Category Archives: Liberty

Updated: In The New Individualist (Get It!)

Ilana Mercer, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Liberty, Media, Objectivism

Under Sherrie Gossett’s capable editorial and stylistic tutelage (as well as well as the brilliant David Kelley, Roger Donway, and others), The New Individualist, The Objectivist Magazine, is both sleek and substantive, rather than tinny and rigidly ideological. The Winter 2010 issue of TNI features a new, minimalist, elegant design, and two pieces by me: “Life In The Oink Sector,” and “Man With the Reverse Midas Touch.”

Please purchase this issue—and if possible, a subscription to TNI—to show your support for this writer and the publisher. Here is your chance to support worthy writers and publishers. Featuring thinkers such as David Kelley and Roger Donway, you’ll be well-rewarded.

Update (March 14): BAB frequenter Hugo Schmidt writes an interesting review in TNI of Robert Spencer’s Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is And Islam Isn’t. As I say, there is a lot that’s worth reading in the new issue. Get it! Subscribe or order an issue.

Updated: The Law Of Medina (Debra)

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Elections, Founding Fathers, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Liberty

She bears the name of another extraordinary woman, the Prophet Deborah, who was judge and leader of Israel in antiquity. Debra Medina is in the race against the incumbent, Rick Perry, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to “capture the government of the second biggest state in America,” Texas.

They, the far-gone establishment, have branded candidates like her “extreme candidates.” JD Hayworth, who is poised to whip McMussolini, is receiving the same treatment.

The Guardian:

Medina is no Sarah Palin. She has no need to write on her hand to remember her talking points. Instead her speech was a complex walk through her extreme anti-government philosophy, citing sources as varied as the Austrian school of economics, St Augustine and modern French philosophers. She said she wanted to get rid of property taxes and allow Texans to do whatever they wanted with anything they owned, whether that was dig for oil or build an extension. There was, she said, no constitutional basis for a federal Department of Education or an Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Reserve. Texas should assert its rights almost as a nation-state, controlling over its own National Guard units. The disdain for government was visceral. The American way, she said, was simple. “There are two rights essential to freedom: private property and gun ownership.”

What I’d like to know is this: Why would Glenn Beck try to trip up this terrific candidate with a question about her supposed “Truther” proclivities?

Only once has Medina slipped up – in an interview she gave to the conservative radio host Glenn Beck. On his show Medina was asked if she thought the US government might have had a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She replied: “I don’t.” She then went on to expand disastrously upon that answer. “I don’t have all the evidence there… I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There are some very good arguments and I think the American people have not seen all the evidence there, so I have not taken a position on that,” she said.

I heard Beck proudly re-run the interview; he seemed flabbergasted that the woman had dared to doubt the integrity of the American state.

Not being a conspiracy theorist myself, it is my view that such a bent far from disqualifies a candidate. In the context of Medina, a hardcore, life-long advocate for natural liberty—a proclivity for conspiracy simply signifies a deep distrust of the Federal Frankenstein.

And that is a good thing.

Incidentally, in a previous post I alerted you to the theft of Jewish history. I see that the looting of the Hebrew language is proceeding apace too. The word Medina has a Hebrew root. Yet the freedictionary.com gives the word an Arabic origin. False.

“The root of Aramaic-Hebrew medina is din, ‘law,‘ and medina in both languages denotes a place in which a given body of law or legal system is applied, i.e., an area of political jurisdiction.”

In any event, here are 50 facts about Debra Medina. (“She was a high-level volunteer for Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. She describes her relationship with Paul as “good,” but frames it more as the typical interaction a constituent might have with a congressman.”)

Update (March 3): “Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Democratic former Houston Mayor Bill White clinched their parties’ nominations for governor Tuesday. … Medina declined to concede. Her campaign claimed that if Perry fell below 50 percent in the final vote count that she would be in a runoff with him because Hutchison had conceded. … ” [Houston Chronicle]

The reporting is so shoddy that, other than in Dan’s comment, I have not found a vote count for Medina. If it is 17 percent, Medina did terrifically. I’ve said it before: The fight for liberty is slow. Since the economy will not be getting better, inflated as it is by paper, Medina will win the next elections.

Update II: Coulter’s Message To Tea Party

Ann Coulter, Conservatism, Liberty, Media, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation

GET BEHIND REPUBLICANS. “I get angry at people who act like there is no difference between the parties. That’s insane,” insists Republican Party booster Ann Coulter.

She instructs the tea party to get behind this or the other Republican—Bill Brady in this instance—if they are for “prayer in schools, against abortion and gay marriage.”

Tucker Carlson mentioned a poll that shows tea-party minded individuals (you and me) don’t give a tinker’s toss about these conservative fetishes. Sounds about right.

Coulter clearly doesn’t get what the Tea Party groundswell is all about. Most wealthy, silver spoon-in-the-mouth establishment types don’t get it. After all, their incomes are guaranteed, irrespective of the coming hyperinflation, by a population stupid enough to mistake their message for a message of freedom.

Update I (Feb. 27): Good will runs eternal for Ann Coulter. She takes that to the bank.

There is a scene in “Dangerous Liaisons” where the protagonist, a lying schemer, is “booed and disgraced by the audience at the opera.” No longer welcome in polite society, she retreats to her boudoir never to emerge again.

If American society had an ounce of moral fiber, this would be the fate of Ann Couter and the other LETHAL WEAPONS of the NEOCON variety—the blood-lusting vampires of the Republican War Machine, whose bitch-hot war talk helped send gullible young men to their deaths.

Update II: Daniel Hannan:

“The American patriots didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their own minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen.

Part of that birthright was liberty from unjust, arbitrary or punitive taxation. The proposition that taxes ought not to be levied except by elected representatives would have been every bit as popular in Great Britain in 1773 as in America. …

The American Revolution, in other words, was inspired by British political philosophy and – more to the point – by British political practice. American patriots saw themselves as part of a continuing British tradition, stretching back through the Glorious Revolution, back through the agitations of Pym and Hampden, back even through the Great Charter to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law.”

[SNIP]

IT’S ALL ABOUT PROPERTY RIGHTS, Ms. Coulter, not fetuses or matrimonial vows.

Update II: Akio Toyoda Should Have Sat It Out … At Home

Business, Constitution, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Politics, Regulation, Socialism, Technology, War

Help me understand what hitherto no cable commentator has, and I include the formidable Judge Andrew Napolitano: Under what law or warrant does Congress get to summons Toyota executives for an inquisition? I’m curious.

So too is the “U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking documents related to unintended acceleration as well as to Toyota’s disclosure policies and practices,” says this newspaper.

Judge Napoiltano of FoxNews didn’t touch on the legal basis for Congress running interference with Toyota—and even seemed to think the first should put the second on notice.

Shouldn’t the matter of the car manufacturer’s malfunctioning accelerators fall to the courts and those harmed? Shouldn’t the injured parties hammer out a settlement in private or in the courts, rather than before our elected buffoons in Congress?

Personally, if I see one more weak, sobbing American begging for The Regulator and the burdened nation to feel her pain; I’ll explode.

(“Shame on you,” Rhonda Smith, of Sevierville, Tenn., said at a congressional hearing.)

What a nation of spineless crybabies. Get a lawyer, join a class-action lawsuit. Go to Haiti. Cry in private. But spare us your imagined near-death experience as your Lexus got ahead of you.

Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corp., ought to have reminded the American political ponces of how many of their countrymen he employs and promised politely to fix his company’s problems.

Moreover, Toyoda could have achieved the brevity much-admired in his culture had he borrowed from that clever commie (and rapier sharp wit) Bernard Shaw, who too was forced to decline an invitation from “a collector of social scalps”:

The House Oversight committee’s invitation to Mr. Toyoda: “We will be sitting between four and six o’clock.”

Toyoda: “Akio Toyoda likewise.”

Update I (Feb. 24): Reader “ryan” echoes my thought exactly. Sean and I were discussing the point “ryan” makes. Only in America, were dumbness is elevated to an art, would a vehicle with an ignition key become a self-propelled lethal weapon.

I drive a 2006 Volkswagen GTI, with a high-tech 200-horsepower, 2.0-liter turbocharged engine. The “pocket rocket” has a spectacularly smooth six-speed manual transmission. (I won’t drive an automatic, never have; never will.) If the gas pedal took on a life of its own, I’d automatically—without even thinking—indicate, take the car off the road, put it in neutral and switch off the ignition.

If you can’t do this small thing, ryan is right: you are the lethal weapon, not the vehicle.

As for the comment postulating that Toyota might be in the business of hoodwinking the American buyer: I remind those who profess their love of freedom and markets that such utterances mean that the Demopublican Regulators are winning.

Toyota would not be in business for as long as it has, producing quality cars, if this was its purpose. The car manufacturer relies for its bread and butter on pleasing consumers, not politicians. Profit? Since when is that anything but a blessing? Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Without them there is nothing—no incentive to produce and invent and no signal as to when production must be accelerated or decelerated.

Well-taken too are Robert’s observations about the Japanese. Having just traveled to a mystical city named Nara, to do high-tech, Sean would second that. Modernity has not changed this homogeneous nation’s genteel nature.

“Like, what can I get you guys” is not a refrain you’ll hear in a Japanese restaurant. Sean was taken aback by the gentility and graciousness of the Japanese ladies. Sure, the youth sports all the technological and sartorial trappings; but they respect their elders. This makes for a more refined atmosphere. After all, generational demarcations are necessary to ordered liberty.

If you do the polite thing and bow slightly—no need to touch your toes like this guy does—as you enter an establishment, faces light up and the courtesy is more than returned.

I do believe that the US, a multicultural toilet, is working hard to impress upon the Japanese the need to open up their country to immigration.

Update II: To Haym (and others): The comment (hereunder) is completely off-topic and won’t be further pursued on this post. But I suppose Japanese warriors are not supposed to be as ruthless as their American enemy—also the only power to have ever, in the history of mankind, stooped to nuke innocent civilians. When will Americans apply equal thinking to all sides?!