 'trade-off' that benefited liberty? Has anyone ever traded away something else and kept the liberty?"
February 11, 2010
I suppose it means something that this piece was authorized to appear in the New York Times, where we can occasionally descry what the ruling class is thinking about, as through a glass darkly: "Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power," by David E. Sanger. Since our own doom at their hands is a certainty, we can only hope that our masters, too, will be crushed by the reality they have so long evaded.
February 11, 2010
Weary of the Sean Hannity – Rachel Maddow spectrum of opinion permitted by our official electronic media, I went rogue the other day and tuned in to Radio Beijing — and whom did I find there, analyzing and opinionating? None other than our friend Steve Sniegoski!
All right, it didn't really happen that way — Steve alerted me to his participation — but it is instructive to learn that although Steve cannot get his book, The Transparent Cabal, reviewed in America's leading paleo magazine, The American Conservative, the Chinese have welcomed him onto a panel alongside China's former ambassador to Iran.
The program is a good one, much enriched by Steve's contributions, and you can listen to it through this page: "Is Iran Next?" It was broadcast on January 28. Steve appears in the first of the two hours.
The two empires — the American and the Chinese — differ in how they manage dissent. In most cases, a man will not actually be arrested for speaking and writing freely in the shadow of the Yankee Colossus; the task of suppressing thoughtcrime here is still left, mostly, to the Polite Totalitarians, who rely not on shackles and razorwire but on networking and defamation. But it's also the case that taboos differ remarkably from empire to empire. And when it comes to one big subject, the Chinese are simply unterrified.
February 2, 2010
Speaking of American cowardice, Salon's Patrick Smith asks,
What has become of us? Are we really in such a confused and panicked state that a person haplessly walking through the wrong door can disrupt air travel nationwide, resulting in mass evacuations and long delays? "The terrorists have won" is one of those waggish catch-alls that normally annoy me, but all too often it seems that way.
"Emergency doors, karaoke bombers and other false alarms." Subtitle: "When did we become such a nation of scaredy-cats?"
As leviathan burgeons, the people diminish. In earlier writing I have focused on how Americans' dependence on government makes them childish; but it makes them cowardly, too.
February 2, 2010
On the other hand, we shouldn't be foolhardy in the presence of our enemies. Here's an account of Prof. Kevin MacDonald's latest trouble from an outfit that has manufactured much of it: "Student Activists Confront Anti-Semitic California Prof," by Sonia Scherr at the Southern Poverty Law Center. MacDonald is a brave man as well as a brilliant scholar, but I'm afraid he spends too much time standing on the tracks, begging the trains to run him down. You'll see what I mean.
The Website for the group MacDonald is reported to have joined, American Third Position, is at american3p.org/.
February 2, 2010
A little pre-emptive nullification has erupted in Virginia, and according to this Washington Post dispatch, some Democrats helped with the eruption: "Virginia Senate bills say no to requiring health insurance," by Rosalind S. Helderman.
February 2, 2010
Bring on the Killer Rabbit. There's more bad news for the Obamunists, according to Politico.com: "Big bang gives way to busted budget," by David Rogers.
I'm beginning to think that the Suddenly-Not-So-Holy O faces one of two likely fates: Either he will surmount his growing reputation for incompetence and re-invent himself, Bill Clinton style; or he will continue lurching down the Jimmy Carter path. You know which one I'm rooting for.
February 2, 2010
A neocon's take. At the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami pens a readworthy post mortem. Let's hope it's not premature: "The Obama Spell Is Broken." Editor's intro: "Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique."
February 2, 2010
Steve Sailer deals with Republican strategy and the Republican fate in this VDare piece, but we anti-party partisans can read it as an analysis of white strategy and the white fate:
"How Come Tom Edsall Can Talk about the Sailer Strategy and I Can't?"
Sailer quotes Democrat scribe Edsall to good effect:
The harsh reality is many voters consider the health care bill a multibillion-dollar transfer of taxpayer money to the uninsured, a population disproportionately, although by no means exclusively, made up of the poor, African Americans, Latinos, single parents, and the long-term unemployed.
February 2, 2010
A fusillade of thanks to the Rockwell site for tipping us to Steve Lee's cheerful, rousing video from Down Under: "Love Song for Firearms Becomes an Internet Hit," by Amy Corderoy. I've played the thing a dozen times. But you may be sure that our supervisors are not amused.
February 2, 2010
We need to be clear about one thing when it comes to Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.). If he turns out to be of any use in blocking the Democrats' socialist-health plan, it will be not as a libertarian hero but instead as a blunt instrument, so to speak. Here's some straight talk by Paul Mulshine at the Star Ledger, of New Jersey: "Mitt Romney's on wrong side of Massachusetts mandate."
Along the way, Mulshine refers to Brown as "the former male model who immediately upon election to the Senate began blathering about all sorts of things unrelated to the reality of what his victory means, which is the likely death of the Obama health plan.
"The reason for his rambling is not hard to deduce: As a state legislator, Brown voted for Obamacare in its original form, which was Romneycare." Indeed he did.
January 21, 2010
I just don't understand how such a thing could have happened! I'm sure the utopians of leviathan are even more surprised than I am:
"Law to Curb Lobbying Sends It Underground," by David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times
The only way to cut down on lobbying is to cut down on government. Now there's a utopian prescription for you: Utopian not because it wouldn't work but because it looks as though we can't get there from here.
January 21, 2010
Whatever happens now on the socialist-health front, Sheldon Richman's analysis will remain must reading for our friends who are still stupefied by fantasies about "representative government," as well as for those of us who contemplate compassionate intellectual interventions:
"Democratic Misrepresentation"
The piece is at Future of Freedom. Richman cites Bruno Leoni's classic, Freedom and the Law, and you should be aware that the Mises Institute offers a paperback edition for a measly ten bucks plus shipping.
January 21, 2010
Steve Sailer's proposals in this VDare piece will offend some TLD readers, but I hope they will still find it worth reading: "Why Haiti Is So Hopeless; and a Very Modest Proposal." I learned a few things here — among which is the fact that Haiti and its neighboring state are racially different. And that explains much.
January 21, 2010
Just for your horrification, here's yet another story in the ye-gods-what-next vein: "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online," by Tamar Lewin at the New York Times.
January 21, 2010
At the Rockwell site, the intrepid William Norman Grigg takes out after the hard men whom he calls, deliciously, those "wearing the habiliments of the coercive caste," as well as the soft people in suits who employ them:
"Hurting People for a Living"
January 21, 2010
Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski alerts us to a favorable review of his book, The Transparent Cabal, offered by Allan C. Brownfeld and posted at News Blaze:
"The Role of Neoconservatives — and Israel's Right Wing — in the War in Iraq"
Dr. Sniegoski reports that Brownfeld has also written a more extensive review, which is due to appear in the March issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Congratulations, Steve!
January 16-17, 2010
David T. Wright recommends two on-line videos as companion resources for his "Climategate" piece of December 13:
• "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a film by documentarian Martin Durkin
• "The Cloud Mystery," a documentary by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark (subtitled)
The videos both reside at YouTube, and Mr. Wright sums up the likely sentiment of Minitrue thus: "YouTube must be destroyed!"
January 16-17, 2010
Statist time warp. Coming upon this New York Times article about our rulers' latest brainstorm, I wanted to mimic John McEnroe and scream, You cannot be serious! But of course they are serious. Statism is all they know, they are unable to understand anything else, and the only thing they can learn from experience is how to increase their power: "Justice Dept. Fights Bias in Lending," by Charlie Savage.
On the subject of increasing their power, though, a friend proposes that the Obamunists are well aware that their policies must create worse disasters, but they want to keep the economy in a state of wreckage so that the sheeple will keep crawling to them for "help." Well, that's much too conspiratorial for me ...
Hmmm.
January 16-17, 2010
Why, again, do they want to murder us? "They" being the jihadists, of course, such as the latest Negro clothing-bomber, "Abdulmutallab." The Bush neocons always said it was because of "our freedom," which I took to mean our freedom to flaunt thong underwear, listen to Rap "music," and engage in, ah, forms of intimate contact that would never occur to farm animals. The 89-year-old Helen Thomas tried to squeeze a better answer out of the current regime during a recent press briefing at the Palace, and reformed spook Ray McGovern tells the story in this piece reposted at Antiwar.com: "Helen Asks Why."
January 16-17, 2010
Britain continues its forced march toward social suicide and the total state: "Myleene Klass warned by police after scaring off intruders with knife," by Roya Nikkhah of the Telegraph. Editor's intro: "Myleene Klass, the broadcaster and model, brandished a knife at youths who broke into her garden — but has been warned by police that she may have acted illegally."
In several of his essays written over the past few years, the culturally disgusted British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple has reported that the United Kingdom now suffers from the highest street-crime rate in the Western world. Long accustomed to seeing the United State listed as number one, I was taken aback the first time I encountered his claim. I am no longer so skeptical.
Our natural liberty to defend our person against physical attack is an elemental attribute of any intelligible and tolerable human society. In denying that liberty, the British state offers a valuable "teaching moment" (as uptown folk say nowadays) for any of its subjects still operating a live brain: It declares itself, explicitly, to be their enemy.
January 16-17, 2010
They're just trying to protect us and our rights. All responsible and patriotic citizens must keep that in mind as they read this dispatch by Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post: "FCC looks at ways to assert authority over Web access."
Kang begins: "The Federal Communications Commission is considering aggressive moves to stake out its authority to oversee consumer access to the Internet, as a recent court hearing and industry opposition have cast doubt on its power over Web service providers."
The very existence of the FCC is a tremendous scandal and crime, one that liberty-indifferent Americans have tolerated since 1934.
January 16-17, 2010
I wager you haven't heard much from the American MSM on the violence that's broken out in Haiti. Here's a corrective, courtesy of Liz Hazelton at the Daily Mail, in the UK: "Haiti earthquake: Looters, machete gangs and fights for water as aid STILL struggles to get through." The editor warns of graphic content.
January 16-17, 2010
We anti-statist radicals may think that Laurence M. Vance pulls a punch or two in this essay at the Rockwell site, but I still pronounce it well worth reading: "Should the U.S. Military Go to Haiti?"
Among the good reasons for saying No, Vance writes, is this: "U.S. military relief efforts in Haiti are a PR bonanza for the military. It is certain to counter, at least for a few weeks, the fact that we are engaged in two unpopular wars."
I fear a darker scenario, where the Army closes with those mobs of machete-wielders and precipitates another protracted episode of the homicidal humanitarianism that's so characteristic of the U.S. Empire.
January 16-17, 2010
Bureau of Dangerous Clowns. In "The Godfather," part one, the movie mogul Jack Woltz declares that a man in his position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous. Clearly, the United State's leading secret police agency does not observe the same protocol: "Spanish MP's photo used for Osama Bin Laden poster," BBC News (no byline).
January 16-17, 2010
Transparodism strikes again. When I first heard about it, I thought this story just had to be a hoax. But if it originated as an outrageous spoof at The Onion or similar satirical venue, Fox News fell for it hook, line, and sinker: "Publisher Renames Joseph Conrad Classic 'The N-word of the Narcissus,'" by Joshua Rhett Miller. Assuming it is for real, it proves again that life in the racially terrified, suicidal West is simply beyond parody.
January 16-17, 2010
At Cato, Julian Sanchez manfully avoids hysteria in the face of some ghastly poll results: "Surveillance State More Popular than iPhone." We should remember what he writes in his closing sentence every time we read of some pollster's extracting a massively positive response by asking: "Do you think it's important to help the economy recover by passing the health-reform bill?"
P.S. That's no joke. As Gary North points out, Keynesians really would answer yes! See his essay "Dr. Keynes's Health Care Prescription," posted at the Rockwell site.
December 23, 2009
Peter Schiff provides some credible and scary analysis of the health bill's impact in this piece at the Rockwell site: "Dropping the Bomb on Health Care."
With respect to the ban on "discriminating" against people with pre-existing conditions, Schiff observes: "The health care bill removes the need for healthy individuals to carry insurance. Knowing that they could always find coverage if it were eventually needed, people would simply forgo paying expensive premiums while they are healthy, and then sign on when they need it. But insurance companies cannot survive if all of their policyholders are filing claims!"
I hope that Schiff's quixotic jousting in Connecticut politics doesn't interfere too much with important work such as this.
December 23, 2009
My wee town of Roanoke, Ind., is able to enjoy the existence of a little video-rental store partly because its "guerrilla capitalist" owner and operator has combined it with a tanning-bed salon. Now, we can be as snide as we want about tanning salons and their customers, but it's more important to understand how casually the human wolves who presume to rule us can wreck our livelihood. And how unexpectedly, too. Did you know this was in the socialist health bill? — "Tanning Salons Say Tax Would Trigger Job Cuts, Store Closings," by Tian Huang, at BusinessWeek.com.
Nota bene: "The legislation includes a 10 percent levy on indoor tanning salons, which replaced a previously proposed tax on cosmetic surgery." I have to wonder how much desperately defensive corruptionism on the part of affluent, politically wired doctors was necessary to purchase that replacement.
December 23, 2009
Department of Maybe This Time They've Gone Too Far, or, Hope Springs Eternal.
• From Agence France Presse, in Paris: "Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend," by Isabelle Toussaint and Jurgen Hecker. In Dark Suits and Red Guards I briefly noted the Red Guards' opposition to pets — and to all the other small comforts and consolations to which normal people resort. I failed, of course, to foresee that a new anti-pet campaign would emerge from the climate-change squirrelery.
You can take this pun or leave it, but the Guards really do seek a cold world, don't they?
• From the Telegraph, dateline Wellington, New Zealand: "Christians outraged by poster showing Mary and Joseph after sex," by Paul Chapman. Editor's intro: "A risqué church billboard showing the Virgin Mary and Joseph in bed apparently after having disappointing sex has caused outrage among Christians in New Zealand." It's an Anglican Church that did the deed, and you've got to like the Telegraph's implied distinction between Christians and Anglicans.
December 23, 2009
I probably ought to add the site where these observations appear, The Thinking Housewife, to our page of site links:
• "Married to a Wimp" starts out, "Dear Thinking Housewife,
"Men are not taught how to be men nowadays. What can I do about the fact that my husband is such a girl?"
• "Intermarriage and Cultural Suicide" endorses immigration restriction of the type that depends on statism instead of the type that depends on (our absent) freedom, but there is much here that pro-West, pro-white freedom lovers will applaud.
The Thinking Housewife is Laura Wood.
December 23, 2009
The extinguishing of our freedom of association began with the "civil-rights" decrees, laws, and regulations, but it now extends even to the use of our state-extorted money to bring strangers among us: "Taxpayers bear the burden as refugee resettlement soars," by Don Barnett at The Tennessean.com.
I am glad to see another writer join me, at long last, in my assessment of Catholic Charities, which as Barnett puts it "is neither a charity nor Catholic, but more an extension of a state welfare agency."
December 16, 2009
The Democrats' health-tyranny bill has absorbed quite a few dings and dents recently, but it's my understanding that their confounded "individual mandate" is still in it, and that the totalitarian scoundrels are still attached to that provision as unshakably as a dog to its bone. At Future of Freedom, Sheldon Richman has written a crackerjack piece about the outrage, posted December 4: "Kill the Insurance Mandate." He ends with a bang, promulgating a rule we all ought to quote at every opportunity.
December 16, 2009
The System's schools soar to new triumphs, both here and over in Airstrip One:
• "State schools admit they do not push gifted pupils because they don't want to promote 'elitism,'" by Laura Clark of the Daily Mail, London.
Senior editor Ronn Neff comments: "It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that if they just outlawed getting an education anywhere and killed anyone who seemed smarter, they wouldn't have to worry about it.
"Oh, wait! Pol Pot did think of that."
• "Obama's Safe Schools Czar Tied to Lewd Readings for 7th Graders," by Maxim Lott of Fox News. Editor's intro: "Obama adviser Kevin Jennings is under fresh attack after it was revealed that the pro-gay group he formerly headed recommends books his critics say are pornographic."
"Safe schools"! How dare they? With respect to both articles, I can only comment that in its final stages the suicide of a civilization gets awfully grisly.
December 16, 2009
I highly recommend the cover article for the January 1 issue of The American Conservative: "Going South," by Ximena Ortiz. Editor's intro: "Militaristic, corrupt America increasingly resembles a Third World state." Get a load of the cover art, too. It's reminiscent of one of the satirical posters that David T. Wright has confected for TLD.
December 16, 2009
At The Daily Mail, Fiona Macrae reports recent developments in the scandal that the Goreites are pretending doesn't exist: "Professor in climate change scandal helps police with enquiries while researchers call for him to be banned" (December 2).
The imbroglio, as well as the MSM's seemingly straightforward reporting of it, may signal a lack of vigilance on the part of the Red Guards. Or maybe just smug over-confidence. I wonder, though, whether their Dark Suit employers may have decided to take them down a peg, for whatever reason.
December 3-4, 2009
This Politico.com piece by Ben Smith makes me think that the totalitarian Red-Greens have indeed been obliged to slow their assault, partly because the Powers That Be have decided that pushing deeper into medical socialism is more urgent: "Have the greens failed?" Editor's intro: "As green activists gather for the U.N. conference, their disappointment is palpable."
A taste:
Advocates for a strong international treaty on carbon emissions continue to wrestle with a deep disconnect between a cultural moment — in which "green" is both a pop phenomenon and a corporate branding gimmick — and deep congressional skepticism toward actual action. Even oil companies pine for the green brand, and it's almost undoubtedly good public relations for the major companies that have stormed out of the Chamber of Commerce because of its opposition to climate legislation.
But the green movement also has been unable to translate the broad popular support for environmental causes into a practical solution that captures the public's imagination and could translate into legislative victory. The mechanism for controlling carbon emissions, known as cap and trade, has turned into an Achilles' heel. And Copenhagen remains, to most Americans, merely the capital of Denmark.
Of course the Red-Greens haven't failed in any strategic sense, any more than the Bolsheviks failed strategically when they fell short of imposing the full measure of misery on their ruled peoples by the end of, say, 1918. Our adversaries never relent, and they have plenty of time. We, however, are running short of it.
December 3-4, 2009
As far as cultural dominance goes, it appears that the Guards are still in the saddle, whip in hand, at least up Minnesota way: "At U, future teachers may be reeducated," by Katherine Kersten at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Editor's intro: "They must denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.)"
The "U" referred to is the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota.
December 3-4, 2009
There are eight million snoopings in the naked country. Whom can you trust these days? Well, for sure it's not "private" companies that are in bed with the state:
"Surveillance Shocker: Sprint Received 8 MILLION Law Enforcement Requests for GPS Location Data in the Past Year," by Kevin Bankston at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
On the other hand, as those born to be slaves will remind us, if you're not doing anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about.
December 3-4, 2009
This piece at Politico.com is worth your attention per se, but its most interesting aspect may be that it wasn't written by one of us anti-Obama hard men: "7 stories Obama doesn't want told," by John F. Harris. Editor's intro: "These storylines could seriously threaten Obama's presidency if they become the dominant frame."
December 3-4, 2009
Yuri Maltsev has been there, and I'm confident he knows what he's writing about in this scary essay at Mises: "What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us."
December 3-4, 2009
The FDIC doesn't have enough trouble? Martha T. Moore writes at USA Today, "Report: Many minorities shun banks."
The TLD co-conspirator who tipped me to this piece commented, "I'll just bet the FDIC is concerned about people it has no access to." But he also passed along this urging from our old friend Sally Druthers: "The FDIC should get Congress to mandate that everyone have a bank account. And the FDIC should provide a public option bank for the poor to use."
December 3-4, 2009
The Turner briberies. American political police may share their foreign colleagues' traditional taste for provokatsiya, according to this AP dispatch at AT&T News: "Report: FBI paid controversial NJ blogger for help."
Just how much of the wild mouth-frothing exploited by the SPLC, ADL, and Security Organs has been unwittingly subsidized with money extorted from us taxpayers? You've got to wonder.
December 3-4, 2009
A Golden Oldie from AR. Whether you wish the imperial legions well or ill, I think you'll find this 2008 analysis gripping, in the wake of the Mohammedan action at Fort Hood: "Diversity in the Army," by Duncan Hengest at American Renaissance. Editor's intro: "A thin veneer covers serious trouble."
December 3-4, 2009
The Fourth Reich strikes back. I'm sure that the guardians of civil liberties around the world will erupt in outrage over this attack on free expression ... any year now: "German court fines British bishop for Holocaust claims" (The Guardian, no byline).
Editor's introduction: "Richard Williamson fined €12,000 over claim on Swedish TV that fewer than 300,000 Jews died in Nazi death camps."
This account at Press TV is quite brief, but I didn't want you to miss its final sentence, which itself amounts to thoughtcrime: "Bishop fined €12,000 for denying Holocaust."
If you ever find yourself in a discussion of The Holocaust™ with a mainstreamer and he exclaims, "Six million, one million, one hundred thousand! What does it matter? You're just quibbling!" — you might do well to refer him to Bishop Williamson's experience. And warn him never to visit Germany.
October 30, 2009
A news flash from Occupied Indiana. Trying to repel street scum, a nightclub in Indianapolis's trendy Broad Ripple district has run afoul of the Race Police, according to this story in the Indianapolis Star: "Claim targets dress code at Broad Ripple nightclub" (no byline).
According to the story, the Indiana "civil rights" commission said that "the dress code prohibits 'gang attire, loose-fitting pants, single-color T-shirts, chains worn outside of one's shirt and picks in one's hair, attire arguably more prevalent among members of particular minority populations.'" And here in Bizarro World, now including my Hoosier Heimat, that makes the prohibition ... you know ... bad.
Is it possible that no one in the African Indianan Community finds the state's solicitude, thus expressed, to be absolutely mortifying?
In any case, if we still had any doubts, it's now clear that by the time our adversaries are finished, there will be nothing left of our freedom of association.
October 30, 2009
State Radio is in race trouble, too! From The Maynard Institute: "NABJ Questions NPR's Diversity Commitment" (no byline). "NABJ" turns out to be the National Association of Black Journalists.
My carefully considered, painstakingly formulated, incisive commentary on this knuckle party is: HAAAAA haa haa haa haaa! And not only that, but HAAAAA haa haa haa haaa!
October 30, 2009
From the Left. Lurking in this AlterNet piece amid all the b.s. are some disturbing hints that the Left-totalitarians are spinning up a major new offensive to push compulsory vegetarianism: "Glenn Beck's Bizarre Outburst Against Meatless Mondays and Vegetarians," by Kerry Trueman. It's an old leftist ploy, of course, to claim that the tyranny they're struggling to impose is inevitable. (Hitting the link, you may be taken to a fund-raising page, but it contains a link to the story.)
Now to the b.s. I don't know much about Glenn Beck, and I'm gratified to learn that he's a carnivore. But Trueman also describes him as a "loopy" libertarian. If so, his loopiness seems to have overwhelmed his libertarianism. If Beck were a real libertarian, one would expect his attack on the "Meatless Monday" program of the government schools in Baltimore to include a wider attack on government schools per se. And one would expect Trueman to mention it.
"Beck as libertarian" seems even less plausible in light of some remarks of his I found, from 2008, about Bush's War. Beck allowed that George W. Bush made mistakes in managing the Iraq War but went on to say that "he was right on going in." And then there's this, from late last month: "Stop Playing Politics; Fight to Win in Afghanistan." Beck writes, "A war cannot be won without horror; stop the politics and fight to win this thing, so that we can limit the horror and return home with honor." Actual libertarians oppose getting into horrible imperialistic adventuristic wars of aggression in the first place, and demand an immediate end to any such crimes on the part of the Empire.
October 30, 2009
Emergency! Emergency! Get used to these Triumphs of Government Medicine, folks: "What's Behind the False Flag Flu Emergency?," by Bill Sardi (posted at the Rockwell site).
Sardi himself may or may not be a health crank, but he makes some awfully good points in his Rockwell piece, and we ought to remember that it's only the official cranks who exercise power over us. To me, it sounds as though we need some doctors of epistemology to keep tabs on leviathan's doctors of epidemiology.
With respect to the flu vaccine, the biggest, brightest, most insistently flashing NO GO warning I see is the immunity from liability that the Central Government has awarded its privileged contractors from Big Pharma.
October 30, 2009
As the attack on tobacco enters its final chapter, the Left-Prohibitionists are turning their sights on alcohol, according to a report at the New Scientist: "WHO launches worldwide war on booze," by Andy Coghlan.
Inspired by the "second-hand smoke" ideology and its success in furthering the totalitarian imperative, the goblins have dreamed up something they call "passive drinking." Coghlan writes: "Sally Casswell of Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, who helped produce the WHO document, says a focus on passive drinking is key to winning public acceptance for more stringent alcohol legislation. 'It challenges the neoliberal ideology which promotes the drinker's freedom to choose his or her own behaviour,' she says."
WHO delenda est.
October 23, 2009
Especially odoriferous. Central Government lawfakers have now passed a bill stripping those who hatefully assault homosexuals of their constitutional protection against double jeopardy: "Senate Approves Broadened Hate-Crime Measure," by David Stout at the New York Times. Non-hateful criminals no doubt will still enjoy the traditional protection.
State-monopoly law enforcers at the local level don't win any prizes from us market anarchists, of course, but the new bill, soon to become fakelaw, will push Central Government power and control further into what has traditionally been provincial business. And as if the whole idea of "hate crimes" isn't smelly enough, not to mention scary and pregnant with abuse, the measure passed by Congress is part of "an essential military-spending bill," according to Timeswriter Stout. As such, the Democrat leadership expected it to win votes from Republican lawfakers in perverted love with war, war contracts, imperi– Oh, excuse me, of course I mean defense. And sure enough, ten Republican senators did vote for it.
October 23, 2009
The Anti-social War Prize. An Australian fellow, Ben O'Neill, has penned a simply ripping piece for Mises on Obama and the big gold star the Scandinavians gave him the other day: "Peace and the 'Peace Prize.'"
O'Neill writes eloquently about social peace vis-à-vis statism, and about the non-aggression principle. And I especially like this:
Since some have charged that awarding the prize to President Obama is premature, I will save them the suspense: Obama will continue to work to expand U.S. government power both abroad and over its domestic citizens. He will continue to push forward a statist agenda and he will routinely use violence to plunder people of their rightfully owned property, suppress their civil liberties, and deprive them of their lives. As such, he will become, if he is not already, a perfectly fitting recipient for the Nobel Peace Prize.
October 23, 2009
White flight by the "progressives." At Newgeography.com, Aaron M. Renn writes of "The White City." It turns out that many of the cities that leftists cherish as urban utopias feature an attribute that we, too, might consider utopian. And I'm not referring to bike paths.
October 23, 2009
The Taki site has posted an excerpt, titled "The Silent Catastrophe," from Jared Taylor's forthcoming book on race and immigration. In this article, Taylor focuses on "the declining quality of the American work force." In looking to the future, I often emphasize what I call the Great White Male Recession and its implications for society; in this writing Taylor examines the accompanying dynamic — what I suppose we might call the Great Colored Procession. Most highly recommended.
October 19, 2009
The November issue of The American Conservative contains two especially provocative pieces, which I wouldn't want you to miss. Luckily, both are already posted at the TAC site. I'm calling this the Wages of Imperialism package:
• "Who's Afraid of Sibel Edmonds? / The gagged whistleblower goes on the record," by Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi
• "The Taliban's Toll / How American taxpayer dollars are being used to fund our Afghan enemies," by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
October 19, 2009
David T. Wright, who alerted me to this piece in the Washington Times, observed, "Here we go ..." And here we go, indeed — "quietly" for now, of course:
"U.S. quietly begins to study gun safety," by Jim McElhatton
It's not just the "U.S." that's doing the study; it's the National Institutes of Health. And any time the state medical machine tackles a social question, especially one that has nothing to do with disease, we move a little deeper into Sovietism and into the medicalization of opinion and behavior.
Hearken to Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Brady civil-disarmament conspiracy, quoted in this article as saying, "Whether the members of Congress like it or not, gun violence is a public health problem in America today."
October 19, 2009
I don't want to come off as credulous, but I'm cautiously awarding this news a single cheer, since it's the first time I can remember the Central Government's formally declaring even a slight retreat in its war on (unapproved) drugs: "Obama's commendable change in federal drug enforcement policy," by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. (This has to do with medical marijuana.) What it means, of course, is that while stroking an important part of its constituency, the regime will pursue and expand police-statism in other areas.
Meanwhile, the conservatives are up in arms over this move by the Obamunists. Jailing people who smoke or ingest substances they disapprove of — that's a function of big, intrusive government that conservatives really like, along with war.
Comment by Modine Herbey. I join Strakon in rationing my cheers. What the story demonstrates is this: the unlimited administrative state is free, at any time, to enforce, selectively enforce, or not enforce at all any of the thousands of paper laws invented by the lawfakers in the legislative, "judicial," and bureaucratic branches of government. The emperor and his servants are free even to make up "law" as they go along. At least that's my "finding," to use a popular word in the tyrants' vocabulary.
October 19, 2009
Kudos to the Mises Institute for posting Karl Hess's classic Playboy article from 1969, "The Death of Politics." I remember vividly the inspiring jolt this piece gave us young freedom-lovers who at the time were investigating the ultimate radicalism: anarchism. Appearing as it did in a popular magazine, Hess's essay gave us hope, too: hope that, one day, freedom itself would become popular.
October 19, 2009
Editor's note. You may notice a gap here in the off-site links. Nothing has been omitted. We just paused for a few months.
• If you'd like to read a column I didn't write or have anything to do with, but that is nonetheless purely Strakonish — right down to its use of the expression "United State" — punch on over to the Rockwell site for this smashing piece by the estimable Will Grigg: "Bright, Dead Alien Eyes." That's a description of some of our rulers, and, seriously, don't more and more of them remind you of extraterrestrials? While we're on the subject, remember: "They live; we sleep."
April 29, 2009
• Joe Sobran has reviewed Dr. Steve Sniegoski's book, The Transparent Cabal, and I'm confident you'll want to read Joe's take: "World War V, Anyone?"
April 29, 2009
• I've been neglecting CounterPunch lately. Here are a couple of worthwhile reads on its site:
¶ Peter Morici mounts an assault on the great banker boodlefest, in "Parking Billions / Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs." Seeing some of the hobbyhorses Morici rides, you will be able to tell that this analysis comes to us from the Left.
¶ More hobbyhorses are a-gallop in this piece by Henry A. Giroux, but it, too, is worth your attention: "The Tragedy of Youth Deepens: Ten Years After Columbine."
Giroux writes: "One major effect of the Columbine tragedy can be seen in the increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary practices that closely resemble the culture of prisons." State schools have always resembled prisons in some ways — including their respective purposes — but now in the age of super-size leviathan, the resemblance is becoming uncanny.
April 29, 2009
• Another site I've been neglecting is Strike the Root — a major, hard-line anti-statist forum — and I thank the co-conspirator of mine who alerted me to this piece on Christian anarchism, by Michael Tennant: "Christianarchy?"
This, I believe, must be filed under the heading of excellent points: "An exhortation to obey authorities does not imply that those authorities are required to exist in the first place."
Joe Sobran has noted that the "difficult saying" — for Christian anti-statists — in Romans 13:1 demands careful interpretation, in view of the Christian martyrs' refusal to submit to the established rulers and deny their faith. One might also mention St. Ambrose's refusal to submit to Theodosius.
April 29, 2009
• In the unlikely event that you need another reason to demand immediate and total separation of school and state, I draw your attention to this illuminating piece by Gary Bauer at Christian Science Monitor Online: "What are U.S. students learning about Islam? / Politically correct textbooks are distorting key concepts and
historical facts."
Even if some private and parochial schools are also using the books Bauer describes, it's still true that government's domination of the education industry exerts a massively distorting influence on what is taught — and on what textbooks are published.
Ronn Neff comments: "Bauer's piece provides us an opportunity to underscore TLD's debt to George Orwell once again, since the article lends itself to the observation that in many ways it simply doesn't matter that the textbooks are being changed, since they are already a pile of lies. Who controls the present controls the past, and this article gives us a peek at the struggle to control the present."
The other half of the Party slogan from 1984 is, "Who controls the past controls the future."
There's a certain question I used to ask on the site fairly regularly. I should never have stopped asking it: Have you reread 1984 yet this year?
April 29, 2009
• The distinction between Society and State is a crucial one, and I've done my best to make the related distinction between America and the United State. But I have to recognize the great trend of our age, which is also the great aim of our supervisors: that our people should merge with leviathan. Or dissolve into it.
At the Taki site, Karen De Coster ably reports on the state of play: "A Nation of Helpless Idiots."
De Coster seems to be alive to the connection between statish thinking and mental disablement. However, I suppose it's all OK, in the same way that torture is OK: the police-statists are just doing their best to Keep Us Safe.
April 29, 2009
• Do they sleep with the fishes? At Common Dreams, Dafna Linzer writes: "Dozens of Prisoners Held by CIA Still Missing, Fates Unknown."
April 29, 2009
• At the New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti write of how the empire decided on its torture techniques: "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use."
Shane and Mazzetti quote a government study from 1956 that puts the War-and-Empire Party in fine company: "The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture.'"
April 29, 2009
• Even the elephants are leaving! In itself, this AP dispatch is hilarious. But for the humans who can't leave Zimbabwe? Not so much: "Elephant exodus reported from troubled Zimbabwe," by Angus Shaw.
April 29, 2009
• Just breaking today is the news that the Obama regime will regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Here's a short account from the BBC: "Obama to regulate 'pollutant' CO2." This great thrust of totalitarian power comes in the form of a bureaucratic edict, which is founded in turn on a grant of far-reaching power to the EPA by Congress. Even so, the BBC reports that Congress is planning to give the enviro-tyrants even more power over the economy.
April 17, 2009
• Provoking a flurry of worry among those who oppose Obamism is a recent report from the so-called Department of Homeland Security about the threat of "right-wing extremism."
Here's an account from Capitol Hill Blue: "Right-wing extremist groups on the rise," by Jane Sutton.
The People's Progressive, Vigilant, and Heroic Organs of State Security claim that they're concerned only about the possibility of (non-governmental) violence. But in reporting the story, the semi-official established media are using the terms "anti-government" and "extremist" in a way that suggests that all such people pose a standing threat of violence toward their peaceful countrymen. Moreover, according to news reports, the national political police are sending their advisory to local law-enforcement agencies across the country.
Pehaps you can see why the DHS disclaimers don't really reassure me, in light of the fact that I've been semi-officially identified as the leader of a White-Nationalist Hate Group. Nota bene: the SPLC smearbund also sends its reports to local cops.
One odd thing. If "anti-government extremists" are all potential murderers, arsonists, and wreckers, in what respect do they differ from the pro-government "moderates" who run the regime and exercise its bloody will?
April 17, 2009
• The estimable Will Grigg deftly assesses the DHS story in this piece at Rockwell: "Revenge of the 'Waco Gene.'" Grigg points out that it's not just Democrats who are responsible for our era's mounting threats to dissent; Republicans have some explaining to do, too. And he writes: "A 'hate group' consists of any group of people who are hated by collectivists."
April 17, 2009
• The metaphor of the unseen "elephant in the room" strikes us as hackneyed now because we unprogrammed denizens of Bizarro World encounter reminders of it every day. At the Rockwell site, William L. Anderson tries to help a Tennessee law-enforcement official detect one such thundering, trumpeting, furniture-smashing pachyderm. I swear, statish thinking can render a fellow worse off than Helen Keller:
"My Censored Reply to the Sheriff"
As you'll see, Anderson's local paper was no help. It is my pesky duty to point out that in declining to run his op-ed, the paper was not actually censoring Anderson. Only a government can censor. No, it was just proving that it's a worthless, System-captured rag.
April 17, 2009
• This New York Times story by Andrew Ross Sorkin is more than a week old, but I want to make sure you catch it: "'No-Risk' Insurance at F.D.I.C."
Free-marketeers have always known that the Federal Deposit "Insurance" Corporation is a fraud — I could have put quote marks around the words "Federal" and "Corporation," too — but now we know, thanks to Sorkin, that it's a fraud of a fraud. Think of it as a meta-fraud.
April 17, 2009
• And now for something up to the minute, from 1959. Over and over I insist on the distinction between society and state, and recommend the same tireless insistence to anyone who considers himself a libertarian. Kudos, now, to the Mises Institute for reminding me of one of my important intellectual influences:
"The Divide Between Society and State," by Frank Chodorov
The posting is the introduction from Chodorov's The Rise and Fall of Society. One thing I had forgotten altogether is Chodorov's argument that an unfounded metaphysical conception of Society helped push people to conflate it with the State.
April 17, 2009
• In March, the National Center for Health Statistics released figures showing that "Out-of-Wedlock Births Hit Record High." The link leads to an American Renaissance page containing snippage and reader comment on the story, as well as a link to the story itself in full text.
April 17, 2009
• At the Taki site, Kevin DeAnna reports on a report about a recent gun show, and adds some observations of his own: "Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms: Dispatch from Knob Creek."
The best part of this succinct piece is its final few sentences. Very pointed.
April 17, 2009
• In fact we can't stop the rush that Thomas J. DiLorenzo describes in this piece at the Rockwell site, but if the American people were to receive a miraculous mind and spirit transplant, DiLorenzo's strategy would have a fighting chance.
"The Rush Towards Socialism — and How To Stop It."
Being a historian, DiLorenzo focuses mostly on the statist horror story that makes up so much of American political history, under this observation: "The fact is that the American people have been servants or slaves to their government for generations." But he starts off the article itself with just the kind of attack I savor, showing appropriate and acidulous contempt for our distant masters:
It only took the Obama administration a couple of weeks to prove that the national leadership of the Democratic Party is guided by totalitarian-minded socialists who seek to create an omnipotent government. The U.S. government is now controlled by people who have been dreaming of living out their utopian socialist fantasies ever since the fantasies were brought to their attention in college decades ago by their Mao/Castro/Che Guevara poster-hanging, capitalism-hating, communistic professors.
Bravo, bravo, DiLorenzo!
April 17, 2009
• Steve Sniegoski has a typically percipient new article posted, this time at Antiwar.com: "Obama and the Neocon Middle East War Agenda." It seems that the neocons may fade away, but their policies never die.
Dr. Sniegoski warns us not to believe Obama's reassurances about his regime's reverting to diplomacy with Iran. I certainly endorse that warning, since Obama is running neck and neck with Bill Clinton to be the most flagrant charlatan to come down the pike since the Great and Terrible Oz.
March 27, 2009
• Americans for Legal Immigration has issued a blast against the SPLC and ADL smearbund that it says has actually prompted a response from a Missouri police official: "Missouri MIAC Documents Scandal Leads to Advisory on SPLC & ADL." Will wonders never cease? I'm sure that WANE-TV, the CBS affiliate in Fort Wayne, will be all over this story.
March 27, 2009
• At the Chicago Tribune, Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac dig into one brief but significant chapter of Rahm Emanuel's professional life: "Rahm Emanuel's profitable stint at mortgage giant."
March 27, 2009
• You may be aware that Emanuel has had a varied career, ranging from ballet dancer all the way to Israeli soldier. And as Secter and Zajac point out, it's well known that he once sat on the board of the notorious fascist entity Freddie Mac. They go on to write, "Emanuel's ... healthy payday from the firm has been no secret either. What is less known, however, is how little he apparently did for his money and how he benefited from the kind of cozy ties between Washington and Wall Street that have fueled the nation's current economic mess."
I assume that Emanuel's principal service to the government-created company lay merely in his being there: in other words, that the company figured to benefit from those "cozy ties" along with Emanuel, who even before he went to work for Obama was, in Mafia parlance, "connected."
Freddie Mac, of course, is one of those outfits that anti-market people love to point to as an example of how "laissez-faire capitalists" have bollixed everything up.
March 27, 2009
• Here comes more "reform." At the Washington Post, Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho write: "Geithner to Propose Vast Expansion of U.S. Oversight of Financial System."
The writers note that "the nation's financial regulations are largely an accumulation of responses to financial crises." Right. Nevertheless, onward and ever onward we go with these periodic crises. Funny. It's almost enough to make a reasonable man doubt the utility of utopian statism. On second thought, naaa ... Let's continue bleeding the patient and feeding him mercury.
March 27, 2009
• There's violence on the border, down Mexico way. L. Neil Smith, writing for The Libertarian Enterprise, offers some good anti-statist analysis in "The War on the Border." As he points out, some System spokesfolk are blaming Americans. On the basis of reading his piece, I conclude that we should instead blame United Statians, if you know what I mean.
Smith writes: "The drug war along the Mexican border could be ended with the stroke of a pen." But that would entail a diminution in the power of leviathan, so it will never happen.
March 27, 2009
• The news from Airstrip One. According to this item at American Renaissance, the Communications Workers Union in Britain has sent a fascinating reminder to the country's postmen: "Letter from a UK Union to Its Branches." For my part, I remind TLD readers that if delivery of first-class mail were not a state monopoly this would not be a problem.
March 27, 2009
• If this be treason ... At Future of Freedom, Sheldon Richman stomps hard on all the Goody Two-Shoes from one side of the System to the other, in "China: Don't Buy Government Bonds!"
For rhetorical purposes, Richman addresses "the people of China" and our "Chinese friends," but I'll go ahead and point out that it's actually the People's Bank of China that's buying U.S. government debt. Beijing is certainly playing a delicate and risky game, but I reckon that financial gain is only part of its goal. The other part is political leverage over the imperial apparatus in Washington.
March 27, 2009
• I wind up today's links with this shocker from ABC News: "Judges Accused of Jailing Kids for Cash," by Frank Mastropolo. Subtitle: "With Corrupt Judges, Kids' Lives Hang in the Balance."
Once again we turn over one of statism's rocks, and once again we recoil in disgust.
March 27, 2009
• Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has made news again, but not at the New Yorker this time. According to Muriel Kane at The Raw Story, Hersh "dropped a bombshell" during a college appearance on March 10:
"Hersh: 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney"
Not everything Hersh wrote during the Bush Time has panned out in every detail, but he's certainly worth reading, and he's certainly more trustworthy than anyone serving the Empire.
March 12-14, 2009
• On his blog, Lew Rockwell posts a friend's observation that is both succinct and mentally nutritious: "Finally, I Understand the Immigration Debate."
March 12-14, 2009
• Meanwhile, on the Rockwell site I find this gripper by William L. Anderson: "It Is Time to Admit the Obvious: The Political Classes Deliberately Are Blocking an Economic Recovery."
Outrageously conspiratorial? Hang on. Anderson writes:
The New Deal was an unqualified economic failure....
However ... the New Deal was an unqualified political success, and it was successful precisely because it blocked the economic recovery. This is counter-intuitive, I realize....
....During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration never had to worry about losing political power, and it held and added to its political majorities. Roosevelt even won a third term of office although the first eight years of his presidency had barely moved the rate of unemployment below what it had been during the worst days of the Herbert Hoover administration.
This spectacular run of political power did not come in spite of the economic crisis; it came because of it.
I hate to appear as a relative moderate on this question, but I'm not sure the Obamites are deliberately plotting to prevent a recovery. Statism is all they know. Fiddling with the dials and levers of leviathan is all they know how to do. At the same time, theirs is a chosen ignorance, which they labor tirelessly to spread. Moreover, ignorance is no excuse for pointing guns at one's peaceful fellow humans and ordering them about.
March 12-14, 2009
• You may have heard that Charles W. Freeman Jr., the new regime's choice to head something called the National Intelligence Council, came down with a severe case of Jews' Complaint and had to withdraw his name. A TLD comrade who may be writing some commentary on L'Affaire Freeman has tipped us to two pieces at the Washington Post that are especially interesting when read in tandem. (Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski's analysis was posted March 15.)
¶ "Intelligence Pick Blames 'Israel Lobby' for Withdrawal," by Walter Pincus. This is the front-page news story, and it contains much fascinating detail about the efforts of the Israel lobby to kill Freeman's chances.
¶ On the editorial page of the same issue appears this unsigned editorial: "Blame the 'Lobby' / The Obama administration's latest failed nominee peddles a conspiracy theory."
So ... wait ... uh, which ...?
Our comrade also alerts us to Ray McGovern's take on the affair, posted at Antiwar.com: "Obama Caves to Israel Lobby." McGovern writes: "The influence of the Israel Lobby is seeping ever deeper into the ranks of the intelligence community."
March 12-14, 2009
• Desperate to end what this AP writer, Victor L. Simpson, calls "one of the most serious crises of his papacy," Pope Benedict has attempted to explain the Vatican's "mistakes" with respect to Bishop Williamson, a Holocaust™ skeptic whose excommunication was lifted. This version of Simpson's dispatch is posted at Yahoo News: "Pope: Vatican made errors in Holocaust denial case."
March 12-14, 2009
• At WorldNetDaily, Star Parker, who I believe is black, writes: "We're all inner-city blacks now."
Miss Parker doesn't touch on all aspects of the negrification of white America — she couldn't do that in a short column even if she were so inclined — but she does make some good points. Here's one that stands up independently of any racial analysis: "Has anyone noticed that the only markets that have failed in America are the ones distorted with major government controls, regulations, subsidies, or taxpayer guarantees?"
March 12-14, 2009
• Hope fades for satirists. So far as I can tell, this is for real, and not something confected by those frisky folks at The Onion: "Poll: Obama beats Jesus as American 'hero,'" by Chelsea Schilling at WorldNetDaily.
In the poll said to have been conducted by the Harris organization, Martin L. King, Jr. came in third. George W. Bush ranked fifth, just ahead of Ape Lincoln.
All I can say is, Transparodistic, transparodistic. We can never know what Henry Mencken would have written about those results, but I suspect they would have tested even his satirical imagination.
February 19-20, 2009
• Just after posting Andy Nowicki's latest column, on the Bishop Williamson affair, I learned of this triumph of free expression in South America: "Argentina expels Holocaust-denying bishop," by Hugh Bronstein at Reuters.
Very few Americans, or other Westerners, will find the Argentines' tyrannical act to be troubling in the slightest degree ("neo-Nazis" being an exception, of course, as Bronstein suggests). And I find that to be at least as troubling as those Harris Poll results.
February 19-20, 2009
• Dr. F. Roger Devlin — whose percipient insights are familiar to TLD readers — offers an account of Michael Hart's Preserving Western Civilization conference, held near Baltimore earlier this month: "Preserving Western Civilization — the horror, oh the horror!" It's at the Occidental Observer.
Dr. Devlin begins: "There was a time, within living memory, when a call for 'preserving Western civilization' would have elicited about as much controversy as a panegyric upon motherhood. How things have changed. To a Baltimore Sun columnist, [the] conference sounded 'creepy.' The proceedings were declared 'extremist' by the Anti-Defamation League, the authorities on moderation...."
Organized by Jews, the conference sought to avoid treating the Jewish Question, in an effort to discourage attendance by the Nazis who often slither into pro-white confabs. Instead — if I'm reading Dr. Devlin's account correctly — the politi-religion of Mohammedanism came in for heavy assault. That's fine with me. Some people on our side of things have become relatively uncritical of Mohammedanism and the Mohammedans, as our compadres have focused on opposing American-funded Zionism, the Bush/neocon crimes, or border-police statism. But the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.
February 19-20, 2009
• Reflecting on Bush's crimes reminds me of how happy I am that we've now entered the Era of Obama and Change We Can Believe In, and that brings me to this piece by Charlie Savage in the New York Times: "Obama's War on Terror May Resemble Bush's in Some
Areas." Those areas may include the CIA "renditions," one of the most shocking serial crimes ever committed by the state apparatus in Washington. The successor of our enemy is not our friend, either. And in important respects, the new boss looks to be — as The Who put it — "same as the old boss."
February 19-20, 2009
• Unlike The Who, I never bothered to "pray we don't get fooled again," in 1971 or subsequently. It was pointless. Writing at Mises, Lew Rockwell provides a thoughtful and eloquent survey of our imprisonment: "The Left in Power."
A sample: "What we have [with the Obamites] is not just a profound love of the state; it is a profound confidence in the capacity of the unlimited state to create heaven on earth. How does this square with the idea of human liberty, of social cooperation, and of the rights of all? Herein lies the great mystery of leftism."
I myself go back and forth on this question: How do leftists actually think? What are their mental processes like? One of my comrades believes it would be as easy to understand the epistemology of space aliens. Of course the whole question assumes the existence of some leftists who are not hateful knaves but sincere and honest fools.
February 19-20, 2009
• Transporting us farther into Bizarro World, Minister of Justice Eric Holder declared February 16 that Americans were "'a nation of cowards' on matters of race, with most Americans avoiding candid discussions of racial issues." I'm quoting the AP's Devlin Barrett, reporting in "Holder: U.S. a nation of cowards on racial matters."
It's as if Vyshinsky had declared, circa 1938, that Soviets were a "nation of cowards" because so many comrades were afraid to criticize Stalin.
According to the story, Minister Holder objects to the way Americans choose their associates and order their private life, even under the iron grid of totalitarianism that already exists: "Even when people mix at the workplace or afterwork social events, Holder argued, many Americans in their free time are still segregated inside what he called 'race-protected cocoons.'" Never before has the phrase "free time" carried such weight!
As you might imagine, American Renaissance's snippage of the story elicited some peppery comments from readers, posted at www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/02/holder_us_a_nat.php. I didn't make my way through all of them, but the first two are worth the visit.
February 19-20, 2009
• This story led the front page in the Washington Post's print edition of February 18: "Swift, Steep Downturn Crosses Globe / Markets Are Hammered as Hope Fades for Quick Recovery," by Tomoeh Murakami. As a doom-and-gloomer it apparently raised some eyebrows in more hopeful sectors of the established media. I wonder whether it was designed to prepare the reading public for Obama's coming failures with the political-economy. The High Sheriffs at the Post may be engineering this party line: Yes, Obama is a god, just as we've been saying; but our plight is so dire that even a god cannot save us from it!
That's not to say that Murakami's assessment is necessarily wrong. In fact, I worry that the latest collapse of the fascist System's house of cards may turn out to be ... It. That is to say, the It that many of us System foes have been expecting since we read certain economic-apolcalypse books in the 1970s, and started stocking up on canned goods and junk silver.
February 19-20, 2009
• Good news from Israel. Writing at Haaretz, Amiram Barkat reports: "Christians in Jerusalem want Jews to stop spitting on them." Someone call the ADL! Oh. Never mind. The good news? Well, these Jews aren't yet pelting the Christian clergy with human excrement. Apparently they still reserve that treatment for rival Jewish cultists.
February 19-20, 2009
• I strongly recommend this Mises article by Robert P. Murphy: "Banks Should Raise Prices in a Recession." It's clear, it's hard-hitting, and it's right.
February 12, 2009
• This piece, by Gary North, is just about as good and probably more thought-provoking: "Economic Fascism and the Bailout Economy." At least I find it so, as a ruling-class analyst whose potted theory of the r.c. has been tested by events — and tested hard — since 2001.
North writes: "Do I see this as the end of freedom? No, I see it [as] the end of the fascist State." I don't share his apparent long-range optimism, and I suspect that a ruling class outside the formal political regime will survive, on a refounded basis; but we must ponder North's arguments. (The essay is posted at the Rockwell site.)
February 12, 2009
• As you may have heard, the Catholic Church is in trouble again with the Powers That Be, and is scrambling to get on their right side:
¶ "Bishop Who Denied Holocaust Is Said to Lose Seminary Post," by Rachel Donadio (New York Times)
¶ "Jews tell Vatican [that] Holocaust denial is a crime," by Philip Pullella (Reuters). As if the Vatican didn't already know. After all, departing from orthodoxy on the Holocaust™ is literally a crime in most of the world's "advanced" social-democracies.
¶ "Pope Rejects Any Denial of Holocaust," by Rachel Donadio (NYT). This part is especially good, as well as predictable: "But Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League ... said he had hoped the pope would go even further, and excommunicate Bishop Williamson once again."
I am heartened to see the major institutions of the West proceeding in their brave, determined, and unfettered quest for truth!
February 12, 2009
• Steve Sailer offers some hard figures in this posting at VDare: "1990s FHA Mortgage Default Rates by Ethnicity." They should come as especially hard figures for those still pushing coercive racial preferences.
February 12, 2009
• At the New York Times blog, Judith Warner reports to creepy and disgusting effect on women's Dreams of Obama: "Sometimes a President Is Just a President." The bit about Obama's lips, "so purple and sensuous," accentuates the overall science-fictional quality of this account.
February 12, 2009
• Get a load of this one, from Wake Forest University: "Adolescents get daily happiness boost from ethnic identity" (no byline).
As you'll see, the findings are based on a survey of kids with a Chinese or Hispanic background. I love the bland (or blind) way in which the report ignores the elephant in the living room. White Western kids would also derive a "daily happiness boost" from recognizing and honoring their ethnic identity, but it would be an intrinsic boost only. From the outside world they would get only a daily pain-and-sadness boost; and the psychologists, sociologists, and other specialists of the enemy intelligentsia would surely help inflict it.
February 12, 2009
• Future of Freedom linked to this piece by Donald J. Boudreaux, writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and I'm happy once again to poach one of FFF's picks: "The camel in the tent."
While resolutely opposing government interference with business, free-marketeers have to analyze the strings attached to the bailout boodle with some finesse, and Boudreaux strikes just the right note here. He is chairman of the famously free-market-oriented econ department at George Mason.
February 12, 2009
• I keep sounding the alarm about the eradication of white Western pride and morale. Kevin MacDonald
offers his take on that — and it's a riveting one — in this writing at The Occidental Observer: "The problem with intellectually insecure whites."
Prof. MacDonald begins: "America will soon have a white minority. This is a much desired state of affairs for the hostile elites who hold political power and shape public opinion. But it certainly creates some management issues — at least in the long run." For my part, I'm afraid those "management issues" will include the problem of how to keep the lights on.
Quoting Hua Hsu's "The End of White America?," in The Atlantic, Prof. MacDonald passes along something that's sure to raise your blood pressure: "The classic thing white [college] students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, 'I don't have a culture.'" If that is truly what the young heirs of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven have been educated to believe, then we have a valuable indicator of just where we are in the trajectory of our civilization.
February 6, 2009
• You will find some good "inside baseball" concerning the Central Government's burgeoning power over the already politicized banking industry in this piece from the Wall Street Journal: "In Merrill Deal, U.S. Played Hardball," by Dan Fitzpatrick, Susanne Craig, and Deborah Solomon. (Note: This is an apparently unauthorized repost at Cbonds.info. The original at the WSJ site is accessible only to subscribers.)
A sample: "The [taxpayer] money is coming at a price. Six months into the great bailout of U.S. finance, Washington's rescue attempt has helped shore up the system. But that emergency effort, planned on the fly, has taken the government on a risky journey deep into the heart of American capitalism."
February 6, 2009
• Two different kinds of collapse are reflected in this piece from the New York Times: "As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force," by Catherine Rampell.
Miss Rampell begins: "With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation's payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.
"The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling."
This, in the midst of the cultural revolution that I've taken to calling the Great Male Recession. Now, apparently, it is becoming the Great Male Depression.
I predict that when it's all over, normal, ordinary women will be as unhappy as normal, ordinary men.
February 6, 2009
• From the Left. At the Nation, we find a noteworthy attack on the ADL's Abe Foxman by Eric Alterman, answering an attack by Foxman on Alterman's old buddy Bill Moyers: "The Defamation League."
The Nation is unusual among nationally distributed left-wing publications in having the courage and inclination to criticize the Israel lobby.
February 6, 2009
• Speaking of courage, here's a courageous piece at VDare by Paul Craig Roberts blasting the bogus basis of the current securitarian tyranny: "Why No Neocon Assassinations? Because the War on Terror Is a Hoax."
February 6, 2009
• I've mentioned how members of the "Morning Joe" panel beat up on Dr. Ron Paul when he appeared on the show for January 27, accusing him of wanting to do nothing about the collapse of the political-economy. Earlier in the same installment, self-described libertarian Tucker Carlson had come in for the same treatment. But of course neither Paul nor Carlson proposed doing nothing. Quite the contrary. They (mainly) wanted the market to be allowed to do something — that is, they wanted private people pursuing their material well-being in society to be set free to do something.
I understand the power and pervasiveness of the modern totalitarian ideology, but I'm still struck by the extent to which doing something has come to mean — even in the minds of most smart people — government doing something instead of free people doing something.
At Mises, Robert P. Murphy seems to share my diagnosis: "Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?" Proud to be a purist, I warn you that Murphy mixes his radical proposals with some compromises.
February 6, 2009
• In light of all the depressing stuff above, I think we all need a good laugh: "Recycling 'could be adding to global warming,'" by Louise Gray and Gordon Rayner at The Telegraph. At last, the Green snake has started to eat its own tail!
February 6, 2009
• Steve Sniegoski has achieved more media exposure — and this time, it's TV! Earlier this week he appeared on Press TV's "American Dream" program, participating in a discussion of the "Unpopularity of the 110th Congress" — the official title — but also analyzed were Obama's foreign-policy picks, and the economic bailout and "stimulus" programs.
You can view the program at www.presstv.com/Programs/player/Default.aspx?id=76622. (I'm told you should "hit Windows Media Player.")
"American Dream" is hosted by Elliott Francis of ABC and formerly of Fox News. On the panel with Dr. Sniegoski were neocon John C. Fortier, from the American Enterprise Institute; and Tony Welch, former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.
November 26, 2008
• Marshall Fritz, R.I.P. In early November, I received the news of the death of Marshall Fritz at age 65. Mr. Fritz was the founder of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State.
Though I once spoke with him on the phone, I never met Mr. Fritz face to face, and I regret that. But what I regret more is TLD's failure to recognize and praise, while he was still living, his work against the monstrosity of state schools. So far as I can tell, instead of wasting their money and energy on pols and political activism, Mr. Fritz and the Alliance focused on telling the truth about state education, persuading parents to pull their children out now, and getting the word out about resources that exist to help them do so. That is exactly the right and honorable course, and I celebrate Mr. Fritz's legacy. Here are two appreciations of it, which as you will see was not limited to his work on liberty of education:
•"Marshall Fritz, Creator of 'World's Smallest Political Quiz,' Dies at 65," by James W. Harris at OpEdNews.com
•"Marshall Fritz, RIP," by Jim Babka at Positive Liberty
November 26, 2008
• The American Conservative's November 17 issue is largely devoted to another legacy — the one established by George W. Bush. Of the theme articles, I think the best is Alexander Cockburn's: "A Long Train of Abuses." It is remarkable that Cockburn, co-editor of the left-wing CounterPunch, comes off here as a classical liberal — even as what many would call a libertarian.
November 26, 2008
• In case you missed this delightful irony attendant to the Obama hysteria, here's an account by Dan Walters in the Sacramento Bee: "Surge for Obama sealed Prop. 8's victory." California's Proposition 8 bans homosexual marriage (at least until the courts gut it). As an anti-statist, I naturally oppose state definition, regulation, and registration of marriage, but that matters not. This internecine brouhaha on the Left affords us all a wonderfully entertaining opportunity to "hide and watch them fight."
November 26, 2008
• TLD's own Andy Nowicki, writing at his blog Dyspeptic Myopic, offers "A Modest Proposal for Unity '08: My Address to America."
He starts by proposing that Blue Staters and Red Staters are "not as different as we may think." And when you see Mr. Nowicki trot out a League of Women Voters bromide such as that, you just know he's up to something. Ah, yes, one day we shall meet him, too, in Orwell's "place where there is no darkness."
This is a good opportunity to alert you that Mr. Nowicki's latest book, Considering Suicide, is on track to come out in 2009, assuming he's not ushered into Room 101 before then. Details to follow.
October 25, 2008
• Partisans of freedom continue to produce trenchant analyses of Washington's latest mega-crime. Robert Higgs (Crisis and Leviathan) has already fired some good salvoes on the Bailout, but I think his latest one is the best yet: "A Gigantic Armed Robbery." It's posted at The Independent Institute.
A sample: "By the time that all of these crimes have run their course, George Walker Bush may well have proved himself to be the greatest economic wrecker and looter in the history of the world."
October 24, 2008
• I'll be looking for the Mises folks to provide a blistering account of Alan Greenspan's latest treachery, but for now here's a "just the facts" account, at Bloomberg.com: "Greenspan Concedes to 'Flaw' in His Market Ideology," by Scott Lanman and Steve Matthews.
It's accurate to say that Greenspan argued for a "free-market ideology" back when he was writing for the Randians (if anyone still remembers those days), but during what was by far the most important part of his career he worked as a Dark Suit mandarin in charge of the United State's central bank. In rejecting a free-market ideology that he hasn't practiced for forty years, he has handed a precious gift to the Left, including the MSM, which blames "laissez-faire" for the recent breakdown of the fascist System.
Did Greenspan's old Dark Suit masters encourage this exercise in desinformatsiya?
October 24, 2008
• In radical disagreement with Greenspan is Dr. Chris Sciabarra, writing for what appears to be his own blog: "A Crisis of Political Economy."
Along the way, Sciabarra observes that "throughout the modern history of the system that most people call 'capitalism,' banking institutions have had such a profoundly intimate relationship to the state that one can only refer to it as a 'state-banking nexus.'"
And: "There is no free market. There is no 'laissez-faire capitalism.' The government has been deeply involved in setting the parameters for market relations for eons; in fact, genuine 'laissez-faire capitalism' has never existed."
And along the lines of something I noted recently, Sciabarra writes that the necessary "structural change will not come to this economy without fundamental intellectual and cultural change. That, my friends, is not on the menu."
The essay is fairly long, but I urge you to chew away at it: It's both tasty and highly nutritious.
October 24, 2008
• At Mises, George Reisman explodes the MSM's crazy contentions about "laissez-faire":
"The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis."
The essay is long, and it gets a bit technical in places, but we should read and learn. In any case, make sure to hang on until you get to the section titled "The Laissez-Faire Myth and the Marxism of the Media." Reisman writes:
When I refer to the educational system and the media as Marxist, I do not intend to imply that its members favor any kind of forcible overthrow of the United States government or are necessarily even advocates of socialism. What I mean is that they are Marxists insofar as they accept Marx's views concerning the nature and operation of laissez-faire capitalism.
October 24, 2008
• From The Telegraph we learn that "Chicago plans school for gay students." As a partisan of freedom I hate saying anything positive about the gyrations of school-statists, but within the overall context of state education, allowing sexual deviates to voluntarily ghettoize themselves doesn't sound too bad to me. It would help protect normal kids from further degradation — though the "normal" schools would naturally continue to dish out the standard homosexualist propaganda.
October 24, 2008
• Coming as late in the game as it did, Jesse Jackson's identification of Barack Obama as a non-captive of the Israel lobby isn't gaining much traction, though I suppose it will lose the Unicorn Prophet a few thousand non-crucial votes in Florida, New York, and other places.
"The O Jesse Knows / Jackson on Obama's America," by Amir Taheri, New York Post
But this classic Jackson Blurt is still interesting. He's right about the lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy toward the Muslim world, but we may debate whether he's right about Obama. I still hope it's true, despite Obama's abasement before AIPAC during the campaign. Optimists would point out that the Bush-Likudnik neocons wouldn't be around to manipulate a President Obama; on the other hand, the Democrat Party contains quite a few Zionist war liberals who would relish the task of protecting Israel's interests using American taxpayers' money. We shall see.
October 24, 2008
• Newswise.com brings us the results of a study showing that "Whites Go Out of Their Way to Avoid Talking about Race."
It begins: "White people — including children as young as 10 — may avoid talking about race so as not to appear prejudiced, according to new research. But that approach often backfires as blacks tend to view this 'colorblind' approach as evidence of prejudice, especially when race is clearly relevant."
If the findings are reliable, they show, again, that whites just can't win for losing.
It reminds me of what Joseph Schumpeter wrote about capitalism and its enemies: "Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the death sentence in their pockets. The only success a victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment."
The difference is that the free market did have some brave, stalwart defenders whose morale was sound, even if they were doomed, while the whites discussed here are terrified little trucklers.
The business about the white kids ("as young as 10") puts a different color (so to speak) on all the established-media gabble about how today's white youngsters "just don't see race" in respect to the colored peers with whom they've been forced to associate.
October 24, 2008
• "Further is from the truth." At Amazon.com, Dr. Steve Sniegoski has picked up yet another unfavorable reader-review that will probably help him sell his book. It's a delight, and one of the delightful things about it is the writer's pen name, "Yoda."
"This book shows the new face of anti-semiticism"
Dr. Sniegoski comments:
It appears that "Yoda," an Israeli, skimmed the book, but he totally distorts what I wrote. He believes that I provide "little evidence" to show that the neocon movement is predominantly Jewish. Then he writes of "Betanyahu's" Clean Break plan. Actually, the neocons participated in the group that presented the plan to Netanyahu; their names were on the study. (Contrary to what "Yoda" writes, Paul Wolfowitz was not involved.)
I mention Larry Franklin, but I do not say he is of the "Jewish faith." I do point out his ties to the neocons through the Office of Special Plans. My focus in the relevant part of the book is on secret dealings with Israel by OSP officials. I do not deal with the actual court case, but, yes, Franklin's defense did claim that it all was perfectly OK. However, for what it is worth, he was convicted. Well, that was just more "anti-semiticism," one supposes.
"Yoda's" handling of my "smear" of Pipes seems to work directly against his allegation.
Dr. Sniegoski also tips us to "Yoda's" Amazon.com review of the Mearsheimer and Walt book: "Mearsheimer and Walt, pro-Arab propagandists," and it, too, is good stuff. I especially like the revelation of "the Juedeo-Christian cultural traditions that the Jewish people have."
October 2, 2008
• Will wonders never cease. I've just come across a piece in what I assume is an established, mainstream organ — the Financial Post (of Canada) — that provides a good Austrian School account of the Bailout and, for good measure, zings both the Chicago School and the Cato Institute along the way: "Karl's comeback," by Martin Masse.
Editor's intro: "Marx's Proposal Number Five seems to be the leading motivation for those backing the Wall Street bailout."
Many thanks to the old friend of TLD who alerted me to this piece.
October 2, 2008
• It's no wonder, though, that we find Sheldon Richman writing percipient analysis of the Bailout: "State Capitalism in Crisis" (FEE, September 26).
Socialists blame "deregulation" for the crisis, but Richman writes: "The focus on regulation, narrowly defined, distracts attention from all the ways that the government has made the financial and housing industries unstable through guarantees and other privileges."
October 2, 2008
• Writing at Mises, Pierre Lemieux labels the crisis a little differently: "A Crisis of Global Statism."
Lemieux observes: "When Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson says, 'I don't believe in raw capitalism without regulation,' he is not revealing a scoop. He is reiterating what has been official American policy for the last century. Whether the result is financial socialism with a human capitalist face, or state capitalism with a strong socialist flavor, it is a matter of choosing between a half-empty and a half-full glass."
October 2, 2008
• Dept. of No Spit, Sherlock. From the Los Angeles Times a few days ago: "Financial industry's campaign donations could help it in bailout," by Tom Hamburger and William Heisel.
Editor's intro: "Firms have given lavishly to both parties in Congress. That could help them get the language they want in the bill — as well as block provisions such as homeowner assistance."
October 2, 2008
• At RealClearMarkets, Steven Malanga offers some useful historical context, focusing on the anti-redlining movement of the 1990s: "The Long Road to Slack Lending Standards."
He notes: "Of course, the new [lower] federal standards [for mortgage loans] couldn't just apply to minorities."
October 2, 2008
• As government entities help us out with our economy, rest assured that they're continuing to help us in other areas, too, including education: "Eyebrows raised over city school policy that sets 50% as minimum score," by Joe Smydo at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Colored minorities aren't mentioned here, so I guess this policy has nothing to do with them or their traditional academic performance.
October 2, 2008
• Dr. Steve Sniegoski has garnered two favorable reviews recently for his hot-selling book The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel.
¶ By Dr. Paul Gottfried, writing at Taki's Magazine: "The Transparent Cabal"
¶ By Bill and Kathleen Christison, writing at CounterPoint: "A New and Revealing Study of the Influence of the Neocons / The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies"
Dr. Sniegoski has also received a highly unfavorable review, but I believe it to be an important one as well. It's a reader-review at Amazon.com, written by one Andrew Levidis: "Disgraceful and Disgusting." It is clear that Mr. Levidis cannot actually have read the book; but no matter. His "review" is so hysterically over-the-top that I'm convinced it will help sell copies of Cabal. Sometimes our adversaries just can't help themselves. We should be grateful for that small consolation.
September 22, 2008
• I find Establishment totalitarians' chattering about "laissez faire" to be maddening, but Sheldon Richman keeps a cool head in this essay at FEE about the Wall Street crisis: "Government Failure."
The toties are also blaming "greed." Richman quotes economist Lawrence White about that and then extends the analysis: "'If an unusually large number of airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can't explain why the number of crashes is higher than usual.' Likewise, greed (however you define this essentially useless concept) can't explain the current economic troubles. Why didn't these troubles occur earlier? Were people less greedy then?"
Make sure to read this piece to the end. Richman's closing "thought experiment" will blow fresh air through your mind.
September 22, 2008
• At Mises, Antony Mueller asks, "What's Behind the Financial Market Crisis?"
He writes: "As a result of the bailouts and the socialization of the mortgage agencies, the financial system is now fully infected with moral hazard. The disastrous effects of these government interventions will show up soon. The major task of bringing the capital structure in order is still ahead and more pain is in the waiting."
September 22, 2008
• Also at Mises, Frank Shostak finds not "laissez faire" but the Fed to be the principal culprit in Wall Street's meltdown: "Can the Rescue Plan Fix the U.S. Economy?" In so finding, he picks his way through the regime's occult manipulation of the supply of what passes, these days, for money.
Though complicated dealings would surely arise in a free-market, hard-money financial system, I've always wondered whether the insanely recondite structure we're saddled with was not deliberately constructed, at least in part, to mystify the sheep who were to be shorn.
That aside, I can't wait for the Mises boys to go to work on the implications of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley's transforming themselves into bank holding companies.
September 22, 2008
• I missed this gasper when it was announced early in September, but I want to get some mention of it on the site. Here's the New York Times's account: "White House Unveils $1 Billion Georgia Aid Plan," by Steven Lee Myers. The idea seems especially obscene now, with the regime's lunge toward finance socialism and its new plundering of taxpayers, and it is obscene. But it pales when you think about the tons of our money that the robber gang in Washington has already poured into Iraq.
September 22, 2008
• Something else I've been wanting to mention on the site is the case of the two British thoughtcriminals who are seeking political asylum in America. For reasons I find murky, they've been put in jail in California. Nicholas Stix has now written an updated account for VDare: "The Heretical 2: Requests for Asylum and Letters from Santa Ana Jail." His original brief account is linked from the present piece.
As the friend of TLD who tipped me to this case observed, it discomfits world "respectables" in two enjoyable ways: First, it reveals the advanced, progressive social democracy of the U.K. — Our Greatest and Most Loyal Ally — to be a place from which people who have committed no actual crime are seeking political asylum; and, second, it puts Our Own Great Democratic Leaders on the spot. Are they really going to extradite thoughtcriminals charged merely with engaging in freedom of expression, which is not yet formally a crime under American law?
As Stix notes, the MSM are — surprise! — staying miles away from this story. That blackout in itself increases the chance that the Bush regime may be able to carry out a "rendition," putting the two dissidents on a midnight flight back to Airstrip One and its Ministry of Love.
September 22, 2008
• It's happening faster than we'd thought. I don't readily swallow government statistics, unless they carry bad news for us. These do: "Whites in the Minority by 2042, U.S. Census Predicts" (Associated Press, posted at Fox News).
As you'll see, the first prediction of 2050 was made in 2004. It makes me wonder whether, when we arrive at 2012, the prediction will be revised again, to 2034. And so on.
In any case, what a lovely old age we hated whites have to look forward to! May we all endeavor to stay strong.
If I may offer a prediction of my own, the remarkable thing about this latest revelation by officialdom will be the yawning indifference with which it will be greeted by millions upon millions of deracinated white soccerites. Worse, their children will probably celebrate it.
Henry Gallagher Fields comments: Assuming I understand this trend correctly, it looks as if in 2020 we will be told that whites became a minority in 2018.
August 18, 2008
• Here is Steve Sailer's analysis of the bad news, over at VDare: "Now They Tell Us! A Few Thoughts on What the Census Bureau's Projected White Minority Will Mean for America."
My idea of What Must Be Done differs from Sailer's: 1) Whites must start having many more babies; 2) whites must rear those children as Westerners while recovering their own racial and cultural morale; and 3) whites must abolish the welfare state, the civil-rights laws, and state education. For starters. A tall order, but doing anything less is worse than useless.
August 18, 2008
• I offer a Georgian War tetralogy, including two pieces from the Left, one from the Right, and one from our side:
¶ By Seumas Milne at The Guardian: "This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression." Editor's intro: "War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It's likely to be a taste of things to come."
¶ By Simon Jenkins at The Guardian: "Bush rebuking Russia? Putin must be splitting his sides." Editor's intro: "Moscow has to take some of the blame. But it is the west's policy of liberal interventionism that has fuelled war in Georgia."
¶ By Patrick Buchanan at his own blog: "Blowback from Bear Baiting."
¶ By Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com: "The Real Aggressor." Editor's intro: "Georgian invasion of South Ossetia sets the stage for a wider war."
Raimondo notes: "If you love GWB, you'll love President Saakashvili." Make sure to catch what he writes about Obama.
August 18, 2008
• Speaking of Georgia and U.S. imperialism, ever heard of a chap named Randy Scheunemann? It would be good if you had. Thanks go to Steve Sniegoski for tipping me to this profile at Rightweb.
John McCain boasts about his close personal ties with officials in various foreign countries including Georgia. However, far from bolstering his credibility as a foreign-policy president, such ties altogether undermine McCain's ability to pursue a neutral, objective, and noninterventionist policy. True, we never had any hopes on that front to begin with. But even those who think a president has legitimate business trotting around the globe as a peacemaker have to question any notion of McCain as an "honest broker."
Beyond that, the whole McCain-Scheunemann-Caspian axis just stinks to high heaven.
August 18, 2008
• Last week, the developing story about possible side effects of the Gardasil cervical-cancer vaccine made it onto the telescreen. And Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group that has been pushing Gardasil revisionism, was actually mentioned in the coverage. According to the story I saw, the CDC was pooh-poohing any concerns.
Without mentioning Judicial Watch, Mick Tsikas at the Los Angeles Times writes: "Gardasil vaccine doubts grow" (August 13).
Here's some material at Judicial Watch on its Gardasil investigation, dated May 14: "Judicial Watch Investigates Side-Effects of HPV Vaccine."
Poison or potion, Gardasil is certainly politically correct. Local totalitarians are forever trying to force kids to get injected with it. As you may remember, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is one of the chief culprits; and making the Perry story especially priceless, last year, were his ties with Gardasil's maker, Merck. But after all, political correctness and political corruptness are by no means mutually exclusive.
According to the New York Times in February 2007, "At least 20 states [were] considering making its use mandatory for schoolgirls," following a big lobbying campaign by Merck directed at state legislators. You may remember that I posted a link to the NYT story at the time.
August 18, 2008
• Back to VDare, where Jared Taylor of American Renaissance writes that P.C. is "Raping the Military." In response to the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military, the Left is now screaming for even more P.C. in order to solve the problem.
I can only hope that the Pentagon gives in and degrades even further the military's effectiveness in pursuing militarism, imperialism, and criminal wars of aggression.
Now, I doubt that the soldier's trade will ever vanish, but I can't believe that defense agencies in the non-statist society I envision would place soldierettes in or near combat. It just wouldn't be good business practice. In any case, female recruits would be few, in a morally and culturally sound society.
August 18, 2008
• I keep saying that the Red Guards are tireless and relentless as they hammer away at the ruins of our civilization. According to columnist Barbara Kay at National Post, some Orwellian creature known as the "Minister for Women" is swinging the sledge at what remains of justice in Airstrip One: "Britain moves toward guilt based on sex."
August 18, 2008
• It seems that for once, Negro short-term thinking may actually help protect what remains of civilization in this country: "Defendant trades murder plea for KFC, pizza" (AP, posted at CNN).
August 18, 2008
• Leftist Chris Hedges sometimes writes things that make me grit my teeth, but I still read him, and I urge you to read this Truthdig piece of his, reposted at AlterNet: "The Price of Oil, Tripled? An Attack on Iran Could Make It Happen."
I find unintentional humor in a quote from one of Hedges's sources, historian and old Kennedy bureaucrat William R. Polk: "Ironically, war [with Iran] would push America into a form of socialist economy." A form different from the one we now labor under, apparently.
August 9, 2008
• I offer two picks from VDare this time:
¶ "'No Real Solution' — Arnold Schwarzenegger's Algebra for Dummies," by Steve Sailer
One charming aspect of a free-market education industry — I imagine — is that parents and teachers would be disinclined to torture most Negro and Hispanic children with algebra and other subjects naturally irrelevant to their future.
¶ "Governor Deval Patrick: 'Together We Can' ... Have Racial Preferences," by Matthew Richer
Richer begins: "Those who wonder what to expect from a Barack Obama White House should start paying attention to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, currently the nation's only elected black governor."
Provocative words here, which do indeed make me think of the unicorn-riding Imam and his children's crusade: "Deval Patrick's job is not so much to govern, but to advertise the open-mindedness of his supporters."
August 9, 2008
• Speaking of provocative words, here are some from Massie Ritsch at OpenSecrets.org: "Oil Industry Leans toward McCain, but Big Producers Favor Obama."
Ritsch writes that the Center for Responsive Politics "was surprised to notice that it's actually Obama who has received more from the pockets of employees at several of Big Oil's biggest and most recognizable companies. Tallying contributions by employees in the industry and their families, we found that Exxon, Chevron, and BP have all contributed more money to Obama than to McCain."
Unfortunately, Ritsch explores none of the foreign- and war-policy implications bubbling under the surface here.
Some of the responders to this post put an "Aunt Sally in Topeka" interpretation on "individual" contributions by corporate employees, in effect arguing that they are meaningless from the political-economic standpoint. I suspect otherwise, though it would be useful to see just where in the hierarchy those generous employees sit.
August 9, 2008
• You don't say! Seriously, it is good to have this sort of thing on the record: "Minorities Often a Majority of the Population under 20," by Sam Roberts at the New York Times.
August 9, 2008
• My eyes narrowed and an eyebrow rose when I was apprised that Hollywood is producing a movie that is both political and "anti-Left." Well, here is what passes these days for a "conservative" movie, as described by a favorable review in the "conservative" Weekly Standard: "Hollywood Takes on the Left," by Stephen F. Hayes.
Students of culture and ethnicity may conclude that tribal concerns are foremost here, just as they were in the days when Hollywood was churning out Stalinist agitprop. Plus ça change ...
August 9, 2008
• In another neocon forum — the Wall Street Journal — John Fund writes a piece more praiseworthy: "The Far Left's War on Direct Democracy."
Fund ably recounts the genuine evil of the genuine Left in fighting the referendum movement, which these days tends to reflect populism of a right-wing kidney. But an old-style republican would make much of his admission that the "initiative is a reform born out of the Progressive Era" — and that republican would have a point. Proponents of consolidated government and expanders of state power seize on any instrument they think will work, from "Progressive" referenda in one era to an elite-managed political class in another era. As an anarchist I cringe to see their victims fumbling with the same machinery.
August 9, 2008
• This, liyeek, rox!!! 4 anywon that are onlien writter or edetter or whataverrr: "Stet," by Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times.
The subtitle is not included in the printer-friendly version I'm sending you to: "The cockamamie diction and syntax of Internet English."
August 9, 2008
• The Great Tomato Scare of 2008 offers some good lessons, but the coercive utopians won't learn them. In the wake of this particular government scandal, the AP's Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports: "Salmonella probe likened to 'Keystone Kops.'"
According to Alonso-Zaldivar, the scare "cost the [American] produce industry more than $200 million."
The lesson that the coercive utopians will learn is, We need more and better regulation!
August 4, 2008
• Two recent Mises pieces deserve to be packaged together:
¶ "Broken Glass Everywhere," by Art Carden
Given the mind-smog of our age, not even the most absurd economic fallacies ever die, and Carden here tackles the one claiming that "disasters can be good for the economy." Along the way he writes:
The back door we installed after our house was robbed is much nicer than our old one. However, the fact that we would have preferred the services rendered by the old door to the services rendered by the new door was revealed in the fact that we had not replaced the old door yet — nor did we have any immediate plans to do so. The new door represents an improvement to our property, but to make that improvement we had to forego the services we otherwise could have enjoyed with the money we spent on the new door.
¶ "Booms, Busts, and 'Krugpot' Economics," by William L. Anderson
He writes: "Can we blame Bush for what is currently happening and what will surely happen in the next year? Absolutely, and we can do it with great relish and authority." But Anderson shows that Paul Krugman's inch-deep statist opinionating on the Bush Bust is no substitute for coherent economic analysis.
August 4, 2008
• No matter how bad and ridiculous you think things are, they always turn out to be worse — and more ridiculous: "Freddie, Fannie Funded Jesse Jackson's Pet Projects," by Keriann Hopkins, Cybercast News Service.
August 4, 2008
• Alternet has posted a piece that Paul Armentano wrote for High Times about the Central Government's latest Goebbelsplutter in its crusade against marijuana: "Govt. Milks Stoner Stereotypes in Anti-Pot Propaganda Film."
Washington's obsession with this innocuous weed is actually not insane, despite all the tax-robbery the government eschews by prohibiting its full legalization. In effect, our rulers have calculated that maximizing tax income from this particular source would fail to maximize their power and pelf overall. The brutes who run the state apparatus prefer to wage war, and like all of its wars, leviathan's war on drugs has proved extremely profitable in terms of power and pelf. The fact that this war is waged against leviathan's own citizen-serfs is if anything an added attraction.
August 4, 2008
• The suicide of a government scientist suspected in the 2001 anthrax attack has been much in the news. At Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald takes a look at "Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News."
Editor's intro: "A top U.S. government scientist, suspected of the anthrax attacks, commits suicide. ABC News knows who is responsible for false reports blaming those attacks on Iraq,
but refuses to say."
Greenwald points out: "If the now-deceased [Bruce] Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick." (Salon.com may block you if you try to access the piece more than once.)
August 4, 2008
• This one really pumps new life into the overused expression "Don't go there": "New hires bring new problems to Postville [Iowa]," by Nigel Duara, at the Des Moines Register.
Seriously, this is just the sort of thing that happens when you rely on police-statism to "solve" social and cultural problems.
August 4, 2008
• On the Left, I find two interesting examinations of the "surge" and the Empire's prospects in Mesopotamia.
Both are posted at AlterNet:
¶ "Forget the Surge — Violence Is Down in Iraq Because Ethnic Cleansing Was Brutally Effective," by Juan Cole of JuanCole.com
¶ "Iraq is About to Explode," by Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam
August 4, 2008
• I wish I could say that this one is just for laughs, but it does have a serious side. In an op ed for the New York Times, Bob Herbert (a Negro) attacks the McCain campaign's recent advertising, in particular the spot — unusually clever for Republicans — that compares Obama to the featherheaded celebs Paris Hilton and Britney Spears: "Running While Black."
Herbert seems not to have gotten the celebrity-comparison theme at all. Instead, in a breathtaking excess of black-liberal paranoia, he writes that the spot was "designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety, and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women."
Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on August 4, Herbert ventured even farther into crankdom, claiming that shots of two towers were deliberately included in the background as "phallic symbols" to heighten the sex theme. If Freudianism is nuts to begin with, what do we call this? Superlatives fail me. In any case, no one else on the "Joe" show saw what Herbert saw. For his part, the jovial Pat Buchanan said that when he sees Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, he focuses on them and ignores the background.
August 4, 2008
• I never thought I'd be linking to a column by Frank Rich, but this column of his written for The New York Times deserves your attention: "How Obama's Trip Abroad Turned Him into the Acting President." (The version here is posted at AlterNet.)
Rich observes: "The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on [the "energy crisis" and] other domestic fronts." No surprise there. If he's somehow elected, I expect John McCain to rival Simian George himself as a surrender monkey on domestic issues.
July 28, 2008
• On our side of the fence, Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo goes to work, and effectively, on this question:
"Is Obama the 'Antiwar Candidate'?" Subtitle: "Two words of advice for the antiwar voter: Caveat emptor."
Raimondo explains what Obama's betrayals will accomplish for the Young Imam and his Party: "The re-invasion and occupation of Afghanistan will give President Obama a chance to highlight his hawkishness and prove himself to the War Party as a good and loyal servant. It will also allow the Democratic Party to refurbish its credentials as a tough-minded crew, ready, willing, and able to spill as much innocent blood as the GOP in establishing U.S. hegemony in the Middle East."
July 28, 2008
• Statish thinking — or at least one aspect of it — is never more vividly on display than when socialists and fascists reject proposals to open up more areas for oil extraction on the grounds that doing so would fail to provide immediate price relief. Despite all the Goreish wailing about Planning for the Next Century or Millennium or whatever, government types have a tendency toward short-term thinking that rivals that of any purse-snatching junky.
But now Robert P. Murphy, writing at Mises, argues persuasively that the statists are wrong even on the immediacy question: "ANWR Drilling Would Provide Quick Relief."
Murphy points out that "market prices help coordinate actions over space and time. To the extent that it is physically possible, the market will exploit the availability of new future supplies in order to provide immediate relief."
July 28, 2008
• I package the next two pieces together for reasons that will be obvious. The first one is an account of how some brave and heroic "peace officers" apparently attacked a boy lying on the ground, his
back broken, and Tasered him 19 times:
"Parents question why Ozark police used stun gun on injured son," by Sara Sheffield and Gene Hartley of KY3 News, Springfield, Mo.
The second piece is by the estimable William Norman Grigg, writing at the Rockwell site:
"Abetting Police Aggression: The 'COPS Effect'"
He starts out, "They really didn't have to wreck the house, but they did it anyway."
Grigg builds on the valuable work he has done in the past on the militarization of the police, focusing here on the influence of what he calls "Police State Television." Reading Grigg's account, I was startled by the realization that much of the police brutishness is exhibitionistic and cowardly at the same time.
July 28, 2008
• "White nationalists" and all others who seek to use state power to solve their social problems should read this AP piece and think again: "Italy fingerprint plan gets initial OK," by Frances D'Emilio.
Italy started out planning to fingerprint just Gypsies, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of many of our racialist-nationalist "cousins." But that turned out to cause too many concerns about civil liberties. So Italy has solved the problem: Fingerprint everyone. Who's happy now? Totalitarians everywhere, no doubt. We can only hope that no one else is.
July 28, 2008
• I keep meaning to visit Lawrence Auster's blog more often. I know I've missed some gems — but not this one, thanks to the longtime friend of TLD who tipped me to it: "An anecdote of black and white in America" (View from the Right). As you'll see, Auster's report provoked quite a few readers to offer reports of their own, producing, in all, another inspiring chapter in the chronicles of our multicultural socialist utopia.
July 28, 2008
• Another friend of TLD gave me the heads-up on this recent action by the KGB wing of the American Left: "Report back from Anti-Racist Action on David Irving NYC Event," by "Anonymous" (posted at Infoshop.org). Statist-leftists have always depended on the initiation of force, of course, but this account of their thuggery is unusually frank. Read it only if you have a strong stomach.
July 28, 2008
• As I have pointed out before, the Red Guards do not roll over, all six legs twitching, on the rare occasion when some court hits them with a little bug spray. In the wake of the Heller decision, Sommer Mathis at DCist.com reports: "New Proposed D.C. Handgun Rules Unveiled."
In terms of TLD categories, the new rules may be seen as a move from Impolite Totalitarianism to (somewhat) Polite Totalitarianism.
This proposed rule is priceless: "Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home." And not a moment sooner! (Italicized phrase in original.)
July 26, 2008
• The fact that old Bombs Away agreed to speak at the recent meeting of The Race (La Raza) is more important than what he said there, but if you're curious here's a transcript, courtesy of the Washington Post: "Sen. McCain Delivers Remarks at the La Raza Convention / As Released by John McCain 2008." (The subtitle suggests that what we have here is only the intended text.)
As you will see, McCain or his spinners managed to find a way to mention the pol's "heroism" in having been a POW, and connect that achievement to "Hispanic concerns."
July 26, 2008
• At a highly unlikely venue — The Guardian — I find this cheerworthy denunciation by Brendan O'Neill: "Greens are the enemies of liberty." Editor's intro: "Environmentalists want to curb our freedom far more than the government's anti-terrorist laws ever will."
Over the past few days the MSM have once again been lavishing airtime on Prof. Albert Gore and his preachings. I am beginning to suspect that Gore is the most thoroughgoing, deliberate totalitarian ever to attain power and prominence in American public life. And that's saying something, in view of the competition he has faced for that dishonor.
July 26, 2008
• Assuming any decent person could actually wish for some kind of "victory" by the Empire as a result of its adventures in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan, could any such person tolerate as a collateral cost the sort of crime Tom Engelhardt reports here?
"The Wedding Crashers: U.S. Jets Have Bombed Five Ceremonies in Afghanistan" (AlterNet)
"Reform" imperialists want to make Afghanistan the main event of the Empire's continuing intervention in the Islamic world. They complain that it is now only a sideshow. If the new regime taking office January 20 makes that change, we may expect many more Afghan weddings to be "crashed," and many more noncombatants to be murdered.
A number of professed libertarians supported the Empire's invasion of Afghanistan. What is their opinion now?
July 26, 2008
• Also at AlterNet is an indignant assessment of the new FISA by Chris Hedges, written apparently for the Los Angeles Times: "FISA Bill's Real Target: What Remains of Our Open Society."
Principled freedom-lovers, of course, were horrified by the original FISA, dating from the Carter regime. Something called a "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" that operates in secret? Not in any country that deserves to be called America.
July 26, 2008
• Any piece whose title curses Franklin Roosevelt is going to capture my attention, and this Mises article by Lew Rockwell did just that: "Freddie, Fannie, and Curses on FDR."
Rockwell writes that with the mortgage crisis "we are not talking about market failure. If you have a housetop you can shout that from, please do so, because the press and the government are going to make every effort to blame private borrowers and lenders for this calamity."
Really, anytime you see a huge cluster of error in the market, you know where to look for the culprits: those busy utopians in power.
July 26, 2008
• I'm not the only wordsmith to insist that he writes better — and thinks better — while emitting clouds of tobacco smoke (cigar smoke, in my case). Now in an unbylined piece, The Independent stipulates to some scientific evidence tending to support that view: "Nicotine's addictiveness linked with memory boost."
As indicated by the title, the emphasis here is all on nicotine's addictive properties, but what I find interesting is this. Public references to nicotine's brain-stimulating qualities are rare, grudging, and fugitive because the System is waging holy war on smoking and smokers. But the present piece implies that all of us weefolk have of cawwwse long known about the positive effects of nicotine. In other words: Nothing to think about here, folks; move along.
July 26, 2008
• At The Atlantic appears a fascinating piece
by John Staddon, a Brit, who compares American and British traffic regulation
and doesn't find much to recommend in the American approach: "Distracting Miss Daisy." Subtitle: "Why stop signs
and speed limits endanger Americans."
It's interesting to read this piece from the anti-statist standpoint, focusing on
how information is disseminated in a
free society, and on the difference between market self-adjustment and the
intricately regulated political economy. In fact, it's almost as though Staddon is
in touch with the insights of the Austrian School.
July 12, 2008
• I find incisive analysis in this AlterNet
piece by Tom Engelhardt:
"Are Cheney's Iran Dreams Shattered?"
Engelhardt's oddsmaking on a war with Iran, as the last shriek of the Bush
regime, parallels my own — I think it's unlikely. But I agree with his
closing line: "And yet, of course, for the maddest gamblers and dystopian
dreamers in our history, never say never."
July 12, 2008
• Posted at his own site is this cogent and
hard-hitting essay by Lew Rockwell: "Grand Theft Society." His subject is the recession
and leviathan's purported struggle against it. A sample: "Government
invariably rules out the possibility that the structure of the public sector itself is
to blame for the problem, whether that problem is terrorism or recession."
July 12,
2008
• Turning to international trade, I
recommend this article by Tim Swanson at Mises: "How Long Does a Free-Trade Agreement Need to Be?"
Once again I find that a writer and I are on exactly the same wave-length. In
1995, commenting on the adoption of NAFTA, I wrote:
One doesn't achieve free trade with a pact that contains 2,000 pages of
exceptions, restrictions, half-measures, subsidies, and compromises. One
doesn't achieve it by erecting a new World Government bureaucracy, either.
You'll be able to tell that we have a real free-trade agreement when we get one
that's only one page long — plus an appendix, maybe, if it's considered
necessary to list all the hundreds and thousands of restrictions, tariffs,
regulations, and subsidies that are being repealed. (The Last Ditch, January
1995, p. 8)
July 12,
2008
• I found the June 30 issue of
The American Conservative to be just terrific, overall, and among the strongest
pieces was this one, by Timothy P. Carney: "Burning Dinner: Government's scheme to fill gas tanks
leaves stomachs empty."
Carney opens: "The 'fatal conceit' that Friedrich Hayek wrote about — the
hubristic belief that intelligent central planners can better advance the common
welfare than can people acting freely — is often used as an analogy or, at
least, an overstatement. In the case of ethanol, however, it is literal: by pushing
this fuel on us, governments could be starving people to death."
July 12, 2008
• Another must-read TAC article, from the
same issue, is "Looking into the Lobby," by the courageous Philip
Weiss. Editor's intro: "The American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual
conference is one of Washington's most important — and least reported
— events."
If your jaw dropped when you read accounts of Barack Obama's pilgrimage to
AIPAC, you'd better prop a pillow under your chin before reading this piece. To
put it another way, in ten years it will probably be illegal to publish it. Or read
it.
July 12,
2008
• This apparently is not a hoax: "Is 'black hole' a racially insensitive term?," by Eric
Berger at the Houston Chronicle.
The Chronicle's publication of this story strikes me as highly improper. As the
Marxists might say, it is "objectively racist," proposing as it does the profound
ignorance or profound madness of a Negro public official.
July 12, 2008
• Seymour Hersh is once again making waves for the Empire, in this piece for the July 8 issue of The New Yorker: "Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran."
Hersh writes: "Some members of the Democratic leadership — Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections — were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party's presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy."
According to Hersh, a "former senior intelligence official" told him that, earlier this year, "a meeting took place in the Vice-President's office and that the 'subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington.'"
June 30, 2008
• In this posting at VDare, Jared Taylor talks about whether people should talk about racial differences and writes: "I can't think of a single truth it should be our government's job to suppress":
"Egalitarian Orthodoxy: 'Noble Fiction' — or Noxious Poison?"
Along the way, Taylor reminds us that "the 'noble fiction' of racial equality does terrible damage to race relations."
June 30, 2008
• Writing at AlterNet, Linda Mamoun reports: "Israel Lobby Authors Walt, Mearsheimer Travel to Tel Aviv." Did people stone them when they spoke? Did the ultra-Orthodox pelt them with excrement, as they occasionally pelt rival cultists? No. In fact, Mamoun's account puts me in mind of Jared Taylor's account, in the piece above, of speaking to a Negro audience on Negro topics.
June 30, 2008
• At Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo asks a question and answers it: "Is War Good For the Economy? In short: No."
I've long thought that the United State ran a very odd sort of empire, and in this column Raimondo reminds me of something an early libertarian hero once wrote: "We have, as the Old Right seer Garet Garrett put it, an empire of a unique type, one in which 'everything goes out and nothing comes in.'"
June 30, 2008
• John McCain and The Race. This revelation is somewhat dated, but I have to take account of it, and the event in question isn't until mid July in any case. According to Fox News, John McCain announced on May 5 that he would appear at the annual convention of the National Council of La Raza: "McCain Reaches Out to Hispanics on Cinco de Mayo."
The anti-white pressure group itself confirms it, in this dispatch: "Presumptive Presidential Nominees John Mccain and Barack Obama To Speak at
2008 NCLR Annual Conference in San Diego."
I hope that, in his speech, McCain will reveal whether he plans to increase the Central Government's subsidies to this racist group or just keep them at their present level.
June 30, 2008
• The Memory Hole burps, and this yellowed fragment flutters forth from a 1958 issue of Time magazine: "The Negro Crime Rate: A Failure in Integration" (posted at Time.com, no byline). If you want a copy, you'd better make one quickly: even though it reflects some '50s liberalism, this piece surely won't be available for long.
June 30, 2008
• Steve Sniegoski's forthcoming masterpiece — The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel — is already garnering notices, including this one by Philip Weiss: "Will Stephen J. Sniegoski's Dissection of the Neocons Get 'Boycotted'?" It is posted at Weiss's own site.
As Dr. Sniegoski's longtime Net publisher, I need to get busy writing my own review.
June 25, 2008
• Over the years famed "maverick" Ralph Nader and his followers have certainly been manipulated by the very ruling elite that he condemns, but he still makes the Rev. Dr. Obama look like a piker in terms of Bolshevism. Here's an account in the Rocky Mountain News of the Nader interview that followers of the mulatto leprechaun are finding so offensive: "Nader: Obama 'talking white,'" by M.E. Sprengelmeyer.
Quoth Comrade Nader: "Basically [Obama is] coming on as
someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic." Even blind Commies occasionally find an acorn. If Obama is elected, he is sure to promote Red Guard socialism — but safely within the overall context of Dark Suit fascism.
June 25, 2008
• Meanwhile, Gary Langer at ABC News analyzes a survey about the impact of Obama's candidacy on race relations: "Obama's Candidacy Underscores Crosscurrents of Race and Politics." According to the subhead, "Poll Finds Four in 10 Think Obama's Candidacy Will Improve Race Relations," and that may be one reason the higher circles have confected the Young Imam as a national figure and presidential candidate.
A TLD writer passes along a friend's trenchant observations about this story's Newspeak-style subversion of language, whereby we are instructed that whites who are the most racially sensible are the least racially "sensitive," while whites who are the least racially sensible are the most racially "sensitive." "Sensitive" whites themselves — indifferent to their rights and racial heritage — prize that characterization, which gives them the moral high ground in the eyes of the System.
For my part, I like this: "Blacks ... remain fairly monolithic in terms of presidential preferences not because there's a black candidate, but because they're the single most loyal Democratic voting bloc." Very well, blacks are sure to vote for Obama on socialist grounds — but is it not obviously true that most are eager to vote for him on racial grounds, too? Minitrue teaches us that such eagerness is wonderful for blacks but that it is not so wonderful if any whites are eager to vote for John McCain on grounds of racial self-defense. (Good luck with that, by the way.)
June 25, 2008
• Those distracted by the campaign for emperor may forget that Congress is still up to its accustomed deviltry. But have we dodged a bullet with respect to gasoline socialism, Nixon/Carter style? William L. Anderson assesses the state of play in this piece at Mises: "The Oil Follies."
A sample: "Anyone familiar with modern politics knows that Republicans and Democrats regularly vie with each other to see who can be more economically illiterate, but it seems that with this proposed legislation, Democrats are determined to take the lead and cripple the U.S. oil industry permanently."
June 25, 2008
• A whole raft of government interventions led to the housing meltdown, but one that especially interests us is leviathan's racist social engineering. At Taki's site, VDare's Steve Sailer analyzes the disaster with particular attention to ethnic issues: "The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis."
Sailer doesn't hit this point as hard as I'd like, but students of Our Democratic Government will not be surprised to learn that these purportedly pro-colored policies of leviathan have hurt colored folk at least as badly as they've hurt white folk.
June 25, 2008
• Whatever else one may say about the U.S. Empire, its operations often come off as downright clownish. I believe the Romans, at least when they were flourishing, had a much better grip on their client kingdoms, especially when the legions were present: "Hundreds Escape Afghan Jail," by Candace Rondeaux at the Washington Post. Subhead: "Taliban Fighters Blow Open Prison Gates in Suicide Attack."
Of course one ought to be cautious in diagnosing imperial ineptitude. Perhaps the Empire doesn't really want to defeat the Taliban (or find Osama, for that matter).
June 25, 2008
• This one falls into the category of No Surprise but Still Worth Knowing: "'All whites racist' indoctrination revived!," by Bob Unruh at WorldNetDaily. Subhead: "Now features 'love' discussion earlier titled 'Gay Marriage.'" This has to do with the Red Guards at the University of Delaware.
Our civilizational enemies are relentless, sleepless, and remorseless; and they are entrenched in power. A couple of years ago when the Supreme Court dinged the University of Michigan's antiwhite policies, the school's president, Mary Sue Coleman, declared that she was determined to do all she could to evade the import of the ruling. And that defiance did not result in her being sacked. Occasional court rulings and lawsuits aren't going to overturn the Zeitgeist.
June 25, 2008
• It's getting ugly — well, uglier — over at the LP. In a cringe-making bid for "exposure," the Party has gone and nominated a minor national figure, Bob Barr, instead of an actual Party activist. Here's a look at the convention from the Left, courtesy of Alexander Zaitchik at AlterNet: "Is Bob Barr the Ralph Nader of 2008?"
True, Zaitchik doesn't know how to spell laissez faire, but he does manage to record some tasty detail. He writes that a member of the Libertarian Radical Caucus "expressed fears that the choice spelled the end of the Libertarian Party." If only it could be true!
But no. Zaitchik writes that "even those Libertarians critical or despondent over the way the party is trending feel that 2008 is their breakout year." Of course.
Supplementary comment by Richard Wilkins: What no one seems to be commenting on is that Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party nominee, is much less libertarian and radical than Republican Ron Paul. The LP thinks Barr will attract Ron Paul revolutionaries, but are the folks who made Dr. Paul's book number one at Amazon.com and on the New York Times bestseller list really going to be enthusiastic about a candidate who favors military intervention in Colombia and seems indifferent to the Federal Reserve's responsibility for our current economic situation?
May 27, 2008
• As David Gordon reports at Mises, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker, is attracting denunciations from admirers of Winston Churchill. In that context, and quoting from Baker as he goes, Gordon ventures to pass along some "Inconvenient Facts about World War II."
May 27, 2008
• At Strike the Root, Roger Young ably assesses the flap over Hillary's reference to the killing of Robert Kennedy. I heard Keith Olbermann's rant on MSNBC, which Young cites here, and in response to what Young writes I can only exclaim, "Exactly!"
"Hollow Outrage"
Young observes: "Apparently, in a 'democracy,' violence is only allowed (or even to be mentioned, as Olbermann whines) once 'the people' (at least a majority of voting, consenting slaves) officially grant the use of violence. Can you think of a more perverted concept to define a social institution?"
May 27, 2008
• "Objective" newsreaders at local telescreen stations continue to lead off "news" stories about returning veterans by declaring that those people have been over in Mesopotamia "defending our freedom." And on Memorial Day that kind of, uh, former food got so thick on the ground that you had to be careful where you walked lest the smelly stuff stick to your shoes. Kudos, then, to Antiwar.com's David Henderson for providing us this remarkably penetrating yet even-tempered analysis:
"The Fight for Memorial Day"
Here's an example of what I mean by "penetrating": "Unfortunately, one of the main ways most Americans get their history is from what is said on national holidays, especially July 4, Memorial Day, Presidents' Day, and Veterans' Day."
May 27, 2008
• Leviathan's work is never done. I predict this report from the Louisiana Weekly will make you see red: "U.S. Racial Discrimination Must Be Remedied, UN Says." Subtitle: "Post-Katrina housing rights violations also cited."
The story has been around since March 10, but I certainly hadn't heard about it. The MSM — at least the part of it I victimize myself with — drones on and on, obsessively, about the race for emperor, pausing occasionally to cover tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods; but we must never forget that all manner of deviltry is occurring in the wings and backstage.
I'm sure the worst antiwhite totalitarian elements in and around the U.S. Central Government will be delighted to use these UN "observations" as cover.
May 22, 2008
• This CounterPunch piece by Alexander Cockburn is intended as a promo for a print-only article by Doug Valentine on der alte Feldmarschall, but it contains some hot stuff: "'Hero' John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?" I've read Valentine's article in the print version, and if even half of this whole story is true, the whimpering puppies of the MSM are on a tighter leash than I'd ever imagined.
I do have to stipulate, though, that I don't care too much, personally, whether McCain was a collaborator once captured. I do care, a lot, about the fact that he was a war criminal before he was captured.
May 22, 2008
• At Mises I find this winner by Lew Rockwell: "Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism."
A sample: "The wish for socialism is a wish for unparalleled human evil. If we really understood this, no one would express casual support for it in polite company. It would be like saying, you know, there is really something to be said for malaria and typhoid and dropping atom bombs on millions of innocents."
May 22, 2008
• Also at Mises, Laurence M. Vance declares, rightly: "Not Tax-Funded Aid to Myanmar."
A taste: "Whether it is termed disaster relief or food relief, it is still foreign aid funded by the forced looting of American taxpayers and given to countries that most Americans can't locate on a map and in many cases have never even heard of."
May 22, 2008
• Foreign aid is bad enough, but the Empire runs other sideshows, too, including one in Red Guard movieland, as this piece at Alternet reveals: "Hollywood Is Becoming the Pentagon's Mouthpiece for Propaganda," by Nick Turse of Tomdispatch.com. Turse's principal example is the current blockbuster "Iron Man."
Supplementary comment by Ronn Neff: "Becoming"? All right, forget all the World War II movies and the pro-Soviet propaganda. What does Turse think "300" was, if it wasn't a pitch for the United State to go to war against Iran?
What does he think "Blackhawk Down" was?
One could easily go on.
May 22, 2008
• Free-marketeers can sum up the principal solutions to the airline mess almost with a verbal shrug: Let insurance requirements replace regulation and private airports replace socialist airports. But it is gratifying to see a full-scale treatment of the question, especially one as good as this essay at Mises by Markus Bergstrom: "Anarchy in the Skies."
Along the way, he points out that "the government is neither necessary nor able to provide sufficient air travel security to prevent hijackings and other attacks on airplanes
or airports, as the events of 9/11 should have established."
May 15, 2008
• On and on it goes. I refer to the Central Government's financing of our enemies.
"Radical Chicano Group Gets Millions in Earmarks" (Judicial Watch, no byline)
Revolution may be impossible, but can any self-respecting white Westerner continue to doubt that it would be justified?
Obama has a Hispanic problem, and if he is elected, with strengthened Democrat majorities in Congress, we should expect more of this kind of thing. With an eye on 2012, Obama is likely to truckle after the Hispanics even more assiduously than Bush has. And maybe more assiduously than McCain would.
May 15, 2008
• In this essay at Future of Freedom, Sheldon Richman keeps hammering away at the public's bedazzlement with politics and pols: "The 'New Politics': Squaring the Circle."
Richman starts off with a question that bedevils me: "How many times will people be fooled by a presidential contender's claim that he is a 'new kind of politician'?" And he asks: "Why does anyone believe [Obama] will deliver where others have failed?"
It's bad enough that there is something deep in American culture that promotes indifference to history. But when we add to that the state schools' and the established media's promotion of ignorance and disinformation — well, you may as well sound the buzzer. I'm afraid the game is over.
May 15, 2008
• At VDare, Kathy Shaidle reminds us of some history that we won't get from the MSM: "First They Came for ... / Canadian 'Hate Speech' Totalitarianism Is Not New." I must note that although Shaidle mentions Paul Fromm, she neglects Ernst Zündel. And that leads me to note that one saw almost no coverage of the Canadian Thought Police until it took out after Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, who are (not to put too fine a point on it) Jews.
May 15, 2008
• Speaking of Jews and free expression, here is a long account of Kevin MacDonald and his work by Brad A. Greenberg at JewishJournal.com: "The professor the anti-Semites love." Subtitle: "Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Long Beach, and the downside of academic freedom."
Greenberg has rounded up an Establishment scholar who says: "The theoretical viewpoint expressed in MacDonald's books stands in the most extreme contradiction to nearly every contentful [sic] core claim of evolutionary psychology."
As suggested by the title, Greenberg relies heavily on the good old guilt-by-endorsement dodge.
May 15, 2008
• I stole the preceding off-site pick from the Institute for Historical Review's News and Comment, and I have to go right ahead and steal another one, too. This piece, appearing in the Washington Post, is by Richard Holbrooke, former investment banker (Lehman Brothers) and Clintonista diplomat:
"Washington's Battle Over Israel's Birth"
Holbrooke starts out: "In the celebrations next week surrounding Israel's 60th anniversary, it should not be forgotten that there was an epic struggle in Washington over how to respond to Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948." According to Holbrooke, Truman's decision to immediately recognize the state put him at odds with "the 'wise men' who were simultaneously creating the great Truman foreign policy of the late 1940s — among them [Secretary of State George] Marshall, James V. Forrestal, George F. Kennan, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, Paul Nitze, and Dean Acheson."
At the time, the structure of the modern U.S. ruling class was still gelling, but we might think of the classic "wise men" as the first generation of Dark Suit mandarins.
"... To this day," Holbrooke writes, "many think that Marshall and Lovett were right on the merits and that domestic politics was the real reason for Truman's decision. Israel, they argue, has been nothing but trouble for the United States." (Holbrooke, naturally, disagrees.)
What I find most interesting in that struggle is how it prefigures the current conflict between the modern Dark Suits and the Bush Likudniks — which, remarkably enough, the latter faction has been winning over the past seven years even though the Likudnik Luftmenschen lack the Suits' material standing within the empire's overall fascist structure. It shows that the Suits, who otherwise seem all-powerful, have a history of suffering defeats over Israel.
May 15, 2008
• Peggy Noonan, the old Reaganite and foe of Big Nurse, detects a scorched-earth strategy on the part of the Clintonistas, in this Wall Street Journal op-ed: "Damsel of Distress."
One of my correspondents goes further. He says Obama's security detail ought to start guarding against an Arkanacide.
May 15, 2008
• From the Left: In this long essay-review of Jerry Hough's Changing Party Coalitions, Tom Mertes dissects the "American Duopoly." The piece is at the New Left Review.
Mertes's analysis could have benefited from Walter Karp's insights, but Karp goes unmentioned here. (That's not surprising. Almost no one mentions Karp.) On the other hand, as a leftist who is more conventional than Karp, Mertes shows a greater willingness to admit the existence of a ruling class outside the official regime.
Mertes's putting the word "totalitarian" in quotes, in adverting to the Soviet Union, prompts me to comment: The fact that a regime has factions and a complex internal machinery doesn't mean it is not totalitarian. United Statians, nota bene.
May 15, 2008
• Writing for the Minneapolis "Strib," Paul Walsh tells the ugly story of mandatory state-worship in a small-town state school: "3 suspended for not standing for Pledge of Allegiance."
In a 2003 article at the Rockwell site, Thomas J. DiLorenzo provides an excellent overview of the Pledge: "Pledging Allegiance to the Omnipotent Lincolnian State." He notes that
students were taught to recite the Pledge with their arms outstretched, palms up, similar to how Roman citizens were required to hail Caesar, and not too different from the way in which Nazi soldiers saluted their Führer. This was the custom in American public schools from the turn of the twentieth century until around 1950, when it was apparently decided by public school officials that the Nazi-like salute was in bad taste.
I invite activists and reformers to contemplate the spectacle of millions of "normal" Americans proudly chanting that Pledge — and then tell me with a straight face that they have a chance of rescuing us by pursuing activism and reform within the System.
May 15, 2008
• Michael Nolan, who has contributed to a couple of libertarian Websites, asks a very good question in this piece for Dissident Voice: "Who Gets Totally Obliterated, Iran or the U.S.?" He wrote it before his main targets — Hillary and her co-conspirators — took their body blow on May 6, but it's still worth reading. Whatever happens at the convention, the War Liberal and Zionist wings of the Democrat Party aren't going to magically disappear.
May 8, 2008
• Jennifer Rubin has penned a piece for the conservative vehicle Human Events that you might want to read, because chances are you won't be seeing much mention of the scandal in your daily paper: "Farmer Reparations." Editor's intro: "A Reparations bill Obama and Hillary just love."
The story illustrates the possibilities for sneaky implementation of Negro "reparations," though in this case they are not reparations for slavery. If Obama makes it into the imperial palace, perhaps he won't have to be so sneaky. Now there's some cold comfort for you.
May 8, 2008
• Elites stink bad when they rot. This Wall Street Journal column succeeded in deepening my contempt for the ruling class's highfalutin' Ivy League, which I hadn't been sure was possible: "Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment," by Joseph Rago. It's not a case of colored (or P.C. white) students vs. a non-P.C. white prof this time: in journalistic lingo, such stories have been rendered almost "dog-bites-man." This time it's a turnabout, though that doesn't necessarily mean we must abandon all of our canine metaphors.
May 8, 2008
• Here's a January piece by Alexander Cockburn that I've just tumbled to: "I am an intellectual blasphemer." It's at Spiked, and the editor's promo reads: "When Alexander Cockburn, author of the forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, dared to question the climate change consensus, he was punished by a tsunami of self-righteous fury. It is time for a free and open
'battle of ideas,' he says."
May 8, 2008
• I find an interesting companion piece at Business & Media Institute: "Report: Global Sea Ice at 'Unprecedented' Levels," by Jeff Poor. Editor's intro: "April 2008 had the third highest recorded amount since records were started in 1979, contradicting media coverage of diminishing sea ice."
Poor writes, understandably enough, that we should not "expect to hear this reported on the your evening newscast." I did, however, hear some mention of it on MSNBC.
May 8, 2008
• Pursuing TLD's mission of delivering fair and balanced coverage, I have to link also to this Reuters piece that attributes the increased sea ice to — Global Warming!
"Climate change warms Arctic, cools Antarctica," by Deborah Zabarenko
Whether or not any of their conclusions are true, it must be said that there's something very Marxist (and Freudian) about the way these Goreites think.
May 8, 2008
• Several years ago senior editor Ronn Neff noted the interesting fact that people never seemed to wonder why they didn't buy their health insurance in the same way they bought their car insurance. What was Mr. Neff getting at? D.W. MacKenzie, writing at Mises, sheds light on the question in examining the arguments of health-socialists: "The Relentless Process of Socializing Health Care." MacKenzie finds their criticism of employer-provided health care to be off base, and I find his own criticism to be very much on base.
A taste: "There are ... reasons to blame the American government for the alleged distortions of employer-paid health insurance. Were it not for the expense of health care in this country, health insurance would be a small part of either an employer's expenses in an employer-paid system, or household expenses in a consumer-financed system."
May 8, 2008
• At USA Today, Dennis Cauchon reports: "Hiring leaps in public sector / First-quarter gain most since 2002." Oh, great.
Note the magical thinking contained in the lead: "Federal, state, and local governments are hiring new workers at the fastest pace in six years, helping offset job losses in
the private sector" [emphasis added]. Bastiat, we need you now more than ever!
Ronn Neff and I wonder whether the "federal" part of this might be an effort by the executive branch to make the economy look better in the short term and thus influence this fall's elections.
May 8, 2008
• It's nice to know that some of today's New Yorkers can get het up over totalitarianism: "Raw milk lovers upset over Amish arrest," by Matthew Lysiak at the New York Daily News. The totalitarianism here is of a typically fascist variety, benefiting established and politically connected dairies with a stake in regulation and the suppression of competition.
May 8, 2008
• It's too much, naturally, to expect neocon David Brooks to talk about racial differences, but I'm afraid this piece of his at the New York Times may lead others to commit that very form of crimethink: "The Cognitive Age."
May 8, 2008
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