Category Archives: America

The Costs Of The Drone & Family

America, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Media

Praag.org (where my weekly column can be read too) is a good source for unreported or underreported US news.

Item: “The Council on Foreign Relations has released its estimates on the year’s covert targeted killings in Yemen and Pakistan, carried out primarily by drones. The Council estimates a total of 3,520 casualties since the drone strike program began in 2004, of whom 457 have been civilians. …” MORE.

Item: The Obama daughters were listed as “senior staff” for “the June 21-27, 2011, trip taken by First Lady Michelle Obama, her family and her staff to South Africa and Botswana. The passenger manifests confirm the presence of Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha on the trip. …” MORE.

Those are some of the costs to this- and other countries of The Drone and his family.

Can Freedom Lovers Chill In Chile?

America, Britain, Free Markets, GUNS, Private Property, Regulation, Taxation

After watching a property search on House Hunters International, I fell in love with Chile.

Life in certain parts of the country offers quite a few of the prerequisites on my list:

* A cold climate: I detest the heat; the brain functions optimally at 65 degrees.
* Beautiful landscapes.
* Very little crime (because of the country’s demographic make-up).
* Wonderful value (in this episode, home hunter “Michelle” purchased upwards of 20 acres of lake view in Panguipulli, for under US $200,000).
* Gun ownership. While it is not “a constitutional right, personal firearm ownership is permitted in Chile.”

Can Chilean property taxes be higher than in the Evergreen State, where, in order to keep up with the price of the miseducation of the effing kids by their unionized educrats, rates increase irrespective of property value? I doubt it. Considering how cheap property is in Chile, taxes on it are likely lower.

I have twice written positively about Chile: “A Vote For Chile’s President” (a column) and “Chile Is No Haiti” (a blog post).

As if to confirm my positive impression of the country, released today by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal is “the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom.” Chile is said to “excel in Latin America.”

Overall, the country ranks number 7 with the US falling behind to number 12.

… The U.S. and the U.K, historically champions of free enterprise, have suffered the most pronounced declines. Both countries now fall in the “mostly free” category. … But as the U.S. economy languishes, many countries are leaping ahead, thanks to policies that enhance economic freedom—the same ones that made the U.S. economy the most powerful in the world. …
… Hong Kong continues to dominate the list, followed by Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand and Canada. These are the only countries to earn the index’s “economically free” designation. Mauritius earned top honors among African countries and Chile excelled in Latin America. Despite the turmoil in the Middle East, several Gulf states, led by Bahrain, earned designation as “mostly free.”
… A realignment is under way in Europe, according to the index’s findings. Eighteen European nations, including Germany, Sweden, Georgia and Poland, have reached new highs in economic freedom. …

MORE.

WASPocracy Replaced By An Idiocracy

America, Christianity, Education, Etiquette, History, The Zeitgeist

Now that America’s “unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class” has been destroyed, Joseph Epstein reminisces longingly about the lost and great benefits to society of this untitled aristocracy’s sense of noblesse oblige.

Epstein, however, wrongly suggests America’s “WASP establishment” has been replaced with a “meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation’s most prestigious schools.”

The WASPocracy was replaced by an Idiocracy.

The prevailing wisdom until now has been that the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) “stood for all that was uptight and generally repressive in American culture.” But those who could not wait for their demise are suddenly bewailing it:

… the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a 1990 book called “The Way of the Wasp,” Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were “success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything.”
Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren’t, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life. As a ruling class, today’s new meritocracy has failed to provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.

I like this. I’ve always said that IQ is in the math-intense fields of inquiry and study:

Apart from mathematics, which demands a high IQ, and science, which requires a distinct aptitude, the only thing that normal undergraduate schooling prepares a person for is… more schooling. Having been a good student, in other words, means nothing more than that one was good at school: One had the discipline to do as one was told, learned the skill of quick response to oral and written questions, figured out what professors wanted and gave it to them.


MORE.