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Saturday, March 31, 2018

Post #3607 M

Quote of the Day

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.
Stephen Covey  


Image of the Day




Escaping the People's Republic of California





The Unintended Consequences of the Minimum Wage Legislation



Facebook Corner


[my response to a pro-abort troll's claim to a pro-life libertarian view that fetuses need their mother's consent, etc.]

The functionality of a womb is related to reproduction; if and when a woman consents to sex, she implicitly consents to the outcome of such an act. (There are procedures and technologies available to minimize the outcome of pregnancy.)

The preborn child doesn't need "permission" to implant herself in her mother's womb. She is not her mother's egg; she's biologically distinct person with her own rights, who occupies the womb for a limited, developmentally necessary period of time.

As to the baby "enslaving" her mother, the baby does no such thing. The baby is a consequence of her parent's consensual act, and her existence was a known risk of that behavior. A contract by its nature cedes certain aspects of freedom; when I accept a job, I don't have rights outside the scope of the contract.

Of course, we care about the life and health of a pregnant woman's body; among other things, the preborn baby depends on her mother's ability to provide sustenance for her own development to thrive.

As for the troll's "rights", she certainly has a right to express her opinion, and as we know the opinion exists outside this group, with or without our permission. But we have a right to associate with others voluntarily, and that implies the right to dissociate ourselves from others. I say, lose/nuke the troll

[An anti-IP libertarian lashes out at the pro-abort troll because she asserts her own books are her intellectual property.]

I will agree with her on the principle of intellectual property.; nobody else owns the product of my own thoughts (unless I develop them under employment). Any distinction from physical labor is self-serving and arbitrary. I'm with Lysander Spooner and others on this. However, I see the original point as ad hominem in nature in this post.

[Mocking pro-abort "fairness" in a pro-life thread]

I'm sure the pro-aborts would argue they kill equally male and female babies.

[Comments on a LifeSiteNews comments on the biased media coverage post-Parkland]

Yeah, I remember CBS News interrupting the NCAA basketball coverage with a "special report" to hype the gun-control event.

[Responding to a sister-in-law's repost of an opinion blaming parents for failing public education]

 Nope. There is much to say about parents not fully vested in their children's education, but this country has vastly multiplied money spent on public education since the 1970's with flat line academic performance outcomes. This is the result of the government monopoly on education and teacher union contracts that make it close to impossible to fire or layoff mediocre teachers.

[libertarianism.org, a Cato Institute affiliation, seems obsessed with what they believe as a sympathetic pro-Confederacy stand by us Civil War critics. The scare quotes are a response to Cato's blurb mocking us critics as "libertarians":]

Do I believe abolitionist Lysander Spooner's contemporary opposition to the Civil War or the "libertarians" who posted this crap?

;[Democrats are still trying to compare Trump's extramarital affairs to Clinton's affairs with women working for him as governor and POTUS, basically arguing conservatives are hypocrites.]

Unlike Clinton, who serially exploited women who served under him in public service, Stormy Daniels did not work for Trump, in or out of office and certainly not during his Presidency--in fact, I think he was a registered Dem at the time. The issue about Clinton had to do with violations of sexual harassment policy as a public service administrator, not about extramarital sex


Political Cartoon



Courtesy of Eric Allie via IPI


Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists


Taylor Dayne, "Tell It To My Heart". The first of 7 consecutive Top 10 hits.

Friday, March 30, 2018

Post #3606 M

Quote of the Day

The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert  

Mackey On the Whole Foods/Amazon Merger, Trump et al.




Eileen Creates Value in the World




Kibbe On the Bipartisan Push To Grow the Debt




Kibbe On Going Into Debt To Research the Effects of Cocaine on Quail Lovelives



Political Cartoon


Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall


Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists


Neil Sedaka (with his daughter Dara), "Should've Never Let You Go". This concludes my Sedaka series.

Rant of the Day: 3/30/18

I've never made a secret of my disdain for Fox News Channel and Hannity in particular. (The latter is a particularly obnoxious, repetitious, hypocritical, enabling sycophant of Trump. For context in this essay, Hannity has constantly hero-worshipped Reagan for decades.)

Hannity has hero-worshiped Reagan during his entire radio talk show career. Ironically I wasn't much of a fan during the actual Reagan years (which were my waning days as a conservative Democrat): I was a harsh critic of the deficits piled up during his Presidency. As a current libertarian, I still am a critic of his failure to cut government and foreign interventionist policies, among other things, certainly no rose-colored glasses.

But Hannity, on his show the other day, made an assertion that Trump was far more effective and productive than Reagan was during his early Presidency. This is absurd on so many levels:

  • Reagan never had a GOP-controlled House.
  • Reagan inherited a sluggish, recessionary economy where the Fed pushed the funds rate to about 20%
  • Trump has added about $1.1T to the national debt in his first 14 months, with a GOP-controlled Congress behind him. That over half of what Reagan did over 2 terms, countered by a divided or opposition Congress. .Never mind that Trump promised to pay off the debt.
  • Reagan was a principled pro-liberty conservative while Trump is a faux populist who has flipped-flopped repeatedly on principle. 
Never mind the fact that Trump couldn't get repeal of ObamaCare done, He hasn't got a functional budget under control, leaping from one shutdown crisis to the next. He spends too much time on tweets, and his Administration has been unstable. 


Thursday, March 29, 2018

Post #3604 M

Quote of the Day

Avoid the crowd. 
Do your own thinking independently. 
Be the chess player, not the chess piece.
Ralph Charell  

Image of the Day




Crazy Liquor Laws




Stossel On the New Generation of Black Conservatives




Lack of Intellectual Diversity in Silicon Valley





Courtesy of Tom Stiglich via Townhall

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists


Neil Sedaka, "Love in the Shadows". I will follow up this series soon with Taylor Dayne.



Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Post #3603 M

Quote of the Day

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life,
hat no man can sincerely try to help another 
without helping himself. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson  

From the New Blog

  1. She's a Trumpkin and insists on watching Hannity every evening.
  2. The xenophobes want "illegals" to self-incriminate. They, like un-American Trump, prefer to ignore the Constitution (Amendment 5), which applies to all residents. Ignore the question. Census
  3. The last thing I want to do is defend GOP policies. But when I read economically illiterate leftist trolls argue that high-tax, high-regulation, high-spending Dems bring prosperity and the GOP brings recession: ENOUGH!
  4. So much for Trump learning from his mistakes. "Rob Porter"
  5. Well, I'm not sure Bolton is the WORST mistake Trump has made; his anti-trade and anti-immigration policies were unforced blunders. But certainly the Bolton pick contradicts his America First campaign rhetoric. "Jimmy Carter"
  6. Replying to   and 
    .....Absolute bullshit. Reagan inherited Carter pick Volcker's rate hikes, The Fed stopped its hikes during the early 1980 recession but almost doubled its funds rate over the year starting that summer. And the 1990-1 recession ended over a year before Clinton started.
  7. The Chinese are threatening to slap a 25% tariff on American pork in reltaliation to the Trump tariffs. That's just great--who is going to buy $1.1 T of TrumpDebt Treasury bills now?
  8. Not all Parkland shooting survivors are gullible anti-liberty minions of manipulative Statist activists and media.
  9. This is how I see a boxing match between Trump and Biden:
  10. The Democrats are suddenly obsessed with Trump's affairs in the 2000's when, surprise, surprise, he was a registered Democrat, It's not like as a feminist governor or POTUS, he exposed himself to or got a blow job from his subordinates.
  11. Do you think Reagan would ever get elected today given the anti-immigrant GOP?
Just a reminder that only the free market can truly serve veterans, not a government monopoly which has failed time and again. Trump isn't curing the problem; he's changing the bandage. "Ronny Jackson"
  1. Replying to 
    HELL NO! The State enslaves, steals, and kills. Liberty is liberation from the State.
  2. Replying to 
    Both parties suck. The government sucks. The only solution is the free market.
  3. God has given you one face, and you Democrats speak out of the other.
  4. The course of Trump's Presidency never did run smooth
  5. Those who are politicians by any other name would smell as foul
  6. Or one of over 320M Americans.
  7. I call on Attorney General Sessions to file federal charges against the cops who murdered this young man.
  8. This is impossible to excuse or defend. There is no evidence to support the notion that that multiple cops outnumbering a man who never shot at them needed to resort to disproportionate lethal force.
  9. Telling Trump he's FIRED!
  10. How awful that John Paul Stevens , in the 8 years he's been retired, still has no regard for the unalienable right of self-defense? This is a natural right, not a State-conferred right. Stevens is a defender of the State, not the people.
  11. What the hell is wrong with the immoral xenophobic Trump Administration, which never turns down an opportunity to evict foreign-born visitors, even if they've contributed to the economy for a generation? Liberians
  12. Replying to 
    No, what will deter mass murderers is making schools less of an enabling , defenseless soft target. Don't stereotype conservatives. We are not right wing authoritarians. Let's point it was Democrats that wrecked the Bracero program and unions have ALWAYS opposed immigration.
  13. As usual, the hypocritical politically correct left-fascists attack anyone who departs from their orthodoxy. Never mind almost 60 million preborn children, unlike their preditated murderers, were denied due process. "Kevin Williamson"
  14. Replying to 
    Actually, 50% of the preborn babies intentionally murdered by their mommies are female

DEAD WRONG: School Shootings Are On the Increase




Statist Manipulators vs. Individual Rights




Conservatives In the Classical Liberal Tradition





Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Ken Catalino via Townhall


Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists


Neil Sedaka, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" (slow, bluesy version). Sedaka's last Top 10, a bluesy remake of his original #1.        We're about to wind up this series.