(11)

As regular readers here know, immigration is an issue that even people who are libertarians with a strong hostility to state barriers to movement disagree about. The nub of the issue can be expressed thus: immigration+welfare state+weak indigenous culture = social discord. Or: immigration+free market capitalism+strong sense of civil society = strong, dynamic country.

Over at the CATO think tank in Washington DC, a number of writers, such as Bryan Caplan, Daniel Griswold, Richard K Vedder and Joel Kotkin argue that immigration, particularly without the distortions and false incentives of a big welfare state, is a force for good and an expression of the desire of people to better their condition not just materially, but in other ways, and that believers in liberty ought to be on their side. In as much as immigration, legal or otherwise, causes certain costs, then there are ways of dealing with this other than a simple blanket ban, which is what some people, mostly, but not exclusively on the right, are calling for.

This is an impressive collection of essays and provides a bit of a counterweight to cultural pessimists, some of whom, ironically, are immigrants themselves.

Another good thing about this collection of essays is that with the exception of Caplan, I had not heard about any of these authors before, so I was pleased to find a large assembly of such insightful writers to follow in the future.

Here is a paragraph from one of the essays, by Joshua C. Hall, Benjamin J. VanMetre, and Richard K. Vedder:

When examining these various views on immigration it’s important not to fall subject to the all too common misperception that one’s immigrant status dictates one’s position in the debate, viewing immigrants as pro-immigration and nonimmigrants as anti-immigration. This is clearly not the case as Brimelow (1999), Hoppe (1998) and Borjas (1999) are some of the most prominent skeptics of immigration and are immigrants themselves - anti-immigrant immigrants.

In fact, the anti-immigrant immigrant is not a new phenomenon. It stems from the growing instinct for individuals to think that their generation is the Great Generation and that those who follow are somehow inferior. So it goes with immigration. One can speculate that the individuals who arrived on the Mayflower lamented newcomers arriving to Massachusetts on subsequent boats in the 1620s as lacking the motivation, the ingenuity, or some other positive attribute allegedly possessed in abundance by those arriving earlier.

In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin lamented the allegedly deleterious effects of new German arrivals to Philadelphia by disparagingly speaking of how Pennsylvania was being “Germanized.”

In the mid-19th century, the great American inventor Samuel F. B. Morse denounced new arrivals from Ireland and spoke of the dangers to America arising from the Roman Catholic faith of the newcomers. A half-century later, Woodrow Wilson pronounced that new arrivals from Italy and eastern Europe were of an inferior stock compared with those coming earlier from the northwestern part of the same continent. So it is not surprising when Borjas (1999) and Brimelow (1999) lament the arrivals to America after 1965 as inferior to those coming in the 1950s or early 1960s. The question that ultimately arises then is, if conventional political ideology does not explain differences in opinion on immigration then what does?

I should add that these essays have a strongly American flavour, but some if not all of the arguments the authors make apply to certain other countries as well.

(9)

This is one of the more ridiculous incidents of security theatre that I have read. I know it is preaching to the converted to post such a link to Samizdata, and the increasingly farcical nature of the United States government surprises no one who reads here, but the post deserves to be spread far and wide. Reading Mike Masnick's account of how the knuckleheads providing "security" at the US Capitol conduct themselves, one can better visualize the inherent idiocy of the entire operation.

(5)

[W]hile SOPA/PIPA may be stalled for now, a big part of the reason is that tech companies got into the lobbying game, too...That’s right, slowly but surely, Congress is sucking the tech industry into their world, making us play by their rules. We have to pay them off, literally with cash, or we get slaughtered.

This is how criminal organizations run protection rackets. Congress is doing just that, only it’s completely legal.

- TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington on the spanner thrown into the works of SOPA/PIPA (for now)

(20)

"Well, I didn't watch the State of the Union, but I did fix the dishwasher, and teach a fairly decent class on the non-delegation doctrine, and edit some page proofs of a forthcoming law review article. So it was a pretty good day."

- Glenn Reynolds

In my case, being a Londoner, yesterday, I attended an excellent Institute of Economic Affairs talk by "Bleeding Heart Libertarian", got a plumber around to deal with a blocked pipe, picked up a suit from the cleaners, discussed a finance matter with my Dad and typed about 4,000 words at work. I did later skim a few lines from the Obama speech, though. I see he's taking tax policy advice from Warren Buffett, whom I am increasingly bracketing alongside George Soros as prime James Bond villain material.

(28)

In a good article at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf (now that is a name to remember) has this zinger of a response to a recent desperate attempt by Andrew Sullivan to try and claim that Mr Obama has been pursuing a brilliant, long term strategy. He asks, how would any Obama voters feel had their man promised to do the following prior to his election:

"(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis."

Now I don't, as readers know, like everything about Ron Paul, who is opposed to every single thing mentioned in this paragraph. But the reason, surely, why even those who might have the odd doubt about him are giving this man respect is for the sort of facts as contained in this paragraph. It is, if you think about it for a few minutes, truly shocking, even though someone like me is not really all that easily shocked by politics and politicians any more.

And here are further signs that Sullivan's infatuation with Mr Obama is a joke:

"Over the years, Sullivan has confronted, as few others have, American transgressions abroad, including torture, detainee abuse, and various imperial ambitions. He's long drawn attention to civil-liberties violations at home too, as a solo blogger and as lead editor and writer of a blogazine. When I worked for Sullivan, he not only published but actively encouraged items I found that highlighted civil-liberties abuses by the Obama Administration, and since I parted ways with The Daily Dish, he and the Dish team have continued to air critiques of Obama on these questions."

"But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans."

And this:

"Beyond strenuously objecting to the focus of his piece and what it doesn't mention, and agreeing with some of Sullivan's points, I have important disagreements with others. "Where Bush talked tough and acted counter-productively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war," Sullivan writes. "Since he took office, al Qaeda's popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted." But it's surely relevant that, according to surveys like this one from James Zogby in 2011, "After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia)." And in the areas where Obama's drone strikes are killing innocent civilians, he is trading short-term terrorist deaths for the possibility that our policies will create more terrorists in the long run. It's a tradeoff some people consider prudent; but that's different from saying he is "winning the propaganda war." In fact, the predictable effect of some of his policies is to increase hatred of the U.S."

Meanwhile, foreign policy specialist - and Salma Hayek fan - Daniel Drezner is unimpressed.

(21)

Wikipedia will be going offline tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act. So will Reddit. This kind of protest could have some effect because ordinary Wikipedia users from all points in the political hyperspace will be told just what a terrible idea SOPA is, and a lot of them will get it.

CNET has a useful FAQ about SOPA.

(16)

The best debater was, without doubt, Newt Gingrich. He would tear Barack Obama apart in a debate.

A good way of understanding just how good a debater Gingrich is may be to compare him to Ron Paul - someone whose opinions I often agree with more than I do with the opinions of Newt Gingrich.

Ron Paul was asked about a radio interview where he appeared to say that Bin Laden should not have been killed by the Navy Seals (I, and a lot of other people, predicted that he would be asked such questions by Obama if Ron Paul was the nominee).

The only way out of such a position is to apologize for one's confused speech and say "OF COURSE BIN LADEN SHOULD HAVE BEEN SHOT".

Instead we got a long complicated reply, comparing (at one point) Islamist terrorists in Pakistan to Chinese dissenters in the United States, and saying that the reason that people attack the United States is "because we bomb their countries all the time".

And on and on (Taliban allies against the Soviets - the Taliban hardly existed at the time, Taliban totally different from Bin Laden's supporters NOT TRUE THEY HAVE THE SAME THEOLOGY, and...).

Ron I agree with you that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved to be a mistake - and I was still almost booing at the television screen as you spoke (a lot of people actually present at the debate could not stop themselves booing you - how you spoke was just so offensive). I agree with your policies (on just about everything), but they way you express yourself........ You do not just sound silly (and make errors of fact) you actually sound hostile to the United States and the West in general. As if you were an enemy of the West - you are not, but you sound as if you were.

And Newt Gingrich - he told a brief story about Andrew Jackson and "killing the enemies of America" and had everyone cheering him. As he did on virtually everything else...

"But he is still wrong about the issues" - no more wrong than Mitt Romney, Rick Perry (less than one percent of the vote in New Hampshire) and Rick Santorum. And he can debate vastly better than they can.

Still it is all pointless now.

Neither Rick Santorum or (even) Rick Perry will get out of the race and endorse Gingrich - which means that Mitt Romney will win on Saturday.

And that means it is over.

The candidate with the least good economic plan (although light years better than Obama) and the person who, when asked if he would support the new Obama law that allows imprisonment (without time limit) of citizens suspected of supporting enemies of the United States - said "yes" (and meant it).

People are to "trust in the good character" of the President not to "abuse this power" - well that is fine, let us see the end of what is left of the rule of law at once. As long as the President is of "good character".

Oh well at least Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase will be pleased.

I hear they have switched some of their support from Barack to Mitt - what a good sign of high moral character. Almost as good as being against abortion (as the most senior Elder of the Morman Church in Massachusetts), then being "pro choice" when in politics in Massachusetts, then being against abortion again (when running for the Republican nomination for President). Oh well my "do not say nasty things about Mitt" New Year's Resolution did not last long - but he is going to be nominee after Saturday, so it is a last negative statement before I (and everyone else interested in defending the West) have to rally behind this man's banner.

One must draw a sharp distinction between the person of the King (as a human being) and "the Crown". In the clash against the Marxists, Mitt Romney will be "King" after Saturday (the Coronation is not till the Convention, but a King is King before his coronation) - so his personal imperfections will have to be overlooked, the oaths that I (and so many others) have taken to defend the West against the totalitarians, will bind us to him in the contest (regardless of what terrible end this riding leads to). The choice of not following the banner will still exist - but not as an honourable choice. The statement "the King will lead us to our deaths" may be true - but it is also irrelevant. After all the enemy will still be in the field, seeking to flee (on the grounds that the commander of our own army is useless) is just a "cop out". When the banner is formally raised one follows the banner - even if it leads into a narrow valley, with the enemy in front and on both flanks. One can advice against it - one can even call the King an idiot to his face. But fleeing is not really an option - neither in honour (leaving everyone else to die), or in practicality (for the enemy will follow after they have done their business - in reality there is no real place to hide). And defeat is not predetermined - if one attacks fast enough (and fortune turns in one's favour), one may be able to cut one's way through, before the enemy has time to react.

To turn to lighter matters.... or, at least, the same matters expressed in a lighter tone.

Max Keiser (and the rest of the dodgy people) will be overjoyed - they are already using their "two Dollar whore" lines (and so on) against Romney. The attacks on Bain Capital may be unfair - but "loading companies with debt so that they fail after you walk away with millions" was a line used against Romney by the Wall Street Journal questioner, the left will use it also (and much more). They will love it when he is the nominee.

Which he will be.

(2)

"Certainly there is a need for free-market economics to be rescued from those who distort and discredit it, but that is the argument that must be made: that this system has delivered mass prosperity (and the self-determination that comes with it) on a scale unprecedented in human history, and that it deserves to be saved from the spoilers."

Janet Daley, writing with justified scorn about those people who have been bashing Mitt Romney for his career in venture capital at Bain. To be honest, his background in this area is one of the few things going for him. It would be quite refreshing to have a president of the United States who can actually read a balance sheet.

For those who have not come across the "creative destruction" line before and how it applies to sometimes wrenching change in business, check out the great Joseph Schumpeter.

As a caveat, I should add that some - but no means most - private equity buyouts of firms have been made possible by cheap credit, and therefore might not have occurred in the way they did had interest rates not been how they were in the past decade or so. On a related point, here is what I wrote in defence of private equity at Samizdata several years ago. Excerpt:

"In the main, what these firms do is target cash-rich firms that are run by often lazy executives who have presided over crappy business decisions. Take the meltdown of Marconi a few years ago, one of Britain's most famous companies. That was a listed company. The destruction of value and jobs in that company remains, in my mind, one of the most disgraceful episodes in British corporate history and who knows, it might have been saved from making big errors had a private equity fund been in charge, rather than deluded executives. Private equity firms helped stymie Deutsche Börse's foolish bid for the London Stock Exchange 2 years ago, and have turned around businesses. They typically buy and hold a firm for 5 years or more, take a hands-on approach to running firms before spinning them off to another buyer or floating them in an IPO. So Will Hutton should spare us sentimental guff about how limited liability firms floated on the stock exchange represent the perfect model of doing business or something that Adam Smith or Voltaire would exalt. They are merely one of the many ways in which economic activity manifests itself. As interest rates rise and the economic cycle turns, some of the excesses of leveraged buyouts will fade and private equity transactions will decline."

(7)

Some commenters on this blog got more than a little sniffy when I had a few critical things to see about Ron Paul the other day. I stand by my remarks, which actually were hardly the sort of fire-eating stuff that some people come up with, but I'll happily repeat my respect for his genuine good points, as I see them.

David French, over at National Review, has an interesting item reflecting on why, of all GOP candidates, and of Obama himself, Ron Paul gets more respect in financial terms from the serving military. Here is the final paragraph:

"I know there are many other reasons why troops support Ron Paul (quite a few embrace libertarian economic principles), but this post is an attempt to explain his support within a national-security framework — how some of the most hardened warriors I know enthusiastically embrace a man whom others say is soft on national security. They don’t see him as soft. They see him as realistic. I disagree (strongly), but it’s an argument that won’t be defeated by ridicule, and it’s an argument grounded in a cultural reality that few Americans have experienced."

(13)

One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It's like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. To make a game of it. Or something.

So, for instance, if Evil concedes that, I don't know, "socialism hasn't turned out very well in practice", Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea "in theory".

No it wasn't. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea.

Often, in circumstances like these, Evil even asks for an equalising goal.

Evil offers a pairing of ideas - good twinned with evil, like socks emerging from the laundrette - as a package: "I'll concede that socialism has turned out badly in practice if you concede that socialism is a nice theory."

The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead.

The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: "Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let's talk about that. And let's you admit that you are wrong about that also. We told you you were wrong from the start, and we were right that you were wrong. We predicted that socialism would turn out badly in practice, on account of it being a bad theory. You pressed on. You were wrong. In theory as well as in practice."

Like I say, press for two-nil.

So, all hail to Mark Meckler. (And further hail to Instapundit for linking to the story, today, and earlier.)

Meckler, arriving in New York and learning that he must not carry a gun, handed his gun over to the New York goons. (That much, he was willing to concede.) The goons promptly arrested him, for carrying the gun up to the point where he stopped carrying it, or something.

Faced with a determined Meckler, and a huge outcry of rage and contempt from the forces of Good, the New York goons have dropped their evil charges. One-nil to Meckler. But Meckler is now being subjected to another evil injustice. The goons still have his gun, and are refusing to return it.

Instead of thanking the goons for being so nice about not arresting him any more, Meckler now wants his gun back. Quite right. New York goons, give the man his gun back! (This is now an international campaign. I am international and I now say this.)

Saying "now give me back my gun" is not only the good thing for Good Mr Meckler to do; it is also excellent tactics. He is now one-nil up. He faces the chance to score another goal, and go two-nil up against the forces of Evil. He is now pressing to do just that.

Quite right. When you have argumentative momentum, against a team that is saying (or in this case also doing) not just one bad thing but many bad things, use it. Thereby keep it, and build it.

When the New York goons do hand back Meckler's gun, if they ever do (and actually, even if they don't), the proper next response, from all of us who have now rallied around Meckler, is: "Now, about all these other gun-carrying people, against whom you have not dropped the charges, and whose guns you have not returned …" Three-nil. Four-nil. Five-nil …

If the New York goons don't hand back Meckler's gun, perhaps because they sense that if they do, Meckler's team will then get more momentum, then the New York goons will be digging their heels in in an argument that they will hate but which the Meckler team will relish.

Also good. Shame about the stolen gun, but also good.

(12)

Now and again, when the subject of environmental alarmism comes up, someone - such as the likes of me - might wonder when, or whether, a mainstream, high-profile politician in an important country will get up and stick it to the Green lobby. For perhaps obvious economic reasons, given its vast natural resources, Canada seems to be the country where this is starting to seriously happen. Consider this report (Reuters):

On the eve of public hearings into a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta's tar sands to the Pacific Coast, the Canadian government lashed out on Monday at what it said were foreign-funded radical groups opposing the project. The comments by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver were another sign of the pressures mounting against Enbridge Inc's proposed C$5.5 billion ($5.4 billion) Northern Gateway pipeline. Canada's right-leaning Conservative government, which says the pipeline would help diversify energy exports away from the United States and more towards Asia, says activists are clogging up the regulatory process.

There's more:

"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade," Oliver said in a statement. "These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda ... They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada's national economic interest." Ottawa and the oil industry are particularly interested in Northern Gateway after Washington delayed a decision on approving TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil sands crude from Alberta to Texas.

Of course, it goes without saying that the UK government is a million miles from this sort of rhetoric, with the partial exception to how ministers sometimes try to push aside environmental concerns that are raised about various transport or other projects. In these cases, though, there are legitimate private property rights issues as stake (such as the use of compulsory purchase powers to make way for something like a high-speed rail link). And as for AGW alarmism in particular, there is yet no sign of a major political figure realising how many votes might be won in confronting this.

(30)

This video makes for hilarious - if frustrating - viewing. Leading Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum ludicrously posits that left-wingers in America are massive advocates for too much freedom...and cites this as a problem.

Richard Nikoley sums up the vile Santorum thusly:

[L]eave it to far-right, fundamentally religious Christians to come full circle, meeting up with commies—in true East meets West fashion—to declare that America is not really about the pursuit of happiness, and that freedom really means freedom to be responsible and subservient to the values dictated to you by on high (or Santorum, his Congregation and extended brethren).

If Santorum and his ilk keep forcing me to agree with left-wingers - in this case, that Santorum is pure evil - it is going to be a very, very long election year.

(23)

A very interesting night, and a fairly inconclusive one unless you were in the bottom tier. There is no clear front runner in the Republican camp and one can essentially look at it as three candidates with roughly a quarter of the votes each... and all the rest divvying up the few leftover scraps in the remaining quarter. The fact that we have two top tier candidates in the race who are not that progressive guy from Massachusetts is perhaps the most important outcome of the night.

The outcome is good in another way: with any kind of luck we could end up with a libertarian sitting in the catbird seat in a brokered convention, assuming of course that he does not surprise us all and win it. I do not think many libertarians are expecting that. The concept of winning is a thing to be slowly approached and gotten used to for most of us. So I will not make any assumptions of grandeur. I will only say we have a good shot at a situation where we have a libertarian in the GOP with substantial power at the convention. He will be able to push them our way and at the same time we have an excellent candidate in the LP itself pushing them from the outside. This should have the GOP strategists wondering how to attract voters from our ranks.

The answer to that question is really simple: drop the Big Statism. Make the repeal of the entirety of Obamacare a priority; and for damn sure stop this mandate talk. If you want even a sidewise glance from us, just drop it and pretend you never even thought about it. Individual Mandate is a poison pill for the GOP and the sooner they realise it, the better off we all will be.

PS: You may have noticed that I have gone MSM journalists one better: I wrote this entire Iowa article without mentioning ANY of the candidate names. Those pikers can only manage to ignore one.

(53)

Romney may have just lost the election for the Republicans. If he is going to stand behind Individual Mandate, then why not vote for a real socialist? Why not just let someone who walks the walk drive things to their disastrous conclusion rather than allowing the left to point to a 'conservative' and blame the failures of socialism on him?

If it is a given that Romney will be the Republican candidate, then come next fall I will vote for Republicans in the House and Senate and Obama for President in hopes that libertarian, tea party and conservative types can dominate the Legislative Branch and fight the Executive Branch every step of the way. If Romney were in, they would have to at least give a show of support for 'their' President. Let us shoot for total war between the branches of government as our best option for preserving liberty.

The government which governs least is best... even if it is because they are too busy fighting amongst themselves to govern at all.

(6)

“One of the more unexpected things I discovered as CEO of a pharmaceutical company was that I had to think as much or more about the federal government than I did about our competition. I had known on an intellectual level that government was involved in the private sector in a great many ways, but it was only when I was actually in business that I felt the full impact.”

Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, page 253. He is describing his time in the private sector during the late 70s and 80s, and emerges as quite a firebrand for supply-side economics (he got to know Arthur Laffer).

Whatever you think of Rummy as a defense secretary (under the Ford and George W. Bush administrations), he comes across as a formidable man of US public and commercial life.

Here is something that I wrote about the FDA and associated drug regulation issues a while ago here.

(14)

As I head to London's Heathrow Airport en route to Malta for the holidays, I see this item during a spot of web-surfing. It is a piece by Gerard Baker, in the Wall Street Journal. Baker has spent a fair while in the US, and clearly, he's been infected:

"But I discovered football when I first came to New York in the late 1980s and my prejudices melted away. It was the era of New York Giants greatness and I was hooked instantly: Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, Mark Bavaro, Jeff Hostetler. Yes, I did just say Jeff Hostetler. That should tell you how hooked I was."

"In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don't mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework. Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other's brains out. It doesn't get any more beautiful than that."

I must say that "soccer", at least in how it is played these days in the English Premiership, tests my loyalty due to the real and alleged antics of the players as much as anything. Further afield, I am still spellbound by such players as Barcelona's residing genius, Lionel Messi, but in general, I am not as much interested in soccer as I used to be. As a result of my general soccer fatigue, I have become more interested in following rugby union and cricket (it helps that England is playing good cricket at the moment; not so the rugby guys). As for American football, I have never really watched it much (I went to a game in Texas in 2004 but that was about it).

As for other sports and events, I can admire the courage and physical endurance of those taking part, such as horse racing jockeys, Tour de France cyclists and the downhill skiers. I can admire a gladiatorial game of tennis between such giants as Federer and Nadal, or, for that matter, watch nervously as a great golfer slugs it out on the greens against a rival. And non-PC though it is, a great boxing match can hold me in its thrall. For me, there are a whole group of sports that I like, and for different reasons. I like watching certain motor sports, but that is more a "spectacle" where the whole event - scenery, noise, colour and adrenalin - come together (as in Le Mans, which I attended this year with a bunch of friends).

(39)

We haven't here done a Kim Jong Il is dead posting until now, probably because what else is there to say besides Kim Jong Il is dead? A new Kim Jong has been installed. Un. From Il, to Un. In English it sounds like going from sick to nothing. North Korea, presently terrible, will either get a bit better, or a bit worse, or a lot worse, or stay much the same. Or, if it gets really lucky, a lot better! Will paid North Korea watchers, experts in North Korean things, do any better than that? I doubt it.

I have called Kim Jong Il Kim Jong Il. Others call him Kim Jong-Il with a hyphen, or Kim Jong-il, with a small i for il. Until today I never knew of this confusion. Blog and learn.

My favourite of the Kim Jong Il is dead postings that I have seen so far is this one, at Mick Hartley's blog, which features the very last Kim Jong Il picture: King Jong Il looking at toilet paper.

I wrote all that last night, but Mick Hartley now has another Kim Jong Il is dead posting up, in which he quotes somebody called Simon Winchester saying this:

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out - its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Or then again, perhaps … not. No bad thing? Competition for commenters: concoct morally disgusting sentences which begin with "For all its faults …". You'll struggle to top that one. These obscene ravings are currently behind the Times pay wall, hence no link, although Hartley does supply one.

Says Hartley:

Better a starving slave state, it seems, than this ghastly modern Americanised culture.

Conservative romanticism raised to a truly idiotic level.

Commenter Martin Adamson adds:

And it's not even remotely true on its own terms. The architecture of Pyongyang is Moscow 1952. The mass displays are China 1964. Painting is Soviet Academy 1936. Music is Gang of Four Operas 1974. Dress is Bucharest 1988 etc etc.

Assuming this is the Simon Winchester in question, it seems that:

Simon Winchester is a best-selling British author living in Massachusetts and New York City.

Heartfelt apologies from Britain to Massachusetts and New York City. Apparently American culture is itself sufficiently un-Americanised for Winchester to find it livable in. Winchester has a new book out, which looks rather creepy. Let's all not buy it.

(2)

Just in case you missed it, the last of these Frank Jisms is this:

This morning I started work on my next book for HarperCollins. Thanks to the sales of Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything, I was asked to write another book. This one will be on my solutions for all the problems facing America. Hopefully it will start a movement when it comes out with me as leader.

Earlier in the same posting Frank J quotes (admiringly) from and links to a piece (by him) about how, if cars were invented only now instead of when they were invented, we wouldn't be allowed to drive them. Funny, and probably true.

(15)

USA cricket captain Steve Massiah has been arrested, and then had his travelling restricted. Why?

According to the arrest warrant, a copy of which is with ESPNcricinfo, Massiah and two other men conspired "to execute a scheme and artifice to defraud a financial institution", listed as Countrywide Home Loans, "and to obtain moneys, funds, credits, assets, securities, or other property owned by and under the custody and control of such financial institution, by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises."

Quite right. People can't be allowed to swindle financial institutions by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises. To be allowed to behave like that, you should be running a financial institution yourself.

(5)

Obama Must Go.

The only shock is why this has not become a meme before now.

(14)

Whilst reading a discussion on the state of Social Security I noticed some conceptual errors, which if not corrected, could lead to very bad results.

Social Security is not a welfare program. It is not a wealth redistribution program. It was created in FDR's time as a one size fits all retirement fund. Every working person is forced to pay a percentage of their income into it so that upon retirement, they will continue to live in a life style similar to the one they had before retirement. At the time this idea was sold to the public, pure redistributive Socialism and welfare simply were not acceptable ideas in polite society.

If someone from a conservative view point puts forth an argument that applying a means test is a way to save Social Security, a way to turn it into a 'social safety net', they are buying into a deadly shift in the ground rules of the argument. Once you agree your pay out from Social Security need not reflect your pay in, you have left the field of play. You have handed the game over to the Socialists and made Social Security a welfare program. It becomes yet another redistribution program 'for the poor'.

No one should fall into that trap. Social Security is an alternate to private retirement savings plans. It was created out of a mind set that said individuals are not adult enough to save for their own retirements. It was created out of a mind set that said private entities could not be trusted to hold such investments and pay them back as promised.

The terms of the discussion we should be taking part in is that not only are these statements false, they are disastrously, blatantly false. When a private program fails, some number of people are indeed harmed. When the time comes to pay the piper on the Government program, millions upon millions of people will be screwed out of their retirement savings.

We can also make the argument that politics has allowed the entirety of Social Security to become an enterprise so flawed that if similar actions occurred in a private company, they would be decried as criminal offences. Individuals carrying out such schemes would be compared to Bernie Madoff. They would be worse than Bernie: by comparison he ruined the lives of a very small number of Americans, not many tens of millions. Social Security proves yet again that the government is incapable of running pretty much anything. If you want a disaster, let the politicians run it.

When the collapse finally arrives and the Ponzi scheme can go no further; when the taxpayer can no long bail out a failed scheme and hide the criminal nature of it all, I very much hope thousands are indicted for the crime. Every person who served in Congress and the Senate who voted to raid the program or undermined the T-Bills on which it rests and every bureaucrat who ever worked for the Social Security Administration who went along with the fraud deserves a long prison sentence.

We need to give poor Bernie some company after all, and he can learn how it is done by the real Pro's.

(14)

It is pretty clear that, whatever big criticisms it launched at George W Bush and his administration when it was in power, that Reason magazine seems to have taken things up another notch after a recent frank, and frankly appalling speech by The One. David Harsanyi is not a happy bunny:

"Smart people can grouse all they want about the supposed zealotry of the tea party or the conservative presidential field (and sometimes, they might be right), but Obama's mimicking Teddy Roosevelt's end-of-career hard left turn tells us a lot about the president's worldview. In his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Obama dropped almost all pretenses and made the progressive case against an American free market system, which he called "a simple theory...one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government....And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here's the problem: It doesn't work."

"Obama, after all, is such a towering economic mind that in Osawatomie, he once again blamed ATMs (and the Internets) for job losses. This is a man we can trust. "Less productivity! More jobs!"

"That's not to say capital isn't useful occasionally, of course. A few days ago, Obama hosted a $38,000-a-plate fundraiser for wealthy Manhattanites. The president—with the Democratic National Committee—has hauled in more cash from rent-seeking financial-sector companies than all Republican candidates combined. This president has supported every big-business bailout with taxpayers' money, even though he claims they shouldn't be on the "hook for Wall Street's mistakes."

"But it is refreshing to hear Obama come out and give us a clear picture of this country in all its ugly class-conscious, unjust, menacing glory rather than veil his arguments with any of that soothing rhetoric that got him elected last time. It's time, my friends, for a new square deal."

And yet I have this fear that Obama is going to win next November.

(31)

Equal time for each candidate (no playing favourites), no audience to make animal noises, serious questions from people who are not media hacks (the A.G.s of three States - including the key States of Virginia and Florida) and no stupid stunts such as hand shows or video links to media plants.

Each candidate given time to express their opinions on serious matters - just that, nothing else. With even the order people spoke in determined by lot.

Not hard to think up - yet no previous debate did that.

And the "Candidates Forum" on Mike Huckabee's show did do this. So a pat on the back due to former Governor Huckabee.

How did the candidates do?

Well Jon Huntsman did not show up (so he gets a fail) and Gary Johnson does not seem to have been invited (the one demerit that can be given to Huckabee), as for the rest......

Ron Paul showed his age (both in his thin voice and in the difficulty he had hearing what was said to him) - but he did advise people to read Bastiat's "The Law" (perhaps the best reading advice any candidate has ever given). He also understood that the Welfare State is unsustainable (as well as being unconstitutional), but also that just waving a magic wand would not wish away the problem of the millions of people who have grown to depend on it - hence the need for transition programs. However, when questioned about terrorism he hinted (did not formally state - but hinted) that America being attacked was the fault of American policy overseas - and that is both vile and just plain wrong.

Governor Perry had some sensible ideas (on energy and on education) - but (as usual) was undermined by his inability, unless speaking from a prepared text, to speak in public (sorry but that is part of the skill set for a candidate).

Rick Santorum spoke with true passion about the things that really matter to him - the social issues (abortion and so on). This will appeal to those who share his passions - but, of course, turn everyone else away from him.

Michelle Bachmann had a lot of good things to say (and some less good) - but she also had that oft mocked (by Jon Stewart and co) fixed look in her eyes. I am certain there is something wrong with her sight - indeed I would not be astonished if it turned out she could not clearly see the people she was talking to. I know poor eyesight should not be relevant - but the look on someone's face does matter. On budget issues Congresswomen Bachmann was good, on illegal immigration her hard line will alienate some people (especially as it is clear, from her whole manner, that everything she says is sincere - so when she says that eleven million people are going to be rounded up, that is exactly what she would do).

Governor Romney was the opposite - his look was perfect (straight at the people he was talking to - with a look of intelligent concern), his voice was perfect also - exactly the right pitch and so on. Content is not really his thing (deliberately so - as it would give the Obama people ammunition to fire at him in a general election, should he win the nomination), but his presentation was ideal. A very good performance.

That leaves Newton 'Newt' Gingrich.

The American Gothic (for that is what he is - an incredible mixture of good and bad in both policy and his personality). Speaker Gingrich's personality is the opposite of mine - to him no position is unwinnable and he is certain that he is the person who can achieve victory. He could be surrounded by a legion of enemies - and be astonished at his good fortune in so many enemies falling into his grasp.

I should despise the man. After all on policy he is as mercurial as Romney (accept that Governor Romney adapts his positions to suit the audience he is trying to reach, the ultimate democrat, small "d" - whereas Gingrich is always restless, always seeking new ideas, even if they contradict some of his older ideas, and is not wildly interested in saying what he is expected to say as he has total confidence in his ability to convince people that he is right), and in personal conduct.....

Governor Romney appears to have no vices (none whatever), no human is without sin - but "Mitt" appears to be as close to being without sin as it is possible for a human being to be, even his changes of policy are a sincere effort to win the support of the voters, and he tends to keep specific promises he makes to voters if he wins an election. Whereas to list the personal failings of Speaker Gingrich would take quite some time - indeed there was so many things that Democrat attack dogs appear to be confused over what specifically to attack him about, especially as, under the normal rules of politics, a Republican who has committed adultery or taken money from Fannie Mae, or has used political connections for his own advantage in office (and on and on) should slink away in shame (for a Democrat to do these things, and much worse, is fine as far as the media are concerned - but Republicans are held to a different standard).

Yet Gingrich shows no shame whatever...

...His inner conviction that he is the solution to the crises facing the United States and the world is total - everything else is a petty matter of which he may formally repent, but does not really interest him and he treats those who are interested in such things with contempt.

"So I have taken your money and seduced your wife. What of it? Do you not understand that I am dealing with vital matters of war upon which our very survival depends? If you can not understand this, you are beneath contempt. Now get you gone - before I have you thrown from the castle wall".

Speaker Gingrich has never actually used these words - but he has come close to it. And complainers (even hard core evangelical Christians) tend to leave confused - even apologizing to him for their silly words.

So I support Romney and oppose Gingrich? Errrr - Romney has all the passion of a mass produced table. Gingrich is a leader - someone who plans and works for the deaths of the enemy. Even his desire for money is a personal one, he holds the Federal government machine (with its hundreds of thousands of dependants and so many millions of dependants) in total contempt and has done his whole life - money that goes to it (rather than to him personally - as just reward for his victories.... at least that is how he sees the matter) is utterly wasted in his eyes. And, of course, he is correct about that.

Governor Romney is what he says he is - a businessman who want to please the customers (the voters) and would do his best to carry on pleasing them.

Speaker Gingrich cares about the war - the real one.

This was made clear even in the summation that candidates made at the end of the Forum.

Everyone else said about how they wanted people to be happy and so on.

Gingrich said something different....

"Join with me and we destroy Barack Obama and his Saul Alinsky radicalism"...

It was not the promise of prosperity.

It was a summons to war. But unlike making the Middle East fluffy (or anything absurd like that) it was a summons to a war that is worth fighting - indeed a war that must be fought because the left are already fighting it.

The left claim that Gingrich is like Richard Nixon, an absurd comparison. Nixon was a weak man full of Quaker doubt (he even sweated when lying - astonishing for a politician), who spent his time aping the policies of the left (they like welfare state spending - I will spend more, and I will introduce price controls and go and crawl to Mao and ......) in a desperate effort to win the approval of people he knew despised him (as if their opinion mattered).

Gingrich reminded me of someone else: Alexander Borgia in the latest BBC series on the Borgias.

Under all the vices is total sincerity - an utter conviction in the rightness of the cause and need to destroy (totally destroy) the enemy. And the intelligence to plan their destruction.

How could I fail to warm to that?

(8)

James Taranto quotes Thomas Edsall, saying (among other things) this, about the kinds of votes that Democrats are now trying to get, and other votes that they are no longer bothering to try to get:

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment - professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists -

Edsall goes on to say that the whereas the Dems have now given up on the white workers, they are still eager to get all the non-white workers to vote for them.

One of the ways to understand the libertarian movement, it seems to me, is that it is an attempt to convert from their present foolishness all those "professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists" whom Edsall so takes for granted. It gives them the "social libertarianism" that they are so wedded to (even if they often don't get what this actually means), but it insists on the necessity of at least some – and in the current circumstances of economic crisis – a lot more - libertarianism in economic matters. Okay, libertarianism will never conquer these groups completely, but it threatens to at least divide them, into quite a few libertarians or libertarian-inclined folks and not quite so many idiots.

Also, demography is not destiny, when it comes to voting. People's "interests" are not necessarily what many party political strategists assume them to be.

The thing is, it is entirely rational to vote for more government jobs and more government hand-outs (a) if you are at the front of the queue for such things, and (b) if the supply of such things is potentially abundant, or not, depending on how you and everyone else votes. But, if the world changes, and you find yourself at the top of the list to have your job or your hand-outs taken away from you, in a world which is going to take these things away from a lot of people no matter how anybody votes, it makes sense to ask yourself different questions, and to consider voting for entirely different things. Like: lots of government cuts, so that you aren't the only one who suffers them, and so that the economy has a chance of getting back into shape in the future, soon enough for you to enjoy it.

The far side of the Laffer Curve is a rather strange place. Different rules apply.

Quite a lot of unemployed British people voted for Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, because they reckoned that Thatcher was a better bet to create the kind of country that might give them - and their children and their grandchildren - jobs in the future and a better life generally. (Whether or not they were right to vote for Thatcher is a different argument. My point is, this is what they did, and they were not being irrational.)

There is also the fact that how you vote in such circumstances of national and global crisis will be influenced, far more than in kinder and gentler times, by how you think. For a start, how bad do you think that the national or global crisis actually is? If you think it's bad, what policies do you think will get that economy back motoring again, in a way which has a decent chance of lasting? How you vote depends on how you think the world works. And how you think can change.

(4)

"“Green” will never be quite the same after Obama. When Solyndra and its affiliated scandals are at last fully brought into the light of day, we will see the logical reification of Climategate I & II, Al Gore’s hucksterism, and Van Jones’s lunacy. How ironic that the more Obama tried to stop drilling in the West, offshore, and in Alaska, as well as stopping the Canadian pipeline, the more the American private sector kept finding oil and gas despite rather than because of the U.S. government. How further ironic that the one area that Obama felt was unnecessary for, or indeed antithetical to, America’s economic recovery — vast new gas and oil finds — will soon turn out to be America’s greatest boon in the last 20 years. While Obama and Energy Secretary Chu still insist on subsidizing money-losing wind and solar concerns, we are in the midst of a revolution that, within 20 years, will reduce or even end the trade deficit, help pay off the national debt, create millions of new jobs, and turn the Western Hemisphere into the new Persian Gulf. The American petroleum revolution can be delayed by Obama, but it cannot be stopped."

- Victor Davis Hanson.

(18)

"At times, Gingrich, who's written more than 150 book reviews on Amazon.com, sounds like a guy who read way too much during a long prison stretch."

- Gene Healy. He's not a fan.

(20)

It's now two very loud something-I-read LOLs for me in three days. First there was this, and now this from ABC News, quoted in this piece by Mark Steyn:

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

There's going to be a new, painful era of self-reliance no matter which politicians get to preside over it.

(12)

This isn't so much a political movement as a form of historical reenactment. That's why the OWS protesters are so vague about what they want - because what they want is to be camping out at a mass 1968-style protest. There's little difference between them and Civil War reenactors, except that the Civil War guys understand that it's not real and the outcome of their mock battles won't have any effect. The 1968 reenactors down on Wall Street have the quaint belief that what they're doing is real.

- "Trimegistus" comments here. Like I said a week ago, farce repeating itself as farce.

(19)

Do you think that the people occupying Wall Street are all idiots, parasitical permanent students, studying nothing of value, and demanding everything in exchange for that nothing? See also the previous posting, and its reference to "the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement".

Maybe most of the occupiers are like that, but this guy seems to have grabbed the chance to say something much more sensible. Fractional reserve banking (evils of). Gold standard (superiority of). Bale-outs (wickedness of). Watch and enjoy.

What a laugh (in addition to being profoundly good) it would be if the biggest winners from these stupid demos were Ron Paul, and the Austrian Theory of Money and Banking.

(2)

"Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually non-existent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for."

- Mark Steyn

On the subject of Steve Jobs, here is - to my pleasant surprise - an excellent and insightful piece by BBC correspondent Justin Webb. Good for him.

(46)

Every so often a big news story develops, or at any rate a story that a lot of people are saying is a big story, and I miss the bus, so to speak. At first I ignore it, in this case because it seemed a small, local American matter of no great interest to me, and then, when I keep on being told, by people whom I respect, how significant the story is, the stories I do read don't make much sense to me, and often hardly any. Having failed to grasp the fundamentals of the matter at a time when that was what everyone who cared was talking about, I never from then on got told about them. In more recent reports, the fundamentals of the story are assumed, rather than spelt out again and again. Consequently, as far as this story is concerned, I lack any sense of the big picture, and each further burst of paintwork that someone adds to the big picture only adds to my confusion.

So it has been with "Gunwalker" (aka "Fast and Furious" which I assume is the name given to the operation in question by those responsible for setting it in motion), which is a story about American government officials selling guns to bad Mexicans, and other Mexicans (Good ones? Other bad ones?) being killed with these guns. I think. Instapundit seems to have linked to stories about this story on an almost daily basis, ever since it became a story, most recently here and here.

Rather than meander on at greater length about what (this being my entire point here) I do not understand, let me state my request simply. Could our ever industrious and informative commentariat take it in turns to try to explain this story to me, and why it matters, as if explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it. Because that, pretty much, is what I am.

I am particularly interested in what the possible motivations of the accused government officials might have been. What nefarious, illegally money-making motives might they have had? But also: What honourable but undiscussable motives might they have had? What greater good might they have been pursuing with the apparent evil that they seem to have been presiding over?

Instapundit is fond of comparing Gunwalker with Watergate, on account of nobody having been killed by Watergate, but on account of it having mortally wounded the Presidency concerned. He presents Gunwalker as a story involving, among other things, blatant mainstream media bias.

But I am also reminded a little bit of that Arms For The Nicaraguan Contras thing that Reagan got accused of. That never bothered me too much, because however illegally Reagan may have acted in obtaining the arms in question, arms for the Contras sounded good to me, given the people that the Contras were said to be fighting against, and who was supporting the people that the Contras were said to be fighting against. And it never bothered Reagan too much because Reagan was not only a genius in general but also a genius in particular at appearing to be the opposite of a genius, with no clue as to what his underlings got up to and therefore who couldn't be blamed for anything they did that was considered bad.

But, although apparently a fairly typical affair of state, this Contragate (?) matter was used by the then left-dominated media to badmouth Reagan. Could this be what the right-leaning alternative media are doing now with this Gunwalker thing? Using it as a stick to beat Obama with, when actually there are quite good reasons for what has been going on? Or are there extremely good reasons to bang on about this thing? These is not statements disguised as questions, they are actual questions. I do not know. But, I now find that I would like to.

(13)

"He just kept on trucking. When unable to get a haircut because the barber would not cut the hair of black people, he bought himself a pair of clippers and cut his own hair. He does so to this day. (Take that, John Edwards!) This is the same man who put himself through Morehouse College majoring in math, got a masters in computer science from Purdue (while improving academically), plotted rocket guidance for the Navy, started in business at Coca-Cola, then went on to turn around the fortunes of Philadelphia’s Burger King franchise, take over the aforementioned Godfather’s Pizza chain, become the head of the National Restaurant Association, be appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and host a radio show into the bargain. And, of course, he defeated the Big C."

Roger L Simon

I cannot see him in David Cameron's inner circle, somehow. For all my worries about where it is headed, the fact that someone like Mr Cain (has to be one of the best surnames in politics) can reach such levels says a lot about what the US is in terms of how people can surmount obstacles to build a successful business despite prejudice and the rest.

(14)

Interesting piece by Diana Hsieh about Republican candidate Gary Johnson. As far as I can tell, he's better than Ron Paul.

(10)

After parting from Jim Bennett at the Roosevelt Hotel, I had to get a shot of this classic bit of Capitalism. You feel wealthy just looking at it.

There is just a classy sexuality to the old Rolls that could never come out of the greyness of socialism.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Instead of staying underground and taking the S train, I walked back through midtown. I always enjoy just passing through Times Square. It is never the same twice. Today I was surprised at the big Xinhua News adverts on the highest and probably priciest of the computer screens which have come to dominate the place.

I sometimes wonder if I am in Times Square or crossed over into a Cyberpunk novel.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The screens now cover the entire surfaces of some buildings in constantly shifting images.

New York or Shanghai? The world just keeps shrinking.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

I had to stop and take a photo of this advert on the wall of the 42nd Street Metro station near the stairs down to the A Train platform. I should not have been surprised by it, given that the Palestinians were asking the UN to tell them they are a State. In my opinion, based on what I hope happens out in the solar system with some Libertarian settlement someday, you do not ask the UN to be a state. You tell them. Of course the other side of this coin is that you try to make friends with your neighbors because if you shoot at them in a Libertarian world, they *will* shoot back...

Is it really peace with Israel they want or is it Israel in pieces?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(0)

Jim Bennett was in town the last few days for a small and intense colloquium in which he had the opportunity to interact at length with Vaclav Klaus, the outspoken free-market President of Czechoslovakia. It was not until Saturday morning that we were able to get together and I arranged for Taylor Dinerman, one of our sometimes Samizdata writers, to join us for lunch. Given the nature of our conversation over burgers and Guinness I half expected to see leftish types holding their hands over their ears and running for the doors lest they hear free-market, pro-capitalist ideas. Why, one of our motley threesome was even an outspoken Republican. Oh, the Horror, the Horror!

Neither Jim nor I have had an opportunity to make the pilgrimage to the World Trade Center site in some years. I have less excuse than Jim on this matter as I pass through Manhattan so often. I just have not 'got around to it'.

There is no comparison between what I last saw and now. When you walk down Church Street and arrive at Vesey street the new building is just THERE. For me the mood for the visit was set by the passenger jet which just happened to pass by in the frame as I took one of my first series of photos.

This image set my mood for a somber remembrance.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The other buildings are equally fine and are rising quickly as well.

I just liked the framing...
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

We had some difficulty figuring out where to go for a view of the new museum but finally did find one.

First glimpse of the new museum.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

In the process we also found much better sight lines for the new complex.

When complete this is going to be a magnificent set of buildings.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

You are never far from something which reminds you of the gravitas and the sheer holiness of this place. Reverent songs will be sung on planets of far stars of the courage of the Fireman of New York.

We will never forget.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Although I took a number of photos with Jim in them, I liked the backdrop in this even though he was somewhat dwarfed by it. I do not think Jim will mind.

Author and pioneer space entrepreneur Jim Bennett.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

(13)

You could live decades in Manhattan and still be surprised by what its vibrant capitalism throws up at you. Last weekend I got an invite to go along to a party that was raising money for some charity cause, although I was not one of the ones there to be a high roller. Let us just say I got in via the journalists back door since one of the celebrity guests was a Fox News personality who was also a friend of my usual Manhattan drinking buddy. It should come as no surprise to long time readers that when in New York I chill with journalists, spacers and the odd Irish musician.

I knew it was going to be interesting before I met up with Taylor Dinerman at the usual media waterhole, but on the some thirty block walk we were lost in discussions about typical fighter pilot behavior with the fair sex, space policy and which foot Paul Krugman is currently inserting. I was expecting something exceptional but when I finally walked over to the railing of the rooftop party I was not quite prepared for a night time view of New York like this. It is really different when you can see the city laid out in front of you in every direction and yet you are close enough to be struck by the full three dimensions. I can hardly imagine what waking up to this every day must be like, but I am glad to know there are people out there who do.

A Northerly view of the Chrysler building and surrounds.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The party had the standard accoutrements. If you simply looked at the bar man serving drinks from a table by the core wall, or at the disk jockey in the corner, it would look like the standard parties we have all attended. The DJ laid down a modern sound track to insure all would eat, drink, be merry and network till they dropped. I was of course doing just that. I handed out Immortal Data Corporation business cards to all and sundry while keeping up my energy from the passing trays of hors d'oeuvres. I do not think I had a repeat taste all evening.

The disk jockey kept the place rocking, or whatever you call it with dance music.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Being the spacer that I am, my actual first photograph of the night was the stunning image of a fall moon rising over the East River from a southeasterly direction. A mere photograph cannot come close to what the eye took in. Believe me, this poor small subset of photons does not come close to doing it justice.

The view of the moon was even more amazing in person.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Later on, after several drinks and much mixing I decided to temporarily break from the crowd, and that was when I discovered the flat was even more spectacular than I had thought. This is where Tony Stark would live if he owned a flat in Manhattan. No doubt about it.

This is not one of Tony Stark's residences. But it should be.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Taylor and I mostly talked with media folk, although there were lots of financial types there as well, with some of which we also spoke. I knew Taylor was fluent in French and Hebrew. Tonight I found him talking at length in German to a businessman and doing the occasional phrase in Mandarin. We were also joined by James Taranto of the Wall Street journal after he returned from a quiet far corner where he did a radio show call in to express his opinion of the latest Krugman piece at the New York Times.

One of the more fun people I spoke to was a woman who started her career as an NPR reporter assigned to Belfast. She was there in the seventies, well before my time, but we still had much common knowledge to share as she was a lover of Irish Traditional music and I think it fair to say that a few of my close friends in Ireland can play or sing a note or two of that genre.

I was there with journalist and occasional Samidatista contributor Taylor Dinerman.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It was a very international crowd, although it is sometimes hard to tell in New York. Someone who you think looks foreign may come out with a strong New York accent when they say hello... or they may speak with a strong accent from some odd corner of the world. You simply cannot tell.

Late in the evening Taylor and I were sipping our drinks and talking Chinese politics with a VP of Tang Dynasty TV, Mike Chen. He is very much the all American himself but is able to travel and mix in China and the three of us were off in a Samizdata like discussion of China's economy, ethnic strife problems, what happens when the North Korean penny drops, why China is building forces, what sort of aircraft India is buying and why...

I think it rather suitable that drinks in hand, we were looking down upon the United Nations Building from our high capitalist perch.

I have always looked down on the UN as an institution. But from here I really did look down on it.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Oh, and we had a chance to talk with Rita Cosby, an old friend of Taylor's from Fox News, before he and I and James went off for our rather late dinner at McFadden's Bar.

Despite the Corona's, the wine, the rum and cokes, and the Johnny Walker I had already downed, or perhaps because of them, I decided after my dinner pint of Guinness that I could not let that poor pint feel lonely. So when they headed home, I headed further down Second Avenue to an old hangout of mine. The rest of the night (and pints) is another story and I was off duty as your Samizdata On The Scene reporter.

Slante!

(4)

I have been in Manhattan for the last few weeks and will remain several more. Although very busy with work for my startup company and earning enough to cover my daily Subway sandwich, I have found time for photos and a bit of fun as well.

I was in Manhattan during the 9/11 remembrance, but I only went to Times Square as getting around in the city was a bit painful at times. On the Friday before the anniversary, a full 1 train I took for an afternoon meeting went out of service for no apparent reason. The engineer told us to get off and then left us standing on a platform up in the hundreds of the Upper West. I skipped the next train as there was no one with a large enough shoe horn and vegetable oil to squeeze me on board.

On Saturday, Manhattan had more roadblocks than Belfast City Centre 1989... although there was a considerably more relaxed constabulary and no automatic weapons in sight.

I did not actually see the new building until this Thursday. I decided to get off the subway early and walk down 7th Avenue through Greenwich and the East Village since I was not in a rush for a fixed time meeting. I did not notice it at first... the new building was directly in front of me but it did not register for quite some time because it is not yet the sort of overawing magnitude of the old Twin Towers. Once I did realize though, I could see that although already a large building, it has a long way to go and is going to be a very large upraised middle finger to the Jihadi's.

It has a long way to go but with an eventual height of 1776 feet it is a message to the world writ large in concrete and steel.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

It is just our simple, quaint, un-nuanced American way of saying 'Up yours Osama"; our way of telling the Jihadi's they have failed and that they will always fail. We will track them down no matter where they hide and no matter how long it takes. And we will kill them.

Meanwhile, we will rebuild and go back to our proper business of making money.

(12)

Apropos that Kevin Dowd speech which Brian Micklethwait wrote about earlier, the name Paul Krugman came up when Prof. Dowd pointed to the absurdity of calls for ever more money-printing, government spending and debt as a way to solve our current economic malaise. Some readers will remember that extraordinary comment by Krugman a few days back when he suggested that policymakers should act as if they believed the Earth was under some sort of attack from space aliens. And of course he's argued that the Great Depression was ended by WW2 (it wasn't, or not in the way Krugman suggests). And a day or so ago, he seems determined to cause dangerously high blood pressure problems by comments such as this, apropos the commemorations of the 9/11 mass murders:

"What happened after 9/11--and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not--was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons."

This is unhinged. Whoever Bernie Kerik is (information gratefully received, Ed), I don't think that you can really say that the Mayor of New York was "cashing in" on the immolation of the southern part of Manhattan. If you want an account of how Guiliani and his colleagues dealt with those terrible days, here is an interview he did with Steve Forbes. As for GWB, I don't think there was some crazy, cynical exploitation of a terrible event although some politicians, Democrat as well as Republican, used the understandably heightened fears about security to hit certain civil liberties, expand government power, and the like. Now by all means criticise the policies pursued at the time by governments in the US and overseas, and goodness knows, libertarians of various hues haven't been shy on that score, but I detected no immediate "cashing in" on the crisis. When events of such enormity occur, any reaction from a politician, sensible or not, could with hindsight be slagged off as "cashing in". Suppose Bush/whoever had done nothing other than mount a police operation, hold a few ceremonies of condolence and leave it at that, or go in for lots of vacuous platitudes. No doubt Prof. Krugman would now be foaming about the complacency of such a stance.

Krugman is a man who, let's not forget, was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, and it would be nice if a certain gravitas could come with such a position. When I try to recall the way that Milton Friedman, that other Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about world affairs to great effect for Newsweek magazine - succeeding the great Henry Hazlitt - there is simply no comparison in tone as well as content. The hatred that seems to pour out of Krugman is actually quite worrying. What is eating him?

(25)

One thing comes through to me as I hear the stories from those doing their part for the remembrance. Far from destroying America, the lowly jihadi's have created a powerful religious symbol. The World Trade Center has become a site of enormous power. Tiny pieces of metal from the site have been forged into religious icons. They are a part of a warship, a part of wind chimes for a church. They are items treated with great awe and reverence, perhaps as much as were bits of the 'one true cross' to generations of the distant past.

To the Jihadi's and to those who think they will one day bring Shari'a to America, I say, "You have not only failed. You have created icons of greater power than your Mecca."

I will go further. Two thousand years from now you and your icons will be remembered only in dusty historical archives. The World Trade Center site will still be there and will have gained a patina of age and legend, a tale of demons who came from out of the East and carried death, destruction and great evil with them as they battered a brave and honorable people.

But the more evil they did, the more the forces of good grew, until one day the hand of all peoples were raised against them and they were cast back into the lowest depths of hell and provinces of the damned from whence they had come.

Jihadi's, you are done. Your dreams are dead. Your followers are dead or will soon be dead. Your beliefs will be forgotten. You have made us stronger and you and all about you are dust in the winds of time.

I do not have to curse you. You have cursed yourselves.

(6)

"I wish Warren Buffett would emulate his father, Howard Buffett, the late Congressman from Nebraska. Howard Buffett decried the move to the welfare state. He wanted to end it. Also, he wanted the U.S. to get out of the Korean war and move to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, he was the campaign manager for Senator Robert A. Taft when Taft ran against Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. I have a proposal for Warren that could cut tax rates for those whom he claims to care about and, at the same time, save having to raise tax rates on him and other rich people: get out of all the wars, close all the foreign bases, and save about $500 billion a year. His father would have liked that."

- David Henderson.

(52)

This piece, about how people are moving from states in the USA governed according to lefty principles, towards states governed by somewhat less lefty principles, reminded me of this piece I recently did here, about people moving from country to country in the world. As in the world as a whole, so in the USA.

Come the next round of elections, the numbers of Americans on the move, and the unmistakable direction in which they are moving, will be hard for the lefties to explain away.

In the emerging presidential campaign, it’s easy to see a version of these questions dominating the debate. Why should anyone choose to endorse liberal, Democratic policies when a single year (2009-10) saw 880,000 residents packing up their belongings to place Barack Obama’s Illinois in their rear-view mirror, while 782,000 new arrivals helped drive the robust economy in Rick Perry’s Texas?

California, so the piece says, lost two million people in the years 2009 and 2010. The promised land no more, it would seem.

I'd be interested to hear what American readers make of Governor Rick Perry. Will I like him, as and when I learn more about him? I've read people saying that Perry sounds too much like President Bush Junior. But I'm thinking that people are in the mood to listen to what is actually being said, next time around, rather than fussing about the mere manner in which it is said. Or is that being too optimistic?

(44)

As I mentioned earlier, the TV networks are giving this wall-to-wall coverage. TJ Holmes on CNN is repeatedly calling it a "monster storm", and everyone is desperately trying not to mention that it has been downgraded to a category one hurricane, the weakest category in the Saffir-Simoson hurricane scale.

Hurricane Irene is political, as well as meteorological.

- Matthew Wells

(3)

A graph on the growth of the regulatory state, courtesy of the National Review Corner blog.

(49)

This person at the Daily Caller appears - with some justification I might add - to take a dim view of Ron Paul, the US congressman and Republican primary contender for the presidential ticket known as "Dr No" on account of his saying no to various government measures and enterprises. He is, famously or infamously, a hardline anti-interventionist in foreign affairs, so much so that his views might be dubbed as almost pacifist. He has called for accountability by the Federal Reserve, and argues that institution ought to be closed down. But he has feet of clay, and this article I link to, which is written in a sort of furious burst of anger, focuses on those flaws and makes light of Paul's merits. In particular, the article unfairly misrepresents the Austrian school of economics and its methodology. It also seems to smear libertarianism on issues like legalising prostitution and drugs, ignoring the obvious arguments that criminalising consensual acts has created huge costs for society.

All the way down at the bottom of a comment thread prompted by this article, is large item by commenter Michael P. Ivy. It is so good that I reproduce it here. There is the odd typo, but it is worth quoting in the raw:

I am always amused by wannabe economists, who call themselves capitalists, but, are unable to embrace or understand the true axioms of capitalism when push comes to shove. Austrian economics spins on essentially to axioms: (1) that there is no free lunch, and (2) all human action is purposeful action motivated by the individual's (not society's) desire to move from a less to a more desired state. These are self evident truths, much like the "more is preferred to less" axiom of the neoclassical school. You butcher Rothbard without understanding his work and particularly his crititique of the neo classical school of wackjob indifference curve analysis and welfare economics. The notion that an individual can be indifferent between two different states of the world without ever actually exercising choice is not a reliable basis for recommending redistribution measures of the Kaldor/Hicks kind. Even Samuelson so much as admitted that it is impossible to derive a social welfare function without making assumptions about the marginal utility of money et al (1951).

The problem with Keynes' economics, is that it must rob resources from one sector of the economy to furnish another and it consumes resources in the process. Moreover, in doing so, the government does so without the knowledge of the benefits that those resources procure that only those individuals holding those resources...know. This is the problem with any measure of government involvement in economics. That they suffer from fiscal illusion (not my money so it don't matter) is one thing, but, they effectively create an environment of uncertainty by destroying productive incentives. Incentives do matter after all and I have yet to see the mathematical models of the neo-classicals actually recognize this and quantify them. The fact is, is that you can't unless you invoke a value judgement of the Keynesian/Samuelson kind.

Welfare economics has never worked and it never will work, for as M. Thatcher so plainly points out, "Socialism is a great idea until you run out of other people's money". The statement captures two notions: (1) if their actually was a multiplier effect on GDP from government spending, don't you think this would be a permanent line item of the government's income/expense statement?, and (2) the No Free Lunch axiom is underscored by the fact that since government is an unproductive entity that consumes resources for its existence without actually creating anything of value is that eventually the productivity of the market is unable to keep up with and compensate for the unproductive actions of government. True capitalists understand this.

And if you think the market is unable to coordinate itself with respect to defense, innovation, policing of private property, mass transit, health, education, indeed all the things you think we require a central planner for, then you obviously have not bothered to school yourself on the opportunities that can and will present themselves if productive individuals are left alone and allowed to participate. Finally, I see that your article is riddled throughout with incorrect and obnoxious assertions about economic theory presented by Rothbard, Mises et al. (semi-autistic dogmatism). The fact is, is that there is nothing dogmatic about the Austrian school. Its core tenet is that the best production, exchange, and coordination of resources occurs when individuals are left free and unfettered to choose. And by whatever math you might care to invoke, given the level of debt ($16T) incurred by the Welfare State, I'd say you're pointing the dogmatic finger in the entirely wrong direction. THAT is what is dogmatic....doing the same illogical, nonsensical thing over and over again (at the people's expense), and expecting a different result every time. So before you decide to write another diatribe on someting you don't know much about, I'd recommend that you review Rothbard...again, and in particular his piece on "Towards a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics". There is nothing dogmatic, hairy scary or offensive about it.

Very good.

Ron Paul is very much a mixed bag, and I would not vote for him, and I am troubled by some of his views. But the fact has to be faced that almost unique in Western politics, he has put forward a classical liberal agenda on certain issues, and done so consistently. And he has managed, despite his age, to touch a lot of young people. There is a lesson here somewhere.

(8)

Sit down. I am about to astonish you. Via the Drudge Report, I found this: Seattle's 'green jobs' program a bust.

A green jobs scheme has failed. Over the shock yet? I've always meant to ask one of the enthusiasts for these schemes why they do not also support a job-creating proposal to forbid the generation of electricity by any means other than men on treadmills, but I have not done so for fear of giving them ideas.

I was lying earlier. I am not surprised at all and do not expect you to be. The best that any government "job creation" scheme can ever do is "create" a few jobs in some specific place or profession while the spotlight is on that place or profession - at the cost of destroying the wealth that actually creates long term jobs, but in a conveniently spread out way so no one much notices. Greens strive to convince us that there are external costs paid by the community as a whole when jets fly or factories produce geegaws. "Look at the whole picture," they urge. "Don't be bedazzled by the transitory benefit accruing to a few and fail to see the larger but subtler harm being borne by the many." They have a point. I wish they could apply it to 'job creation'.

Apparently, however, this Seattle scheme was even a bust in its own terms. It withered even before the spotlight moved on.

The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle's numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

That was not the only part of this article rich in irony. Look at this:

"Who's benefitting from this program right now – it doesn't square with what the aspiration was," said Howard Greenwich, the policy director of Puget Sound Sage, an economic-justice group. He urged the city to revisit its social-equity goals.

....Greenwich said the energy retrofit market has turned out to be extremely complicated, with required hammering out of job standards, hiring practices, wages and how best to measure energy benefits.

Market? Where was the market there? The things that have "turned out" (talking as if it all happened by chance) to be "extremely complicated" (that I can believe) are the workings of the interlocking tangle of government rules and protections that people like him and his "economic justice" group advocate. Job standards. Hiring practices. How best to measure energy benefits on some government form. It is sad for all those whose hopes are dashed by these schemes, like the mugs here in the UK who trained as assessors to issue Energy Performance Certificates, or like the unfortunates who got burnt metaphorically and literally in the great Australian insulation debacle. (Not surprisingly, Tim Blair, chronicler of that saga, also has a post about this Seattle fandango. Mine was started first, though.) But what a joke when the very thing that reduces the progressive silver bullet to a twist of mangled brass is... all the stuff that progressives wanted all along.

On second thoughts, I need not worry about giving them dangerous ideas. The great 'men on treadmills' job creation scheme would never get moving. It would have to be persons on treadmills regardless of gender, age, religious belief or sexual orientation for a start. And what about disabled access?

(15)

Instapundit, whom I revere for his relentless, industrial strength linkage (happy tenth anniversary Professor), has been in the habit, in recent times, of linking to pieces about how Americans are getting ever more disappointed by President Obama. But, as I am sure that Instapundit himself appreciates, the disappointment with Obama coming from Obama's own former supporters is not because Obama's preferred economic policies are now correctly understood by those ex-supporters to be disastrously destructive, but rather because Obama seems insufficiently determined and skilful in imposing these policies upon Americans who would prefer relatively sensible economic policies.

Obama's leftist critics are not disappointed with Obama because they have come, reluctantly and through bitter experience, to share the opinion of his policies held by the Tea Party. Rather are such critics disappointed with Obama because he is not crushing the Tea Party, but instead haggling with them, and doing so, as these critics see it, with insufficient skill and nastiness.

Yes, Obama still seems to believe in the same daft policies that these leftist critics favour. But where is the passionate commitment to folly that he persuaded them he felt when he was getting elected, and that they still yearn for? Perhaps someone else (Hillary Clinton?), with greater energy, industriousness and human warmth, could lead America over the cliff with the proper amount of dash and determination, instead of Obama just leading the herd from somewhere in among it.

One should not, in short, confuse the fact - if fact it be - that President Obama is now being thought by ever more Americans to be doing a bad job, with the claim that all of America is coming to its senses in the matter of what it should do about its current economic woes, or what will happen to it, and to the world, if it does not do what it should do.

(3)

Notice how the loudest complaints about “broken politics” come from those who lost the debate. It’s understandable for sore losers to rage against the machine. But there’s no need for the rest of us to parrot their petulance.

- Charles Krauthammer.

(12)

Obama declares US is still a AAA nation, in his regard. Like when i would try & convince my parents that my C+ in math was pretty much a B-

- Mark Ronson (via Twitter)

(24)

I see that some Democrat politicians in the USA have taken to calling Tea Party politicians terrorists.

I wonder if this is wise on their part. It is clearly wrong and nasty; that's a given. What I now wonder is whether such insults will be politically damaging to the Tea Party, or rather to any politician who uses such wrong and nasty language. Is this some kind of concerted effort by Democrat bigmouths to badmouth the Tea Party? Or are they just very angry, and individually blowing off steam? Being the optimist I am, I suspect the latter, or that if it is more the former, it may be a serious miscalculation.

Recently, in a comment here (I apologise for forgetting to which posting this comment was attached and for being unable to supply the link that the commenter did supply – perhaps he or some other commenter can rectify that and I will be able to add the link (by turning those last two words blue)) to a theory that once a "convinced minority" (I think that was the phrase) reaches about ten per cent of the population, its success from that moment on cascades, and soon part or even all of the agenda that this minority is pushing soon becomes a given of conventional discussion and debate. (I presume that this book was involved.)

This makes a lot of sense to me. I think the key to such transformations of opinion or behaviour are that individual members of the population, even though mostly not themselves already members of the convinced minority in question, are almost all of them quite closely connected to people who are.

The Tea Party, for the purposes of such analysis as this, doesn't just mean all the good (I think) people who are spending every spare hour and spare dime they have forcing, by impeccably democratic methods, Tea Party opinions upon that great and greedy bi-partisan tribe of Washington tax-and-spenders. I include also the (much(?) greater) group of people who, when they hear a Tea Party opinion about government spending, government debt and so on, nod their heads and say: "Yeah that's right. They may be … (insert insult of choice involving religion, science, abortion, witchcraft, guns, four-wheel-drive vehicles, etc.) … but these people are right about government spending. It's too much. It's got to be controlled."

And, I'm guessing, a lot of Americans now know people like that. A lot are even related to such people. They may not agree with such sentiments themselves, but they know, and like, maybe even love, people who do now believe such things. So, when some Democrat politician calls a Tea Party politician a terrorist, a great many average Americans respond, not by making a note to not join the Tea Party and to agree about how mad they are when next they come up in conversation, but rather, by reacting with a thought like: "Hey, that's my Uncle Freddy you're talking about! He likes those Tea Party people. He may be a bit of an old grump, but he ain't no terrorist sympathiser. He drove a truck in Gulf War 1. Last Christmas he bought me an iPhone. He's okay. Take it back!"

To put the above story another way, the key to all this is that once the population as a whole starts to have its own personal face-to-face take on what it thinks about that convinced minority with its previously off-the-chart-of-respectability opinions, no amount of political and media insults can change how they see things. They now have their own personal versions of the story, and they ain't going to be told what to think by a mere politician on TV.

If that's right, and if all this convinced minority stuff does now apply to the Tea Party, then bigmouth Democrats calling their Tea Party enemies "terrorists" is cause not for fear, but for rejoicing, among all those of us who want the finances of the US government to be something vaguely like sane in the years to come. Such insults are not evidence of an argument being or about to be won by such Dems; it is evidence that they are at least beginning seriously to lose this argument, and that they are starting to realise this. They know that a great many people will feel personally insulted by all this terrorist talk, but, … Grrrrrrrr!!!! What the hell is happening to the world, when a politician can't spend other people's money any damn way he likes? Screw the damn world!!! Screw you all, you bastards!!! When Dems call Tea Partiers terrorists, they are being honest, in the sense that they are truly saying what is on their angry, confused, wrong, nasty minds.

Does the above make any sense? It does to me. Or am I being, as I so often am, too optimistic?

By the way, while typing in this posting (on an unfamiliar computer) I noticed that I had at one point put the "Teat" Party. But actually, I quite like that phrase, to describe all the kind of people who think that Tea Partiers really are terrorists.

(6)

This paragraph from a good posting by Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review's Corner blog, applies not just to the US, but also to the UK:

"The strangest thing about the current paradox of cash-flush companies and little or no economic growth is the administration’s puzzlement over the lethargy — as if no one outside Washington ever listened to what the administration has said or noticed what they have done the last three years."

Exactly. I'd also add to VDH's list of things that have stymied recovery: the still-lingering and damaging impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on things such as initial public offerings and the foolish FASB tampering with share option payments that have crimped venture capital startup businesses. (I can, by the way, recommend this book by Dale Halling about why US entrepreneurship is stalling - it controversially argues that a key problem has been the erosion of patent law in the US, an argument that is bound to get some libertarian opponents of IP excited).

VDH's points apply in Britain, too, such as what he says about demonisation of some businesses, as well as things like bailouts, Green regulations and so on. Of course, a key problem here is the European Union and all the red tape that comes from that.

Regime uncertainty, if I can use that term, is a big problem. We have a tax authority (HMRC), given the power to decide, as it goes along, what constitutes tax "avoidance", so that avoidance is now seen as wrong, as is tax evasion. This relates to a wider problem of uncertainty. Even the daftest tax laws are more tolerable if they are predictable. The problems get even worse, though, if officials have the ability to retrospectively decide that this or that business practice is wrong and should be shut down. Our tax code remains one of the longest and most complex in the world.

We need far fewer laws, and those that remain should be simple, easy to understand and enforce. Sometimes though, doing things the simple way seems to be so hard.

(14)

American government spending will be higher in 2011 than it was in 2010.

The deal is one great big shining lie.

- Paul Marks

(27)

"Little does Barack Obama understand that he has forever branded himself as an incompetent and failure. His narcissism and lifelong history of receiving public adulation will not allow him to comprehend the damage. He does not understand that now few will listen to his speeches, no matter how well delivered; that few will believe what he is saying, as he has lied and obfuscated the facts so often. Many world leaders have already arrived at the conclusion that Barack Obama is a leader that cannot be trusted, the citizens of the United States are beginning to understand that he is a man without a core set of principles thus incapable of guiding the ship of state. The media, increasingly realizing their culpability in the nation's current state of affairs, has begun to ask more penetrating questions and grudgingly question Obama's fitness for office. Columnists once infatuated with his ability to deliver a speech and skin color have finally begun to admit their error. The Left has become more open in their criticism, as they now understand that the hero upon whom they vested so much hope is a hollow shell."

- Steve McCann.

(22)

Ideas matter, and especially to intellectuals like President Obama. He is not a rigid ideologue and is capable of flexible maneuvering. But his interpretation of history, his attitude toward sovereignty, and his confidence in multilateral institutions have shaped his views of American power and of American leadership in ways that distinguish him from previous presidents. On Libya, his deference to the UN Security Council and refusal to serve as coalition leader show that he cares more about restraining America than about accomplishing any particular result in Libya. He views Libya and the whole Arab Spring as relatively small distractions from his broader strategy for breaking with the history of U.S. foreign policy as it developed in the last century. The critics who accuse Obama of being adrift in foreign policy are mistaken. He has clear ideas of where he wants to go. The problem for him is that, if his strategy is set forth plainly, most Americans will not want to follow him.

- The Obama Doctrine Defined by Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey

(9)

At this point it might be useful to clarify precisely what the dispute concerns. The question is not whether the federal government should grow. As Reason's Nick Gillespie pointed out a few days ago, nearly nobody in Washington has actually proposed shrinking the leviathan. To the contrary, the dispute is whether to raise federal spending from the current $3.8 trillion to $4.7 trillion over the next decade (the Paul Ryan plan) - or to $5.7 trillion (the Obama plan). Bear in mind that those increases would come on top of one of the fastest expansions of federal spending in U.S. history. When President Obama took office, the budget stood at $2.9 trillion. Two. Point. Nine.

- A. Barton Hinkle

So the USA is screwed... and does this remind you of something?

(18)

Reading about the arrest of what appears to have been an extremist planning an attack on Ft Hood, Texas, I was struck by the contrast with the Oslo attack last weekend.

Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, was arrested Wednesday after making a purchase at Guns Galore in Killeen, Texas, the same ammunition store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased the weapons he allegedly used to gun down 13 people and wound 32 others on Nov. 5, 2009.

The point being that a legal gun shop owner is more likely to call the police than a black market arms supplier would. Now if we could only get all the gun rights people in America to realise the advantages of legal outlets for drugs as well...

(10)

A few years back, I proposed an alternative budget for the UK. IIRC, it involved cutting taxes by a quarter, spending by a third. Even assuming no increase in economic growth (that would boost sales tax revenue), this would have created a massive budget surplus that could have cut the UK national debt by over 10%.

I opposed default then for what I still think were good reasons: first, many private individuals and institutions bought bonds in good faith; but second, because the UK nearly had to surrender to Nazi Germany in 1940, and had refused to confront Hitler when war was still not necessary partly because of the consequences of a partial default on war bonds from the First World War. In essence, appeasement was the necessary policy of 1930s British governments because they could not expect to borrow so had to pay in gold and whatever the British public could be persuade/forced to raise (yes I know pacifism was big too, but the financial imperative meant that it was the only option).

Whether we take an interventionist view or not, the re-militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 was the moment when, without firing a shot, Hitler could have been stopped.

What does this have to with events in Europe and the USA today? In short, I think the financial situation is so dire, and the political solutions on offer so inadequate, that default is now the only credible outcome. I therefore conclude that it needs to happen very soon, rather than after wasting more resources on more "bail-outs."

We will just have to take our chances that no one decides to, invade the Falklands, or grab Gibraltar, or build nuclear weapons and give them to terrorists, or blow up US embassies. I explain why below.

The US debate on "raising the debt ceiling" misses an essential point. The credit ratings of many governments are on the brink of being downgraded unless there is an improvement in the debt/asset ratio or there is clear evidence of economic recovery without inflation. Neither of these outcomes is clearly at hand.

To increase the debt ceiling by any amount merely worsens the over-borrowing of the past two decades. If anything, the debt ceiling should be cut not raised. There are exactly four ways of doing this: default, print "money," cut spending or raise taxes.

As Barack Obama put it so eloquently during his US presidential election campaign: "raising taxes in a recession is stupid." Putting up rates will probably not raise revenue because the people and businesses that are driven to bankruptcy will more than offset any marginal increase in revenue.

Cuts is spending are almost impossible: contractual obligations have been made, any cuts to public sector pension payments will be challenged and, judges being so-to-retire-public-sector-persons, they might not interpret the law the way spending cutters would like. The sad truth is that the commitments cannot be met, but only a default will prove the legal way for governments to stop spending.

Printing "money," is actually the current strategy, and it looks OK, until inflation kicks in. When it takes a wheelbarrow of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread and cash registers have to count pounds by the hundred million, such a policy could lead to political instability and revolution.

I've outlined two problems with defaulting: bondholders are punished and in a real emergency, the government would not be able to raise money. There is a third problem, which is an opportunity: once a default has been called, the interest rates for government bonds have to go up, a lot.

This normally bad thing means that entire government programs will simply have to stop because the money to pay for it cannot be raised. It means that private borrowing becomes harder too, at least for those whose credit ratings are not good. But it also means people quickly have incentives to sort out their own over-borrowing and to start saving: those savings accounts offering 10% suddenly look quite attractive.

It is by cutting excessive debt and re-building deposits that the financial system can re-build itself.

I'm therefore praying for the most childish behaviour from the American politicians and for someone to say "No" in Europe to propping up the Greek welfare state.

(3)

A reminder, the problem isn’t the debt ceiling - it’s the debt, ...

- Rand Simberg

(17)

There is an interesting discussion at the Cafe Hayek blog about how much it matters that Americans don't currently save very much. Well, given that real interest rates (taking into account inflation) are negative, and that holding cash means real wealth declines, it is not surprising that real savings have been steadily eroded. The blog's author is certainly right about this point, however:

"If saving is good for Americans, the nationality or place of residence of the savers whose saved resources are invested in the American economy is irrelevant. If saving is good for Americans, then given Americans’ saving rate, savings invested in the American economy by non-Americans are a blessing – a blessing that is bigger the greater is the amount of this foreign savings and investment in the American economy."

"Yes, we Americans would be even wealthier materially if we Americans saved even more – wealthier materially both as a product of many or all of us having larger financial portfolios, and as a product of the economy of which we are a part having an even greater volume of total output. But for this very reason we Americans are made wealthier also when foreigners save more and invest their savings here, regardless of how much or how little Americans save and invest."

Of course if I can nit-pick, I would make the point that when, say, Chinese investors bought oodles of US government bonds in the years leading up to the credit crunch of 2008, it helped drive US long-term interest rates even lower, hence encouraging even more US domestic consumer spending and borrowing, a process we know went horribly wrong. (The main culprit in all this was the Federal Reserve, not China, I should point out). Of course, if non-domestic savers are channeling those savings into investments that yield a positive future return, such as investments in technological innovations, new products and services, then that's all to the good.

If we were to move away from fiat money to a commodity-based monetary system and 100 per cent reserve banking for demand deposits, then a savings culture would be encouraged considerably. At present, persuading people to save is understandably hard because people, even if they are not hard-money zealots like me, smell that there is something rotten with our money.

In some ways, I see parallels between the loss of faith in paper money and the declining credibility of the AGW crowd. I think it was Brian Micklethwait of this blog who said something along the lines that we have had junk science, and now junk money. There is only so much junk that human civilization can stand.

(35)

When people burned to death in the UK because first responders failed to do their job, I considered it the UK Socialist disease which we all know has progressed to a stage that is nearly terminal. I did not believe such a thing could happen in the US. I did not think we produced cowards of such grandious scale.

But we do.

First responders, both Police and Fireeman let a suicidal man drown because the water was too cold and they might have got a chill.

Awww. Those poor little children. The got their pretend fire and police helmets for Christmas some years back and never realized that real first responders have to do very dangerous things and put their lives on the line to save people. Their job is to risk death that others might live.

I hope the people of Alameda County fire all of them and hire some adults. I suspect there are quite a lot of military Vets who have the guts and determination to actually do the job.

I wish we could kick them out of the USA. They are an embarrassment.

(10)

As briefly mentioned in a post below, people - a lot of them who seemed to be classical liberal stirrers like yours truly - gathered in the sun-lit gardens in front of the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, to witness the unveiling of a statue of Ronald Reagan. I like this editorial in CityAM by Allister Heath, who signs off with these two paragraphs. His comment about JF Kennedy is very much on point:

"In fact, Reagan wasn’t even that original. The best exposition of how tax cuts can reinvigorate an economy remains Democratic president John F Kennedy’s spectacular 1964 reforms, which reduced the top rate from 94 per cent to 70 per cent (Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, of course, but his tax cuts were agreed prior to his death). Two years later, the federal tax haul was 11 per cent higher than forecast: more people made more money and their taxable efforts more than compensated for the reduced tax rate. Kennedy had been proved spectacularly right when he had argued that “an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”

"In 1981, Reagan reduced the top rate of income tax to 50 per cent. In 1986, he cut it again to 28 per cent. Of course, this benefited the richest disproportionately – but they nevertheless ended up shouldering a greater tax burden and paying for a greater proportion of public spending. The share of tax raised from the best-paid 1 per cent jumped from 19 per cent in 1980 to 25.6 per cent in 1990. The moral: to squeeze more tax out of the rich, lower the top tax thresholds. We learnt that in Britain starting in 1979 – but with top earners now taxed at 52 per cent and millions paying 42 per cent, the lessons have been forgotten again. Britain needs to discover its very own Ronald Reagan, a hopeful, optimistic, pro-individual liberty, pro-growth politician with an uncanny ability to communicate. Any takers?"

Well said. In a spirit of fairness, though, I link to an interview with Reagan's former budget director, David Stockman, who is a fierce critic of the deficits (he also strikes me as somewhat embittered). I am not sure if his call for tax rises in the absence of any serious spending cuts is going to find any welcoming audience. I also think Stockman is far too dismissive of the fact that because of the Reagan supply-side tax cuts, revenues boomed.

As Heath says, hero-worship is something any genuine liberal should avoid. The list of heroes in public affairs is, as far as I can judge, short. Reagan is one of them.

(75)

It bemuses me that a certain type of commentator will often - sometimes rightly - be angered at the over-reach of Western powers' foreign policy but be quieter about other, less obvious, intrusions if they happen when a more leftist government happens to be in power. And a lot of this sort of double-standard occurs with the United States.

Such critics appear to have been silent on the following issue: under the current Democrat presidency of Mr Obama, the US last year passed a stunningly badly crafted piece of legislation, known as FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). The law was passed at a time of what can best be described as hysteria about the amount of money that Americans were allegedly stashing abroad in places such as Switzerland, the Bahamas, the Caymans, and so forth. The major governments of the world, such as the US, Germany and UK, fondly imagine that there is, so to speak, a huge pot of gold that got lost down the back of the sofa.

What FATCA does is require any financial institution that is believed to deal with expat US citizens and Green Card holders to provide a great deal of information to the Internal Revenue Service. In other words, all manner of financial institutions, ranging from big banks to small investment boutiques, must prove to the Internal Revenue Service's satisfaction that they have not got US citizens/GC holders on their books if they want to be unmolested by the IRS's powers. If they have such clients or invest into the US stock market, etc, they must provide huge amounts of additional reporting data to the US. "Foreign Financial Institutions" must report investors who are taxable in the US to the US tax authorities. If they fail to do so, they pay a 30 per cent withholding tax. And proving that someone is, or might be, a US citizen might be hard, particularly if that person has been living outside the US for decades, and there is not much paperwork going back, say, 30 years.

This is a quite stunning extension of the IRS's power around the world, affecting European, Asian, African, Latin American and other regions' banks, who may have been blissfully unaware that some of their clients had, at any point, a US "taint". And I am frankly astonished that not more has been said by non-US governments about this; however, given that governments such as those of Germany have resorted to the dubious practice of paying for data stolen from Swiss banks, I have no great hopes that respect for sovereignty or the rule of law applies.

The net effect of this law will be to make it even less likely that banks and other firms will want to touch Americans living outside the US due to the heavy compliance cost. The law will be a blow against globalisation and business growth, as this article at Forbes makes clear. It will be even less profitable for firms to deal with Americans if they live abroad. Those US nationals working in the City of London, for example, will find it is harder to open a bank account, manage a mutual fund or get insurance. A former US colleague of mine is in a nasty predicament. When I called the US Embassy here about the matter, I received nothing but blank ignorance.

FATCA is yet another blow against the free movement of people around the world, and will be particularly tough on the middle class, hard-working professionals who don't have access to the flashiest lawyers and advisors. The super-rich and well-connected will, of course, be okay. I doubt that someone like the US Ambassador or military types serving abroad have even heard of it. (The US military tends not to be affected by such legislation anyway, although you can never be sure. If any serving personnel do get hit, it would be good to know the details).

It is sometimes said, by a certain type of sneering European or self-hating international travelling American, at how bad it is that all those ghastly, ignorant hicks don't hold passports. Well, part of the reason is that getting a passport is a bureaucratic nightmare in the US. Another is that the US is a big and beautiful place with so much to see that why would any sane American want to leave for any extended period of time? But another reason is that the IRS, which is out of control, is making the process of being an expat a waking nightmare.

As for whether politicians of any kind, including the Tea Party crowd, give a flying f**k about this issue, is unclear. There may be few votes in it, but I would have more respect for supposedly libertarian-leaning GOP members such as Ron Paul, his son, or one or two others, if they could be persuaded to lobby for wholesale repeal of this atrocious piece of legislation.

(49)

If you only go to IMAO occasionally (like me), or even not at all, then allow me to pass on a recent Frank J-ism (if you will pardon the expression) which made me smile if not laugh out loud, from here:

And the thing is, maybe the economy is technically turned around and very slowly starting to go in the right direction, it’s just does Obama not expect us to not notice how far he went off course before finally getting things around? It’s like we’re driving from Newark to New York, and we’re constantly yelling at Obama, “Turn around! You’re going the wrong way!” And eventually we’re in Los Angeles, right at the shore where we can’t go any further off course, and Obama finally says, “I guess I better turn around.” And then he expects us to buy him lunch for making the smart move of turning things around. And we’re like, “Man, we were so much better off when we were back stuck in that ditch.”

I think a negative maybe got wrongly doubled sowhere near the beginning of that, but you get the point.

My approximate understanding of voters is that they do indeed vote about the immediate future, rather than reward or punish politicians for their past deeds or misdeeds, the most famous case being how British voters booted out Churchill in 1945, despite his triumphant war leadership, but because of his presumed inability to win the peace. He won in 1951 not because of his heroic past, but because of what he was then saying: set the people free.

Obama is now tanking in the polls because the US economy is now experienced as bad. If it feels like the US economy is heading in the right direction come election day, Obama could indeed win. I could go on, but prefer to leave commenters who actually live in the USA, like Paul Marks, to take that further, if they care to. I will only say that I vividly recall being told, by a visiting American at the time when President Bill Clinton was riding very low in the polls during his first term, that he had zero chance of winning again. But, he did.

Also, I was amazed by this FJ revelation:

It’s time to admit the truth: I’m not a bland American male, but really a gay girl living in Syria.

I did not know that.

So, she probably doesn't know that much about Obama's re-election chances either.

(26)

I have pretty much ignored the Weiner Dong flap as I am not much fussed about how the man gets laid. Whether he is true to his wife, a kinky netizen or as much a womanizer as some of my musician friends of old does not much matter to me. His political stands would be equally obnoxious to me whether he be Saint Weiner or an alley cat guitarist. However, I could not pass up this brilliant little bit of poetic license from the always humorous Iowahawk which Taylor Dinerman pointed out to me.

`My name is Weinermandius, Dong of Dongs: Look on my junk, ye mighty, and despair!'

As oft saith Glenn Reynolds, "Read the whole thing."

(6)

There is a good article up at the moment by Brendan O'Neill, one of those strange "libertarians" (he's a Marxist) hybrids who writes good sense on lifestyle issues and the environment, but a lot of guff on economics. He's absolutely on target here about New York City and its ghastly mayor, Michael Bloomberg. (As a former news-wire journalist, I used to refer to Bloomberg, the media business, as the "Borg", given its messianic, controlling tendencies).

Anyone who thinks that the paternalist "nudgers" are not a menace to liberty should read this article.

I love New York, and visited it earlier this year and plan to make a return journey later in 2011 as part of a business trip. It feels safe in the main; I enjoy the sights and the sounds and unlike Taki, the racist uber-paleocon who is strangely indulged in the Spectator, I don't get het up about about the fact that there are a large number of non-whites in NYC.

(27)

I have been following this minor scandal via Instapundit. This to make clear that I am engaged in the study of American political culture, rather than wallowing in trivial scandal like wot you might of thought.

There are two things I don't understand.

In this video (excellent snark by Real Clear Politics: they have chosen the perfect excerpt to present without comment), the question and answer go thus:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: "Have you ever taken a picture like this of yourself?"

REP. ANTHONY WEINER (D-NY): "I can tell you this, that there are -- I have photographs. I don't know what photographs are out there in the world of me. I don't know what have been manipulated and doctored and we're going to try to find out what happened. But the most important reason I want to find out what happened is to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Obviously somebody got access to my account. That's bad. They sent a picture that makes fun of the name Weiner. I get it. Touche."

The second thing I truly don't understand is why he does not simply answer "Yes".

Times have changed. It is traditional to say at this juncture, "I am not a prude, but..." . I am a prude and proud of it. I wish times had not changed (for one thing, a whole branch of humour is being rendered obsolete now that there is no need for coded language), but changed they have. Emailing pictures of one's wedding tackle to persons of the opposite sex really is not that unusual. Sixth formers and bored secretaries get into trouble for it every week. Fumble-fingers hitting the "Send" button with the wrong email address in the little box - or the wrong group of addresses - really is not that unusual either.

My advice in this situation has to be "man up".

(60)

Here is an interesting take on the two mainly libertarian-leaning candidates for the Republican presidential ticket: Gary Johnson and Ron Paul. Our own Brian Micklethwait has thoughts on Johnson (he's a fan); I certainly would be more inclined, if I were a US voter, to go for GJ rather than Ron Paul. Mr Paul is sound on issues like the Federal Reserve but on a lot of stuff, his classical liberal credentials strike me as a bit suspect, although people whom I respect, like Brian Doherty of Reason magazine, say nice things about him.

Of course, the fact that such persons can have a crack at a presidential nomination is in itself a fact that separates the US from the UK. I cannot at the moment think of a single major UK Conservative politician who comes close. And as for continental Europe.......oh dear.....Silvio Berlusconi? (That was a joke).

(73)

The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and a member of the Socialist Party in France, on sexual assault charges in the USA has triggered a stream of bizarre collectivist wailing.

"Arrest Throws France Into Disarray and Disbelief" says the New York Times...

But why 'disbelief'? Now I have no idea as to the merits of this particular case and thus no position on this statist bastard's guilt in this matter, but socialists are people with a profound sense of entitlement to what other people have but are not freely willing to give up without threats of violence.

So is it hard to believe that someone whose entire world view is based on using force to take what is private without prior consent might have used force to take what they wanted from a woman? It is not really so different.

(18)

"At the moment, I am very pessimistic about the prospects for the United States solving its fiscal problems without a crisis. Given that we have divided government, a reasonable long-term budget will require a compromise. But the two sides seem to live in alternate universes. The Republicans' alternate universe is based on the belief that government spending ought not to exceed its historical average of about 20 percent of GDP. You can't get future spending down to that level, however, without really major cuts in future spending on Social Security and Medicare. Much as I would like to see those programs phased out completely, neither I or nor anybody else can claim to have won an election on that platform. The Democrats' alternate universe is based on (a) the belief that the rich are not paying their share of taxes and (b) with Obamacare passed, the rise in health care spending as a share of GDP is as good as arrested. So they see no need to change the status quo on entitlements."

- Arnold Kling.

I think a crisis is coming. And maybe, in a spirit of schadenfreude, we can finally prove the truth of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", but not in a way she approves of.

(33)

I was naturally delighted to hear the news that Osama Bin Laden came to a sticky end at the hands of US SpecOps and the importance of that far outweighed my wish that someone other than the dismal Barack Obama was in the White House to take the credit.

But the extraordinarily inept manner in which the post-hit PR has been handled is just adding to the joy of the moment for me... the weird and unseemly hasty 'burial at sea', almost as if they are actively trying to incite the legions of conspiracy theories out there, followed by contradictory accounts of what happened and what the mission's brief actually was...

...he was killed because he resisted arrest... no, he was killed because that was the mission objective... he was armed... no he wasn't... he used his wife as a human shield... no he didn't... well yes but it wasn't his wife... or not... this son was killed... no, some other son was killed... and so on and so on...

We could be looking at the best possible outcome here: Osama dead and Obama and his team snatching PR defeat from the jaws of victory. This just keeps getting better and better!

(8)

Some say Gaddafi and the Philadelphia Democratic machine might be a match made in.... well, wherever...

(36)

I am pleased that Barack Obama has decided, somewhat late on, to nail the nonsense that he did not have the right basic birth certificate details to enable him to hold his office. Good. I think that some characters on the fringe have provided a free gift to opponents by turning this into an issue.

The real problem is that the US electorate, by a mixture of self-delusion and misplaced enthusiasm, voted for a man unqualified for the responsibilities of high office, and a socialist in terms of his political doctrine. For sure, he continued the high spending of his predecessor, and the TARP policies, but he stepped them up. He still seems to be in denial about the scale of the fiscal hole the US is in.

The US is not, at root, a socialist country, although its universitieis and certain towns contain a lot of people who wish the country was like their imagined Western European social democratic welfare states. The irony being, of course, that these states are falling apart, with Greece being the most egregious example. For all his supposed modern appeal, Mr Obama is a strangely old fashioned figure. I am convinced that Obama is a one-term president. In the end, silly speculation about his birth certificate will not affect things one way or the other. And let's be honest: some of the people who were going on about this subject struck me as racists; it enabled the pro-Obama camp to claim that parts of the right did not like Obama for discreditable reasons.

Meanwhile, our own Brian Micklethwait has thoughts about who he'd like to run against Obama.

(64)

The US Civil War, a bloody conflict in which more than half a million people perished, started earlier this month, 150 years ago. I have occasionally written before about how historians, given their regional or ideological opinions, have revised the accounts of what happened, and some of the revisionists - especially from the Confederacy -friendly side, have been counter-attacked themselves. A book that stands in the revisionist tradition but which avoids some of the sillier forms of name-calling against Lincoln, while not downplaying the centralisation of power that came after the war ended, is a very fine study by Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, which I have started to read.

I see that Taki, the mega-rich columnist for the Spectator who is very much a part of the isolationist, paleocon Right, repeats the accusation that slavery, as an issue, never really emerged as a causus belli in the war until at least two years after the conflict started. That may well be true: the idea that the fight between the Union and the Confederacy was some sort of simple war between the forces of Northern good against Southern evil is wrong, or at least does not recognise the genuine grievances that some on the Southern side felt. Let's not forget that war histories tend to get written by the victors. I can even see why some libertarians, for instance, look favourably upon the Confederacy in terms of the issues of states' rights - if not the evil of slavery, obviously. But there are times when the enthusiasts for the Confederacy do make fools of themselves, and Taki does it with this little line in his Spectator column this week (behind a subscriber firewall)(page 55): "Lincoln did everything for effect, and his death even got him on the back of the five-dollar bill, whereas in my opinion he should have been tried in absensia for the crimes he committed during the war and the destruction he caused to one of the loveliest societies that ever existed, the antebellum south." (Emphasis: mine). It is tempting to write Taki off as a bit of joke, a sort of ultra-conservative clown. Any man who can write of a society in which a large number of people were owned as slaves and subject to all the humiliations of slavery, as "one of the loveliest societies that ever existed", deserves to be treated with the utmost contempt.

The scars of the Civil War still exist, and the issue has also roiled the libertarian movement in recent years. A case in point being the observations about the Lew Rockwell crowd by Timothy Sandefur, for instance.

Update: Sandefur has more thoughts.

(8)

Here:

Via here.

(42)

There are many reasons to hope that President Obama is a one-term president, and they have been rehearsed on this blog many times. But occasionally there are arguments against him that strike me as seriously off-base. One such has surfaced during the recent commentary about how he is not "doing enough" in the Middle East and North Africa; he is not, apparently, giving enough angry speeches about Egypt, or Libya, or sending vast carrier fleets to the Med, or the Gulf, or generally behaving like a Teddy Roosevelt and doing the "let's give those furriners hell" thing. Well, at the risk of drawing heavy fire from the hawks who lurk around this site, I would argue that funnily enough, there may be a measure of method in this supposed madness.

For instance, I fail to see what, really, the US or other major powers could or should have done about Egypt. Far better, in my view, to let the Egyptians take ownership of their country's problems and challenges. If anything positive does come out of the "Jasmine Revolution" (whoever comes up with these terms?), better that it be an achievement by the locals, a source of pride and genuine self esteem, not something associated with "abroad". For far too long, the Middle East, and many other places besides, have had this oh-so-convenient excuse that their problems were all the fault of the Great Satan and his arrogant, silly interventionism in pursuit of oil, or whatever. The US has often played the part, not always willingly, of being the world's designated driver (the person who stays sober so he can drive his drinking buddies home at the end of the evening). The trouble with being a designated driver is that it starts to encourage the drinkers to drink even more, become more rowdy, and then they can start to vomit on the street, get into fights, or then almost resent that goody-goody who is always there, with the car, to take them home again. Time for some adult responsbility rather than constant reliance on the West.

I am not of course suggesting that Obama has necessarily been taking a wise, cautious stance based on thoughtful reflection. Other issues may have played a part. But I think we should perhaps give a bit more credit where it is sometimes due here. There are limits on what even the most powerful of countries can and should do. In the case of Egypt, and possibly Libya, the smart policy may be to watch, pay close attention but in general, to stay out of the mess. It is, in fact, a conservative stance. Maybe, just for once, The Community Organiser has shown a bit of common sense. He may, in short, be behaving like a "Swiss", but I fail to see why that is necessarily terrible or something to be ashamed of. (It should be noted that since Obama's ascendancy to the White House, the US has put the Swiss banking system under relentless, even hysterical, attack).

Normal service will be resumed later. Stay tuned.

UPDATE. Well that did not seem to persuade anyone. But read carefully, gentle readers. I am not suggesting that this is all a consequence of deep thought, or of anything broadly benign. It may well indeed be that The One is paralysed, out of his depth, a silver-tongued twerp who is in over his head, whatever. But unlike Christopher Hitchens in the article to which I link, I do not think that what the North African crises call for is mass-scale US interventionism. Sure, the US could and should have been quicker to get US nationals out; maybe also it should have acted faster to realise the fallout of all this. But why should the US, given its heavy commitments in other areas (Iraq, Afghanistan) feel called upon to sort out the mess of yet another region of the world?

(9)

The US-based Koch brothers, who back organisations such as the Reason Foundation and the Cato Institute, are used to getting plenty of hostile media and political criticism from statists of various hues, who of course, are perfectly happy to receive money extracted by state-backed violence - tax. The Obama folk, the unions and some cheerleaders in the MSM will be doing everything they can to discredit the Kochs, hurt their business empires, etc. Good luck with that. The Koch brothers have been patiently supporting classical free market organisations for decades and are hardly likely to retreat now. Excellent. Back here in the UK, the support for free markets and classical liberalism by business owners has been far more muted, in part for tax reasons, in part because there is less of a climate in favour of these ideas. But there have, of course, been honorable exceptions: the Institute of Economic Affairs, for instance, was founded with backing from a businessman/ex-RAF officer, Antony Fisher, in the post-WW2 years.

In any event, considering how the likes of George Soros, Ted Turner and others have shovelled gazillions at various statist causes in recent years, what is clearly really upsetting the Left is that the playing field is not as uneven as they would have hoped. And this whole nonsense also demonstrates the utter stupidity of the McCain Feingold unconstitutional assault on the First Amendment, carried out in the last decade. Far from driving private and corporate money from US politics, all it has done has to encourage money to adopt a different route.

Here is an amusing item on the matter over at Pajamas Media.

You can imagine the thought-processes of your average Obamaniac: "These businessmen are supporting the free market! This is terrible: there oughta be a laaaaaaawwwwwwww!".

Update: more insanity via Reason's Hit and Run blog.

(44)

Which they probably won't now take, but later they may get the point.

I recall how, some time in the early 1980s, I had a run-in with a British Post Office worker.

I had this package which I wanted the Post Office to, you know, post to someone. So I wrapped it up and took it to the Post Office.

But it turned out that it was just that little bit too big for the hole that this Post Office worker wanted to put it into.

"Look", he said, as if instructing a small and inattentive boy. "It's too big to go in," said he. "Can't you see that?" He had a point, sort of. It really wasn't hard to see, now. Big package. Slightly smaller hole. As we would say now: simples. And yes indeed, I could see that now. But when I was wrapping up the package at the bookshop I was then working in, I had no idea about the hole I would later have to stuff the package into. I felt like hitting the Post Office worker with the package, or at the very least explaining all this, in an angry tone.

But, wisely, I did not do this. Instead, all forced charm and bogus ingratiation, I acknowledged the abjectness of my obviously foolish miscalculation, and apologised deeply. What had I been thinking? Then, I tried to persuade him to think of some other procedure to enable the Post Office to post my package, and eventually, after some further instruction of me concerning my sloppy and foolish ways, he did agree to accept the package, despite its obvious failure to fit into his hole. He took the package and disappeared in a self-important manner to some room in the back of the Post Office. I went back to my bookshop, muttering curses to myself and speculating about the hole I would really have liked to shove my package into.

Some little while later, I observed, on the television, some Post Office workers who were engaged in a fight of some kind against our then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher wanted to do something or other to the Post Office that the Post Office workers were angry about. It would cause chaos, they said, and make the Post Office worse, they said, and more expensive, as it quite possibly would, and quite possibly did. But because these Post Office workers were dealing, not with defenceless little me, but with Margaret Thatcher on the rampage, they were the ones now on the defensive. She wasn't trying to persuade them of anything. She was simply telling them. They were trying to persuade her to do things differently.

To this end, the Post Office workers were appealing for public support.

They thought they would get it, effortlessly. From the way they were talking on the television, you would think that The Public were about to rise up in a great tidal wave and overwhelm the Prime Minister with their hatred of her (then as now quite widespread) and their love for the workers of the Post Office and their admiration for their extreme wisdom and obligingness.

But The Public all did as I did. We just sat there, saying: "You bastards may well be right that Maggie T's plan will harm the Post Office, but her plan does at least have one huge plus. You hate it! It will make you suffer! You think we will help you stop it. Dream on, you tyrannical, supercilious bastards." The great public silence that greeted the Post Office workers, instead of the great wave of support that they had been counting on, must have shocked them deeply. Important silences, huge non-events, are not usually front page news. But I noticed, and others surely did too. I wondered what Mr Your-Package-Is-Too-Big My-Hole-Is-Too-Small was thinking and feeling about it all. I hoped he was suffering.

Those Post Office workers had totally misunderstood that package-in-the-hole moment that I had had with one of them, and millions upon millions of other moments like it, stretching back through the decades. They, the Postal Workers, imagined that at the end of such moments, The Public walked away full of love and gratitude for the Postal Workers. But actually, we walked away full of pent-up rage. We had had to force ourselves to fake love and gratitude, and hated the Postal Workers all the more because of this. They had believed our performances. They really thought that we really were full of love and gratitude for them. Big mistake. Huge mistake.

Come the day when the tables were turned by a politician who was aggregating all our rage into a force majeure moment which left them trying to persuade her to do what they wanted, they were helpless.

All of which was brought on by this Instapundit posting about how angry the American Public now feels about American public sector workers of various kinds.

I now feel much better. Also, I wonder if blogs will make a difference to this kind of thing. Will blogs, and especially blog comments, tell America's public sector trade unionists to back off gracefully, the way no blogger or blog-commenter could tell our unions circa 1984? They surely will. They surely are. But will they listen? Will they get it? It will be interesting to see.

(24)

Here's Ronald Reagan's great speech of 1964. Like many classical liberals, I realise that he fell short of what we would want - the size of government did not appreciably fall on his watch, although tax rates fell sharply and some important deregulations continued. But the Soviet Union did reach its demise when he was in power - and he was partly responsible for pushing it on its deathbed - the entrepreneurial boom seen in areas such as Silicon Valley did seriously get under way why he was POTUS, aided by a friendly tax regime. It is not hard to see - much to the frustrations of his snooty detractors - why this man was so much loved. Here is a balanced assessment by David Mayer.

(34)

It will not do to chastise Obama’s budget proposal as a simple “refusal to lead,” a “punt,” or a “cynical political maneuver.” Obama isn’t failing to lead. He is very cleverly leading us toward an irreversible expansion of the welfare state. If Obama is reelected and in control when the entitlement crisis finally does hit, he will manage the country toward Euro-style taxes and Euro-style socialism. After all, in the midst of its current fiscal crisis, Obama is pushing Europe to expand spending, not contract it.

Perhaps I’m wrong and “the president’s abdication of leadership” sound bite will be enough to defeat “the GOP’s heartless cuts.” Even so, as an alternative, I suggest: “Obama’s radical plans are leading us off a cliff.”

- Stanley Kurtz

(15)

An old friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge, has joined the senatorial race in Maine to get on the Republican ticket, running up against Olympia J. Snowe. She is very much a RINO Republican, as you can see from this legislative record on her official website. Andrew Dodge has been a key figure in the Maine Tea Party movement, and has caused a stir by making it clear that the TP must be about tax, spending and the deficit, and is not interested in any social conservative agenda. For instance, he wants to cut the drinking age from its current age of 21 and is relaxed on issues such as gay marriage, etc. He may be seen as too much of a "wild card", but he'll freshen up the primaries, that is for sure.

Of course, having spent a fair amount of his life abroad, including the UK - his late father used to be a senior oil executive and Andrew lived all over as a result - he has seen what socialism has done in the UK, and does not want the same to take root 'Stateside. That is an argument he can throw at any locals who wonder, absurdly, if he is "American" enough.

I wish him luck. At least the campaign will feature loads of good heavy rock music!

(36)

The commentary soundbite of the night so far, from the BBC's coverage of Super Bowl XLV, from Tiki Barber:

Do not go to bed. Work is not as important as this game.

It's Pittsburgh 25 Green Bay 28, in the fourth quarter, after Pittsburgh managed what I believe is called a "safety" "two-point conversion" (see comments), Pittsburgh having earlier in the game been down by 18 points. Nobody's ever won a Super Bowl having been that far behind, but this looks to be anyone's.

Mike Carlson, Britain's ubiquitous American Football expert, commentates for whichever channel has the games, be it Channel 4, Channel 5, or, as now, BBC 1, and so he's with the BBC tonight, as he has been throughout the play-offs. I seem to recall complaining here about the snide little political digs that Carlson has in the past indulged in, when commentating for Channels 4 or 5. The BBC seem to have told him to cut it out. Usually, whenever any player is called Bush (I seem to recall there being a Reggie Bush) Carlson calls him "the Bush you can support". (Yes, I mention this in the comments here, in connection with something Carlson said during last year's Superbowl.) George W. Bush himself is actually watching this game, as is Condoleeza Rice, or that's who it looked like to me. They showed a whole row of such people. Whatever Carlson may have wanted to say about that he kept to himself.

Green Bay win the Vince Lombardi trophy, 31-25. The grandstand finish that Tiki Barber had been saying might, if earlier games were anything to go by, be contrived by Pittsburgh's hobbling miracle worker of a quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, never happened, and it ended rather tamely, as American football games sometimes do, with guys kneeling down, and then … it was ... over.

Now they're saying that a play called Lombardi, about the great Green Bay coach of yesteryear that they now name the Super Bowl trophy after, just opened on Broadway. Blog and learn.

The Green Bay Packers are the "world champions". Yeah. But now they are making a good point, which is that the Super Bowl has no exact parallel in British soccer. That has the FA Cup Final, but also the Premier League, and also a couple of European titles to shoot for. Every other year there's either a European national tournament, or the World Cup. Only in the American version of football does the winner of the one big game win absolutely everything.

(3)

I've heard about this many times, and laughed at what I imagined it to consist of, again and again. But I've never actually seen it, until, a few days back, Instapundit linked to it.

"A few days" is a decade in Instatime, so forgive me if I don't trawl back for half an hour through half a dozen pages of Instapunditry until I spot his posting on the subject, and merely supply anyone besides me who is interested with the link to the thing itself, which I did make a note of.

Here.

(25)

... that 'tax pros' are worried that tax evasion will be greatly increased by new regulations in the USA

Tax pros now fear that tax evasion could go viral if the health-reform bill’s new 1099 requirement takes effect next year. They say more small businesses will likely opt to do all-cash transactions under the table to avoid the 1099 reporting requirement, and all of its onerous provisions, which are worse than small businesses may realize.

"Tax evasion could go viral"... what a pleasing concept. Well all I can say to these unnamed 'tax pros' laboring away tirelessly to make people 'compliant' is "from your lips to God's ear".

Few things would help the growth of the culture needed for a fight back of liberty to succeed than something that not only induced contempt for the state but actively motivates self-interested resistance to the supra-constitutional tax gathering arm of the US government... and perhaps the single best form of resistance to an over-mighty state is keeping as much money as possible out of its hands.

Encouraging tax evasion: far from being an 'ugly side effect' it is the unforeseen silver lining that may tip millions of apolitical business folk into unwitting de facto alliance with liberty's anti-statist friends.

(63)

John Hawkins: Now, in recent years we started to hear more people calling to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good idea, bad idea? What are your thoughts?

Thomas Sowell: Good idea.

John Hawkins: Good idea? What do you think we should replace it with? What do you think we should do?

Thomas Sowell: Well it's like when you remove a cancer what do you replace it with?

(75)

There is a nice piece by Don Surber (H/T, Instapundit) seeking to explain the hatred that is felt among some folk for Sarah Palin. He obviously focuses on the attitudes of Americans, but I'd wager that some of that applies also to non-Americans who hate or despise her in much the same way that such people also got riled by Ronald Reagan's folksy speaking manner and ignored the wisdom and intelligence of that man. It is a good piece.

It got me thinking about why certain politicians, even if they espouse views which are not necessarily all that outrageous or objectionable, provoke feelings of such hatred in some quarters. In the UK, for example, the last person I think who was really hated in the Palinesque sort of way was our own Margaret Thatcher. There are certain things in common - although not ones I would stretch too far - such as that they came from unfashionable parts of their countries (Lincolnshire/Alaska); made a point about religion in their lives (they are obviously nutters then); happy marriages (which provokes a strange kind of resentment among some folk); a certain middle-brow, cultivated lack of pretension; the pitch and tone of their voices (Maggie sounded very arch early on), and so on.

Add in the fact that they are women in a male-dominated arena of politics, and the reason for hatred grows. And I also think that for a lot of so-called feminists, a woman who espouses "family values", supports capitalism, etc, is seen as letting the side down. This rather ignores what we Samizdata writers would say, that free markets, when freed of state interference, are usually very good news for women, since bigotry against women, like any other group, is a cost.

There is also something quite useful about Sarah Palin in this regard. Although I do not agree with all her views, at least as far as I know what they are, I usually find that the sort of people who say they hate or despise her are nobs of the first rank. So it is a sort of useful marker: if I find myself talking to someone and her name comes up and the reaction is as described, I can usually pigeonhole that person as someone to be avoided.

And Palin has great legs. The sources of hate must run very deep indeed.

(36)

This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.

I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.

So here goes.

In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.

Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, there had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.

Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they'd deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.

Hard to choose, wasn't it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.

It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.

Enter the Tea Party.

The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …

I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I'll put the next five words into the title of this posting.

… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.

The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.

The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are "extreme" Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.

The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blaim for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)

No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.

This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don't say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.

(64)

Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.

It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.

Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly 'grass roots' movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover 'individual defence' is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists... the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.

But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that... well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain't going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.

(34)

Matt Welch, over at the Reason Hit & Run blog, comes across this piece of nuttery from the land that gave us Dan Ackroyd and John Candy. How sad and oppressive that nation appears. Of course, there is no reason for anyone else to gloat: in Britain, we have more than our fair share of censors and wannabe controllers of supposedly offensive messages.

Canada does seem to be prone to a lot of this sort of nonsense. Mark Steyn, a Canadian national now living in New Hamshire, has had his problems with self-appointed guardians of what is considered to be acceptable to say and write.

My old man, when in the RAF in the 50s, once nearly emigrated there to serve in the Canadian air force. You might now be reading me with a Toronto or Vancouver dateline. Oh well, Dad chose to move into farming instead.

Erratum: I previously said John Belushi was Canadian. He was not. Sorry for the error.

(37)

David Henderson, over at the EconLog blog, has astute observations to make about the statements made by a parent of the girl murdered by the Arizona shooter. I recommend you read it all. It is probably not the sort of article to appeal to Paul Krugman, who is now well on the way to achieving the status of what the swearblogger Obxnoxio the Clown calls "a weapon's grade cock-end".

Here is more on Krugman's descent, over, at all places, the Economist.. Even that organ of high-minded opinion is starting to publish attacks on him. Or maybe its editors are starting to take note of our own Paul Marks.

(20)

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."

Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, "What is government if words have no meaning?" At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.

A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of "treatment" (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient's will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.

And yet - there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. "He should have been locked up before this" does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.

Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.

(62)

In today's Guardian Michael Tomasky has written the following article about the murder of six people and attempted murder of many others, including Congresswoman Giffords: In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time. Some selected extracts:

... You don't have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.

... So what particular type of nut is Loughner? We don't have a full picture yet. But we have enough of one. His coherent ravings included the conviction that the constitution assured him that "you don't have to accept the federalist laws". He called a female classmate who had an abortion a "terrorist".

In sum, he had political ideas, which not everyone does. Many of them (not all, but most) were right wing. He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know? For anyone to attempt to insist that the violent rhetoric so regularly heard in this country had no likely effect on this young man is to enshroud oneself in dishonesty and denial.

I would like to report to you that my nation is in shock, and that we will work together to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Alas, neither of these things is close to true. Of course an event like this is hard to believe in the moment; but in the context of our times, it's really not surprising at all. Last summer, a California man armed himself and set off for San Francisco with the express intent of killing liberals at a nonprofit foundation that had been pilloried by Glenn Beck and others. Only the lucky accident of his arrest en route for drunk driving prevented the mayhem then.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has documented more than two dozen killings by or arrests of rightwing extremists who intended to do serious political violence since 2008. One Tennessee man killed two worshippers at a liberal church, regretting only that he had not been able to ice the 100 liberals named by author Bernard Goldberg as those most responsible for destroying America. Giffords herself received threats after voting for the healthcare reform bill, and shots were fired through the window of her district office. An event like this has been coming for a long time.

We have much more to learn about Hasan before we can jump to any conclusions. A New York Times profile of him from yesterday notes that this army psychiatrist, who'd presumably heard many blood-curdling war stories, obsessively feared being sent over to Iraq or Afghanistan. But it then says that the FBI has monitored some internet postings by a certain Nidal Hasan that spoke positively of suicide bombers, comparing them to soldiers who risk their lives for their comrades. The Times didn't know if it was the same Nidal Hasan.

For all most Americans know about Palestinian culture, Nidal Hasan could be as common a name as Dave Johnson. The Palestinian is an unknown person in the US. Jews are a part of the country and have been for decades, but average Americans pretty much know Palestinians only as suicide bombers. Sadly, for some Americans this event will reinforce an image of a people who resort first to mindless violence.
...

We should assume until it's proven otherwise that Hasan was an American and a loyal one, who just snapped, as Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds and political persuasions do. And, as is so rarely the case in these situations, he's alive, so we'll have a chance to hear him express his views some day.

(39)

What depraved individual wants to make it easier for the government to do stuff? The government doing stuff is expensive and hurts freedom, so we should all be trying to make sure it barely ever does anything. Still, there are people out there that hate humanity and want the government constantly doing stuff and spending our money while pushing us around. They must be foiled.

- from a posting by Frank J concerning a proposal to make government faster, entitled Making Government Slower. His suggestions follow.

(9)

Oh my. I am laughing. It is an American New Year's Day tradition to watch the Tournament of Roses Parade. The granddaddy and the best of all American parades, the Rose parade is even older (1890) than the Rose Bowl game (1902).

The floats are the most strictly regulated of any parade and all of them deserve prizes for genuine awesomeness but still, there is unmistakable 'all must have prizes' going on. One of those prizes is awarded by the governor of California. It is awarded to the parade float "that best represents life in California." This year the winner is the Sierra Madre association float. It is very beautiful to look at.

One small problem. It broke down. It blocked up the parade route and needed a tow truck to move. While it apparently does happen from time to time, I've never before seen a Tournament of Roses Parade float behind a tow truck. And there goes the float "that best represents life in California" being dragged down the parade route behind a tow truck. Like Bernie, dead but still going through the motions. Someone has posted some video.

As they say, "you couldn't make it up."

(30)

Estate taxes - or what are called inheritance taxes in the UK - have been an issue in the public sphere lately. Russell Roberts, who writes over at the Cafe Hayek blog - a fine one - has an article criticising such taxes in the New York Times, typically a bastion of Big Government "liberalism" (to use that word in its corrupted American sense). Check out the subsequent comment thread. Here are a couple of my favourites for sheer, butt-headed wrongness:

"There should be 100% confiscation of all wealth at death; except for a family owned business, not incorporated! Passing on wealth is a huge negative for society and probably and even larger negative for those who get the moola; they generally end up with pretty wasted lives! There is no value to passing on wealth except for the egos of the passees!! And there should be a liquidation of all existing foundations, trusts, and other tax avoidance schemes as well! I know so many trustees and administrators who have no economic value whatsoever; and most of these things just perpetuate the arrogance of the founders!"

Here's another, from someone called "jmfree3":

Finally, there is the big government is intrusive arguement, which is most commonly made by cold-hearted conservatives (are there any empathetic conservatives or is it wrung out of you all in Young Republican meetings?). Wanting the most greedy people in America to be able to keep the fruits of their greed is not really defensible unless you believe, as most conservatives do, that people who cannot help themselves should be left to die in squalor before the government takes one penny from the more fortunate to help them. Fortunately, liberals care more for there fellow human beings and fight for those who cannot fight for themselves (which is how I know most Democrats in Congress are NOT liberals). After all, isn't there something in the Bible about "as you treat the least of these"?

Okay, there are other comments from people which are more sensible, such as making the point that there are other examples, besides estate taxes, of taxing people twice. The double-taxation aspect of inheritance tax is not, in my view, the worst thing about it. Rather, it is a tax on the maker of a bequest; it effectively says, "We, the State, are going to ban you from giving all your legitimately owned money to whoever you want, and we demand that a large chunk of it should return to the State that nourishes you and protects you". If you read the comment from "jmfree03", that is pretty much what such people believe. They don't, not in any rooted sense, believe in the idea of private property and respecting the wishes of the owners of said.

Now, of course, the NYT readership is not typical of US public opinion as a whole, if the recent mid-term Congressional elections are a guide. I would also wager that while there has always been a strong egalitarian strain in American life - more so than here - that it has tended to avoid a general denigration of someone just because they are born to rich parents. After all, everyone born in the USA these days is, on this basis, a very lucky person compared with say, someone born in the former Soviet empire, or large bits of Africa, for example.

I remember, many years ago before I started this blogging business, having a chat with Brian Micklethwait and we commented on the size and power of the left in parts of the US, especially in the big universities and other such places. A theory of Brian's was that it is precisely because the US is so fabulously rich in its mostly capitalist way, that it can afford to support a large class of people inclined to attack it.

It is, of course, ironic that the left supports confiscation of inheritance, since a large element of the left in the US can be described as "trustafarians"; over here, as is sometimes noted, a lot of the Greens - such as Jonathan Porritt or Zac Goldsmith - are born to money and privilege. The Toynbees and the rest are fairly well minted.

Here is one such article here, back in October 2007, that addresses this whole idea that inheriting lots of money gives someone an "unfair" advantage in life over someone else, as if life were like a pre-defined race, such as the Tour de France. But that gets things entirely wrong. It is the fallacy of the zero-sum approach to life generally.

And here is another article by me on the same subject, responding to a letter in the Times (of London) newspaper.

(44)

Having been a bit ill and it having been very cold recently by London standards, certainly in November or December, I have been consoling myself by paying more attention than I otherwise might have done to the Ashes, aka the series of five day cricket matches that happens every couple of years or so between England and Australia.

My main feeling about the Ashes just now is that there is an amazing contrast between the score, which now stands at nothing-nothing (as in: nobody has won any of these games yet), and the way many of the commentators are talking. England are great, on top of their game, firing on all cylinders, well organised, etc. etc. Australia are rubbish, a nation in crisis, woe woe woe. You'd think Australia had already been beaten five nothing, like England were last time they came calling. Yes, England saved the first game well, and yes, England are now on top in the second game. But a combination of rain and good Australian batting on a good batting pitch could well leave it nothing-nothing as the third game begins, and who knows what might then happen? Momentum in sport is a funny thing. One team can dominate, and then something (often just a bit of blind luck) can go against them and suddenly a savage negative feedback loop of failure, recrimination at earlier missed opportunities and general frustration can strike them down, along with the agony consequent on them having been too complacent, and now knowing it. Meanwhile their seemingly doomed opponents can bounce back, gripped by an equal-and-opposite positive feedback loop of surging confidence and astonished nothing-to-lose optimism. An almost absurdly one-sided contest can suddenly mutate into a real old dogfight that either team could win. This can happen. This could happen. England have not yet won anything in this series.

But, in opposition to point number one, the England team seem thoroughly to understand all of the above. Everything they have been saying in interviews that I've seen, especially in the ones involving their admirably level-headed captain Andrew Strauss, has been along the lines of: we've a lot of tough cricket ahead, so far it's nothing-nothing, Australia will play better, and ... well, see my previous paragraph. If I thought the England team didn't get what might happen if, to coin a phrase, they were to take their eyes off the ball, then I'd now be full of dread. As it is, I agree with my Australian fellow cricket-nut and fellow-Samizdatista Michael Jennings that England are indeed now favourites to win this thing. Fingers crossed. Success in sport can indeed be almost automatic, but only for teams which assume that winning is never automatic and can only happen if they give it their all.

To switch subjects from a mere game to the somewhat more serious matter of the state of the world, of the USA in particular, one of the things that most impresses me about the USA's Tea Party movement is that they too seem to have exactly this attitude to the tasks they now face. Everything I hear from these people in interviews and blog postings says something very similar to the sentiment I now attribute to the England cricket team. So far, they now say, all we've done is elect a few politicians. We have many years of tough politics ahead of us if we are actually to accomplish anything. Don't, they keep on telling themselves, echoing one of their most significant leaders (who would surely deny that accusation), get cocky. It is this very lack of any assumption on their part that they will automatically have any real world consequences that now most makes me believe that the Tea Party will have real world consequences.

So, am I saying that life is like a game of cricket? I suppose I am. Sometimes, it is.

(125)

Pro Tea Party writers in the USA still, mostly, call their statist enemies "liberals". Later in that same piece I've linked to, its author, Michael Gerson, also uses the phrase "panicked progressives", partly because "progressive" is an alternative word for "liberal" that is now doing the rounds with what appears to me, from here in the UK, to be particular vigour just now (having (like "liberal") been around for many decades), and partly, presumably, because panic and progressive both begin with p and the phrase sounds good. I like pretty much everything Gerson says in this piece, but put it like this: I wish he lived in a world where there already were better words hammered into everyone's heads to describe the people he is criticising other than "liberal" and "progressive".

Because, the word "progressive" is just as wrong as the word "liberal". The statists who argue for the destruction of the dollar and for bank bail-outs (again) and for nationalised derangement of medical care and for green-inspired economic sabotage aren't "liberals". They do not believe in liberty; they believe in curtailing liberty. But neither do they believe in anything which it makes sense to anybody except them to call "progress". Progress is the exact thing these statists are now trying and have always tried to destroy, and just lately have been doing a pretty damn good job of destroying. Progress means things getting better. These self styled "progressives" are only making things worse.

Underneath these unsatisfactory labels, which the statist (a better word for these people in my opinion) enemies of liberty and progress have chosen for themselves and have been using for decades, is an assumption, both by the statists and by those who really do believe in liberty and in progress, that the statists are the people who will inevitably continue to decide about such labels.

But the statists no longer do. One of the biggest events to have happened in the entire world in the last two or three years is that the statist tendency has lost its monopoly control of the media in the USA. The statist media used to be "mainstream". No longer. Now, their bias is utterly clear and out in the open, because there is now a whole different torrent of different media outlets exposing this bias, every day, every hour, every minute. The statists no longer control the agenda. The statists no longer control the language.

Well, that's not quite right. Statists are still controlling the language, because they are still being allowed to.

But statist words will go on meaning what the statists want them to mean only if the real liberals and the real progressives allow such foolishness to continue. For the people who really do believe in liberty and in progress can now decide their own language. They can use their own preferred words amongst themselves and they can attach their own preferred words to their enemies, and when they do, there will not be a damn thing that the statists will be able to do to stop them.

In this blog posting, which is centrally about not using the words "liberal" and "progressive" to describe people who are neither, I have instead called these people "statists". I am somewhat unsure about that word's rightness, not least because it might suggest greater devolution of power within the USA, in accordance with its Constitution, from the Federal Government to state governments, rather than any sort of generalised opposition to or suspicion of governmental compulsion of all kinds. Comments on that, including comments to the effect that there are much better words than "statist" out there, just waiting to step up or which already have stepped up to verbal stardom, so to speak, which I hadn't thought of or which I have temporarily forgotten about, would be very welcome. Dirigiste? Centralist? Governmentalist? Despotist?

Whatever. "Statist" (or whatever) is not central the point of this posting, which is a double negative, rather than anything positive. What I am very sure about is that people who really do believe in liberty and in progress should stop calling the enemies of liberty "liberals" and should stop calling the enemies of progress "progressives".

(5)

I have just received the sad news that David Nolan, co-founder of the Libertarian Party and co-creator of the World's Smallest Political Quiz died November 21st, 2 days before his 67th birthday.

(17)

Here at Samizdata we've only paid rather sporadic attention to this whole TSA grope and change (a phrase we have surely not heard the last of) thing, our most thorough airing of the issue so far having been in this posting and in its comments. But over at Transport Blog there is an excellently link rich posting about it all, compiled by Rob Fisher.

In particular Rob notes a Slashdot commenter (on this) saying something which particularly deserves to get around:

I don’t even think the TSA should be the one scanning the people at all, it should be the individual airlines. That way you can choose to pay for your security if you really want it, and competitive practices can find the optimal solution.

Indeed, and this was mentioned in passing in the comments on that earlier Samizdata posting. Safety doesn't need to be imposed by governments. People want safety, but they also want other things (fun, convenience, speed, comfort, not to be embarrassed or humiliated by neanderthals, etc.) and it should be up to people to make the trade-offs for themselves.

Personally, I suspect that an under-discussed aspect of all this is that a lot of people in the USA (as in many other places), and in particular just now in positions of authority and influence in the USA, think that air travel is evil and that curtailing it, by whatever method that works, is just terrific. These people are fast losing the argument about why air travel is evil (global warming blah blah blah), but the terrorism thing gives them an excuse to just keep on hacking away at the abomination (as they see it) of regular people regularly taking to the air. And the more that regular people squeal that they ain't gonna fly no more, the merrier these flying-is-evil killjoys will feel about it all. Protest from the ranks of the newly immobilised is good because that means that it's really working.

(21)

Instapundit (and yes I am reading him a lot just now) has been linking to a book called Gray Lady Down, which is about the downfall of the New York Times, from a persuasive proclaimer of the statist consensus to an unpersuasive proclaimer of the statist ex-consensus. I've not read this book, but it has a big picture of a skyscraper on its front cover. Might there, I wondered, be a brand new, custom-built headquarters involved in this story? There might indeed:

The New York Times Building is a skyscraper on the west side of Midtown Manhattan that was completed in 2007. ...

Previous example of something very similar here. Since writing that earlier posting, I have dug out the original description of this syndrome, by Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, and I note that he sees the causation involved as a bit more complicated than I had previously stated. It is not just that building a new headquarters building causes an enterprise to take its eye off the ball. Its eye already was off the ball, or it would never have decided to build its new headquarters in the first place.

(10)

Sarah Palin has apparently attacked Barack Obama in her impending book 'America By Heart' and Alex Spillius writes:

The attack is likely to deepen the impression that the former Alaska governor is too divisive a figure to win the presidency.

A political saying unflattering things about a political opponent! Whatever next? Crazy days, eh?

(5)

Real life spy dramas are interesting but what happens after the Big Denouement?

Russian intelligence sources told local media that the traitor who gave away Anna Chapman and nine others was Colonel Alexander Poteyev who served in the KGB's elite 'Zenith' Special Forces unit during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

A criminal case for 'state treason' had been opened against him and he will be tried in absentia like other traitors before him, they said.

Hardly surprising...

Fyodor Yakovlev, a KGB veteran who said he served with Colonel Poteyev in Afghanistan, told the Regnum news agency that he now regarded his former comrade as a "non-person".

"This non-person will live a lonely life until the end of his days in fear," he said. "Lonely because his relatives and loved ones will not be by his side. Either his children will have to alter their appearances or else they will be doomed to the same nightmarish existence as their father."

...so his loved one were left behind in Russia when we was extracted by CIA Operations, eh? Pity that but...

Colonel Poteyev is believed to have fled to the United States in June through his native Belarus days before the ten agents were arrested in America. He was reportedly deputy director of 'Department S' inside the SVR, the unit which coordinates the work of illegal agents in the United States.

He is reported to have worked in New York in the first half of the 1990s. It was there that the CIA is said to have recruited him, offering him a financial settlement. His wife later became resident in America and his son and daughter moved there before he fled Russia in June.

...er, hang on, Fyodor... did you not just say his loved one were not by his side?

Sorry but sounds to me like some guy called Hank Smith from Chickasaw Falls, plus his wife Wilma, son Hank Jr and daughter Natasha... er, I mean Britney... are living Happily Ever After and spending that hearty 'financial settlement' from Uncle Sam in a suburban strip mall looking forwards to Christmas somewhere with a fuck load better weather than Moscow.

(7)

It didn’t used to be so hard to get the liberal message heard over the screams of reality. Journalism was once a respected profession where liberals ignored reality to portray themselves as unbiased newsmen while actually pushing people towards liberal ideas and away from thuggish reality. Reality still found ways to occasionally get people to listen to it, whether through economic conditions or war, but its message could be contained. Eventually, though, reality weaseled its way into the media, first through talk radio, then Fox News, and now the internet, where pajama-clad imbeciles with brains too simple to understand anything other than reality spout reality on numerous websites on a daily basis.

- Frank J Fleming

(66)

This comment by "Armaros", made in response to a Guardian piece by Michael Tomasky about the former president's new book, put the case well:

His whole agenda was thrown out the window on 911.

Not since the war of 1812 was the WH directly targeted by an enemy.

He was going to focus on Mexico, L American trade and education.
He recognized that only by bringing Mexico up to par with the rest of N America, can free trade be fair.
He was also for immigration reform and resisted the xenophobic tendencies of the SW states and tried to educate America about why this problem was occurring.

He can claim credit for No Child left behind, along with the late Teddy Kennedy who ran with the bill in the Senate. One of the most memorable stories of bi-partisan co-operation.
He was also instrumental in helping Africa and dealing with AIDS.

Bono and Geldof praised him for that.

His administration was also the most multiracial in American history.
He even offered the VP spot to Powell who decided against it in the end.
He choose a black S of state, a black NSA, and a Hispanic AG.
His Supreme court choices were centrist and sensible in Alito and Roberts.

He addressed crowds in Texas in Spanish and garnered more Latino votes than any republican before him, both as governor and president.

He will be of course remembered for the war(s).

Those will be judged with time. Iraq can be said to be a success. Saddam is gone as is the mad fascist ideology and tyranny. Iraq has proven that democracy can and should work among Arabs.
Most of the criticism of Iraq (aside from the fact that there was a war) was that Arabs cannot live in a democracy.

There have been 4 elections in Iraq with greater turnouts than most Western ones and one can say that democracy did take some hold there.

Afghanistan is still up in the air. I am not sure whether what was done in Iraq can be done there. However it is no longer a base for international terrorism.
In other words, Afghanistan is no longer a threat to us.
Whether it would revert to being that once Western troops leave is a fair question.

Bush was the first US president to declare the necessity for a Palestinian state. Another one of his forgotten positives which the Left omits on the regular.

(52)

This morning I recorded a BBC Radio 4 programme about the late LTC Rolt, historian of the industrial revolution, biographer of (to name but one) Brunel, and the man who put a Rocket, to coin a phrase, under British industrial archaeology and who did much to make it a popular British enthusiasm.

The programme ended by quoting these words from Ecclesiasticus (not in the Bible and not to be confused with Ecclesiastes which is in the Bible) chapter 38:

All these put their trust in their hands and each becometh wise in his own work. Without these shall not a city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn nor walk up and down therein. They shall not be sought for in the counsel of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high. But they will maintain the fabric of the world, and in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer.

This guy liked it too, when this show was first aired, on Nov 8th.

Not saying I agree, mind. Read what precedes it (e.g. by following the immediately above link) and you discover that the writer of these stirring words had no problem with the working stiffs playing no part in government. That's strictly for the idle - and therefore wise - rich to take care of.

But, stripped of that context, the above quote reads more like a protest on behalf of the downtrodden craftsmen and a claim that they should be sought in the "counsel of the people". Understanding it that way, which is how I did understand it when I first heard the words on my radio this morning, I liked it a lot.

I also think that these words capture something of what the Tea Party is about. We, say the Tea Partiers, run the world, even if we don't rule it. We certainly maintain the world. We know how the world works. Without us the world – the "fabric of the world" - stops. When the idle rich, mounted on high in their assemblies, decide about how the world shall be ruled, they should damn well be listening to us. A healthy majority of those in such assemblies should be us.

(23)

Many pixels have given their life on this site in discussions about how supporters of constitutionally limited government must 'compromise' to achieve their goals. Such people urging compromise are usually 'sensible conservatives' but see us wild eyed 'libertarian' types as potentially useful 'fellow travellers' if only we would learn to be more pragmatic.

And my view is usually to find out if the person telling me to compromise supported Bush or McCain, if American or Cameron if a Brit. And if they did, I try to discover if they are having serious buyers remorse... and if not, I tag them not as a 'fellow traveller' but as a political enemy to be opposed at every level.

But as in the USA there is at least a viable opposition movement to the Leviathan State whereas in the UK the now out-of-office Demonic Party and the ruling Stupid Party/Stupider Party coalition agree on all the Important Roles of the State, I will confine my remarks to America-centric ones because the vast majority of folks in the UK seem to rather enjoy the whole 'circling the drain' sensation and after all, the NHS is 'the envy of the world'.

It seems clear that the best chance for 'small staters' (which means small-L libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives) in America is taking over the Republican Party and that is exactly what the Tea Party is all about.

However the self identified libertarians, classical liberals and genuine conservatives within the Republican Party over the last 15 years have not been the solution to anything, indeed they have been the root of the problem...

...why?

Because in thinking that they must compromise on even the fundamental core principle of constitutionally limited government, large numbers of ostensibly pro-liberty people have voted for and abetted Big State Republicans like George "I started the bailout" Bush and John "I support the bailout" McCain. If you can 'compromise' to that extent, you are either lying about being in favour of limited government or you have no conception of what the word 'limited' means. 'Limited' does not mean "vast-but-growing-less-than-the-other-guy".

It is the very fact so many people who want a smaller state refused to ever say "THIS IS A DEAL BREAKER"... and really mean it... but rather kept endlessly holding their nose and voting for The Lesser Evil that made it possible for the state to keep growing remorselessly under Republican governments.

But the Cold War in over, we won, so Reagan's excuse no longer applies.

I have nothing against compromise with fellow travellers and usually see little value in obsessive purity tests, but the key here is compromise with fellow travellers (such as libertarians compromising with conservatives and visa versa), but what has happened over and over and over again is endless 'compromise' with people whose objectives are in fact antithetical.

So in short, what oh so many 'small staters' have been calling 'compromise' when they hold their nose and vote for a Big State politician just because he is running as a Republican, is not "compromise" at all... it is surrender.

What possible reason did the likes of Bush or McCain have to accommodate the views of 'small staters' when they knew they would vote for them regardless of how much they grew the state? No reason at all. None.

You want to know the problem? Look in the mirror and the problem will look back at you. That was the realisation that spawned the Tea Party and I was calling for that before the Tea Party even existed.

(57)

The true enemy of the Tea Party movement, contrary to what oh so many in the the clueless and wilfully blind MSM would have you believe, is not Obama and the Democratic Party, it is the Republican Party's establishment... i.e. the people who made Obama presidency possible.

And so when George W. Bush, the very embodiment of everything that brought the Tea Party into existence, says "Sarah Palin is unqualified", then it is time to start counting the days until the Tea Party propels her into the White House at the head of the angry mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks soccer moms, office workers and garage mechanics.

Often the quality of a person can be judged by who their are enemies... and that means Sarah Palin is looking more appealing by the day.

(35)

Now that the US mid-term elections are over and the Republicans have scored a decisive victory in the House, and won seats in the Senate, the thought must occur that California, which has stuck to its socialistic politics, is ever closer to going bust. The GOP in Congress is unlikely to tolerate a bailout for a state run by delusional, mostly Democratic, fools. But if California does go bust and defaults on its debt, what happens then? Maybe this would be a good thing in the long run. Several South American states have defaulted in the past, but they did recover, eventually.

I guess one not-so-difficult thing to predict is that businesses and people will continue to flee California. It is so sad: the last time I was there, the place appeared - maybe only on the surface - to be booming.

Rand Simberg has thoughts.

(23)

In 2012 there will be a US presidential election using a new distribution of the electoral college. This will use the population data of the current US census. After last night's elections, there has been a dramatic change in what happens if the Democrat and Republican candidates end up with a tie (for example 269 votes each).

Short answer is that, assuming the politicians stick to their party, the Republicans win the presidency, but the Senate would pick a Democrat for Vice President. Details at my election blog.

[Update: correction made from comments, thanks Lone Ranger!]

(48)

Some have asked how the Tea Party movement hopes to pressure Republican leaders or influence the party. That's the wrong way to look at it. The goal is not to pressure Republican leaders but to become the Republican leaders. The goal is not to influence the party but to become the party.

- Richard Viguerie

(7)

For the benefit of anyone who would like a Brit libertarian angle on the US Midterms, Antoine Clarke has blogged about them already (with more promised) at his recently launched Norlonto Review. And Rob at Rob's Blog is also up and liveblogging. Both are at Mr and Mrs Rob's home for the evening.

I too was going to be there, if only to see how the new offspring is doing, but a seriously sore throat demands that I remain at home, and probably also that I stay away from babies outside of London. Have a good evening everyone, and sorry not to be there to share with you face-to-face whatever fun may materialise. Your blogging will be the next best thing.

LATER - best bit yet, from Rob at 20:48:

So Al Jazeera had a polite discussion with a sensible Tea Partier who was allowed to make all kinds of sensible points about healthcare reforms and stimulus packages. Al Jazeera is much better than the BBC.

Building an audience by reporting things intelligently. Whatever next?

LATER: Michael J just got a mention from Rob, so maybe there'll be something from him here. Or here.

(18)

Karl Rove, a leading advisor for George W. Bush and therefore one of the people who made the Obama presidency possible, has launched another attack on Sarah Palin.

If I were her, I would be grinning from ear to ear.

(33)

Initially, when I saw the article, I wondered what on earth the editorial honchos at the Spectator Coffee House blog were doing in allowing this piece of invective to be published about the Tea Party movement in the US. But maybe those guys are actually being very smart, since the article is so bad, so unhinged, that it bears out the truth of what this Daily Telegraph columnist argues, which is that a large chunk of liberal (in the US sense) opinion is in total denial about what the Tea Party movement is about. It is just not within their mental frame of reference to comprehend ordinary voters rebelling about having to pay higher taxes for higher spending. ("But darling, how can the little people be so ungrateful?").

The Coffee House article tries to dismiss the TP movement is nothing more than a front for religious extremism. Now I don't particularly care for religion and as regulars will know, I tend to regard the separation of church and state as being one of the good things about the US, although the idea of such separation is not explicitly called for in the US Constitution.

But what the author of the Spectator Coffee House piece does not ask is this: if some of the Tea Partiers are playing fast and loose with American history, then are not the supporters of Mr Obama, and the bailouts, and the money printing of the Fed, also taking liberties with the intentions of the Founders? And that, surely, is what this is all about. The anger that is felt across the US among ordinary people is that their country is being bent out of shape by a group of people who hold them in contempt.

(17)

Concerning these elections that are coming up in the USA in a week or two's time, there seems to be a big argument going on about how smart the Democrats are compared to the Republicans. How smart or dumb are Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and the rest of them? Who, for instance, is being smarter or dumber about the year 1773? But those who worry about how smart or how dumb the various candidates for election are, or how smart or how dumb are the particular voters they are each trying to pander to, are, I think, missing a bigger point.

If you think that you and people like you should control large swathes of society and large swathes of the economy, then you really had better be very - make that impossibly - smart, and you are not smart, if only because you believe in this seriously dumb idea. But if the notion that you keep repeating during your campaign is that neither you nor people like you, nor your political opponents nor people like them, should have this kind of centralised power over everything, then provided you are sufficiently smart to make that one smart idea stick and have political consequences, it really doesn't matter how dumb you may be about anything or even everything else.

Obama has many smart opinions and many dumb ones, I think. But if he and his ilk are to have the kind of power they seek over the world, then them being quite smart and quite dumb guarantees not smartness but dumbness, in all the areas of life where regular people have found that they want to do things in their own various ways, while Obama and his friends think that something that they consider smart is preferable. And the smarter Obama and his friends think they are the dumber they end up being. (Alternatively, as Paul Marks likes to say, Obama is smart and is being dumb on purpose. Either way, it is not smart to vote for him.)

It is said that Sarah Palin and her ilk have many dumb opinions. Clearly Palin couldn't have got where she is, any more than Obama has got where he is, without being smart about some things. But yes, I'm sure Palin's fairly dumb about some things. But the difference is not merely that Palin is smart and dumb this much, while Obama is dumb and smart that much; it is that their dumbness or smartness have profoundly different consequences if Obama and friends think that President Obama and friends should boss lots and lots of things, while Palin and friends think that President Anyone and friends bossing lots and lots of things is dumb and are able to act on that notion.

So, for instance, if you have (what I would consider to be) dumb opinions about God, evolution, and so on, it doesn't matter, if, when you win your election, your most important political idea about God, evolution etc., is that both you and I should be allowed to worship God or not, think seriously (as I would see it) about science or not, as you imagine that your God is telling you to, or as I think makes sense. If that's what you'll do when you win your election, that'll do for me. And our agreement actually goes deeper than this. If the major political consequence of you believing in your God is you also believing that nobody on earth should try to play God, then I agree wholeheartedly. Politically, we are more than mere allies; we are kindred spirits.

My worry, and the worry of lots of others who believe in the government bossing as little as possible, is that the team which now says it is against politicians bossing everything, even against themselves doing it, may do very well in their mere elections, but then, when the power to boss everything actually is right there in their hands, they will forget the one truly smart thing they were saying during their campaign, and start being truly dumb. The bad news is that quite a few of the people on my preferred team probably already think like this. The good news is that others in the team I support are already looking beyond the elections, and saying that if that is how things then go, they won't go along with it.

(27)

I rather liked this excellent article by David Harsanyi explaining the rise of the Tea Party:

Do I wish that Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck hadn't declared that being gay was a choice (as if there's something wrong with choosing to be gay)? Yes. Do I wish he hadn't followed up by comparing a gay genetic predisposition with alcoholism? I do. If you were brainy enough to watch "Meet the Press" instead of wasting time in church last Sunday, no doubt you cringed at this primitive lunacy.

After all, what's more consequential than a faux pas about nature and/or nurture? Who cares that Democrat Michael Bennet was busy moralizing about the cosmic benefits of dubious economic theory and science fiction environmentalism - ideas that have already cost us trillions with nothing to show for it?

Just as long as we stay focused on what's important, right? We're so easily distracted.

Those who believe being gay is a choice are Neanderthals. The enlightened trust science. That's why the president appointed a science czar, people. A science czar who co-authored a textbook arguing for mass sterilizing of Americans to prevent an imagined population bomb. You know, "science."

Read the whole thing.

(12)

This article by one of the Home Depot founders has been out for a few days, but I thought it would be good to put it up as it communicates, with a sort of barely suppressed rage, how businessfolk in the US feel patronised and insulted by the sort of policymakers in Washington, obviously starting with Obama.

And I would happily wager that there are a lot of business people who feel pretty much the same way about the UK, as well. I just wish we would have more entrepreneurs making these kind of comments.

(18)

Victor Davis Hanson homes in on one of the big themes of the forthcoming USA elections, which is just how many of the candidates are not life long politicians, but people who have got seriously stuck into doing other things. Not stuck in to other things so as to have a better story to tell when they eventually make that first dash for political office that they all along had planned, but seriously stuck into other things as in seriously stuck in, as in it not occurring to them that they would ever be running for any political office:

[A] rare American - war hero, author, West Point instructor, retired colonel, conservative - Chris Gibson is running neck and neck in New York’s 20th Congressional District. I don’t get involved in political races per se; but I met Chris during his one-year stay at Stanford, and found him a rare Renaissance figure - yet another of these idealistic first-time candidates without a political resume who are entering the fray to save this country. I think pundits have not appreciated the fact that this is not quite a red/blue, Republican versus Democratic race, but a historic election in which many of the Republican candidates are first-time politicians, beholden to no one, and not part of the Republican establishment.

Not having a "political resume" seems to be just what the voters are now looking for. Every time the regular politicians accuse one of these political amateurs of having said or done something amateurish, the above impression, of not being a regular politician, is reinforced.

I get the feeling that the present political class in the USA contains hardly anyone who could mend a roof or build a car or program a computer or fly a helicopter, but that in among the next bunch, there will be quite a few who can do such things. There will be more "life skills" (think of the Harrison Ford character in Six Days and Seven Nights) in American politics than there are now.

Not that I think this matters very much. The crucial thing is: will these people have the right political ideas and do the right political things? You can do something very well but then come an almighty cropper when you switch careers, just as you can be undone by a mere promotion out of what you did well to telling others how to do what you did well. If this next generation of US politicians, many of whom are now professional-at-other-things, prove to be as amateurish in a bad way as the present lot of politicians, then they won't last long as politicians, and heaven help America.

(11)

With apologies to all for whom this is stale news, I want to report on Ezra Levant's latest book. Remember Ezra Levant? Yes, the guy who put his head way above the parapet to defend freedom of speech against the ridiculous 'Alberta Human Rights Commission', which had been busy trying to stamp it out.

I have not been paying much attention to Ezra Levant lately, but last night I happened to re-visit his blog, and I soon struck gold. Or rather: black gold. Oil. Shale oil, to be more precise.

A commenter on this later posting by me here about Levant mentioned Canadian shale oil, and now Levant has written a whole book about this.

Canadian shale oil is taking a huge bite out of the market share of those Middle Eastern terror paymasters who have been such pestilential opponents of free speech in the West in general and of Ezra Levant's free speech in particular, which could just be how Levant got interested. The Greenies hate Canadian shale oil, probably for that same reason. The Mainstream Media ... well, that bit's obvious. What's not to love about a book saying hurrah for Canadian shale oil?

As I say, lots of Samizdata readers will have seen these bits of video, of Levant talking about this book, Ethical Oil (brilliant title, yes?), at least a week ago. I've only had time to watch and hear half of the first bit of video, but already I know that any Samizdata readers who do not yet know about this book will likely be very glad to hear about it now.

Many bad things have happened during the last decade. One of the best things to have happened during that same time is that books like this one of Ezra Levant's - thanks to all of, you know, this - can now become as widely read as they deserve to be.

(18)

“It is true that individual financial institutions made bad decisions. In my opinion, they should have been allowed to go out of business—that would have been the proper way for them to be handled. However, their decisions were secondary to government policy. It should be remembered that the Federal Reserve owns the monetary system in the United States; we do not have a private monetary system. In 1913, our monetary system was nationalized. If you’re having problems in the monetary system—which is where the problems in the economy began—they are, by definition, government problems. This is analogous to interstate highway bridges falling down: If interstate highway bridges were falling down, everyone would recognize that the government owns the highways and conclude that this is a government-caused problem. Well, the government owns the monetary system, and the errors by the Federal Reserve are the foundations of the financial problems we’ve experienced.”

John Allison, former CEO of BB&T, who is that rarity in financial services, a genuine free marketer who knows what the prime cause of the credit disaster has been.

(The quote is taken from an interview of Allison by The Objective Standard, a fine magazine. Most of the articles are behind the subscriber firewall.)

(25)

This is a headline in the leftist New Republic magazine, over an article lauding any kind of US government spending, by Jonathan Cohn:

"Wanted: More Fraud, Abuse in Government Spending"

Here's a paragraph to show just how far down the Keynesian rabbit-hole parts of the pro-stimulus crowd have gone:

"But efficiency isn't the Recovery Act's primary purpose. Reviving the economy is. And that's required spending a vast amount of money very quickly--a goal that, inevitably, is at odds with spending the money carefully. Or, to put it another way, a stimulus that threw a little more money away might have created more jobs."

So "throwing away" money - which is ultimately not the government's to "throw away" but belongs, or is claimed, from individual citizens - "creates" jobs, does it? So if the US unemployment rate is stubbornly holding just below 10 per cent - a miserable result - then what is needed is yet even more spending, more money printing. These guys remind me of what was said, not always fairly I might add, of WW1 generals, who, when faced with the failure of their latest mass infantry assaults against the German army in Flanders, were urged for one more push, one more bout of bloodletting and hence on to victory.

Einstein once defined madness, I recall, as the repeating of an error and failing to learn from such errors over, and over again. By that measure, parts of the media and commentariat in the US are out of their conceited, Keynesian minds.

(11)

I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians - especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU - to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics.

- Michael C. Moynihan, linked to and already picked out as a nice little nugget by Instapundit, which is where I saw it. I know, I know, who gives a defecation what ex-music-celebs think? Or for that matter current actors. Well, I like it when they talk sense, if only because the people who talk nonsense get so miserable and angry about it.

(26)

A few days ago, I linked to an article that seeks to frame some, if not all, of Obama's political ideas within a sort of anti-colonial setting. It is fair to say that not everyone is buying it, and this article brutally takes on that thesis. And the writer, Heather MacDonald, is no leftie. At all. She writes for the Secular Right blog, which as its name implies, is a site written by those of a generally conservative bent who are not religious and generally regard the Republican Party's involvement with the Religious Right as not a Good Thing.

She does not pull her punches. And she has a point, although I still think the anti-colonial angle has some traction. It does, I think, explain things such as Obama's apparent no very great affection, that I can see, for the UK. Even so, in general my take is that Obama is a hard-left politician who has - at least for a while - bamboozled a lot of people into thinking of him as a centrist. But it is worth pointing out that his Big Government views are not really so odd in a nation once ruled by the likes of Roosevelt, LBJ, and for that matter, Richard Nixon (who brought in wage and price controls, let's not forget).

Anyway, read the whole piece.

(24)

Doctor Zero:

ObamaCare is the most powerful job-killing force unleashed against our economy in decades. It dramatically increases the cost of labor, and applies huge fines against companies that resist its mandates. Companies such as Caterpillar, John Deere, Prudential, and AT&T responded by announcing thousands of layoffs. This is a perfectly rational reaction to a bill that dramatically increases the cost of labor, especially when the legislation keeps mutating and producing expensive new horrors, such as the nationalization of student loans that wiped out thousands of jobs at Sallie Mae.

I sort of get much of that, although I would definitely have to follow the second link to see how ObamaCare is nationalising student loans, and to find out what on earth "Sallie Mae" might be. But, speaking more generally about this huge furore, I have a real problem with ObamaCare. Not in the sense that it is causing me to lay off hundreds of my employees, but in the sense that I am finding the arguments about it very hard to follow. Mountains of verbiage have already been written about ObamaCare and many more will follow. But I am afraid I missed the early bits, where the actual blow-by-blow damage that ObamaCare will unleash (is now unleashing) was itemised, briefly and punchily. Anti-ObamaCare writers tend now merely to allude to the assumed harm of it, rather than yet again itemising it. Much is made by critics of ObamaCare of the immense length and complexity of the relevant legislation, which it seems most US politicians have no more read right through than I have. But what, approximately speaking, does it all say?

I suspect I am not the only Brit who feels this way. Not that long ago, for instance, I heard those comedians on Mock The Week take it in turns to denounce Americans for not welcoming ObamaCare, and I knew they were talking out of their smug and self-satisfied arses (especially that little bald one who is smug self-satisfaction personified, if you don't happen to agree with something he is saying). Death panels? No. It's free healthcare for those who can't now afford it, you obese God-frazzled morons. What could possibly be wrong with that?!? Do you all want to die prematurely of terrible diseases and accidents that the British health service cures immediately at no cost?

But had I been on the panel, trying to resist (in particular) the Smug Dwarf's relentless leftery, I don't think I would have done a very good job. Most Brits watching, if my reaction is anything to go by, either agreed that all American opponents of ObamaCare are indeed morons, or that they perhaps have their reasons for not wanting it, but that these reasons will for ever be a mystery, probably involving some Americanised version of God.

So, commenters, please fill me (us) in. Please help us Brits - this particular Brit especially - to wrap our brains around ObamaCare. What, briefly, are those "mandates" that Doctor Zero refers to? How are student loans involved? And what else is being inflicted?

I would like to be able to concoct a further posting entitled something like: "A brief but pretty much complete explanation for confused Brits of why ObamaCare is a really bad idea and why so many Americans are right to hate it". And maybe, with your help, I will be able to do that.

One particular request. What concerns me is not to dig deeply into any particular harm that ObamaCare is doing. What I seek is completeness, combined with as much brevity as can be contrived. In the event that I do manage that follow-up posting that I can now only dream of, I want an American to be able to wizz through it, and say something like: "Yup, that about covers it. That's why so many of us hate it. I actually don't think number three is quite as bad as your short description of it implies, and I think number five is far worse even than you say. But, nothing major is missing from that list. Good job."

Maybe such a posting already exists, and I need only read it, and link to it.

Or maybe (I've just been following the links in the quote above, just to check that they work), my question is wrong. Maybe what I really want is a brief guillotine-blow-by-guillotine-blow guide to the entire Obama legislative "achievement", of which "ObamaCare" is only a part.

Anyway, whatever help anyone can offer along these approximate lines would be most welcome.

(154)

I knew next to nothing about this woman but if the statist right and left attack someone as hard as they have her, I get a strong suspicion I might like her a lot.

Listen to this interview of her on Pajamas TV before the primary which she has handily won. Make up your own mind. She certainly hits the Austrian economics and small government buttons in my soul. Libertarians need to get behind this woman in November. If you are in Delaware, volunteer. You can make a really big difference for a small amount of effort.

The media are going to attack her mercilessly. In no time at all the MSM will be telling us horror stories about the loathsome habits of her pet fish (if she has any). Consider this your inoculation against them.

If I can forgive her for belonging to a clan that warred with one side of my family (the O'Neill's) centuries ago, so can you!

I just have to add this Firefly clip noted by Glenn Reynold:

(38)

An honest leftie? In the American MEDIA? Who'd a thunked it!

Lawrence O'Donnell: Yes. And I've been a liberal for so long that I still call myself one. I didn't change to "progressive."

THR: But you have referred to yourself as a socialist.

O'Donnell: Yes. A practical European socialist which, as it turns out, we all are, if you know that Social Security ... is a socialist program, and that Medicare is a socialist program and that all economies of the world are mixed with some capitalism and some socialism and they just vary in their degrees.

THR: So you have no objection when conservatives call President Obama a socialist?

O'Donnell: No. But if they're honest about it, they would call themselves socialist, too. Newt Gingrich preserved the socialist state. He never once introduced a bill to repeal Medicare.

THR: Would you object if a Republican introduced such a bill?

O'Donnell: No, because I think it's an honest position. I hope Rand Paul does if he becomes a senator. There are people who honestly hold themselves in opposition to socialism. But there isn't a single one in the U.S. Congress who does.

True enough.

(16)

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does not lose his temper, or at least not much. He favours a fairly dry, laconic style. So dry, in fact, that the duller sorts can miss it. So when he does come out with something unusually sharp, I tend to sit up and take particular notice.

"Ah, but remember when you now-disappointed Obama supporters were lecturing us about the fierce moral urgency of change? With such overweening self-righteousness? Even as you resolutely failed to look at what was going on, or to inquire into what Obama was actually like? So pardon me, now-disappointed Obama voters, if I point out that you’re rubes."

By the way, does anyone bother to read Andrew Sullivan these days?

Update: I see that Matt Welch, at Reason's Hit & Run blog, has become unusually sharp about Sullivan these days. The latter's blind devotion to TARP and the rest is driving even some people who are generally nice to Sully increasingly to distraction.

(32)

"Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment. But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost."

- Dinesh D'Souza.

Those mid-term elections in November should be interesting.

(10)

I've known about the Kochs, and about their legendary wealth and about their massive support with some of it for the US libertarian movement, ever since I first became a part of the London libertarian scene in the late 1970s. (Although, I'm still not sure how they are pronounced. Cock? Coke? Kotch? (Coach?)) So the idea that their support for libertarianism is now or ever was some kind of covert operation, rather than just rich people spending their own money trying to do and spread goodness as they saw it, is, to me, utterly ridiculous. One of the Kochs even ran for vice-President, I am reminded here. Was that secret too?

Well, I guess it sort of was. What happens is that you spend two or three decades generally stamping and shouting and raising all kinds of heaven and hell, saying that every bit of sex and drugs and rock and roll and free marketeering that you can think of should be legalised, and they ignore you. Finally you start making some rather big waves, in some way that doesn't involve them helping in any way, even by them deigning to denounce you, and they then call you "covert". It wasn't even that they couldn't get you on the phone despite trying, twice. No. You couldn't get them on the phone, ever.

Personally I think it's a very good sign that they are now attacking libertarianism, pro-capitalism etc., by pointing out that there are these rich capitalists who are in favour of it. This tells me that they feel they are running out of actual arguments. It also tells me that they don't think that them drawing attention to the libertarian movement, by banging on about how these evil capitalists support it like this, can draw much more attention to this movement than we are now contriving for ourselves. In short, we are now up and running as a force in the real world beyond that of mere ideological intercourse among consenting ideologists, and they know it.

(9)

A pretty fair summary of what the Tea Party movement means for current US politics and the races leading up to the mid-term elections. For non-US readers who are unfamiliar with all this, the article is not a bad introduction. At least the Reuters report does not write it off as full of racist nutballs or religious bigots, and actually focuses on the anti-tax, anti-spending viewpoint of the Tea Partiers.

(39)

I think that in the light of the recent controversy about the place possibly known as the Cordoba Center near Ground Zero, the real cause for annoyance on the part of any New Yorker, surely, is why it has taken so long to get going with any serious construction down there. This Wikipedia entry on the Empire State Building, for example, suggests that the building in Midtown was erected in a space of only a few years. That was in the early 1930s - what was so radically different then?

I suspect that if we already had an impressive and dignified piece of architecture in the southern tip of Manhattan, the row about what happens to nearby buildings would not have erupted so much. It seems that planning and political issues are at stake here - after all, places such as Dubai and various parts of Asia put up skyscrapers with great speed these days.

Or maybe the intention all along is that Ground Zero should remain a flat, empty space of land, purely in the form of a place for remembrance.

(25)

This is about Barack Obama's relationship to a charming, well-meaning but ultimately rather contemptible chap called Dave.

This Dave. Another guy called Lawrence also comes into it as well.

I loathe the film Dave. As entertainment it's fine. Politically it is a liberal (US sense) wish fulfillment fantasy with the sole redeeming virtue that it implicitly acknowledges that the only way they would get their way is by lies. In it a nice but dopey guy called Dave substitutes for his double, the philandering, i.e. Republican, President of the United States. The switch was intended to be just for one appearance at first but ends up being permanent when the President has a stroke.

From the synopsis: "When he takes the extreme action of reworking (with the help of his friend Murray, an accountant from Baltimore) the national budget in order to save a $650 million program for helping the homeless ... " When he takes the extreme action, you mean, of foisting on the American people a programme they did not vote for and presumably voted against when they elected a President who opposed it. Again from the synopsis: "...Dave convinces her [the president's wife] to remain and keep up the ruse, when he realizes he has a chance to improve the nation." You mean, a chance to impose his will on the nation. "Dave then holds a news conference announcing that he is firing Alexander [conniving Chief of Staff], and proposing a comprehensive full-employment program to Congress. [Liberal wish fulfillment fantasy.]

For some reason the film does not cover the bit where he gets hammered in the mid-term elections, having suddenly proposed a lunatic plan to Congress that seems to come from the manifesto of the sort of party that Ralph Nader voted for when young and silly.

None of the nice characters in the film seem troubled by the idea what they are doing - unconstitutionally replacing the elected leader with an unelected leader who takes the country in the direction he personally thinks best - scarcely differs morally from a coup d'état. All is justified by Dave's goodness.

The plot of Dave, a movie that deeply annoys me, is very close to that of a science fiction novel I love, Heinlein's Double Star.

Can I think of a better reason than political partisanship for claiming that the people who substituted Dave Kovic for a political leader in a coma in Dave acted wrongly and the people who substituted Lawrence Smith a.k.a. The Great Lorenzo for a political leader in a coma in Double Star acted rightly? I think so. Heinlein, who had thought deeply about democracy even if he did not always like it, went to some trouble to give John Joseph Bonforte's staff as little choice as possible.

Most urgently, if Bonforte does not turn up at a Martian ceremony in which he is to be adopted into a Martian clan it will be taken as an insult graver than any human can imagine and will probably cause inter-species war. That's the whole reason he was kidnapped.

Secondly Bonforte is not out of commission because of natural causes but because his political enemies kidnapped him and used drugs to damage his mind. In other words the substitution is stopping the bad guys benefiting from their evil deeds. People are being deceived, yes, but the deceivers are doing all they can to make what would have happened without the crime happen despite it, not to make new things happen.

Oh yeah, thirdly, he is not actually in office when the substitution occurs. The voters are not having someone they did not vote for secretly substituted for someone they did; they are subject to the lesser deception of being asked to vote anew (in an election part-way through the book) for someone who is not really who he says he is. I think that makes a difference.

Anyway, back to Barack. This "secret Muslim" theory is conspiracy crap, or possibly people having a laugh when answering surveys. He was born in the US and Trig is Palin's child so you can all put away your warming pans. And the man has a rather distinctive physical appearance that would be difficult to duplicate.

Bodily he is but morally he is not the Barack who campaigned as a centrist. Which deceiver does he resemble the most, do you think, Dave or the Great Lorenzo?

Added later: I would like to expand on my last sentence above in the light of thoughts prompted by the comments. Having an elected leader diverge from the manifesto he or she was elected upon is sometimes the price you pay and sometimes the benefit you get for electing a human being rather than an automaton. Human beings adapt to circumstances, which may include justifiably breaking a promise. They also deceive or - and this is an interesting case - are happy to let others deceive themselves. Caveat emptor.

(15)

The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d'etre.

Death spirals of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, knowing acceptance of our generation's role in the capitalist meta-narrative, knickers losing their raison d'etre... I tells 'ee, one of these nights we'll all be murthered in our beds.

(23)

"So Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are all on Air Force One. Suddenly it malfunctions and crashes. Who survives? America."

From a commenter on this item.

Actually, the logic applies to most countries and their governments. Parts of our MSM like to believe that if the leader of X or Y has a problem, dies or whatever, that the nation will be plunged into chaos. Not so; it is a mark of a healthy country that the passing of a leader, even in tragic circumstances such as those affecting Poland recently, is not a massive blow to the country per se.

Tangentially, this book by Gene Healy about the "cult" of the modern presidency is worth reading.

(19)

"Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble? When it comes to handling oil spills, the answer is Richard Nixon. Like our current president, Nixon too presided over a major offshore oil blowout—the three million gallon Santa Barbara spill of 1969. And, like Mr. Obama, Nixon responded by whipping up anti-oil sentiment and passing a sweeping moratorium on drilling. This parallel is important to keep in mind, because Nixon's reaction helped cause the worst energy crisis in American history."

Alex Epstein.

Alas, the rest of the article is behind the WSJ subscriber firewall (I wonder how that is working out for Mr Murdoch, Ed).

(5)

Head Start, which provides preschool programs to poor families, is a prime example of the Senate committee’s true attitude toward evidence-based decision-making. In January, the Health and Human Services Department released a study of Head Start’s overall impact. The conclusions were disturbing. By the end of first grade, the study found, Head Start graduates were doing no better than students who didn't attend Head Start. "No significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year," the report concluded.

And how did the Senate panel react to this dismal evidence? They set aside $8.2 billion for Head Start in 2011, almost a billion dollars more than in 2010. Of course, the fact that Congress spends billions of dollars each year on unproven programs does not itself argue that the government should start spending hundreds of millions of new dollars on new unproven programs. But it does undercut the argument that federal education dollars should be reserved only for conclusively proven initiatives.

- Paul Tough in an op-ed in the New York Times.

...via Steve Sailer, who comments:

That's pretty funny when you stop and think about it.

(28)

The United States operates what it refers to as the Visa Waiver Program. This allows citizens of other rich countries to make short visits to the US without the hassle of obtaining a visa in advance. This follows what is pretty much standard practice: citizens of most rich countries can visit most other rich countries without obtaining a visa. In recent times the US has also required visitors to register their passport numbers with a US government website prior to coming to the US, presumably so that potential visitors can be checked against a list of prohibited visitors. This is more than most other rich countries require (although my native Australia has a very similar system) but is a very minor inconvenience.

Up until now, this whole process has been free of charge to the traveler. However, as of September 8, the US will start charging a $14 fee for people who wish to use the visa waiver program.

It is not actually terribly uncommon for governments to extort charge money from tourists in ways like this, but it is once again relatively unusual for such fees to be charged when citizens of one rich country visit another rich country. (Fees are more common when citizens of rich countries visit poor countries or vice versa). As a frequent traveler, however, I find such fees loathsome. Having a moneygrubbing government steal money from you is not a good first impression of a country. Such policies do of course influence where I choose to travel to, and whether I will return to a country for multiple visits.

What does boggle the mind about the new US policy is its justification. The fee has been introduced under something called the Travel Promotion Act of 2009, which was passed with overwhelming support in both houses of Congress. Apparently, the money is to be used to set up something called the Corporation for Travel Promotion, which will apparently "promote America to overseas tourists", and thus halt the decline in tourism to the US.

Got that? A tax is to be imposed on tourists, the proceeds of which will be used to set up a new bureaucracy to promote US tourism to foreigners, who will then come in greater numbers.

Brilliant.

(53)

I was about to stick this up as a(n) SQotD, but I see that there already is one. Never mind, here it is anyway:

Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. The New Republic’s print edition describes the reaction of the Administration on “April 14, 2009 as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip”. Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”

Obama had hit on the phrase the New Foundation. He tried it out with Presidential historians at a private dinner in the White House. Doris Kearns Goodwin nixed it. She said it sounded “like a woman’s girdle”. Goodwin was right. But it underscores the complete vacuity of a public policy built on wordsmithing. The administration was trying on words like a courtier at Versailles might try on a hat or a dress thinking it would make a difference.

Not that there is anything wrong with hats or dresses or deckchairs. The only thing wrong is imagining that rearranging these articles on the deck of the Titanic will keep it afloat. There’s something crazy about that, something pathetically crazy.

That's Richard Fernandez reflecting on the declining esteem in which President Obama is now held, abroad and at home.

Two thoughts. First, I'd have put a comma where it says "hats or dresses or deckchairs", to make it "hats or dresses, or deckchairs". There is a slight change of gear there, which, I would say, needs a bit of punctuational acknowledgement.

But second, more seriously, is Obama's present nosedive in esteem, well described by Fernandez, irreversible? Having just watched our own former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, damn near levelling out from what looked like a nosedive towards total catastrophe for himself and for his party, and achieving a very decent, under the circumstances, crash landing that nearly saved both. Brown only lost by an extraordinarily narrow margin, given how things had looked only a few months earlier, and his main opponent, from having looked a winner by a mile, had to make do with leading a mere coalition. Seemingly doomed politicians - inevitable losers, to use the word that Fernandez also uses - can make comebacks. Can Obama? Can this Titanic yet be kept afloat?

One thing that might improve matters for President Obama is that just now (or so it looks to me from over here) even the one party media who got Obama elected are now criticising him, a bit, partly for real, but partly in order that their next burst of slavish support for him will look honest instead of slavish.

On the other hand, if what happened here with Gordon Brown is anything to go by, Obama's saviours will not be his media cheerleaders, or for that matter his own speechwriters, but his leading opponents, who will somehow contrive to look as clueless as he now looks.

(43)

In most every election, 80% of blacks vote Democratic - the perceived party of free stuff - rather than for the party that ended slavery.

- Rachel Marsden

(40)

The American media has used up its credibility on vanity projects. AGW was the primary one over the last few years, but the biggest vanity project of theirs was Obama. He's been elected, and no one in America really has any illusions, on either side of the aisle, that he was "the media's candidate." The problem that they face is that they are now tied to him, and he's sinking fast. Turns out, despite how many times they claimed it wasn't true or didn't matter, that he's inexperienced, indecisive and lacks any sort of guiding principle. They spent all the credibility they had with the American people over the last 15 years or so, and ramped that spending way up to get Obama elected. They are now broke, incredible, and paying the price. Fox News is the only one that didn't waste its credibility capital on this (and have learned to horde it viciously after being under credibility attack by the others since its birth) and is now thriving because of it. Even leftists in America are now turning to Fox more than the rest of the media when they need hard news, like in a crisis or attack situation. The media wasted the reputation they built up since WW2 on tawdry baubles like AGW and Obama, and now no one trusts them. That's the state of the US media.

- Samizdata commenter "Phelps", writing about this.

(34)

I would be very interested to learn what our American commenters make of Andrew Breitbart. My impression is that he's really making misery for the One Party Media in the USA, but occasionally making mistakes. Did he mishandle that video featuring Shirley Sherrod? Or is he being falsely accused of having done so by lilly-livered Conservatives who are too keen on being liked by liberals who will always despise them? My impression is that Breitbart didn't call Sherrod a racist, but that he did, rightly, call her audience racist.

I ask because the latest Breitbart sally seems to contain a (another?) quite serious error. The New York Times has issued what looks to me like a deeply dishonest "retraction", saying that the racist things said to some Congressman in the street were nothing to do with the Tea Party Movement, when the actual truth, as commenter number one on his piece immediately points out, is that they were nothing to do with anything because they never even happened. And Breitbart seems to me to be letting the New York Times get clean away with this piece of blatant scumbaggery, contenting himself with merely demanding that all the other One Party Media organs issue the same utterly dishonest semi-retraction. If this is Breitbart hitting back twice as hard, my reaction is that he could have landed a far heavier flurry of punches than he just did. Is that a fair criticism, and even if it is, am I just doing that old arm-chair moaner thing of saying that whoever is doing the real business for my team, when I am doing nothing, could be doing even better. Am I demanding the best in a way that is for practical purposes hostile to the good?

Whatever the particular truth about just how good a job Breitbart is or is not doing on the One Party Media, I get the distinct impression from over here that something very big is happening to the US media. Some kind of - sorry but the phrase is exactly appropriate - "tipping point" seems to be being reached.

The thing is, people on the whole tend not to unleash cumbersome solutions upon circumstances that don't seem to be a problem. It takes time for people to desert their old familiar ways of acquainting themselves with what's going on in the world, and there has to be a solid reason to do this, same as there has to be a solid reason to move house or switch from PCs to a Mac, or to stop drinking any alcohol. It takes some particular lie about something that they are personally familiar with, to "tip" them, like when their own genuinely good-guy cousin and his thoroughly nice wife get called (along with a few thousand other people) racists by some loud-mouthed hand-deep-in-the-government-till scam-artist on the television, without any corrective complaint from the grey-haired professorial old guy introducing it, and when they read the same stuff in their newspaper the next morning. At which point they start suspecting that everything else in their formerly trusted newspaper, or on their hitherto perfectly adequate TV channel, could also be deception and scumbaggery. The point being that this switch wasn't going to happen all in one go, with the overnight arrival of the internet. But I have the feeling that the number of US citizens who are, just about now, arriving at this point in their news and current affairs habits, is becoming something approaching a Moment in US History.

Is that right? Or just wishful thinking. To put it another way, Paul Marks is fond of saying in comments here that "most people" still get their news from the regular old media rather than from blogs and such. Is that observation starting to become seriously obsolete? After all, if a quite large percentage of those who still read (exclusively) and trust (implicitly) the regular old media now have family or friends whom they do not consider to be completely mad who don't and who don't, that has to change things. Doesn't it? At the very least, that means that the One Party Media are now experienced by most as putting forward a distinct point of view, rather than just serving up The News. And that's quite a change. Isn't it?

ADDENDUM: I wrote what is immediately above before reading Dale's piece immediately below.

(13)

I have not yet read 'American Empire: Before the Fall' yet myself but have been hearing a great deal about it.

I do not myself believe America is going to 'fall'. Quite the contrary, I believe it is the ruling class in America that is about to go through a very big fall, albeit with some bad short term consequences for the nation before that occurs.

The very fact that a self-published book can rise so far in the Amazon rankings is a testament to just how ticked off average Americans are with the power elite.

Their day of reckoning is coming.

(6)

Any politician who first stirs up love amongst you is trying to steal something from you.

- Tom Smith

(20)

From the latest Radio Times:

McCarthyism: There Were Reds Under the Bed

In the light of recent spy revelations, David Aaronovitch uncovers dramatic evidence that the notorious Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy may have been right after all about Soviet infiltration into the US government.

That's this coming Sunday, July 25th, at 1.30pm, on BBC Radio 4.

Google, google. Here is more about the programme:

David Aaronovitch thinks the unthinkable about the McCarthy period.

The hunt for the so called 'Reds under the beds' during the Cold War is generally regarded as a deeply regrettable blot on U.S history. But the release of classified documents reveals that Joseph McCarthy was right after all about the extent of Soviet infiltration into the highest reaches of the U.S government.

Thanks to the public release of top secret FBI decryptions of Soviet communications, as well as the release under the fifty year rule of FBI records and Soviet archives, we now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was extensive, reaching to the highest level of the State department and the White House.

We reveal that many of McCarthy's anticommunist investigations were in fact on target. His fears about the effect Soviet infiltration might be having on US foreign policy, particularly in the Far East were also well founded.

The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets. We explore why much of this information, available for years to the FBI, was not made public. We also examine how its suppression prevented the prosecution of suspects.

Finally, we explore the extent to which Joseph McCarthy, with his unsavoury methods and smear tactics, could have done himself a disservice, resulting in his name being forever synonymous with paranoia and the ruthless suppression of free speech.

Hearing from former FBI, CIA and KGB operatives as well as formerly blacklisted writers, David Aaronovitch, himself from a family of communists tells the untold story of Soviet influence and espionage in the United States.

Interesting. Phrases like "thinking the unthinkable", coming from the BBC, generally signify something drearily conformist, of the sort that it is almost unthinkable to contest, like the claim that, I don't know, economic growth is not all good, or that pollution pollutes. Not this time, I think you will agree.

Although, I distrust that last bit, about McCarthy's "unsavoury tactics" being to blame for his failure. It was McCarthy's fault that the Bolsheviks weren't unmasked? I wait to be convinced that what saved the Bolsheviks of that time and place was Joe McCarthy's ineptness. I prefer the more obvious explanation, which is that the very Bolsheviks who had, as McCarthy rightly claimed, dug themselves into the US government were the ones who stopped him.

I also rather resent the timing of this revelation. Now, they tell us? I think that one of the habits of the bad guys is to concede the truth, but only when it's too late to do much good. The purpose of such admissions is not the truth for the sake of it, but to establish what honest fellows the bad guys are, so that their current or next pack of lies will also be believed, until that too is unmasked, too late, and so on. But maybe that's to be too cynical, at any rate in this matter. I am not familiar with Aaronovitch's writings and thinkings over the years. Maybe he's a good guy.

I'll certainly be having a listen to this. Either at 1.30pm on Sunday, or failing that, soon after.

(33)

Michael Tomasky blogs for the Guardian on American affairs. He is a fairly left wing Democrat, and is currently feeling down. He describes in this piece how a piece of internet humour cheered him up. He was sent a letter to the Red States (i.e. the ones voting Republican in the weird American convention for political colours) that reads:

Subject: Letter to the Red States:

Dear Red States.

If you manage to steal this election too, we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all of the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.

We get stem cell research and the best beaches. You get faith healing and swamps.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

I am not so much interested in whether the contrasts drawn in the letter are true or fair. I did not even understand many of them. I am very interested in the way that this kind of humour can no longer be kept secret from those who are the butt of the joke. Despite being in the form of a letter to the Red States the original writer of this (from the reference to stealing "this election too" it dates from before Obama's victory and probably from just before Bush's second term) must have known that it would be harmful to the Democrat cause to have it actually read by too many Red Staters, particularly come election time. It would arouse even more hostility from a bloc of voters the Democrats would like to reach when accompanied, as it often was, by the Jesusland map.

A couple of decades back - when this sort of thing was photocopier humour rather than internet humour - such a letter would have been seen overwhelmingly by fellow Democrats and Blue State persons. Now it can be found by anyone. It can be found by anyone years after the event. It keeps on being found years after the event.

At first I thought of this in personal terms: one can imagine this letter to the Red States appearing on the website of some minor political guy in 2010 and causing him embarrassment in 2020 when the Republicans run it as an attack ad on TV, or whatever has replaced TV, just as his plane lands at Texas as part of the last-minute tour of swing states. But, imagining harder, he could probably laugh it off. Some of these red-staters might even laugh with him. By then, a cultural change will have occurred. It will have emerged that everybody has multiple skeletons in their cupboard; you can not spend years on the internet without accumulating them.

Bigger than the effect on any one person, though, is the dispersed effect of lots of Republicans being slightly irritated and slightly more prone to think that when Democratic party politicians come courting their votes they are laughing at them behind their hands. As indeed they are. (I could but heroically will not digress into the question of whether Republicans laugh at Democrats in the same way. You are not missing much; the term "hegemonic discourse" was in there somewhere.) However possibly that dispersed irritation also will be moderated by the coming everybody's-got-skeletons cultural change: by then we will all know more about how everybody has multiple faces that they show in different groups. (Strange how "two faced" is an insult but "multi-faceted" is praise.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we will all be less able to ignore our knowledge of everybody's rotating mild disloyalty to all the groups to which they belong except the one to which they are talking at any particular minute.

Oddly enough the name of Michael Tomasky has come up in another context concerning stuff on teh interwebs being seen by eyes it was not intended for. American right wing blogs are fizzing about "JournoList", this being a private internet forum for American left wing journalists, academics and think tankers, where they would work out this week's media consensus. Tomasky was a member. So was David Weigel, a journalist for the Washington Post, who had to resign from covering conservative affairs for that paper after expressing his opinion of several leading conservatives on JournoList by means of a term that I at first thought referred to their alleged propensity to engage in illicit commerce with rats but I now deduce means to behave towards someone in an underhand manner. You will have deduced that JournoList is no longer private and that some people think that its members were acting towards the American public in an underhand manner.

There will be several scandals like this. Then they will stop because everyone will have adapted. The words "private internet forum" will be regarded as oxymoronic. The politically imprudent humour will continue, though. Nothing can shut a human mouth once it has started on a joke, except possibly the prospect of saving it up for a larger audience on the internet.

(20)

I am not talking about classical revolution by arms, but a revolution of ideas. I have been watching, and in may ways participating, in the growing split between world views that is contemporary America. I have little time for the fabric of the leftist views, although I have little problem with many of the lifestyle threads they support. They have now moved so far away from my own 'center' that I am much more inclined to throw in my lot with the 'Country Party' discussed in this The American Spectator article.

It is well worth reading, and although not perfectly congruent with libertarians, it is certainly far closer than the positions of contemporary liberals.

(6)

I just got the news: our friends in Massachusetts have received their Official Massachusetts Government Notification that their Initiative to Roll Back the Sales Tax from 6.25% to 3% is on the November 2, 2010 Ballot.

Carla Howell, I salute you!

(12)

Subtracting time needed to get to the area, at 146,000 barrels per day that translates into 9 million barrels that could have been processed since the initial offer was made by the Dutch.

- a commenter here called 'Willab' remarking on the belated US decision to accept Dutch assistance in dealing with the BP oil spill.

(18)

I have only just come across this article by Lawrence Solomon in the (Ontario) Financial Post of June 26 - about the five-star lunacy of the US government's response to offers of help in cleaning up the mess. Highlights:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. …

...the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers ...

... The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks ... By May 5, ... the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment

... Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. ... In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berms to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berms. …

Draw your own conclusions.

(16)

“Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

- Benjamin Franklin.

Happy 4th of July to my American friends and relations. This is a good day for all Anglospherists to remember.