If you're not confused,
you're not paying attention.
Tom Peters
Kids Say the Darndest Things...
From the Daily Caller:
Students in a rural Kentucky county — and their parents — are the latest to join a growing national chorus of scorn for the healthy school lunches touted by first lady Michelle Obama. “They say it tastes like vomit,” said Harlan County Public Schools board member Myra Mosley at a contentious board meeting last week, reports The Harlan Daily Enterprise.This is "Social Justice"?
From Michael Snyder:
More than 50 large U.S. cities have adopted “anti-camping” or “anti-food sharing” laws in recent years, and in many of these cities the police are strictly enforcing these laws. Sometimes the goal appears to be to get the homeless people to go away. Apparently the heartless politicians that are passing these laws believe that if the homeless can’t get any more free food and if they keep getting thrown into prison for “illegal camping” they will eventually decide to go somewhere else where they won’t be hassled so much.The statists are trying to regulate even who gets to eat your own food, an act of charity? But somehow it's okay if they tax/steal your second sandwich and distribute it themselves so the politicians get credit.
Tell Me That He Didn't Just Say That
(HT Drudge):
“What do you think he’d say about Obamacare?” asked Joyner, when discussing King’s legacy.
“Oh he’d like that,” Obama asserted. “Well, because he understood that health care, health security is not a privilege, it’s something in a county as wealthy as ours, everybody should have access to.”
"We were just talking with some folks earlier about the fact that, for a lot of people, it will be cheaper than your cell phone bill," Obama explained.If you are spending $10K a year on your cellphone, you need to change cellphone carriers. NOTE: you don't have to shop a rigged government exchange to find a cheaper plan...
Somehow I don't think Obama implying that MLK was an economic illiterate is a compliment. I'm sure that Obama would not have told MLK that before the reform, a hospital already could not refuse emergency care based on an ability to pay, that increasing numbers of physicians refuse to accept new government healthcare patients (Medicare and Medicaid) because of the red tape and/or the providers lose money on them, and that the result of ObamaCare has been to dampen employment (jobs and hours) and significantly higher premiums because of gold-plated benefits and mandates; I'm sure that MLK would also not be impressed by how black employment and household net worth have worsened over Obama's tenure...
Guest Blog Excerpt of the Day
Obama knows how to bluff people whom are not very intelligent; he will speak intellectual gibberish with authority, and the MSNBC anchors will swoon with approval. But really smart people realize that he's a phony. Here is a classic example from one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell. To provide context, you have to realize, as I have written several times (a signature blog quote), "If there's one thing Obama knows, it's symbolism." There is an ongoing dispute between Argentina and Great Britain over a group of offshore islands. Obama is attempting to signal an Argentinian tilt on the dispute by using (he thinks) the Argentinian name for the disputed islands. Now let's pick it up from Sowell:
One presidential gaffe in particular gives the flavor, and suggests the reason, for many others. It involved the Falkland Islands.With Argentina today beset by domestic problems, demanding the return of the Falklands is once again a way for Argentina's government to distract the Argentine public's attention from the country's economic and other woes. Because the Argentines call these islands "the Malvinas," rather than "the Falklands," Barack Obama decided to use the Argentine term. But he referred to them as "the Maldives." It so happens that the Maldives are thousands of miles away from the Malvinas. The former are in the Indian Ocean, while the latter are in the South Atlantic.
Back during Barack Obama's first year in office, he kept repeating, with great apparent earnestness, that there were "shovel-ready" projects that would quickly provide many much-needed jobs, if only his spending plans were approved by Congress. He seemed very convincing — if you didn't know how long it can take for any construction project to get started, after going through a bureaucratic maze of environmental impact studies, zoning commission rulings and other procedures that can delay even the smallest and simplest project for years.Just consider the red tape of the Keystone Pipeline approval.(cf. below): "For more than 1,800 days, the Obama administration has been analyzing whether the Keystone pipeline is in the national interest." So much for Obama's priority for those 42,000 "shovel-ready" jobs...
Liberty Thought of the Day
The Keystone Pipeline: Obama "Dithering As Usual"
Keep in mind that oil pipelines crisscross the US, and pipeline technology improves over time. The issue at hand is the anti-fossil-fuel EPA which does the bidding of anti-economic growth radical environmentalists fighting the already thoroughly vetted State Department approval. (The environmentalists would rather see us continue imports from volatile regions or anti-American regimes: war, vs. free trade, is a worse threat to the environment.) Among other things, environmentalists fail to adequately account for environmental impacts or feasibility of alternative transports of oil, including truck, rail or oil tankards. Obama is as usual leading from behind vs. refereeing this bureaucratic turf battle like a real executive.
I Am So Done With Pakistan: Cut Off Aid Now
I think I've finally heard of an anti-Christian law which is like the Old South's morally unconscionable Jim Crow laws on steroids, an incontrovertible violation of human rights. From the NY Post:
But though I’m kept in a tiny, windowless cell, I want my voice and my anger to be heard. I want the whole world to know that I’m going to be hanged for helping my neighbor. I’m guilty of having shown someone sympathy. What did I do wrong? I drank water from a well belonging to Muslim women, using “their” cup, in the burning heat of the midday sun.No doubt Ms. Bibi remembers John 4:
I, Asia Bibi, have been sentenced to death because I was thirsty. I’m a prisoner because I used the same cup as those Muslim women, because water served by a Christian woman was regarded as unclean by my stupid fellow fruit-pickers.
4Now [Jesus] had to go through Samaria. 5So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.See here for a relevant historical context of the Jew-Samaritan separatism. That any government would criminalize an act of kindness is unconscionable. Muslims make up about 97% of Pakistan; there is no excuse for such a grotesque violation of individual rights; water is a basic necessity of life.
7When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Or do not use dishes Samaritans have used )
Whistle-blower Protections - Yes
Bulk Privileged Document Downloads and Distribution - No
I do think there is a strategic need for a certain degree of government secrecy: you will not win a card game where everyone can read your hand but you can't read theirs. We cannot rely on PR releases from self-serving competitive powers; we could not want weapon designs, audits of infrastructure vulnerabilities or revelations of defense strategies or military plans or intelligence agent aliases to be made available; if we cannot maintain discretion, it will have a chilling, counterproductive effect on intelligence gathering and negotiations.
We would have to unacceptably depend on the professional ethics of potentially corrupt, unaccountable, unauthorized third-party recipients to sift through documents; think, for instance, of a rogue third-party recipient whom could use sensitive information to blackmail a high-level government official, an undercover agent or a foreign intelligence source.
It would be one thing if I was a diplomat whom knew that, say, President Obama was lying or misleading the American people about the rationale for military intervention in the Middle East or a national intelligence director misleading the country of the nature or extent of unauthorized domestic spying; in the cases of Manning and Snowden, it comes across more like cherry-picking some after-the-fact egregious discovery to rationalize their crimes, an unethical breach of professional ethics, violating their employment contract, putting lipstick on a pig.
Nevertheless, Greg Mitchell has listed a number of politically inconvenient truths, basically hidden from policymakers and American voters among Manning's stolen documents (HT Reason), including corrupt foreign government leaders taking a cut of American aid, foreign leaders turned a blind eye to US violations (e.g., bringing certain banned weapons or bombs), missed diplomatic opportunities (e.g., Hussein's invasion of Kuwait may have been motivated in part by soft oil prices in the aftermath of the Iran War), etc. To give a current contrast, the Obama Administration has made much of Assad's alleged use of chemical agents (as if murder by one means is more equal than murder by more politically acceptable means), but for example, the US had previously supported Saddam Hussein despite knowledge of his use of poison gas.
The only way to minimize the risk of these ethically dubious incidents is a less intervenionist foreign policy.
Yes, My Views on Some Things Have Changed Part III (Part II)
I have previously discussed the evolution of my position on national defense; I am not anti-military: I was born a military brat, and my Dad retired from the military while I was in college. In fact, I served in the Navy as a math instructor at a training center. The overwhelming majority of people in the military are not jingoistic warmongers; they are disciplined professionals whom serve their country faithfully. They don't romanticize war; my first dorm RA had lost one of his legs in Vietnam, and I've known people whom have lost a loved one.
In my case, I originally entered college with the idea of pursuing the priesthood, probably in the context of a teaching order like the Jesuits or Oblates. I was skeptical of the worthiness of two conflicts my Dad had served in (Korea and Vietnam). But I was also a realist: I had seen in high school history documentary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; I was shocked such evil existed in the world. I was not unmoved by enormous violations of human rights under the USSR (particularly under Stalin) and Red China, the killing fields of Cambodia, the atrocities in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, etc. But I also realized that it was infeasible for the US to play Whack-a-Mole with rogue nations or leaders.
To a large part, I trusted political leadership to realize the bounded nature of our feasible commitments. I think, like many Americans, I was shocked by the events of 9/11, the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians. I did expect Bush to go after UBL, and when the Taliban regime protected UBL and his cohorts, I expected a response; what I did not expect was a man whom had run against Clinton's nation building would have fallen in the same trap of the Soviets, etc. I also had concerns about Saddam Hussein, whom certainly had a motive to strike against America and controlled more resources to make it happen. I also thought he well understood the sectarian issues that led his father not to pursue regime change at the close of the first Gulf War. Once Bush intervened, I thought we had a moral obligation to leave a functioning local government, not open a Pandora's Box of regional war, say, a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. But I did not envision indefinite commitments, one which continues to this day.
So I think my preference for a less activist foreign policy has always really been there. As to when I finally divorced from neo-con policy, it probably was due to two things: (1) the end of my patience was reached with the US backing the corrupt Karzai regime; (2) Obama's totally incompetent, political bungling of the Afghanistan surge decision. You don't split the difference of highest-risk, low-manpower options, and you don't announce a withdrawal before you've achieved military objectives. It's like boxing with one arm tied behind your back. You get what you pay for; either fight or cut your losses and move on. Unfortunately, Obama had boxed himself in with the absurd partisan rhetoric that the "real" war was in Afghanistan.
I've found the American exceptionalism discussion, explored in a relevant Cato Institute Event, to be interesting. I .do think our nation being one of immigrants, a revolution based on a more comprehensive application of liberty principles and equal standing under the law, and a reasonable stable democratic republic is unique; but I don't think we have a mission to propagate our application of liberty principles as a matter of force. I think we promote peace by liberty-based trade policies and spread the worthiness of our principles by exemplifying their consistent application domestically and prudently in international matters.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne and Townhall |
Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips". A Glen Campbell channel on Facebook recently featured the second clip with Stevie doing a soulful duet on the classic Bob Dylan tune.
