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Friday, August 8, 2014

Miscellany: 8/08/14

Quote of the Day
Give people a convincing reason and they will lay down their very lives.
Patrick Dixon

Tweet of the Day
In reply to:
Before going further, I am no Nazi sympathizer; I still have nightmarish memories from high school clips on concentration camp liberation: piles of corpses, emaciated survivors. I have written against our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in earlier posts this week. I don't think Dresden was discussed during my history classes; I think I stumbled across the atrocity a few years back on the Internet.

A sample from the BBC (and the following from the Guardian):
Sixty-eight years ago today, British and American aircraft dropped thousands of tons of high-explosive bombs on the German town of Dresden.
The fire storm it unleashed destroyed six square miles of the city centre and killed an estimated 25,000 people, almost all of them were civilians.
Victor Gregg was a soldier in the British 10th Parachute Regiment when he was captured at Arnhem in 1944. As a prisoner of war he worked in a town near Dresden.
After getting caught sabotaging a factory he was sent for execution in Dresden on the day the air raids began.
I survived the bombing of Dresden and continue to believe it was a war crime
Then came the evening of the 13 February, 1945 – 68 years ago this week. I was a prisoner of war held in Dresden...As the incendiaries fell, the phosphorus clung to the bodies of those below, turning them into human torches. The screaming of those who were being burned alive was added to the cries of those not yet hit. There was no need for flares to lead the second wave of bombers to their target, as the whole city had become a gigantic torch. It must have been visible to the pilots from a hundred miles away. Dresden had no defences, no anti-aircraft guns, no searchlights, nothing.
When you read a then girl's account of people falling down before her unable to breath, being set on fire, a mother trying to escape with her baby, only to lose him into this hell on earth...

This is what Gregg thinks of these missile/bombing strategies of the likes of Clinton and Obama:
My justification for still harbouring these attitudes is the events in European history since the ending of the second world war. The massacres in Bosnia at Srebrenica, the hurling of Tomahawk missiles by British naval cruisers into the centre of an inhabited Benghazi, the manner in which as a nation we still tend to be sympathetic to the use of superior aircraft strength to bomb overcrowded refugee centres. These are the reasons my anger has refused to subside.
Image of the Day


Via Alex Auman
Via Lew Rockwell

Chart of the Day

Via Lew Rockwell
Remy's Back and Entering the TSA Contest



A Rant on Tom Woods and Anthony Gregory on George Bush

Let me start by saying that, without any prompting from Woods and Gregory, I could come up with a long list of issues with George W. Bush, including:

  • the second-largest addition to the nominal federal debt (an argument could be made about FDR's spending during WWII)
  • the first super-bureaucracy, DHS, including the TSA
  • his reluctant use of the veto as a check on creeping government expansion
  • one of the largest expansions in domestic spending since LBJ, including a radically expanded Education Dept. under No Child Left Behind
  • Sarbanes-Oxley, a radical regulatory overreach
  • the Patriot Act
  • the nomination of dubiously qualified Texas crony associates to AG and SCOTUS
  • an unfunded Medicare drug benefit expansion
  • dubious interventions against Afghanistan and Iraq, neither which initiated hostilities, was a credible military threat and had well-known governance challenges
  • a Keynesian stimulus and unprecedented economic intervention in 2008, including TARP
Gregory brought up other things up including stripping Katrina citizens of their weapons, etc., but you know, I'm a little fed up with Bush bashing in general; Bush only had nominal control over Congress between 2003-2006--not strong enough to make his own tax cuts permanent, basically inherited a correcting stock market, corporate scandals (Enron, Tyco, etc.), and 9/11 and ended with a severe recession, once again instigated by ruinous Fed policy. In each criticism above, in terms of funding and regulation, we should point out the Democrats objected it wasn't nearly enough. We should point out conservative Republicans opposed most of the domestic policy expansions/interventions. Medicare expansion required some legislative arm-twisting to get out of the House, for instance.

But as to being the worst President of one's lifetime (Gregory)? Give me a break. To a certain extent it depends how old one is, but Obama not only has run up the biggest debt in American history, but we've seen the NSA scandal, the obscenely unconstitutional ObamaCare, Dodd N Frankenstein, an unparalleled expansion of executive power grab, an escalation of unauthorized drone activities and meddling across the globe. Keep in mind Obama has sustained, even expanded policies he explicitly criticized Bush about. And let's not forget LBJ's radical escalation of the Vietnam War using conscription and the Great Society, a gigantic expansion of failed policies, including Medicare, not to mention race riots and other unrest. There was Nixon's abuse of power in Watergate, the birth of the EPA, the end of the gold-backed dollar. Under Clinton, we had Waco, intervention and nation building in East Europe, domestic terrorism, the rise of Al Qaeda, and an unsustainable Nasdaq boom and the first phase of the ruinous housing bubble. 


Tom Woods got a little snide particularly near the end of the podcast to the point I wanted to kick his ass. He and Gregory seemed to be in a contest over whom could bash Bush the most, thinking that everyone has forgotten how bad Bush was given 6 years of the hapless incompetent Obama regime. Keep in mind this piece of work-in-chief had supermajority control of Congress his first 2 years and instead of basically facilitating a fragile recovery, the Dems smother the fire with ObamaCare and Dodd N Frankenstein, engage in government-dominated economic stimulus aimed at green technology, infrastructure, and education. They ran up the ideological scorecard. Woods and Gregory are basically arguing there's little difference between the Dems and GOP--the GOP is simply Big Government Lite; and the Republicans/conservatives are being hypocritical by applying different standards to Bush and Obama. This is pure bullshit, and it's a pet peeve. Conservatives pushed back on TARP, Medicare, and other policies. As I recently quoted Goodman, an Independent Institute colleague of Gregory, all of the innovative policy ideas over the past 25 years have come from the right side of the aisle. It's very difficult to run against unsustainable Santa Claus; look at how Paul Ryan became the target of Dem-bashing Grandma-over-the-cliff over even modest entitlement reforms, even as the Dems were raiding Medicare funding to help pay for ObamaCare. I'm not saying the GOP doesn't have its own share of blame, but when you threaten spending and regulation, all the special interests, crony capitalists benefiting from the status quo come out of the woodwork.

A Viral TD Bank Ad



Facebook Corner


I think people are reading too much into this. I don't see him as saying anything about those whom vote for someone--anyone--else or don't vote. The point is if and when you vote for someone and he turns out to be a miserable failure, like Obama, you have no one to blame except yourself.


(National Review). Rich Lowry: The leader of the free world wants the GOP to stop hatin'. 
Said The One whom focuses on lovin' Bush, the GOP, the Tea Party, Fox News, ...

(Jeffrey Tucker). Prison is a cruel system, completely out of control, and one with an immense human cost. It's a violation of human rights. http://tucker.liberty.me/2014/08/08/the-prison-system-is-a-violation-of-human-rights/
You are dead wrong about this: "Rand Paul is singular among Republicans who have even broached the topic." This comes from a "Progressive" website, re: Paul Ryan's poverty plan: "On criminal justice, Ryan quietly shifted his position to endorse bipartisan, progressive reform including moves to reform draconian drug sentences, and policies that ease re-entry from prison...He endorses several sentencing reforms, including a bipartisan bill to ease draconian drug prison terms, and to eliminate racially disparate sentences for crack and powder cocaine sentences. He also calls for improved rehabilitation programs for prisoners, and opportunities to earn credits for early release from prison."

(Lew Rockwell). So Sue Me: Obama Trails In Executive Order Rankings
This is so retarded. The idiot writing this article first of all doesn't know the difference between executive actions vs. executive orders; "Obama was the first modern president to use executive actions in lieu of executive orders or executive memoranda." Executive actions, unlike the others, don't have the force of law. The House is suing over executive actions. I'm not even a parasitic lawyer, and I know the difference; this piece of work couldn't even fact-check his own article heading.

 Lew must have low standards to reference this piece of crap. Obama has made it clear that he has no interest in compromise, it's either the GOP capitulates to what he wants, or he'll act on his own. This is a philosophy of tin-pot dictators.

 This shallow comparison of executive orders as though the nature and extent of orders are even comparable is methodologically so absurd the author would flunk Statistics 101.

 There are reasons to criticize the lawsuit, but Rockwell seems to forget that the House passed a bill to legally change the enforcement date, and Obama said he would veto the bill because it was "unnecessary". That is an implicit admission that he knew he was trying to legislate, a violation of the Balance of Powers.

(Reason). Does the U.S. have a responsibility to intervene in Iraq to protect civilians from ISIL and a situation U.S. policy helped create?
No, this is a moral requirement for the Iraqi government and their regional allies. ISIS remains responsible for genocide. We do not have the authority or resources to play Whac-a-Mole on global atrocities. What I do think we can and should do is expand our immigration policy for persecuted religious minorities.

(Jeffrey Tucker). Bomb Iraq! What an idea the geniuses in Washington have come up with. 24 years of bombing hasn't achieved the goal but that just means we are one bombing campaign short of total victory.
Nothing like moral hazardous policy to keep Iraqi Air Force pilots glued to their seats, not to mention inviting blowback from ISIS on US interests. When will they ever learn?

(Lew Rockwell). Tom DiLorenzo is 60 today–though you could never tell it by looking at him. A superb teacher and scholar in economics and American history, he has–to take just one achievement–changed the climate of opinion on Lincoln, the founder of the American imperium, which has gone on to wreck our freedom, and much of the world besides. Thanks to Tom, no professor or journalist can feel safe in retelling the regime’s lie about St. Abraham. Too many Americans, especially students, know the truth. Tom, many, many happy returns.
It takes enormous courage to take on establishment historians vested in Statist mythology; he's been a lightning rod. As a fellow writer/scholar, I admire his compelling writing style; some of his essays, e.g., on economic fascism and the myth of natural monopolies, are some of the finest, most persuasive I've ever read. I look forward to every new piece he posts, and he was the first name on my list of Tom Woods podcast interviews (on which he has subsequently appeared)

(Reason). Congress needs to assert itself by taking an active role in deciding what to do (or not do) about ISIS, rather than simply leaving it up to the president.
i like how republlcans are outraged when a democrat takes unilateral action, and democrats are outraged when a republican takes unilateral action. ever notice how such policies are applied by members of each party....but outrage is expressed based on which party holds the executive? "Its the executive party outrage flip flop rule" C'mon people.
Good or bad, at least Bush had the integrity to seek Congressional approval, and at the time he had popular support. The current Fascist-in-Chief, who, by the way, holds a Nobel Peace Prize, ran on the fact that he OPPOSED intervention in Iraq. And he took credit for getting us out of Iraq, even though he didn't expedite GWB's own schedule and in fact failed to convince Iraq to extend our stay. Come on, people; this troll's analysis is pathetic.

(Reason). When asked who punched him, he replied, "The police."
 I am a cop. I do crazy things like arrest burglars, stop drunk people from fighting, and help people who have no one else to call. 
I like reason.com but it seems that more and more posts are getting anti-police. 
I guess I'm part of the problem.
But would you testify about a cop you saw abuse his power and/or stop him? Are you saying your fellow cops wouldn't target or isolate you for ratting them out?

More Proposals









Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via IPI
Courtesy of Henry Payne via Reason
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Billy Joel, "Uptown Girl". I love this bouncy retro arrangement, almost like an updated Frankie Valli and the Four Season's sound. Billy Joel was living every American boy's fantasy--a pop star dating the girl next door, Christie Brinkley...


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