Stop and think,  collected — 2012

Note. Because of all the changes in the archive pages, over time, you will find that many or even most of the links you hit to other "Stop and think" installments actually lead nowhere. I intend to work on that problem bit by bit, but in the meantime if you encounter frustration with a particular link, please feel free to hold my feet to the fire. — Nicholas Strakon

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Move along, move long; nothing to donate to here. Not to take sides prematurely, now, or prejudge the sublime operations of our perfect Nifongian-socialist justice system, but I couldn't help being dumbfounded when I learned that George Zimmerman's fund-raising website had been taken down. (Word on the street is that it attracted $204,000 in donations to Zimmerman and his family during the two weeks it was posted.)

Finally I find, in a story at the Washington Post, some information on why the site was eliminated. In what follows, "Mark" is Zimmerman's lawyer, Mark O'Mara, and "Woods" is a spokesman for the latter:

"It was taken down at Mark's request and [Zimmerman] will not have any future online presence unless authorized in advance by Mark," Woods said in an email....

O'Mara has hinted that he will ask Zimmerman to be declared indigent, which would allow [sic] taxpayers to pay for his legal bills. Any income from the website would make that process more difficult.

Again, far be it from me to prejudge any criminal proceeding! My motive here is merely to decry the society-crushing gauntlet of socialism — in this case, criminal-justice socialism. This state intervention won't just rob taxpayers to pay for another's criminal defense but will also help keep any unseemly torches and pitchforks off the road to serfdom. [Nicholas Strakon]  (April 30, 2012)

A co-conspirator tips me to this report by John Hudson of The Atlantic Wire: "North Korea Vows to Cripple the U.S. with Fake Missiles."

Let's hope the neocons don't get any ideas as a result of this fraud. They love going to war over fake weapons. [Nicholas Strakon]  (April 2012)

The echo gangs. In his Future of Freedom piece for April 26, "An Echo, Not a Choice," Sheldon Richman takes out after Republicans, such as Romney, who posture as advocates of the free market; but the General Secretary also gets dinged along the way. Here's how I look at it: the two ruling parties aren't identical — any more than the Gambino and Genovese families are identical. [Nicholas Strakon]  (April 2012)

Biden's bumper sticker. "If you're looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited," Vice Emperor Joe Biden tromboned the other day, "it's pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive."

You already know what I think about fascist corporate bailouts — robbery is "successful" from the standpoint of the robber and those with whom he shares his swag, but not so "successful" from the standpoint of the robbee. So I'm going to focus on the "Osama bin Laden is dead" part.

To be nice, momentarily, let's accept all the Establishment categories and claims — Osama was the Dr. No of the Mohammedans, it's great to have U.S. troops including secret commandos roaming the world and killing people, OBL was still alive at the time of the commando raid in Abbottabad, and so forth. OK. But would someone finally tell me what Barack Obama's giant personal contribution was in getting Osama? What was it that the General Secretary did, personally, that was so ingenious and heroic? Will we eventually see a photo of Little Beige Big Man wearing a helmet, similar to the pic that did wee Mikey Dukakis so much good in 1988?

With his bumper sticker, Biden is mainly seeking to impress those who can be impressed by dumb-head slogans pasted to cars. But conspiratorialists may be forgiven for wondering whether the Obamunists are also hinting at something that they can't come right out and say, namely, that they reversed a secret policy of the Bush Likudnik regime with respect to Osama. That policy being, We don't really want to get this guy. [Nicholas Strakon]

Good job, there, Strakon. For once you wrote something about Obama and Osama without getting them mixed up and writing "Obama bin Laden." Honestly, it is difficult, distinguishing among all these foreigners. [Modine Herbey]  (April 27, 2012)

Update, April 28. The Democrats are now claiming that a President Romney would not have said "Yes" when the militarists and national-security creeps asked whether he wanted them to whack OBL. Wheels within wheels, mirrors upon mirrors ... Wrinkle my brow however much I may, it's all too recondite for me. [NS]  (April 2012)

A public-spirited injunction recently received here at TLD Galactic Headquarters:

Dear Citizen,

I am writing to caution you against the racially and gender-insensitive rhetoric in your recent "Stop and Think" observation, where you repeatedly write: "Mr. (?) Bayne," as if it were not entirely obvious which of the several genders Bijan C. Bayne represents (not that it matters, of course!). Your insensitive use of the word "Mr." in place of an appropriately gender- and class-neutral title is also noted. If I see any future violations, rest assured that I will report you to both the Ministry of Sensitivity toward Bizarre Negro Names and the Directorate of Wymyn's and Transgendered Welfare.

Officiously,
Citizen Tawoenyna

I thank a veteran TLD reader and supporter for the above "injunction."

(April 2012)

A Big Premise takes another hit. In The Atlantic — of all places — a piece has appeared that, tragic as it is to relate, dynamites the foundations of our Glooorious Duh-MOCK-risy: "Obama vs. Romney: Unknowable Foreign-Policy Differences," by Conor Friedersdorf (April 18).

With respect to the leading presidential contenders, Friedersdorf writes: "There's no sure way to predict who will do what if elected."

Wait! That sounds familiar. Seems I read another article once upon a time that said much the same thing. It differed from Friedersdorf's piece, though, in being informed by principled analysis. [Nicholas Strakon]

They can't wait. Even more rule by decree is on the way, according to the New York Times's Charlie Savage, in "Shift on Executive Power Lets Obama Bypass Rivals" (April 22).

Savage begins: "One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism."

As a tyrant vaunting and arrogant, the General Secretary has now wrapped his redoubled autocracy in a propaganda slogan, "We Can't Wait," and has even had it inscribed it on a banner. I hope some of us victims, at least, will understand who "We" are. If I may abuse grammar for the sake of idiom, it ain't Us.

We ought to remember, though, that this is the modern American style of rule by decree. That is to say, most of it is legal! In the way that legal is understood these days, at least. Most of Obama's ukases are based on grants of power — constitutional or otherwise — by Congress. Often, those surrenders reside in bills thousands of pages long that are unread by any of "our representatives." That is most frequently the case with respect to slapped-together monstrosities rammed through Congress in times of panic and crisis. Those panics and crises, in turn, typically come roaring upon us out of previous state invasions of society — both American society and societies around the world. It's really an impressive system, when you think about it.

The result is that we are drowning in "laws" — fake laws — and "programs" that cannot be uniformly enforced or administered. And the result of that is to give the inhabitant of the Presidential Palace (and, ultimately, those who own him) a scope of discretion that's just dizzying to the observer who favors liberty, justice, peace — and real law. It's the American embodiment of George Orwell's old insight about totalitarianism, as a system under which there are no laws. Only decrees. [NS]  (April 2012)

Two "Days," a little too close together on the calendar. Tomorrow, Wednesday the 25th, is World Malaria Day (the meaning is, Anti-Malaria Day). In publicizing that fact, the telescreen is saying that 1,400 children die of malaria every day around the world. It seems unbelievable, but it's the World System's own figure, so I'm taking it at face value for the sake of argument.

Non-leftists with an eye to irony may think that World Malaria Day comes too close for comfort to Earth Day, which was Sunday the 22nd. (The Left, of course, has little more sense of irony than it has of humor.) How many millions of people were doomed to die of malaria because of the Red Greens' successful attack on DDT? The enviro-Stalinists started up Earth Day in 1970, and owing to their influence (and, no doubt, some corporate-statist skulduggery) the Nixon regime by regulatory fiat banned the domestic use of DDT two years later, kicking off the World System's global assault.

In all the jabber about malaria, I'll be curious to see whether there's a mention of the World Health Organization's 30-year ban on the use of DDT in the Third World, or whether that crime vanishes — swoosh! — right down the memory hole.

Official discouragements and restrictions on DDT continue. For example, according to the EPA, WHO even now approves only the indoor use (!) of DDT, and the U.S. EPA leans on other countries "with the goal that DDT be used only within the context of Integrated Vector Management programs, and that it be kept out of agricultural sectors." Out of agricultural sectors! — that's a good one. [Nicholas Strakon]

See "An Environmental Failure: Restrictions on DDT,"
by Ashley Herzog, at Townhall.com.

(April 24, 2012)

The virtual foreigner. After months of leftist snarking about Mitt Romney's unorthodox technique of canine transportation, having to do with strapping his dog's cage on the top of his vehicle, the Romney people have now pointed out that little Barry Soetoro actually ate dog when he was living in Indonesia. I'm not going to joke about that — the now-august general secretary was only a kid at the time, and some kids gobble up whatever oddments are placed before them by their Authorized Caregivers.

Far from joking, I'm going to make two serious points. First, the Fido-munching has been sitting around in plain sight since Obama confessed to it in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, in 1995. Only now are System scribblers who have read the book acknowledging it for the benefit of those of us who have resisted reading that particular masterpiece. That reinforces the point made by investigators of the pol's murky background, such as Jack Cashill in his riveting Deconstructing Obama, that the main reason the Obama murkiness has persisted so long is the entrenched indifference of the left-wing mainstream media in the face of it.

My second point is more important, I think. It's not little Barry's fault, but the fact remains that for four years — crucial childhood years — in Indonesia he was exposed to an environment utterly strange to that of the historic core of our country's population. If he learned to eat dog, what other things did he learn that took deeper root? What alien influences helped form him? What alien values, assumptions, and habits of mind did he absorb?

In itself, his dog-eating reveals the inner Obama no more than a man's skin color reveals the whole panoply of his likely racial traits. Both of those things, though, are indicators of differences that are probably far less superficial. However long-delayed, the widespread publicizing of Obama's dog-eating is a good thing. It reminds us people of the majority that he is truly an alien overlord. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2012)

An old rocker's lèse majesté. At an NRA conference on April 19, Ted Nugent, a former pop music figure, said that if Obama is re-elected, he, Nugent, will be "dead or in jail" by this time next year. And he referred to Obama and some of his minions as criminals.

According to the Washington Post, Nugent also said, referring to the Obama regime, that "we need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November."

Democrat squealers — prominent among whom was the unspeakable Debbie Wasserman Schultz — took those remarks as a physical threat against Obama and claimed that Nugent was inciting violence. (One of my correspondents wonders whether Nugent was indeed inciting violence — on the part of the state against himself.)

A writer at the left-wing forum AlterNet chimed in, alleging that, in the past, Nugent had described the General Secretary as a p.o.s. and had called upon him to "suck on my machine gun." Well, but maybe that was just to encourage the Maximum Leader to get high off the fumes of Hoppe's No. 9, yes?

Nugent denied that his NRA commentary constituted a threat, and the Secret Service, which was quick to interview him, is now apparently satisfied with that.

This little dust-up makes me wonder whether the Organs of State Security, or the left-wing squealers, at least, will take it as a threat from now on whenever I post one of my hyperbolic statements about being "popped behind the wire" sometime in the future. (I hope they are hyperbolic.)

Like Nugent, we at TLD often describe our rulers as criminals. In fact, describing government as the worst form of organized crime is one of our big things. Is that, too, criminal, in the eyes of the squealing political Respectables?

I wonder whether it still permissible to post that verse from Psalm 109 containing the phrase, "May his days be few" — not referring to Nugent, that is — without attracting the attention of the Organs.

In any case, I wish to be charitable toward the Big 0 and his minions: it is understandable if great criminals who live by the gun misunderstand their victims as hinting that guns can be pointed in the opposite direction. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2012)

Has Rich Lowry seen this story? I'm referring to news coverage of the atrocity in Spring, Texas, and I'm pretty sure you've seen it. Here's a follow-up account: "Lawyer: Mom accused in fatal baby abduction [was] upset," by Juan A. Lozano of the Associated Press. You've got to love that "upset."

Lozano starts out: "Neighbors of a Texas [Negro] woman accused of kidnapping a newborn boy after fatally shooting his [white] mother said Thursday they were shocked when a photo of the friendly, polite woman flashed across their television screens following her arrest."

Friendly. Polite. Just got upset.

We'll have to wait and see whether the killer gets off because of the unfathomable evil of her crime and the insufficiently clever manner in which it was committed.

Meanwhile, the Left and the other antiwhite forces will surely continue to amass their irresistible arguments and evidence against the racist madman John Derbyshire and his intolerably noxious version of "The Talk." [Nicholas Strakon]

No doubt "Daddy" just got upset. In Fort Wayne, Ind., much closer to home for me than Spring, Texas, a salt-and-pepper lesbian couple have been arrested on charges of felony child abuse and neglect of two little boys, involving serious bodily harm including broken bones that were never attended to by a doctor. The boys are the sons of the white "partner." The Negress, called Tawoenyna (sic) Portee, is the "partner" accused of actually inflicting the brutal beatings.

According to the version of the story broadcast by WANE-TV News, the boys referred to the couple as "Mommy and Daddy." "Mommy," naturally, is the actual mommy; the Negress played the role of "Daddy." However, WANE's print version says one of the boys called the Negress his "mommy/daddy." Whichever is the case, I fear that the boys' physical batterings are the least grievous of their many injuries.

I was curious to see whether WANE posted the photos of the pair that it had broadcast. What it has done is interesting. The photo one sees first on the page is a dazzlingly pointless shot of the red-and-blue light bar atop a police car. At first I didn't even realize it had anything to do with the story. Then I noticed little "1 2 3" links at the bottom of the photo. Hitting "2" brings up the photo of the white "partner." Hitting "3" brings up the photo of the Negress. Very clever. I tell you, our adversaries just do not miss a trick.

This morning a lady from the local outlet of Stop Child Abuse and Neglect appeared on the telescreen, in connection with the story, to reveal that a child living with a biological parent and a "significant other or partner" is "more than five times at greater risk of abuse" than a child living with his two biological parents, a single parent, or his grandparents.

More than five times!

Now, since like Winston Smith I am blessed (or cursed) with a memory of past party lines, I know that such an observation represents a change in the Red Guard social-service message. In the not-too-distant past, the Guards were telling us that a child reared by both of his "biological" parents derived no advantages from that arrangement, if indeed he did not suffer a disadvantage, since it reduced his exposure to stimulating and diverse experiences. The traditional "nuclear family," if it ever actually existed, was suffocating and, of course, fatally patriarchal. And real daddies were just bad. [NS] (April 2012)

Another triumph of statist utopianism is described, though not exactly celebrated, in this New York Times piece by Michael M. Grynbaum: "With Classroom Breakfasts, a Concern That Some Children Eat Twice."

Grynbaum writes: "New York City's policymakers [are] in an uneasy place: trying to tackle children's hunger while combating what has seemingly become a national epidemic of childhood obesity."

Re-engineering society to make everything better for everyone is hard! [Nicholas Strakon]

Unsatisfiable. At AlterNet I discover this amusing blip in the Red Guard party line: "The Hunger Games' Subtly Racist Cliché: Why is Hollywood still reducing black actors to spiritual servitude?" by Bijan C. Bayne. Mr. (?) Bayne is complaining about what he/she calls the Negro Spirit Guide, as confected by Hollywood, i.e., the Entertainment Left.

Next, Mr. (?) Bayne will no doubt expatiate on the racist oppression represented by those Negro computer geniuses, science prodigies, and legal savants whom the scriptwriters and casting directors are always coming up with. [NS] (April 2012)

The Derbyshire Affair (April 7). I'm moving my mention of John Derbyshire's recent Hateful Hating Hate-mongering Hate piece to the top of the heap, here, and adding to it because the matter has now exploded into a full-fledged Affair — at least for us tiny frogs splashing away in our small pond. My original entry, from April 5:

At Taki's Magazine, John Derbyshire presents Hate Facts informed by Hate Analysis, and it's all just so Hateful that I wonder how long Taki, despite his billions, can possibly keep his site on the Net or himself outside the wire: "The Talk: Nonblack Version."

You may wish to ignore Derbyshire's point no. 13, even with his subsequent caveats, as being pointless and a waste of time and energy, especially in view of the social opportunity costs involved.

At View from the Right, Larry Auster and his commenters chime in to good effect, in "Derbyshire's 'Talk,' and the controversy it has triggered." I think you'll enjoy their assessment as they watch the terrified little bunnies at National Review bounce off into the tall grass.

I suspect the fun has only just begun. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Update: April 9. The sacking has now occurred, according to this Politico dispatch from April 7: "National Review fires John Derbyshire," by Dylan Byers. The rabbits can resume placidly munching their carrots.

Of the stinky things that NR editor Rich Lowry is quoted as saying, this assaults my nostrils the most violently: "... The main reason that people noticed [Derbyshire's piece] is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we'd never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways." (You've got to love that clubby, faux-affectionate "Derb" in this context — "I'm sure ol' Joanie the Arcster understood why we had to burn her.")

Right, Rich. Well, I for one was astonished to learn that Derbyshire wrote for NR, and was a longtime contributor at that. I guess it shows how many years it's been since I last bothered to glance at NR. On the other hand, I visit Taki's Magazine every day.

Many people in the liberty community — not to mention the race-realist community — have probably forgotten that National Review still exists. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2012)

Shock! Shock, I tell you! The System is still capable of surprising me, and I was surprised to see this, at the New York Times: "NBC Fires Producer of Misleading Zimmerman Tape," by Brian Stelter.

Well, now we're getting somewhere. Kind of. Still no apology to White Hispanic George Zimmerman, though.

An excerpt:

Inside NBC, there was shock that the segment had been broadcast. Citing an anonymous network executive, Reuters reported that "the 'Today' show's editorial control policies — which include a script editor, senior producer oversight and in most cases legal and standards department reviews of material to be broadcast — missed the selective editing of the call."

At the Rockwell site, Jeff Berwick provides a nice, deeply horrifying overview of the surveillance state and its progress: "It's a STASI World." [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2012)

The very latest in leftist thinking. Conservatives of a "strict construction" bent have traditionally been skeptical of judicial review, and some have even called on Congress to impose statutory limits on the scope of the federal judiciary's power. I'm an anarchist and therefore not a constitutionalist, but I always enjoyed reading what Joe Sobran had to say about the Constitution and its tyranny-minded torturers. Joe was strict! I was sympathetic with his insistence that the courts have no monopoly on interpreting the Constitution, even if I was unsure how the principle of to-every-man-his-own-Constitution would work. Why, that could lead to anarchy, I always thought.

I open thus in order to armor myself, in what follows, against any charge of hypocrisy and to make it plain that I haven't started idolizing the Court and its cloudy powers just because it temporarily lacks a firm leftist majority. To some extent I'm dogless in the big fight over separation of powers — though I've long since unleashed TLD's pack of slavering Rottweilers against ObamaCare itself, and I do certainly hope that, in the present case, one group of government employees (the justices) successfully counter that other group of government employees.

On Fox News today, showing up to defend the Palace against the Supremes was Ian Millhiser, representing the Center for American Progress (like that bland name, do you?). With the rigid, unblinking, almost pouty sternness that's common among leftists, Millhiser declared:

The Court doesn't have the power to overturn the Affordable Care Act. The Constitution says that Congress can regulate commerce. The Affordable Care Act is a regulation of one-sixth of the nation's economy. The Court can overturn many things if they are actually unconstitutional. But the only thing that the Court has the power to do is to follow the text of the Constitution of the United States. Striking down the Affordable Care Act is not within the judiciary's power.

• I aim this one mostly at my constitutionalist friends. The Constitution does indeed give Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. It is highly unfortunate that the Founders, who we are taught had such an exquisite finger-tip sense of how Power might be abused, suffered a complete collapse of imagination here. (That's the generous interpretation of what they were up to. They, we may wish to recall, included Alexander Hamilton.)

• It's also worth noting, though obvious and somewhat boring, that Millhiser is coming out here against judicial interpretation. His conservative interlocutor on Fox pointed out what a change that was for liberals. I think the word hypocrisy was used. Millhiser did not tell us who may decide that legislation is unconstitutional if the Supreme Court dasn't do any interpreting. I doubt that he would designate, as such deciders, the People "out of doors," finally uprisen against tyranny.

• "The Affordable Care Act is a regulation of one-sixth of the nation's economy." In other words, the more all-encompassing the present health-care tyranny is, the more constitutional it must be. Purloining in broad daylight a favorite point of anti-Obamunists — the "one-sixth" part — and turning it to totalitarian purposes, Millhiser wins the Spring 2012 TLD Award for Left-wing Chutzpah.

• And now that question. Would Millhiser encourage the Obama regime to ignore the Court's decision if a majority votes to overturn? Ward Hill Lamon, U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia and an old crony of Abraham Lincoln's, claimed that Lincoln issued (but later withdrew) a warrant for the arrest of his enemy Chief Justice Taney in 1861. (It would have been Lamon's job to collar Taney and drag him off.) Is Obama, that great fan of Lincoln, thinking along similar lines? Justice Minster Holder has recently conceded that "courts have the final say," but who has confidence in any of that man's assurances? OK, that's three questions. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2012)

Turns out we were just funnin'. In "Marbury vs. Obama," posted April 3, I speculate about what "Jay Carney [will] try to argue, in another desperate scramble to clean up after Obuffoona...."

According to ABC News, here is what Carney did, uh, argue:

"[Obama] certainly was not contending ... that the Supreme Court doesn't have as its right and responsibility the ability to overturn laws passed by Congress as unconstitutional," Carney said during Wednesday's White House briefing. "He was referring to 85 years of judicial precedent, of Supreme Court precedent, with regard to matters like the one under consideration. And it's maybe fun to pretend he meant otherwise, but everyone here knows that that's what he meant."

Please, Brer Justice, don't throw me in dat briar patch! At View from the Right, Larry Auster's site, a commenter offers a thought worth pondering. It begins: "The last couple of days have illustrated why the people who say that Obama is a horrible negotiator have a strong case. He has created a situation, with his remarks about the Supreme Court, in which the Court cannot rule the way he wants without creating the widespread perception that they have bent to political pressure from the White House."

Yes. But the argument from stupidity always deserves skepticism. Should we now take more seriously the arguments of those who say that Obama and the Obamunists wouldn't mind seeing the health-care law overturned? — both for short-range electoral purposes and for the long-range purpose of laying the groundwork for a fully socialized system?

Obama himself is a dull tool; but I'm reminded here of his predecessor, the patron saint of bricks and turtles and everything thick and slow, who was surrounded by some very clever puppet-masters. Bush and the neocons initiated a war that was stupid, insane, blundering, misconceived — I leave it to you to insert any similar adjectives — but one that also just happened to suit the neocons' and Israelis' long-range strategy. Funny how that works. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2012)

Marbury vs. Obama. Flanked by the rulers of Mexico and Canada, General Secretary Obama declared yesterday that "it would be an 'unprecedented, extraordinary' step [for the Supreme Court] to overturn legislation passed by the 'strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.'" That's as reported by Mark Landler of the New York Times in his story, "President Confident Health Law Will Stand," which Landler's editors buried on page A-17.

As they should do, Obama's opponents are having a good deal of fun with the little man's latest skydive into bottomless ignorance, or transparent deceit if you prefer.

According to The Free Dictionary, Franklin Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act swept through the House in 1933 by a vote of 325 to 76 — a strong majority in anyone's book, one would think — only to be overturned by the Supreme Court in 1935. Now, true, the Senate passed the NIRA by only seven votes. So will Jay Carney try to argue, in another desperate scramble to clean up after Obuffoona, that it's not the sort of thing his master was talking about? Well, he'd better not: let us look at the congressional votes for ObamaCare, formally titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In its case, matters were reversed. According to Wikipedia, it passed the Senate 60-39: a "strong majority." But it had to struggle to victory in the House, slipping through by a vote of 219-212, as we may recall, but as the general secretary apparently does not.

I will be interested to see whether the New York Times continues, with a straight face, to describe the affirmative-action charlatan in the Palace as a "constitutional lawyer." [Nicholas Strakon]

"Rule of law" utopianism. Writing of Obama as a "constitutional lawyer" reminds me that I've got something to say about his "promise" not to abuse the police-state provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act. Kevin Baker, in the NYT book review I link to, is only one of many — naturally including libertarians and paleoconservatives — to notice that, as Baker writes, it is "a curious position for a former constitutional scholar to take: the promise of one man substituted for the rule of law."

What I have to say is actually for the benefit of those Obama critics. Their devil is too small. On January 20, 2009, Obama promised that he would "to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." He actually promised it twice, because of the chief justice's initial bumbling. And all of his predecessors made the promise at least once. They were required to.

Lincoln made it. Twice. Wilson made it. Twice. And Truman. And Nixon. And Lyndon Johnson. And George W. Bush.

Franklin Roosevelt made the promise four times.

Well, look where we are.

Any purported rule of statute law must always depend on the promises of men: and they are men hungry for power, privilege, and pelf. Many of us in the liberty-sphere regard the Constitution, our supreme statute, as a distressingly well-designed engine for the growth of consolidated central government. But it's still hard to deny that it took a lot of straining and twisting and lying, by a lot of men of promises, to put us under the heel of today's socialist-fascist-imperialist leviathan.

No piece of paper is going to enforce itself. Now that's a promise. [NS] (April 3, 2012)

Last week, several of us co-conspirators had a little e-mail discussion about Justice Breyer's notion that "the very act of entering into the world as a newborn babe could be construed as 'commerce' that invokes federal regulatory authority," as an editorialist for the Washington Times put it.

Senior editor Ronn Neff observed that an adverse ruling by the Supreme Court is not going to drive a stake through the heart of ObamaCare:

Now that those particular arguments have entered the 'market of ideas' they will not go away. They will only flourish. Think of all the obscene state actions that were unthinkable 40 years ago. Someone proposed them, and someone else said, "Nahhh. We can't to do that." But each proposal was simply shelved, not tossed out.

Only free-market ideas can be thrown out completely and for all time — because of the Great Depression and because the poor can't afford to buy everything.

If [the justices] were to strike [the individual mandate] down on constitutional grounds, I think most people understand the only approach you can take after that to get everybody covered, everybody in the pool, is to go to a Medicare-for-all type proposal. That is something Republicans have rejected. That's why they had proposed the approach that is in the Affordable Care Act. That's why Mitt Romney took that approach up in Massachusetts, because that is the one way that everybody gets into the insurance pool.

If ObamaCare survives with the individual mandate intact, the resulting chaos will also result in a powerful push for "a Medicare-for-all type proposal," of course. As regards any given pol, such as Van Hollen, the only question is whether he knows that and is planning for it even now, or whether he is just a useful idiot.

A secondary point, suggested by Van Hollen's mention of the Republicans. Over the week just past, the theme has emerged among the Democrats that "the Republicans themselves" — not just Romney — have proposed an individual mandate "in the past." I doubt that the Democrats are making that up out of whole cloth, because it would be so easy for the Republicans to loudly demand that they supply names and facts. Unless it is a bare-faced lie, it's a vivid demonstration of how the duopoly system can build leviathan in a collusive-appearing way, even when no actual collusion is presently occurring between the two official ruling parties. (In arguendo, I'm assuming a lack of systematic collusion just now.)

I'm always frustrated when Democrats rely on a claim of "tu quoque" in defending their latest expansion of state power against Republican opposition. "Who cares?!" I want to yell. "What does the consistent proponent of freedom and the free market say? Where are the ideas?" But to the media those questions are usually irrelevant. Their blinkered focus on the two official parties of leviathan helps keep "debate" within System-safe parameters, that's for sure. [Nicholas Strakon]

Richard Wilkins comments (April 4). No less a center of the conservative movement than the Heritage Foundation proposed an individual mandate as part of its "free-market" alternative to HillaryCare in 1993, and I believe that the Heritage health-care folks eventually consulted with Mitt Romney on his Massachusetts plan. (April 2012)

At The Freeman, Sheldon Richman has penned another important and thought-provoking piece, one that casts a much brighter and broader light on Brecht's old trope about rulers' "electing a new people."

"Seeing Like a Ruling Class: Making society legible"

Romney's promise. According to today's Politico Playbook, here is some of what Mitt Romney was due to tell the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference today, by video: "In a Romney administration, there will be no gap between our nations or between our leaders." He was referring to the United State and Israel.

No gap, eh? I am tempted to make an extremely crude joke about who would be the do-er and who the do-ee, if you catch my drift; but I'd better leave that sort of thing to Jim Goad, et al., over at the Taki site. Romney was also programmed to say: "As President, I will be ready to engage in diplomacy. But I will be just as ready to engage our military might. Israel will know that America stands at its side, in all conditions and in all consequence."

Way to go, Mitt! Yes, that's the way to preserve Washington's sterling reputation, in the Mohammedan world, as an objective, disinterested, even-handed broker of peace!

Of course Romney would be breaking no new ground there. But how about this, also from today's Politico e-mail update?

"Green donors bet on Romney flip-flop," by Darren Samuelsohn: "Julian Robertson, founder of the Tiger Management hedge fund, helped put cap-and-trade legislation on the map with $60 million in contributions over the past decade to the Environmental Defense Fund. Now, Robertson has given $1.25 million to Romney's Restore our Future super PAC, plus the maximum $2,500 to the Romney campaign. Other green-minded financial backers may not be giving as much as Robertson, but they still share the view that climate-change science and a solid environmental agenda wouldn't be a lost cause if Romney won the White House."

Fair questions. Partisans of natural rights can explain what they mean by "just" and "justice," and do so clearly and concisely.

Can leftists explain what they mean by "fair" and "fairness"? Those are concepts on which American leftists are relying ever more heavily as they call for expanded and more intrusive state power.

Why does hardly anyone ever ask them to explain? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2012)

Silencing. Miss Sandra Fluke, the 30-year-old left-wing activist who is also a law student at Georgetown University, says that her anti-leftist critics, such as Rush Limbaugh, tried to silence her after she declared at a mock congressional hearing that other people should be forced to pay for her contraceptives.

Anti-Leftists, it is claimed, are trying to silence their leftist adversaries when they make rude fun of them, even though the anti-leftists are often obliged to recant and apologize a couple days later, as was the case with Limbaugh.

At the same time, leftists try to silence their anti-leftist adversaries — and sometimes do silence them — by mobbing them, blacklisting them, pressuring their employers to sack them, leaning on publishers to suddenly discover that anti-leftist books are "repellent," threatening and intimidating hosts with whom the anti-leftists have signed contracts, and so on.

At least the Left in this country hasn't started silencing its critics and other non-fans by resorting to the techniques of its more forthright foreign cousins — clapping them in psychiatric prison, sending them to the Gulag, or shooting them in the back of the neck. Let's count our blessings, while we still enjoy them. [Nicholas Strakon]

Modine Herbey comments. What delicate flowers these comrades are! As if anyone could ever silence the Left.

A little more on Miss Fluke, courtesy of Larry Auster.

(March 2012)

A Fluke of privacy. Interviewed last week by CBS News, Miss Fluke said of Limbaugh: "I think he was confused about what my testimony said, for starters. I didn't say that I should be paid for anything. What we were talking about was private insurance covering a medical need. It has nothing to do with the government paying for anything, or taxpayers, or anyone like that."

"Private insurance"? Really? Then what was Miss Fluke doing, on camera, talking to politicians at a faux-official event in government surroundings? Maybe it was because she'd have difficulty actually finding private insurance against the "illness" of pregnancy, since as Sheldon Richman pointed out in the column I linked to before, pregnancy results from a volitional act. That's unless we're talking about rape, and all delicacy aside, it is my understanding that Miss Fluke isn't claiming that she's a victim of ongoing serial rape. Rape insurance: now, that's something a free market would provide. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. — on that "all delicacy aside." Let's keep in mind that in publicly discussing her voluntary sexual habits, and her inability to finance them, it is Miss Fluke who has set all delicacy aside. Not I. And for that matter, not Limbaugh, either.

Impervious. One reason the leftists are impervious to arguments that the health-care law is tyrannical is that they don't grasp the distinction between force and freedom — or if they do grasp it, they don't care.

One reason the Left continues to hold the high moral ground in the eyes of so many ordinary people is that those ordinary people don't grasp it, either.

At the same time, neither the leftists nor the ordinary people whose confusion they exploit would hesitate to object if someone broke down their door and tried to steal their TV.

How much farther can the chasm widen between the intellectual habits that people practice in their daily life and the ones they bring to bear when they think about the state? Is there really no limit? [Nicholas Strakon]

Modine Herbey answers. No. (March 2012)

"Move along." James Q. Wilson, who formulated the "Broken Window" theory of neighborhood decline and public disorder, died March 2 at 80.

As administered by government police on property claimed by government, many applications of Wilson's ideas are unjust, such as ordering undesirable street people to "move along." But they are absolutely just and rightful for true property owners and those whom they've delegated to protect their property.

The very image of a broken window reminds us that fixing such things is the business of property owners, motivated by self-interest, and no one else.

As Proudhon observed, liberty is "not the daughter but the mother of order." Under statism we cannot have both liberty and order. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2012)

The Pentagon's brain drainage. I most heartily recommend the Mises Daily article for February 29, "Military Spending and Bastiat's 'Unseen,'" by Eric Phillips.

Let me offer a substantial extract:

There are only so many people ... who have the brain power to obtain PhDs in the hard sciences, and in 20th- and 21st-century America, a disproportionate number of these people have been employed by the military-industrial complex — from one-third to two-thirds of all technical researchers at any given time since World War II. According to the late Columbia University professor Seymour Melman, this "has left many U.S. civilian-products industries at a competitive disadvantage due to faltering product designs and insufficient improvement in industrial-production efficiency." To see the effect of the private-sector R&D shortage, Melman contended, one need only

go to the stores that now sell great arrays of "high tech" merchandise. Pay attention to the boxes for these goods, which typically state where the contents are made. Try the largest libraries and see if you can find texts that contain instruction for production of the products that have been disappeared from U.S. manufacturing.

They are not there.

Boy, that "NATO" outfit really knows how to run an empire. On February 21, according to the New York Times, "NATO personnel" burned some Korans in the presence of native Afghanis, and the results were predictable. In today's New York Times story, "Afghan Protests over the Burning of Korans at a U.S. Base Escalate," Alissa J. Rubin writes, "In the eastern city of Jalalabad, where one person was killed and 10 wounded, protesters said that both Afghan soldiers and NATO troops fired on the crowd."

Among the results that were predictable — in news that apparently broke too late for Rubin's story — was the killing of two American soldiers by one of those carefully trained and indoctrinated pro-U.S. Afghan soldiers we hear about. That's according to the Wall Street Journal's Dion Nissenbaum in this dispatch: "U.S. Soldiers Killed, as Kabul Braces for Wider Protests." (Apparently someone authorized the actual nationality of the dead soldiers to be specified.)

"NATO" says it had confiscated the Korans from imprisoned evildoers and that they contained evildoing messages in code. Even the neocon war partisans are upset about this one, pointing out that the books should have been turned over to the intelligence folks for examination.

The official mantra from both "NATO" officials and the U.S. regime is that the burning was "inadvertent" and an "error." Yesterday's New York Times story reported that the "NATO" commander, Général John R. Allen, de le Corps des Marines, apologized for the disaster and said it was unintentional.

The "NATO" personnel who actually did the deed may have thought they were burning auto-repair manuals or copies of Tristram Shandy, I suppose, though you'd think the horrified reaction of the Afghan witnesses might have tipped them to the fact that something wasn't right. Well, I suppose the Afghanis are always upset about something. But to proceed up the chain of command, it seems likely that someone intended the burning, despite the assurances of General der Marine-Infanterie Allen. And, in fact, that someone ordered it.

TLD readers have a pretty good idea of what I think of Mohammedanism, but — Hate Watch Alert! — I really hate imperialism. Even when it's conducted by "NATO" legionaries, commanded by Generale dei Lagunari Allen.

I don't know whether I'm allowed to point this out, but the same people responsible for the bumbling and atrocious war against the Afghanis cannot stop babbling and drooling — here at home in NATO-ica — about how tolerant and compassionate and humane and understanding we ordinary NATO-icans have to be as they thrust exotic Third Worlders among us, using money stolen from us in taxes. What's the word for "irony" in NATO-ish? [Nicholas Strakon] (February 23, 2012)

Another libertarian embarrassment. American Renaissance dangled some red meat in front of its readers on February 22 by running snippage of a piece at Reason magazine, "The Silly Panic over a Minority White Nation" (original full version), by Ronald Bailey. AR's editorial intro was a gem: "Hispanics will become categorized as whites, so whites have nothing to worry about!"

The resulting comments from readers were actually more restrained, overall, than I would have expected, but the posting did provoke quite a few denunciations of those awful libertarians and all their works.

Much of Bailey's piece reads like a parody of racially insensible libertarianism, written by one of our enemies, but unfortunately it's for real. Such treatments deepen my growing distaste for the word libertarian. All real libertarians ought to recognize it as a ruined label, and anti-statists who are race-realists need to be especially wary of it.

As other writers have done, Bailey relies heavily on the confusing incoherence of typical ethnic categories: whites, blacks, Orientals (Mongoloids) — and "Hispanics." But "Hispanic" is only a linguistic category. And the question of the day, as it pertains to the mass migration from south of the border, has to do not with Castilians or with Argentinians of German heritage but with mestizos and indios, and the extent to which those people of alien race can be expected to assimilate without helping to destroy the things that civilized Westerners cherish. (Bailey takes intermarriage to be an unobjectionable form of assimilation.) The writer also adduces the old, sloppy notion that Irish-Americans and some other Europeans weren't white, and he seems to have concluded from that claim that race as we refer to it now either doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

Bailey ends his essay by writing, "America is an ideal, not a tribe." That is the same, pretty much, as the liberal and neocon claim that America is a "proposition nation." The trouble is that the ideals and propositions keep changing, and for the worse. Why do they change? One reason is that whites of Western heritage no longer know how to act as white Westerners, and don't care that they don't know. That's very important. But another reason, also very important, is that non-Western or even anti-Western colored people are flooding into the country.

The two troubles are related. Let us suppose that some kind of non-destructive assimilation is conceivable, in principle, for alien nonwhites — to the extent, say, that Negroes had been assimilated by 1950, before the drug epidemics, before "Rap" and the "gangsta" subculture, before wilding and flash-mobbing, before established-media promotion of anti-white hatred, before welfare-momism and EBT cards, and before bastardy became not just an embarrassing problem for Negroes but an overwhelming epidemic. What is the chance that even that much assimilation will occur now, on the part of the mestizos and indios, when not even whites will act white?

We race-realist anti-statists at The Last Ditch are living proof that a man doesn't have to renounce his attachment to liberty in order to recognize deep-seated cultural differences, deep-seated hostility to whites and to the West, and — especially — biologically seated racial differences. To recognize, in other words, that the deluge of alien colored people is a big problem.

Now, how do partisans of liberty tackle social problems? We don't attempt to tackle illiteracy and ignorance by endorsing state education. We don't attempt to tackle poverty and unemployment by endorsing state management of the economy. We don't attempt to tackle pollution by endorsing state "ownership" of the environment and natural resources, and the extinction of property rights.

Similarly, we don't attempt to address cultural and demographic problems by endorsing border-police statism. Instead of continuing to move in the wrong direction, and expanding state power, we demand liberty and justice for everyone, allowing people to protect their property, educate themselves as they see fit, choose for themselves whom to do business with and associate with, and decide for themselves which strangers, if any, deserve to be helped. Liberty partisans have much to teach those who do endorse coercive ways, but they'll never succeed in teaching or even reaching anyone if they blind themselves to the very problems that are at issue: including problems of race and culture.

I have made these points before; now I have had to make them again; I will keep repeating them, as often as is necessary, until darkness falls, or I do. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2012)

A related column of mine from 2006.

Big Sister explains freedom. Sally Kohn, the homosexualist left-winger, appeared on Fox News this afternoon in a left-right back-and-forth about the continuing contraception controversy, and she was brimful of the usual leftist Facts & Figures showing that most major Catholic institutions are all for the Obama "compromise" and that huge percentages of ordinary Catholics have no problem with the regime's overall policy.

It didn't occur to Kohn, apparently, that the overwhelming popularity (as she sees it) of Obamunism tends to undercut her case for compulsion. Naturally, her conservative interlocutor failed to raise that screamingly obvious point.

On second thought, though, I suppose the Reds can't rely on overwhelming voluntary compliance with their desires, can they? It's still not 100 percent. The Party demands 100 percent compliance.

And of course it demands that 100 percent of thoughtcriminals, no matter how few, must receive the old humanitarian, compassionate boot in the face.

But the best was yet to come. Kohn went on to declare: "The Constitution and the very makeup of our country from the beginning has [sic] been balancing religious freedom with individual liberty and choice, and that's exactly what the administration has been trying to do."

So that's what they've been trying to do!

As far as I'm aware, that breaks a little new ground, at least in its explicitness. I wrote recently in this space that real rights cannot conflict with each other; it's the statists' positivistic fake rights that conflict with real rights. But now Kohn is framing her totalitarianism, not as the "right" to some material condition that others are forced to arrange, but as "individual liberty and choice."

Religious freedom, it transpires, isn't an aspect of individual liberty at all, despite what we've all thought all our lives. Instead, it has always been in conflict with individual liberty ...

... Here in Oceania.

Once again, the conservative interlocutor didn't blink at Kohn's jaw-dropping assertion. After all, she had her own carefully prepared little tape to play; no time to actually grapple with ideas. No time to craft two or three easy sentences and show up Kohn for a fool, and a nasty one at that. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2012)

Maybe they're afraid it actually works. The Mormons' practice of posthumously baptizing people, including Jews, is in the news again. According to the Washington Post, "Nobel-laureate Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and a top official from the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney should use his stature in the Mormon Church to block its members from posthumously baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust."

The church hierarchy was quick to respond:

"We sincerely regret that the actions of an individual member of the Church led to the inappropriate submission of these names [for posthumous baptism]," spokesman Michael Purdy said in a statement. "These submissions were clearly against the policy of the Church. We consider this a serious breach of our protocol and we have suspended indefinitely this person's ability to access our genealogy records."

So, in this case, where something really important was involved — i.e., Jewish sensibilities — the Mormons didn't have to strain to come up with a politically convenient "revelation." They just set about having their boffins refine and restrict their technology.

Senior editor Ronn Neff comments: "But what pikers these Jews are! Why not demand that the Mormons unbaptize the Jews they've already baptized?"

This ridiculous matter reminds me of the time a certain anarchist atheist of Jewish heritage — old-timers would recognize his name — vehemently objected when he discovered that a friend who was an anarchist Christian was praying for him. The objection? The Christian was violating his rights! [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2012)

In the coils of the "safety net." On February 12, I found this piece atop the page-one section of the New York Times site: "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It," by Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff.

It is full of people's "stories," which senior editor Ronn Neff has properly identified as a hallmark of leftist journalism (and oratory); but in this case not all of them are raving paeans to government. The article is a long one, but I encourage you to get through at least two or three pages of it. You will find some truly shocking statistics about the metastasizing dependence of ordinary Americans on leviathan.

Mr. Neff observes: "It is precisely this kind of story that so turns my stomach against the state that I urge its enemies (all seven or eight of them) not to turn to it for 'benefits' until the direst circumstances compel it.

"And even then, it may be better to freeze to death on the streets first."

Appelbaum and Gebeloff's piece has garnered attention from the harder Left. A leftist at AlterNet, "Dartagnan," was inspired to crow: "NYTimes: The Anti-Government Republican Base Is Totally Dependent on Government." The restlessness about becoming serfs of socialism expressed by some of the people quoted in the Times frustrates "Dartagnan": it's irrational, and the unfortunate result of all that reactionary right-wing Republican propaganda! [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2012)

"Access." Do you favor "women's access to contraception," or do you oppose "women's access to contraception"?

Hint: If you say you favor "access," you're a "progressive" and a fan of a government-dictated health industry. If you say you oppose "access" — but what civilized person could oppose that? We don't need to hear from that type person.

You've got to admire American leftists' flair for language, or anti-language at least. The wallahs down at Orwell's Ministry of Truth, Bureau of Newspeak, had nothing on them.

These trick questions and boobytrap-ambiguous word uses amount to a twist on T.H. White's summing up of totalitarianism: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." In the Left-totalitarians' mental universe, which they try to browbeat us into entering, anything not subsidized with taxpayer money does not exist.

In other words — and I think I may have arrived at this formulation before — society does not exist; only the state exists.

I wish we could somehow figure out how to arrange "access" to non-existence for the state. Unambiguously. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2012)

Writing at the Freeman, Sheldon Richman has trouble with the entire notion of contraception "insurance": "Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable" (February 10, with updates about the "compromise"). A sample: "Coming of child-bearing age and choosing to use contraception is not an insurable event. It's a volitional act." (February 2012)

Progressive education. In the Obama contraception tyranny we see a clash between the actual right to freely exercise one's faith and the fake right to obtain health care, forcibly, at someone else's expense.

Real rights cannot clash with each other. Real rights and fake rights must clash, the former against the latter. In fact a good way to detect fake rights, arbitrarily dreamed up by state-building collectivists, is to check and see whether they entail the abridgment of other people's rights to life, liberty, and property. By definition real rights do not and cannot. I believe a philosopher might refer to this as the law of non-contradiction in action.

Left-totalitarians are explicitly, unapologetically denying the real right to act peacefully in accordance with one's conscience in favor of the fake right to forcibly obtain health care. I'm inclined to thank them for their bracing honesty. They are burning off all the mystifying, obscurantist fog behind which they lurk, ripping away the masquerade behind which they scheme, to let us see them as the brutish enslavers they are.

To use the Left's own jargon, it is truly a "teaching moment." [Nicholas Strakon]

Modine Herbey comments. I urge Obama to stick by his bloody guns. Attempt no compromises with freedom, tyrant! May your version of "health care" bring millions more of our countrymen out from under the ether. (February 2012)

More homicidal humanitarianism, at our expense. Quoth John McCain, in calling for the United State to arm the Syrian rebels: "The blood-letting has got to stop."

There speaks a man for whom force, i.e., blood-letting, is the solution to everything — even blood-letting!

Please note that this American senator is not talking, here, about Americans righteously defending themselves and their freedom here at home, forcefully or otherwise. Instead, he wants to require American taxpayers to finance the escalation of a civil conflict, in a faraway land, that is none of our business. With results that are unpredictable.

If I may paraphrase Chesterton, "This statist has suddenly and quietly gone mad. He is talking nonsense; and he can't stop." Of course that's not exactly right: McCain is never quiet. And "suddenly" must not be taken to mean "recently." [Nicholas Strakon]  (February 2012)

I just hope I'm out of the stadium before the two-minute warning. Of all the Super Bowl commercials this year, the "Halftime in America" auto-industry spot narrated by Clint Eastwood has engendered the most adverse comment. Its political message, celebrating the results of the Obamunists' partial nationalization, is nothing new, though I don't understand why it doesn't infuriate more taxpayers and for that matter all of us who are forced to use the regime's counterfeit currency. It's the same message we heard after the Chrysler bailout in 1979 and after the Bush-Obama banker bailouts: that is, robbery works! — at least from the standpoint of the robbers and those sharing their swag.

Infuriating, as I say, but otherwise not very noteworthy. What I do find noteworthy is the commercial's crippled metaphor: Halftime in America? What does that mean? Both legs (so to speak) of a metaphor have to work, or the thing winds up being pretty lame. This one works on the football side but not so well on the hope-for-the-future side.

Reagan's "Morning in America" actually had the same defect, if you think about it — since darkness eventually falls on even the brightest day — though I suppose it was saved by some religious and poetic resonances with the everlasting day, the great "gettin' up mornin'" when we're supposed to awaken to eternal life, and so on.

But halftime? Clunk. "Halftime" means that the game is half over for America. People in vibrant countries and civilizations don't think in terms of a halftime. What — are we supposed to expect that after another couple hundred years or so of Obamunistic Hope and Change, America will finally arrive at an eternal, steady-state utopia?

A darker reading seems much more likely at this juncture. The Eastwood commercial depends heavily on Pravda-scale fantasies regarding the "progress" of Detroit, that haunting epicenter of ruin and decivilization. For me, the only way the halftime metaphor works is as a warning that the rest of the country is halfway to Detroit. Tick, tock. [Nicholas Strakon]  (February 2012)

Paul Kersey comments on the commercial, at Stuff Black People Don't Like.

A trio of recent off-siters that I find worthwhile:

• How liberals think is always a fascinating topic: furiously fascinating, one might say. In the context of Duluth's official antiwhite propaganda campaign, a commenter at Larry Auster's View from the Right, "Patrick H.," offers a noteworthy dissection of the logic of anti-racism as practiced by antiwhite liberals.

• Jim Goad waxes impolite as usual, in "Homosexuality: What's Choice Got to Do With it?" (Taki's Magazine, February 6, 2012).

In a somewhat muddy essay on this inherently muddy subject — "The homosexual choice" (2004) — I pointed out that, whatever the truth of the matter is, the "we were born this way" premise is much more empowering for the homosexualists than the old "sexual preference" idea.

• Will Grigg once again hits the bull's eye, in this slammer of an article originating at his own site and featured today on the Rockwell site: "The Pseudo-Courage of Chris Kyle" (February 5, 2012). Mr. Kyle, who at one time wore the colors of the world's most dangerous criminal gang, has now published his memoirs, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. [Nicholas Strakon]  (February 2012)

Kangaroo scientists take another leap. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are now saying that sugar is toxic and addictive —

But let's hit the pause button right there.

So far, I'm still on the bus with these boffins, pretty much (though I don't like loose talk about addiction, which is a murky concept indeed). I've been on and off the Atkins Diet several times over the past seven or eight years; and especially when I'm on it, I like to harass my friends with the dire (and somewhat hysterical) dictum, "Just as chocolate is poison to dogs, sugar is poison to humans!" Even when I'm not Atkinsizing, I keep candy, ice cream, and high-octane colas on the Index Victuum Prohibitorum, and I sample cookies, cakes, and pies only at birthday parties and other such free-for-alls.

Now, all of that being said, let's hit Play:

— and "should be considered a controlled substance just like alcohol and tobacco." That's from the editor's intro of a Time magazine piece on the subject, "Should Sugar Be Regulated like Alcohol and Tobacco?" by Bonnie Rochman, February 2, 2012. Rochman writes: "To counter our consumption, the [report's] authors advocate taxing sugary foods and controlling sales to kids under 17."

There they leap again.

The leap I refer to is the one from science to ideology, and it's a giant one indeed. The moment these marsupial M.D.s and Ph.D.s bounce from describing their scientific findings to making policy recommendations, they recast themselves as ol' Joe Blow sittin' beside the cracker barrel and workin' his jaw. In other words, their opinion about what should happen to our liberty is no weightier than ours.

In fact, we may want to accord it even less weight. I've noticed — haven't you? — that nowadays scientists almost always accompany their headline-worthy biological or environmental findings with a certain kind of policy proposal: one that involves not weakening leviathan's crushing and ruinous power but strengthening it. And that occurs in an era when a grievously large proportion of scientific research is financed by one level of government or another. If I may again trot out one of my favorite formulations: Comrades, it is no accident. [Nicholas Strakon]  (February 2012)

A related column of mine from 2007:
"Global warming: What if the Left is right?"

Clip joints. According to the telescreen out of Fort Wayne, an Indiana state representative who was sponsoring a bill to abolish licensing of barbers and cosmetologists has now withdrawn it because — in the newsreader's words — he "got a lot of compelling testimony last week from cosmetologists and others in the industry to keep regulation in place." (Print version of WANE-TV story, January 26, 2012.)

Rep. David Wolkins (R-Winona Lake), who introduced the bill, is quoted in an earlier Indianapolis Star story as saying, "This bill was dumped in my lap because I'm the 'smaller-government person' in the House. I have nothing in it other than I am the carrier." Circus clowns have nothing on brave, principled statesmen in the ability to back-pedal at lightning speed. According to the story, Wolkins also said, "It has created a headache. They're all up in arms."

"They," the Star writes, include "the Professional Beauty Association, a national organization of salons, spas, distributors, and manufacturers" who are "opposed to the legislation, [and say that] the bill will kill cosmetology schools, put local product distributors out of business, jeopardize the livelihood of Indiana's barbers/cosmetologists, and threaten the health and safety of consumers."

Nice to see that the "health and safety of consumers" at least get a mention, at the end. But it's plain to see that the consumers aren't the chief concern here; the main thing is the desire of established operators to stay legally protected from unruly competitors. Where are the quotes from those endangered consumers, terrified at the prospect of greedy, heartless, exploitative, unhealthy, extremist laissez-faire free-market dog-clip-dog capitalism breaking out in Indiana?

The story itself is instructive, but so is the way the Fort Wayne TV station (which is government-friendly) reported it. According to the Progressive fairy-tale ideology long promoted by the government schools, it should have been the customers who pressed for the regulations to be retained. But the TV newsreader and her scriptwriter were blind to the aspects of the story that — in light of the System's traditional party line — should put it in the man-bites-dog category. After all, "business always opposes regulation," right? Absent was any declaration along the lines of, "Oddly enough, it's the industry itself that's calling for the regulation to be retained." (Media consumers do hear "oddly enough ..." fairly often in the course of "straight" news coverage.)

Have we been deep-dyed in statism for so long now that the old Progressive fairy tales are no longer considered necessary? Or any mental activity whatsoever? [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Modine Herbey comments. Yes. (January 2012)

Their inclinations are obvious. With the encouragement of the Red Billionaire himself, the left-statists are now using Warren Buffett's secretary as a pawn in their never-ending drive for higher taxes. General Secretary Obama himself, in last night's State of the Leviathan speech, adverted to the fact that Debbie Bosanek pays federal taxes at a higher rate than her boss does.

Naturally we'd better not hold our breath waiting for the right-statists — war conservatives and other giant-government conservatives — to propose the obvious solution for this "unfairness," which is also the gradualist, reformist, moderate-libertarian solution: Cut the maximum tax rate for Mrs. Bosanek and everyone else down to the rate that Buffett pays!

That reform would address the Left's perpetual whining for "equality" and "fairness," and at the same time would advance the cause of liberty and prosperity, restricting the life's blood flowing to the state, that malignant tumor on society.

The fact that we don't hear mainstreamers of the Left, Right, or totalitarian Middle proposing any such thing makes their inclinations, assumptions, and premises crystal clear. Some of them occasionally burble about cutting taxes, but when push comes to shove, they've all got good reasons for keeping the level of mass robbery about where it is. After all, they've got plans for our money, much more important than any plans we little people may have for ourselves and our families.

I refer, above, to the moderate-libertarian solution to the disparity in tax rates. Well, real partisans of liberty and justice have their own idea of what the uniform tax rate should be. Hint: the conceiving of that number represents one of the great breakthroughs of Hindu mathematics in the ancient world. [Nicholas Strakon]  (January 25, 2012)

The emperor has no unicorn. In his imperial oration, Obama declared: "I'm a Democrat, but I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: that government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves and no more." Let's take the little liar at his word and examine that idea.

Last summer Mitt Romney got roasted by the Reds and the Pinks when he said that "corporations are people." That set me to wondering who the leftists think do populate corporations; but now I've got to wonder what kind of entities Obama thinks populate the government. In a 1971 debate with state-defender Jeffrey St. John, Roy Childs said — and I never tire of quoting him — that "government does not consist of men who have powers of epistemological elitism; that is, they have no means of knowledge not available to other men." They don't have other special abilities denied to non-government people, either; or special exemptions from the ordinary morality governing non-government people; or special exemptions from the laws of scarcity, supply and demand, and simple arithmetic.

But if we're to take him at his word, Obama must believe that government is magic and that government people are supermen somehow definitively elevated above the normal human plane. (Don't get me started on what Lincoln may have believed.) I'll point out in passing that such a belief contradicts the democratic slogan that "we are the government." But more important, there is a reading of Our Leader's dictum that leads straight to anarchism: What can government people do that other people can't do? A good deal worse than nothing, that's what. [Nicholas Strakon]  (January 25, 2012)

Complications of fascism. President Obama rejected the current application for the Keystone XL oil pipeline yesterday, blaming procedural problems and (of course) Republicans, according to John M. Broder and Dan Frosch, writing in the New York Times: "Rejecting Pipeline Proposal, Obama Blames Congress" (January 18, 2012).

The move earned denunciations from Speaker John Boehner, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas J. Donohue, and American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard, according to Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson, writing in the Washington Post: "Obama administration rejects Keystone XL pipeline" (January 18, 2012).

I'm hoping Obama suffers some lasting political injury from this, but that's because I'm not choosy about what injures that swine's prospects. Free-marketeers and all partisans of liberty and justice fiercely oppose the Keystone XL project, albeit not for the same reasons the statist environmentalists and enemies of industrial civilization oppose it.

We oppose it because it depends on the exercise of eminent domain, which is the euphemism that governments have dreamed up for what is actually robbery by forced sale. It's the same as if a carjacker, sticking a gun in your face, said he was going to take your late-model car but would throw you a hundred bucks in return. You might object to that sum, not to mention being forced to deal with the bandit at all; but if the robber and his criminal confederates determined in their solemn councils that a C-note was a "fair price," you'd be sunk. And, if you forcefully resisted, shot.

Actually, eminent domain isn't quite the same as street robbery, because only governments add insult to injury by bleating slogans at you about how robbing you serves the "public good," the "general welfare," the "national interest," etc., just the same as all their other crimes, including their mass-murdering wars.

Within the category of what government people call "eminent domain" we find two distinguishable types of robbery: the mostly socialist and the hard-fascist. We see the mostly socialist type when governments force owners to sell property for state projects — new highways, military installations, government airports, and so on. Even so, those projects are still partly fascist in nature because they shower tax money on private contractors who are connected with the boys downtown and revel in state privilege (often buying it with bribes).

We see the hard-fascist type when governments steal the property and then hand it over to new "private," i.e., non-governmental, owners. That's what would happen with Keystone XL.

• "Keystone XL Pipeline Relies on Eminent Domain for Success,"
by Jonathan Mariano, TriplePundit.com, November 7, 2011
• "Keystone XL pipeline unites left and right,"
by Rachel Weiner, Washington Post, November 11, 2011

Eminent domain reveals a deep truth about the governments that practice it: although not all of them have succeeded in imposing totalitarianism, they all tend toward totalitarianism. They operate upon the totalitarian premise that no peaceful man's rightful property is secure if seizing it would serve the purposes of government people. In effect, government is the ultimate owner of all property — an idea that has survived from the old days of monarchies that evolved from feudalism. As I have proposed before, our common familiarity with taxation may have bred a lack of contempt — or a lack of understanding, at least. But let a man be once clubbed over the head with eminent domain, and in that bruised cranium there may arise a freshly contemptuous understanding of the nature of the state.

As enthusiasm for fascism goes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is hard to beat. The Times reports that the Chamber also lobbied for the authoritarian and deeply fascist Stop Online Piracy and Protect I.P. acts, the threat of which — as you may have heard — recently called forth upon the information highway some pretty sophisticated villagers brandishing some pretty advanced torches and pitchforks, prompting an entire infestation of lawfakers to scatter like rabbits. (We'll have to see how long they remain in the tall grass, cottontails quivering.) As if that weren't enough, the Chamber supports right-to-work laws, yet another government intrusion into the economy.

I think that from now on in these pages we'll just call it the U.S. Chamber of Fascists. [Nicholas Strakon]  (January 19, 2012)

Just in time for the start of Worship Season. The Washington Post has been authorized to report that the hysterically funny inscription on the Martin L. King memorial about his being a "drum major" will be rectified to some extent.

One hopes that this doesn't ruin the entertainment value of the monstrosity.

In any case, the thing's cautionary value is more important, and that will be unimpaired since its looming Morlockian style will remain. (Have they installed a siren to pull in the Eloi yet?) [Nicholas Strakon]

Modine Herbey comments: No, Strakon, in our current dystopia no sirens are required to pull in the Eloi.

Strakon replies: True enough. We don't hear sirens before the Eloi troop into Morlock territory. It's only afterward that they tend to go off. (January 2012)

• "The Cult of St. Martin Luther King — A Loyalty Test for Careerist Conservatives?,"
by Paul Gottfried, VDare, January 16, 2012.
 
• "I'm So Bored with MLK," by Jim Goad, Taki's Magazine, January 16, 2012.
Excerpt: "His ongoing canonization is such that Jesus is now merely
Martin's towel boy. Compared to MLK, Jesus is not very sacred
at all in this culture. He's a much safer target to criticize."

They are inventive — gotta give 'em that. According to the New York Times, General Secretary Obama is now seeking more power in order (so he claims) to shrink the government.

I can't quite put my finger on it, comrades, but I think something is wrong with this picture. [Nicholas Strakon]  (January 2012)

Watering the bodies: We really are wonderful! The story about U.S. Marines' urinating on the corpses of their fallen foes in Afghanistan pales in comparison with the actual atrocities committed by Our Glorious Boys (and Wymyn) as they have striven to impose Rights for Wymyn and the GLBT Community, Mandatory Diversity, and Israel-friendly Duh-MOCK-risy in some highly unlikely venues. Still, you've got to admit that the story broke just at the right time to illustrate Joe Audie's latest essay, "We're so wonderful!" [Nicholas Strakon]

Henry Gallagher Fields comments: The desecration pales, too, in comparison with the atrocities committed by Our Boys in previous imperialist wars, such as World War II.

Not many Wymyn at the front in those days, of course, thank God. No, the regime's family-abandonment and culture-destruction policies worked differently under Franklin Roosevelt, herding women into the war factories to play Rosie the Riveter. (January 2012)

Politics is disgusting. I recently told a friend that if I were a minarchist and a voting man, I'd vote for Ron Paul — but I went on to say that I still wouldn't, really, because if my vote in the primary for the best man actually helped get him nominated (through some magic), I'd be helping to elect the worst man. I wouldn't have anything to do with such a maddeningly disgusting system.

As hard as it may be to imagine, my disgust with politics just continues to deepen. Now, it makes me uneasy that for the second time in the past few months I'm feeling some sympathy for old Mitt, but I've just got to get into this. The other day, in calling for free individual choice in health insurance, Romney said: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If, you know, someone doesn't give me the good service I need, I want to say, you know, that I'm going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me." That statement, in itself quite praiseworthy from the free-market standpoint, is now being characterized as a gaffe — same as when Romney stood up in the face of the shrieking Reds and told them that "corporations are people," i.e., that corporations aren't actually populated by Satan's imps, space aliens, badgers, or whatever other entities the commies may be fantasizing about.

Romney is often snarked at for being an android whose every utterance is carefully programmed, but look what happens when he actually says something that's interesting and (perhaps) less painstakingly scripted. If some of the words he uses — in this case, "I like being able to fire people" — are similar to words his enemies have used in a radically different context to condemn him, why, that's good enough!

The contextless phrase is good enough, by the way, not just for such execrable creatures as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, quacking away on behalf of the DNC, but also for Romney's Republican rivals Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman. The latter promptly went forth and proclaimed that "Governor Romney enjoys firing people." I knew that Perry was an awfully primitive lizard, but now Huntsman has revealed himself to be the lowest species of slime.

Bushwhacking knaves feed lies to drooling fools — and it's the candidate's fault, because he should have anticipated it all. No one is expected to be unfoolish enough to reflect that in his everyday life he, too, likes to be able to fire a saboteur of an auto mechanic or a scorch-prone electrician.

Once again, all the way through yet another election year, it looks as though I'm going to have to keep that bottle of Emetrol out on the counter within easy reach. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

A letter-writer recently observed here in The Ditch that politics makes us stupid, just as the other aspects of statism do. Thanks to this current imbroglio we see revealed some of the mechanics of how politics operates to punish and discourage actual thought. [Henry Gallagher Fields]  (January 10, 2012)

Maybe Professor Doctor Algore can answer this. One hundred percent of Chevy Volts have now been recalled. It seems that the battery casing catches fire. (GM isn't calling it a recall, but a "customer service campaign," to avoid bad publicity and — get this — federal monitoring. How can a company partly owned by the state avoid state monitoring?)

What I want to know is whether the recall is due to the danger the fire represents to the driver and passengers or is due to the danger the fire represents to the environment. [Ronn Neff]  (January 2012)

Finally! Now the world starts to make more sense to me. MSNBC has suspended Patrick Buchanan as a commentator because of racial and ethnic crimethink contained in his new book, Suicide of a Superpower.

Apparently, promoting protectionism and praising Alexander Hamilton on the air can take a fellow only so far. But I should be serious. Some commentators are opining, plausibly, that the reddest of the news nets tolerated Buchanan for as long as it did because it liked how he beat up on Republicans of the War Party. That has become pretty stale now, not to mention a little inconvenient, since the Obamunists have shown themselves to be members in good standing of the same Party.

According to Alternet's Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who applauds Buchanan's purging, his book contains "several white supremacist statements, including the absurd assertion that 'white folks' built America. (Sounds like someone flunked 8th grade history class.)"

Yes, indeed, I've never heard anything as absurd! As all of us attentive students learned in eighth grade, if it hadn't been for the Negro contribution, why, there'd be no Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge, electricity generation, railroads, telephones, refrigeration, airplanes, cars, lasers, Mac computers — we owe it all to Tyrone and Lakeesha! Without their ultra-beneficent ingenuity, the whole continent would be a howling wilderness, just like Darkest ... Ooops! Well, never mind.

Of course this brings to the forefront a question that some of us have surely meditated upon already: What are the young-uns being taught in eighth grade? [Nicholas Strakon]  (January 2012)

Simple Nick is puzzled again. I came across a piece in the New York Times today that I found thought-provoking: "A Shrinking Military Budget May Take Neighbors with It," by Binyamin Appelbaum. Actually, make that question-provoking.

In his second paragraph, Appelbaum writes: "... As the Pentagon confronts the prospect of cutting its budget by about 10 percent over the next decade, even some people who do not count themselves among its traditional allies warn that the potential impact on scientific innovation is being overlooked. Spending less on military research, they say, could reduce the economy's long-term growth."

The overall argument of the piece is a variation on the old assertion that if we hadn't had all our Grand and Glorious Wars, we'd never have had big airplanes, computers, radar, infrared, sulfa drugs, lightweight materials, modern surgical techniques, and so on. The Big One — World War II — is adduced as the Big Example here, despite some trivial aspects such as its mass incineration of factories, libraries, universities, research institutes, museums, and human minds.

But let's look further back, all the way to 1880, when American technology was going great guns and the economy was expanding by leaps and bounds. Bell had invented the telephone, Edison and Westinghouse were conducting their creative struggle over electricity, Mergenthaler was about to invent the Linotype, and the Roeblings had developed whole new technologies to build the Brooklyn Bridge, which would open in 1883.

Yet the U.S. Army in 1880 numbered only about 30,000 soldiers, and the entire War Department was housed in one average-size office building next door to the White House.

Nick the Simple wants to know: How was it all possible? [Nicholas Strakon]

Ronn Neff comments. It is of course true that without the military there are things we perhaps like and would not have.

Let's get excessive here: Maybe not the Internet. Maybe not High-Def radio and TV. Maybe not space exploration. Maybe not certain fabrics or preservatives.

But this is a classic case of the broken window. What do we not have that we would have?

All the state can ever, ever, ever do is rearrange capital and impose costs. Its every action does one or both. Inherently.

So there are losses. What state-worshippers have to say is: We like this stuff better than any that free men would have given us.  (January 7, 2012)

Have the neocons seen this map? The telescreen just showed a map of where the mighty Iranian Navy is conducting its dangerous, reckless, saber-rattling war games with its advanced super-weapons. Come to find out, it's just off the coast of — not New Jersey — not California — or even Montana — but, believe it or not, Iran!

Well, Nick the Simple is simply dumbfounded.

The context is different, but I can't help being reminded of the old German joke about a Nazi Party official's trying to illustrate the glorious crusade against Bolshevism for a Bavarian peasant, with the aid of a map. The peasant points to the giant swath of territory stretching across half the map and asks what country it is. The official replies, "The Soviet Union." The peasant then points to a different country and asks what that tiny place is. The official answers, "Why, that's Germany!" After stroking his chin for a bit, the peasant looks up and asks, "Has the Führer seen this map?" [Nicholas Strakon]  (January 2, 2012)

I heard it on Fox News: peace and freedom are bad for business. On New Year's Day an anchor at Neocon Central was interviewing an investment professional named Ed Butowsky about economic prospects for 2012, and Butowsky said that of all the leading presidential candidates, Ron Paul poses the greatest threat to the stock market and Americans' 401Ks. You see, Dr. Paul erroneously takes a "non-interventialist [sic] approach to outside of our borders," despite the fact that there's a "world economy" these days, and most of our big companies do business outside our borders, and world events are economically important, so ... there.

Now, I have difficulty imagining the election of Dr. Paul even in arguendo, but if such a thing were to happen, it would deliver a great shock to the System (provoking it, by the bye, to de-elect him as soon as possible). And it seems reasonable to predict that such a disturbance in the Force would be reflected in a stock-market panic of some magnitude.

But if Wall Street expert Butowsky were a free-market man, he would accept that panic as a necessary correction — a healthy liquidation of malinvestments as companies were obliged to depend on the economic means of obtaining wealth and abandon the political means. And he would confidently look forward to a return to prosperity, on an honest and solid foundation. (I am, of course, discussing the effect of peace and liberty if implemented and leaving aside the question of whether a President Paul, or any elected official, could actually implement them.)

Instead, by insisting on the badness and wrongness of Dr. Paul's ideas, Butowsky was defending the status quo. He was suggesting that wars of aggression and other foreign interventions are now necessary to support the American economy. That our economy is so fascist and interconnected with fascism around the world that it would be destroyed by a policy of peace, free trade, renunciation of empire, and radically deep cuts in taxes for war, foreign aid, and the IMF.

To the Paulites I say: This is what happens when you try to foment a political revolution without first engaging in the decades of work it takes to complete an intellectual and cultural revolution. Even smart people won't be able to understand the simplest things you're talking about.

Or if by chance they do, they won't be willing to admit it. [NS]
 

Ronn Neff comments. What utter parochialism. Don't these guys understand how important the other planets are to our economy and well-being? To say nothing of the comets! If there weren't laws passed governing the travel plans of comets, it would be Deep Impact every other day. But do they ever talk about it? Do they wonder whether there is sufficient oversight in this matter? Don't they realize that there are factions seeking to deregulate the solar system?

Morons! There's a whole industry out there waiting to be created, and the environmentalists are all just tunnel-visioned on this planet. Don't they realize there are crystals out there just screaming to enlighten us?

I know my 401K has suffered from their narrow focus.  (January 2012)
 

2011

Published 2012 by WTM Enterprises.