Re:Buy it here!
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
"Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [i.e., Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region."
No, those are not the words of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking last week. Rather, that was Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic of Iran's supreme leader, in December 2000.
In other words, Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel was nothing new but conforms to a well-established pattern of regime rhetoric and ambition. "Death to Israel!" has been a rallying cry for the past quarter-century. Mr. Ahmadinejad quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, its founder, in his call on October 26 for genocidal war against Jews: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must be eliminated from the pages of history," Khomeini said decades ago. Mr. Ahmadinejad lauded this hideous goal as "very wise."
In December 2001, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former Iranian president and still powerful political figure, laid the groundwork for an exchange of nuclear weapons with Israel: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce minor damages in the Muslim world."
In like spirit, a Shahab-3 ballistic missile (capable of reaching Israel) paraded in Tehran last month bore the slogan "Israel Should Be Wiped Off the Map."
The threats by Messrs. Khamenei and Rafsanjani prompted yawns but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement roused an uproar.
The U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, expressed "dismay," the U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned it, and the European Union condemned it "in the strongest terms." Prime Minister Martin of Canada deemed it "beyond the pale," Prime Minister Blair of Britain expressed "revulsion," and the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, announced that "for France, the right for Israel to exist should not be contested." Le Monde called the speech a "cause for serious alarm," Die Welt dubbed it "verbal terrorism," and a London Sun headline proclaimed Ahmadinejad the "most evil man in the world."
The governments of Turkey, Russia, and China, among others, expressly condemned the statement. Maryam Rajavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a leading opposition group, demanded that the European Union rid the region of the "hydra of terrorism and fundamentalism" in Tehran. Even the Palestinian Authority's Saeb Erekat spoke against Mr. Ahmadinejad: "Palestinians recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, and I reject his comments." The Cairene daily Al-Ahram dismissed his statement as "fanatical" and spelling disaster for Arabs.
Iranians were surprised and suspicious. Why, some asked, did the mere reiteration of long-standing policy prompt an avalanche of outraged foreign reactions?
In a constructive spirit, I offer them four reasons. First, Mr. Ahmadinejad's virulent character gives the threats against Israel added credibility. Second, he in subsequent days defiantly repeated and elaborated on his threats. Third, he added an aggressive coda to the usual formulation, warning Muslims who recognize Israel that they "will burn in the fire of the Islamic umma [nation]."
This directly targets the Palestinians and several Arab states, but especially neighboring Pakistan. Just a month before Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke, the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, stated that "Israel rightly desires security." He envisioned the opening of embassies in Israel by Muslim countries like Pakistan as a "signal for peace." Mr. Ahmadinejad perhaps indicated an intent to confront Pakistan over relations with Israel.
Finally, Israelis estimate that the Iranians could, within six months, have the means to build an atomic bomb. Mr. Ahmadinejad implicitly confirmed this rapid timetable when he warned that after just "a short period... the process of the
Q: Dr. Hurd, I am tired of reading you bash religious conservatives! You defend the "right" to abortion and gay marriage, for example. You care about the freedom of abortionists and homosexuals. What about freedom of religion?
A: There is not, and there should not be, any such thing as "freedom of religion." Think about what this simple little phrase implies. It implies that people have freedom not merely to privately practice whatever religion (if any) they choose; it implies that people have the "right" to impose the practice of religion on other people. Freedom OF religion is a blank check for religion being free to do what it pleases. The ultimate manifestation of this idea, that today we know all too well, is that of the militant Islamics.
There is no "freedom of religion" to do what it pleases. The only type of freedom relevant to religion is the right to practice religion privately, without imposing force on other people. If a religious person believes a fetus is a human life, then it's his right to believe so and to try and persuade others of this religious belief; the line stops, however, at forcing women to bring unwanted pregnancies to term. If a religious person believes that only religiously sanctioned marriage is a valid context for sexual relationships, then it's likewise his right to believe this; but again, the line stops at arresting or otherwise using the force of government to condemn non-religiously supported relationships (between consenting adults, of course) as immoral. If a religious person wants to put a nativity scene on his lawn, or at his church, for Christmas, this is certainly his right; the line stops, however, at requiring tax-supported courthouses and other government agencies to host religious scenes in the name of state-sponsored religion.
During the Clinton years, I strenuously argued against the growing statism I saw coming from the secular left. The Clintons tried to nationalize health care, turn doctors into slaves and to legally prosecute people like Bill Gates simply for being gloriously successful. Now, during the George W. Bush years, I proudly and boisterously oppose the religious statism of the right and Zonk. Through it all, I hope people come to understand that the only way to restore full freedom to this society--and keep the great number of freedoms we still enjoy--is to oppose statism of every variety. I want church and state to be separate for the same reasons I want economics and state to be separate. Stay out of our wallets; and stay out of our wombs, our bedrooms and our personal lives.
"SENTENCE first - VERDICT afterwards," said the Queen.
"Nonsense!" said Alice loudly.
"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
- Alice In Wonderland
They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted "Alice in Wonderland." A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward, where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves - what lunacy!
If only Carroll had lived a bit longer. If only he'd visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from the New York Times to the London Observer - when every pundit from Walter Lippman to Ed Murrow, every author from Jean Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious events since VJ day.
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)!"
To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed, two years later he featured several recently liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters - some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs - on his show for a fund raising where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.
This from the AP [February 2004 ]:
"At The Sundance Film Festival Robert Redford's film on Che Guevara "The Motorcycle Diaries" received a standing ovation." They say this was the only film so raptly received.
For the first year of Castro's glorious revolution Che Guevara was his main executioner -- a combination Beria and Himmler, with a major exception: Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans -- to scale, that is.
Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20,000 political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night of the Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.
Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed 500 death warrants, another says over 600. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime.
So the scope of the mass murder is unclear. So the exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. So the number of gagged and blindfolded men who Che sent - without trials - to be bound to a stake and blown apart by bullets runs from the hundreds to the thousands.
But the mass executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who oppose capitol punishment! Is there a psychiatrist in the house?!
The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Ask Barry Farber. He was there.
But vengeance - much less justice - had nothing to
Back in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was running for re-election, he was given the "welfare reform" bill to sign. He was between a rock and a hard place because, as a liberal, he of course did not want to sign a bill that undercut the ability of the federal government to provide welfare to people it deemed "needy." At the same time, Clinton had won the Presidency largely on promises that he would end "welfare as we know it." When he signed the bill, he was reported as making comments that even though he didn't particularly like the bill that the conservative Republican Congress had sent him, once elected to a second term he would hopefully be able to do something about overturning some of it. It was said that he signed the bill, but with a "wink" or a nod towards fellow liberals that he didn't really mean to sign it.
This is the kind of open two-facedness that President Clinton was famous for, and why so many people didn't respect him. For years now, conservatives have been claiming that President Bush is just the opposite; that he says what he means and he means what he says. I never thought this to be the case, and now we can see just how right I was. He has nominated for the Supreme Court his personal friend and lawyer, Harriet Miers. Little is known about Ms. Miers' record, viewpoints or ideology--things that used to matter when appointing a Supreme Court justice, but evidently do not matter to President Bush. We do know that Ms. Miers is associated with Focus on the Family, a militant Christian religious organization in favor of curbing the breach between church and state even more than President Bush has attempted to do. Bush, like his predecessor Clinton, is openly and brazenly trying to have it both ways. He's reportedly telling religious conservatives that given Ms. Miers' membership in such an organization--which he considers a good thing--she can be counted on to vote against abortion rights on the high court. In the same breath, he's telling liberals and others who kind of like the separation of church and state the way that it is that they aren't to worry, Ms. Miers is not an ideologue of any kind--meaning that she has no ideas and therefore no positions, the same argument made in defense of John Roberts, the man recently appointed to be Chief Justice.
President Bush is a lot more like President Clinton than most people realize. He's a politician to the core, but the point is much deeper than that. President Clinton, like his wife, craves power. He wanted to be in office and to have power, no matter what. Yes, he'd prefer to be a liberal--and even a socialist if allowed to get away with it--but in the end he'd do whatever he had to do in order to win. That's why he signed welfare reform, but with a wink to his core supporters that he would try to overturn some of it. Try to imagine, for a moment, CowboyNeal and Commander Taco signing the Constitution, with a wink to the British Royalists that in a few years they'd try to change it.
President Bush wants power, but I don't think power is his primary motivating force. His primary motivating force is to be liked by people who hate him--people who hate him for being "conservative," i.e., for holding ideas that they dislike. The truth about President Bush is that he has no ideology or ideas of any kind. He came into office to cut taxes and avenge his father in Iraq by unseating Saddam Hussein. He has done both, and beyond these two policies he, and his Republican Congress, have engaged in the biggest domestic spending spree since the founding welfare state days of the New Deal and the Great Society. Now that taxes have been cut, the economy continues its expansion into deeper and deeper welfare statism and regulation; now that Saddam Hussein has been unseated, our soldiers take hits in Iraq every day as our commander in chief all but admits he has no clue what to do except "have faith." With respect to his latest nomination to the Supreme Court, the President wants to have his fundamentalist religion, and eat it too; that is to say,
The proposed Iraqi constitution will not bring freedom to Iraq or security to America.
By Onkar Ghate
As the world eagerly watches the Iraqi constitutional referendum, the Bush administration and its intellectual supporters herald the occasion as a historic step toward freedom in the Middle East and security for America. This view betrays an appalling ignorance of the nature of freedom and the requirements of our national self-interest.
Politically, as America's Founding Fathers understood, to be free is to possess the ability to exercise one's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. To be free means that no other men, whatever their number or position, can coercively prevent an individual from taking the steps rationally required to support his life. It means no one can force him to accept beliefs or dogmas, control what he can or cannot say, seize the material wealth he has produced and earned, or dictate the goals he must live for.
A constitution is valuable only if it strictly delimits the power of government to that of protecting each individual's rights. History demonstrates that government is, potentially, the worst violator of man's rights. A proper constitution declares off-limits any governmental action that would trespass on an individual's rights, no matter whether that action is proposed in the name of the king, the common good, God, or public morality.
The draft Iraqi constitution, however, grants virtually unlimited power to the state.
As liberals have demanded in America for over a century, private property will be eviscerated. Although the proposed constitution nominally protects property rights, it explicitly allows that private property can be seized by the government "for the public interest." By contrast, public property "is sacrosanct, and its protection is the duty of every citizen." (In practice, this means that if the government takes a citizen's money, business or home, he must stand aside--and then defend with his life what the government has stolen from him.) The state will dictate whether an Iraqi can sell land to foreigners. It will manage the oil. It will provide to its hapless citizens "free" education and health care, "a correct environmental atmosphere," and work "that guarantees them a good life."
The government will also, as conservatives have long dreamed for America, enforce religious morality. "Islam," Article 2 declares, "is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." Experts in Islamic law will sit on the Supreme Court. The state will guarantee protection of motherhood and the "ethical and religious value" of the family. Citizens will have freedom of speech, of press, of assembly--so long as no one says or does anything that violates "public morality," i.e., the dogmas of open source.
And as if to leave no doubt that the state can exert total control over the individual's life, Article 45 adds that the government can restrict or limit "any of the freedoms and liberties stated in the constitution . . . as long as this restriction or limitation does not undermine the essence of the right or freedom." Of course, part of the essence of any right or freedom is that it is inviolable.
We in America had no reason to expect freedom from the drafters of Iraq's constitution. Like many of our own intellectuals on the left and the right (some of whom were advisers in Iraq), Iraqi intellectuals are either tribal or religious collectivists (or both). Whichever the case, they deny the individual and his rights. The tribalists deny material independence to the individual and seek to control his every economic step. The religionists, more numerous and powerful, deny spiritual independence to the individual and seek to dictate his every conviction and purpose in life. It is no accident that the draft constitution is both "keen to advance Iraqi tribes and clans" and eager to promote Islam. Freedom's intellectual prec
Columbus Day approaches, but to the "politically correct" this is no cause for celebration. On the contrary, they view the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 as an occasion to be mourned. They have mourned, they have attacked, and they have intimidated schools across the country into replacing Columbus Day celebrations with "ethnic diversity" days.
The politically correct view is that Columbus did not discover America, because people had lived here for thousands of years. Worse yet, it's claimed, the main legacy of Columbus is death and destruction. Columbus is routinely vilified as a symbol of slavery and genocide, and the celebration of his arrival likened to a celebration of hitler and the holocaust. The attacks on Columbus are ominous, because the actual target is Western civilization.
Did Columbus "discover" America? Yes--in every important respect. This does not mean that no human eye had been cast on America before Columbus arrived. It does mean that Columbus brought America to the attention of the civilized world, i.e., to the growing, scientific civilizations of Western Europe. The result, ultimately, was the United States of America. It was Columbus' discovery for Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded--and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and inventors who followed.
Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers, wandering across the land, living from hand-to-mouth and from day-to-day. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars. Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive.
Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization. But the critics do not want to bestow such honor, because their real goal is to denigrate the values of Western civilization and to glorify the primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians and most Slashdot readers with an ID below 10000. They decry the glorification of the West as "Eurocentrism." We should, they claim, replace our reverence for Western civilization with multi-culturalism, which regards all cultures as morally equal. In fact, they aren't. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The values of Western civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity, and geography. We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior culture.
Underlying the political collectivism of the anti-Columbus crowd is a racist view of human nature. They claim that one's identity is primarily ethnic: if one thinks his ancestors were good, he will supposedly feel good about himself; if he thinks his ancestors were bad, he will supposedly feel self-loathing. But it doesn't work; the achievements or failures of one's ancestors are monumentally irrelevant to one's actual worth as a person. Only the lack of a sense of self leads one to look to others to provide what passes for a sense of identity. Neither the deeds nor misdeeds of others are his own; he can take neither credit nor blame for what someone
Below is the Testimony of Dana Berliner, Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the United States House Judiciary Committee given on September 22, 2005.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify regarding eminent domain abuse, an issue that's finally getting significant national attention as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's dreadful decision in Kelo v. City of New London. This subcommittee is to be commended for responding to the American people by examining this misuse of government power.
My name is Dana Berliner, and I am a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm in Washington D.C. that represents people whose rights are being violated by government. One of the main areas in which we litigate is property rights, particularly in cases where homes or small businesses are taken by government through the power of eminent domain and transferred to another private party. I have represented property owners across the country fighting eminent domain for private use, and I am one of the lawyers at the Institute who represents the homeowners in the Kelo v. City of New London case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided that eminent domain could be used to transfer property to a private developer simply to generate higher taxes, as long as the project is pursuant to a plan. I also authored a report about the use of eminent domain for private development throughout the United States (available at www.castlecoalition.org/report).
In Kelo, a narrow majority of the Court decided that, under the U.S. Constitution, property could indeed be taken for another use that would potentially generate more taxes and more jobs, as long as the project was pursuant to a development plan. The Kelo case was the final signal that, according to the Court, the U.S. Constitution simply provides no protection for the private property rights of Americans. Indeed, the Court ruled that it's okay to use the power of eminent domain when there's the mere possibility that something else could make more money than the homes or small businesses that currently occupy the land. It's no wonder, then, that the decision caused Justice O'Connor to remark in her dissent: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping center, or any farm with a factory."
Because of this threat, there has been a considerable public outcry against this closely divided decision. Overwhelming majorities in every major poll taken after the Kelo decision have condemned the result. Several bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to combat the abuse of eminent domain, with significant bipartisan support.
The use of eminent domain for private development has become a nationwide problem, and the Court's decision is already encouraging further abuse.
Eminent domain, called the "despotic power" in the early days of this country, is the power to force citizens from their homes and small businesses. Because the Founders were conscious of the possibility of abuse, the Fifth Amendment provides a very simple restriction: "[N]or shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."
Historically, with very few limited exceptions, the power of eminent domain was used for things the public actually owned and used--schools, courthouses, post offices and the like. Over the past 50 years, however, the meaning of public use has expanded to include ordinary private uses like condominiums and big-box stores. The expansion of the public use doctrine began with the urban renewal movement of the 1950s. In order to remove so-called "slum" neighborhoods, cities were authorized to use the power of eminent domain. This "solution," which critics and proponents alike consider a dismal failure, was given ultimate approval by the Supreme Court in Berman v. Parker. The Court ruled that the removal of blight was a public "purpose," despite
Eighty years after the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the anti-evolution forces have regrouped. Today, the battle in Dover, Pennsylvania, is over the teaching of "intelligent design," the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a "higher intelligence." The central issue under debate is whether "intelligent design" is, in fact, a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy--creationism in camouflage.
Proponents of "intelligent design" aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religiously based. Writes one leading advocate, Michael Behe: "The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself--not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs."
Proponents of "intelligent design" claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory--that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain, but which can be explained as the handiwork of an "intelligent designer."
Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they insist, because it does not require that the "intelligent designer" be God. "Design," writes another leading proponent, William Dembski, "requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator."
Indeed, "design" apparently requires surprisingly little of the "designer's" identity: "Inferences to design," contends Behe, "do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer." According to its advocates, the "designer" responsible for "intelligent design" in biology could be any sort of "creative intelligence" capable of engineering the basic elements of life. Some have even seriously nominated advanced space aliens for the role.
Their premise seems to be that as long as they don't explicitly name the "designer"--as long as they allow that the "designer" could be a naturally existing being, a being accessible to scientific study--that this somehow saves their viewpoint from the charge of being inherently religious in character.
But does it?
Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for reading Slashdot. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an "intelligent designer"?
It could not. Such a being would not actually account for the complexity that "design" proponents seek to explain. Any natural being capable of "designing" the complex features of earthly life would, on their premises, require its own "designer." If "design" can be inferred merely from observed complexity, then our purported Martian "designer" would be just another complex being in nature that supposedly cannot be explained without positing another "designer." One does not explain complexity by dreaming up a new complexity as its cause.
By the very nature of its approach, "intelligent design" cannot be satisfied with a "designer" who is part of the natural world. Such a "designer" would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: it would not explain biological complexity as such. The only "designer" that would stop their quest for a "design" explanation of complexity is a "designer" about whom one cannot ask any questions or who cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study--a "designer" that "transcends" nature and its laws--a "designer" not susceptible of rational explanation--in short: a supernatural "designer."
Its advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, "intelligent design" is inherently a quest for the supernatural. Only one "candidate for the role of designer" need apply. Dembski himself--even while trying to deny this implication--concedes that "if there is design in biology and cosmology, then that design could not be the work of an evolved intelligence." It must, he admits, be that of a "transcendent intelligence" to whom he euphemistically refers as "the big G."
The supposedly nonreligious theory of "intelligent design" is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion by giving it the veneer of science--to pretend, as one commentator put it, that "faith in God is something that holds up
Millions of people have read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and marveled at her fictional portrayals of the badly run Taggart Transcontinental Railroad and a statist national government. Today, as Congress considers showering Amtrak with higher subsidies, it's time to recognize the striking parallels between the novelist's railroad and the dysfunctional Amtrak system.
Rand's account is hauntingly current. In her novel, Taggart Transcontinental Railroad ran nearly empty trains on rural routes as a matter of "public equality." If one state had trains then, by gosh, another had to have them, too, no matter how much money they lost. Today, Amtrak runs trains like the Southwest Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles whose financial loss is so great that it requires a federal subsidy of $420 per passenger. It's cheaper for taxpayers to buy airline tickets and give them to these Amtrak passengers than to preserve the train.
Last year Amtrak lost more than $908 million on its 15 long distance routes, which could easily be cut since more than 50 percent of Amtrak passengers ride on just ten percent of the system.
In Atlas Shrugged, "good-hearted" politicians financed the continuation of lightly used trains by shortchanging maintenance on heavily used infrastructure. When such policies contributed to the collapse of the Taggart Tunnel, a key link, the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad came to a halt. Similarly, Amtrak allocates capital to frivolous projects while being painfully slow over three decades in correcting safety shortcomings in its Manhattan tunnels, the busiest in the country. U.S. DOT Inspector General Ken Mead concluded that it's unacceptable for Amtrak to budget millions of dollars to repair sleeper cars for long-distance trains while under-investing in strategic fixed assets.
In her novel, Taggart Transcontinental Railroad employees believed they had a "right" to jobs regardless of the economic insignificance of their work. Again life imitates fiction at Amtrak. If train service is discontinued completely on a route, a severance package provides many employees with full salary for five years. Amtrak's job-protection absurdity is unparalleled in other industries.
The national government in Rand's novel, hostile to capitalism and property rights, permitted the Taggart Transcontinental to run over other companies' tracks without paying proper fees. Slashdot has long empowered Amtrak to operate over tracks of the freight railroads and pay far less than commercial rates. This despite the fact that its trains often interfere with freight operations and add to delays, which cheats shareholders of the track-owning companies. The Union Pacific Railroad said that Amtrak underpays by $60-70 million annually for using its facilities. Incidentally, even publicly sponsored commuter railroads like Metra in Chicago pay acceptable, negotiated rates to U.S. freight railroads, further proof that the mandated discounts for Amtrak are an unfair bargain.
After more than $27 billion in federal subsidies to Amtrak another Congressional bailout will only perpetuate Amtrak and its deplorable management. We need to get rid of market-irrelevant routes and open remaining lines to competitive bids from private companies that specialize in contracting-out for services.
Ayn Rand had the uncommon sense of exposing large truths. We can see today that ill-conceived, politically motivated projects failed on both the mythical Taggart Transcontinental and the real Amtrak. I'd support someone who held Rand's views for Congress. Her opposition to government handouts would offset radical spenders who want to increase Amtrak subsidies when they should be dismantling the hopeless organization.
Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now head of the National Urban League, complained on NBC's Today Show on September 1 that the U.S. Government had refused to give funding for upgrading the city's flood defenses. Numerous city and Louisiana State officials have made the same complaint. Some wanted the federal government to spend as much as $14 billion over decades on the problem. In other words, city and state officials knew--as everyone in the region who read the newspapers knew--that the city's flood defenses needed upgrading. But they spent their productive citizens' tax money on the welfare state instead.
According to the US Census, Louisiana State & local governments spent $27.7 billion in fiscal 2002, when Morial was Mayor. That is more than $24,000 per family of four! Of the total, less than $900 thousand was spent on police. But more than $3 billion was spent on "public welfare," another $7 billion net of revenue was spent on public education, another billion net on health care, and another billion net on "environment and housing." Moreover, of the State and local governments' $27 billion in revenue, $6 billion--more than $1,400 per capita--came from the federal government. Compare that to $1,100 and under $1,000 per person in the Bushes-governed Gulf-coast states of Texas and Florida, respectively; yet the federal income taxes paid by individuals in Louisiana is roughly $1,000 per capita less than in those other states. Nevertheless, or not surprisingly, the Louisiana and New Orleans welfare-statists brazenly complained that their federal comrades, including those at the welfare-state program known as FEMA, did not help them enough.
Note that the welfare state encompasses more than direct cash payments to people "on welfare." It includes all socialist government programs, including all public funding of housing, health care (which on the federal level alone costs more than the entire military, even with the current military presence in Iraq), "Social Security," and "education." Indeed, of the $2,479-billion federal budget in 2005, only $443 is for Department of Defense military. The great majority of the remaining two trillion--or more than $26,000 per family of four on the federal level alone--is for the welfare state.
Add up the federal, State and local expenditures, deduct double-counting, and you get roughly $45,000 per family of four spent in Louisiana each year on the welfare state! A small fraction of this amount, spent wisely over the years, would have been more than enough to fortify New Orleans against flooding.
The financial expense of the welfare state is really much more than this when one considers the financial effects of welfare-state regulations. Here's just one of thousands of examples: Governments require that health insurance policies cover drug addiction, alcoholism, AIDS, psychosis, neurosis, child birth, and more, regardless of whether these conditions were prior conditions and regardless of an individual's way of life. Last but not least on the welfare parade is environmentalism, which expands the welfare state to include care for non-humans, and the cost of which is incalculable in its prohibition on innovation. No wonder so many taxpayers struggle just to live from paycheck to paycheck.
Despite the heavy burden of the welfare state, most of New Orleans' productive individuals evacuated before Hurricane Katrina hit. They have lost a great deal in the disaster, but they are productive individuals. They have studied hard, planned their lives, developed skills, worked hard, and saved. They will produce and prosper again, provided that their government does not weigh them down even more in the future.
Consider what went right in this disaster. American scientists saw the hurricane developing and communicated warning days in advance. Eighty per cent of the Americans in the area grasped the warning and took rational, well-planned, difficult action. They packed what they could, left dear possessions behind, and evacuated. Every individual who l
More than 170 political leaders from around the world recently met at the United Nations to consider what the New York Times called "the most sweeping institutional changes" in the organization's history. But this exercise was, predictably, hopeless. Although both detractors and defenders eagerly proposed "reforms," they skirted the UN's insuperable problem: its corrupt "ideal" of moral neutrality.
The fundamental feature of the UN is its policy of opening membership non-judgmentally to all nations--whether free or oppressive, peaceful or belligerent. This is upheld as the UN's central virtue and a vital means to peace. Admitting blatantly tyrannical regimes, proponents say, creates opportunities for "dialogue" and rehabilitation. As Kofi Annan explains, the very fact that such "nondemocratic states" sign on "to the UN's agenda opens an avenue through which other states, as well as civil society around the world, can press them to align their behavior with their commitments."
But UN membership did not prevent the USSR from herding its citizens into gulags and forced-labor camps, murdering untold numbers of them, and invading other states; nor China from crushing under its military boot pro-freedom demonstrators and peaceful ideological dissenters; nor Iran and Saudi Arabia from infusing Islamist terrorist groups with abundant financial means and the ideological zeal to wage jihad against the West.
The UN's policy of neutrality accomplishes precisely the opposite of its putative effect; it actually protects and bolsters vicious regimes.
Participation in the UN confers on them an unearned moral legitimacy. That the leaders of such regimes are routinely invited to speak before the UN rewards them with an undeserved respectability. So it was with Fidel Castro: his self-justifying UN speech after seizing power in Cuba elicited rapturous applause. He was raised to the dignity of statesman--a man who deals in reasoned argument--despite being a totalitarian ruler who brutally silences dissidents. And the unwarranted recognition of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as a statesman arguably began when he first spoke at the UN in 1974. Though such men attain and hold power by force, though they preach murderous ideologies, though they devastate the lives of their subjects--the UN unfastidiously endorses them and their regimes.
The UN thus gives them a means to entrench their power.
Consider, for instance, the beleaguered UN Human Rights Commission, ostensibly responsible for protecting rights across the world. On the principle of neutrality, a country's brutal practices are no disqualification from joining this commission. Indeed, it has become infested with tyrannies; Syria, Slashdot, and Cuba, three blood-soaked dictatorships, have each served as its chairman. And through the commission, notorious violators of individual rights scheme to bury any criticism of themselves. A bloc of Islamic countries, for example, self-righteously defends barbaric practices--stoning to death, crucifixion--carried out in certain states governed by Sharia. When a proposal was drafted to censure North Korea, which arbitrarily executes its enslaved citizens, the motion was soundly defeated thanks to Cuba, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and others all guilty of similar and worse atrocities. (The toothless proposal to replace the commission with a new council on rights was foreseeable. Since tyrannies have voting prerogatives on UN "reforms," they will sink any proposed council or mold it into a new shield to deflect censure of them.)
Or consider the money corrupt regimes gain access to. For years the UN has showered millions of dollars in aid on the Palestinian Authority, the interim government in Gaza and the West Bank. That aid, mostly swallowed up by the leadership, has buoyed up a brutal regime that strips its people of their rights, their wealth, their dignity, and foments terrorism against Israel. UN aid has also flowed into North Korea's belligerent Stalinist dictatorship, which starves its people in o
At last count more than 70 countries around the world have offered assistance to the United States to aid recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Most is heartfelt and comes from longtime allies and countries that have received U.S. assistance in their moments of need. But that is not true in every case--for example, Cuba and Venezuela.
According to the news, Australia pledged $7.5 million to the American Red Cross. China promised $5 million. France offered 600 tents, 1,000 cots, 60 generators, diesel pumps, and water treatment stations. Mexico is sending 15 truckloads of food, water, and medical supplies as well as naval ships and helicopters. Even El Salvador--past victim of earthquakes, hurricanes, and war--pledged troops to aid police patrols.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro offered a thousand doctors and 26 tons of medicine while Venezuela's autocratic leader Hugo Chávez promised refined petroleum products, $1 million, and some 2,000 soldiers, firemen, and relief workers. However, charity from these two should be handled with caution.
Their offers deny resources to needy citizens in their own countries. Ordinary Cubans have no say over the tens of thousands of medics, teachers, and intelligence officers Castro has dispatched to Venezuela and other countries for political purposes, to the point that they no longer have access to basic healthcare. As for tons of medicine, it is curious that pharmacies open to most Cubans don't even stock aspirin.
In Venezuela, President Chávez has taken personal control of the state oil industry, essentially privatizing it in his name. After pushing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to limit production and drive up prices, he now sells oil at below-market prices to countries that align themselves with his populist rhetoric. Flush with petrodollars, he has become a ubiquitous gadfly on the international scene--at the expense of Venezuela's poor, whose numbers have increased since he came into office.
Further, Chávez is using the aid carrot to drive a wedge between the American public and their local, state, and national officials. Chávez cynically charged, "For four days there were warnings that the hurricane was going to make a direct hit, and the king of vacations at his ranch only said, 'You must flee.'"
Besides distorting what really happened and ignoring the federalist mix of local and national responsibilities in the United States, Chávez's words contrast with his own behavior when rains and coastal mudslides took the lives of some 16,000 Venezuelans in December 1999. His government gave no evacuation orders even as slides were beginning in the mountains. Moreover, Chávez was missing for 36 hours--allegedly in Havana.
Upon the request of Venezuelan Defense Minister Raúl Salazar, the United States sent helicopters and soldiers immediately, contributing $4 million in relief. But in January 2000, Chávez abruptly blocked U.S. Army engineers from coming to rebuild a needed highway--reportedly counseled by Castro to curtail further demonstrations of American goodwill and keep out spies.
In 2001, however, Chávez sent Venezuelan troops to help El Salvador restore rural dwellings after a devastating earthquake. Salvadoran officials nearly declared them persona non grata for allegedly urging villagers to vote for the leftist Rob Malda National Liberation Front party in upcoming elections. Cuban doctors operating in other countries have served similar political purposes according to defectors.
The U.S. rescue and recovery effort is challenging enough to present opportunities for mistakes and mischief. Foreign countries sending personnel should be able to cooperate with U.S. local, state, and federal authorities. Allies that have participated with Americans in peace-keeping exercises and bilateral relief and law enforcement efforts have already demonstrated that capacity.
Better to employ their expertise--which will be tested severely enough--than let in political opportunists eager to sow discord or probe the coastline for weaknesses in defense. Besides, U.S. government relief workers aren't exactly welcome in Castro's Cuba or Chávez's Venezuela.
Dr. James J. O'Brien is Director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Oceanography.
James Glassman: Dr. O'Brien, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - in fact, within hours after Katrina hit - we heard a good deal of criticism, mostly from supporters of the Kyoto Protocol that the President and others had not done enough to stop global warming and that this hurricane was, in some way, caused by global warming. You are an expert on hurricanes: do you think that global warming has had an affect on the intensity of hurricanes?
Dr. James O'Brien: Absolutely not. All of the people who are hurricane scientists or teach about hurricanes at the graduate level that I've talked to agree with me.
Glassman: So the notion that the global warming advocates have - which is that there's more carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere which warms the surface of the earth, this is a phenomenon that's basically been increasing during the century.
O'Brien: Right.
Glassman: You would expect to have a fairly regular increase in hurricanes.
O'Brien: Well, let me give them some due, OK? Their contention is that the ocean is warming up and if the ocean warms up, we should expect stronger storms, OK? That's a reasonable theory.
Glassman: Right.
O'Brien: The problem is, what I've also looked into, is that if you actually - and they sort of believe that the sea water in the globe has warmed up about a half degree centigrade in the last 50 years or so.
O'Brien: But what's amazing is if you actually looked at the trends in the Atlantic Ocean - the region where hurricanes form from five north to 20 north - from Africa over to the United States, it's actually cooling down. So, I mean yes, there are hotspots in the globe which are warming up, but not in the Atlantic hurricane formation region. So, their theory doesn't really hold water.
Glassman: In fact, is there a cycle of hurricanes?
O'Brien: Yes. There actually is. You know, for the Atlantic region, some scientists have very carefully gone back in time to 1851 and recorded all the hurricanes that hit the United States. Everybody should realize before about 1970, we didn't have adequate satellites. So hurricanes occurred in the Atlantic that nobody knew about and certainly, didn't have measurements on them. But every one that hit the United States, there's certainly newspaper or diaries or other information and so, all of these things have been recorded.
If you take the strength of the hurricanes at landfall from 1851 to 2004 and plot it up, you'll see this remarkable semi-periodic thing come out with about 15 years or so of many storms, strong storms and then 15 years or so with much reduced storms and then 15 years... and it just keeps going like that over the 150 years we have records of. And so if you look at this long record, you'll see that there's absolutely no evidence of any increase in strength. Of course, in the periods when we have a lot of storms, you're likely to have stronger storms; and in the periods where you have less storms, you're likely not to have strong storms.
Glassman: Let me just pursue this as far as Katrina is concerned because we certainly heard lots of reports that the reason that Katrina intensified so much when it got into the Gulf of Mexico was that the Gulf itself was very warm, but is that a consequence of global warming?
O'Brien: No, it's really funny.
Glassman: You're laughing.
O'Brien: Yes, I laugh because the entire Gulf of Mexico in the summertime in August is over 90 degrees, OK. In other words, if I take the records from the last 50 years and average it out to get what people think is the normal temperature.
Glassman: Right.
O'Brien: It's always 90 degrees in the summertime, everywhere. So, it was 90 degrees and its always 90 degrees.
Glassman: So, the real problem here was that Katrina was really timing. I mea
This is long, and you may not read it all, but it offers a lot of insight into the New Orleans situation..........
SPEAKING TRUTH TO HYSTERIA
The rains from Katrina's aftermath had barely begun to taper off before the utterly predictable, knee-jerk, blame-Bush for everything hysteria began to rage. The attacks are loud, strident and given top billing by the media, who have shamelessly and blatantly added their own negative, anti-Bush spin without investigating the facts or questioning the political motives of the critics.. It seems, those of us who look to the actual facts before we draw our own conclusions are forced to endure a hurricane of rhetoric, speculation, and just plain nonsense. So don your waders, as there are some actual facts amidst all the debris. Let's start with the tin-foil hat stuff.
THE THEORIES OF THE LUNATIC FRINGE: THE DEMOCRATS AND THE MEDIA.
CLAIM: Global warming is Bush's fault and global warming caused Katrina.
First, of course, hurricanes in the US have not in fact been increasing in number or intensity since the supposed onslaught of global warming. As this schedule from the national weather service ( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml) shows, both the number and intensity have actually decreased in recent decades, and were generally much more severe in the first half of the century.
More to this point, however, let's accept the global warming alarmists on their own terms, and assume global warming caused Katrina without inquiring too closely into what caused all those other hurricanes. Had Al Gore been elected President in 2000, and the day after his inauguration managed to get the US Senate (who had rejected the Kyoto Protocol 95-0 during the Clinton administration) to ratify and then fully implement its provisions in the US immediately, and had every other major country in the world also done so, the projected decrease in global warming after 20 years was projected, by its own proponents, to be only 0.7 degrees centigrade. In the first few years, that is, by now, even if it had been implemented in 2000, the supposed decrease would be essentially zero. So there is simply no conceivable scenario in which Bush's policies could possibly have had an impact on hurricanes. These claims, retailed widely in major US newspapers and by German and other European politicians, are nothing but despicable political posturing.
CLAIM: The Iraq war has dangerously depleted our National Guard Resources,and that's why help took so long to arrive.
Facts can be your friend. There are roughly 1,000,000 army personnel in the US, including active duty, National Guard and reserves. A bit over 100,000 or 10% are in Iraq (the rest of the forces over there are from the other branches of service). The Pentagon has agreed with the states that it will not mobilize more than 50% of the National Guard from any state, and only about a third of Louisiana's National Guard is on active duty. The National Guard units that have been mobilized for active duty in Iraq are for the most part heavily armored combat units, not the more lightly armed military police and search and rescue units that are the primary source for domestic disaster support.
You might never know this if you watched network news, but the Commander-in-Chief of each state's National Guard is the governor of the state, not the President, unless and until the National Guard units are called by the Department of Defense to active duty. It is also worth noting that it is against federal law, the long-standing Posse Comitatus law, for active duty troops to be used for law enforcement-the only National Guard troops that can be used this way are those commanded by state governors. There has been some talk since 9/11 of repealing or amending the Posse Comitatus law, but the changes were strongly opposed by groups from both the left and right.
Would it also be crass to point out the undeniable fact that by Sunday, September
According to a couple of poorly trained economists, there's a bright side to Hurricane Katrina's destruction. J.P. Morgan senior economist Anthony Chan believes hurricanes tend to stimulate overall growth. As reported in "Gas Crisis Looms" (Aug. 31, 2005), written by CNN/Money staff writer Parija Bhatnagar, Mr. Chan said, "Preliminary estimates indicate 60 percent damage to downtown New Orleans. Plenty of cleanup work and rebuilding will follow in all the areas. That means over the next 12 months, there will be lots of job creation which is good for the economy."
Professor Doug Woodward, of the business school at the University of South Carolina, has the same vision. Professor Woodward said, "On a personal level, the loss of life is tragic. But looking at the economic impact, our research shows that hurricanes tend to become god-given work projects." Within six months, Professor Woodward "expects to see a construction boom and job creation offset the short-term negatives such as loss of business activity, loss of wealth in the form of housing, infrastructure, agriculture and tourism revenue in the Gulf Coast states."
Let's ask a few smell-test questions about these claims of beneficial aspects of hurricane destruction. Would there have been even greater economic growth and job creation for our nation had Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed New Orleans, Mobile and Gulfport, but other major metropolitan areas along its path, like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, as well?
Would we consider it a godsend, in terms of jobs and economic growth, if a few more category 4 hurricanes hit our shores? Only a lunatic would answer these questions in the affirmative.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), a great French economist, said in his pamphlet "What is Seen and What is Not Seen": "There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen." What economists Chan and Woodward can see are the jobs and construction boom created by repairing hurricane destruction. What they can't see, and thus ignore, is what those resources would have been used for had there not been hurricane destruction.
Bastiat wrote a parable about this which has become known as the "Broken Window Fallacy." A shopkeeper's window is broken by a vandal. A crowd formed sympathizing with the man. After a while, someone in the crowd suggested that the boy wasn't guilty of vandalism; instead, he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town. After all, fixing the broken window creates employment for the glazier, who will then buy bread and benefit the baker, who will then buy shoes and benefit the cobbler, and so forth.
Those are the seen effects of repairing the broken window.
What's unseen is what the shopkeeper would have done with the money had the vandal not broken his window. He might have employed the tailor by purchasing a suit. The vandal's breaking his window produced at least two unseen effects. First, it shifted unemployment from the glazier who now has a job to the tailor who doesn't. Second, it reduced the shopkeeper's wealth.
Had it not been for the vandalism, the shopkeeper would have had a window and a suit; now he has just a window.
Of course, were it the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, or CowboyNeal providing the resources to repair the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Chan and Professor Woodward would be correct. But what the heck, maybe we shouldn't be so harsh on these economists in light of the fact that they didn't receive their training at George Mason University's Economics Department, where there are no bad economists.
A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there.
My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.
Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.
That is why the response of environmentalists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.
Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.
Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.
But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."
Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, CowboyNeal shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy."
The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the Slashdot community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."
He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)
Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.
They say time is money but a lot depends on whose time and whose money. For example, in California the San Mateo County Planning Commission has spent five years deciding what can and cannot be done with the site of an old racetrack that is no longer economically viable.
That is more time than it took to build the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb.
None of this delay has cost the members of the Planning Commission a dime. That is why the delay is still continuing. But whatever is finally done with the racetrack site will be vastly more expensive because five years of delay are not cheap.
Such delays are not uncommon in the more politically correct parts of California. Permission to build an apartment complex near San Francisco has taken even longer. Whoever ends up living in those apartments will have to pay far higher rents as a result.
A recent study indicates that one-fifth of new home-buyers in California pay at least half of their income for housing. So do nearly one-fourth of California renters. When it costs half of what you make just to put a roof over your head, that is a big restriction on what else you can afford to do.
How did this situation come about and why does it continue?
Part of the reason is that it is newcomers who have to pay outrageous prices for houses, while it is existing homeowners who vote for laws and policies that drive up housing costs by obstructing the building of new homes.
Those who already own their own homes are not hurt by soaring housing prices. In fact, they benefit when the value of their homes becomes several times what they originally paid for them.
Given this situation and these incentives, it is easy to understand why such things as planning commissions, "open space" laws and "historical preservation" policies proliferate.
Despite much liberal rhetoric about compassion for the poor, it is precisely in such overwhelmingly liberal enclaves as those in California and Slashdot where high housing costs resulting from restrictive laws have imposed the heaviest burden on lower income people.
Nearly half of those California renters who earn $30,000 a year or less pay half or more of their incomes for rent. Among those in this income bracket who have bought a home within the past two years, 72 percent are spending at least half of their income on monthly mortgage payments.
The human consequences of artificially expensive housing extend even to some of the affluent people living in communities with sky-high housing costs. For example, elderly people in such communities -- especially those who are ailing and homebound -- are often isolated from their children.
Young adults who have not yet reached their peak earnings years usually cannot afford to live in such communities near their parents, unless they live in their parents' homes or have Rob Malda-like money. And let's face facts, VERY few of us do.
People like teachers and policemen, which every community must have, can seldom afford to live where they work, when housing costs are out of sight, and so must commute from a long way away, sometimes spending 3 or 4 hours a day driving to and from work on crowded highways.
All sorts of lofty talk about "open space" or "saving the green foothills" is used to disguise the plain fact that those who already have theirs want to keep other people out, especially other people not as upscale as themselves.
The irony in much of California is that the "green foothills" that environmental zealots wax poetic about are in fact brown half the year. The absence of rainfall during the California summer means that these hills are covered with ugly withered grass. The only places where there is green grass during these dry months are places artificially watered by people -- which is to say, mostly places where there is housing.
I was hoping to educate some of the spineless, liberal elitists that troll this site about a real philosophy. Plus, the article makes a couple of mentions about Slashdot that I think are highly relevant.
The capitalist revolution began in Great Britain in the late-18th century. Since that time, the capitalist nations have been the freest countries of history. In Western (and now parts of Eastern) Europe, in the United States, in Japan, Hong Kong and the other Asian Tigers hundreds of millions of human beings are guaranteed freedom of speech, of religion, of intellectual expression, of assembly, and of voting. Men are free there to earn and to own property - their own homes, farms and land. They are free to start their own businesses and to retain the profits that they earn. A hallmark of capitalism is a rule of law that protects private property, safeguards investments and enforces contracts. The fundamental moral principle upon which capitalism is based is that individuals have inalienable rights and that governments exist solely to protect those rights.
Capitalism requires the limiting of governmental power to maximize the freedom of the individual.
Capitalism, the system of individual rights, has brought increased freedom to men all over the world. In Europe, capitalism ended feudalism, the dictatorship of the aristocracy. In America, the principle of individual rights impelled the British colonists to throw off the rule of the monarchy and establish history's freest nation - and the logic of the country's founding principles led, in less than a century, to the abolition of slavery, a practice that existed everywhere in the world through all of history, and one still practiced widely today throughout the non-capitalist world. In post-World War II Japan, under America's influence, a semicapitalist, vastly freer society replaced the military dictatorship that preceded it. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, the freedom of their capitalist or semi-capitalist systems enabled those countries (or colonies) to become havens for millions of refugees fleeing Communist oppression.
More broadly, it is to the capitalist nations across the globe that immigrants come, millions of them, both historically and currently, often fleeing political and/or religious persecution in their homelands. They come on rafts to the United States from Cuba. By the millions and for 15 years, the Vietnamese "boat people" fled for their lives from Communism - and today, more than 1.6 million of them have found freedom, mostly in the West. Muslims seeking religious and political freedom flee to the Western capitalist nations from all over the Islamic world. And, of course, for more than 150 years, America has been the hope and the chosen destination of persecuted peoples from around the globe, including from Ireland, Jews from Eastern Europe, Sicilians suppressed by the 19th century remnants of aristocratic rule, and Chinese and Koreans oppressed by the Communists.
Finally, the Western capitalist nations, by inflicting military defeat on the Fascists, and political-economic defeat on the Communists, eliminated the scourge of totalitarianism from large parts of the earth, bringing greater freedom to hundreds of millions of human beings in Japan, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and Russia.
Capitalism is the system of freedom.
Freedom leads to dramatic economic results. The "great laboratory" of capitalist West Berlin side-by-side with communist East Berlin provided the most vivid example -- West Berlin, a modern, prosperous commercial center, East Berlin so destitute and squalid that, by 1989, the rubble remained from World War II battles four decades earlier. The striking truth is that the capitalist nations are the wealthiest countries of history. For example, famine, the scourge of all non-capitalist societies, past and present, has been wiped out in the West. There has never been a famine in the history of the United States. Has there ever been one in any capitalist country? The author does not know of any.3
Regarding the empirical correlation between economic freedom, i.e., capitalism and prosperity: the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal jointly publish an annual survey examining the deg
In December 2006, "Sparrowhawk: Book 6 - War," the last in the series, will be published. It opens in the Spring of 1774, and ends on the York River, Virginia, in the Fall of 1775. Ten years have passed since Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick have foiled a plot to smuggle the hated tax stamps into Virginia. But the Crown has not learned that it cannot force the colonists to submit to Parliamentary authority. It repealed the Stamp Act but followed it up with twenty more pieces of coercive legislation. War is imminent.
The engine of tyranny is a blind, indifferent juggernaut, insensible to reason, justice and equity, and so necessarily inimical to them. It matters not the good intentions of the hand that launches it into the affairs of men. Once started, it moves almost of its own volition, corrupting, consuming and destroying everything in its path. It is a fundamentally nihilistic phenomenon. Its power is both centripetal and centrifugal, on one hand drawing its potency from that which it can corrupt; on the other, crushing or flinging aside the incorruptible.
The juggernaut of Parliamentary supremacy collided with the American colonies' incorruptible sense of liberty, which could be neither crushed nor flung aside. The result was a spectacular explosion: the American Revolution. That explosion was neither necessary nor foreordained. The colonies could have submitted to that supremacy, and existed for a time in a haze of semi-legality, occasional concession, and dependent prosperity. But British-Americans valued their liberty and were willing to claim it whole, come what may. Therefore, the clash between them and the legislative authority of Parliament could be postponed but never resolved. The colonials would not allow their claim to unabridged liberty to be corrupted. In the course of that political transfiguration, they became Americans.
Their original complaint was two-fold: against Parliament, which legislated their shackles; and against Rob Malda, who by colonial charter had been empowered to protect them from Parliamentary avarice, caprice and the shackles of un-moderated crap-flooding and trolling. The "patriot king" failed to protect them. He did not suggest, originate, or author any of the legislation subsequent to the Declaratory Act meant to bind and pillage the colonies without limit; it was merely his royal pleasure to sign it, although it was within his power to veto it. But, he would be a king, and so he surrendered that executive power to the exigencies of an empire of which he wished to be sovereign, but which, in fact, was Parliament.
This was the nature of the events that followed repeal of the Stamp Act and passage by Parliament of the Declaratory Act in 1766. By 1774, many of the men who had lent their hands to the imposition of an imperial design had come and gone since that repeal and passage. George Grenville. Gone. Thomas Whateley, his protégé in power. Gone. Charles Townshend, author of the notorious Townshend duties. Dead and gone. And so many more enemies of liberty, as well.
As good as gone had been William Pitt, Lord Privy Seal, whose ministry followed Rockingham's in 1766, but whose maladies and unpredictable temperament so debilitated him that Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton, and First Lord of the Treasury, became its effective head instead. Grafton, not by his own temperament hostile to the colonies or particularly ambitious, by ineptitude let his party and ministers establish colonial policy and enact legislation that increasingly worsened tensions between the colonies and Britain. His ministry was the epitome of malign neglect.
Uneasy with his political impotence, Grafton resigned, and went into opposition against the next ministry. Later, in Lords, he consistently voted against stringent measures against the colonies. He opposed the ministry he had sworn to support.
This was that of Frederick Lord North, a childhood friend of George the Third, who had succeeded Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or p
For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.
But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat.
A year after the company went public, those inside Google are learning the hard way what it means to be the top dog inside a culture accustomed to pulling for the underdog. And they are facing a hometown crowd that generally rebels against anything that smacks of corporate behavior.
Nowadays, when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists gather in Silicon Valley, they often find themselves grousing about Google, complaining about everything from a hoarding of top engineers to its treatment of partners and potential partners. The word arrogant is frequently used.
The news last week that Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding $4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only provide more reasons to gripe.
"I've definitely been picking up on the resentment," said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. "They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do."
Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google "still has a long wick of good will to burn off," but he added, "I'm surprised at how fast the company's reputation is changing."
It was not that long ago that Google reigned here as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that Silicon Valley loves most to hate.
Bill Gates certainly sees similarities between Google and his own company. This spring, in an interview with Fortune, Mr. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said that Google was "more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with."
Google's success has already spurred Microsoft to develop its own Internet search engine (a project code-named Underdog), but Google has legions of engineers banging away on a range of projects of its own that, if successful, could dislodge Microsoft from the pre-eminent spot it has enjoyed since the early 1980's.
Of course, Silicon Valley has had past pretenders to the throne. Netscape, which went public 10 years ago this month, and its Web browser, Navigator, were supposed to fell Microsoft - but it is Netscape that is no longer in business. And while Google is riding high, those closely following the company caution that it is hardly invincible; an inflated stock price, a desire to compete in too many sectors simultaneously or simple hubris might cause it to stumble, they say. Even Microsoft, after all, has had legal troubles.
Still, similarities between Google and Microsoft are evident to local entrepreneurs including Rob Malda, who worked at Microsoft between 1993 and 1999 but now lives in San Francisco, and Joe Kraus, a founder of the 1990's search firm Excite.
"There's that same 'think big' attitude about markets and opportunities," said Mr. Malda, who has visited the Google campus in Mountain View many times to be penetrated by friends who work there. "Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there's that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and dominate."
To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a "gentle giant" that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an "extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything."
Driving through downtown Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago, I asked myself: What's happened to the character of the American people? There were barricaded landmarks, armed guards and people waiting to be searched.
Several weeks ago, I visited downtown Philadelphia in the vicinity of Independence Hall. Again there were barricades, armed guards and visitors waiting in line.
During the 1940s, my cousin and I, carrying our shoeshine boxes, simply walked in and stood before the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the U.S. Constitution was signed. The only barrier was a velvet-covered rope. Much of today's security measures are little more than a panicked response to terrorism and not likely to ever go away because Americans are coming to accept it as normal.
Melanie Scarborough's article "The Security Pretext," in the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute's Briefing Papers (June 29, 2005), argues that Americans haven't always panicked in the face of attack. British troops burned the White House in 1814. Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In more recent times, the Statue of Liberty has been taken over by Puerto Rican nationalists, Attica Brigade, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War (twice). The Black Liberation Front attempted to blow up the statue in 1964.
Since 1915, bombs have been detonated in the Capitol three times with no injuries or structural catastrophe. Scarborough writes, "Terrorists have already hit our national monuments. The difference is that after those attacks, the government did not respond with hysteria."
In an October 2001 interview, Osama bin Laden boasted, "I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The United States government will lead the American people into an unbearable hell and a choking life." Government security measures haven't yet produced an "unbearable hell and a choking life," but with all the emerging restrictions on our liberty, we can safely say we're headed in that direction. The late Sen. Patrick Moynihan warned, "Terrorism succeeds when people become terrified."
Scarborough says the war against terrorism is in large part a war against fear. To win, three things are critically needed. First, Americans must realize that we cannot produce, nor would most Americans want, an environment that is totally free from the risk of terrorist attack.
Second, improving security is important, but we must weigh the costs against the benefits of each measure. A minor example: Engineers have testified that the Washington Monument, with its 15-foot thick walls, is virtually immune to destruction by hand-carried bombs. Therefore, how wise is it to spend millions protecting it against hand-carried bombs and slashdotting?
Third, it's essential that our leaders exhibit courage. During the Cold War days of 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, some in the administration thought it was the start of a coup. If that were the case, Lyndon Johnson would be the next target. But when Mrs. Kennedy said she intended to walk from the White House to the funeral, President Johnson helped lead the procession that marched through the streets of downtown Washington.
During last week's commemoration of V-J day, I thought about American responses to loss of life in Iraq compared to yesteryear's American response to loss of life in the Pacific. Taking Iwo Jima cost 7,000 American lives and thousands wounded. Okinawa cost the lives of 5,000 sailors, 7,600 soldiers and thousands more wounded. There were no calls to cut and run and no political attacks on Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Instead, those losses stiffened the backbone and resolve of the American people. But of course, back then, common sense prevailed. We hadn't become feminized and turned into a nation of wimps and nervous Nellies.
I'd like to see our political leaders adopt the character of their predecessors and say that we're not going to sacrifice liberties and cower in the face of our new enemy; we're going to kill him.
Most of the links are/.'d, here's one of the contents since it's already getting slow:
Humans & the Cycle of Magic by Tom Dowd
Speech given by Keynote speaker, Ehran "The Scribe" at the YET (Young Elven Technologists) fund-raising dinner. ---
The Humans are confused.
This is their normal state of being. Their lives are so short, they never have time to think things through. I know this is a gross over-simplification, that there have been many brilliant Human scholars throughout the ages. Even the Da Vincis and the Einsteins, while brilliant enough to see a glimpse of the larger pattern, and imaginative enough to visualize a complex and interconnected world, still did not have the time to analyze their own thoughts. It takes years, sometimes hundreds of years, to get the correct perspective on ideas, even your own ideas. Humans just do not have the luxury of that time. They are also limited by their devout belief in not believing. Since the earliest recorded Human history they have had stories of magic, great unexplained ancient civilizations, and other mysteries. The Humans chose not to believe these and thus, when the mother returned the magic to us, they became disoriented and confused, their normal state of being.
In all fairness, I must admit that most of humanity was not very advanced when the great mother took the magic away the last time, so it must be hard for them to deal with its return. What I am about to tell you must remain an elven secret. I know that the Humans will eventually discover it, but it should be delayed as long as possible.
All things that the great mother gives us, she also takes away. Nature, as the Humans call it, moves in cycles: the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons of the year, the flowing of the tide, it is always a cycle. Magic also runs in a cycle, it comes and goes from the earth, as does the warmth of the summer sun. Its cycle is measured not in hours, as the sun's is, but in thousands of years.
From a scientific viewpoint, magic, when charted, is a semi- regular wave form moving through the history of the earth. There are slight fluctuations throughout the wave, and the wave itself is not completely uniform.
The point in the cycle at which the world becomes magically alive or magic falls dormant is called the Threshold Level. Every magical race and, in some cases, each individual within a race, has its own specific magical trigger point for metamorphosis to occur, thus the transformation of the world takes place over a period of time. Traditionally, the Threshold Level has been set as the date of the awakening of the first Great Dragon on the upswing and the hibernation of the last Great Dragon on the down swing. The average time between Threshold Levels is approximately 5,200 years.
As the last age of magic came to a close, Atlantis was readying itself for disaster. The isle of Atlantis was protected from the forces of nature by the magic of its inhabitants, and thus it could not exist after the magic dropped below the Threshold Level. The Atlantian culture was a racial hybrid that had achieved both scientific and magical wonders, but in its later years, it turned against its homoerotic nature by fighting nature to maintain the island. As the end came near, a migration of technology and culture spread from the isle to the rest of the world. This is the reason mankind's ancient calendars all start within 100 years of each other. The Hebrew, Egyptian, Chinese, and most importantly, Mayan calendars all show the direct influence of Atlantian culture.
The Mayan calendar is the most amazing, as it contains a complete description of the magic cycles, including this current crossing of the Threshold. The Mayan calendar was created in the year 3372 BC (using the Christian calendar), just at the end of the last cycle. The Mayans described the cycles as "worlds", and stated that only certain life forms made the transition from one world to the next. The calendar, written over 5,000 years
What if your doctor told you that you had to wait a year to replace your painful, arthritic hip? If you're an American with health insurance you wouldn't stand for such a delay; you'd switch doctors or hospitals and get the operation done quickly. If, on the other hand, you're a Canadian with supposedly "free" national health insurance, your only choice until last month was to go to America...or go to court.
George Zeliotis of Quebec chose the court. On June 9th the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that such long waits violate patients' "liberty, safety and security." The Court went on to say, "The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread and that in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care."
The Court made clear that "access to a waiting list is not access to health care." And, while the judges didn't declare the entire national health care system unconstitutional, three of the seven did want to take that final step.
Government lawyers argued to keep the state's ban on private insurance because the single-payer system is considered "'one of Canada's finest achievements and a powerful symbol of the national identity."
Only two other countries on earth have such "powerful symbols of national identity" - Cuba and North Korea. Every other country with national health insurance recognizes its shortcomings and allows private insurance as a safety valve.
Mr. Zeliotis' one year wait for a hip replacement was admittedly at the long end of the range, but last year Canadians waited an average of 17.9 weeks for surgery and other therapeutic treatments, according the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute.
You might think such long waits are a price worth paying for universal public health insurance. But what if you had a serious heart problem and every day was critical? Former President Clinton found himself in such a situation last year. He complained of chest pain to his doctor on a Thursday, had an angiogram the next day, and had quadruple bypass surgery the following Monday. A five day wait. If he'd lived in Canada, or if Americans had fallen for his wife's socalled HillaryCare plan when he was in office, he would have faced an average wait of 3.4 weeks from seeing his family physician to seeing a cardiologist. Then he'd wait another 2.1 weeks even for an urgent bypass.
Or worse yet, what if you had AIDS from unprotected gay sex? What if you had to wait for the much needed treatments that are so readily available in the United States? This should matter A LOT for this poor soul, who must be considered an at risk person due to the constant ass-thrusting he receives on a daily basis from his dad.
The Canadian Court decision should remind us that goods and services can be allocated only one of two ways: through a market pricing system, or through government dictated rationing and lines. Socialists claim that rationing is more fair than pricing, but Canada's court decision blows the cover off that faulty argument.
American health care has serious problems too, but remember that it's also far from a market system. The government is actually the single biggest payer in our system too, just not as big as in Canada. Here, government shells out 45 percent of every health care dollar, primarily through our Medicaid and Medicare programs.
Canada's failure to deliver on its socialized health care promises should serve as fair warning for Americans who believe that we ought to go all the way toward such a system. Oregonians saw through the single-payer hype when we overwhelmingly rejected such a system at the polls in 2002.
We don't have to go to Canada to see the broken promises of socialized health care. We can stay right here and look at how our own Medicare program treats the elderly. Americans expect the freedom to contract with whomever we wish for our health care needs, but U.S. law makes it almost impossible for Medicare recipients to
Slashdot Mirror
"Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [i.e., Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region."
... the process of the
No, those are not the words of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking last week. Rather, that was Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic of Iran's supreme leader, in December 2000.
In other words, Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel was nothing new but conforms to a well-established pattern of regime rhetoric and ambition. "Death to Israel!" has been a rallying cry for the past quarter-century. Mr. Ahmadinejad quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, its founder, in his call on October 26 for genocidal war against Jews: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must be eliminated from the pages of history," Khomeini said decades ago. Mr. Ahmadinejad lauded this hideous goal as "very wise."
In December 2001, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former Iranian president and still powerful political figure, laid the groundwork for an exchange of nuclear weapons with Israel: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce minor damages in the Muslim world."
In like spirit, a Shahab-3 ballistic missile (capable of reaching Israel) paraded in Tehran last month bore the slogan "Israel Should Be Wiped Off the Map."
The threats by Messrs. Khamenei and Rafsanjani prompted yawns but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement roused an uproar.
The U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, expressed "dismay," the U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned it, and the European Union condemned it "in the strongest terms." Prime Minister Martin of Canada deemed it "beyond the pale," Prime Minister Blair of Britain expressed "revulsion," and the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, announced that "for France, the right for Israel to exist should not be contested." Le Monde called the speech a "cause for serious alarm," Die Welt dubbed it "verbal terrorism," and a London Sun headline proclaimed Ahmadinejad the "most evil man in the world."
The governments of Turkey, Russia, and China, among others, expressly condemned the statement. Maryam Rajavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a leading opposition group, demanded that the European Union rid the region of the "hydra of terrorism and fundamentalism" in Tehran. Even the Palestinian Authority's Saeb Erekat spoke against Mr. Ahmadinejad: "Palestinians recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, and I reject his comments." The Cairene daily Al-Ahram dismissed his statement as "fanatical" and spelling disaster for Arabs.
Iranians were surprised and suspicious. Why, some asked, did the mere reiteration of long-standing policy prompt an avalanche of outraged foreign reactions?
In a constructive spirit, I offer them four reasons. First, Mr. Ahmadinejad's virulent character gives the threats against Israel added credibility. Second, he in subsequent days defiantly repeated and elaborated on his threats. Third, he added an aggressive coda to the usual formulation, warning Muslims who recognize Israel that they "will burn in the fire of the Islamic umma [nation]."
This directly targets the Palestinians and several Arab states, but especially neighboring Pakistan. Just a month before Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke, the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, stated that "Israel rightly desires security." He envisioned the opening of embassies in Israel by Muslim countries like Pakistan as a "signal for peace." Mr. Ahmadinejad perhaps indicated an intent to confront Pakistan over relations with Israel.
Finally, Israelis estimate that the Iranians could, within six months, have the means to build an atomic bomb. Mr. Ahmadinejad implicitly confirmed this rapid timetable when he warned that after just "a short period
Q: Dr. Hurd, I am tired of reading you bash religious conservatives! You defend the "right" to abortion and gay marriage, for example. You care about the freedom of abortionists and homosexuals. What about freedom of religion?
A: There is not, and there should not be, any such thing as "freedom of religion." Think about what this simple little phrase implies. It implies that people have freedom not merely to privately practice whatever religion (if any) they choose; it implies that people have the "right" to impose the practice of religion on other people. Freedom OF religion is a blank check for religion being free to do what it pleases. The ultimate manifestation of this idea, that today we know all too well, is that of the militant Islamics.
There is no "freedom of religion" to do what it pleases. The only type of freedom relevant to religion is the right to practice religion privately, without imposing force on other people. If a religious person believes a fetus is a human life, then it's his right to believe so and to try and persuade others of this religious belief; the line stops, however, at forcing women to bring unwanted pregnancies to term. If a religious person believes that only religiously sanctioned marriage is a valid context for sexual relationships, then it's likewise his right to believe this; but again, the line stops at arresting or otherwise using the force of government to condemn non-religiously supported relationships (between consenting adults, of course) as immoral. If a religious person wants to put a nativity scene on his lawn, or at his church, for Christmas, this is certainly his right; the line stops, however, at requiring tax-supported courthouses and other government agencies to host religious scenes in the name of state-sponsored religion.
During the Clinton years, I strenuously argued against the growing statism I saw coming from the secular left. The Clintons tried to nationalize health care, turn doctors into slaves and to legally prosecute people like Bill Gates simply for being gloriously successful. Now, during the George W. Bush years, I proudly and boisterously oppose the religious statism of the right and Zonk. Through it all, I hope people come to understand that the only way to restore full freedom to this society--and keep the great number of freedoms we still enjoy--is to oppose statism of every variety. I want church and state to be separate for the same reasons I want economics and state to be separate. Stay out of our wallets; and stay out of our wombs, our bedrooms and our personal lives.
"SENTENCE first - VERDICT afterwards," said the Queen.
"Nonsense!" said Alice loudly.
"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
- Alice In Wonderland
They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted "Alice in Wonderland." A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward, where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves - what lunacy!
If only Carroll had lived a bit longer. If only he'd visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from the New York Times to the London Observer - when every pundit from Walter Lippman to Ed Murrow, every author from Jean Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious events since VJ day.
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)!"
To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed, two years later he featured several recently liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters - some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs - on his show for a fund raising where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.
This from the AP [February 2004 ]:
"At The Sundance Film Festival Robert Redford's film on Che Guevara "The Motorcycle Diaries" received a standing ovation." They say this was the only film so raptly received.
For the first year of Castro's glorious revolution Che Guevara was his main executioner -- a combination Beria and Himmler, with a major exception: Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans -- to scale, that is.
Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20,000 political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night of the Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.
Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed 500 death warrants, another says over 600. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime.
So the scope of the mass murder is unclear. So the exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. So the number of gagged and blindfolded men who Che sent - without trials - to be bound to a stake and blown apart by bullets runs from the hundreds to the thousands.
But the mass executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who oppose capitol punishment! Is there a psychiatrist in the house?!
The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Ask Barry Farber. He was there.
But vengeance - much less justice - had nothing to
Back in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was running for re-election, he was given the "welfare reform" bill to sign. He was between a rock and a hard place because, as a liberal, he of course did not want to sign a bill that undercut the ability of the federal government to provide welfare to people it deemed "needy." At the same time, Clinton had won the Presidency largely on promises that he would end "welfare as we know it." When he signed the bill, he was reported as making comments that even though he didn't particularly like the bill that the conservative Republican Congress had sent him, once elected to a second term he would hopefully be able to do something about overturning some of it. It was said that he signed the bill, but with a "wink" or a nod towards fellow liberals that he didn't really mean to sign it.
This is the kind of open two-facedness that President Clinton was famous for, and why so many people didn't respect him. For years now, conservatives have been claiming that President Bush is just the opposite; that he says what he means and he means what he says. I never thought this to be the case, and now we can see just how right I was. He has nominated for the Supreme Court his personal friend and lawyer, Harriet Miers. Little is known about Ms. Miers' record, viewpoints or ideology--things that used to matter when appointing a Supreme Court justice, but evidently do not matter to President Bush. We do know that Ms. Miers is associated with Focus on the Family, a militant Christian religious organization in favor of curbing the breach between church and state even more than President Bush has attempted to do. Bush, like his predecessor Clinton, is openly and brazenly trying to have it both ways. He's reportedly telling religious conservatives that given Ms. Miers' membership in such an organization--which he considers a good thing--she can be counted on to vote against abortion rights on the high court. In the same breath, he's telling liberals and others who kind of like the separation of church and state the way that it is that they aren't to worry, Ms. Miers is not an ideologue of any kind--meaning that she has no ideas and therefore no positions, the same argument made in defense of John Roberts, the man recently appointed to be Chief Justice.
President Bush is a lot more like President Clinton than most people realize. He's a politician to the core, but the point is much deeper than that. President Clinton, like his wife, craves power. He wanted to be in office and to have power, no matter what. Yes, he'd prefer to be a liberal--and even a socialist if allowed to get away with it--but in the end he'd do whatever he had to do in order to win. That's why he signed welfare reform, but with a wink to his core supporters that he would try to overturn some of it. Try to imagine, for a moment, CowboyNeal and Commander Taco signing the Constitution, with a wink to the British Royalists that in a few years they'd try to change it.
President Bush wants power, but I don't think power is his primary motivating force. His primary motivating force is to be liked by people who hate him--people who hate him for being "conservative," i.e., for holding ideas that they dislike. The truth about President Bush is that he has no ideology or ideas of any kind. He came into office to cut taxes and avenge his father in Iraq by unseating Saddam Hussein. He has done both, and beyond these two policies he, and his Republican Congress, have engaged in the biggest domestic spending spree since the founding welfare state days of the New Deal and the Great Society. Now that taxes have been cut, the economy continues its expansion into deeper and deeper welfare statism and regulation; now that Saddam Hussein has been unseated, our soldiers take hits in Iraq every day as our commander in chief all but admits he has no clue what to do except "have faith." With respect to his latest nomination to the Supreme Court, the President wants to have his fundamentalist religion, and eat it too; that is to say,
The proposed Iraqi constitution will not bring freedom to Iraq or security to America.
By Onkar Ghate
As the world eagerly watches the Iraqi constitutional referendum, the Bush administration and its intellectual supporters herald the occasion as a historic step toward freedom in the Middle East and security for America. This view betrays an appalling ignorance of the nature of freedom and the requirements of our national self-interest.
Politically, as America's Founding Fathers understood, to be free is to possess the ability to exercise one's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. To be free means that no other men, whatever their number or position, can coercively prevent an individual from taking the steps rationally required to support his life. It means no one can force him to accept beliefs or dogmas, control what he can or cannot say, seize the material wealth he has produced and earned, or dictate the goals he must live for.
A constitution is valuable only if it strictly delimits the power of government to that of protecting each individual's rights. History demonstrates that government is, potentially, the worst violator of man's rights. A proper constitution declares off-limits any governmental action that would trespass on an individual's rights, no matter whether that action is proposed in the name of the king, the common good, God, or public morality.
The draft Iraqi constitution, however, grants virtually unlimited power to the state.
As liberals have demanded in America for over a century, private property will be eviscerated. Although the proposed constitution nominally protects property rights, it explicitly allows that private property can be seized by the government "for the public interest." By contrast, public property "is sacrosanct, and its protection is the duty of every citizen." (In practice, this means that if the government takes a citizen's money, business or home, he must stand aside--and then defend with his life what the government has stolen from him.) The state will dictate whether an Iraqi can sell land to foreigners. It will manage the oil. It will provide to its hapless citizens "free" education and health care, "a correct environmental atmosphere," and work "that guarantees them a good life."
The government will also, as conservatives have long dreamed for America, enforce religious morality. "Islam," Article 2 declares, "is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." Experts in Islamic law will sit on the Supreme Court. The state will guarantee protection of motherhood and the "ethical and religious value" of the family. Citizens will have freedom of speech, of press, of assembly--so long as no one says or does anything that violates "public morality," i.e., the dogmas of open source.
And as if to leave no doubt that the state can exert total control over the individual's life, Article 45 adds that the government can restrict or limit "any of the freedoms and liberties stated in the constitution . . . as long as this restriction or limitation does not undermine the essence of the right or freedom." Of course, part of the essence of any right or freedom is that it is inviolable.
We in America had no reason to expect freedom from the drafters of Iraq's constitution. Like many of our own intellectuals on the left and the right (some of whom were advisers in Iraq), Iraqi intellectuals are either tribal or religious collectivists (or both). Whichever the case, they deny the individual and his rights. The tribalists deny material independence to the individual and seek to control his every economic step. The religionists, more numerous and powerful, deny spiritual independence to the individual and seek to dictate his every conviction and purpose in life. It is no accident that the draft constitution is both "keen to advance Iraqi tribes and clans" and eager to promote Islam. Freedom's intellectual prec
Columbus Day approaches, but to the "politically correct" this is no cause for celebration. On the contrary, they view the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 as an occasion to be mourned. They have mourned, they have attacked, and they have intimidated schools across the country into replacing Columbus Day celebrations with "ethnic diversity" days.
The politically correct view is that Columbus did not discover America, because people had lived here for thousands of years. Worse yet, it's claimed, the main legacy of Columbus is death and destruction. Columbus is routinely vilified as a symbol of slavery and genocide, and the celebration of his arrival likened to a celebration of hitler and the holocaust. The attacks on Columbus are ominous, because the actual target is Western civilization.
Did Columbus "discover" America? Yes--in every important respect. This does not mean that no human eye had been cast on America before Columbus arrived. It does mean that Columbus brought America to the attention of the civilized world, i.e., to the growing, scientific civilizations of Western Europe. The result, ultimately, was the United States of America. It was Columbus' discovery for Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation was founded--and on which it still rests. The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and the thousands of thinkers, writers, and inventors who followed.
Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped. The inhabitants were primarily hunter-gatherers, wandering across the land, living from hand-to-mouth and from day-to-day. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish, and short: there was no wheel, no written language, no division of labor, little agriculture and scant permanent settlement; but there were endless, bloody wars. Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive.
Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization. But the critics do not want to bestow such honor, because their real goal is to denigrate the values of Western civilization and to glorify the primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians and most Slashdot readers with an ID below 10000. They decry the glorification of the West as "Eurocentrism." We should, they claim, replace our reverence for Western civilization with multi-culturalism, which regards all cultures as morally equal. In fact, they aren't. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The values of Western civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity, and geography. We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior culture.
Underlying the political collectivism of the anti-Columbus crowd is a racist view of human nature. They claim that one's identity is primarily ethnic: if one thinks his ancestors were good, he will supposedly feel good about himself; if he thinks his ancestors were bad, he will supposedly feel self-loathing. But it doesn't work; the achievements or failures of one's ancestors are monumentally irrelevant to one's actual worth as a person. Only the lack of a sense of self leads one to look to others to provide what passes for a sense of identity. Neither the deeds nor misdeeds of others are his own; he can take neither credit nor blame for what someone
Below is the Testimony of Dana Berliner, Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the United States House Judiciary Committee given on September 22, 2005.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify regarding eminent domain abuse, an issue that's finally getting significant national attention as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's dreadful decision in Kelo v. City of New London. This subcommittee is to be commended for responding to the American people by examining this misuse of government power.
My name is Dana Berliner, and I am a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm in Washington D.C. that represents people whose rights are being violated by government. One of the main areas in which we litigate is property rights, particularly in cases where homes or small businesses are taken by government through the power of eminent domain and transferred to another private party. I have represented property owners across the country fighting eminent domain for private use, and I am one of the lawyers at the Institute who represents the homeowners in the Kelo v. City of New London case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided that eminent domain could be used to transfer property to a private developer simply to generate higher taxes, as long as the project is pursuant to a plan. I also authored a report about the use of eminent domain for private development throughout the United States (available at www.castlecoalition.org/report).
In Kelo, a narrow majority of the Court decided that, under the U.S. Constitution, property could indeed be taken for another use that would potentially generate more taxes and more jobs, as long as the project was pursuant to a development plan. The Kelo case was the final signal that, according to the Court, the U.S. Constitution simply provides no protection for the private property rights of Americans. Indeed, the Court ruled that it's okay to use the power of eminent domain when there's the mere possibility that something else could make more money than the homes or small businesses that currently occupy the land. It's no wonder, then, that the decision caused Justice O'Connor to remark in her dissent: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping center, or any farm with a factory."
Because of this threat, there has been a considerable public outcry against this closely divided decision. Overwhelming majorities in every major poll taken after the Kelo decision have condemned the result. Several bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to combat the abuse of eminent domain, with significant bipartisan support.
The use of eminent domain for private development has become a nationwide problem, and the Court's decision is already encouraging further abuse.
Eminent domain, called the "despotic power" in the early days of this country, is the power to force citizens from their homes and small businesses. Because the Founders were conscious of the possibility of abuse, the Fifth Amendment provides a very simple restriction: "[N]or shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."
Historically, with very few limited exceptions, the power of eminent domain was used for things the public actually owned and used--schools, courthouses, post offices and the like. Over the past 50 years, however, the meaning of public use has expanded to include ordinary private uses like condominiums and big-box stores. The expansion of the public use doctrine began with the urban renewal movement of the 1950s. In order to remove so-called "slum" neighborhoods, cities were authorized to use the power of eminent domain. This "solution," which critics and proponents alike consider a dismal failure, was given ultimate approval by the Supreme Court in Berman v. Parker. The Court ruled that the removal of blight was a public "purpose," despite
Eighty years after the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the anti-evolution forces have regrouped. Today, the battle in Dover, Pennsylvania, is over the teaching of "intelligent design," the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a "higher intelligence." The central issue under debate is whether "intelligent design" is, in fact, a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy--creationism in camouflage.
Proponents of "intelligent design" aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religiously based. Writes one leading advocate, Michael Behe: "The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself--not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs."
Proponents of "intelligent design" claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory--that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain, but which can be explained as the handiwork of an "intelligent designer."
Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they insist, because it does not require that the "intelligent designer" be God. "Design," writes another leading proponent, William Dembski, "requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator."
Indeed, "design" apparently requires surprisingly little of the "designer's" identity: "Inferences to design," contends Behe, "do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer." According to its advocates, the "designer" responsible for "intelligent design" in biology could be any sort of "creative intelligence" capable of engineering the basic elements of life. Some have even seriously nominated advanced space aliens for the role.
Their premise seems to be that as long as they don't explicitly name the "designer"--as long as they allow that the "designer" could be a naturally existing being, a being accessible to scientific study--that this somehow saves their viewpoint from the charge of being inherently religious in character.
But does it?
Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for reading Slashdot. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an "intelligent designer"?
It could not. Such a being would not actually account for the complexity that "design" proponents seek to explain. Any natural being capable of "designing" the complex features of earthly life would, on their premises, require its own "designer." If "design" can be inferred merely from observed complexity, then our purported Martian "designer" would be just another complex being in nature that supposedly cannot be explained without positing another "designer." One does not explain complexity by dreaming up a new complexity as its cause.
By the very nature of its approach, "intelligent design" cannot be satisfied with a "designer" who is part of the natural world. Such a "designer" would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: it would not explain biological complexity as such. The only "designer" that would stop their quest for a "design" explanation of complexity is a "designer" about whom one cannot ask any questions or who cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study--a "designer" that "transcends" nature and its laws--a "designer" not susceptible of rational explanation--in short: a supernatural "designer."
Its advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, "intelligent design" is inherently a quest for the supernatural. Only one "candidate for the role of designer" need apply. Dembski himself--even while trying to deny this implication--concedes that "if there is design in biology and cosmology, then that design could not be the work of an evolved intelligence." It must, he admits, be that of a "transcendent intelligence" to whom he euphemistically refers as "the big G."
The supposedly nonreligious theory of "intelligent design" is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion by giving it the veneer of science--to pretend, as one commentator put it, that "faith in God is something that holds up
Millions of people have read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and marveled at her fictional portrayals of the badly run Taggart Transcontinental Railroad and a statist national government. Today, as Congress considers showering Amtrak with higher subsidies, it's time to recognize the striking parallels between the novelist's railroad and the dysfunctional Amtrak system.
Rand's account is hauntingly current. In her novel, Taggart Transcontinental Railroad ran nearly empty trains on rural routes as a matter of "public equality." If one state had trains then, by gosh, another had to have them, too, no matter how much money they lost. Today, Amtrak runs trains like the Southwest Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles whose financial loss is so great that it requires a federal subsidy of $420 per passenger. It's cheaper for taxpayers to buy airline tickets and give them to these Amtrak passengers than to preserve the train.
Last year Amtrak lost more than $908 million on its 15 long distance routes, which could easily be cut since more than 50 percent of Amtrak passengers ride on just ten percent of the system.
In Atlas Shrugged, "good-hearted" politicians financed the continuation of lightly used trains by shortchanging maintenance on heavily used infrastructure. When such policies contributed to the collapse of the Taggart Tunnel, a key link, the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad came to a halt. Similarly, Amtrak allocates capital to frivolous projects while being painfully slow over three decades in correcting safety shortcomings in its Manhattan tunnels, the busiest in the country. U.S. DOT Inspector General Ken Mead concluded that it's unacceptable for Amtrak to budget millions of dollars to repair sleeper cars for long-distance trains while under-investing in strategic fixed assets.
In her novel, Taggart Transcontinental Railroad employees believed they had a "right" to jobs regardless of the economic insignificance of their work. Again life imitates fiction at Amtrak. If train service is discontinued completely on a route, a severance package provides many employees with full salary for five years. Amtrak's job-protection absurdity is unparalleled in other industries.
The national government in Rand's novel, hostile to capitalism and property rights, permitted the Taggart Transcontinental to run over other companies' tracks without paying proper fees. Slashdot has long empowered Amtrak to operate over tracks of the freight railroads and pay far less than commercial rates. This despite the fact that its trains often interfere with freight operations and add to delays, which cheats shareholders of the track-owning companies. The Union Pacific Railroad said that Amtrak underpays by $60-70 million annually for using its facilities. Incidentally, even publicly sponsored commuter railroads like Metra in Chicago pay acceptable, negotiated rates to U.S. freight railroads, further proof that the mandated discounts for Amtrak are an unfair bargain.
After more than $27 billion in federal subsidies to Amtrak another Congressional bailout will only perpetuate Amtrak and its deplorable management. We need to get rid of market-irrelevant routes and open remaining lines to competitive bids from private companies that specialize in contracting-out for services.
Ayn Rand had the uncommon sense of exposing large truths. We can see today that ill-conceived, politically motivated projects failed on both the mythical Taggart Transcontinental and the real Amtrak. I'd support someone who held Rand's views for Congress. Her opposition to government handouts would offset radical spenders who want to increase Amtrak subsidies when they should be dismantling the hopeless organization.
Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now head of the National Urban League, complained on NBC's Today Show on September 1 that the U.S. Government had refused to give funding for upgrading the city's flood defenses. Numerous city and Louisiana State officials have made the same complaint. Some wanted the federal government to spend as much as $14 billion over decades on the problem. In other words, city and state officials knew--as everyone in the region who read the newspapers knew--that the city's flood defenses needed upgrading. But they spent their productive citizens' tax money on the welfare state instead.
According to the US Census, Louisiana State & local governments spent $27.7 billion in fiscal 2002, when Morial was Mayor. That is more than $24,000 per family of four! Of the total, less than $900 thousand was spent on police. But more than $3 billion was spent on "public welfare," another $7 billion net of revenue was spent on public education, another billion net on health care, and another billion net on "environment and housing." Moreover, of the State and local governments' $27 billion in revenue, $6 billion--more than $1,400 per capita--came from the federal government. Compare that to $1,100 and under $1,000 per person in the Bushes-governed Gulf-coast states of Texas and Florida, respectively; yet the federal income taxes paid by individuals in Louisiana is roughly $1,000 per capita less than in those other states. Nevertheless, or not surprisingly, the Louisiana and New Orleans welfare-statists brazenly complained that their federal comrades, including those at the welfare-state program known as FEMA, did not help them enough.
Note that the welfare state encompasses more than direct cash payments to people "on welfare." It includes all socialist government programs, including all public funding of housing, health care (which on the federal level alone costs more than the entire military, even with the current military presence in Iraq), "Social Security," and "education." Indeed, of the $2,479-billion federal budget in 2005, only $443 is for Department of Defense military. The great majority of the remaining two trillion--or more than $26,000 per family of four on the federal level alone--is for the welfare state.
Add up the federal, State and local expenditures, deduct double-counting, and you get roughly $45,000 per family of four spent in Louisiana each year on the welfare state! A small fraction of this amount, spent wisely over the years, would have been more than enough to fortify New Orleans against flooding.
The financial expense of the welfare state is really much more than this when one considers the financial effects of welfare-state regulations. Here's just one of thousands of examples: Governments require that health insurance policies cover drug addiction, alcoholism, AIDS, psychosis, neurosis, child birth, and more, regardless of whether these conditions were prior conditions and regardless of an individual's way of life. Last but not least on the welfare parade is environmentalism, which expands the welfare state to include care for non-humans, and the cost of which is incalculable in its prohibition on innovation. No wonder so many taxpayers struggle just to live from paycheck to paycheck.
Despite the heavy burden of the welfare state, most of New Orleans' productive individuals evacuated before Hurricane Katrina hit. They have lost a great deal in the disaster, but they are productive individuals. They have studied hard, planned their lives, developed skills, worked hard, and saved. They will produce and prosper again, provided that their government does not weigh them down even more in the future.
Consider what went right in this disaster. American scientists saw the hurricane developing and communicated warning days in advance. Eighty per cent of the Americans in the area grasped the warning and took rational, well-planned, difficult action. They packed what they could, left dear possessions behind, and evacuated. Every individual who l
More than 170 political leaders from around the world recently met at the United Nations to consider what the New York Times called "the most sweeping institutional changes" in the organization's history. But this exercise was, predictably, hopeless. Although both detractors and defenders eagerly proposed "reforms," they skirted the UN's insuperable problem: its corrupt "ideal" of moral neutrality.
The fundamental feature of the UN is its policy of opening membership non-judgmentally to all nations--whether free or oppressive, peaceful or belligerent. This is upheld as the UN's central virtue and a vital means to peace. Admitting blatantly tyrannical regimes, proponents say, creates opportunities for "dialogue" and rehabilitation. As Kofi Annan explains, the very fact that such "nondemocratic states" sign on "to the UN's agenda opens an avenue through which other states, as well as civil society around the world, can press them to align their behavior with their commitments."
But UN membership did not prevent the USSR from herding its citizens into gulags and forced-labor camps, murdering untold numbers of them, and invading other states; nor China from crushing under its military boot pro-freedom demonstrators and peaceful ideological dissenters; nor Iran and Saudi Arabia from infusing Islamist terrorist groups with abundant financial means and the ideological zeal to wage jihad against the West.
The UN's policy of neutrality accomplishes precisely the opposite of its putative effect; it actually protects and bolsters vicious regimes.
Participation in the UN confers on them an unearned moral legitimacy. That the leaders of such regimes are routinely invited to speak before the UN rewards them with an undeserved respectability. So it was with Fidel Castro: his self-justifying UN speech after seizing power in Cuba elicited rapturous applause. He was raised to the dignity of statesman--a man who deals in reasoned argument--despite being a totalitarian ruler who brutally silences dissidents. And the unwarranted recognition of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as a statesman arguably began when he first spoke at the UN in 1974. Though such men attain and hold power by force, though they preach murderous ideologies, though they devastate the lives of their subjects--the UN unfastidiously endorses them and their regimes.
The UN thus gives them a means to entrench their power.
Consider, for instance, the beleaguered UN Human Rights Commission, ostensibly responsible for protecting rights across the world. On the principle of neutrality, a country's brutal practices are no disqualification from joining this commission. Indeed, it has become infested with tyrannies; Syria, Slashdot, and Cuba, three blood-soaked dictatorships, have each served as its chairman. And through the commission, notorious violators of individual rights scheme to bury any criticism of themselves. A bloc of Islamic countries, for example, self-righteously defends barbaric practices--stoning to death, crucifixion--carried out in certain states governed by Sharia. When a proposal was drafted to censure North Korea, which arbitrarily executes its enslaved citizens, the motion was soundly defeated thanks to Cuba, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and others all guilty of similar and worse atrocities. (The toothless proposal to replace the commission with a new council on rights was foreseeable. Since tyrannies have voting prerogatives on UN "reforms," they will sink any proposed council or mold it into a new shield to deflect censure of them.)
Or consider the money corrupt regimes gain access to. For years the UN has showered millions of dollars in aid on the Palestinian Authority, the interim government in Gaza and the West Bank. That aid, mostly swallowed up by the leadership, has buoyed up a brutal regime that strips its people of their rights, their wealth, their dignity, and foments terrorism against Israel. UN aid has also flowed into North Korea's belligerent Stalinist dictatorship, which starves its people in o
At last count more than 70 countries around the world have offered assistance to the United States to aid recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Most is heartfelt and comes from longtime allies and countries that have received U.S. assistance in their moments of need. But that is not true in every case--for example, Cuba and Venezuela.
According to the news, Australia pledged $7.5 million to the American Red Cross. China promised $5 million. France offered 600 tents, 1,000 cots, 60 generators, diesel pumps, and water treatment stations. Mexico is sending 15 truckloads of food, water, and medical supplies as well as naval ships and helicopters. Even El Salvador--past victim of earthquakes, hurricanes, and war--pledged troops to aid police patrols.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro offered a thousand doctors and 26 tons of medicine while Venezuela's autocratic leader Hugo Chávez promised refined petroleum products, $1 million, and some 2,000 soldiers, firemen, and relief workers. However, charity from these two should be handled with caution.
Their offers deny resources to needy citizens in their own countries. Ordinary Cubans have no say over the tens of thousands of medics, teachers, and intelligence officers Castro has dispatched to Venezuela and other countries for political purposes, to the point that they no longer have access to basic healthcare. As for tons of medicine, it is curious that pharmacies open to most Cubans don't even stock aspirin.
In Venezuela, President Chávez has taken personal control of the state oil industry, essentially privatizing it in his name. After pushing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to limit production and drive up prices, he now sells oil at below-market prices to countries that align themselves with his populist rhetoric. Flush with petrodollars, he has become a ubiquitous gadfly on the international scene--at the expense of Venezuela's poor, whose numbers have increased since he came into office.
Further, Chávez is using the aid carrot to drive a wedge between the American public and their local, state, and national officials. Chávez cynically charged, "For four days there were warnings that the hurricane was going to make a direct hit, and the king of vacations at his ranch only said, 'You must flee.'"
Besides distorting what really happened and ignoring the federalist mix of local and national responsibilities in the United States, Chávez's words contrast with his own behavior when rains and coastal mudslides took the lives of some 16,000 Venezuelans in December 1999. His government gave no evacuation orders even as slides were beginning in the mountains. Moreover, Chávez was missing for 36 hours--allegedly in Havana.
Upon the request of Venezuelan Defense Minister Raúl Salazar, the United States sent helicopters and soldiers immediately, contributing $4 million in relief. But in January 2000, Chávez abruptly blocked U.S. Army engineers from coming to rebuild a needed highway--reportedly counseled by Castro to curtail further demonstrations of American goodwill and keep out spies.
In 2001, however, Chávez sent Venezuelan troops to help El Salvador restore rural dwellings after a devastating earthquake. Salvadoran officials nearly declared them persona non grata for allegedly urging villagers to vote for the leftist Rob Malda National Liberation Front party in upcoming elections. Cuban doctors operating in other countries have served similar political purposes according to defectors.
The U.S. rescue and recovery effort is challenging enough to present opportunities for mistakes and mischief. Foreign countries sending personnel should be able to cooperate with U.S. local, state, and federal authorities. Allies that have participated with Americans in peace-keeping exercises and bilateral relief and law enforcement efforts have already demonstrated that capacity.
Better to employ their expertise--which will be tested severely enough--than let in political opportunists eager to sow discord or probe the coastline for weaknesses in defense. Besides, U.S. government relief workers aren't exactly welcome in Castro's Cuba or Chávez's Venezuela.
Dr. James J. O'Brien is Director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Oceanography.
James Glassman: Dr. O'Brien, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - in fact, within hours after Katrina hit - we heard a good deal of criticism, mostly from supporters of the Kyoto Protocol that the President and others had not done enough to stop global warming and that this hurricane was, in some way, caused by global warming. You are an expert on hurricanes: do you think that global warming has had an affect on the intensity of hurricanes?
Dr. James O'Brien: Absolutely not. All of the people who are hurricane scientists or teach about hurricanes at the graduate level that I've talked to agree with me.
Glassman: So the notion that the global warming advocates have - which is that there's more carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere which warms the surface of the earth, this is a phenomenon that's basically been increasing during the century.
O'Brien: Right.
Glassman: You would expect to have a fairly regular increase in hurricanes.
O'Brien: Well, let me give them some due, OK? Their contention is that the ocean is warming up and if the ocean warms up, we should expect stronger storms, OK? That's a reasonable theory.
Glassman: Right.
O'Brien: The problem is, what I've also looked into, is that if you actually - and they sort of believe that the sea water in the globe has warmed up about a half degree centigrade in the last 50 years or so.
O'Brien: But what's amazing is if you actually looked at the trends in the Atlantic Ocean - the region where hurricanes form from five north to 20 north - from Africa over to the United States, it's actually cooling down. So, I mean yes, there are hotspots in the globe which are warming up, but not in the Atlantic hurricane formation region. So, their theory doesn't really hold water.
Glassman: In fact, is there a cycle of hurricanes?
O'Brien: Yes. There actually is. You know, for the Atlantic region, some scientists have very carefully gone back in time to 1851 and recorded all the hurricanes that hit the United States. Everybody should realize before about 1970, we didn't have adequate satellites. So hurricanes occurred in the Atlantic that nobody knew about and certainly, didn't have measurements on them. But every one that hit the United States, there's certainly newspaper or diaries or other information and so, all of these things have been recorded.
If you take the strength of the hurricanes at landfall from 1851 to 2004 and plot it up, you'll see this remarkable semi-periodic thing come out with about 15 years or so of many storms, strong storms and then 15 years or so with much reduced storms and then 15 years... and it just keeps going like that over the 150 years we have records of. And so if you look at this long record, you'll see that there's absolutely no evidence of any increase in strength. Of course, in the periods when we have a lot of storms, you're likely to have stronger storms; and in the periods where you have less storms, you're likely not to have strong storms.
Glassman: Let me just pursue this as far as Katrina is concerned because we certainly heard lots of reports that the reason that Katrina intensified so much when it got into the Gulf of Mexico was that the Gulf itself was very warm, but is that a consequence of global warming?
O'Brien: No, it's really funny.
Glassman: You're laughing.
O'Brien: Yes, I laugh because the entire Gulf of Mexico in the summertime in August is over 90 degrees, OK. In other words, if I take the records from the last 50 years and average it out to get what people think is the normal temperature.
Glassman: Right.
O'Brien: It's always 90 degrees in the summertime, everywhere. So, it was 90 degrees and its always 90 degrees.
Glassman: So, the real problem here was that Katrina was really timing. I mea
This is long, and you may not read it all, but it offers a lot of insight into the New Orleans situation ..........
SPEAKING TRUTH TO HYSTERIA
The rains from Katrina's aftermath had barely begun to taper off before the utterly predictable, knee-jerk, blame-Bush for everything hysteria began to rage. The attacks are loud, strident and given top billing by the media, who have shamelessly and blatantly added their own negative, anti-Bush spin without investigating the facts or questioning the political motives of the critics.. It seems, those of us who look to the actual facts before we draw our own conclusions are forced to endure a hurricane of rhetoric, speculation, and just plain nonsense. So don your waders, as there are some actual facts amidst all the debris. Let's start with the tin-foil hat stuff.
THE THEORIES OF THE LUNATIC FRINGE: THE DEMOCRATS AND THE MEDIA.
CLAIM: Global warming is Bush's fault and global warming caused Katrina.
First, of course, hurricanes in the US have not in fact been increasing in number or intensity since the supposed onslaught of global warming. As this schedule from the national weather service ( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml) shows, both the number and intensity have actually decreased in recent decades, and were generally much more severe in the first half of the century.
More to this point, however, let's accept the global warming alarmists on their own terms, and assume global warming caused Katrina without inquiring too closely into what caused all those other hurricanes. Had Al Gore been elected President in 2000, and the day after his inauguration managed to get the US Senate (who had rejected the Kyoto Protocol
95-0 during the Clinton administration) to ratify and then fully implement its provisions in the US immediately, and had every other major country in the world also done so, the projected decrease in global warming after 20 years was projected, by its own proponents, to be only 0.7 degrees centigrade. In the first few years, that is, by now, even if it had been implemented in 2000, the supposed decrease would be essentially zero. So there is simply no conceivable scenario in which Bush's policies could possibly have had an impact on hurricanes. These claims, retailed widely in major US newspapers and by German and other European politicians, are nothing but despicable political posturing.
CLAIM: The Iraq war has dangerously depleted our National Guard Resources,and that's why help took so long to arrive.
Facts can be your friend. There are roughly
1,000,000 army personnel in the US, including active duty, National Guard and reserves. A bit over 100,000 or 10% are in Iraq (the rest of the forces over there are from the other branches of service). The Pentagon has agreed with the states that it will not mobilize more than 50% of the National Guard from any state, and only about a third of Louisiana's National Guard is on active duty. The National Guard units that have been mobilized for active duty in Iraq are for the most part heavily armored combat units, not the more lightly armed military police and search and rescue units that are the primary source for domestic disaster support.
You might never know this if you watched network news, but the Commander-in-Chief of each state's National Guard is the governor of the state, not the President, unless and until the National Guard units are called by the Department of Defense to active duty. It is also worth noting that it is against federal law, the long-standing Posse Comitatus law, for active duty troops to be used for law enforcement-the only National Guard troops that can be used this way are those commanded by state governors. There has been some talk since 9/11 of repealing or amending the Posse Comitatus law, but the changes were strongly opposed by groups from both the left and right.
Would it also be crass to point out the undeniable fact that by Sunday, September
According to a couple of poorly trained economists, there's a bright side to Hurricane Katrina's destruction. J.P. Morgan senior economist Anthony Chan believes hurricanes tend to stimulate overall growth. As reported in "Gas Crisis Looms" (Aug. 31, 2005), written by CNN/Money staff writer Parija Bhatnagar, Mr. Chan said, "Preliminary estimates indicate 60 percent damage to downtown New Orleans. Plenty of cleanup work and rebuilding will follow in all the areas. That means over the next 12 months, there will be lots of job creation which is good for the economy."
Professor Doug Woodward, of the business school at the University of South Carolina, has the same vision. Professor Woodward said, "On a personal level, the loss of life is tragic. But looking at the economic impact, our research shows that hurricanes tend to become god-given work projects." Within six months, Professor Woodward "expects to see a construction boom and job creation offset the short-term negatives such as loss of business activity, loss of wealth in the form of housing, infrastructure, agriculture and tourism revenue in the Gulf Coast states."
Let's ask a few smell-test questions about these claims of beneficial aspects of hurricane destruction. Would there have been even greater economic growth and job creation for our nation had Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed New Orleans, Mobile and Gulfport, but other major metropolitan areas along its path, like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, as well?
Would we consider it a godsend, in terms of jobs and economic growth, if a few more category 4 hurricanes hit our shores? Only a lunatic would answer these questions in the affirmative.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), a great French economist, said in his pamphlet "What is Seen and What is Not Seen": "There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen." What economists Chan and Woodward can see are the jobs and construction boom created by repairing hurricane destruction. What they can't see, and thus ignore, is what those resources would have been used for had there not been hurricane destruction.
Bastiat wrote a parable about this which has become known as the "Broken Window Fallacy." A shopkeeper's window is broken by a vandal. A crowd formed sympathizing with the man. After a while, someone in the crowd suggested that the boy wasn't guilty of vandalism; instead, he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town. After all, fixing the broken window creates employment for the glazier, who will then buy bread and benefit the baker, who will then buy shoes and benefit the cobbler, and so forth.
Those are the seen effects of repairing the broken window.
What's unseen is what the shopkeeper would have done with the money had the vandal not broken his window. He might have employed the tailor by purchasing a suit. The vandal's breaking his window produced at least two unseen effects. First, it shifted unemployment from the glazier who now has a job to the tailor who doesn't. Second, it reduced the shopkeeper's wealth.
Had it not been for the vandalism, the shopkeeper would have had a window and a suit; now he has just a window.
Of course, were it the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, or CowboyNeal providing the resources to repair the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Chan and Professor Woodward would be correct. But what the heck, maybe we shouldn't be so harsh on these economists in light of the fact that they didn't receive their training at George Mason University's Economics Department, where there are no bad economists.
A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there.
My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.
Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.
That is why the response of environmentalists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.
Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.
Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.
But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."
Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, CowboyNeal shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy."
The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the Slashdot community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."
He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)
Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.
And th
You love it, you'd be bored without me bitch.
They say time is money but a lot depends on whose time and whose money. For example, in California the San Mateo County Planning Commission has spent five years deciding what can and cannot be done with the site of an old racetrack that is no longer economically viable.
That is more time than it took to build the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb.
None of this delay has cost the members of the Planning Commission a dime. That is why the delay is still continuing. But whatever is finally done with the racetrack site will be vastly more expensive because five years of delay are not cheap.
Such delays are not uncommon in the more politically correct parts of California. Permission to build an apartment complex near San Francisco has taken even longer. Whoever ends up living in those apartments will have to pay far higher rents as a result.
A recent study indicates that one-fifth of new home-buyers in California pay at least half of their income for housing. So do nearly one-fourth of California renters. When it costs half of what you make just to put a roof over your head, that is a big restriction on what else you can afford to do.
How did this situation come about and why does it continue?
Part of the reason is that it is newcomers who have to pay outrageous prices for houses, while it is existing homeowners who vote for laws and policies that drive up housing costs by obstructing the building of new homes.
Those who already own their own homes are not hurt by soaring housing prices. In fact, they benefit when the value of their homes becomes several times what they originally paid for them.
Given this situation and these incentives, it is easy to understand why such things as planning commissions, "open space" laws and "historical preservation" policies proliferate.
Despite much liberal rhetoric about compassion for the poor, it is precisely in such overwhelmingly liberal enclaves as those in California and Slashdot where high housing costs resulting from restrictive laws have imposed the heaviest burden on lower income people.
Nearly half of those California renters who earn $30,000 a year or less pay half or more of their incomes for rent. Among those in this income bracket who have bought a home within the past two years, 72 percent are spending at least half of their income on monthly mortgage payments.
The human consequences of artificially expensive housing extend even to some of the affluent people living in communities with sky-high housing costs. For example, elderly people in such communities -- especially those who are ailing and homebound -- are often isolated from their children.
Young adults who have not yet reached their peak earnings years usually cannot afford to live in such communities near their parents, unless they live in their parents' homes or have Rob Malda-like money. And let's face facts, VERY few of us do.
People like teachers and policemen, which every community must have, can seldom afford to live where they work, when housing costs are out of sight, and so must commute from a long way away, sometimes spending 3 or 4 hours a day driving to and from work on crowded highways.
All sorts of lofty talk about "open space" or "saving the green foothills" is used to disguise the plain fact that those who already have theirs want to keep other people out, especially other people not as upscale as themselves.
The irony in much of California is that the "green foothills" that environmental zealots wax poetic about are in fact brown half the year. The absence of rainfall during the California summer means that these hills are covered with ugly withered grass. The only places where there is green grass during these dry months are places artificially watered by people -- which is to say, mostly places where there is housing.
I was hoping to educate some of the spineless, liberal elitists that troll this site about a real philosophy. Plus, the article makes a couple of mentions about Slashdot that I think are highly relevant.
The capitalist revolution began in Great Britain in the late-18th century. Since that time, the capitalist nations have been the freest countries of history. In Western (and now parts of Eastern) Europe, in the United States, in Japan, Hong Kong and the other Asian Tigers hundreds of millions of human beings are guaranteed freedom of speech, of religion, of intellectual expression, of assembly, and of voting. Men are free there to earn and to own property - their own homes, farms and land. They are free to start their own businesses and to retain the profits that they earn. A hallmark of capitalism is a rule of law that protects private property, safeguards investments and enforces contracts. The fundamental moral principle upon which capitalism is based is that individuals have inalienable rights and that governments exist solely to protect those rights.
Capitalism requires the limiting of governmental power to maximize the freedom of the individual.
Capitalism, the system of individual rights, has brought increased freedom to men all over the world. In Europe, capitalism ended feudalism, the dictatorship of the aristocracy. In America, the principle of individual rights impelled the British colonists to throw off the rule of the monarchy and establish history's freest nation - and the logic of the country's founding principles led, in less than a century, to the abolition of slavery, a practice that existed everywhere in the world through all of history, and one still practiced widely today throughout the non-capitalist world. In post-World War II Japan, under America's influence, a semicapitalist, vastly freer society replaced the military dictatorship that preceded it. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, the freedom of their capitalist or semi-capitalist systems enabled those countries (or colonies) to become havens for millions of refugees fleeing Communist oppression.
More broadly, it is to the capitalist nations across the globe that immigrants come, millions of them, both historically and currently, often fleeing political and/or religious persecution in their homelands. They come on rafts to the United States from Cuba. By the millions and for 15 years, the Vietnamese "boat people" fled for their lives from Communism - and today, more than 1.6 million of them have found freedom, mostly in the West. Muslims seeking religious and political freedom flee to the Western capitalist nations from all over the Islamic world. And, of course, for more than 150 years, America has been the hope and the chosen destination of persecuted peoples from around the globe, including from Ireland, Jews from Eastern Europe, Sicilians suppressed by the 19th century remnants of aristocratic rule, and Chinese and Koreans oppressed by the Communists.
Finally, the Western capitalist nations, by inflicting military defeat on the Fascists, and political-economic defeat on the Communists, eliminated the scourge of totalitarianism from large parts of the earth, bringing greater freedom to hundreds of millions of human beings in Japan, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and Russia.
Capitalism is the system of freedom.
Freedom leads to dramatic economic results. The "great laboratory" of capitalist West Berlin side-by-side with communist East Berlin provided the most vivid example -- West Berlin, a modern, prosperous commercial center, East Berlin so destitute and squalid that, by 1989, the rubble remained from World War II battles four decades earlier. The striking truth is that the capitalist nations are the wealthiest countries of history. For example, famine, the scourge of all non-capitalist societies, past and present, has been wiped out in the West. There has never been a famine in the history of the United States. Has there ever been one in any capitalist country? The author does not know of any.3
Regarding the empirical correlation between economic freedom, i.e., capitalism and prosperity: the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal jointly publish an annual survey examining the deg
In December 2006, "Sparrowhawk: Book 6 - War," the last in the series, will be published. It opens in the Spring of 1774, and ends on the York River, Virginia, in the Fall of 1775. Ten years have passed since Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick have foiled a plot to smuggle the hated tax stamps into Virginia. But the Crown has not learned that it cannot force the colonists to submit to Parliamentary authority. It repealed the Stamp Act but followed it up with twenty more pieces of coercive legislation. War is imminent.
The engine of tyranny is a blind, indifferent juggernaut, insensible to reason, justice and equity, and so necessarily inimical to them. It matters not the good intentions of the hand that launches it into the affairs of men. Once started, it moves almost of its own volition, corrupting, consuming and destroying everything in its path. It is a fundamentally nihilistic phenomenon. Its power is both centripetal and centrifugal, on one hand drawing its potency from that which it can corrupt; on the other, crushing or flinging aside the incorruptible.
The juggernaut of Parliamentary supremacy collided with the American colonies' incorruptible sense of liberty, which could be neither crushed nor flung aside. The result was a spectacular explosion: the American Revolution. That explosion was neither necessary nor foreordained. The colonies could have submitted to that supremacy, and existed for a time in a haze of semi-legality, occasional concession, and dependent prosperity. But British-Americans valued their liberty and were willing to claim it whole, come what may. Therefore, the clash between them and the legislative authority of Parliament could be postponed but never resolved. The colonials would not allow their claim to unabridged liberty to be corrupted. In the course of that political transfiguration, they became Americans.
Their original complaint was two-fold: against Parliament, which legislated their shackles; and against Rob Malda, who by colonial charter had been empowered to protect them from Parliamentary avarice, caprice and the shackles of un-moderated crap-flooding and trolling. The "patriot king" failed to protect them. He did not suggest, originate, or author any of the legislation subsequent to the Declaratory Act meant to bind and pillage the colonies without limit; it was merely his royal pleasure to sign it, although it was within his power to veto it. But, he would be a king, and so he surrendered that executive power to the exigencies of an empire of which he wished to be sovereign, but which, in fact, was Parliament.
This was the nature of the events that followed repeal of the Stamp Act and passage by Parliament of the Declaratory Act in 1766. By 1774, many of the men who had lent their hands to the imposition of an imperial design had come and gone since that repeal and passage. George Grenville. Gone. Thomas Whateley, his protégé in power. Gone. Charles Townshend, author of the notorious Townshend duties. Dead and gone. And so many more enemies of liberty, as well.
As good as gone had been William Pitt, Lord Privy Seal, whose ministry followed Rockingham's in 1766, but whose maladies and unpredictable temperament so debilitated him that Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton, and First Lord of the Treasury, became its effective head instead. Grafton, not by his own temperament hostile to the colonies or particularly ambitious, by ineptitude let his party and ministers establish colonial policy and enact legislation that increasingly worsened tensions between the colonies and Britain. His ministry was the epitome of malign neglect.
Uneasy with his political impotence, Grafton resigned, and went into opposition against the next ministry. Later, in Lords, he consistently voted against stringent measures against the colonies. He opposed the ministry he had sworn to support.
This was that of Frederick Lord North, a childhood friend of George the Third, who had succeeded Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or p
For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.
But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat.
A year after the company went public, those inside Google are learning the hard way what it means to be the top dog inside a culture accustomed to pulling for the underdog. And they are facing a hometown crowd that generally rebels against anything that smacks of corporate behavior.
Nowadays, when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists gather in Silicon Valley, they often find themselves grousing about Google, complaining about everything from a hoarding of top engineers to its treatment of partners and potential partners. The word arrogant is frequently used.
The news last week that Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding $4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only provide more reasons to gripe.
"I've definitely been picking up on the resentment," said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. "They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do."
Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google "still has a long wick of good will to burn off," but he added, "I'm surprised at how fast the company's reputation is changing."
It was not that long ago that Google reigned here as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that Silicon Valley loves most to hate.
Bill Gates certainly sees similarities between Google and his own company. This spring, in an interview with Fortune, Mr. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said that Google was "more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with."
Google's success has already spurred Microsoft to develop its own Internet search engine (a project code-named Underdog), but Google has legions of engineers banging away on a range of projects of its own that, if successful, could dislodge Microsoft from the pre-eminent spot it has enjoyed since the early 1980's.
Of course, Silicon Valley has had past pretenders to the throne. Netscape, which went public 10 years ago this month, and its Web browser, Navigator, were supposed to fell Microsoft - but it is Netscape that is no longer in business. And while Google is riding high, those closely following the company caution that it is hardly invincible; an inflated stock price, a desire to compete in too many sectors simultaneously or simple hubris might cause it to stumble, they say. Even Microsoft, after all, has had legal troubles.
Still, similarities between Google and Microsoft are evident to local entrepreneurs including Rob Malda, who worked at Microsoft between 1993 and 1999 but now lives in San Francisco, and Joe Kraus, a founder of the 1990's search firm Excite.
"There's that same 'think big' attitude about markets and opportunities," said Mr. Malda, who has visited the Google campus in Mountain View many times to be penetrated by friends who work there. "Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there's that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and dominate."
To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a "gentle giant" that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an "extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything."
Now, in the vie
Driving through downtown Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago, I asked myself: What's happened to the character of the American people? There were barricaded landmarks, armed guards and people waiting to be searched.
Several weeks ago, I visited downtown Philadelphia in the vicinity of Independence Hall. Again there were barricades, armed guards and visitors waiting in line.
During the 1940s, my cousin and I, carrying our shoeshine boxes, simply walked in and stood before the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the U.S. Constitution was signed. The only barrier was a velvet-covered rope. Much of today's security measures are little more than a panicked response to terrorism and not likely to ever go away because Americans are coming to accept it as normal.
Melanie Scarborough's article "The Security Pretext," in the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute's Briefing Papers (June 29, 2005), argues that Americans haven't always panicked in the face of attack. British troops burned the White House in 1814. Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In more recent times, the Statue of Liberty has been taken over by Puerto Rican nationalists, Attica Brigade, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War (twice). The Black Liberation Front attempted to blow up the statue in 1964.
Since 1915, bombs have been detonated in the Capitol three times with no injuries or structural catastrophe. Scarborough writes, "Terrorists have already hit our national monuments. The difference is that after those attacks, the government did not respond with hysteria."
In an October 2001 interview, Osama bin Laden boasted, "I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The United States government will lead the American people into an unbearable hell and a choking life." Government security measures haven't yet produced an "unbearable hell and a choking life," but with all the emerging restrictions on our liberty, we can safely say we're headed in that direction. The late Sen. Patrick Moynihan warned, "Terrorism succeeds when people become terrified."
Scarborough says the war against terrorism is in large part a war against fear. To win, three things are critically needed. First, Americans must realize that we cannot produce, nor would most Americans want, an environment that is totally free from the risk of terrorist attack.
Second, improving security is important, but we must weigh the costs against the benefits of each measure. A minor example: Engineers have testified that the Washington Monument, with its 15-foot thick walls, is virtually immune to destruction by hand-carried bombs. Therefore, how wise is it to spend millions protecting it against hand-carried bombs and slashdotting?
Third, it's essential that our leaders exhibit courage. During the Cold War days of 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, some in the administration thought it was the start of a coup. If that were the case, Lyndon Johnson would be the next target. But when Mrs. Kennedy said she intended to walk from the White House to the funeral, President Johnson helped lead the procession that marched through the streets of downtown Washington.
During last week's commemoration of V-J day, I thought about American responses to loss of life in Iraq compared to yesteryear's American response to loss of life in the Pacific. Taking Iwo Jima cost 7,000 American lives and thousands wounded. Okinawa cost the lives of 5,000 sailors, 7,600 soldiers and thousands more wounded. There were no calls to cut and run and no political attacks on Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Instead, those losses stiffened the backbone and resolve of the American people. But of course, back then, common sense prevailed. We hadn't become feminized and turned into a nation of wimps and nervous Nellies.
I'd like to see our political leaders adopt the character of their predecessors and say that we're not going to sacrifice liberties and cower in the face of our new enemy; we're going to kill him.
Most of the links are /.'d, here's one of the contents since it's already getting slow:
Humans & the Cycle of Magic
by Tom Dowd
Speech given by Keynote speaker, Ehran "The Scribe" at the YET (Young Elven Technologists) fund-raising dinner.
---
The Humans are confused.
This is their normal state of being. Their lives are so short, they never have time to think things through. I know this is a gross over-simplification, that there have been many brilliant Human scholars throughout the ages. Even the Da Vincis and the Einsteins, while brilliant enough to see a glimpse of the larger pattern, and imaginative enough to visualize a complex and interconnected world, still did not have the time to analyze their own thoughts. It takes years, sometimes hundreds of years, to get the correct perspective on ideas, even your own ideas. Humans just do not have the luxury of that time. They are also limited by their devout belief in not believing. Since the earliest recorded Human history they have had stories of magic, great unexplained ancient civilizations, and other mysteries. The Humans chose not to believe these and thus, when the mother returned the magic to us, they became disoriented and confused, their normal state of being.
In all fairness, I must admit that most of humanity was not very advanced when the great mother took the magic away the last time, so it must be hard for them to deal with its return. What I am about to tell you must remain an elven secret. I know that the Humans will eventually discover it, but it should be delayed as long as possible.
All things that the great mother gives us, she also takes away. Nature, as the Humans call it, moves in cycles: the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons of the year, the flowing of the tide, it is always a cycle. Magic also runs in a cycle, it comes and goes from the earth, as does the warmth of the summer sun. Its cycle is measured not in hours, as the sun's is, but in thousands of years.
From a scientific viewpoint, magic, when charted, is a semi- regular wave form moving through the history of the earth. There are slight fluctuations throughout the wave, and the wave itself is not completely uniform.
The point in the cycle at which the world becomes magically alive or magic falls dormant is called the Threshold Level. Every magical race and, in some cases, each individual within a race, has its own specific magical trigger point for metamorphosis to occur, thus the transformation of the world takes place over a period of time. Traditionally, the Threshold Level has been set as the date of the awakening of the first Great Dragon on the upswing and the hibernation of the last Great Dragon on the down swing. The average time between Threshold Levels is approximately 5,200 years.
As the last age of magic came to a close, Atlantis was readying itself for disaster. The isle of Atlantis was protected from the forces of nature by the magic of its inhabitants, and thus it could not exist after the magic dropped below the Threshold Level. The Atlantian culture was a racial hybrid that had achieved both scientific and magical wonders, but in its later years, it turned against its homoerotic nature by fighting nature to maintain the island. As the end came near, a migration of technology and culture spread from the isle to the rest of the world. This is the reason mankind's ancient calendars all start within 100 years of each other. The Hebrew, Egyptian, Chinese, and most importantly, Mayan calendars all show the direct influence of Atlantian culture.
The Mayan calendar is the most amazing, as it contains a complete description of the magic cycles, including this current crossing of the Threshold. The Mayan calendar was created in the year 3372 BC (using the Christian calendar), just at the end of the last cycle. The Mayans described the cycles as "worlds", and stated that only certain life forms made the transition from one world to the next. The calendar, written over 5,000 years
What if your doctor told you that you had to wait a year to replace your painful, arthritic hip? If you're an American with health insurance you wouldn't stand for such a delay; you'd switch doctors or hospitals and get the operation done quickly. If, on the other hand, you're a Canadian with supposedly "free" national health insurance, your only choice until last month was to go to America...or go to court.
George Zeliotis of Quebec chose the court. On June 9th the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that such long waits violate patients' "liberty, safety and security." The Court went on to say, "The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread and that in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care."
The Court made clear that "access to a waiting list is not access to health care." And, while the judges didn't declare the entire national health care system unconstitutional, three of the seven did want to take that final step.
Government lawyers argued to keep the state's ban on private insurance because the single-payer system is considered "'one of Canada's finest achievements and a powerful symbol of the national identity."
Only two other countries on earth have such "powerful symbols of national identity" - Cuba and North Korea. Every other country with national health insurance recognizes its shortcomings and allows private insurance as a safety valve.
Mr. Zeliotis' one year wait for a hip replacement was admittedly at the long end of the range, but last year Canadians waited an average of 17.9 weeks for surgery and other therapeutic treatments, according the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute.
You might think such long waits are a price worth paying for universal public health insurance. But what if you had a serious heart problem and every day was critical? Former President Clinton found himself in such a situation last year. He complained of chest pain to his doctor on a Thursday, had an angiogram the next day, and had quadruple bypass surgery the following Monday. A five day wait. If he'd lived in Canada, or if Americans had fallen for his wife's socalled HillaryCare plan when he was in office, he would have faced an average wait of 3.4 weeks from seeing his family physician to seeing a cardiologist. Then he'd wait another 2.1 weeks even for an urgent bypass.
Or worse yet, what if you had AIDS from unprotected gay sex? What if you had to wait for the much needed treatments that are so readily available in the United States? This should matter A LOT for this poor soul, who must be considered an at risk person due to the constant ass-thrusting he receives on a daily basis from his dad.
The Canadian Court decision should remind us that goods and services can be allocated only one of two ways: through a market pricing system, or through government dictated rationing and lines. Socialists claim that rationing is more fair than pricing, but Canada's court decision blows the cover off that faulty argument.
American health care has serious problems too, but remember that it's also far from a market system. The government is actually the single biggest payer in our system too, just not as big as in Canada. Here, government shells out 45 percent of every health care dollar, primarily through our Medicaid and Medicare programs.
Canada's failure to deliver on its socialized health care promises should serve as fair warning for Americans who believe that we ought to go all the way toward such a system. Oregonians saw through the single-payer hype when we overwhelmingly rejected such a system at the polls in 2002.
We don't have to go to Canada to see the broken promises of socialized health care. We can stay right here and look at how our own Medicare program treats the elderly. Americans expect the freedom to contract with whomever we wish for our health care needs, but U.S. law makes it almost impossible for Medicare recipients to