If there’s any conflict between Hillary and the Chicoms, it’s kinda like the difference between a Maoist and a Trotskyite.
Bubblehead Les
September 26, 2012
Comment to She’s a libertarian all of a sudden.
[In political philosophy anyway. Hillary wouldn’t want to play second fiddle to Mao or Trotsky.
I’ve read a fair amount about Hillary. She is smart, extremely ambitious, craves power, and the ice water in her veins is pumped by a heart of steel.—Joe]
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in turn urged China and its Southeast Asian neighbors to resolve disputes “without coercion, without intimidation, without threats and certainly without the use of force”.
I wish she’d seen the light 40 years or so ago. I wish the U.S. government would treat our citizens the same way. I was at a press conference Monday to say the same thing for Gresham Bouma, but we got thrown off the front porch of the Idaho Department of Labor (which will cease to exist if Hillary gets her way with her new-found policy of eschewing all coercion, intimidation and threats).
Hillary is of course a die-hard Progressive (incremental comminust) and so she is all about using coercion, intimidation and threats. Her quote above does prove that she at least understands coercion, intimidation and threats to be bad things, even if she’s been advocating them all her adult life. There wouldn’t be a Democrat Party without coercion or threats, and only about 3 or 4% of Republicans could exist in their current iterations. It could be said that the main purpose of today’s Democrat Party (together with their media allies and the government education complex) is to rationalize the increased use of coercion, intimidation and threats, and I suppose the purpose of the Republican Party has been to make it possible for the Democrats.
But talk about brass. She’s made a career calling for coercion and threats in nearly every aspect of American life, and now it’s not to be tolerated from communist China. Wow. They must be laughing pretty hard at her right now. You’d think she would lay awake nights thinking of her wild contradictions. That is if she had a conscience. Even if she were only concerned about her reputation for the sake of her position and power, caring nothing for the truth, maybe she’d want to think a little bit before opening her mouth.
If people “are crazy, can’t be trusted, and need to be regulated and controlled”, as one Socialist recently told me, then doesn’t that mean that government which are made up of people need the same type of supervision?
It would seem to me that, if you value consistency and hence truth, you must conclude that either both people and governments made up of people need to be controlled or governments/supervisors must be made up of greater beings.
Governments which rule by divine authority have an extremely poor record of generating peace, prosperity, and happiness. Hence I think we can dismiss them outright. That leaves us with governments which have some degree of control over their actions or no control.
Again it would seem the choice is clear. Governments with no controls upon them are historically hostile to peace, prosperity, and happiness. Hence the only question would seem to be how much control. What is the optimal amount of control for a government and it’s people such that some measure of “public good” is optimized?
I suspect we have all the data we really need to answer that question. We have 50 states with various amounts of controls upon the government and the people living in those environments. The question can thus be refined a bit more. How do you measure “public good” and how do the various states rate using that system of measurement? Do there exist states with too much or too little control of government and/or their people? Or can it be shown that all states have too much/little control over government and/or the people and we need to increase/decrease the scope of the regulation of government/people in our experiments to find the optimum?
I think I know the answer but I’m willing to look at the data to see if my hypothesis is correct.
Or course there is also the valid concern of natural rights and where government gets it’s authority to regulated and control people. That is my preferred domain to have a discussion about limits on governments. But it’s challenge enough to get people to think about facts and results. Getting them to think about fundamental principles is generally an advanced topic beyond the scope of ordinary discourse.
Someone I Know (hereinafter refered to as SIK) related an incident at his home that occurred some weeks ago, and I thought that this blog would be a good place to mention it.
In the wee hours of the morning, SIK woke up, went to the living room for some reason or other, and found a stranger passed out on his couch. He tried rousing him to no avail. Shook him a bit, even, as you would do to wake up someone for an urget conversation. No response. The stranger was breathing, but obviously very drunk. SIK went back to bed. In the morning SIK’s wife went to the combination room to make coffee while SIK managed to rouse said drunk for a little chat. Mr. 20-something-year-old Drunk didn’t know where he was at first. He apologized for the intrusion. SIK offered him a ride. Drunk declined, and went on his way. Wife said that she thought she’d seen him at a nearby house before (nothing suspicious – just there, like a neighbor or friend of a neighbor) but wasn’t sure. SIK and his wife have guns in the house and know how to use them, if that matters to you.
End of story.
What would you do? What is the right thing to do? SIK has no small children or anyone else at the house. Just he and his wife, if that matters to you. I think it would matter to me, as I am something of a mother bear if you will. I don’t know the answer for my sake. There are many, many situations that are extremely difficult, at best, to second-guess if you’re not there– if you’re not the person responsible for making the decision. So don’t. You weren’t. Just think about it. I can tell you from experiences (though very different from this scenerio) that I have a hard time going counter to my “instinct”, which ever way that “instinct” might go. Or is it “conscience”? That could be a strength or it could be a weakness. I admit that I don’t know. Reason, alone, as I believe most people think of it, doesn’t always provide the best answer, but then maybe it depends on the depth of the reason. In this case I think it could be argued that SIK made the worst possible decision, from a “tactical” point of view, and that at the same time it had the best possible outcome. But what if the guy had been in a diebetic coma or something?
Edited to Add; The front door was unlocked, so the guy just walked in.
Via Say Uncle.
This is very appealing to me. It almost sounds like Galt’s Gulch:
Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains or sales.
Proponents say the tiny, as-yet unnamed town will become a Central American beacon of job creation and investment, by combining secure property rights with minimal government interference.
“Once we provide a sound legal system within which to do business, the whole job creation machine – the miracle of capitalism – will get going,” Michael Strong, CEO of the MKG Group, which will build the city and set its laws, told FoxNews.com.
Strong said that the agreement with the Honduran government states that the only tax will be on property.
“Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth,” Strong said.
…
The laws in the city will be separate from those in the rest of Honduras. Strong said that the default law that will be enforced in the city will actually be based on Texas state law, which has relatively few regulations.
“It will be Texas law with more freedom of contract. Texas scores well on state economic freedom rankings,” he explained.
Hmmm… I wonder what I could build and export using native labor and materials.
If you think you have the right to use force against me bring guns.
Atlas Shrugged Part II Trailer
September 5, 2012
That really resonated with me. But then the entire book did.
There are a bunch of other good quotes in there too.—Joe]
We often come up empty-handed. There are always a lot of words being said and written, but the far less meaning. Our job is to search for the meaning. It’s fun.
Seen on a paper grocery bag;
“[Big grocery chain] has partnered with [presumably Obama stash money-funded green energy company] to convert their waste into power for the community.
This initiative will help produce 3 mega-watts of power. Enough to power 3,000 homes for one year!”
What does that mean? It’s only a one-year project? What happens after that? Or is it that someone flunked their high school physics classes and doesn’t know the difference between power and energy?
Then there’s that all too convenient, catch-all word in there; “help”. Let’s say for sake of argument that all the Columbia hydroelectric projects combined produce on average 100 gigawatts. All by myself then, I could help produce 100 gigawatts by pissing in the river. I could help produce 100 gigawats for one year, each year, by pissing in the river once per year. Hope and Change.
In fact it doesn’t mean anything as written, but either we are supposed to believe that it means something anyway, and love them for it, or the people who wrote it are ignorant and can’t be bothered with looking things up, or both. And among the listed items of “output” from this “initiative” are “green power” and “carbon credits”. Oh goody. I guess the recycling of the paper into new paper is no longer good enough, and the use of food waste as animal feed is no longer a good thing. So we can burn this stuff, cut down more trees and use more farmland. For carbon credits. Hope and Change.
Then there was this “Halftime in America” ad from Chrysler that many people thought meant something really great. It’s one of the more artfully meaningless, and/or misleading bits in television. In fact, if it means anything at all, it means that the government bailout and takeover of Chrysler, using taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to hand a company over to the unions, is The Way to get out of an economic downturn. It also implies strongly that if one auto company goes into receivership, we stop making cars– a wildly ignorant idea if ever there was one. In fact there is the very real and very well-proven concept of “creative destruction” wherein one badly-run company goes out, making the way for the next, better-run company to flourish, the end result of which is more and better, and more affordable cars, with more stable car-making jobs as a side benefit. “Halftime in America” conveniently ignores all that, instead using pure (false) assumption and building on it with innuendo. And if there is a “halftime” provision written into the U.S. constitution, at which time we were presumed to have entertained the Central Planners for 100 years, started going broke as a result, then regrouped with more central planning to fix the destruction from the earlier Central Planning, then I am Karl Marx’s uncle. In fact we are under attack by the Progressive movement and the only way out is to rid ourselves of it and get back to our beautiful American Principles of Liberty.
The arena with probably the least meaning of all is politics. When millions of people were swooning over Sarah Palin during the Palin/Whatshisname campaign, I went over to her personal web site to see if I could find any meaning. I have to hand it to her– she is very, very good at combining words, thousands of them, into sentence after sentence, without a scintilla of meaning. Total blank-out. Very impressive.
At the same time, Obama told us he wanted “Redistributive Change” and that “When you spread the wealth around everybody benefits” out of one side of his mouth, while telling us he would have the most transparent, open and fiscally responsible administration ever. Right there, at that moment, he proves to the whole world, with just those two assertions, that he is a lying piece of shit. Then we elected him. I guess searching for meaning isn’t a hobby for many people.
Make a point of it. Next time you see a politician speaking, or an advertisement, or anything really, try to see if there is any meaning, and what, exactly, is the meaning.
First;
Then;
Those are the burnt out ruins of Berlin, after Central Planning had run its course.
The lesson? Mind your own business.
On the other hand; if mass destruction is your end goal, then by all means centrally plan to your heart’s content, but of course you’ll need your own army. And it had better be one hell of an army. You see what happened to that son of a bitch in the photo, and he had, in say 1940, the best army and the best air force, and prossibly the best navy in the world. He did accomplish plenty of destruction, so you can look up to him I guess, as one of the greatest Central Planners in history.
He, like all Central Planners, of course naturally assumed that he was smarter than all of the People of Europe, or of the world, combined. It’s always like that– they’re so shockingly ignorant and/or stupid that they think they’re smarter than everyone else, and they are furthermore shockingly stupid enough to think that their towering genius automatically gives them the right to tell us lesser creatures how to live (or not live).
Here’s the clue that maybe you are one of those twisted, nasty, retarded fools. It’s very simple. If you see someone minding their own business, and you hate them, and you want to do something about it, you’re a Central Planner. As a Central Planner, you are of course too fearful to actually do anything yourself about these people who mind their own business, so you’ll seek some official position, or a gang or committee or some such, so you can have other people do your dirty work. That way you don’t feel like the criminal you are, because other people are carrying the guns for you. If you had the guts and the initiative to act on these hatred impulses on your own, you’d be what we call a common criminal.
If you had guts, self initiative, and a little bit of decency, you’d be too busy minding your own business to worry about stopping or redirecting someone else’s. That, and you’d have a vested interest in protecting property rights.
Special Interest; any interest with which communists disagree.
Lyle
September 11, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—Suzanne Langland.
[This didn’t really catch my eye until Windy Wilson commented, “Lyle, ‘Liberty shouldn’t be a special interest’ does fit on a bumper sticker.”
I’m inclined to respectfully disagree with that being on a bumper sticker. I think the proper phrasing should be “Liberty is not a special interest.”—Joe]
It has been suggested (by Barron and Janelle) that I change the name of this blog from “The View From North Central Idaho” to “The View From The Clock Tower”.
While I got a chuckle out of this it is just a bit too over the top for me.
Besides, in addition to being afraid of heights should things go sufficiently “pear shaped” that a clock tower view might be of interest I think I would prefer a view from a R/C vehicle (air, land, or water) loaded with Boomerite.
Today is a national holiday celebrating the European, and very un-American, idea of the Balkanization of society into classes, and specifically celebrating the “labor class”. I won’t bother trying to unpack all the layers upon layers, and the sub layers upon sub layers of false assumption behind it. Instead I make the very American assertion that every one of us, regardless of circumstance, is an autonomous entrepreneur.
We aren’t born into classes or groups. We are born, or immigrate, into the American Experiment. We may decide to sell our “labor” (and in this case I use the word as a practical noun or a verb as opposed to a classification) to someone else as a part of our life plan, or we may decide to go more or less directly into our own businesses, but neither choice is one that is foisted on us by society.
Actually; whether you are selling your labor to someone else’s business, whether you’re selling products or services under your own personal business banner, or whether you serve on the board of directors for a large corporation, you are in fact your own business. If your name is Billy Bob and you shovel manure for a dairy farmer, you should think of yourself as Billy Bob’s shoveling service. You are your own boss (to the extent anyone is his own boss, which is small). Anyone serving as his own boss needs customers (they’re the real bosses don’t you know – they control the money you’re looking to get) and in this case your customer is that farmer. You serve your customer and in return you get paid. That’s a business you’re in, whether you understand it or not. You’re an entrepreneur. Get your head straight and make the best of it.
“Labor” in the communist sense is something altogether different. In that case, as a laborer you are in a group pitted against the other classes in a political struggle for resources and perks. Your class or group is in direct competition with all others, for a piece of the confiscated booty. It’s gang against gang. Your gang is the only one that counts and all other gangs are your enemies. The pinnacle of success for your gang is when you take over full control of the government.
In the American model on the other hand, you are an autonomous operator– a business consisting of one individual. You compete for the favor of potential customers in a system of property rights protection. Your only method of success then is to do a better job in serving your customers. Lobbying, or the brute strength of gangs (or labor unions) then has little or no place, because there is no power in government to lend favor to your business at the expense of others. Government has no rights to itself – only the responsibility to protect every individual’s property rights. Cooperation in the form of combined resources (the corporation model) does have a place, because the economy of scale (usually but not always) allows a larger business to produce better goods or services at lower prices. It is the height of a polite and just civilization.
Too bad the American system has been corrupted by the Progressive communist movement into something ugly. They make it ugly by getting government’s coercive power involved in it, then use that ugliness to tell us that “capitalism” doesn’t work. Lying scum.
I’ll call this Lying Scum Day then. Have a happy one, suckers.
The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts…
H. L. Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[And, sadly, representative government is better than all other forms attempted.—Joe]
No one can honestly say Clint Eastwood isn’t a great actor.
Nor can they say he’s a bad director. He has acted in, directed, produced, produced
music for, or even three all four of those, in seven movies in just the last four
years. His most recent interviews have shown him to be sharp, eloquent, and
engaged. If you saw Gran Torino in
the theater, you could watch a movie he wrote, directed, produced, and made
music for, and watch a trailer for an upcoming movie he directed and produced. His
brain is fully functioning.
So, why and how did his speech at the RNC seem so… rambling, unfocused, edgy, and odd? If we KNOW he’s mentally all there, what
was he doing? If we assume he was doing exactly
what he intended to do, what was he intending?
I think that the republican base is going to vote for Mitt,
some enthusiastically, some holding their nose, but they’ll vote for him
none-the-less. The Dem base will likewise vote for O. No-one on a national
stage will convince that 90% of the electorate of anything different, only
personal experience or epiphany will change anything for them. I think he’s
smart enough to know that, so he wasn’t talking to any of them. He’s an actor and director – focusing on reaching the target audience is what he does.
But, if the R convention attendees and typical convention watchers and committed D or R voters are not his audience, then who was he speaking
to? Perhaps it was the very-low-information voter, the apolitical working-stiff,
the disengaged voter, who recognizes a movie star but has nary a clue who their rep
or senator is, who ANY of the SCOTUS are, and don’t normally watch conventions.
Perhaps he chose to speak in a way that makes all the well-scripted speakers and high-information voters cringe, but in a way that
was different, weird, and odd, but also put humor and the strange right next to the
hard-hitting stuff, so when it got played and replayed and discussed by various
folks in all sorts of outlets, both by those who agree AND those who disagree,
it will get those fundamental facts, like highlighting there are 23,000,000
unemployed, out to many of those low-info voters, and will sway them. It got
the movie-going-but-not-political voter to tune in, and stay and watch Rubio. It
created an instant icon for the politically-absent president, the empty chair. He used unexpected and oblique off-color humor that perfectly captured the essence of the trash-talking Chicago bully in the White House. It
is possible, when we look back on that moment three months from now, that it
will be seen as an absolutely brilliant piece of seeming scatter-brained-improve
that shifted that all-important indecisive, low-information, non-ideological
middle, the folks that vote with their hearts but not their brains. Either that, or it’s one of the fasted pieces of rapid-onset dementia
ever.
We are not your citizens. The actual relationship is that you are our elected official. You answer to us. Apparently, you’ve lost a little perspective. The reason the founders included the 2nd amendment was so that, if necessary, we could remove politicians that lost perspective. Regardless of your personal delusions, Mr. Pawlowski, Allentown is not your little kingdom where you can wave a scepter and institute what you want, when you want.
In America, Mr. Pawlowski, the people and the Constitution are in charge.
Stu Ronaldson
August 28, 2012
The Left’s New Gun-Control Strategy
[I’ve said essentially the same thing before but in a more general sense. It probably is beneficial to be a little more direct to an individual politician that is getting a little too uppity. Good job Stu.—Joe]
A couple of possibilities come to mind.
Maybe she stood in front of the bulldozer believing that when
the driver saw her, he’s stop. That would imply that she believed the Israelis
are moral and reasonable, and directly gives lie to much of what’s been said
about them in defending her actions.
Maybe she thought the driver would not stop, meaning she deliberately
let herself get killed, to be used as a propaganda tool. This would sort of imply some serious psych issues.
Maybe she was so stupid / ignorant of heavy equipment that
she didn’t realize that the driver might not see her, and not stop because he
was in a military zone that civilians had been excluded from and had no reason
to believe that some idiot might be standing in front of him.
In no case do I see any reason to support her actions,
change my beliefs, or care about her and “her cause” in any way, because it’s
nothing more than a personal tragedy for her family (who failed to educate her
properly), and a propaganda tool for people who want to re-create the holocaust
and tear down the best parts of Western civilization.
There will always be useful idiots. That doesn’t mean we have
to give them a platform.
American veterans under attack by our government? That DHS statement from a few years ago does come to mind.
People are being arrested and “committed” against their will as mental cases for saying things that, by the standards of this blog, are fairly innocuous. They did this sort of thing in the Soviet Union, but it seems to be happening in the U.S. now. Watch both videos, taking note of the things that were said openly by the left on national TV.
I’ve said for years that The Enemy will do things that are so crazy we’re afraid to even mention them for fear of sounding crazy ourselves, or things so crazy no one wants to believe it. It’s happened before, so one can only assume that it will be done over and over. Has it come to this?
What happens next is we start blaming the victims. “They wouldn’t have been arrested if they weren’t doing something stupid or wrong…” Neighbors start informing on neighbors, and “you wouldn’t mind being searched if you had nothing to hide” becomes the word of the day. “We wouldn’t have all this trouble if it weren’t for those people saying things against the government. It’s all their fault. Get ’em!”
Look for it. It’s all happened before, and the sharks are always on the hunt.
We see that term, “stunning” too often. This interview with Dinesh D’Souza however was actually stunning. Please watch the whole thing. Wow! In any other circumstance this stuff would dominate the headlines for months and then linger for generations.
Actually, this is dominating the headlines, but not in the Old Media. You have to look elsewhere. Forget about the Old Liars (ABC NBC CBS MSNBC NYT et al). They are done. How did they get away with it for so long? That, I hope, will be one of the big topical questions in history classes for the next hundred years.
It’s been done, but I second the notion that we stop worrying about about the Old Media. Some people still bitch about them, wringing their hands over the latest dumb thing they did, always reacting and rarely acting. No, Young Grasshopper; move past them, like the wind. They are nothing.
We have our own media and our own culture.
This year I endeavored to keep a nice garden. The biggest job, after the soil has been worked and the seeds planted, is weeding. Early on, when the seedlings are all very young, it can be difficult to tell the difference between some weed seedlings and the ones you want, so I tend to let some of them get more established before I pull them. It took a lot of work, but between planting the vegetables on little berms and watering only the berms, I have the garden relatively weed free, except for some morning glory that never goes away unless you blast the whole garden several times with Roundup before planting.
But something struck me along the way. Even now, months into it, I find weeds that are mature, “hiding” among the desirable plants. They have a color or a shape just similar enough that we don’t see them among the vegetables unless we look very carefully. Several of us have taken it upon ourselves to hunt down and pull the weeds, but still a few of them can be found, growing and maturing, feeding off of the water, nutrients and sunlight intended for the vegetables, and producing seeds that will hang around until next spring. Then the battle starts all over again.
Although there are many good techniques for keeping them in check, the weeds still find a way to exist and suck some of the life out of the garden, even if it’s just a little bit. It is a never-ending battle that you never really “win”, see, but it can be rewarding all the same if you keep your eyes open and do what needs to be done.
As the Republicans are frantically trying to figure out just what it is they should pretend to believe during the upcoming election, and while we stand here and complain to each other that “we can’t vote our way out of this” there are organizations already in place already doing something about it and already having a positive effect. Even if “we who uphold the principles of liberty” win and win and win, one election after another, we can never stop tending this garden. There is never any final victory after which you can let your guard down and just live. Life is like that. We can complain about how the weeds have just totally taken over the garden, and yet who’s fault is that?
Weeds are what they are– we know exactly what they are and how they operate. We know that they aren’t going to disappear from the Earth. We also know what the vegetables are and what they need to thrive, right? So…
(Sorry if you don’t like allegory. For some reason I’m seeing it all over the place lately, as though life itself is one big set of metaphors and allegories. I get on a kick like this for a while, and then it’s on to another. It’ll pass)
I had started writing a essay on learning and the brain and
current understandings about it, and realized as it grew HUGE that it revolved around examining some rhetorical
questions. Here are some of the core questions, with their import and details left
as an exercise to the readers and commenters, unless there is significant
interest in a particular one being addressed in some future essay.
Compare and contrast data,
information, and knowledge.
Why do people use them
interchangeably, and what problems arise when people do?
Compare and contrast school
and education.
Must one imply the other
(or the other, one)?
Compare and contrast smart
and educated.
Why do educated people get
them confused so much more often than smart people (both in themselves and
others)?
Compare and contrast teaching
and learning.
How do you measure the
effectiveness of a teacher?
Compare and contrast knowing,
understanding and wisdom.
How does one get turned
into the other?
Compare and contrast intrinsic
aptitude and interest.
Can one be leveraged into
the other, or are they merely randomly connected?
What is the most important thing a human should learn?
Rank, in order, the top 10
things one should learn by voting age. Why?
How can you tell truth from falsity?
How often do you ask
yourself “how do I know that? What
are my assumptions?”
At its most basic (biological) level, what is learning?
What makes this happen?
How are repetition and strong emotional tagging different?
Is it important for children or young adults to learn how the brain learns and works at some point, before they become an adult?
How could learning this help children in school?
How can a neural connection be strengthened, or made more interconnected
with others?
Compare and contrast a
single, strong connection, with highly interconnected knowledge.
How many strong emotional “tags” are there in a very safe,
nearly risk-free, environment?
Would this present a
challenge to learning?
What makes the brain think something is important enough to
learn (that is, remember and think about enough to apply the knowledge later)?
What is the brain designed to do, and in what sort of
environment?
WHY? HOW? Can we use this to help teach and learn?
How is it people can think communism is viable when even very small children and animals defend their property and territory?
I have to conclude either they are incredibly naïve, stupid, or intend to be the enforcers and hence are incredibly evil.