The Aristocrat Arrogance over Residency Requirements
The disgust with this isn't confined solely to Baldwin's shallow politics and ideology, but that the political elites regard geographic disparity as a mere inconvenience in their desire to rule us. Hillary moves to New York, Alan Keyes to Illinois, Bobby Kennedy to New York,
Baldwin to wherever is convenient. These people aren't some local politician redistricted out of their seat due to petty politics who has to move his home a few blocks in order to be eligible, these are the landed estates, the aristocrats and 'global citizens' who are posing as our neighbor with a name on a mailbox in order to rule us from Washington. It's repulsive and disgusting.
Labels: government, politics, theory
Buildings, Bureaucrats and Bitchy Ben
Having run across
"Worcester State Hospital" online at an odd-Americana type event, I was overjoyed to easily find the creepy abandoned sanitarium from the road. As I approached, though, the street in front of it was blocked off for some silly bureaucratic reason. I drove up anyway, and saw all sorts of posted signs about no pedestrian access, no admittance, no entry and crap like that. Frankly, few things upset me more than lazy bureaucrats hanging bitchy signs telling me where I can't go. Little did I realize that I was being followed, and that I was being watched to wait and see if I would approach, no doubt ready to give me a good scolding for not obeying the clearly marked signs. Oh, let me also point out, that this is public land. It's extremely frustrating and aggravating that these bureaucrats are cordoning off entire swaths of land and declaring that you and I cannot trespass on public land. I remember the same frustration, post 9/11 when the aristocracy decided to keep the people's house away from the people, because God forbid the people actually come to it. Who am I being protected against? The easy answer is to say that they're afraid of lawsuits, but let's not forget who writes the laws! Who enforces them! The government can't tell me with a straight face that they're worried about my safety and my security and their liability when they are the ones writing the laws. I don't want to make too much about this, but I just think it's a small part of an overall trend where we are subconsciously conditioned to accept blind authority. We are told where we can go, and no one deviates. We are told what we can photograph, and no one dissents. We are told that "copyright" protects all aristocratic interests, and those who violate are defamed as 'thieves' - we tolerate this oppressive cultural control by these self-appointed bureaucrats and by a legal system gone mad. I ventilate my frustrations through writing, but it's only a temporary fix. You can't paint outside without being harassed by the police, you can't assemble without people asking for your damn permit, and you can't live outside the lines without enormous pressure to box you back in. The land of the free, home of the brave has become the land of those who comply with the bureaucrats and the few who end up fined, harassed and imprisoned for nothing more than refusing to paint by numbers.
Labels: architecture, government, regulation, resistance, society
Obama as Leviathan
I made
this Obama Leviathan graphic, both with graphic images and
without, based on this
infamous cover to Thomas Hobbes' classic work,
The Leviathan. Alas, the only consistent comment from friends seems to be that they don't initially see 'it' and then when they do I don't hear anything further.
Labels: abortion, government, history, imagery, obama
Media softening the public to accept cocaine legalization
Proclamations about how the 'drug war' is failing are about as old as time. One wonders if cartels can afford unchecked spending how much it would cost to bankroll some interest groups, lobbying outfits and hollywood producers. As Ted DiBiase taught all us young kids through his theme song as a young WWF fan: "everybody's got a price."
We're told/sold that the war on drugs is lost, that it's a failure, even though it stabilized Columbia. We're told that after legalizing it, the crime will go down, even though as a drug it becomes an irrational desire, an unchecked addiction. We're told/sold that diseases and viruses will vanish because needles will be plentiful and safe. It's almost the same b.s. marketing around abortion and the pill: that sex will be safe and without consequence and everyone's marriages will improve and that human beings will live in harmony with one another. The liberal dreams are always nightmares in reality, and who knows, perhaps we'll be able to watch the disintegration of our communities at an even faster pace if Czar Obama, Caesar of the Ages, either decriminalizes, legitimizes or ends enforcement against hard drugs. By the time kindergartners are shooting up on the playground, Obama will be busy giving 250k speeches on the lecture circuit, so what does he care.
This also demonstrates that the economics of hard drugs, claimed by libertarians that the constricted supply artificially creates the destructive situation where violence flourishes is essentially a completely false premise: more drugs equals more violence. When a commodity is as precious and as desired, no amount of supply is going to stop people from doing whatever it takes to procure it.
Labels: drugs, government, obama, policy
politically incorrect tax cheats
Get an appointment by Obama and your tax cheating is an 'honest mistake' but be
politically unpopular like these folks, and you're going to prison.
Labels: government, obama, taxes
Busting Budgetary Bailouts: An Alternative
If the federal government is going to blow through $700 billion in order to bail out these reckless banks, then why not offset that expense with the sale of other government assets? The federal government has a series of things it could do to raise capital to justify these expenses, and if this is as important as they claim it is, then it ought to justify getting rid of wasteful spending.
The CATO Institute has a nice convenient list of what government could sell to raise $81 billion right away, and shed about $5 billion in annual commitments. There's even
a handy guide from CATO about how to trim $300 billion from the federal budget with relatively little pain.
Labels: budget, Economics, government, policy, politics
Nationalization is Socialism in every country but this one.
The Treasury department has now
effectively nationalized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as this very lengthy Wall Street Journal article explains. And the rationale for this is that no one wants to default on these loans and start foreclosing on houses where loans shouldn't have been approved in the first place. If you want to read between the lines as to what this means, you'll have to consult
the always prescient Steve Sailer, who explains that
this is the "diversity recession" caused by foolish loans to those who were completely unqualified to handle them, but who benefited from having the right skin color. And now, after assuming this debt, the government gets to make another crisis within a current one, by writing loans to these clowns, and taking equity within the companies. Not only is the federal bank a perpetual donor, it is now going to be an owner. This will have disastrous consequences for the financial industry later on.
And we ought to be more outraged and more alarmed by this. We would call it socialism or nationalization elsewhere. The long history of antipathy towards Fidel Castro stemmed in no small part from his nationalization of industries in Cuba in 1959, we effectively okayed the assassination of
Allende in Chile in 1973 when he moved to nationalize industries there and institute socialism. And I don't point these things out in order to castigate them, rather, quite appropriately, to demonstrate how serious it is when this nationalization effort happens. It affects an entire country, it screws up the financial industry, and it throws economies into chaos. The US foreign policy gets criticism from all sides, but I don't think it's legitimate when it undertook actions to stabilize the world and provide the security for countries to keep doing business. A Pax Americana based on trade and free markets is at least a predictable, stable and a relatively fair one. But now, we are clearly in the midst of a rule by emotional appeal to the masses, mob rule.
When
Hugo Chavez nationalizes foreign industries, it's appropriately labeled socialism. When we nationalize our own financial industry to protect it against a preferred political class of voters, a de facto ruling elite (noting that the actual ruling elite simply relies on this class of voters), it's... somehow different.
When Bush
promises "
universal home ownership" in his state of the union, who was he appealing to? He was promising wealth from the homeowners to those who didn't have the means to own one. It was a power-play, and socialism. It is mindless "equity" in the most base of material ways. We think, "houses" and say, "happy" but we don't wonder whether the same things that cause a man to be in debt or financially unstable might cause him to lack the stability needed to keep that house. Or the many people in this country whose jobs are too transient to be in one place long enough for a 20-30 year mortgage. I recall discussing this aspect of Bush's policies with conservative friends, and everyone came back to the same essentially liberal line: that all our minority problems will just go away, crime will finally come down, education will go up, drug use will go away, when minorities are "invested" and are part of this great "ownership society" and feel like "stockholders" in their community.
How silly. How naive. And how foolish of myself that I didn't see through those arguments.
We are reaping what we have sown. We elected a soft socialist who didn't want "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and proclaimed how "compassionate" he was, and despite all the hype and hope, and the hyped hope, we got what it really was: socialism, just in small doses. Shame on us for not seeing this for what it truly was, and for trying to buy our way out of racial discord. The result will no doubt be more chaos and instability in the financial markets, and bring about more racial discord when these homes finally default, and will lead to greater government control over the economy which will, again, promote more inefficiencies and economic uncertainty.
Labels: Bush, Economics, government, policy, politics, race
The State Knows Best, LA and China
So the same paternalistic impulse to
regulate your eating habits in Los Angeles is at work
in China for the Olympics with the regulation of the internets. I positively love McDonald's, but I know that when I eat there I get fat. It's pretty straightforward. And to lose weight, I have to exercise and not eat McDonald's. Being fat, while certainly no fun, is not cause for the local government to start dictating business decisions, and I think they'll soon find that it doesn't help-- most of the fat people will just drive to other neighborhoods to find their big macs. If you subsidized healthy food so that it was free, and taxed McDonald's so that a burger was $10, would you have a healthier community? No, you'd just have even poorer fat people. And yet that intrusion, a decision impacting people in a real tangible way, is less appealing and sexy than the rather mundane censorship of ideas by China. Was anyone surprised by this? Did the naive really think that Chinese communists were going to embrace free speech? Yet we hold speech in the abstract as a higher ideal than true liberty, which is not freedom to have a well-run government, but freedom from government coercion: either in what pages you browse or in your eating choices.
Labels: government, media bias, regulation
