Category Archives: Government

UPDATED: Cameron’s Categorical Confusion

Business, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Government, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Science, Technology

Off-shore oil driller and acclaimed scientist and inventor James Cameron, who “has worked extensively with robot submarines,” is annoyed that the film directors running BP have not used his know-how to plug the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Reverse that; Cameron is the filmer; BP the explorer. But you get how ridiculous Cameron’s puff is; how inflated Hollywood’s sense of itself is.

What matters is that the public get an idea of how crucial to life itself are the hard sciences, although a whole lot will have to change before the youth, streaming into law, health care and finance for the obvious reason (it begins with a “g”) change course, and those with the aptitude do hard science.

UPDATE (June 4): The images of immobilized pelicans weighed down by oil are heartbreaking. In the animal rescue and clean-up efforts we ought to begin to see the strength of private initiative.

The political Idiocracy continues to make hay of this environmental nightmare. Insisting Big Daddy O was supposed to clean up, show more rage, froth at the mouth more.

The fact that the POTUS and the FLOTUS like to live it up is perhpas unseemly. But the idea that if Obama were not so self-absorbed, or more unhinged emotionally, he’d do what’s right to save our ravaged coast—this is misguided.

This is so sad. (Here are my birdies.)

In “Regulation Encourages Recklessness” I spoke to what I think is at the root of environmental despoliation:

• Regulations, which are the culmination of agreements between the regulated and the regulators, to the detriment of those left out the loop: wild life and the rest of us.

• The tragedy of the commons, i.e., the absence of property rights: “Government-controlled resources go to seed because there is no private ownership of the means of production. Entrusted with the management of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of millions of people you don’t know, don’t care about, are unaccountable to, and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement except to whine like wimps—how long before your performance plummets?”

• The modern corporate colossus resembles government in many ways.

My smart readers can think over the last point—have at it. I’ll be back to mark your pixelated papers.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Republican

Barack Obama, Ethics, Government, Law, Morality, Politics, Republicans

The Joe Sestak “scandal” is nothing but garden-variety politics routinely practiced by both parties. Yet as Rome burns, such quid pro quo is what is consuming the Republican Party’s bobbleheads. The signal dishonor of which Obama operatives stand accused, via Sam Stein, is offering a job to “Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn) in exchange for him not entering the Pennsylvania Senate primary.” The act has “seasoned political observers, historians, and lawyers responding with veritable yawns”:

American presidential history is littered with quid pro quos, implicit and explicit secret job offers, and backroom deals, so much so that the Sestak offer may be more the norm than the exception to it.
“It is completely unexceptional,” said Dr. Russell Riley, associate professor and chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia. “I read some place today that this is evidently illegal, which was shocking news to me. I don’t know what the statutes are that would bear on this… it just doesn’t seem to me to particularly rise to the level of being newsworthy in the first place and the fact that it’s spun out into a scandal has been surprising.”
George Edwards, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University, says: “There is no question whatsoever that presidents have often offered people positions to encourage them not to do something or make it awkward for them to do it. Presidents have also offered people back-ups if they ran for an office and lost. All this is old news historically.”

The complete column is HERE.

Note, this is not to say the shenanigans of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and President Bill Clinton were legal. They could very well be illegal. They are certainly morally dubious. But politicians are by definition immoral. By blowing the scandal du jour out of proportion, an unspeakably crooked class is made to sweat the small stuff only.

I guess Republicans have a stake in perpetuating this state-of-affairs.

Updated: South African Police Rounds Up ‘Right-Wing Militia’

Africa, Government, GUNS, Law, Liberty, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Republicans, South-Africa, Terrorism

What goes for the reconstituted South African Police Force, a corrupt, illiterate, and ill-trained force, riven by feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties, is organized enough to go after “right-wing militia.”

Taking a page out of the unholy American hymnbook, an extremist—in the eyes of the law and the propagandized at large—is any patriot who doesn’t approve of pillage politics, loss of all individual liberties and, in the case of South Africa, a massive transfer of assets from owners to non-owners while, simultaneously killing off the former.

THE OUTRAGE HERE is that the arrest is linked to an email I too received, which did no more than speak of what is underway in South Africa and attach images of harpooned, raped, sodomized, skewered, white victims. Notice that the authenticity of the so-called subversive material has not been denied by the arresting authorities.

Here’s the report:

“APA – Cape Town (South Africa) South African police this week swooped on members of an extremist right-wing organisation, the Suidlanders, as part of an investigation into plans to sabotage the soccer World Cup, APA learns here Sunday.

Raids have taken place in Pretoria and Mpumalanga and come in the wake of heightened racial tensions after the murder of white supremacist leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche and the recent outbursts by African National Congress Youth League president Julius Malema. [No arrests of his ilk, so far.]

Earlier this week, the police also swooped on the Worcester home of Frederick Rabie, a former lieutenant colonel in the old civilian force commandos, in the Cape Province. He was arrested and police discovered an arms cache, including explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his house. The bust comes a week after the arrest of the head of security at the Worcester Magistrate’s Court (in the Western Cape Province), Henry Harding, following the discovery of a cache of explosives, firearms, ammunition and drugs in underground storerooms at the magistrate’s court.

Rabie was given bail and will appear in court on Monday.

The police investigation into the suspected sabotage plot is linked to an e-mail calling on foreigners to boycott the World Cup that is being circulated worldwide. It talks of a war against white South Africans and carries graphic details and bloody photographs of white victims of crime. Claiming to reveal information suppressed by the South African Police Force (SAPF) and the media, the e-mail urges foreigners to stay away from South Africa during the World Cup.

Claiming that the country is on the verge of a full-blown revolution that would lead to civil war, the website says : ‘The time has come for people to realise they cannot be on the sideline any longer and everybody’s participation is needed to defend the last bastion of a true Christian nation against total annihilation.’

Sources this week confirmed that alleged plans by right-wing elements to ‘destabilise’ South Africa in the run-up to the World Cup were being taken “seriously”. Police spokesman Colonel Vish Naidoo refused to comment on the investigations, but said that the security forces were prepared for any eventuality during the World Cup.”

[SNIP]

BACK HOME, AND according to William N. Grigg’s update on the Hutaree prosecution:

“the Hutaree defendants, U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Roberts provides extensive excerpts from the evidence. This includes redacted transcripts of conversations in which militia David and Joshua Stone, Michael Meeks, and Kristopher Sickles talk about killing judges and law enforcement personnel.

The ellipses littering the transcript are tangible evidence of cherry-picking by the prosecution.

Even orphaned from context, however, the recorded conversations don’t amount to evidence of a criminal conspiracy, but rather a tendency to engage in the worst kind of self-deluded, adolescent locker-room braggadoccio.” [sic]

UPDATE: I’m growing tired of the Comments Section always plumping for the Republicans, no matter how I and others have labored over the years to show that once in power, there is not an iota of difference between the parties. Really tired. Why should I advertise for the creeps? I’m also tired of adding links to my work to show that, for example, reports maligning patriotic Americans were begun under Bush.

Read up. Search under “Republicans” in BAB’s archive and under the Articles archive on the main site.