Category Archives: The State

UPDATED: Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed’ (More Gloom)

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Democrats, Fascism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Paleoconservatism, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

The following excerpt is from “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” my new WND.COM column:

“Last week, this column explained the divide between Americans and their ‘Overlords Who Art in D.C.’ I asked that you quit invoking words too weak to describe that divide. ‘Disconnect,’ ‘disrespect’: These are soft designations; they don’t begin to bridge the moat that separates you from your sovereigns.

Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and the government that literally has them by the genitals is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.

If you’re a tax payer — at least 50 percent of Americans are tax consumers — you are the Beltway’s bitch.

So stop beseeching sinecured statists for ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ They will never know what it’s like to slum it in your neighborhoods. They’ll never experience the effects of inflation and rising prices as you will; they’ve voted themselves salaries twice as high as yours and pensions in perpetuity. You’re paying.

Think of yourself as a servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows. That’s how I felt as I drove through the suburbs of Northern Virginia, in October of this year. I saw what Peggy Noonan lushly described in her Wall Street Journal column, excerpted by John Derbyshire in his full and fair assessment of the tottering American experiment, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism …

The complete column is “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” now on WND.COM.

Avail yourself of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, on Kindle.

Merry Xmas to all,
ILANA

UPDATE (Dec. 25): “IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME” (as the Beatles lyrics go). The Powers that Be thought “Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim” (and also happens to have “the equivalent of a pacemaker”), needed a reminder of her ordeal.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.
“I turned to the police officer and said, ‘I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'” and they said, ‘No, you have to do this,'” she said.
Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.
“I told them, ‘No, I’m not going to have my breasts felt,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are,'” said Hirschkind.
When Hirschkind refused, she says that “the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.”
An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Hey, what do you know: A noisy, irate, flying public has changed the behavior of their sovereigns not a whit. Who would have thunk? (See “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed.”)

And what do memebers of the sheep herd say about a middle aged, ill American lady being mauled by rabid TSA dogs?

“I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it,” said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

It matters not a bit that “less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down.” This practice is a matter of policy, not happenstance. Theoretically, everyone could be molested, very many are. No freedom loving individual should be consoled by the repulsive, “rare-occurrence” excuse.

The Wasteland Of Central California

IMMIGRATION, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Victor Davis Hanson crisscrossed central California, looking at the lay of the land, and the ineluctably intertwined effects of statism and rampant illegal immigration:

“The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate.” …

MORE.

Our Overlords Who Art in D.C.

Ancient History, Debt, Elections, Glenn Beck, Government, IMMIGRATION, Inflation, Morality, Taxation, The State

“Glenn Beck and his faithful are dead wrong. Our overlords Who Art in D.C. will forever be incapable of sympathizing with us; will never respect us or our ‘God-given rights’; and will always rob us blind. Why? Because they can.

Contrary to what some of my countrymen believe, not even praying hard will send us a fatherly figure that resembles an American Founder to deliver us of the rotating kleptocracy that has taken up permanent residence in Washington and its surrounds.

Like the migrant flotsam and jetsam inflowing from Latin America, the imperial government and governing class are going nowhere.

Yes, how about that? Americans venture into Mexico at their own peril. Some have been killed on that country’s border. Still, politicians and their enabling pointy heads have looked obedient Americans in the proverbial eyes and told them that the fabric of their communities is renewed by endless immigration; that humanity has the natural right to venture here there and everywhere; and that, although they are suffering near Grecian joblessness, they should, ‘shut-up and pay up.’

A bloodbath of a midterm election has done nothing to stop the slash-and-burn Congress — ducks that should be lamed — from concocting bogus tax relief that increases the cost and burden of government, and guarantees that Americans pay for the accreting oink sector, if not through taxes, then by way of debt and dollars devalued.

How is that possible?

Across the pond, governments have begun courageously slashing their spending so deeply as to send the moochers and the looters of their societies rioting into the streets. Stateside, the government is in the midst of orgiastic outlays. Egged on by media ‘experts,’ journos, party strategists and TV tartlets (Republican and Democrat), Washington (Left and Right) behaves as if the events underway over there have no bearing back here, in debt-laden America.

At $14 trillion, America’s OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) almost equals its GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Yet the comitatus — ‘the sprawling apparatus … that encompasses not only the emperor’s household and its personnel … but also the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals’ — see nothing wrong with a proposed 1,924 page Omnibus bill, worth 1.2 trillion gigabucks.

In the book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of Rome, Cullen Murphy draws the unflattering parallels between the imperial rule of ancient Rome and that of modern America, down to the contemporary ‘musicians’ [that would be Bono and Bon Jovi, surely], ‘the courtesans, diviners, buffoons … the people who taste the emperor’s food before he himself does … the core groups of bureaucrats and toadies who function within the nimbus of great power.’ The domain name ‘USA.gov.’, if you will.” …

More in my new column, “Our Overlords Who Art in D.C.” Read it now on WND.COM.

Just in time for Christmas, my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, is now available on Kindle.

UPDATED: Assange is us

Free Speech, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Military, Republicans, Technology, The State

This is from my new, WND.COM column, “Assange is us”:

” … What is top-secret to some, however, is open-source for others. First-Amendment jurisprudence is … clear-cut with respect to the great guerrilla journalism of WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks operators have committed no crime in publishing what is undeniably true, newsworthy information. Antsy America has no jurisdiction over a foreign entity (WikiLeaks) and its proprietor (Julian Assange). The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog confirmed that U.S. law looks upon WikiLeaks as ‘a passive recipient of the material.’ ‘Most First Amendment lawyers would say that preventing the publication of material is justified only where absolutely necessary to prevent almost immediate and imminent disaster. It’s an extremely high standard,’ Jack Balkin, a First Amendment expert at Yale Law, told the WSJ. …

… Why has this individual become the enemy? Should Americans not have an inkling, by now, of what it’s like to live at the mercy of the federal government’s imperially imposed edicts? Aren’t we all being treated as potential terrorists at the nation’s federally controlled airports, by the TSA, an arm of the government now stalking Assange?”

The complete column is “Assange is us.”

The Second Edition of Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society (the print edition may be purchased here) is now also available on Kindle.

UPDATE (Dec. 10): The reader below (see Comments Section) says Assange provided the identities of “pro-freedom, pro-democracy activists in places like Afghanistan, Iran, Venezu.” First, provide proof of such online Wikileaks.

Second: Let me get this. The minions in the military may freely ad-lib about the subjects they’ve “liberated” (and sicced upon one another) in far-flung places. Conversely, the publisher of this stuff—which was forsaken for every military tom, dick and harry to read—must be extra careful in its publication. The statist will always apply a different standard to his cherished government. Frederick Bastiat the statist is not.

But then the reader conflates, 1) democracy and freedom. 2) The wrecking ball we applied to Afghanistan and Iraq with freedom. When you hold 1 & 2 to be true, your premises are shaky from the start.