Category Archives: Socialism

Prior Restraint Arguments As Pretex To Watch YOU

Argument, Constitution, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Law, Liberty, Rights, Socialism, Terrorism, The State

If we accept state aggression based on prior restraint arguments, then aggress we must ad absurdum. Why not stop all statists from procreating, lest they sire proponents of state theft and aggression? Such a program would at least be in furtherance of liberty. (And we could all do with fewer Meghan McCains.)

Prior restraint arguments are being galvanized as justification for nation-wide information sweeps conducted by the state for over a decade. Another cow, “Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching,” said “that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.”

It is quite telling that the story about the “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily” was broken by Glenn Greenwald (an American) writing for The Guardian (British).

Most serious libertarians have been shouting about state snooping from the rooftops for over a decade. Now you’re listening! I already told you weeks back that there was absolutely nothing new about state snooping.

Via The Guardian:

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.
The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI’s request for its customers’ records, or the court order itself.
“We decline comment,” said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

(I believe “Entertainment Interruptus,” published on November 28, 2001, was my first column touching on the The Patriot Act.)

The Power Of Poverty

Government, Justice, Old Right, Socialism, The State, Welfare

Ever wonder why people who don’t have jobs are always chilling? “Only America has figured out how you get to be poor and have money at the same time,” explains that irrepressible exile Fred Reed. Listen up, America, to the lessons Mr. Reed learned from a chap (a prototype) called “Git-Some”:

When I got to Washington, DC, I decided that I ought to be poor. It’s a good deal. You get lots of free stuff and you don’t have to work. If I had knowed about poverty when I was fourteen, and what a good thing it was, I’da give up my paper route. I mean, who in his right mind would get up at four-thirty in the morning in January, with eight inches of snow on the ground, and ride across lawns on a bike with four hundred pounds of the Wheeling Intelligencer in a basket, so people could read about crooked politicians and clip grocery coupons? And then I’d catch the school bus.
That teacher lady said I was pretty smart, and she hoped I’d go far, but I reckoned she’da been happy if I just went to the next country over.
When you got out of high school, you had to get a job, and get up mornings even if you didn’t want to, and do something all day that you probably didn’t like. Unless you were poor, and then you could sleep in and do what you wanted all day. I didn’t know it then, though.
Best thing if you want to be poor is to go to Washington, the Yankee Capital, and take up poverty. Then the feddle gummint gives you a house for free. … The gummint gives you Medicaid in case you fall on your head, and Food Stalmps … welfare ain’t a lot of money. It ain’t a lot of work, either. But it’s enough to live on really good if you think about it.

Uncle Fred don’t lie. Ask Kristina Cogan, who receives $80,000 worth in government benefits for being “poor.”

MORE from Fred.

Fisker, Tesla: Fisting* The Paying Public

Bush, Business, Fascism, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Regulation, Sex, Socialism, Taxation, Technology

Last night we dined at a local eatery in our Washington State town. Parked outside the restaurant was the electric commie car, the Tesla Roadster.

Well of course, the pinkos who proliferate and rule my state are as dumb as they are dastardly.

DUMB because they fail to understand that, “Whether a vehicle is propelled by hydrogen-powered fuel cells or electricity, both electricity and hydrogen don’t magically materialize in the vehicle. They must first be generated. Be it coal, natural gas, nuclear or a hydroelectric dam, these cars are only as clean as the original source of energy that generated the vim that powers them.”

Other than to increase the consumption of gas, because people drive more in them, state-sponsorship of so-called fuel-efficient cars is a grand exercise in compulsory misallocation and waste of capital. It proves that the development of technologies is best left to the market, not to environmental bureaucracies. The electric car is a marvelous metaphor for the legislator’s attempt to shackle the ‘wayward’ consumer. Purchase one, and your best bet is to avoid straying too far from the socket in your garage, or, alternatively, drive with a very long extension cord, lest your vehicle turn into something not nearly as useful as Cinderella’s pumpkin at midnight. The benefits to the consumer are few, much less to the environment, unless a steady discharge of lead, cadmium, and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—is a blessing in disguise.

[“Commie Cars”]

DASTARDLY because the immoral pinko has no qualms about forcefully taking from taxpaying Americans to give to favored state-sponsored interests, like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive.

The first “received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.”

Here, Republicans deserve to be reminded to hang their heads in shame. “The Department of Energy loan program was created in 2007 during the George Bush administration,” for the purpose of manufacturing the equivalent of the USSR’s “People’s Car.”

The second “has received $193 million of a $529 million Energy Department loan … Fisker Automotive — the electric-car maker that was granted a half-billion-dollar federal loan and on Friday dismissed about 75 percent of its remaining workforce — is purportedly facing a lawsuit from the same firm that sued the government-funded Solyndra company …Fisker laid off 160 of its roughly 210 employees Friday morning from its Anaheim, Calif., location.” (Fox News April 06, 2013.)

Don’t look to GOOGLE to serve you news straight up either. News about the bankruptcy or lack of viability of these subsidiaries of the state does not pop up first in related searches.

Writing in the Mises Institute’s indispensable Free Market, PETER G. KLEIN partially explains the dynamics that underpin these examples of American fascism (state-corporate collaborations). “Partially,” because Dr. Klein omits the private-property variable and philosophical fulcrum. (And the editor of TFM does Dr.Klein a disservice by giving the essay a title that is unexplained in the text: What on earth is “Tang”? Writers/editors should never assume their readers know what they’re talking about.) Explains Klein:

Today, when we look at private companies like Google,
Apple, and Facebook and marvel at their innovations, we
should remember that these companies are constantly
subject to market tests, and that the goods and services
they innovate must be accepted by consumers to be profitable. When they succeed, we know that they are creating value for society because consumers have chosen their products and services over others.
The goods and services produced by the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation do not face any kind of market test. The goods and services they produce are valuable to the directors, and
members of Congress, and to the researchers themselves
who are on the payroll, but the value of this research is
determined arbitrarily.

Tesla and Fisker “produce” for the dim-witted Hollywood and D.C. elites, whom YOU are forced to finance. That’s it.

Fisker and Tesla are fisting* the paying public.

***

* Disclaimer: The reason I know about this practice is because I used to volunteer as an HIV/AIDS counselor in South Africa. Filthy and perverted, it’s an appropriate metaphor for robbery by state and special-interests.

UPDATE II: ‘The Americans’ Is Awesome TV

Communism, Film, Hollywood, Intelligence, Pop-Culture, Socialism

I was wrong. “The Americans,” a period drama from the FX network, is not trite TV. I should not have fallen so fast into dismissive mode—but, then, can you blame me? Hollywood’s record of producing abysmally acted, amateurish, sub-intelligent scripts is solid. It speaks for itself.

In “The Americans,” Keri Russell kicks more than corporeal ass as a complex, introverted (now that’s novel), and most interesting character.

Matthew Rhys as her spook husband is magnificent; intense, authentic and manifestly conflicted.

The plot, script and attention to detail deserve high marks too.

And lo and behold, the Russian characters in the series are not just American extras with bad accents; they’re for real, accent and all.

So good is “The Americans” that Holly Taylor and her slightly less offensive brother, as the spy couples’ horrid kids, do not spoil the viewing experience. The children are straight out of 2013, down to their awful vernacular (lots of “like” to preface every sentence), and the staccato tart tones of Taylor’s voice.

“The Americans,” as I see it, is better entertainment than “Justified,” whose protagonist is well-acted (but I don’t like him one bit; I like the “Drew Thompson” outlaw and the prostitute he rescues from a sure death).

It’s all good TV courtesy of Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions.

UPDATE I: From the Facebook thread. “Nicki Fellenzer: Tell me more. I can’t get enough of this series. I’m a fan. Good, fun TV, harking back to a better time in our American history. The fact that Keri Russell looks so all-American works in her favor and with the script: Of course her Russian handlers would have chosen an American-looking Russian girl to be the spy next door. More Nicki.

UPDATED II: We were cheated out of the new episode tonight. Sorrows were duly drowned in the delights of the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory. Cooper is an animated, wonderful creation (which Wikipedia delights in maligning as a sicko. What’s new?).