Category Archives: Terrorism

TSA Goons To Burrow In Your Bone Marrow

Constitution, Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Private Property, Regulation, States' Rights, Technology, Terrorism

How do TSA tormentors consolidate more control over American travelers? They escalate the security threat. It was a matter of time before the home-grown terrorists of the Transportation Security Administration found a ruse to move from using technology that scans the surface of their victims’ bodies to technology that exposes our internal organs by means of medical X-rays.

The ALLEGED reason for rogering and radiating a pathetically pliant American population deeper and more vigorously? Nothing very concrete is needed. A “2005 incident in which Colombian men were accused of surgically implanting narcotics into human couriers.” Yes, the TSA has simply floated a rumor, based on a 2005 memo it has dressed up to appeal to all news outlets, and these outfits have reported it as fact:

Reports of al Qaeda preparing so-called “belly bombs” designed to be surgically implanted in potential terrorists before they board airplanes have already led to increased scrutiny for anyone traveling to the U.S. who appears to have had recent surgery, U.S. officials said.
The Department of Homeland Security recently issued a bulletin warning of renewed interested in the tactic — suspected to be the latest innovation from infamous alleged bomb maker Ibrahim Asiri. According to U.S. officials, a would-be attacker would slip through airport security, board a plane and detonate the bomb using a chemical-filled syringe. …”With proper skill, a surgeon could indeed package a bomb or explosive device [and] it could be implanted inside the abdominal cavity,” he told ABC News. Melrose said that if placed properly, a bomb the size of a grapefruit may not even cause the patient discomfort.

This is the dynamic behind the subjugation at the airports.

And why not? Tea-Party “freshmen” are getting stale. They’ve been doing nothing much about the assaults on citizens who travel by air. Why should they? Sure, there was a bit of a commotion, late last month, over the obviously necessary humiliation of a 95-year-old, gravely ill woman, whose adult diapers TSA trash removed in the course of a securing the nation’s flying public. The protests amounted to meek requests for a TSA apology, no more. None was forthcoming.

Tea party representative have forgotten the little people—with the exception of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who penned an op-ed in The Hill, today, 07/05/11:

The requirement that Americans be forced to undergo this appalling treatment simply for the “privilege” of traveling in their own country reveals much about how the federal government feels about our liberties. The unfortunate fact that we put up with this does not speak well for our willingness to stand up to an abusive government.
Many Americans continue to fool themselves into accepting TSA abuse by saying, “I don’t mind giving up my freedoms for security.” In fact, they are giving up their liberties and not receiving security in return. Last week, for example, just days after an elderly cancer victim was forced to submit to a cruel and pointless TSA search, including removal of an adult diaper, a Nigerian immigrant somehow managed stroll through TSA security checks and board a flight from New York to LA — with a stolen, expired boarding pass and an out-of-date student ID as his sole identification! He was detained and questioned, only to be released to do it again 5 days later! We should not be surprised to find government ineptitude and indifference at the TSA.
At the time the TSA was being created I strongly opposed federalization of airline security. As I wrote in an article back in 2001:
“Congress should be privatizing rather than nationalizing airport security.

Ditto. The same argument was made in “WHOSE PROPERTY IS IT ANYWAY?,” on June 5, 2002.

UPDATE II: Libertarianism Lite Likely Won’t Cut It

Constitution, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Ron Paul, Sex, Terrorism, The Zeitgeist

Some libertarians dream that the establishment-endorsed libertarianism-lite, currently being touted on Fox News- and Business as the only legitimate strand of libertarianism, will catch-on in this America. Dream on.

Liberty loving adults in the US tend not to identify with fast-talking youths, wearing trendy eye-wear, who insist that the cultural foot-and-mouth that is “Glee” and Gaga is the very essence of American freedoms and liberties. (Anyone who has ever read this space knows that I don’t have any objection to risque expression; only to artistically worthless cultural products.)

Granted, life-style libertarians come in all shapes and sizes; they are often older, but are always juvenile. In the country’s founding documents, they divine all kinds of exhortations to let it all hang out. Much as the Left does.

If I’ve learned anything about what remains of Middle America, it is that ordinary, gun-toting, homeschooling, bible-thumping Americans are unmoved by people who draw their paycheques from foundations, think tanks, and academia, and wax orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman. Although it might appear sophisticated, this stuff is reductive and shallow—a kind of post-graduate cleverness that lacks any philosophical depth.

Life, liberty, property: that’s what negative liberty is all about. The rest is either fluff or ancillary.

True, libertinism can be freeing in many ways, but forgotten by left-libertarians (I prefer libertarians lite; it’s more accurate) is this: libertinism is subsumed within a larger, more-inclusive category of liberty.

Besides, joining the Idiocracy is never liberating. Things that addle the brain permanently are, ultimately, not liberating.

(And what’s up with Nick Gillespie’s less than harsh words about the War on Terror? On Fox News’ Stossel, Gillespie seemed to second the general impetus of the War on Terror. He also went soft on the TSA, protesting only that a well-intentioned effort (TSA) had gone terribly wrong. Wrong! The War on Terror is an unconstitutional crock that guarantees the growth of the state. The TSA is engaged in legalized crime and needs to be dismantled, its goons jailed for each assault perpetrated.)

As I noted, when defending Ron Paul, in 2008, from attacks by the same libertarians,

Beltway libertarians … are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else “cool and cosmopolitan.”
Judging by Reason’s “35 Heroes of Freedom,” “cool and cosmopolitan” encompasses William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful.”
Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” That sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.

[Or is it “Womin’s Studies”?]

Naturally, I’m down with any lifestyle the individual chooses, just so long as he or she doesn’t visit violence on others (as the TSA does). But to conflate low-culture and manifest ignorance with American liberties is asinine. (And very much the essence of life-style libertarianism.) As the libertarian law goes, all human beings have the freedom to act-out in anyway they like, so long as they abide by the non-aggression axiom.

Personally, I favor discretion. For if “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, then sexual—or any other—exhibitionism is anathema.

UPDATE I (June 29): Tom DiLorenzo has blogged the this post at LewRockwell.com:

“Fast-Talking Youths Wearing Trendy Eye-Wear . . .
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo on June 29, 2011 02:42 PM

.. and “waxing orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman” on the FOX networks. That’s how Ilana Mercer describes the Kochtopusian “libertarian lite” crowd of Beltway “libertarians.” They’re the same crowd that orchestrated a vicious smear campaign against Ron Paul, as Ilana discusses.
Ilana’s just-released book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, is a must-read. Among the “blurb”writers who praise the book on the first few pages are yours truly, Tom Woods, Thomas Szasz, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

UPDATE II (June 30): ANARCHISM. In reality, working as we are with so few options, there is not much that separates the classical liberal (your host, Mises, etc.) and the anarchist (Rothbard, LRC). The wise, freedom-loving thinker knows this, and works to optimize collaboration. However, as someone who was once an anrachist, and had reconsidered, after careful thought, turning to liberalism in the classical (and American) tradition, my thoughts on anarchism may be of interest.

Here they are in “AGAINST ANARCHISM.”

“Do Immigration Laws Violate Libertarian Axiom” is another relevant read. Ditto my immigration archive, the articles in which advance (unanswered) arguments as to why humanity does not have the right to venture wherever, whenever.

“Kosher Butchers”

Europe, Foreign Policy, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Nationhood, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, South-Africa, Terrorism, The West

The International Criminal Tribunal sure honored Slobodan Miloševic’s right to a speedy trial, didn’t it? The President of Serbia and Yugoslavia languished in jail for years during which he conducted his own defense. Eventually, Miloševic expired in his cell from a heart attack. A similar—if not worse—fate awaits Ratko Mladic. Once a Serbian general, Mladic is now an aging, ailing fugitive, whom the impartial western media describes as a “war criminal.”

Writes Julia Gorin: The crimes “Karadzic and the abducted-by-night Milosevic, not to mention all the lesser-known Serbs currently serving multi-decade terms” are guilty of: “daring to fight back when Muslims attacked. They are guilty of being Serbian officials during war. Of daring to answer war with war.”

[T]he Mladic arrest is meant to overshadow all the bad news coming from our Great Islamic Hope in Kosovo. As if Mladic did anything approaching the crimes that the ‘legitimate’ rulers of Kosovo committed against non-Albanians and Albanians alike — and by their own hand. As if 1500 Muslim soldiers — not “8000? — dying from a combination of combat, landmines, infighting and — yes — criminal execution of POWs compares to kidnapping and torturing civilians and selling their organs, to name just one slice of what these apparently more ‘kosher’ butchers are guilty of.

MORE.

It goes a little deeper than that. What western powers have done to Serbia and South Africa, and are in the process of doing to Israel, is not terribly mystifying. To “get it,” you need to grasp the left-liberal urge to deracinate historic communities, and strip flesh-and blood human beings of the fellow feelings all human beings harbor, but some are better at hiding: the affinity for one’s own kind.

kin, clan, Koran: This is what Muslims are fighting for in Afghanistan and Iraq. Driven by left-liberal urges, the US wants to replace their community with our kind of centralized bureaucracy. Muslims will never give up. I secretly admire them for that. But Western communities can be made to roll over with ease.

In my my new book, and in the 2010 address, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”—it borrows heavily from Into the Cannibal’s Pot—I give a good sense of the extent of the West’s culpability in the demise of one such western outpost.

The dynamics of Serbia’s demise are similar—at least from the vantage point of the scheming West.

UPDATED: The Triumph of Anarcho-Terrorism

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Nationhood, Palestinian Authority, Technology, Terrorism

On purely utilitarian grounds, it’s difficult to understand the “civilized” world’s almost universal drive to shrink the civilized sphere that is Israel and expand the anarcho-terrorist territory that is the Palestinian Authority. Why in the world would anyone who prizes productivity, industry, and trade push for the eviction of productive, industrious, traders from the “disputed territories,” only to replace them with destructive occupants? Even if you believe this folly serves the cause of justice, you have to admit that ceding territory to the Palestinians is a terrible waste of scarce resources.

In 2008, the US ran a “goods trade deficit with Israel of $7.8 billion.” We still do (link). Why? Because Israelis make and export things, a lot of high-tech things. Other than explosives, animate and inanimate, what have the Palestinians ever made and traded? Why, without Israel, Palestinians would be without electricity. The main market for Palestinian goods (labor) is Israel. Yet the Palestinians keep bombing their economic lifeline.

Since its independence, Israel has demonstrated its capacity for self-governance. Since they began demanding self-determination, Palestinians have proven incapable of the same. Any more territories Israel cedes will soon fall into disrepair, as did Gaza.

The Palestinians can’t feed themselves, although they manage to cannibalize their own and those around them. Still, the so-called civilized world wants to imperil the existence of the those who’ve turned a howling desert into a thriving country, and reward a warring, whining faction of self-styled victims.

Why? It’s a vexing question.

UPDATE (May 24): There is an interesting thread on Facebook. My response will give you an idea of the discussion’s direction:

“Euclid was a Greek mathematician [not an Arab]. I am not sure what Chris means. But so as not to advance something along the lines of the mythistory called Afrocentrism, let me say that “The origins of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians.” And then the Indians, who were subsequently brutalized under some or other caliphate.

As Mises observed, no doubt, the Arabs were great preservers of culture by means of its translation. They were also great copiers too. No doubt there was an Arab civilizational heyday. But innovation was less in that DNA…