The Anarchist Flamethrower

August 24, 2007 – Sub-Prime Debt From A Ground Zero Perspective

2007-08-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have a friend named Annie. She is a single mother with two kids and a serious problem with her house. She is about to lose it.

She ran up her two credit cards and made her payments late. And so her interest rate went from (an already usurious IMHO) 16 percent to 32 percent. So in effect she couldn’t ever pay it off making the minimum payment each month which, if she was lucky, is the best she could do. This is real; I saw the statements from Mastercard and Visa myself. She bought a car she couldn’t afford, but hey she needed something to drive, right? And something dependable too, not some crappy ol’ hoopty, as we call ‘em here in Detroit. She has a job and kids and other responsibilities and so dependable transportation is a must.

When you get jammed up like this, very soon the bill collectors start calling. And calling and calling. At home, at work, at your parents and relatives, and on your cell phone. And these calls are unrelenting, and needless to say, embarrassing.

She was pouring her heart out to my girlfriend and me one night when she was over at the house for a barbecue. “WTF am I gonna do man? I just can’t stand this anymore,” she said to us finally.

My best advice: Make a deal, go bankrupt, or hire a lawyer to negotiate with your debtors, but whatever you do, DON’T get a second mortgage loan against your house. Don’t. Just don’t. Easy and simple though this solution seemed, I strongly advised against it. Annie’s house note, taxes, and utilities were about the only bills that she did keep up with. And which was smart too. So far so good.

The reasoning behind what I said to her was this; Visa and MC can call you constantly, embarrass and humiliate you, and generally make your life miserable. And Ford Credit can and will take you car away, but at least you’ll have a roof over your head. A place to live for her and her kids is the priority here. The other debt she could deal with later. Visa, MC, and Ford Credit can all make your life miserable, embarrass you, ruin your “credit reputation” (i.e., your credit report and FICO score), but in the grand scheme of things in this life, it’s worth it all to persevere through such a predicament than it is to lose your homestead.

But she did it anyhow. And things were fine, for a while. She got the money and paid Visa and MC off in full and then she cancelled the accounts. She paid off her car too. But then she got laid off for a while and got behind on both mortgages. And now she’s being foreclosed on. Which is exactly what I was afraid would happen.

If she had done as I suggested she’d still be getting calls from bill collectors and had her car repo’ed and be reduced to public transportation and a hoopty, but still, she’d have had a place to live, a refuge, a nest, whatever you wanna call it; A safe, secure place to be that she owned, and a good springboard for getting her financial situation back in order. But that possibility is gone now. Visa and MC and Ford Credit don’t mind though. They already have their money.

I hope that she really likes that car, and that it’s in good shape. Because after shipping her kids off to their father (and changing schools and having to put up with a bitchy step mom to boot), she’s gonna have to live in it for a while.

I am not gonna make the expected rant here against the usurious sub-prime loan business that some of you are no doubt anticipating at this point. No, the fault lies with Annie and her bad choices. And boy howdy is she gonna pay for those choices, too. And the consequences for her and her children are going to be felt for a long while.

I hope anyone reading this benefits somehow from this cautionary tale I’ve laid out here.

sub-prime_debt, forclosure, debt

August 23, 2007 – I Quit My Day Job in the Movement

2007-08-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

I resigned my gig as Tuesday guest editor at STR yesterday. Partly for political reasons and partly for health considerations.

My liver disease and kidney problems are putting a great strain on my body and I require frequent medical treatment, which takes up a lot of my time and energy. And so something had to give, and the STR gig was one of things I had to let go of. It takes a least four hours to put together a good daily edition and that fours hours is a bitch when I am groggy and weak from treatment and when I just want to lay down and take a nap. But if you have an edition to get ready you can’t rest when you feel like it without compromising the quality of your edition, which was something I was loathe to do.

The political considerations were an issue too. I believe that oppression is what it is, and I see no distinction as to whether you are being squashed down directly by a state entity (i.e., courts, cops, bureaucrats, and politicians) or by some “private” entity (monopolists, rent-seekers, special interest groups and such ilk) who influence the state with money-bought political clout.

Microsoft, the RIAA, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and similar groups and wealthy individuals should have no means to do what they do to assert their views on us. Foisting an unpopular agenda without a state provided system of law courts and judges (who are all ultimately backed up by armed police) to make us conform to their will is what the state-privileged sorts do. They use force without actual violence, (at first anyhow) to repress and dominate us, but my friends the anarcho-capitalists and the big and small “L” libertarians just don’t see it that way.

But as I said yesterday, some see “private” coercion, (that is, special interests using the state as a catspaw for their own ends) as somehow different and somehow acceptable because see, it’s supposedly “private” and “voluntary.” Which of course any rational analysis shows to be false. There is nothing “private” about a cop arresting you, or “voluntary” about being sued. I really don’t question the anarcho-capitalists and libertarians sincerity of belief, but I do reject their dismissal of my critique of their idea of what constitutes liberty.

And so there you have it.

oppression libertarian anarcho-capitalist special_interest_groups, gun_control liberty class_struggle rent_seeking

August 21, 2007 – Whom Do You Trust?

2007-08-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve been getting some criticism lately from people I respect that my views are “too left-wing” (whatever that means), because I oppose oppressive actions taken by private entities (i.e., religious groups, business interests, political parties) rather than confining my criticism only to oppressive action by state entities.

As if. A boot on your neck hurts no less when it’s held there by a soldier or cop because of some governmental conflict or by the same soldier or cop acting on behalf some private interest who has convinced the state to enforce their notions of proper conduct. The boot is the same, the cop is the same, and the gun to your head is the same. Being sued by the IRS is really no different in cause or effect than being sued by the RIAA, Microsoft, the Brady Campaign or any number of other private entities that use their privileged position with the state to dominate you for their own gain or benefit. And yet many alleged libertarians claim to see a moral distinction between the two forms of oppression. Well I don’t.

Most of the SDS members that I know fall into the political category called “anarcho-socialist” or “anarcho-syndicalist.” They desire a “no controlling authority” condition of liberty that allows them to run their own workplace and set their own conditions of labor. This program may not be classical laissez-faire political economy, but so what? Leave ‘em alone and they’ll succeed, fail, or muddle along on their own and on their own terms. The rest of us don’t have to worry that they’ll impose their (horror of horrors) “socialist views” and practices on the rest of us, because they don’t believe in state authority and forming a state is the only way that they could do so.

And yet many, many, (most even) "libertarians” that I know or have known over the years can and do easily shift right back into the deep-red Republican base that most emerged from originally with just a few simple compromises in the GOP’s platform. Look at the highly touted GOP maverick Representative Ron Paul. Now he’s a Republican. But in 1988 he was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president and even had a fundraiser hosted by LSD guru Timothy Leary. And Paul didn’t have any trouble moving back into the GOP afterwards either. And note the newly minted Libertarian big shot and ex-GOP U.S. Representative Bob Barr. Now he’s an LP member when just a few short years ago he was a U.S. Attorney and was happily and quite successfully prosecuting people on behalf of Leviathan. The LP even spent what little funding it had to get him defeated for re-election in 2002. And now he’s one of their own. Go figure?

Some late night comedian (I think it was Bill Maher) said that libertarians were just: “Republicans who like to be able to get high, look at porn, and blow off church without feeling like hypocrites.” And consider how well these authoritarian types slip back forth into and out of the Republican base where they started. And I just don’t see that kind of kind of thing from the SDS types, those dreaded socialists. And I know a few, too.

So if and when the chips are down, I trust my anarcho-socialist/anarcho-syndicalist SDS comrades to keep the faith about seizing liberty when and where they can way more than I ever will the LP types who seem to be able to morph back and forth between the LP and the GOP right-wing without any troubling thoughts about moral or ideological consistency.

Tags:
Libertarian Party SDS anarcho-socialist anarcho-syndicalist Ron_Paul Bob_Barr GOP oppression

Aug 17_2007 - Everbody's A Critic

2007-08-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

Everybody’s a critic. Even me. I posted some book reviews on Amazon.com and the response has been generally negative. I am not surprised though. Few people bother with writing thoughtful reviews on books. The writers tend to be people who really liked the book or who really didn’t like it much at all. And so when you write a review that is kinda on the negative side of things it usually pisses off the people who liked it.

It does provide me with an easily accessed list of books that I’ve read and records my impressions of them though. And which is very cool for me because I like to go over them from time to time and see if my thinking about them has changed.

Tech Tags: books literature criticism book_reviews Amazon.com

August 9, 2007 – The Late Richard Rorty on “How It’s All Gonna End"

2007-08-09T15:57:00.000-07:00

I guess this is all old news as far as many of you are concerned, but this “final interview,” (he died a few days after giving it) with the noted American philosopher and intellectual Richard Rorty wherein he predicated how (what passes for) liberal democracy in America will finally come to a crashing, complete, and no-BS end, without even the façade of individual rights and liberties, (like what we have now), and never mind the boiling frogs stuff.

“Rorty said,” in the interview, “that after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, ‘it became clear that the political right would try to substitute the 'global war on terrorism' as an excuse not only for keeping the national security state intact but for undermining the political institutions of the old democracies. I was terrified that the Bush administration would carry American public opinion with it, and would succeed in brushing the liberties of the citizen aside.'

Even though public support for the Bush administration is at low ebb, Rorty still believed that ‘sooner or later, some terrorist group will repeat 9/11 on a much grander scale. I doubt that democratic institutions will be resilient enough to stand the strain.’ “

I completely agree. Whether the next Commander-in-Chief is a Dem or Rep, “liberal” or conservative, whether the US Congress has a Dem or Rep majority in either or both houses, or whether the SCOTUS is 5-4 strict-constructionist or ACLU sympathizers, it ain’t gonna matter one fookin’ bit. Before the dust even settles the tanks will roll out, the cops and feds will start rounding people up, and the whole rest of the coup d’etat protocol we’ve seen over the years in the Turd World States where they have this thing down to science.

I am not just being paranoid either. This what I honestly have felt to be our precarious situation for long time, and now someone of substance and stature and, given his terminal condition, nothing to lose by saying it, has said it too. Sooner or later al-Qaeda, Hamas, North Korea commandos or someone such as them is gonna get hold of a suitcase nuke or dump a few barrels of ricin into some major city’s water supply…and well, you get the idea.

I dare anybody to tell this won’t happen. It’s just a matter of when.

Richard_Rorty the_Apocalypse American_Democracy terrorism al-Qaeda

July 24, 2007 - No Working Class Solidarity Here Guys!

2007-07-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

According to this article in the Washington Post, a carpenter's union local outsourced their picket line to paid local homeless types in order to raise its numbers. Sheesh. Not much working class solidarity here, you guys. Outsourcing your own labor struggle is kinda of a tip-off that you either don't have much support for your actions within your own base or the membership feels itself too good for such tasks. Either way though...

"Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters" says the article, "they are not union members. They're hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket. Many were recruited from homeless shelters or transitional houses. Several have recently been released from prison. Others are between jobs. ‘It's about the cash," said Tina Shaw, 44, who lives in a House of Ruth women's shelter and has walked the line at various sites. 'We're against low wages, but I'm here for the cash.' Carpenters locals across the country are outsourcing their picket lines, hiring the homeless, students, retirees and day laborers to get their message across. Larry Hujo, a spokesman for the Indiana-Kentucky Regional Council of Carpenters, calls it a 'shift in the paradigm' of picketing."

Unions suck in this country. They actually operate more as labor agencies whose sole purpose is fiduciary; that is to say, to get their members the best possible deal on wages, benefits, and working conditions, and give short shrift to the concept of class struggle and labor solidarity. That however should be their main purpose; elevating the condition and power of the working class. And which is how the unions act in Europe and most other places. In America though the political dimension of class struggle has totally escaped the often corrupt and always politically oblivious labor union leadership.

Tech Tags: labor_unions, class_consciousness, labor_solidarity

July 18_2007 - I Think Reformists Are Wrong

2007-07-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to read Glen Allport's column on Strike the Root yesterday wherein he lays out all the ways that political parties, special interest groups, ideologues, mercantilists, and the rest of the running dogs of statism, screw up liberal democratic governance, and then goes on to endorse the candidacy of a statist politician in an election in order to "fix" it all! Go figure? The real problem with state governance is the state itself; who runs it and how hardly matters. That has been my conclusion based on my own historical analysis, anyhow. It really surprised me that the STR publisher would post such an article given STR's stated position on such matters.

Reformism is a waste of time. In the end, when the bourgeoisie finally conclude that they can't dominate the political process any longer, they will undoubtedly turn toward fascism to maintain control and retain their privileges. That is what they've always done in the past.

Glen_Allport, Strike_the_Root.com, reformism, Ron_Paul, statism

July 18, 2007 - Road Trip!

2007-07-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

2007 CrimethInc. Convergence - July 25-29, 2007 Athens, Ohio

From the promo website:
"Last summer’s convergence featured over forty workshops, including urban exploration, traveling for free, the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, Proudhon and mutualist banking, local radical history in Winona, stories from the 2005 G8 protests in Scotland, squatting to own, several self-defense workshops, a reading group for which literature was distributed in advance, a discussion for survivors of sexual abuse, a report on anarchist activity and challenges in Latin America, a conversation about anarchism and spirituality, and a discussion entitled 'Lucy Parsons and Post-Left Anarchy in the 1880s.' In addition, there was a puppet show about mountaintop removal, an anti-authoritarian jug band performed traditional spirituals, and a filmmaker presented a documentary about a Brazilian form of anarchist psychotherapy."

Sounds kinda of interesting and I am planning on attending. It's a short distance from where I am now and it would be good to remind myself that there are more of us out there than the media reports, eh? If anyone reading this has been to a previous convergence or has any other tips, advice or opinions about these kind of events or the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective, please get in touch.

See ya' there!

CrimethInc_Ex-Workers_Collective, Anarchist Convergence_2007, Chemical_Ali

What Happened to FreedomSLUT?

2007-07-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

I've seen that unique and useful site get bogged down with commercial spam before sometimes, but the admin doesn't delete it any more, and so it has become kinda useless. You can dig through all the crap postings to find the occasional gem still, but who really wants to, eh? Sad.

Tech Tags: FreedomSLUT spam

July 15, 2007 - Agony Vs Agonizing

2007-07-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

I've been experiencing some nerve pain in my neck and arms lately, making it hard to type very long or much. And so I haven't been. I seem to be getting better. Shingles, as this condition is called, are a bitch. But I endure.

On the other hand I've been able to catch up on my reading and also spend more time with the kids.

I may take a trip out to the coast soon or maybe even to Costa Rica. If I can't do any useful work, I may as well have some fun.

Any book suggestions? Or fun suggestions?

tags: chemical_ali shingles travel Costa_Rica

June 26_2007 - What the Future Holds if the Dems Win

2007-06-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

The usual statist crapola unfortunately.

Arnold Kling wrote this analysis posted on TCS that seems to catch it all in a nutshell. One side of the Dems wants more, more, more! state intervention in our lives. The other side, well not so much, but..just run it all better and without a deficit too.

June 17_2007 - An Interesting Review of an Interesting Book

2007-06-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

I saw this customer review on the Amazon.com webpage for a book I am currently reading. How Nonviolence Protects the State, by Peter Gelderloos.

Both are worth a look.

June 12_2007 - "Useful Idiots"

2007-06-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

Hugo Chavez's "Useful Idiot"

"In political jargon, the term 'useful idiot' was used to describe Soviet sympathizers in western countries (particularly in the United States) and the alleged attitude of the Soviet government towards them. The implication was that the person in question was naïve, foolish, or in willful denial, and was being cynically used by the Soviet Union, or another Communist state."
From Wikipedia.

And speaking of which, I saw this blurb in an article in the right-wing tabloid Human Events.

Help Wanted: Cindy Sheehan Replacement
“Wanted: A mother or father whose son was a God-loving, red-blooded American who willingly gave his life for his country’s security and freedom. Applicant must be willing to shill for a ‘progressive’ presidential candidate, such as Sheehan did for John Kerry in 2004. Candidate must be able to curse like Mephistopheles, coddle the world’s dictators, be willing to leave her/his family, recite left-wing lies … with authority, and look good in Code Pink’s Pepto Bismol pink T-shirts.”

And I thought I was cynical. Pretty true though. Sheehan is an idiot, useful or not. See, when she openly endorsed nascent totalitarian Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and started criticizing Democrats for not keeping their promise to end the Iraq war the mainstream media and the Dem political elites dumped her like a hot potato. I guess you just can't be too cynical about the mainstream media and statist politicians can you? Apparently not.

Technorati tags: Cindy_Sheehan, Useful_Idiot, politics

June 08_2007 - Zog and Mr. Poop

2007-06-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a short column I wrote for Strike_the_Root.com on my theory as to why liberal democracies eventually evolve into nanny-cratic authoritarian states over time.

The Origins of Authoritarianism in the Democratic State

"In a democracy however, the reverse is the case; the public’s every wish must be accommodated and acted upon instantly. And so laws are passed, regulations, specifications, and instructions are published, and are continually added to. And of course Zogs must be hired and armed in order to make it all work. And there’s the rub. The problems that all these rules, laws, and red tape address are minor and usually temporary; but the government-approved solution is nearly always permanent. And so the boil of public opinion reduces our natural and abundant liberty to steam which then disappears into the wind and then is gone. Permanently gone."

Technorati Tags: liberty laissez-faire nanny_state Lenny_Bruce economics

June 07_2007 - Some Thoughts on "Special Prosecuters" & Scooter Libby's Prison Sentence

2007-06-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Continuing on with my post from yesterday in re the injustice of the grand jury system and its misuse by so-called Special Prosecutors (i.e., those appointed to investigate political crimes) here is some profound analysis from Democratic Party operative and law professor Susan Estrich.

On Grand Juries:
"Libby is in trouble not for what he did, but because he wasn't as careful as the others during his interviews and grand jury testimony. If he'd just said, 'I don't recall' a hundred times, or even invoked the Fifth (whether properly or not, following the Monica Goodling approach), he wouldn't be bankrupt, ruined, disgraced and heading to prison."

Yep.

On Special Prosecutors:
"The whole phenomenon of special prosecutors turns the usual rules of investigating on their head. Instead of focusing on crimes, special prosecutors tend to focus on people themselves. Dig deep enough, ask enough questions, particularly under oath, and only those most experienced with the criminal justice system are likely to escape unscathed. Hardened criminals know enough to shut up. For others, the human tendency is to say too much, to shade the facts, to try to protect yourself and your colleagues, not necessarily from criminality, but from embarrassment. Lewis Libby is a lawyer, but he hadn't practiced in years, and neither had his wife. Unfortunately for him, it cost him plenty."

Indeed.

Technorati Tags: Scooter_Libby, Grand_Juries, politics, special_prosecutors Susan_Estrich

June 06_2007 - Some Thoughts on the “Scooter” Libby Sentence

2007-06-06T05:52:00.000-07:00

I have no sympathy for Libby and his role in foisting the Iraq invasion on the American public. However, I have great empathy with his position as a human being who is being crushed like a little bug under the heal of Leviathan.

As someone who has been “invited” to talk with the FBI following the 9/11 attacks (which I declined to do) and who has been officially summoned twice to appear before grand juries I have some sympathy for Mr. Libby. The closest thing American law has to a Star Chamber this side of Gitmo is the modern grand jury process.

As originally conceived, the GJ was intended to protect persons accused of crimes by making the state prosecutor show before a jury of common citizens that first, a crime was committed, and second, that the prosecution had enough evidence to bring a specific person to trial for it.

Too bad that it ain’t how it all works in practice though. When you get up to testify, the only lawyer in the room is the DA. There is no impartial magistrate or judge to insure that the proceedings are conducted impartially and in accordance with the rules of evidence and the law. Persons giving testimony are not allowed to have legal counsel present. The panel of jurors only receives evidence as is supplied to them by the DA. Cross-examination of witnesses is not permitted. Oh, and the entire process is held in secret too. The public is not allowed to observe the proceeding, the news media is excluded, and anyone leaking info from the proceedings can be arrested. The transcript of the proceedings is withheld from any perusal by anyone, even you or your attorney, until such time as it is “unsealed” by the DA.

Real fair, eh? Even an experienced lawyer and political operative like Mr. Libby couldn’t avoid an indictment, and he knew all the rules, (rigged as they are) in advance, too. Now guess how much chance a non-lawyer has?

Bottom Line: Always refuse to testify by asserting your right to avoid self-incrimination. Assert the protection granted you by the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer any questions. Enjoy your constitutional protection against self-incrimination it while it lasts. Which may not be much longer.

Technorati Tags:
Scooter_Libby, Grand_Juries, Fifth_Amendment, Star_Chamber

June 04_2007 – Some Communist Criticism of Anarchism and Anarchists

2007-06-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

I've been reading through these articles because I've often criticized the CP over the years for their statism, illogic, for resorting to violence, their hypocrisy and for their shamefully poor record of advancing liberty and equality among human beings. But I'll let these guys' words speak for themselves. Look through 'em if you care to. (So here ya go, Jerry.)

Left-wing Neo-Conservatives: The reflection of neo-conservatism in socialist thinking – Part One

Left-wing Neo-Conservatives: The mailed fist behind the anti-authoritarian phrase – Part Two

Anarchism and the Marketplace

The Anarchist Dead End – A series of articles from the (Detroit) Communist Voice .

Technorati Tags: Communist, Communist_Party, anarchy, anarchism, politics

May 31_2007 – My Cynicism About Darfur

2007-05-31T20:13:00.001-07:00

I keep seeing these heart rending stories about the slaughter going on in the Darfur a province of Sudan. But it makes me wonder,what it is exactly that this slick lobbying campaign and its bank rollers would have “us” (using “us” in the collective sense of it, as in the American government) do exactly? Many if not most of the noisy pleaders whose message is directed at the US Congress and the Bush Administration are the same subset of persons and groups that are currently loudly denouncing the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan too. Go figure that? Haven't these folks seen exactly what happens when one nation, no matter how powerful and well-off it may be comparatively, tries to establish itself as the World Cop?

Let the UN and the African Union handle this one you guys. America's plate is full right now with other more pressing imperial entanglements. Again, what, (military intervention, boycotts, airstrikes, blockades, something else?) would these maudlin interventionists have “us” do? I honestly wonder what the real agenda is here.

“Lobbying groups regularly get their way in Washington”, says this article from the Washington Post, “but few have had as much impact in a short period as the Save Darfur Coalition, an organization that has been pressing for international intervention in war-torn Sudan.

Over the past two years, it has flooded lawmakers' inboxes with pleas for assistance, filled the Mall with protesters and blanketed the airwaves with heart-rending commercials. One ad showed photos of anguished, starving Sudanese and asked, 'How will history judge us?' "

History has already judged this sort of thing; and the honest truth is that the interventionists are nearly always wrong. And yet with each new crisis they persist. History doesn't repeat”, said Mark Twain, “ but it often rhymes.” And we know how this kinda song goes too, even if we only know the melody and not the words.

May 30_2007 - Cheap Gas or Energy Independence: Not Both

2007-05-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Says economist Robert Samuelson in today's Washington Post:

"It's one of those delicious moments when Washington's hypocrisy is on full and unembarrassed display. On the one hand, some of America's leading politicians condemn high gasoline prices and contend that they stem from "gouging" by oil companies. On the other, many of the same politicians warn against global warming and implore us to curb our use of fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

Guess what: These crowd-pleasing proclamations are contradictory. Anyone fearful of global warming should cheer higher gasoline prices, because much higher prices represent precisely the sort of powerful incentive needed to push consumers toward more fuel-efficient vehicles and to persuade the auto industry to produce them in large numbers. Bravo for higher prices!"

True enough. If we want the free market and human ingenuity to liberate us from dependence on foreign oil and we also want a healthy and cleaner environment we have to let oil prices rise to what the owners and producers of that oil ask. It is the only way my friends. We just can't have cheap oil and not be dependent on crude petro from places like Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela and the Middle East. The "cheap" gas we have from what we are doing now isn't all that cheap when you add to it the huge cost in blood and treasure that maintaining a huge military presence all over the world to gain and retain access to it, eh?

May 29_2007 - Cindy Sheehan 'Resigns' as Protest Leader

2007-05-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

Cindy Sheehan 'Resigns' as Protest Leader

Good riddence you politically illiterate attention whore. Ever since Sheehan played kissy face with that thug Hugo Chavez, a nascent neo-Castro, I've had no further use for her "leadership" role. Just like with John McCain, John Kerry, Jack Murtha and the rest of our "war heroes," Sheehan seems to think that her loss entitles her to a level of credibility that she just doesn't deserve.

The Iraq war and all the rest of America's imperial entanglements should be abandoned just as a matter of justice and honor, period. And this would be true even if her son had come home from Iraq without a scratch. Lead on Ron Paul.

May 29_2007 - Even Blind Pigs Find an Occasional Acorn Now and Then

2007-05-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

When my father died this past January one of the things I inherited from him was his unfinished subscription to the Wall Street Journal. And I have to say that over the years I have not found the WSJ very much to my liking. And why is that? Well, their business news stories, while usually well written and researched, are pretty commonplace fare; mainly stuff I can find for free on the web, although not as well written perhaps. And ditto with their tables of stock data, currency prices, precious metal values, and such too. And their reliably “vulgar libertarian” argumentation in their right-wing editorials and columns just drive me nuts.

But once in a while, as my maternal grandfather used to say: “Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, now and then.” Meaning, the pig got lucky, not that he’s skillful or smart.

And so it was when I read a review in today’s edition of the WSJ of Michael Barone’s New book, Our First Revolution -The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers.

Barone describes and analyzes the coup d’etat by nascent English [Classic] Liberals in
1688 that toppled the last Stuart monarch James II, for fear he’d further erode the traditional rights that most English folk had come to like, and become more like the absolute authoritarian monarchies in continental Europe.

“Although James II stood for Catholic obscurantism,” says the review, “pro-French appeasement, and Stuart paternalism and monopoly--all of which would have held Britain back politically and commercially in the 18th century--it is hard not to sympathize with his Lear-like cries of anguish as both his daughters, Mary and Anne, betray him in order to safeguard their claims to the throne.”

Well, I didn’t, but still, that quibble aside, it’s a good review.

“Yet had James II not made myriad errors after succeeding his brother, King Charles II, in 1683--errors that help to trigger William's later intervention—‘French-style absolutism might really have sprung into life’ in England, Mr. Barone writes, perhaps ‘in late 1688 or early 1689.’ Such absolutism was doing well on the Continent, especially under Louis XIV, and James was busy trying to buy the coming general election and pack the House of Commons. When an heir was born to James in June 1688, establishing the Catholic succession, the moment of decision had arrived.”

And England, America and the whole English-speaking world benefited from the coup’s final result, says Barone’s analysis.

How so?

“Everything that flowed from the Whig victory of 1688--limited government, the Bank of England, tradable national debt, triennial Parliaments, mercantilism, free enterprise, an aggressively anti-French foreign policy, the union with Scotland, eventually the Hanoverian Succession and the Industrial Revolution--combined to make the English-speaking peoples powerful. Mr. Barone proves beyond doubt how much the Glorious Revolution inspired the Founding Fathers to launch their own, with Virginia gentlemen farmers seeing themselves as the heirs of England's revolutionary aristocrats. The 1689 Bill of Rights in Britain thus unquestionably paved the way to the American Bill of Rights of 1791.”

Well, perhaps or perhaps not. Some think that the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution are merely Libertarian Myth, mere fable, and weren’t really any form of genuine progress in political philosophy, in theory or in practice, at all. That view I disagree with. All those developments were positives, the best that could be expected in those times, and Liberal Democracy was an important milestone in human political evolution.

Plus, I like English history, and so I am gonna read it.

Technorati tags: Michael_Barone English_history

May 27_2007 – What I’m Reading These Days

2007-05-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

Please don’t get the wrong idea here; I read what I’m interested in or curious about or has been recommended to me or is on a topic or subject I’m working on, and doesn’t mean that I embrace any ideas the books might contain. So with that noted, here’s the list.

Buda's Wagon: A Brief History Of the Car Bomb
By Mike Davis
This book, “… [t]races its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. [Mike] Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with ‘rings of steel’ against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.” (AK Press blurb)

How Nonviolence Protects The State
By Peter Gelderloos
“People working for social change face plenty of difficult questions, but sometimes matters of strategy and tactics receive low priority. Among many North American activists, the role of nonviolence as the default mode of struggle bears little scrutiny. Is nonviolence effective at ending systems of oppression? How is nonviolence connected to white privilege? Is militancy naturally macho, or does pacifism reinforce the same power dynamics as patriarchy? Ultimately, does nonviolence protect the State? How Nonviolence Protects the State brings existing criticisms of nonviolence, and several new ones, together into one book, in an attempt to illuminate one of the most severe roadblocks to social change today.” (AK Press blurb)

Durruti in the Spanish Revolution
By Chuck Morse (Translator) and Abel Paz
“In this new and unabridged translation of the definitive biography of Spanish revolutionary and military strategist, Buenaventura Durruti, Abel Paz has given us much more than an account of a single man's life. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution is as much the chronicle of an entire nation and of a tumultuous historical era. Paz seamlessly weaves intimate biographical details of Durruti's life—his progression from factory worker and father to bank robber, political exile and, eventually, revolutionary leader—with extensive historical background, behind-the-scenes governmental intrigue, and blow-by-blow accounts of major battles and urban guerrilla warfare. Written with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the anarchist ideals that motivated Durruti, this is an amazing and exhaustive study of an incredible man and his life-long fight against totalitarianism in both its capitalist and Stalinist forms.

Includes an afterword by José Luis Gutierréz Molina's on Abel Paz's life and the historiography of the Spanish Revolution.” (AK Press blurb)

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. " - Thomas Carlyle

May 25_2007 – The Results of Living in A True “Culture of Corruption”

2007-05-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

Every so often I return to my roots; in my case the mainly Middle-Eastern/North African enclave in Dearborn, MI where I grew up. Then, as now, it is the first place recent immigrants take up residence when they come to America. And the culture, history and life experience that they have informs all their actions and practices too.

I was visiting a friend there recently and we were having a snack at restaurant that serves the food of the Yemenis. The time was early afternoon and it was warm and humid, especially in the kitchen area. So the cooks were taking a smoke & coffee break in the area near the alley door, and the door itself was propped open to allow some cool fresh air in and to let the smoke and steam out. My friend is fireman for the city of Dearborn and carries a badge and ID proclaiming such too. Now being the sort that he is (i.e., a notorious buttinsky), he went up to the cooks and flashed his badge on them and explained that it is against heath code regs to have the door to the kitchen propped open; it can only be open when and if someone is entering or exiting. Anything else is a violation which can get the restaurant fined or closed by the “authorities.” It was this which my friend Firefighter Buttinsky was attempting to warn them about. But that is not the effect it had though.

The owner came running out and jabbered in his native dialect with the cooks to ascertain what the hub-bub was all about. Mr. Owner was absolutely convinced that Mr. Fireman was soliciting for a cash bribe, free food, or something. See, that's how things are done and how badge carriers act in Yemen. The downside of doing business this way is that it adds to the owner's costs, it allows nasty and unhealthy conditions to exist and persist over time, and other bad things as well.

Once the owner figured this out, that it was just friendly advice and not solicitation for a bribe, the look on his face was priceless. America is a good country, mostly, ain't it?

May 22_2007 - RIAA Seeks Royalties From Radio Stations Now Too

2007-05-22T06:55:00.001-07:00

“The LA Times reports that the RIAA wants royalties from radio stations. 70 years ago Congress exempted radio stations from paying royalties to performers and labels because radio helps sell music. But since the labels that make up the RIAA are not getting the cash they desire through sales of CDs, and since Internet and satellite broadcasters are forced to cough up cash to their racket, now the RIAA wants terrestrial radio to pay up as well." [Slashdot.org/ post]

It would serve these fookin' greedy monopolist assholes right if they did get they're way on this only because I believe that in pretty short order market forces would settle their hash once and for all. Radio stations would likely stop or seriously cut back on playing the songs and bands where they had to pay royalties and start playing more independent artists and groups that didn't require it. What are the coporate bands who are RIAA clients gonna do when their latest crap gets no or very limited airplay?

The RIAA, MPAA and their shills, lackeys, and dupes in the mainstream media and Congress are marching themselves and their products ever closer to the cliff that I sincerely hope that they go over soon. Step on you morons.

And notice please that this whole “the airwaves belong to the people” meme (but in practice actually meaning “belongs to the government”) provides the nexus for their entire rationale (such as it is) for for this and every other monopolistic practice and the rent seeking that they continually attempt to impose (and then enforce) on us. Ditto with copyright laws too. Without a huge government law enforcement apparatus and the threat of ruinious lawsuits in civil courts what power would these greedheads have at all?

May 20_2007 - WE WIN! No cops for us!

2007-05-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

The Village Council voted Friday night against forming a police force or contracting with the Lenawee Sheriff's Department by vote of 5-1 with one councilperson absent. And so we win, for now. As some famous dead white guy said once: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." And so the flamethrower will keep his ears pricked-up for any further footsteps of approaching tyranny.

May 19_2007 – Final Thoughts and Observations (for Now) on Peace and Order without Police

2007-05-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

“Once the State law-enforcement monopoly is destroyed, and the inadequate State protection of person and property is no longer forced upon us, each ex-citizen will have the opportunity to consume protection services according to his own tastes and preferences. If he is a risk-lover, he may reduce his expenditures on protection services far below that level which he was forced to pay implicitly through taxation. If the risk-lover's estimate of the risk he faces and the competitive market's estimate are the same, he may even demand no protection services at all! However, most people exhibit risk-averse behavior, particularly when faced with large-loss, small-payoff risks. Since non-purchase of protection services can be thought of as such a risk, we thus expect risk-averse persons to exhibit an effective demand for protection services.” Order Without Law: Where Will Anarchists Keep the Madmen?

by John D. Sneed

I have insurance and an alarm system on my business premises that notifies a security company or the villages's (volunteer) fire & rescue department as well as myself, if there's a problem. And that's it; that's the whole extent of my need for security and safety services. I pay for it all and it's customized just how I want it. Anything more I don't want, don't need and can't/won't use. What additional protection will having Deputies or a Village Police force give me in exchange for much higher taxes and way-less personal liberty? I can't see any. If my neighbor has expired tabs on the license plates on his boat trailer, what's it to me? If I drive down to Ohio to buy a few cartons of cheap cigarettes for myself and bring a few back for my friends, who gets “hurt” by it? Nobody but the state tax collectors. But if there are cops, and they now find out about it or discover it in the course of their “normal duties”, they'll “care” and big time, too.

And please don't give me any of that “obedience to the law is freedom” BS either, cuz I don't buy that. Obedience to a law you didn't write, ratify, or otherwise agree to, (or even know about at all), isn't “freedom” in any sense of the term, period.

Technorati Tags: public_safety

May 18_2007 – Why Our Village Doesn't Need Cops, Cont'd

2007-05-17T19:57:00.000-07:00

As if I haven't said enough about this eh? Well apparently not so let me continue on folks. Two cops in the neighboring town to our north (Jackson, MI) got “honored” last night for blasting down a mentally impaired old women who answered the door with a small kitchen knife, probably cuz she was wondering who the hell was pounding on her door. So what did these two brave Jackson cops do? Back off and call for support? Spray her with pepper spray or shock her with a taser? Nah, they opened fire on her and shot her no less than ten times in the chest and face with their pistols. And for this they get the highest award the Jackson PD can give, the "Medal of Valor" [sic]. Yep, it sure does require a lot of “valor” to shoot some old lady to death on her front porch.

Now I would ask all you proponents of a police force if this; Is this the kind of protection and service we really need in our village too? The next time the neighbor's dog is barking at night, instead of just calling them up like civilized people and asking them to let their fookin' dog in already, we'll all just call 911 and have armed cops show up and maybe give a ticket, or take the dog, or worst case scenario, blast your neighbor dead? If everything goes good, and the cops just go with the first two options, are you really gonna have a better relationship with your neighbors afterwards, or are you going to have a tit-for-tat smoldering feud going on for long while, even years maybe? Next time your kid hops the neighbor's fence to get his ball back, they then call Officer Pig on you. Seems fair after all, eh? You did the like to them, right?

Screw all this stuff! We can handle our own affairs ourselves. And so we should.

May 17, 2007 - Ron Paul Voted Off Future Debates

2007-05-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

Yes dear friends, it didn't take long, did it? The American Idol-type "debates" the GOP and media poobahs put on for the masses are now starting a movement to oust Rep. Ron Paul, the GOP's real "maverick" (as opposed to the egocentric and inconsistent John McCain), from any further candidate beauty show spectacles (aka "debates") because he strays from the RNC/neo-con script and tells the truth about things. And after just one "debate" too. Hell, Simon Cowell would probably have voted to keep Paul on just for the entertainment value his comments have alone. And all of which shows what a fraud this whole process is anyhow.

I saw this new story on the Drudge Report today about how the Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party wants Paul excluded from any party-sanctioned debates here in my state. Sad it is when you get bounced (voted off?) for telling the inconvenient truth about things, eh?

" 'Given what he said last night," the story reports, "it was just so off the wall and out of whack that I think it was more detrimental than helpful.' [Michigan GOP chairman Saul] Anuzis said his petition would go to debate sponsors and broadcasters to discourage inviting Paul."

And so it goes.

Technorati Tags: Ron_Paul, GOP_South Carolina _debate, censorship

May 17, 2007 - Tax Evaders for Increased Foreign Aid and Other Stuff

2007-05-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

The pot calling the kettle black redux. I found this tidbit while perusing economist Dean Baker's blog:

“That is not the name of Bono's organization, [i.e, Tax Evaders for Increased Foreign Aid] but perhaps it should be. The NYT devoted an article to the Irish rock star's complaints about 'a particular crisis of credibility' among wealthy countries who have not carried though on their commitments to help poor countries. Such words are especially ironic coming from Bono. He became a Dutch citizen a few years back to take advantage of a provision in the Netherlands tax code that applies a very low tax rate to royalty income.” [Link in original]

Go figure, eh? Just like the George Clooneys, Rosie O'Donnells, Angelina Jolies, and such like amongst the glitterati who all employ the best tax evasion/avoidance schemes the worlds best bankers, tax accountants, and lawyers can devise to avoid paying their “fair share” of taxes which would presumably then be redistributed to the world's poor, Mr. Rock Star shields his own wealth the best he can while calling the rest of us cheap. Sheesh. Wadda hypocrite.

On Ron Paul's “Gaffe” at the GOP Debate

Above link is the YouTube clip of what transpired.

Ex-NYC mayor Rudy Guliani jumped on Ron Paul's ill-stated but quit correct assertion that the US wouldn't be such a target of hatred in the world if we left the rest of world the hell alone. Not how Rudy sees it though. He was there, see, and so he knows that isn't why al-Qaeda blew up the WTC on 9/11. How he knows this, Rudy G. never fully explained, (but then does he ever?) The thing that I found most discouraging were all the guffaws and hoots from the studio audience and the smirks and eyerolling from the punditry about Paul's being an “isolationist (like that's a bad thing), or that Paul is just a nutso libertarian.

But then it probably is nutso to ever think that a Republican-Libertarian alliance or common front would ever succeed anyhow given the total transformation of the GOP (the party of Isolationism until World War II started) into the modern day War Party under the leadership of Bush and the neo-cons.

Dr. Paul's noble last ditch attempt to guide the GOP out of the quagmire is now shown to be wholly futile, but I do admit it was a brave and noble gesture on his part. Don't be surprised if the American Idol-style of political debate and the mainstream media pundits and plutocrats who run it, “vote” Dr. Paul off the stage pretty damn soon. And so it goes.

Techorati Tags:

Ron_Paul, Rudolf_Guliani , isolationism, Bono, world_poverty

May 16, 2007 – More on Outsourcing from Barbara Ehrenreich

2007-05-15T20:43:00.000-07:00

Democratic-Socialist Barbara Ehrenreich notes tartly the progressive destruction of the American working classes, both white and blue collar, in her blog post here.

“The world may be flat,” says Ehrenreich, “as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India. The website’s editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere $20,800 a year – and no, they won’t be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena’s city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away. And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there’s always Google Earth.” [links mine]

True enough. State Capitalism seems to be a race-to-the-bottom for most of us.

Technorati Tags:
state_capitalism, statism, economics, out_sourcing, Democratic_Socialists_of_America, Barbara_Ehrenreich

May 15, 2007 – Some Disappointing Stuff Found Whilst Web Surfing Today

2007-05-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

This tidbit from Wired.com. It seems that some “white hat hacker” posted an ad with Google that specifically promised (and in clear language too!) to infect the clicker's computer with a virus or malware; and amazingly enough, loads of people actually clicked on the link! Go figure?

“It's hard to say,” says the story about this experiment, “whether people clicked on the ad because they assumed it was a joke, or because they simply misread it as an anti-virus ad. Still, the numbers are pretty scary. The other shocker here is that Google, which does quite a bit of policing on ad content, didn't notice the scammy ad. Stevens says, 'I designed my ad to make it suspect, but even then it was accepted by Google without problem and I got no complaints to date.' Apparently, he's still running the ad, with slightly different experimental parameters. Can't wait to see what he finds out next . . .”

Me too. Sheesh.

And just to round out my disappointment in the level of human conduct and discourse on the web today, a little racist humor from Fark.com, (usually) one of my favorite websites:

“Taliban replaces slain commander, Abdullah Rullah Dadullah, with his brother, Anna Banna Fofanna Me My Momanna.” (Tag-line from the link) [My link added]

I guess the guys at Fark find the names of Arabs and other non-Western European ethnicities amusing. What's next for you Farkers? Polock or nigger jokes? Double sheesh, and a shake of the head here. I am not humorless or PC, but come on now..this isn't just an “all-in-good-fun” joke here, now is it?

Enemy or not, what's so fookin' "funny" about a dead guy? Death is about the only time ever that everyone is equal; equally dead anyhow. And so it goes.

Technorati Tags:

Wired.com white_hat_hacker Fark anti-Arab_racism Abdullah_Rullah_Dadullah Taliban

May 14, 2007 – What I Am Reading These Days

2007-05-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

Summertime and the living is easy! Or easier than in the fall and winter months anyhow, especially if you're in the firewood business. Here is what occupies me now. Any suggestions? I am open to them.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
“Urban theorist Davis takes a global approach to documenting the astonishing depth of squalid poverty that dominates the lives of the planet's increasingly urban population...Though Davis focuses on individual communities, he presents statistics showing the skyrocketing population and number of 'megaslums' (informally, 'stinking mountains of shit' or, formally, 'when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery') since the 1960s. Layered over the hard numbers are a fascinating grid of specific area studies and sub-topics ranging from how the Olympics has spurred the forceful relocation of thousands (and, sometimes, hundreds of thousands) of the urban poor, to the conversion of formerly second world countries to third world status.” From a Publishers Weekly review from the Amazon.com website for the book.

The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Djilas
“For Djilas, communist regimes were slumbering civil wars between the government and the population. The government could only keep control by using physical (knocking down insurrections, incarceration and show trials) and ideological (censure) violence.

Djilas also analyzes the role of Lenin and Stalin in the creation of this State bureaucracy.
The Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz defined the difference between fascism and communism as follows: fascism was a reality, communism a utopia, but both were characterized by the ruling of one party which wielded uncontrolled and unlimited power. Both were a disaster for the population. Djilas' book is the 'classic' about totalitarian bureaucracies. A must read, not only for historians.” A reader's review from the Amazon.com website for the book. First published in 1957, Djilas got three years in a labor camp as punishment for writing it from the Yugoslavian state.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan
“Timur Kuran, author of Islam and Mammon: The Myth of the Rational Voter discredits the fashionable view that democratic politics necessarily prevents socially harmful policies. Voters lack incentives to become well informed about political controversies, Bryan Caplan shows, and their policy choices tend to be based on deeply, persistently, and systematically mistaken models of reality. Caplan's findings lead inexorably to the conclusion that democratic governance can be improved only through reforms based on realistic assumptions about human cognition. Anyone concerned about political efficiency should read this elegant book carefully.” From a promotional blurb on the dust jacket back cover. From what I've read so far, it would be the perfect companion for Hans-Herman Hoppe's book Democracy: The God that Failed, at some anarcho-lib seminar or study group.

Technorati Tags:
Bryan_Caplan, Mike_Davis, Milovan_Djilas, Planet_of_Slums, The_New_Class

The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter,

May 13, 2007 - Wall Street Journal Now Featuring Commentary from Anarcho-Capitalists? Yes, Indeed!

2007-05-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

No, dear readers, that's not a tag line or a teaser designed to lure you in. Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University and the maintainer and host of the Anarchy FAQ website was featured in Saturday's edition (both print and on line ) of the Wall Street Journal with a short guest column on why the majority of people in America actively support (or at least don't actively oppose), government actions and policies that are against their own interests. (Bottom Line: Heart over head; meaning sentiment over reason. Sorry for the spoiler. And I highly recommend you follow the link and read Caplan's article.)

“Behind every policy that does more harm than good,” says Caplan, “there's a special interest that favors it anyway. The [2003] steel tariff was bad for consumers, steel-using industries and foreign steel producers, but the steel lobby still pushed for it. Farm subsidies are bad for both taxpayers and unsubsidized farmers, but in 2002 the American farm lobby got a 70% increase in government support. The minimum wage is bad for consumers, employers and low-skill workers who get priced out of their jobs, but unions are hard at work to raise it again.”

Caplan has written a new book (which I've ordered but not read yet) on the same general theme (see pic) that shows the public as a herd of marching sheep of all things. Talk about anarcho-libertarian themes, eh? We've been using that one for years.

Technorati Tags: economics, political_economy, laissez-faire, anarchism, Bryan_Caplan, tariffs

A reader wrote me to say that you can get access to the full article from the WSJ by signing up a for a free "netpass" here: http://www.congoo.com/netpass/install

May 10, 2007 - Ol' Bob Hasn't Lost His Touch

2007-05-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan from his Modern Times CD.

Bob Dylan Workingman's Blues #2 Lyrics

There's an evenin' haze settlin' over town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak
Well, the place I love best is a sweet memory
It's a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf
Come sit down on my knee
You are dearer to me than myself
As you yourself can see
While I'm listening to the steel rails hum
Got both eyes tight shut
Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from
Creeping it's way into my gut

Chorus:
Meet me at the bottom, don't lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the frontline
Sing a little bit of these workingman's blues

Well, I'm sailin' on back, ready for the long haul
Tossed by the winds and the seas
I'll drag 'em all down to hell and I'll stand 'em at the wall
I'll sell 'em to their enemies
I'm tryin' to feed my soul with thought
Gonna sleep off the rest of the day
Sometimes no one wants what we got
Sometimes you can't give it away

Now the place is ringed with countless foes
Some of them may be deaf and dumb
No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come
In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can feel a lover's breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death

(chorus)

Well, they burned my barn, and they stole my horse
I can't save a dime
I got to be careful, I don't want to be forced
Into a life of continual crime
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?

Now they worry and they hurry and they fuss and they fret
They waste your nights and days
Them I will forget
But you I'll remember always
Old memories of you to me have clung
You've wounded me with your words
Gonna have to straighten out your tongue
It's all true, everything you've heard

(chorus)

In you, my friend, I find no blame
Wanna look in my eyes, please do
No one can ever claim
That I took up arms against you
All across the peaceful sacred fields
They will lay you low
They'll break your horns and slash you with steel
I say it so it must be so

Now I'm down on my luck and I'm black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I'm all alone, I'm expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
I got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don't know what work even means

(chorus)

[Lyrics found on http://www.metrolyrics.com]
Words and music by Bob Dylan
Copyright 2006 Special Rider Music

May 10, 2007 - The Naked Economist

2007-05-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

As in "the emperor has no clothes." It's not hypocrisy on the part of conventional statist economists that makes them so weird but that they can't see a phenomenon for what it is. So says unconventional economist Dean Baker, anyhow.

"Alan Blinder, a Princeton University professor and former Clinton administration economist, had a lengthy piece in the Washington Post Outlook section that told readers that offshoring "rattles" him. After reading this, and other pieces Blinder has written on the topic, I am still at a loss to understand what he finds rattling.

It is important to keep in mind that Blinder is not retreating an inch from his support of free trade, as he clearly states in the column and the title, "free trade's great, but offshoring rattles me." Offshoring appears to be rattling because it is not just less educated people like manufacturing workers who lose their jobs due to offshoring, but also some highly educated workers like software engineers.

But where is the problem here for a committed free trader? We told the autoworkers and textile workers who lost their jobs or get lower wages because of trade that life's tough, get used to the global economy. Is there any reason that we should treat more highly educated workers differently? After all, who should be better prepared to compete in a global economy than a person with an advanced degree in a cutting edge field?" [Links in original text]

Baker makes some very good points and I recommend his article.

Read it all here.

May 09, 2007 - Why “Public Ownership” is a Disaster for Newspapers.*

2007-05-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

I found this opinion piece at Salon.com (registration required?) after I wrote my previous blog entry today. And while it doesn't pertain directly to what I wrote about the dinosaur media and the Internet the author makes a pretty interesting point; privately owned media is more likely to be diverse, independent and is more likely to stay that way than are the big corporate media conglomerates, who in the end, are only about the bottom line for their shareholders and Wall Street analysts.

“Public ownership” says Gary Weiss, “has been a disaster for newspapers not just because it invites hostile takeovers. Quite simply, much of what newspapers do has no clear investment rationale. Entire segments of the business -- such as foreign bureaus and investigative reporting -- are inimical to profitability, particularly when viewed on the quarter-by-quarter basis favored by Wall Street. [CNBC pundit James] Cramer nailed down the shareholder value view of the newspaper biz a few weeks ago, when he said, 'These are diminishing assets. They don't need to exist. Younger people rarely read them.'

Cramer is not wrong or cynical; he is simply being realistic and refreshingly free of hypocrisy. Viewed from a shareholder value perspective, the newspaper business is a dinosaur. And that is why the shareholder point of view needs to be eliminated from the newspaper business. The shareholders, not the newspapers, are the ones who don't need to exist.

A free press has a purpose in society. Shareholders, bless their hearts, deserve to make money without being screwed. But they should find another way of turning a profit. Columbia Journalism Review put the case against public ownership mildly in a recent editorial, saying, 'Public ownership of newspapers no longer makes the kind of sense it made when the industry was rapidly shedding labor costs thanks to new technology, and when the money that stockholders poured in was invested partly in editorial.' " [link in original]

Hmmm... Maybe this will all shake out in the marketplace, but it is kinda sad to see all the independently owned papers get gobbled up by Gannet, NewsCorp, and the Rupert Murdochs of this world, but maybe their aggregation will usher in newer and better kinds of media like the Drudge Report, independent political and cultural websites, blogs, Radio Pacifica, and the other forms of news reporting and opinion voicing that are currently taking root. I hope so anyhow.

*A “publically owned company” as is used in this context means this.

Technorati Tags:
newspapers, media, mainstream_media, independent_media

May 10, 2007 - Old media turns combative against new media

2007-05-08T22:28:00.000-07:00

I was heartily amused to hear this whistling past the graveyard bloviating from all the “old media” executive types reported in this Reuters.com new story. What fookin' crock! Newspapers are losing circulation and ad revenue left and right, the ratings for the TV news ditto, and yet the Internet just keeps chugging along.

The last gasps from these media plutocrats who are foolishly trying to maintain their monopoly on “real news” as opposed to say the blog you're reading now, and the like are just plain wrong. Sure the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric reaches far more people than I do, but when you sort it all out and then look at the big picture, the honest truth is that more and more people are reading, looking at, and posting to web forums and blogs than ever before, and in all likelihood, this tread will persist and increase. Viacom, the RIAA, MPAA and the rest can sue for royalty payments, damages, and otherwise try to suppress what we read and look at all they want, but in the end it will all be futile. Their tough talk is just BS, and everybody knows this by now, even them too, when they're being honest.

Myself, I haven't given up on viewing TV news or reading the mainstream newspapers and magazines, but now only as part of the mix. I'll bet that's the way it is with you too, eh dear reader? But the days when the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the big Three TV networks dominated the news and opinion on the national level and the local paper's monopoly in the local markets is going down fast. Why the hell should I care what NYT columnists Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman think about world affairs and such as opposed to say what bloggers, posters, and columnists at Strike the Root.com or the Drudge Report have to say? Why should I put an ad for a boat trailer in my local rag when I can post it on Craiglist or eBay instead? Local people read those websites too, eh?

The old media isn't gonna just die off, but it is gonna get smaller and less influential though; the big shot media are now just going to be one voice among many. And that's a good thing.

Technorati Tags:
mainstream_media, communications, independent_media

May 08, 2007-The Democrats Try to Tackle the “Free Trade” Issue

2007-05-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Perusing the New York Times today, I saw where the labor unions are starting to have some doubts about the loyalty of the new Democratic majority in the US congress. After having been whacked around for the past four decades or so, the American trade union movement is at the point now where it has to prevail on this, or risk total extinction.

“All of this is playing out”, says the Times article, “under the nervous, suspicious gaze of an army of interest and constituent groups, particularly on the left, where many fear the committee will eventually bow to the powerful interests on the pro-trade side. Organized labor in particular has been voicing concern in recent days.

‘Sandy Levin sits on a committee that has tremendous pressure on it from Wall Street,’ said Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio and a longtime critic of American trade policy. ‘I hope he’ll be able to stand up for Main Street, but I don’t know.’

Mr. Levin said fears that Democrats would give up on their core demands, for labor and environmental standards, were groundless. ‘If anyone thinks that after all this work, we’re going to give it up, they’re just wrong,’ he said.

The Ways and Means Committee has rarely been known as a hotbed of economic populism. Its new 24-member Democratic majority has a voting record that is significantly more pro-trade than the House Democratic caucus as a whole, concluded an analysis of 15 trade votes by I.M. Mac Destler, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and author of American Trade Politics.”

Okay, fair enough. But still, like the late Will Rogers is reputed to have said: “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.” Isn’t that the truth! Because as economist Lew Rockwell pointed out, real free trade doesn’t require any laws or treaties.

Technorati Tags:
Free_trade, laissez-faire, economics, Lew_Rockwell, economics

May 6, 2007 – Some Thoughts on Economic Theory vs. Economic Reality

2007-05-06T19:57:00.000-07:00

Brad Spanger put up an interview of Samuel E. Konkin III on his blog wherein he describes the difference between anarcho-capitalism and agorism. I recommend you read it even if you aren’t especially interested in the arcane nuances of economic theory. (A category that includes me for the most part.)

Some paleo-conservatives, anarcho-capitalists, and Libertarians conflate free-market, laissez-faire economics with the state-capitalism that we actually have now when they defend capitalism. But what we have now certainly isn’t a free market at all, is it? The state continually interferes in markets to the detriment of voluntary human interaction and activity.

The Marxoid’s view of capitalism (i.e., an economic system wherein wealth accrues based upon ownership) is largely true in the society we have today. And many defend the privileged position of the ownership classes as free-market economics. Read the LvMI blog, the Tech Central Station website or the Wall Street Journal some time for some glaring examples of this false consciousness.

“In theory,” explains Konkin, “those calling themselves anarcho-capitalists … do not differ drastically from agorists; both claim to want anarchy (statelessness, and we pretty much agree on the definition of the State as a monopoly of legitimized coercion, borrowed from Rand and reinforced by Rothbard). But the moment we apply the ideology to the real world (as the Marxoids say, “Actually Existing Capitalism”) we diverge on several points immediately.”

Indeed.

Technorati Tags:
Agorism, anarcho-capitalism, economics, Samuel_E._Konkin_III

April 28, 2007_So Ah...Where'd Those Posts Go?

2007-04-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

DEEP down the memory hole, I hope. See, the problem here for me is that anything I write (even opinions) seems to draw me into deep and detailed arguments more suited to grad students, professional policy wonks, and politicians. For every thing I say or profess to believe, someone will object or offer some little known or obscure source which I then have to carefully analyze and judge the credibility of and respond to in kind, and which I don't especially relish doing. After all, I'm not trying to convince you, dear reader, of anything; I'm giving you my opinion FWIW to you, which you can take or leave, as you see fit.

I got into a bad flame war a few years over at Anti-State.com over an article I wrote and I should have learned from that experience that it's probably best to leave the serious writing on economics and political theory to the big-brains who have the time, brains and education for such things, and just live my short happy little life kibitzing from the sidelines. In essence to, “leave the writing to the smart people,” as one of my ASC critics so helpfully put it.

April 22, 2007_Do It Cuz I Said So, Citizen!

2007-04-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

I see from perusing the NY Times that good 'ol NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to levy an $8 fee to anyone driving into Manhattan from 0600-1800 M-F. For the "public good" I suppose. At least that's what he said at the press conference he called to announce it. But don't worry folks, the expected (by him anyhow) $400 million that this fee would raise will be paid mainly by suburban commuters and who cares about them? And screw 'em anyhow see, cuz they don't vote in NYC, eh? Such cynicism.

You folks reading this that live in my village take note; this and similar shit is the kind of thing you should expect to see in the near future if the Village Council decides to hire a police force or contracts with the Lenawee county Sheriff's Department to assign Deputies in lieu of a police force. And never mind that a small portion of the revenue from tickets and fines levied will be kicked back to the village.

I'm told that in many Turd World nations the army, militia and police and other "unofficial" bandits regularly set up impromptu road blocks and rifle through the possessions, cargo, and wallets of whoever wants to pass through. And which is probably better too, in that a quick on-the-spot bribe inhibits commerce less than what is currently being proposed. And it's less worrisome than always fretting about where or when a cop car is gonna pop up behind and give you a ticket for whatever "crime" you've committed while driving to the store or picking up your kids after baseball practice. I was looking a the fine schedule posted on the wall at the courthouse in Adrian recently, and the cheapest fine that I noted was $125 (for expired tabs). Something to think about eh?

Technorati Tags: road_taxes traffice_stops oppression tyranny injustice Mayor_Bloomberg
Icerocket Tags: oppression, tyranny, road_taxes, Mayor_Bloomberg

April 21, 2007_ Interesting Stuff from the Web

2007-04-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Anthony Gregory Reviews Idiocracy
“ 'Some libertarians might find the movie a cheap shot on capitalism, but insofar as it is, it is not the free market version being attacked. The film takes place where corporation and state have become so mixed as to be indistinguishable.' If you have not yet seen this hilarious film yet, do yourself a favor and rent it tonight. You’ll be glad you did.” (Strike the Root.com)

[Don] Imus's Real Crime
He empowered the charlatans Sharpton and Jackson, says Imus-fan Elizabeth Wright. (Lewrockwell.com)

'MySpace will fail..' Says Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales
"There's way too much advertising and they're not really respecting their own community."

The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective
“I also recall seeing a lot of tsk-tsking from Paul Birch and others of like mind in some discussion forum several months back, about what blackguards union workers were for demanding higher wages when their labor was most needed. Golly, aren't these the same people who defend "price gouging" by the oil companies? It's not very consistent to go from 'caveat emptor' and 'fooled you twice, shame on you!' in every realm except labor relations, to spelling 'God' E-M-P-L-O-Y-E-R within the workplace. The hostility is quite odd, assuming the person feeling it is motivated by free market principle rather than a zeal for the aggrieved interests of big business. They seem, in fact, to implicitly assume a model of employer-employee relations based on a cultural holdover from the old master-servant relationship.” An essay by Kevin Carson. (Via FreedomSLUT.com)

The Sun's Atmosphere Sings
“In the cosmic equivalent of a guitar pick, so-called microflares at the base of loops could be plucking the magnetic loops and setting the sound waves in motion, the researchers speculate. While solar flares are the largest explosions in the solar system, microflares are a million times smaller but much more frequent; both phenomena are now thought to funnel heat into the Sun's outer atmosphere.The acoustic waves can be extremely energetic, reaching heights of tens of miles, and can travel at rapid speeds of 45,000 to 90,000 miles per hour. 'These [explosions] release energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs,' von Fay-Siebenburgen said.” (YahooNews.com)

Enemy of the State
“My own sheltered childhood ended with the Cultural Revolution. My parents were denounced as 'stinking intellectuals' and 'counter-revolutionaries.' Our house was ransacked. Under the new policy, I went to a nearby school of workers’ children, some of whom threw rocks at me and even left human excrement on our balcony. But Jianguo thrived amid the social turmoil, and became a leader of a Red Guard faction at his school. He seldom came home. When he did, he dressed in full Red Guard fashion: the faded green Army jacket and cap, the Mao button on the shirt pocket, the bright-red armband. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and, with his manly good looks, he seemed to me larger than life. I was shy and tongue-tied in his presence.” (The New Yorker)

April 19, 2007 _ Proudhon's Old Saw is as Sharp as Ever

2007-04-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

So old that it is often passed aside for consideration as a cliche, it still rings true as ever to my way of thinking. This quote from Jean-Pierre Proudhon that it is:

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the public interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. " - J.P. Proudhon

That rant I posted yesterday made me think of Proudhon's words yet again. Our village "governs" itself just fine actually, and we won't be any better off hiring cops. Every busybody, prude, buttinsky, and scold will look to the Village Council and its cops to enact their every notion, thought, fancy and whim into law and prohibit, regulate, tax, and outlaw whatever it is that they don't like or approve of. They'll find a pretense or cause for everything that ever happens, did happen or could happen, and propose a "legal remedy" for it, and along with a schedule of fees and fines to make it turn a profit for the village and of course men with guns to back it up.

If someone has a faulty electric outlet or forgets to turn the flame off a stove burner and burns their kitchen up, why then, the buttinskys will no doubt say, we need to require by law, a smoke detector for every room and fire extinguishers as well. And how will we know people are complying? The village ordinance compliance officer can go to each home and inspect it. And what if the home resident doesn't want to comply or admit the OCO? She can then call the Village Cops to make them admit her, crashing the door in if need be, eh? This is totally insane. Prudent people will do the smart thing (as they see it anyhow) whether it's the law or not; and the feckless and shortsighted won't. And all the laws and cops won't matter one damn bit.

If we are stupid enough to step into this quagmire, how the hell will we ever get out again? Something to think about folks.

April 18, 2007 – Some “Law and Order” Issues Roiling My Village

2007-04-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

One of the main things I like about where I live now, a rural village of 2600 people in Michigan, is the fact that it has no police. Oh, it has some badge carriers, but they are unarmed, non-uniformed sorts with very little status or power. It has an “ordinance compliance officer” (formally known as the Village Constable; her main “power” is to give you a warning notice or a ticket if you violate some strictly local ordinance, such as
burning trash in the summer or not keeping your dogs off other people’s property, and such like matters) and the school crossing guards on some street intersections duringschool hours. But beyond those two types, nothing.

We don’t even have an “Andy Taylor of Mayberry” type of town sheriff, never mind some overzealous Barney Fife style goof. See, we don’t really need ‘em here. We don’t have any “crime” of the violent and destructive sort. And never mind the “official stats” because as we all know by now, “figures never lie, but liars sure do figure”. Of course there are violations of Michigan and Federal law that occur here, but nothing people really care about or that hurt anyone. Certainly nothing that hurts them in a material way.

If my neighbors like to get high, have expired license plate tags, don’t pay their child support on time, smoke where they shouldn’t, don’t mow their lawns regularly, have loud mufflers, or any of the other numerous laws that get violated here with impunity, who really cares? Who is hurt by it? No one actually, so it’s no skin off my ass what people do, and so I don’t care one bit.

And, if by some odd or rare circumstances, some villager should actually require the assistance of the police, well, we have a Sheriff’s substation about ten miles down the highway and a Michigan State Police post about the same distance in the other direction and a countywide 911 telephone system for that. Local volunteers handle fire and ambulance services when needed. And so we get along just fine. Nearly every home in the village has at least one firearm, should it ever be needed, for serious security issues. But that never seems to come up. Not to my knowledge anyhow; all of our public safety and security needs are covered by our present set-up already, thank-you very much, very nicely, very cheaply, and very subtly. Or so I thought.

But now though some busybody sorts that can’t seem to get along with this one family of bad neighbors a proposing a new system. The troublemakers in this case here are a family of drunken louts. An older woman lives with her two “boys” (who are both in their mid thirties, at least) and both of whom are “work-disabled” and receive state assistance, so they need not maintain employment. They like to drink to excess and have loud arguments some times, often really, and I fully understand why this annoys people.

So to remedy this situation, the busybodies want the village to levy a 1-mil tax on all real estate (that is to say a tax of $1 per thousand dollars of assessed value, so the owner of a $100k house would need to pay $100), to hire three full time police officers. And principally just to tell the aforementioned drunken louts to pipe down because people are trying to sleep.

The thing is folks, if we hire cops for the village, suddenly there will be someone who “cares” that we like to get high, have expired license plate tags, don't pay our child support on time, smoke cigarettes where we want, don't mow our lawns regularly, or have loud mufflers. They'll “care” enough to arrest us, fine us, jail us, spy on us, and anything else they decide to, up to and including killing us if need be. Is all that really a good trade off here? More tax money spent and way less liberty than what we have now, just to deal with what is, in the end, a ver minor problem. I say no, it isn't. Just shun them, eh?

April 18, 2007 – Euro-Statism is Just as Bad as Our Own

2007-04-17T20:03:00.001-07:00

I was reading about the upcoming election in France and and this article in the on-line edition of the New Yorker captures perfectly the intransigent nature of the statist mind whatever its nominal political leanings or beliefs may be.

“The French” says the article, “are often accused of being trapped in their Cartesian categories. A cold sandwich cannot morph into a hot sandwich without considerable mental accommodation on the part of the person putting it together. In politics, the left cannot creep toward the center, let alone the right, without a deep, if not intolerable, sense of ideological betrayal. The right rarely even considers the possibility of creeping. Change, on the right, is more a matter of cosmetic surgery. For most of the French, the 'center'—call it a third way or Clinton’s way or Blair’s way or simply a free-market, social-democratic consensus—has been a contradiction in terms, perhaps because they remain so deeply devoted to the protective and protectionist state, l’État protecteur, that both the left and the right have helped create. The state has been reified, even deified; it carries the imprimatur of a historic compromise with reality.”

Yeah, right. Like reality can be “compromised with”, eh? The French really are different from us, but not as much as we think.The only thing states protect is their own power, privilege and prerogatives and if any actual good comes from it, well, that's just plain ol' luck or happenstance. The care and feeding of the state itself and its political base, always come first. And all this blather about “right”, “left” and “center” as a dynamic political continuum is just bullshit. Proudhon, Bastiat and Cantillon must be spinning in their graves right about now.

Icerocket Tags: statism, French_politics
Technorati Tags: statism French_politics

April 17, 2007- Urbanization and the Heavy Hand of Leviathan

2007-04-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

In my county of residence (Hillsdale) in rural Michigan relations between people and the local units of governance are still pretty informal. That doesn't mean that the government at all levels isn't an expensive, onerous and stifling presence, because it is. However, that said and stipulated, it isn't nearly as bad as it is in the urbanized counties to its immediate east and north. When I have to “do business” with the local bureaucrats I have to visit them at their sinister mirrored glass civic palaces, they don't come to me. And the worse thing of all is the security arrangements. In Lenawee, Washtenaw, and Jackson counties you are herded into lines and forced to empty your pockets, (and the contents are inspected outside your view), you must surrender your purses, backpacks, briefcases, lunch bags and all else for “inspection” too; and it only gets worse. If you're wearing a belt, you have to remove it and hand it over until you leave. And ditto with cell phones, anything metal, pens, and/or anything else the creepy little private security types think bears closer examination. And further, just to add to the “compliance milieu” there is an armed uniformed Deputy Sheriff eyeballing you while the security team “processes” you.

Now keep in mind that this is all for ordinary people to come inside a government building which they paid for and maintain in order to pay their taxes, buy dog licenses, get building permits and other licenses, or look-up or file records (birth, death, deeds, etc).

I could see perhaps the need for security at this level at a courthouse or jail where criminal elements are being held or tried, because I do recognize many of the defendants are dangerous people. But all this just to file a remodeling plan for a bathroom or a garage addition? And for crying out loud I am so sure al-Qaeda operatives in their little caves in Tora Bora are continually scheming to get a suicide bomber into the Lenawee County Building or the Jackson County Civic center, eh? Maybe it's just me; as I grow older, I find that this kinda overkill on security operations is degrading to have to deal with. And “deal with” is the operative term. It isn't like you even can go anywhere else for the piece of paper that the state requires you to have to live your life or do your business in compliance with the law either.

So I already feel queasy just going there. But it is the flagrant abuse toward your privacy and dignity that just push me over the edge. Deputy Pig at the Lenawee courthouse waited for the person in front of me at the entry line to go inside the inner sanctum, and then took his very nice and expensive Blackberry cellphone/PDA out of the basket and turned it on and started scrolling through his phone numbers and other stuff. She didn't care about our reaction to this abuse, either. The owner had to leave it, and she was the only one around. Well, the only one around with a large semi-automatic pistol and the power to arrest. Her position and attitude made the rest of us lined up like cattle invisible to her I guess. Deputy Pig didn't even try to disguise her flagrant abuse of this man's privacy and property from the rest of us. Such an attitude, eh?

A small thing I suppose, but stuff like this bothers the shit out of me. I don't know how much longer I can stand it. It all builds up.

Technorati Tags: oppression privacy Leviathan security_checkpoints

Ice Rocket Tags: oppression, privacy, Leviathan, security_checkpoints

April 16, 2007 – Why Stalin of All People?

2007-04-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

This one’s for you “techno-geek.” And you know who you are!

I am reading the Stalin biography mentioned yesterday because it seems to me that he is the modern prototype for a successful dictator. Uber-successful to be precise. Stalin took over a poor, backward country where most people lived in mud huts and used wooden plows drawn by horses. When he sloughed off his mortal coil, some two and a half decades later, the USSR had a world empire protected by a huge army and nuclear weapons.

More details? Let’s see now. Stalin saved an unpopular dictatorship with a crumbling economy from counter-revolution and all its enemies, both foreign and domestic; He outflanked and eliminated all his rivals for power inside the Soviet Communist Party; He served as a warlord for the state that took on the Nazi war machine and destroyed it; He played the western Allies and their diplomats for saps and took over half of Europe without a shot fired; He survived the beginning of the Cold War. And, best of all no doubt, (at least from his point of view), Stalin died peacefully in his sleep, after a long life. Stalin didn’t accomplish all this by luck. It was all by cunning, ruthlessness and a massive power of will.

I am told that Saddam Hussein based his entire “style of governance” (if you wanna call it that) on Stalin. The military uniforms they both favored (although like Stalin, Saddam was never a soldier and, like Stalin, was rejected for military service when he tried to enlist.) Saddam had every major biography of Stalin in a special room in his library. He even had foreign works translated by his own personal “Stalin scholar.” A library of over a thousand books (only on Stalin), too.

If you’re looking for what a “successful” modern, cult-of-personality, absolute dictatorship looks like, and how it survived, thrived and endured for so long (e.g., from 1927 to 1953) just take a look at Uncle Joe's career.

Pathologists study cancer and I study dictators; What else can I say?

Technorati Tags: Stalin, Joseph_Stalin, dictatorship

April 15, 2007 – What I am Currently Reading

2007-04-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

As if you care, eh? Whatever. Here's my list anyway, along with some shameless cribs from the Amazon.com and the AK Press descriptions.

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
“In this revealing study of a Southside Chicago neighborhood, sociologist Venkatesh opens a window on how the poor live. Focusing on domestics, entrepreneurs, hustlers, preachers and gangs linked in an underground economy that 'manages to touch all households,' the book reveals how residents struggle between 'their desires to live a just life and their needs to make ends meet as best they can.' In this milieu, African-American mechanics, painters, hairdressers, musicians and informal security guards are linked to prostitutes, drug dealers, gun dealers and car thieves in illegal enterprises that even police and politicians are involved in, though not all are criminals in the usual sense. Storefront clergy, often dependent 'on the underground for their own livelihood,' serve as mediators and brokers between individuals and gang members, who have 'insinuated themselves—and their drug money—into the deepest reaches of the community.' Although the book's academic tenor is occasionally wearying, Venkatesh keeps his work vital and poignant by using the words of his subjects, who are as dependent on this intricate web as they are fearful of its dangers.”
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Durruti in the Spanish Revolution
“In this new and unabridged translation of the definitive biography of Spanish revolutionary and military strategist, Buenaventura Durruti, Abel Paz has given us much more than an account of a single man's life. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution is as much the chronicle of an entire nation and of a tumultuous historical era. Paz seamlessly weaves intimate biographical details of Durruti's life—his progression from factory worker and father to bank robber, political exile and, eventually, revolutionary leader—with extensive historical background, behind-the-scenes governmental intrigue, and blow-by-blow accounts of major battles and urban guerrilla warfare. Written with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the anarchist ideals that motivated Durruti, this is an amazing and exhaustive study of an incredible man and his life-long fight against totalitarianism in both its capitalist and Stalinist forms.
Includes an afterword by José Luis Gutierréz Molina's on Abel Paz's life and the historiography of the Spanish Revolution.” From the AK Press' promo summary blurb.

Stalin: A Biography
“Stalin has ascended to an equal plane with Hitler in the pantheon of world-class monsters and mass murderers. Yet, perhaps due to the relative unavailability of primary-source material, much of Stalin's life and his motivations remained a mystery. But recently released Soviet archival material, of which this fascinating and unsettling biography takes full advantage, has shed new light. Service, an esteemed scholar of Russian and Soviet history, does not minimize Stalin's crimes or absolve him of responsibility for the horrors of the Soviet era. He makes clear that Stalin, from his youth, was a 'damaged' personality with a propensity for brutality against both friend and foe. But, as Service convincingly illustrates, this monster was a human who could write sensitive poetry, dote on family members, and inspire loyalty. Furthermore, the paranoia that permeated the reign of Stalin and led to the Great Terror descended not from Stalin but from an adherence to a pseudoreligion that encouraged followers to shape, even twist, their perceptions of reality to conform to absolute truth. A necessary reappraisal.” Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association.

Ice Rocket Tags: Buenaventura Durruti, ghetto_capitalism, Joseph_Stalin

Technorati tags: Buenaventura_Durruti, ghetto_capitalism, Joseph_Stalin

April 12, 2007 - The End is Nigh for XP

2007-04-12T03:47:00.000-07:00

"Computer makers have been told", say this article, "they'll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite consumer resistance to Vista and its compatibility problems.

By early 2008, Microsoft's contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines. 'The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January,' said Frank Luburic, senior ThinkPad product manager for Lenovo. 'At that point, they'll have no choice.'

Despite Microsoft's relentless promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the finicky SOHO market." (Via Slashdot.org/)

As I have noted elsewhere before, all is not lost folks. You can always learn to use Linux or get a Mac as an alternative. However you probably should start saving the money now for a new machine (if you're gonna go with a Mac) or start looking at your local community college or adult education programs course offerings if you want to get to know Linux in serious way, and so skip over the frustration of trying to learn a new OS on your own by trial and error.

So if you've misgivings about the way Microsoft is relentlessly "borgifying" cyber culture and the Internet (and don't we all?) then you've received fair notice. Or at least as fair as you're likely to get from the Redmond oligarchs.

Technorati tags:
Windows_XP Linux Mac Ubuntu Damn_Small_Linux Microsoft_monopoly_power

April 11, 2007 - So Don Imus is a Jerk

2007-04-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

But then everybody who listens to him already knew that. So what the hell’s the problem? Well this; he called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho's” on the air, that’s what. A team that is mainly made up of black women. And so the “outrage” [sic] from the usual suspects. But whatever, folks. You regular listens of Imus’ morning radio show must have known by now that he talks about people like that, in between his guest interviews with big-time pols and the Hollywood set, and whoever's flacking their new book or movie, to whom he’s either snidely condescending or outright rude.

And just as predicted, (by me anyhow) the market is reigning ol’ Don in. Sponsors have announced that they are pulling their advertising and so the program's revenue. That is what is really gonna get him in trouble and not his rude and obnoxious language. And this is as it should be. Imus can clean up his act, or go on cable or satellite radio, and his outraged critics can just flip the dial and listen to music or another radio program.

Looking at the stats for his show, I see Imus has only about 300k (give or take) people that even listen daily to him anyhow, so again, what’s the big deal here? That croaking old toad Paul Harvey gets more listeners than that just in metro-Detroit. Hell, Imus' ratings are so low, even the proudly low-rated ideologues at the Air America ™ radio network or the tax funded ones at NPR would probably cancel him. And that being the case, I’d imagine that of the listeners Imus does have, few as they are for a national show, they must want and enjoy his schtick. A tempest in a tea cup here IMHO.

So tomorrow morning (in about two weeks that is; CBS radio and MSNBC have both “suspended” Imus' show for that long) spin that dial around and see what else is on then, or buy an iPod, or read the newspaper.

Technorati tags: Don_Imus censorship freedom_of_speech

April 11, 2007 - No One Wants to Touch this Tar Baby

2007-04-11T05:43:00.000-07:00

"The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," says this news item in the Washington Post, "with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.

At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military."

But nobody with any thought of a further career in the military wants to take it on. Go figure? Like JFK said after the failure of the proxy US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, "Success has many father's, but failure is an orphan". And in this case an orphan nobody wants to adopt either.

The prospective uniformed "war czars" see the writing on the wall; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are grinding machines that continually need more blood and treasure, with only slim chances of ever turning out well, but Mr. Bush and his rapidly shrinking cabal just can't admit to themselves that these wars were a bad mistake, and are way too stubborn and prideful to just accept that fact, and get the hell out. And so the money gets spent and the casualties on both sides mount.

The Iraq war is over; and Iran won. The only real counter balance to Iran was Iraq (as was planned and intended as far back as the Reagan administration), and which is now a political basket-case. And as for Afghanistan? That has been the graveyard of empires for millennia, the Soviets and now the US being it's most recent victims.

Technorati tags: war Iraq Afghanistan militarism imperialism

April 9, 2007 – More Debate About the US Income Tax Changes Nothing

2007-04-09T15:50:00.000-07:00

Cato Craft over at RadioFreeLiberty.com, has a pretty good podcast posted about the purpose of recognizing your own, personal, “Tax Freedom Day.” It makes you note at what point in the year a typical person's earned enough income to pay their taxes and so are finally working for their own benefit and not to pay the feds, the state, the city, the school board, the county, and the rest.

I agree with everything Cato says about the immoral and illegal nature of taxes; that arguing and acting on the view that taxes can be challenged in court on constitutional principles, as some of us do, is a wholly futile enterprise. So says Cato anyhow, and I agree. While a few people do manage to wiggle free of the long arm of the IRS, in nearly every case I am aware of, if you play this hand, you'll lose your shirt, as well as your reputation, money, property, liberty, and even life in some cases. Impeccable logical and sound and informed legal argumentation is futile. Expecting the government-run courts to seriously entertain arguments to the contrary is like expecting a cat not to chase a dangling piece of string. Of course Leviathan will act against you; its the nature of that particular beast, no? Just like a cat and dangling string.

Like the words of wisdom Cato winds up the podcast with, “the constitution is irrelevant”in American courts. Cato says “pay your taxes, and stay free”. That is to say, free to act against the state, and able to live your life. Taxes, for now, are just a cost of doing “business” with the state. A price we pay to stay at liberty.

You're a good man Cato Craft: clear-eyed and pragmatic to a fault. And that's a problem I'd like to have.

Technorati Tags: tax tax_resistence war_tax economics

April 8, 2007 -Self Defense in Theory & Practice

2007-04-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

What Really Happens In A Gunfight?
“Truly, the most important thing in all this is where you hit your opponent. I have spoken with a little old lady who severed the aorta of a home invader with a FMJ .32 while, at the same time, talking to a police officer that could not stop a knife-wielding assailant with five rounds of .45 ACP hollow-point.” [My emphasis]

Just like with sex, it isn't the size of your gun, but what you do with it, that counts. A sad reality of the world we live in. An interesting read too, if you're not put off by the bloodymindedness of the author. Bottom line: Keeping your wits about you and marksmanship skill trump firepower.

Another interesting article on the theoretical and practical implications of taking full responsibiltiy for your personal safety is What Would Happen If the Police Just Went Away? by Warren Tilson.

Technorati Tags: guns self-defense non-aggression_principle NAP

April 7, 2007 – Some Interesting Stuff from Web Surfing This Morning

2007-04-07T07:41:00.000-07:00

'Open Carry' [of a sidearm] Begins for Basil
“I have been open carrying on streets and trails around and in Manhattan the last week or two (and on rivers and mountain trails forever), but today I carried openly in the Three Forks hardware store and the Manhattan grocery store. No problems... everyone was friendly, though I did notice a couple of women gawking at me out the front window of the grocery store as I left, and I noticed a guy checking me out in Three Forks as I entered the store as he was leaving “ Web forum postings from the Clairefiles.

The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers
Regina Lynn @ Wired.com

10 Foods Tough to Digest
MSN Health & Fitness column slideshow with commentary. Kind of surprising too.

Record Store Owners Blame RIAA For Destroying Music Industry
“It's not every day that you see a NY Times piece use the word 'boneheadedness' to describe the strategy of an organization." Zonk @ slashdot.org.

Cop killer 'Bucky' Phillips had time of his life on the lam
" 'I enjoyed those few months more than I've enjoyed any other time in my life,' said Phillips, who is serving his sentence at the Clinton County [NY] Correction Facility.” CNN

Max Stirner's Philosophy Examined
“ 'Eigentum,' that which is owned, is for Stirner an expression of a willed relation. As a willed relation, it can be discarded at any moment - by will. Opposed to the willed relation is the bond, the 'ought' and the 'shall'. These are simply relations that are not mine to dispose of, but which are given me from without - without also in the sense of an 'essence' I must confirm to and cannot dispose of. ” Interesting.

Parents Balking At Schools [seemingly endless] Fundraising
“"We have to pitch the merchandise, collect the money for the merchandise, and deliver the merchandise, and I'm not, as a mom and a family, set up to do that,' she says. And, after years of being asked to sell things such as wrapping paper, Eagleson finally had had enough. 'I simply called the school and called the principal and said my son will not be participating any further in sale-type of fundraisers,' she told McGinnis. And, McGinnis points out, she's not alone. At Dutch Neck Elementary School in Princeton Junction, N.J., parents voted to do away traditional school fundraisers. Principal Scott Feder says they 'went away, and now we do a 'Write a Check' campaign, where we send a letter home and the parents respond with sending in what they feel is appropriate.' Checks are written directly to the school, are tax deductible, and are producing as much money as traditional fundraisers did. Feder says the school even exceeded its goal for the campaign, two years in a row. How much time do parents save by just writing that check? 'Maybe a week's worth of hours, hours and hours and hours of time,' says Feder.” (CBS News) Voluntarism works the best anyway. (Via Strike-the-Root.com)

04/06/07 - Public Employee Unions Got What they Wanted in the Last Election – Now Let’s See if They Want What They’re Gonna Get

2007-04-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Correctional Officers Union and the Michigan State Police Troopers Association both of whom happily endorsed, contributed lots of time and money, and otherwise went all out for the re-election last November of Michigan’s incumbent governor, Democrat Jennifer Grandholm. But now it seems the jokes on them. She’s pardoning hundreds if not thousands of low level incarcerates in order to close two prisons and is laying-off a few dozen state troopers and few hundred CO’s and prison staff support. Hah!

It’s sad that it took a situation of financial distress on the part of the state of Michigan to do this; it should have been done anyhow, just on principal. If these people aren’t dangerous enough to actually require incarceration on account of the seriousness of their crimes or danger to society, WTF are they even being held at all, regardless of financial considerations by the state? And good for the Grandholm administration for doing this instead of going for a big tax increase. Often the pols threaten to do this sort of thing just to scare the public into raising taxes or not at least not cutting them. She seems to actually mean it.

The union leadership, which here in Michigan is overwhelmingly Democratic, thought their support would surely lead to a different result eh? And thank you for your support guys! Haw!

April 4, 2007 - Pols vs. Educrats: An April Fool’s Joke, All Year Long

2007-04-04T04:13:00.000-07:00

The Washington, D.C. municipal government, that exemplar of competence and rectitude, is pushing to take over management of their local school system because see, the school board is crooked, wasteful and incompetent. All reported by the Washington Post without a hint of irony or sarcasm too, although it reads like something from Fark or The Onion. This howler is like Cheech tellingChong to let him drive cuz he’s too high.

My kids go to private schools that their grandparents and myself and pay for, and I’ve found this arrangement to be worth every penny of the additional cost. Yes, I say “additional,” because the local school board still wants “their” tax money from me, too.

“School board President Robert C. Bobb said,” the article goes on to say, “in a statement that he would stay on the board, although his role would be diminished. ‘Now that the council has acted, it's time for leaders in the District to sit down, roll up our sleeves, and work together . . . with the interests of the children of the District front and center,’ he said.” Yeah, whatever Mr. Bobb; you’ll still be collecting your check and benefits even though there’s even less work for you to do, and what you’ve done so far has been just swell too.

As I’ve said before, this kind of news story could just as easily have been a satirical piece from The Onion or Fark with very little tweaking, and it is very revealing of the statist mentality of the journalists that write this stuff as well, that they can do it with a straight face. Or then again, maybe being able to is a skill the scribes learn in a class that they teach at journalism school?

Technorati Tags: politics education mainstream_media

April 3, 2007 - “Economics for Real People” vs. Vulgar Libertarian Bullshit from Corporate Press Releases

2007-04-03T17:56:00.000-07:00

[And with all due respect to Gene Calahan who wrote a book by the same name. This article is about bad times for employees of Circuit City.]

“Like many companies,” says this revealing article in Businessweek, “Circuit City has a set of company values, which it conveniently lists on its website. First among them: 'Our associates are our greatest assets.' Last week some 3,400 of them learned what that means. Their jobs were eliminated solely because the company decided they were getting paid too much. Clearly, the company doesn't value them as 'great assets.' If it did, it would realize that firing employees because they've performed well enough to earn raises demoralizes everyone else. What kind of inducement is it for employees to work hard and excel if their reward might be a pink slip? And why would people want to shop at a store where the low premium on service is so loudly trumpeted?”

Oh the joys of being a wage slave! Those folks did everything the company asked them to do, and did it well; and their reward is to be kicked to the curb. But I hear some people actally like being wage slaves AKA corporate employees, because working for yourself is such a risky, tiresome and heavy responsibility. Whatever. Some people like S&M too.

As for me, I'll take the risk of fending for myself and come what may, rather than put my future in the hands of the corporate types and politicians who dominate American style state capitalism.

04.03.07 – The Reports of My (Impending) Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated!

2007-04-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not dead yet.

I saw this article posted on the front page of STR today and via the BBC. Well, as Mark Twain once noted about rumors, the reports of my impending death have been greatly exaggerated.

For one, I used the moniker “Chemical Ali” way before Al-Majid ever did and I have proof. You can see it here, if you've a mind to. I should have done a DBA filing or some such action a long time ago to make sure that my ass was covered on this angle, but who knew back in the days before the Iraq invasion that I'd even need to consider such a possibility? Not me, sad to say.

So if and when the day comes when they hang this prick, keep in mind dear reader that this guy is Ali Hassan ibn-Majid Al-Tikriti and not your correspondent, who is Ali Hassan Massoud ibn-Mohammad Al-Dearborn Michigan. And as for all that other shit that this muderous Ba'athist A-hole pulled over the years as Saddam's henchman, that ain't on me folks.

04.02.07- Rent-Seeking Faux Libertarians

2007-04-02T04:19:00.000-07:00

Far be it from me to defend Microsoft. I use their products as little as I can manage to. But suing the Redmond behemoth over tabbed browsing? The property rights of software development, especially one application that is so fookin' obvious, seems retarded to me. Inventors should benefit from developing new inventions or creative work, but in the end how can you really "own" an idea? Even if you thought of it first and then wrote code to make it work.

This whole business of "property rights" for code, DRM, copyrighting and patents is just absurd. For once you accept the idea that this is all property that you own, what then becomes the mechanism for the "owners" to protect it? Private legal eagle thugs like the RIAA or feds are equally oppressive. I have gotten into this issue before with someone who writes code for a living, and while this guy claims he's a libertarian and desires very limited government, the fly in his ointment is his hypocritical and contradictory notion that a state must exist to protect his work, but it's free markets and sink-or-swim for everyone else.

And which amounts to rent seeking on his part, and which boiled down to its essence, means he's willing to steal money from myself and others to establish a state entity that employs armed police, prosecutors and establishes and maintains prisons, all to protect his precious code. Phooey on that. That idea is nothing more than a state sanctioned market privilege, and no amount of rhetorical sophistry or spin-doctoring will make this vulgar libertarian notion seem rational. None that I've read so far, anyway. But they just keep on trying though. Go figure?

04.01.07 - Insurrectionary Anarchism?

2007-04-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

"Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice and tendency within the anarchist movement which opposes formal anarchist organizations such as labor unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses. Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate direct action (violent or otherwise), informal organization, including small affinity groups and mass organizations which include non-anarchist individuals of the exploited or excluded class."

I liked the definition right up until the part about initiating violence. At that point the author of this Wikipedia defintion starting sounding just like Lenin circa 1917. The ends don't justify the means, in my view. Some people just have a taste for blood, even on the left. Hell, this definition could be deconstructed and spun by neo-cons with just a few tweaks to justify their program of establishing liberal democracy by the sword, no?

"Insurrectionary anarchism", says the article linked in the definition above, "is not an ideological solution to all social problems, a commodity on the capitalist market of ideologies and opinions, but an on-going praxis aimed at putting an end to the domination of the state and the continuance of capitalism, which requires analysis and discussion to advance. We don't look to some ideal society or offer an image of utopia for public consumption. Throughout history, most anarchists, except those who believed that society would evolve to the point that it would leave the state behind, have been insurrectionary anarchists. Most simply, this means that the state will not merely wither away, thus anarchists must attack, for waiting is defeat;" [italics in original]

That conclusion about "waiting is defeat" is right on though. In the end every living thing ages and dies. And one never knows how long we'll live. In essence the real oppressor is the clock and the calendar; "waiting is defeat" is surely true for in the long run we're all dead. If you want to live free in the here and now, you have to act in the here and now.

03.31.07 – The Dismal Science Redux, Wal-Mart Espionage, Deconstructing Exurbia

2007-03-31T17:07:00.000-07:00

Deconstructing the Dismal Science
“Economic theory and economic fact have long since parted company. And since we structure the world according to the theories of economists, this imperils just about everything.” Some thoughts on the disconnect between liberal democrat notions of economic theory and the reality out here, by Barry Lind in the American Prospect. (Free subscription required)

Big (Box) Brother
“It reads like a cold war thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across the hall from his quarry. Finally, after four days of surveillance, including some patient ear-to-the-keyhole work, he is able to report back to headquarters that he has the goods on them. They’re guilty! But this isn’t a John Le Carré novel, and the powerful institution pulling the strings wasn’t the USSR or the CIA. It was Wal-Mart, and the two suspects weren’t carrying plans for a shoulder-launched H-bomb. Their crime was “fraternization.” One of them, James W. Lynn, a Wal-Mart factory inspection manager, was traveling with a female subordinate, with whom he allegedly enjoyed some intimate moments behind closed doors. At least the company spy reported hearing “moans and sighs” within the woman’s room.Now you may wonder why a company so famously cheap that it requires its same-sex teams to share hotel rooms while on the road would invest in international espionage to ferret out mixed-sex fraternizers. Unless, as Lynn argues, they were really after him for what is a far worse crime in Wal-Mart’s books: Openly criticizing the conditions he found in Central American factories supplying Wal-Mart stores.”

I suppose Wal-Mart has the right to spy on their people, but why do they?

Exurbia: Built on Paradox and Hypocrisy
“This situation is thick with paradox and hypocrisy; in supporting a draconian immigration crackdown, right-wing white America is rebelling against the builders of the modern-day fundamentalist-anarchist paradises that so many of its voters find so enticing. Just as the Hebrew slaves built the pyramids for the pharaoh, Mexican slaves built exurbia for white, middle-class America.”

03.30.07 - Somalia: They Should've Left Well Enough Alone

2007-03-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

The US, UN, AU and all the other meddlesome actors on the international stage, that is. I see now by this story from the BBC that the violence and chaos level in the new Somali state is way, way worse than existed when the Somalis lived in stateless anarchy. Go figger? And yet the Brit news and analysis types think this progress. Like we anarchists like to say, "the best state is no state at all."

03.30.07 - Emma Goldman Had a Pretty Smile

2007-03-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Emma Goldman, age 21.

Why is it I wonder that whenever Emma Goldman's pic appears in an article the author always uses images of her as a very old woman? They don't usually do this with men do they? Maybe it just bothers me more because it seems to most eyes that men age better. Is this unconscious sexism on my part or some unnamed aspect of human psycho-biology. Who knows? Anyhow, I like this pic of EG better.

03.29.07 "Good Government" Not in the GOP's DNA?

2007-03-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

"The third is that the alternative reality conveyed by the Republican media -- Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk -- has created a Republican activist base that is genuinely not reality-based, and from which the current generation of Republican pols is disproportionately drawn. And the fourth, pertaining specifically to the inability of the administration to stop politicizing government, is that good government is just not in their DNA. Bush and Rove are no more inclined to create a government based on such impartial values as law and science than they are to set up collective farms." Says a Washington Post blogger anyhow.

But is that really such a bad thing? I am cynical enough to say that the government that runs the state, (any state), is mainly concerned about it's own organizational maintenance, the care and feeding of it's political base, and maintaining it's hold on power; any good it does after tending to those goals first is coincidence or luck. How I see it any way.

03.07.07 – Nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” is Bullsh*t

2007-03-07T13:56:00.000-08:00

Whether it’s the 1950’s, 60’s or ‘80s that you pine for, remember this; times have always been tough for the average American. To get anywhere at all requires a lot of preparation, effort, sweat, and a good dose of luck.

“Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the ‘flexibility’ of our workforce", say one Washington Post blogger, "decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh."

03.01.07 Some Stuff I Found After the Fact

2007-02-27T20:41:00.001-08:00

Doesn't that always happen?

When a Stranger Calls
“I'm not comfortable with clients calling me at home. If a situation is urgent and I need to speak with a client, I'd rather call the client myself than have my home phone number distributed to people I don't have personal relationships with." This is what Businessweek’s advice columnist said to tell your boss when she gives your home phone or personal cell number to contractors, vendors, clients, and whoever-the-hell-else without asking you first. Now what pray is your rejoinder if the boss then says: “Take the *&^%* calls bitch, or you’re fired!”?

The Gospel of the Wage Slave
“First, starting way back in the 1950s, you had to be ‘positive’ to get ahead in business, i.e., ready to see the glass half full even when it was lying shattered on the floor. Then, somewhere in the first few years of the 21st century, the bar was raised to ‘passionate.’ It wasn’t good enough to feel ‘positive’ about spending your day doing cold calls to potential customers in Dayton, you be had to be ‘passionate’ about it. And now, apparently, even that isn’t good enough – you have to develop a YES! Attitude, as in throwing back your head, balling up your fists, and screaming YEESSS!!! The purveyor of this new over-the-top, fan-like, enthusiasm is Jeffrey Gitomer, in his brand new Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. What attracted me to the display in the bookstore was the odd packaging: a hardcover, but smaller than the average paperback, with a bright red ribbon for a page-marker (a biblical touch, someone in the publishing industry explained to me.) “

02.27.07 - Vulgar Libertarianism, Chattel Slavery, and Wage Slavery Cont’d

2007-02-27T13:10:00.000-08:00

Actually Z., the preceding essay wasn’t a response to John DeLaubenfel’s column at Strike the Root. I posted that essay so as to have an easy and simple way to get my thoughts out onto the web so that I can refer to vulgar libertarian issues with a link, when needed, and so that I don’t have to continually re-Google and then compose and type unique answers each time I get asked questions about it. However, I’ll still take the compliment; so thanks!

John feels, (if I understand him correctly), that because in America there exists a somewhat freer, (for now) market for labor, and that with the 13^th Amendment added to the USC in 1865, making involuntary servitude illegal, that (ta-dah!) my concept of “wage slavery” (and some other people’s as well) must therefore be wholly impossible. Which, by the limited reasoning he uses, seems to be true; and which to my mind is a fine example of VLA.

Here is brief and non-technical comparison of “chattel slavery” versus what it means to be a “wage slave”, that I shamelessly cribbed from a Yahoo service meant to help kids with their homework. I am not an econo-Geek, and so I’ll leave the highly technical economic jargon to the websites and writers who are. But I do know and feel oppression when I see it, and have no compunctions about saying so. Or to admitting when I think someone has proved me wrong by more convincing evidence or a better argument. So with that preamble, let me begin.

“Chattel slavery is [like] owning a person like he/she was an animal.

Wage slavery is having someone in debt to you and [who is then] forced to work it off. The person working it off only falls deeper in debt, and is never able to pay off the original debt.

In chattel slavery the owner is able to kill, rape, and torture their property. Although killing was sometimes seen as the most extreme, and rarely done. The slave was nothing more then property.

Wage slavery existed in different parts of the country during different periods in history. The sharecropper would buy his supplies from the landlord at high prices. The sharecropper would then give half of his crop to the landlord for just using his land. The rest he could sell for a profit. The profit was never able to pay off the landlord though. Thus the landlord got money for half the share of the crop, plus the money for selling supplies at higher prices. This would in turn keep the sharecropper working the land in order to pay a debt off that could never be paid off.

Another version of this works like this. A coal miner lives on company property. The only store within miles is the company store. The company store sells everything at high prices. The miner goes in debt from the company store every month. Thus is forced to work every month to pay a debt that keeps on increasing by the month.

The only similarity is that the landlord/slave owner gets work done for a minimal cost while keeping the slave/worker from being able to leave.”

Chattel slavery can only be held in place by brute force, whether by a state or a private (that is, a non-state entity) oppressor. It just won’t work any other way. So, with that understood, let’s move on to the form with which chattel slavery was contrasted with.

People in modern America society get bogged down doing jobs that they don’t really like or want to do, but really have no choice but to do them. They get into debt up to their eyeballs in order to buy crap that they only think they need or want. Needs and wants, which if they examined them just a little more closely, they’d see are more trouble than they’re worth; and leading to a craving for possessions which end up owning them. They are on a self-imposed life style which to me constitutes a kind of slavery over the free human spirit. The selling of the most precious commodity (if one care’s to think of the irreplaceable and very limited seconds, minutes and hours of one’s lifespan as a commodity), all in order to pay off VISA, make their payments on their SUV or for other such like, and all of which strikes me as being a self-imposed form of spiritual slavery levied upon our real life circumstances, in real time. Time being one thing that can never be replaced or regained, at whatever price. I wonder how much people should care what their credit report says about them after they’re dead?

Now, some people have jobs that they like and pay them well enough; and so they wholly discount the concept of slavery to debt, to greed, to unlimited desire for things and such like, as impossible. I disagree.

Technorati Tags:
vulgar_libertarianism wage_slavery chattel_slavery

02.25.07 - Vulgar Libertarian Arguments - What they Are and What they Aren't

2007-02-25T17:16:00.000-08:00

Many times readers address me with questions, arguments, retorts and injured feelings about things I've said, posted, or written when I've described and condemned what is dear to them a being “vulgar libertarian argumentation”, (and abbreviated hereafter as “VLA”). I usually remember to include a written explanation of what VLA is or add an embedded hyper link if published for the web so that this won't happen. But it does, so I've decided to clear the air about this matter.

So let me start by defining my terms. “Vulgar libertarian argumentation” is using the rhetoric of liberty to advocate or defend ideas or issues in order to make it appear a given argument is about economic or political liberty when it’s really not. This form is often taken by people that don't really understand the basis for the criticism or by cynics and connivers who do, but wish to shift the basis for their arguments from what they're truly about to what they'd like the reader, listener, or viewer to think that they're about. Using VLAs in argumentation or debate is similar to the way some criminal defense lawyers and civil rights advocates play “the race card,” in law courts or the court of public opinion; which is to say that if you can get people asking the wrong question, the answer to the question doesn't matter as much, or even matter at all, in many cases. But first some background.

Political philosopher Kevin Carson coined the noun phrase “vulgar libertarianism”to describe a certain kind of faux free market political or economic analysis that consists of misapplying free market or libertarian principles to situations where they are irrelevant or not applicable.

“The term, coined as far as I know by yours truly,” says Carson, “alludes both to the 'vulgar Marxism' of twentieth century Marxoids, and to what Marx called the 'vulgar political economy' of the generation after Ricardo and Mill. The defining feature of vulgar political economy, as Marx described it, was that it had ceased to be an attempt at the scientific explication of the laws of economics, and had become a hired prize-fighter on behalf of plutocratic interests. (...) But with the triumph of the industrial owning classes in 1830s Britain, the focus of political economy shifted from scientific investigation and a radical challenge to the power of the Old Regime, to an apology for the status quo.” And today's apologists, known to us now as pundits, spin doctors, and such, do much the same thing; they defend the status quo, while using the rhetoric of liberty to do so.

It is not my purpose today to defend Carson's economic analysis in the above cited paragraph, but is instead to highlight the form of argumentation that he is criticizing. To better illustrate what is meant by calling an analysis or argument VL I think it best to cite examples of VLA and then deconstruct them to show how and why they are false.

A good example of this occurred in 2004, when then-New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey was caught trying to hire his boyfriend for a position in the New Jersey state bureaucracy and for which he was wholly unqualified for; and when McGreevey faced massive disapproval and embarrassment because of this, he chose to resign and blame it all on homophobic bigotry on the part of his political enemies and completely disregarded the corruption and nepotism aspects, which was in fact the principal reason for the disapproval and criticism. This is how VLA is used for obfuscation. McGreevey's spin doctors wanted the discussion to be about individual privacy, sexual liberty, and homophobia, and not about corruption or cronyism, which were in fact the real issues.

I chose this example because I believe it clearly show the attempt to use the rhetoric of liberty to obfuscate what the issue really was. The use of this tactic abounds. It seems every time a town wants to use eminent domain to confiscate private land in order to hand it over to a developer, the “acting for the common good” style of rhetoric is employed to defend it. What the argument should be about though is, “good for who?” And why? Arguments for state funding or subsidies for the construction of privately owned business enterprises, especially sport stadia, are often couched in this form as well. Unless you read and consider carefully, oftentimes VLA can escape your notice or even seem plausible until you examine the cui bono considerations, at which time “who benefits?” becomes readily apparent, and never mind the rhetorical ruffles and flourishes used to disguise or camouflage it.

Another confusing aspect of VLA is the term itself. The “vulgar” part of the noun phrase denotes “common” as in “commonly misunderstood,” and not vulgar in the sense that the term denotes in modern English today, as meaning invective, profanity, blasphemy or rudeness in written or spoken language. This is unfortunately so do to the term's origins in 19^th century political and economic discourse when the term “vulgar” had an entirely different context and connotation. Language is malleable and the definition and connotation of words and phrases can change over time; and this the source of VLA's next major misapplication.

I have had many people retort to me that they are perplexed as to why I think they are using VLA, because they tell me they never used profanity, ad hominem attack, or inventive in their writing or remarks. All I can do then is either explain the whole concept yet again, or just let it pass without comment, in the interest of avoiding yet another flame war or food fight.

If any of you armchair philologists care to suggest to me a better understood or clearer word or phrase that can take the place of VLA, I would be glad to hear your thoughts and suggestions. As that famous employer of libertarian rhetoric to defend the status quo, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has observed, “words mean things,” and I for one think that we need to preserve the memes, language, and rhetoric of liberty for actually defending and advancing liberty. The advantage in doing so would be to take a big sword out of the hands of those that use our own language and terms to fight against everything we believe in. I hope readers of this essay will agree with me that this is worth the effort.

Technorati Tags:
vulgar_libertarianism vulgar_libertarian_argumentation Kevin_Carson VLA

02.22.07

2007-02-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

Some stuff I though worthy of reading or listening to today.

Days Of War, Nights Of Love Audio Book: Hypocrisy
It can’t be avoided, so deal with it as best you can, and stop worrying about it. It is a mental relic of our religion based culture. An excellent essay in the form of a podcast, and yes, I know they spelled it wrong. AudioAnarchy.org

Nostalgia for the Past isn’t a Plan
“The state of our Republic today is pretty dire. Calls to rectify the situation by means of Kulturkampf seem to me misguided, however. The central problem of the United States today is not that people’s brains are encrusted with filth but that they have been scrubbed so clean by puritan Left ideology that we have lost the ability to talk, even to think, about what ails us. This is as true over large parts of the conservative movement as it is in the popular culture at large. We cannot discuss what needs discussing, and we have stripped away defenses that will protect us when the coming tsunami of new understandings in the human sciences makes landfall.” John Derbyshire

Reflections on the 1956 Revolution in Hungary
“As the gun lobby says: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. My interest is in why people kill, why they make wars and revolutions, and why they undermine civilized life even though their well-being depends on protecting it. To say that people do all this because they are sinful or destructive or driven by their ids or irrational or stupid or genetically aggressive is to postpone facing the question, not to answer it. For the question remains of why they act on these motives rather than on dozens of other motives they also have, such as altruism, caution, reason, fear, pity, conscience, and so on. This, of course, is a general question, and I am not about to give a philosophical answer but only to set forth my opinion of what motives led to the Revolution and whether the Revolution was worth what it cost. I am afraid I will offend those who have sentimentalized the Revolution, and for this I apologize in advance. But, as I see it, the task of philosophers is to tell the truth to the best of their ability, not to obfuscate in order to avoid unpleasantness.” John Kekes

The Kathryn Johnston Indictments: A Good Start. A Long Way to Go.
“When 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot and killed by Atlanta narcotics officers last November, it had all the trappings of the typical drug raid gone wrong. Critics (like me) cautioned Atlanta officials to use Johnston's death to spur real reform in the investigation and policing of drug crimes, and to avoid what other cities have done in the wake of such tragedies: express regret and remorse, promise changes, then return to doing things the same way they've always been done.” Radley Balko Well maybe. Let’s see if the cop union doesn’t spin this into a typical police “accidental shooting” type whitewash first though.

Technorati Tags: neo-con_mischief police_shootings audio_anarchy Hungarian_Revolution

02.04.07 - National ID Cards Are a Moot Point Folks

2007-02-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

Your state issued driver’s license is already a de facto national ID card and has been for some time now. Any cop or other state minion from anywhere can easily find out damn near every thing any "public" [i.e. government] data base has on you instantly, and in private data bases as well, with just a few more key strokes; So why all the fuss about the Real ID Act, now?

I think it’s the boiled frog syndrome at work. People give up their liberty, privacy, and anonymity gradually and by small increments quite readily; it’s only when a big chunk gets taken, that some then object. The time for bitching about all this stuff is well past, it seems to me, because it ain’t gonna be repealed or reversed by the courts, no matter what the Maine legislature or the ACLU do.

"You have zero privacy …get over it," Scott McNealy once told a group of reporters, after being hammered by questions about privacy issues. True enough, eh? If some lawyer, cop or bureaucrat wants to know what DVDs I have rented from Netflix, or see my checking account info, or whatever-the-hell-all-else, she can easily get that information, and this has been true for some time.

So again, why now? Cui bono?

01.24.07 – A Compendium of News Articles, Blog Posts, and Commentary on the Ongoing Ed Brown Tax Resistance Siege

2007-01-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

I hope this doesn't end up as the fate of Ed Brown

Update on the Brown's Situation
“We visited Ed Brown at his home in Plainfield today. The Feds have not shown up there yet, but a few more supporters dropped by while we were there and a few media outlets. Ed was warm and in good spirits at his house. He was talking on the phone with well-wishers and was entertaining guests. When we talked with him he was resolved to defend his rights even if that meant killing federal agents or his own death. He was also comparing our country with Nazi Germany. Since the Feds do seem to want total control over our lives, I cannot fault his comparison....” (Keene NH Free Press)

Tax Resister Ed Brown in His Own Words
A short article which includes a brief video clip of Mr. Brown explaining himself. (informationliberation)

An Income Tax Bloodbath A-Brewing? “His death would accomplish nothing (except show some people the government's brutality) and would convince nobody of the correctness of his position. If they starve him out instead of storming the place, he will have accomplished absolutely nothing.” (Reason.com blog)

“Show Us the Law and I’ll Pay” Says Tax Resister
Which totally misses the point; Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right. Law or no law direct confrontation is futile, suicidal and serves the purpose of the state more than it does his own. I wonder why Brown doesn’t see this? (Fox News)

Wife Makes a Deal; Husband Digs In
"While her husband barricaded himself in their Plainfield home for the fourth day in a row, Elaine Brown returned to federal court yesterday, accepted the help of a lawyer and appeared close to reaching a plea deal in her tax evasion case.” (Concord NH Monitor)

Why I Support Ed Brown
“I'll be there, with my sign: "Fed. Bullies, Leave the Browns alone". I'm asking you who also believe the income tax is wrong, or illegal, or however you look at it to be there, too. Being there doesn't mean you have to be in a gun battle with the feds. It just means you are taking a stand with Ed Brown to say "The income tax is wrong" and to tell the feds to leave the Browns alone. Now is the time to take a stand. Our freedom is worth it.” (The Libertarian Enterprise)

Militia man prepares for standoff that, so far, isn't coming
“Ed Brown's supporters prepared for a stand off with the government despite U.S. marshals' continued statements that they have no plans to attack.” No plans they’ll gonna tell us about until they do it, methinks. (An unnamed blog entry)

And if you have any interest in what the mainstream media have to say about this, here is a list of their crapola. Pretty predictable though; (i.e. “what a nut cake” and such.)

01.22.07 – I Guess I Had Better Watch My Mouth After All

2007-01-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

I saw this article link on Fark.com and which was no doubt meant to be ironic and funny. Take a gander:

“An elderly man who wrote in a letter to the editor about Saddam Hussein's execution that "they hanged the wrong man" got a visit from Secret Service agents concerned he was threatening President Bush.
The letter by Dan Tilli, 81, was published in Monday's edition of The Express-Times of Easton, Pa. It ended with the line, ‘I still believe they hanged the wrong man’.”

I wrote this piece as a short column for a website a few weeks ago and the editor told me that, while he had no problem with it himself, he just didn’t want to take the risk of having federal goons knocking on his door about it. And so he declined to post it. “Farfetched and chicken”, I thought at the time, but whatever. It’s his site and he can do as he thinks best. But now comes this. I guess he had a point. So WTF do they do this sort of checking up on mere words expressing opinions, which the US government claims is our right after all? To establish FUD in our minds and fear in hearts, that’s why. And because it seems to work too, eh?

Sorry dude, I guess you had it right, and I was wrong. This wouldn’t be the first time, either. My apology is offered.

Technorati Tags: FUD, fear_uncertainty_doubt, censorship, Freedom_of_Speech

01.18.07 – Another Ruby Ridge in the Making Here Folks?

2007-01-19T20:52:00.000-08:00

It sure seem that way here in both respect to the foreshadowing for state sponsored violence and ready-made answers to why it always seems to go down this way. This news item caught my eye on the Drudge Report website today.

“A former militia man convicted of tax evasion,” says the story, “prepared for a government siege Friday at his fortress-like home, but U.S. marshals gave no indication they were planning to confront him.” [Emphasis mine]

Ah yes, goes the mainstream media, a much dreaded and no-doubt thoroughly reprehensible oaf of a tax cheat and “ex-militia man” [sic] is holed up in his “fortress-like home” in the Granite State waiting for his own personal Armageddon with the feds after being convicted in absentia of tax evasion. But the slagging doesn’t stop there folks. Look at what the article goes to say about the people that support this man.

“The Browns' case has found support on the Internet from militia members to libertarians and anti-tax groups.” Yikes! Militia members, anti-tax groups and even libertarians are in support of Mr. Brown; A trifecta of subversive evildoers to be sure, eh sheep? [Emphasis mine]

No doubt some day soon, stories such as these will include terms like abolitionist [sic] and freedom-lover [so called] as well, should those terms find any widespread acceptance. And they will be added to the mix for sure, should the rebranding nomenclaturists of the liberty movement make any headway whatsoever in their rebranding efforts in order to circumvent the influence of the mainstream media, pundits and academics, as seems to be the intent.

Chalk up another media coup for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL, and all the other regressive sorts who make it their business to dominate political discourse and language, and hence the perception and interpretation of current events in American political culture. And so, if and when Mr. Brown and his wife get arrested, shot, gassed, burned alive, or whatever sad fate no-doubt awaits their Custer-like “last stand,” it will all be swallowed whole by the ever content and listless grazing sheep that inhabit this nation as their just desserts.

And so it goes.

Technorati Tags:
linguistic_deconstruction , mainstream_media, militia, taxes, tax_resistence, Ruby_Ridge

01.14.07- Pirate Bay Website to Buy its Own Nation-State?

2007-01-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

Well now! This is an interesting approach. Buying your own sovereign entity sure doesn’t put you on an equal basis as, say, nuclear-armed England, (AKA the United Kingdom [sic]) in real terms; but it does by the norms of international law. This is kind of an extreme response to PB’s ongoing persecution for audio and movie file sharing, but whatever, eh? It’s their time and money and so I wish ‘em well, and I hope it works out.

Now if they really wanted parity with the bigger and better armed nation-states of Europe they’d find some way to get a nuke. Remember Raven in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snowcrash? Like that. National governments would have to be crazy to try anything then. The media corporations may have a lot of pull with the political types, but what politician would be willing to trade political contributions and the goodwill of the entertainment companies for even the remote possibility of cruise-missiles landing on a major city? Even if they weren’t nuclear. World War II was a long time ago, but I’m sure the Brits remember the V-2 missile attacks against London from those times. Which must be kind of scary to contemplate too; and just so a few music and movie companies can get paid their royalties, eh?

I think that this is the real reason that Iran, North Korea and the rest truly want nukes. Nation-states aren’t created equally in terms of power, but nukes sure go a long way toward evening things out in this regard. The “balance of terror” they called this concept during the cold war years, if I recall correctly.

I hate to say it, but this balance of terror concept may well be the only real to way to check the power of the nation states and protect small enclaves of independent liberty, sad as it makes me to say it. Imagine how the Paris Commune uprising or the War for Southern Independence and other blatant actions of nation-state entity’s to crush and eradicate succession and independence movements would have fared if the rebels had possessed equal defensive capability?

Technorati Tags: Pirate_Bay, filesharing, Snowcrash, digital_rights_management

01.11.07-What is a "Libertarian" to the Mainstream Media?

2007-01-12T08:11:00.000-08:00

Usually it means (to them) someone who is a hopelessly unrealistic Utopian in their views about things social and political. To wit, this short outburst from social critic and political writer Barbra Ehrenreich on her blog.

"13. Create a new airline –Libertarian Air– for people who would rather risk being blown up than be treated like potential mass murderers every time they fly." [my emphasis]

See the context here? Only idiots (i.e. those "libertarian types"), don't see and understand that the need for a mini-police state at every airport and border crossing is an unhappy, but absolutely necessary, condition of modern life, however sad this may be.

And so the slagging continues. Just remember; who controls the language controls the culture. Remember that the next time Keith Olberman, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Al Franken and the rest of the currently popular and trendy political funnymen rip on Bush and the Republicans. They are all just as ready and willing to slag any "crazy notions" about liberty, economics or politics, that you may have or yearn for, as they are as to trash the current targets of opportunity in the White House.

The mainstream media, including the funnymen previously noted above, have an agenda, and the only reason they are aren't trashing us, right now, is because they think there's no real need to. Not yet, anyhow.

Technorati Tags: politics , mainstream_media, linguistic _deconstruction, libertarian libertarianism

01.05.07 - An Anarchist Meets the Mainstream Media cont’d

2007-01-05T18:31:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in a previous post regarding the rebranding of the term “anarchist” to “freedom lover” [sic] and/or “abolitionist” [sic], that I believe that the mainstream press, who act as meme carriers for the politicians, academics and pundits, will easily and quickly slag any new term that denotes anti-statism. I mentioned the “Michigan Militia treatment" in that post, and I promised some further explanation at some future time; and that time is now. So, here goes.

“The militia movement,” says the ADL Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network , a website directed at American law enforcement agencies, “is the youngest of the major right-wing anti-government movements in the United States (the sovereign citizen movement and the tax protest movement are the two others) yet it has seared itself into the American consciousness as virtually no other fringe movement has. The publicity given to militia groups in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when the militia movement was erroneously linked to that tragedy, made them into a household name. Even comedian David Letterman frequently joked about the militia; in 1999, for instance, his list, ‘Top Ten Signs You're Watching a Bad Disney Movie,’ included ‘It's called 'The Little Right-Wing Militia That Could.’ Indeed, reporters, pundits and politicians alike have used the term so frequently that it is often tossed about carelessly as a synonym for virtually any right-wing extremist group. ‘ ” [emphasis and links mine]

Please note in the cited paragraph (and highlighted) how the use of the derogatory term “right-wing” is applied to any group that is for the sovereignty of individuals, for individual rights, or are opposed to tax injustices, are all lumped together. To wit: if you oppose the continual encroachment on your natural rights as human beings, or are opposed to excessive and unfair taxation, then you too are “right-wing” and de facto allies, if not actual ones, although from the way the rest of the article is written, you might be involved in an actual alliance with them as well. I urge those interested to read the entire article and see for themselves the contextual implications of these associations.

And all this since the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, which was attributed to lone-wolf nihilist Timothy McVeigh, who was never shown in a court of law to be affiliated with any group whatever; So why the militia associations in the press and other media then? I could write a whole book on that topic, but suffice it to say that any person or group that puts individual rights ahead of the state’s prerogatives, is suspect to the statist mindset, even to the point of considering such views as evidence of mental instability or illness.

For most of Western history, from the end of the feudal period in Europe and then inAmerica until 1930[1], the militia was considered to be the entire local male population of physically capable men of militarily appropriate age, usually between the ages of 15 to 45. They were loosely organized along paramilitary lines and were often required to keep their own swords and spears and later rifles, in their own homes, and at their own expense. These militias were not deployed in foreign wars (usually) unless invaded, but were instead used for local peacekeeping (at a time when police and private security firms didn’t exist yet), or for local or regional emergency and natural disaster response. [2] These forces were commanded locally and later (in America at least) by local officials. [3]

From the American Heritage Dictionary, (1990 edition)

mi·li·tia (mə-lĭsh'ə)
noun.

An army composed of ordinary citizens rather than professional soldiers.
A military force that is not part of a regular army and is subject to call for service in an emergency.
The whole body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service.

And so there it is. But consider this newer entry from Dictionary.com as to the meaning of the term militia.

mi·li·tia (mə-lĭsh'ə)

noun.

A body of citizens enrolled for military service, and called out periodically for drill but serving full time only in emergencies.
A body of citizen soldiers as distinguished from professional soldiers.
All able-bodied males considered by law eligible for military service.
A body of citizens organized in a paramilitary group and typically regarding themselves as defenders of individual rights against the presumed interference of the federal government.

[emphasis mine]

Note the additional definition, and thus by inclusion in a dictionary, made authoritative the slagging of the term in modern times. And I have absolutely no doubt that, should any new, rebranded terminology or nomenclature for anarchist, anarchy, and anarchism, catch on in the public mind, this new term, will in time, become a term of disparagement and used as an epithet.

To you folks who disagree: All I can say is that you should give this a try; if it works, I’ll admit I was wrong and join in your efforts. But I’m not holding my water waiting for this to happen though.

Notes
1
Grimes, Gerald. The People’s Army. New London: Yale University Press. 1978. pp. 4-7.
2
Grimes, p.67
3
Grimes, p.68

Technorati Tags: anarchy, anarchist, anarchism, linguistic_deconstruction, militia, mainstream_media

01.02.07 - Saddam Hussein Dies – RIHYB

2007-01-01T22:30:00.000-08:00

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti is dead, finally. The hangman has sprung the trap, and Saddam is gone. And as photographic proof from the usual sources has shown, he is well and truly dead. And so I'll offer some final observations on his life and the manner of his death.

1.) Once again all the talking-head “experts” [sic] on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, C-Span, and the BBC are proven wrong. The Sunni communities in Iraq and elsewhere didn't come unglued with rage and grief and run amok with an orgy of rioting or terrorism. No more than usual anyhow. They understand that Saddam provoked the U.S. too many times, started too many wars, and was finally deposed, given a show trial, and executed. This is the norm for Middle Eastern and Iraqi politics you see. The only thing that bothers anyone, other than the most hardcore Saddam loyalists, is that a Shia hangman in the pay of the puppet government pulled the lever to hang him. It's an "honor culture" thing, which I am not gonna go into here and now, but you can look it up. In honor cultures people like to handle things such as this for themselves.

2.) Being the arrogant ego-maniac he was, Saddam wouldn’t just hop on a jet with his wife, sons, and entourage, and fly away into exile, as he was offered the chance to do. Bad move, Mr. President.

3.) Even though it would have brought the roof down on his head from the usual suspects in the American mainstream media, Bush should have been more upfront and supportive of the decision to execute Saddam. Sure, this would have been denounced by Amnesty International and the rest of that ilk, but “victor's justice” is a concept that is widely understood and accepted in the Arab world. And it would have made perfect sense to Iraqis of all denominations and factions. We won, you lost, so you die; and this is especially just in their eyes too, in that Saddam wasn't astute enough to run off into exile; this appeals to their sense of justice on several different levels.

4.) When Saddam went into exile himself for a while in 1959, it was because he had tried to shoot dead the then-current Iraqi dictator, who had himself driven the previous tyrant, King Faisal II, into exile. So Saddam knew the stakes involved here, and chose to stay and fight it out with the U.S. This will be admired by some, but derided as insanely foolish by most. Saddam wasn't a martyr in their eyes (i.e. some who dies defending his country, his family, tribe, or for Islam); he was a fool who didn't know or couldn't see the party was finally over. This, to the Middle Eastern mind, seems very stupid indeed. Nixon bailed out when his position became untenable, as did Gorbachev when the Soviet Union imploded, because that is what smart politicians do. When your time’s up, you leave. Because you will leave, one way or another, like it or not. Saddam was lucky, and even brave in some respects, but not that wise apparently. And so he paid for it.

5.) Middle Eastern leaders leave office as head of state in one of three ways typically; they get assassinated (Sadat in Egypt, Harreri and Gemayal in Lebanon, Rabin in Israel, and King Faisal I in Saudi Arabia), die of natural causes while still in office (Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria, Arafat in Palestine), or they flee into exile (the Shah of Iran, King Farouk of Egypt, and King Idris I of Libya). Saddam gambled and picked door number four; and his "prizes," so to speak, were humiliation via a show trial and then death at the end of a rope.

Hmm... Perhaps Saddam’s manner of death will begin a trend. I kind of like the thought of the tyrants in my life, and their numerous enablers, beneficiaries and minions, dancing on air under the local streetlight poles. But this murderous feeling usually passes after a while. Usually...

P.S. – The “RIHYB” acronym in the title means, “Rot in hell, you bastard”.

Technorati Tags: Saddam_Hussein, Saddam_executed, Iraq, capital_punishment, politics, imperialism
Icerocket Tags: Saddam_Hussein, Saddam_Hanging, Iraq, capital_punishment, imperialism, politics

01.01.07- "The Complete Letters of Insurgents" in Podcast

2007-01-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

Anarchists being real; what a concept, eh? For once, they speak in their own voices and talk about poverty, jail, repression, internecine squabbling within the movement, the price of cigarettes and groceries, or arguments with their wives; how much they love, and fear for, their kids. I’ve only listened to few of the theses podcasts so far, but if the first few are any indicator, they’re going to be a great listen.

From the moxieO blog.

”After three months of reading aloud to each-other on late nights, Freddy Perlman's Letters of Insurgents has now been recorded in its entirety for Audio Anarchy. The book is a long collection of fictional letters between two eastern European workers who were separated after a failed revolution 20 year prior. It presents anarchist ideas in a way that only a story about relationships could, and the reader is left with a set of questions that are subtle, nuanced, and infinitely complex. While this book explores so much (from Platformism to Situationism, from Hungary '56 to May '68, from Council Communism to Stalinism, from the Watts Riots to Spain '36), it ultimately serves to sketch a line; the line between those who are seeking to realize their own potentialities among others doing the same, and those who are building the crystal palaces which always become barracks.

Reading these 850 pages aloud took us through delirium, laughing fits, and lucid conversations. The 31 hours of recorded audio mean a lot to us, and we will be making merit badges for those who listen to all of it. We hope those who do listen will get as much out of it as we did by recording it.”

Technorati Tags: anarchy, anarchist, anarchism, labor_movement, politics, class_struggle

Icerocket Tag: anarchy, anarchist, anarchism, labor_movement, politics, class_struggle

01.01.07 – I Told You So

2007-01-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

We're finally rid of that tyrant permanently!

Some news stories from Baghdad, Iraq and London, England regarding Saddam Hussein’s execution.

Executioners and Saddam Exchange Insults before Hanging
Then they danced a victory jig around the dangling corpse.

Saddam’s Daughter When Told Father was about to Hang while at Beauty Salon, Stayed to Get Nails Buffed
Don’t judge her too harshly here folks. Her dad did, after all, have her husband shot for treason in 1997, so she probably still had issues with him.

Hussein Hung at Prison Where He had Thousands of Enemies Tortured and Killed While in Power
And upon the same gallows, too. This is both ironic and fittingly just, eh?

And of course there is this predictable reaction from the American mainstream media.

Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned
Questioned by the American occupation forces, that is. “One participant described the meeting [between the puppet government and the puppet masters] this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’ ” (NY Times) [my emphasis]

What point would a lengthy and drawn out appeals process serve? Is exculpatory evidence or extenuating circumstances regarding Saddam’s crimes likely to emerge that would merit further consideration or delay? These issues being raised by the NYT reporter in the above cited news article are the product of the overly process-oriented American legal system and have no relevance or interest to the Iraqis. But it is very predictable on the America media’s part though. Sheesh.

And finally, why the need to document the hanging so extensively with photographic and video evidence? Again, this is a matter of culture and history. There haven’t been, (until very recently, anyhow) any free and independent new sources in the Middle East. What free and independent media reportage that did exist was all done by exiles based in America and Europe.

The people in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East would never really believe or accept that Saddam was actually dead unless they saw him die with their own eyes, and the evidence for such was brought to them by sources they trust and believe. That is why the need for photo and video evidence, although I don’t rule out a certain degree of morbid curiosity or the desire to witness vicariously the death of this loathsome tyrant who oppressed and slaughtered them for two and half decades. Still not satisfied? Ask your self this: Would you watch a Bush impeachment trial or a Rumsfeld hanging? I would.

Technorati Tags: Saddam_Hussein, capital_punishment, Saddam_Hanging, Iraq, mainstream_media, politics

Icerocket Tags: Saddam_Hussein, Saddam_Hanging, Iraq, capital_punishment

12.29.06-Even Hangmen Die

2006-12-29T17:51:00.000-08:00

The buttinsky's of the Western world ought to shut up about Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti already. Especially about whether the Iraqis now in power hang him, that is. It is the height of imperialistic hubris and chutzpah and not to mention disrespect, to even offer an opinion about this here folks. It is their society, the crimes Hussein committed were (principally) against the Iraqi people, and in the end, it is their call about how to judge him and what form that judgment shall take. Period.

Personally, I oppose the death penalty, period; the only exception being for personal or collective self-defense. That is; if you attack me or my community, we have a natural right to defend ourselves with appropriate levels of force, up to and including, killing you. But other than this one exception, I oppose the infliction of violence or death.

However, I don't live in Iraq, and neither do you guys criticizing Hussein's fate here either. How do you imagine it would have gone down with the American people if some theocratic regimes had demanded during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 that he be stoned to death as an adulterer, because that is what they deem appropriate in their culture’s and tradition’s? Not very well, no doubt. That issue was America's business, and we’ll decide for ourselves.

The current Iraqi state is a US puppet; this goes without saying. But that doesn't mean it isn't acting on an accurate assessment of the will of the Iraqi people though. And so let’s let them decide, okay?

Technorati Tags: Saddam_Hussein death_penalty the_non-aggression_principle politics

12.28.06 – An Anarchist Meets the Mainstream Media

2006-12-27T21:28:00.000-08:00

I've been blogging a lot lately about the controversy swirling around the idea of "rebranding" anarchism and/or libertarianism in order to make it more palatable to the media and the sheep that read, watch and listen to it.

I've given my views on that topic; which are that the press, academics, and the punditry will just trash the rebranded nomenclature too, and the politically illiterate won't be any more educated, interested or enlightened than before, either. If you want to rehash or inform yourself about that whole affair, go here and here and here.

I was politically active as an LP libertarian (card carrying no less!), an independent "coalitionist" (i.e. I tried to form ad hoc coalitions with Democrats, Republicans, LPers, the Green Party, and interest groups to accomplish specific political goals), and as a anarchist working with liked minded fellow anarchists. So I've been there, and done that. Maybe not as much as some others, but I've been in the trenches before, and not just kibitzed from the sidelines.

So with that preamble of my bona fides, let me say that the mainstream media is never gonna buy a new tag. Nope, never. Oh they may report on it to their readers, viewers or listeners sure, but the reporting will just as bad, misinformed, slanted, and just plain false as it is now. For example:

I gave a short speech before a demonstration in front of my local city hall once, and it was reported on in the local press and I even had a ten second or so sound bite on the local TV news.

Some days later I was contacted by a columnist/reporter who specialized in local issues and politics for a daylong interview. I guess I was flattered. At least a first. I checked up on this mook, and what he really liked to do was portray the subject of his interviews as a kooky, illiterate rabble-rouser and nut, unless you were a “mainstream” Republican or Democrat. And that was if he liked you. If not, well you got the "Michigan Militia" treatment. (More on that syndrome later, but not right now.)

Mr. Media liked to interview his victims in their native element, hopefully, their home. He jokes around with you like a regular guy, chatting on local stuff. Schools, sports, local issues and personalities and such. Then he explains that he grew up in Chicago, where his father was a member of the Republican Party; in fact the only one in the neighborhood, so he knows what it's like to be ostracized and slagged for being in the political minority.

Now hopefully having gained your sympathy and trust, he moves on. Do you own a gun? Oh yeah, how many? Can I see them? How's about we go out in the back so my photog can snap a few pics of "us" popping off a few shots? Can I tour your home too? Just quick look around. Is this your home office here? My, what interesting books you have! Did you read 'em all? Why so many by Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, and Lenin? Whoa! You have The Turner Diaries!? I thought you said you were an anarchist?

Careful reflective answers avail you nada. Guess what kind of news article you get written about you? No really, take a guess.

Snarky comments about the decor and style of your home furnishings, what nutso books you read (complete with a list of the most inflammatory and controversial authors and titles to be sure!), along with few pics of you popping off a few shots in the backyard with your AR-15. And so whatever kind words Mr. Media has for you or your politics (few at best, and delivered in a very condescending manner) are all completely undone by images and reportage about the Gadsden Flag on the wall of your study, your odd books, and your huge and scary lookin' rifle. That is what you get when you’re an anarchist, libertarian, Constitution Party, Taxpayer’s Party or are otherwise affiliated with some similar third-party outfit, and especially so if the words "liberty", "constitution", or "people's" are included in your name.

So, in the end, do you really think Mr. Media is gonna give you a fair shake cuz you call yourself a "freedom lover" or "abolitionist"? I don't think so.

PS. - I met Mr. Media at a coffeehouse near where I lived. And I was impeccably dressed, direct, honest, and scrupulously accurate and precise in my responses to the questions put to me, whether political or personal, too. And the story never ran and Mr. Media and his photog stuck me with the lunch tab, too. Go figure?

Technorati Tags: media independent_media anarchy anarchism anarchist politics third_parties

12.27.06 – Et tu, Paul?

2006-12-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

What's up with all these libertarian intellectuals defending Pinochet? First it was George Reisman, a notorious crank and pseudo-libertarian fascist, and now Paul Craig Roberts too, as well? I have to admit I don't understand this from Roberts at all. The ex-Reaganite Treasury department apparatchik and Wall Street Journal and National Review editor/columnist has denounced the neo-cons and the Bush administration in the most scathing terms, even to the point of questioning Bush's sanity and calling him a nascent fascist tyrant for illegal imprisonments and wire tapping in his “war on terror” and yet Roberts defends Pinochet because he "only" killed 2300 Chileans? "Only “2300”, Paul? Most people who kill (directly, or by giving orders to, which is morally the same thing) are called psychopathic serial killers, not “heroes of national salvation” [sic]. I have to admit I don't understand this at all.

Unlike Reisman, who in my estimation is a clear and obvious crank, Roberts always struck me as a natural and steadily evolving voice for anti-statism and anti-authoritarianism that stayed true to his Goldwaterist views even as the GOP morphed into a big-spending, big-deficit, big-government outfit and a War Party with neo-Wilsonian imperialist designs. But now this?

And just as with Reisman, PCR ignores the embezzlement of by Pinochet of Chilean state funds into his own private bank accounts which he stashed overseas. Now come on Mr. Roberts why would a man bent on "national salvation coup"[sic] find it necessary to steal money for himself and stash it away overseas? Actions speak more accurately to true intent than speeches and decrees in my observation, and it also speaks volumes as why Roberts Reisman and other defenders of the coup never mention this inconvenient truth let alone try to explain or defend it, eh?

And the Letelier assassination by car bomb in Washington DC in 1976 is nothing more than a state sanctioned terrorist murder. Letelier was in America, not Chile, so how and why was he such a threat, this one lone powerless and near penniless exile, that Pinochet's junta found it necessary to commit a double homicide outside its own borders?

The fact that Allende only got 36% of the vote for President and that he began taking steps toward land reform and ending the sweetheart deals the international mining companies had enjoyed for so long, was hardly a good enough reason for all this bloodshed, and certainly no reason for engaging in state sanctioned terror bombings and murder, stealing money for his own personal use, and illegal imprisonments and extra-judicial executions. And the torture and rape of dissidents is, or should be, beyond the pail, regardless of political or economic problems, for civilized people.

Reisman and now Roberts, seems to believe that you can fight terror with bigger, better, and more brutal terrorism, fight disorder with chaos, and reign in an over-reaching state with a bigger and more over-reaching authoritarian state.

Roberts’s reputation has certainly taken a big nose-dive in my opinion. I'll never read his anti-Bush, anti-state, and anti-war screeds with the same enthusiasm again, if in fact I ever bother with 'em at all. It really makes me wonder about the LvMI blog and Lewrockwell.com websites, ostensibly devoted to liberty, that they seem to endorse this view of revolution and counter-revolution on their websites.

[A note on sources here. I didn’t have the time today to add the hyperlinks to this post giving my sources for some of the statements of fact. Scroll down to the posts on Pinochet for the preceding days and you’ll find ‘em there. I extend my apologies for the inconvenience.)

Technorati Tags: Pinochet Paul_Craig_Roberts George_Reisman Chile Orlando_Letelier coup oppression

12.26.06 - Disable the New RFID Infested US Passports with a Hammer?

2006-12-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

Nice try, but this probably won't work out as intended

I saw this article at Wired.com and reposted at Slashdot.org saying that, in effect, the only surefire way at present to disable the RFID ensconced in passports is to give them a few hard whacks with a hammer. I believe that this will in fact work, in the sense that it'll destroy the functionality of the damn things. Well & good, as far as it goes. But consider the possible unintended consequences.

I don't know what the federal law is on this matter, but I know that in Michigan people who use marking pens to blot out their SSN or otherwise alter, deface, bend, fold, spindle or mutilate this government issued identity document are faced with criminal sanctions. And that's just the "official" response. Let's consider next how cops, TSA goons, federal agents, and other state agents and their "on the ground and in your face" enforcer's are likely going to react to this.

In Michigan they'll confiscate your license right on the spot and give you a summons to appear in court if it looks like you altered or mutilated your DL deliberately. They will do this as well if they think it happened accidentally too, but they won't give you a summons usually; they'll just take it, and tell you to go get a new one, pronto. Some time back a friend of mine got his Michigan license plate confiscated from right off his truck on the side of the road because a MSP trooper couldn't read it clearly at fifty feet because it was rusty and bent. (Michigan DOT and local road commission workers salt the hell out of the roads here come winter, and the state issued plates aren't coated, and whose fault is that? But I digress...)

I can only imagine what kind of trouble you'd get from the Border Patrol, ICE, DHS, TSA inspectors, who-the-hell-all-else if your passport is not working properly in their swipe slots or card readers, and especially so if it appears that you caused them all this extra grief (that is, made them work harder on a busy day), intentionally.

And if you think or are banking on the idea that Mr. Federal Agent is just gonna wave you through with a big smile and call the 800 number for contractor maintenance to come out and check his scanner or swiper, guess again folks. No, more likely he'll hold all of you back in some holding area or have you stay in line for however long it takes until the technician figures out what's the matter; the passport RFID or the reading devices. And guess what'll happen when they figure out its you? Nothing good, that's for damn sure.

“... [B]e careful – tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison," says the original Wired.com article," not to mention the 'special' customs search, with rubber gloves. Bon voyage!"

My point exactly. All you hackers out there, just keep on trying, eh? This "hammer time" approach just isn't gonna work out well for you.

Technorati Tags: passports RFID oppression tyranny

Icerocket Tags: passports passport_hacks RFID oppression tyranny

Some interesting stuff to read if you get bored this Christmas Holiday

2006-12-24T20:22:00.000-08:00

Anarchy in the Here and Now
by Joe Average
"To be fair, much anarchist thought and action in the past and present is equally useless. Many anarchists used to feel that it was enough to just rise up and destroy the state, afterwards instituting 'spontaneous' social organizations to co-ordinate work life and civic life. To me, this is an absurd idea for today's political and social situation. To begin with, the state is too powerful at this time for people to overthrow directly and militantly. This is by no means to say that militant confrontation with authorities is to be ruled out: in fact, it is crucial that we DO confront authorities when the need arises so that they are always aware that we are here and that we oppose their brutality and oppression. But to imagine that we could topple all the powerful institutions such as the police and army, the FBI and the CIA, schools and the IRS with militant street fighting alone is an exercise in futility."

Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy
By Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“Even though I support relentless surgical strikes against terrorists posing an imminent threat to the United States, I have argued that America's only practical long-term course of action is strategic disengagement from the region. In the long-run, I stand with those American Founding Fathers who advocated free trade with all, entangling political alliances with none. If that advice was good for a simpler world, it is even more appropriate for a world of immense complexity, in which no one power can control for all the myriad unintended consequences of human action. The central planners of socialism learned this lesson some time ago; the central planners of a projected colonialism have yet to learn it.”

At least some Objectivists are starting to see that embracing the anarcho/libertarian values of anti-imperialism and neutrality in the affairs of other people are a pretty good idea after all. Let’s hope the nutcakes at the Ayn Rand Institute start to see the light too. It’s only rational after all, eh? - AF

Old Anarchist Traditions Die Hard
By Rob los Ricos
"In revolutionary Spain, the leadership of the syndicalists were in position to take over the Republic, but chose instead to preserve the state in a coalition with the Democratic, Communist and Socialist parties, much to the chagrin of the rank-and-file workers, who ignored the dictates of their professed leadership and proceeded to valiantly demonstrate to the world that true revolutionary change was possible in the industrial age by abolishing money, seizing the means of production, transportation and communication and redistributing the land to the peasants who worked it. In the end, the Republican forces, led by the communists, crushed the anarchist revolution, while the syndicalist leadership watched in horror or bemused disinterest ("We told them not to take over the factories!").

The lessons to be learned from the past are obvious: for a truly Libertarian society to emerge, it will take a great deal of effort, along a broad front by all Anarchists. (And that communists are back-stabbing lackeys of the bourgeois.) In the Cold War era, anarchism became more of a philosophy than a living movement. But, during the turbulent era of the '60's and '70's, particularly with the emergence of the punk scene, anarchist ideas were once again being brought up and taught, written about and argued over, particularly with communists, who - to this day - believe that what anarchists really need is a little leadership (theirs, of course) to steer them in the right direction."

Rothbard's Time on the Left
By John Payne
"[Murray] Rothbard argued that most of the original opposition to the Cold War came from right-wing Republicans, but within a few years, the Old Right had been taken over by the National Review crowd that was heavily populated by former Communists like Frank Meyer and James Burnham, now eager to bomb their erstwhile comrades into oblivion. Rothbard recounted how these warmongers led him to conclude that the New Right was not, and could not be, his ally.

He claimed:
'[T]he right wing has been captured and transformed by elitists and devotees of the European conservative ideals of order and militarism, by witch hunters and global crusaders, by statists who wish to coerce 'morality' and suppress 'sedition.' " (pdf)

12.23.06 – Reisman Continues to Defend Pinochet

2006-12-23T08:46:00.000-08:00

A Pinochet minion protecting the public from the Red Menace, Franco-style

No, really!

Fascist apologist Reisman defends himself against charges of neo-Francoism (i.e. “[K]ill all the Reds!”, although he seems to actually mean all of the social democrats, socialists, communists, independent reformists, trade unionists, clerics, journalists, NGO social welfare groups and anyone else who isn’t a state symbiotic kleptocrat living off state-sanctioned economic privilege) on the LvMI blog yet again today.

I disagree in whole with Riesman’s opinions about Pinochet. However, even accepting his argument that a fascist dictatorship held in place by military and police death squads is somehow preferable to a reformist social democratic regime, (which followed the rule of law, and which could have been removed in the next election if they FUBAR’d the economy too badly), was it really necessary to use such techniques as torture, rape, kidnapping of family members, and worse, to enforce the dictatorship’s “national salvation” program? Even Lenin, Stalin and Castro never used those tactics.

And further, if Pinochet was only motivated by the desire not to have Chile become a Cuban-style communist state, why did he find it necessary to embezzle millions of dollars in Chilean state funds and put them into his personally owned bank accounts overseas? Reisman never touches that issue apparently because it goes directly to the heart of the “I did this (coup) for the salvation of the Chilean people!” meme, and which to my mind, is the best proof of Pinochet’s disingenuousness.

Apparently in the twilight of his life, Reisman wants to go out with a bang. Having been purged a while back from the crypto-fascist Ayn Rand Institute for “deviationism” [sic], and having retired from teaching economics at the Pepperdine University, he now wants to tell us all what he really thinks, since his retirement is secure and he has nothing left to lose by holding back. I’ve always disagreed with Reisman, but his support for violence and dictatorship to save us from things which are worse (worse how he doesn’t say; maybe being shot by a red firing squad is somehow worse than being shot by a fascist one, perhaps?).

Why the LvMI poobahs continue to permit him posting privileges on their blog is really hard to understand. Maybe they like the extra web traffic it brings in. Who knows?

12.22.06 - Past Time to Abandon the Word 'Libertarian' Too, Says Ms. Maravillosa

2006-12-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

“Regular readers have probably noticed that for some time now,” says Sunni Maravillosa, “I’ve been using the term pro-freedom instead of the more common libertarian. It was a deliberate shift, as I saw while working at Free-Market.Net (and continuing since then) that some individuals and groups that self-identify as libertarian didn't consistently uphold freedom-friendly values, or offer solutions to problems that were freedom enhancing. They ranged from seemingly small things, like libertarian think tanks offering studies and opinions that further entrench state boondoggles like mass transit, to fundamentals such as supporting various flavors of victim disarmament or more restrictive abortion laws. And, of course, in the past few years the shift has escalated, to the point where libertarian can mean anything from a thoroughgoing love of liberty to a republicanesque façade that distills to Freedom for me, but not for thee at its best and quickly tails off.”

As one responder to my blog post about the alleged “need” to change from calling ourselves anarchists to calling ourselves abolitionists [sic] noted that in the public mind and in mainstream political culture, “libertarian” is conflated to refer to a meaner nastier breed of plutarchy-loving Republican with a taste for Social Darwinism. The lackluster ex-talk show host Bill Mahr (formerly of ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Mahr, and a self-proclaimed libertarian himself), said that libertarians, “[A]re just Republicans who like to smoke dope and party, look at porn, and blow off going to church”. So much for the term libertarian in pop culture today, eh folks?

"However,” Maravillosa goes on to say”, I'm not calling for us to completely abandon the term [libertarian]. It seems to me that, by choosing to identify ourselves as pro-freedom or some other, equally precise descriptor [NAPper? ZAPper? ZAPA?], we can accomplish two things: 1] We offer an unequivocal statement of our position on what freedom is, our valuing of it, and how it is to be applied; and 2] we offer a channel for identifying the muddled state of the libertarian concept, and educating those who are interested as to its real meaning and history. Without that kind of conversation, the word is going to remain hopelessly unclear, and useless to those of us who remember what it once stood for."

Okay, but I am still a little confused here. If whole point of this exercise in re-branding the freedom movement in such a way as to be more palatable to the sheep and more self-defined, so as to take away the tendency of the mainstream media, academics, the punditry, and the Hollywood, pop-culture, late-night comedian types to define us wrongly, what is to stop them from doing it again? What’s the point?

If you are against rule by states, you are an anarchist by definition, whether that makes some 10th grade civics teacher blanche with outrage, or whether political cartoonists show us as bomb throwers and rioters, or if Jay Leno, George Carlin, Bill Mahr, and Stephen Colbert continue to mock and misrepresent us. The point is that these pricks will do all this anyway, for their own unique reasons of course, but they will do it all the same, whatever label some would have us adopt.

Maybe Allport and Maravillosa would have us bring in some high-tech, new-age marketing types who could set up some focus groups of soccer moms, NASCAR dads, gen-X’ers, or who-ever-the hell-all else their target audience is, and find some name for this movement that sells easier and goes down smoother?

The two main points that I want to make regarding the issue of re-branding libertarians and anarchists are these.

First, as Ayn Rand famously noted, “A, is A.”, AKA Aristotle’s law of identity: (i.e. A thing is what it is; or a as the Bard of Avon noted, “[A] rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”) If you oppose the existence of state entities and the practice of statism, you are by definition an anarchist. So fookin’ what if the sheep, media poobahs, professors, pundits and TV funnymen can’t handle it? They can’t handle any other form of accurate philosophical or political nomenclature either. Calling “gun control” [sic] “victim disarmament” [sic] hasn’t changed the views of the anti-gun soccer moms, the NY Times editorial board, or David Letterman either, so what the hell good does it do? You tell me cuz I don’t see any gain from it at all. People that aren’t willing to dig a little deeper into the causes and meanings of things aren’t gonna start doing so now because of a name change or re-branding effort. Those sorts are never gonna be part of us because they don’t really desire freedom or liberty at all; Just a cushy, comfortable life paid for or subsidized by the theft by proxy of the thugs they elect or support.

Second, as A.J. Nock noted we are the “remnant.” And we always will be unless we set up deliberate communities to change that status. We aren’t a race or ethnicity but persons who share a more or less congruent core set of principles (i.e. no initiation of force, any state entities, and truly free markets and enterprise). The sheep want health care, police protection [sic], tax breaks, affirmative action, public education, public morals, and all the rest of their wish list, codified into law, enforced by armies, police, courts and prisons, and paid for or heavily subsidized by taxes on others. The political culture in America today amounts to; “Why should I vote for you? What’s in it for me?” And so I don’t see calling myself a “freedom-lover,” “abolitionist”, or whatever the hell else they come up with, changing a damn thing.

But hey you guys go for it with my best wishes, and prove me wrong.

12.18.06 – “Abolitionist”? Nah, I’m Still An Anarchist

2006-12-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

Glen Allport wrote a column at Strike the Root.com today whose thesis is that the term "anarchism" is bad. Not anarchism itself mind you, (i.e. opposing states and statism), but the label "anarchist" because the definitionally illiterate in the mainstream media equate anarchy with chaos and violence. And STR's owner and publisher apparently agrees with Allport too, given his endorsement in the tag line ("recommended" [to read] ), and making the column the first item in the article list.

"Civil society", says Allport, "requires nothing less than complete abolition of initiated coercion. If history and current events teach us nothing else, they teach us that initiated coercion is evil, and that when used widely and systematically (as every government does) it becomes, all too often, an evil of epic proportions. All excuses, schemes, and rationalizations for initiating coercion against others only create more coercion. We’ve tried 'the divine right of kings.' We’ve tried 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' We’ve tried 'democracy.' It doesn’t matter how you dress it up: initiating force or threats of force against peaceful human beings is a crime, and creates nothing but injustice, violence, and misery. Using the term ‘abolitionism’ points out that ALL forms of initiated coercion must go; belief that it is necessary or benign to initiate coercion for this or for that reason, or in some special manner, is delusional and dangerous.

So call me an abolitionist, please. I hope you will consider joining me in use of the term."

I guess it doesn't occur to Allport that the politically illiterate journalists, pundits, and academics will eventually conflate "abolitionist" with the anti-slavery movement in American history and begin to say, "[W]hat a crock! We don't have slavery in America any more. So what is this all about?" And then go on to dismiss or misinterpret what "abolitionists" must be about. And so the circle of misstatement is again complete.

Here is the email I sent Allport in re his column.

"Glen,
I agree with what you wrote here somewhat, but here is what I see as the problem. What will prevent politically illiterate mainstream journalists, academics and the punditry from redefining your new terminology negatively as well? As Ayn Rand famously noted 'A is A.’ If you don't believe in states or statism you are an anarchist by definition, and so calling yourself an ‘abolitionist’ changes nothing. So in the end, what is the point? To draw people into the freedom movement by making a name change that embarrasses them less? Good luck with this, but I don't think it'll work. You can call it a calamari sushi roll if you want to, but in the end you're still eating squid.” (12.18.06)

Life is short, and so you have to choose your goals and objectives carefully if you expect see any results in your lifetime, and this particular word game that Allport suggests we all enter into seems to me to be a sure bet to end up being a major and ultimately futile and time consuming waste of effort. That's how I see it anyhow.

Technorati Tags: anarchist anarchism anarchy abolitionist linguistic_deconstructionism

Icerocket Tags: anarchist anarchism anarchy abolitionist linguistic_deconstruction

12.17.06-George Reisman: Libertarian Apologist for Totalitarian Rule

2006-12-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

Gracias, Senor Reisman!

And all posted on the Ludwig von Mises.org blog of all places, too. Go figure?

"The General is denounced again and again", says professor Reisman, "for the death or disappearance of over 3,000 Chilean citizens and the alleged torture of thousands more. It may well be that some substantial number of innocent Chilean citizens did die or disappear or otherwise suffered brutal treatment as the result of his actions. But in a struggle to avoid the establishment of a Communist dictatorship, it is undoubtedly true that many or most of those who died or suffered were preparing to inflict a far greater number of deaths and a vastly larger scale of suffering on their fellow citizens."

Aside from the obvious nonsense of what he implies here, (i.e. that a fascist dictatorship is somehow better than a communist or socialist one), Pinochet killed, tortured, exiled, imprisoned and suppressed not only the democratically elected government but also labor unions, news media (independent, socialist, communist, and essentially all voices that opposed his coup), academics, (political and non-political), religious groups and clergy, and embezzled Chilean state funds for his own personal use. Pinochet didn't merely kill the supposed Communists and their allies, but essentially any and all who opposed his dictatorship.

How the hell can Reisman support such an undertaking, one that lasted some seven long, dark years? Read the above-cited paragraph carefully please; it could be written as a justification for Hitler, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Castro, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il or any other dictator, the way I read it.

But Reisman gets worse.

"Their deaths and suffering should certainly not be mourned, any more than the deaths of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and their helpers should be mourned. Had there been a General Pinochet in Russia in 1918 or Germany in 1933, the people of those countries and of the rest of the world would have been incomparably better off, precisely by virtue of the death, disappearance, and attendant suffering of vast numbers of Communists and Nazis. Life and liberty are positively helped by the death and disappearance of such mortal enemies. Their absence from the scene means the absence of such things as concentration camps, and is thus ardently to be desired."

I wonder what Reisman thinks of the innocent people Pinochet and his apparatchiks killed? Merely collateral damage I would guess, based on what he says here.

In 1976 the Chilean state intelligence service paid to have anti-Castro Cuban exiles detonate a bomb in Washington, DC under a car passengered by former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, killing him and an assistant (a native born American citizen) and injuring two others. An act of state sponsored terrorism by any other name, no? But Reisman says deaths like these "should not be mourned", but celebrated evidently.

Reisman has revealed himself as a pro-fascist and anti-liberty nutjob who really has no business at all calling himself a libertarian. Reisman’s authoritarian and pro-violence initiation views have lately gotten him booted from even such an extreme outfit as the Ayn Rand Institute, an organization well known for its apologetics for statism and war as well, but with this screed he goes straight into the ranks of kookery such as is found at Stormfront.com and other such ilk. WTF is he doing writing stuff like this on the LvMI blog anyhow, and why the hell hasn't it been take down yet?

Technorati tag: Pinochet Icerocket tag: Pinochet

12.15.06 - Some Thoughts on Armed Uprisings

2006-12-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

I wrote yesterday about the Brady Campaign's belief that an armed population is useless in preventing tyranny by the state. And now I want to add a few more thoughts.

If a foreign power were to occupy your hometown and impose its culture, laws, and political, economic and religious views on you and your neighbors, how long do you think it would be before that occupier and its dupes and lackeys started getting victimized by IEDs, ambushes, snipers, and other such clandestine armed resistance? My opinion is not very long at all. And why do I say this? Because such resistance works! As numerous examples from modern history show us.

The IRA drove the English to negotiate with them over the status of Ireland (1916, 1997), the Vietnamese drove out the US (1975), and the Afghans drove out the Soviets (1989), just to name a few examples. Some of these nation-states went easily, and some went hard, after thousands of deaths, casualties, and much money spent, but they all eventually went, and that is my point.

Some states, such as Russia, have dug in their heels, (as they have in Chechnya) for strategic and/or economic (i.e. the oil) reasons they believe are vital, and so it will take longer and result in more deaths, but eventually I predict, they too will go. Long term war is sure bet for political unpopularity and unrest (even for despots) and is a proven economy killer. Skimming off money, which would otherwise be used privately for productive purposes, to make war, eventually bankrupts even the richest of societies, as the modern history of imperialism has shown. The US and Russian empires will be no exception to this dynamic.

Imperial powers will be the first to go into extinction, followed by the huge multi-ethnic imperialist nation-states. Smaller entities will emerge as the norm. Where it'll all go from there I don't know, and can't honestly predict. I am not a Marxist historical determinist or Fukuyama-ist neoconservative that believes in so-called "scientific laws" of historical progression. Instead I believe that as Mark Twain observed, "[H]istory doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”