Well, that’s not good. And more bad news: Hurricane season starts on Tuesday.
UPDATE: This reminds me of why weather control is so important. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Whoever figures it out first will rule the planet. Alas, the Chinese government is making progress on this, while we can’t even plug a damn pipe.
…so little time. I have a lot of stuff that I want to write one of my big, sprawling posts about, but I don’t have the time yet.
Stay tuned.
By pure chance, I happened to stumble upon these two videos yesterday:
(Via Alterdestiny)
(Via The Gunslinger)
Make of it what you will.
The Eclectic Iconoclast has a very good post about Libertarianism that I highly recommend. This post started out as a comment I was going to make on it, but it got too long.
EI writes that Libertarians “elevate the rights inherent in property ownership above and ahead of the rights of individuals.” I take issue with this. Most Libertarians certainly do allow that you can’t just kill people for trespassing, for example. The reason they object to government intervention to say, tell white business owners that they have to let black people into their stores is simply as a matter of the precedent it sets. If the state can intervene against a person’s right to control their property in the interest of letting another person occupy that property, it means the government it means, in broad outlines, that the government may violate a person’s rights when it determines that it is in the service of the greater good.
Now, of course, this is a basic function of government. As EI points out, most Libertarians acknowledge this. Everyone would agree that the government can violate someone’s right to move about the country freely if that someone has, for example, murdered a bunch of people. Nevertheless, Libertarians are uneasy with this idea. They certainly would say the government should intervene to stop the murderous activities of the Ku Klux Klan, but should they intervene to say that “you must serve all customers, regardless of race, at your restaurant”?
I freely admit that the ultimate effect of the libertarian policy is to say that in this case, we value the proprietors right over the potential customers right, but this is not actually the Libertarian objective. The Libertarian objective is to minimize government intervention. Why? Because it can lead to giving the government too much power, and that can be dangerous.
The Libertarian logic is basically that government is either (and sometimes both) evil and totalitarian, or at best inefficient, incompetent, and corrupt. Therefore, you want it to have as little power as possible.
Now, the Iconoclast does make a compelling argument that the Libertarians are, in fact, wrong in their view of the role of government. I am unsure about this aspect of the issue myself–on the one hand, I think the government is inefficient and corrupt, but on the other hand, I don’t know that the private market is really any better.
More and more, I’m starting to think my hunch that the Tea Party is motivated by economic factors–particularly by Ricardian Equivalence–is wrong. They seem to be motivated by deeper factors; more akin to fervent nationalism, or patriotism, than anything else.
Every now and again, the idea of “American Exceptionalism” crops up in their rhetoric. I think that this–and, more accurately, their perception that the administration does not believe in it–is what motivates them.
I’m coming to think Patrick Buchanan’s description of the Tea Party isn’t far off the mark.
I’ll be back to posting on Friday, if all goes according to plan.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”–Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Oh, well. Nevertheless, I hope to be back by then.
I just read this very interesting post at The Other McCain. It’s a little long, but it’s well worth reading.
(Of course, I’m in no position to complain about lengthy blog posts after this.)
Peter Cook once said that his nightclub “The Establishment Club” was inspired by “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.”
I am reminded of this quote by the recent “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day“, in which, as a response to fanatical Islamic extremists threatening violence over an episode of the show “South Park” that (sort of) depicted Mohammed, people are to, well, draw him.
I suppose I approve of the activity, since I am firmly of the opinion that absolutely no good can come from religious extremism. And yet I can’t help but feel the whole exercise is… pointless. I mean, did it really win anything for us? Did it change any minds, or, much more importantly, make us in any way safer from further attacks by radical Islamic terrorists?
The problem here is a problem I see not only in satire, but in protest marches, in protest songs, and even in everyday discourse, where passively insulting something or someone acts as a substitute for actively fighting against it.
Put plainly, I worry that this will make us complacent. It’s all well and good to draw Mohammed, if it makes you feel better about things, but let us not think for one moment that we have taken any actual effective action towards combating this violent extremism.
No, it’s not the sequel to Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 horror book The King in Yellow. It is a series of posters in Italy of Adolf Hitler, clad in a pink uniform. This is being done to advertise a line of clothing.
I really have to wonder what the meeting where they dreamed this up was like. I mean, seriously, how could anybody talk about this for any length of time and think it was a good idea?
Sounds like Blanche Lincoln and Bill Halter are in a close one. Doesn’t surprise me; neither has much charisma.
