There are new images in the Gallery. (Click to the right.) Both were snapped in Santa Barbara, in December of 2009. In the one, I’m watching the news. In the other—and to offset the daily, news-watching aggro—I’m preparing to run on the Santa-Barbara beach.
Update (Jan. 21): Middle-aged men and women: What do you think I am? A toast to middle age. I like to say that I’m as old as Ann Coulter. And she too lies about her age.
Classical Liberalism, Feminism, Free Speech, Gender, IlanaMercer.com, Iraq, Military, Morality, Private Property, Sex, The State
Oh dear, some industrious Army general in Iraq wants to limit the wages of whoring in the military. Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo III, quite reasonably, reports ABC News, issued a policy on Nov. 4 “forbidding pregnancy among his soldiers.”
His policy statement said violation of the rule could be punishable by court martial, and that it would also apply to the men who get female soldiers pregnant, even if the couple is married.
Pregnant soldiers are immediately redeployed out of combat zones to bases where they can get comprehensive medical care.
“The true purpose behind this is to cause them to pause and think about, ‘Okay wait a minute. It was written in the order and I’m going to leave my team. I’m going to leave an outfit shorthanded,'” Cucolo said.”
[SNIP]
NO MORE MAKING Whoopy In The Military? What next? Leaving Iraq for lack of recreational outlets? We can only hope.
Anyone with a brain cell knows that the military, other than being an arm of the state, subject to all the malignancies that entails, is one of the Biggest Whore Houses around.
The authority on the subject is “Stephanie Gutmann, a Jewish woman out of Manhattan,” as Fred Reed forthrightly fingers her. Reed writes the following about Stephanie’s apolitical “reportorial” effort, which,
[D]escribed perfectly the fraud and double standards used to make women look successful in the army. Much of it would be hard to credit, except that I had seen it from outside … In the course of events I met Steph a couple of times, chatted on the phone, and lost contact with her. The book got few and bad reviews because it was not what the media wanted to hear. It was a fine book.
As is “Steph’s” Other Book. Read about it here. (I too have had a pleasant exchange or two with this lovely lady.)
Update (Dec. 23): To the distracting diversions in the Comments Section, including my responses (by necessity), let me repeat: The Posting Policy of BAB states: “Please note that ‘Barely A Blog’ is private property. Posts are published at the proprietor’s discretion.” Apparently this requires explanation, as participants prefer the fun of expressing themselves without the discipline of acquaintance with the philosophy espoused here.
THE CONFUSION about this statement demonstrates even more the need for participants to become “vaguely familiar with the political philosophy championed on this forum and the Mother Site, ilanamercer.com. Accordingly, there is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. I’m afraid you may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or tangible living room only if I let you so do.
My mother was saying, “Do you remember the post you wrote in May of 2006 titled ‘Holland Keeps Afloat; Why Can’t New Orleans?’? Well, Time magazine has finally caught up with you. In November of 2009, Time ran an article with a similar theme.”
IlanaMercer.com, a one-woman outfit, is generally ahead of the game and the pack—sometimes years in-the-lead. Why are ilanamercer.com and the companion site Barely A Blog such good causes? If you don’t already know, do read “Why Support ilanamercer.com” for but a few of the reasons. Or spend some time burrowing in the archives of BAB and ilanamercer.com.
Times are hard, but if you value the commentary and the community on this space; if you appreciate the time I spend in crafting daily, original, topical commentary, keeping the Comments Forum open for your venting; responding to Comments, and ensuring exchanges remain civil and grammatical—please consider showing your appreciation.
I’m afraid BAB will be closed to comments for now until, well, I can be assured that the time devoted to moderating this well-supervised, interactive, labor-intense forum is time well-spent.
Thank you for your generosity (my homie, T. Cup, says hi).
Merry Christmas and a happy Hanukah,
ILANA
Update (Dec. 14): Bar those few faithful souls whose commitment to my causes I appreciate more than they know, I’m afraid the response to our Christmas appeal has been poor.
Those of you who have my P.O. Box are welcome to use it (and keep it private).
What are you supporting? A marginalized voice that beats most well-funded group thinkers out there in coverage and commentary.
On the topic of those fattened collectivists: Neil Cavuto has begun, lately (on December 11, 2009, to be precise), to cover the discrepancy between the respective incomes of workers employed in the private vs. the parasitical sector. Cavuto got his column “idea” from USA-Today data.
I beat both entities to it.
Let’s see, when was my “Life in the Oink Sector” written? September 25, 2009. That column was cited by the New York Times’ “Economix” blog. Needless to say, the Times would have never ever bothered to apprise its readers of the cost “of these pampered pigs”:
“There are upward of 20 million of these pampered pigs, hogging 87,000 different institutions in government and public education, where the payrolls are always lard-laden in comparison to private-economy paysheets.”
Ultimately, what neither the Times nor Cavuto will ever do for you is speak to the economic-cum-moral principles that differentiate the voluntary sector from the work force that uses FORCE to keep itself larded up.
Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Law, Natural Law, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Religion, Science, The Courts
And very possibly, a future Supreme-Court justice. Sunstein, bosom buddy and intellectual soul mate to Barack, was confirmed the other day by the Senate. Cusses all around. The tenacious Glenn Beck, who forewarned about Van Jones, has been on the case. But WND’s Ellis Washington makes the clearer case (although he fails to appreciate that America IS already regulated to death):
Cass Sunstein: Regulating America to Death
By Ellis Washington
Animals should be allowed to sue their owners.
~ Cass Sunstein
Because people ascribe a degree of respectability to academics, intellectuals, philosophers and scholars, they can disregard the rights of the people much easier than a naked tyrant. In fact, Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche can go places Hitler, Stalin, Chavez and Obama could never dream.
As I have written many times, the Obama administration are the masters of misdirection and chaos theory; therefore, while the America people last week were transfixed on the resignation of “Green Czar” Van Jones, another even more dangerous fascist from the academy quietly slipped through the portals of power.
Last Thursday Cass Sunstein, a former colleague and mentor of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 57-40 as the new director of regulatory affairs and information, an obscure but powerful agency within the Office of Management and Budget. Here is what the “regulatory czar” does: He regulates laws – past, present and future.
Sunstein is a friendly fascist who only “nudges” people to bow to his will. TV host Glenn Beck says of Cass Sunstein that he is “the most powerful invisible man you’ll ever see.”
Are we headed for a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss? Find out in “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America” Judge Richard A. Posner, an intellectual mentor of mine and former colleague with Sunstein and Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, said the following about Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a leading scholar on animal rights with whom Sunstein is often associated:
Since the publication of “Animal Liberation” [1975], Singer has received a wide range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of animal rights. … Richard Posner challenged that Singer failed to see the “radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees.
While Sunstein spent his entire career inventing rights for rats, dogs and pigs that would make the Constitution’s framers spin in their graves, he is even more despicable in casting aspersions against constitutional rights plainly delineated in the Bill of Rights. For example, here is Sunstein views on the Second Amendment right to bear arms:
“My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than [it] appears.”
In 2008 Sunstein co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. “Nudge” discusses how public and private organizations can “help people” to make better choices in their daily lives since apparently Sunstein and his busybody socialist colleagues of the academy think that We the People are too stupid to live our own lives our own way and accept the consequences. Thaler and Sunstein argue that: People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. Space will not allow me to adequately detail the utter tyranny and naked assault on our constitutional rights Sunstein plans to launch against American capitalism in his new role as regulatory czar.
Here is a summary of the autocracy Americans can expect from Czar Sunstein: * Sunstein advocates a “Second Bill of Rights” even more totalizing and all-consuming than initially proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care and a right to protection against monopolies. * Sunstein notes that personhood need not be conferred upon an animal in order to grant it legal standing for suit. * Sunstein has argued that “we should celebrate tax day.” * Rumor has it that Obama is grooming Sunstein as a future Supreme Court justice.
Last week Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said, “[Sunstein] is to the left of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The leitmotiv of Sunstein’s entire legal philosophy and worldview is encapsulated in two very evil and failed philosophies of the past: 1) Social Darwinism [evolution], and 2) Moral Relativism – a theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.
In other words, nothing has more intrinsic value than anything else. Sunstein’s ideas on judicial minimalism and behavioral economics belie the fact that for almost 30 years he has assaulted the Judeo-Christian traditions of Natural Law so venerated by the Constitution’s framers to preserve America’s republic.
To Sunstein ideas like “liberty,” “freedom” and “Natural Law” are irrelevant and counterproductive to his grand, socialist view of law rooted in moral relativism and social Darwinism. That’s how Sunstein can have a scholarship named after his dead dog while concurrently mandating environmental policies that will put tens of thousands of American farmers out of business by fostering ever expanding environmental, land and water regulations that will de facto make farming too cost-prohibitive.
What Mussolini, Stalin and Mao did in the light to harm their citizens and deny them their fundamental human rights, Cass Sunstein, as Obama’s regulatory czar, will do in the night by slowly, irrevocably regulating America to death. Sunstein reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Othello” when the sinister Iago repeatedly whispered his verbal venom into the receptive ear of Othello (Obama), which lead to his demise. Indeed, Sunstein said it best: “There is no liberty without dependency.”
Update I (Sept. 12): I’m not mad about the cheapened Argument From Hitler (in the Comments Section). So far, Barack is continuing the “work” Bush and others before him began. Few Republicans fussed about the breakneck speed at which the Bush Administration concentrated power in the executive, to give but one example. Or the way it expanded the warfare state, to give another. So far, I don’t see a qualitative difference between Bush and Obama; they exist on the same continuum of accreting statism.
Update II: I wonder if crazy Cass would come for me if he read my defense of Michael Vick: In Defense Of Michael Vick I & In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2.
Update III (Sept. 13): To the imperious reader who is unhappy with my disinterest in the futile, immaterial evolution debate: We are not about to go off-topic and veer into evolution. Take it behind the scenes with Myron. As for the “not good enough” complaint: More so than most columnists and writers, I have applied libertarian thinking to a wide-ranging array of topics, from intellectual property to antitrust, to Just War, to economy, Hollywood, Islam—you name it, I’ve written about it. Far more important than the idiotic evolution debate has been my defense of the unique, privileged, preeminent nature of humanity in the universe. The articulation of that philosophical position is far more significant than the idiotic debates about evolution, engaged in by the Godless neocons/Republicans and their adversaries. Now, if the bitching reader were a major donor toward my generally thankless efforts at shedding light where darkness is the rule—then I might indulge him. But, alas, he isn’t.
Addendum: Here’s fodder for another fit over my unorthodox positions: Even more disinterested am I in whether God exists or not. I conduct my life with morality and ethics. Some would say that’s godly enough. Others would demand communal worship. Frankly, I don’t care. It makes no sense to assert or fight over the irrational and the supernatural; that which cannot be proven. I respect believers and defend the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition–this is the sum of my work. That’s all that matters. To me, at least. (At that’s what counts.)