Update II: Michael Revivalist Revelry

America, Journalism, Media, Music, Pop-Culture, Sarah Palin, The Zeitgeist

Civilians are dying in Iraq; soldiers in Afghanistan, Putin, his little helper (Dmitry Medvedev), and the patriotic Russian people, are getting the better of Barack; China’s Uyghur minority is going ape on its Han majority, Zelaya is seeking solace from Clinton—Bill, that is; key Irani clerics have dismissed the results of the vote (that’s good news; sensible non-interventionist wanted any findings to issue from Iran)—all the while, America’s cable news channels have been glued for hours-on-end to the formless shape of Rev. Al Sharpton, and other other black entertainers, swaying to the sounds of a pop singer passed. The same specter has occupied the front-pages of major newspapers.

To paraphrase Pat Buchanan, a silly people living in serious times.

Perhaps our Alaskan lass gets it. Having, we hope, seceded from “politics as usual,” Sarah went fishing with her hunk and her adorable kids. I hope she’s winking in the direction of Russia, and having a laugh at the expense of the self-important Obamas.

Update I: Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D, Bill O’Reilly’s token black intellectual (read: a man who is clearly a product of America’s system of racial promotion, and doesn’t make O’Reilly’s lack-luster intellect too obvious), said: “Michael Jackson is the greatest child prodigy since Mozart.” Good grief. This man teaches at an elite university and he cannot distinguish between a Mozart and a songster, who was able to write a simple, three-chord jingle and dance to it; and who couldn’t even play an instrument proficiently, much less compose a symphony or an opera?

For this music lover—Bach, anytime anywhere—that was the most obscene comment to come out of the “wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage.” Writes Debbie Schlussel, with equal disgust: “the only people I feel for at this funeral circus are those kids. Sad to see his daughter, Paris Michael Jackson, cry. It’s probably the only sincere moment in the entire thing. The rest are just phonies glomming [sic] onto a successful circus act.”

[SNIP]

Bubbling up from this sewer of coverage, so emblematic of American society, was the repeated refrain that MJ managed to transcend race and gender. How stupid. The man was tortured by his race and his looks. The latest reports detail the shocking lily-white color of his frail, emaciated body, and the fresh track marks along his snow white bony arms. This was a man wracked by hate for his original looks. It takes self-loathing to voluntarily transform yourself—through dangerous, disfiguring, bone-crushing surgery—from a black young man into a no-nosed elf whose facial structure—the bones—had been chipped away to render a concave, collapsing mess, both sexless and raceless.

As for MJ’s alleged genderless “achievement”: the claim that Jackson was gay is certainly silly. He was clearly childlike and quite innocent. He didn’t have a history of affairs, male or female, and there was no evidence of child-molestation, although there was ample evidence that MJ assembled around him grafters who did not hesitate to use their kids to blackmail a childish man with means.

Update II: Jackson’s adopted daughter is a lovely little girl, who doesn’t sound remotely like the Valley Girls infesting that state. I dread to think how she’ll fare if one of the sisters takes her in. MJ seems to have imparted some manners to his kids.

“Ever since I was born, daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine.”—PARIS KATHERINE JACKSON, Michael Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter, at the pop icon’s memorial service Tuesday.

Oy Vey Uyghur!

China, Foreign Policy, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Palestinian Authority, Russia, Terrorism

“Oy vey, or just oy,” writes Wikipedia, is a [Yiddish] exclamation of dismay or exasperation meaning ‘woe.” Woe indeed. The Uyghurs, as far as I know, are to China as the Chechens are to Russia: fractious Muslims, with mayhem on their minds, a state-of-being also described as a quest for “self-determinism,” when used by left-liberals vis-à-vis the acting-out Palestinians, Uyghurs and Chechens do.

Yet, for the life of me, I cannot locate on Wikipedia a reference to the Muslim faith of the estimable Uyghurs, now rioting in China’s Xinjiang region.

Wikipedia does note, without elaborating, that China sympathized with the US after 9/11, but leaves hanging the reaction of the Uyghurs. Did they dance in the streets as their Palestinian coreligionists did?

Ever consistent (NOT), expect neocons to weigh-in on the side of Uyghur independence (forgetting that they just bemoaned the release from Gitmo of a couple of Uyghurs), as liberals like Obama, on a Disney-like tour to Russia, imperiously counter with calls for Georgian and Chechen independence. Idiots all.

Updated: Vin Suprynowicz On The Immigration Vexation

Classical Liberalism, Crime, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Reason

“Californians are living now what will be America’s future—unless mass immigration is stopped,” writes Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM. I thought I’d beat the daring VDARE folks by mentioning the latest American of note to be picked-off by an immigrant: NFL quarterback Steve McNair. His alleged assailant was a 20-year-old Iranian woman, Sahel Kazemi. But VDARE, being unbeatable on exposing the miseries and contradictions of enforced, centrally planned “third-world immigration and immiseration”—that proved impossible.

I do want you to read “Letting the looters vote on who’s for lunch,” an eminently reasonable column by another intrepid freedom lover, Vin Suprynowicz. Other than Vin, myself and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, I have not come across a libertarian who was willing—and able—to offer a sane, reality-based, countervailing analysis of current libertarian “thinking” on immigration:

“A recent column on the euphemisms used by proponents of illegal-immigrant amnesty brought some irate buzzing from all seven members of the Young Anarchists’ League.

As near as I can figure, I’m “not allowed” to call for the enforcement of current immigration laws — or possibly of any laws, even those few (like the immigration laws) enacted within the powers delegated to Congress under the Constitution — because any such enforcement of the law amounts to some kind of “collectivist police state fascism” against people who have “not initiated force or fraud.”

I’m not sure how you cut through a border fence without “initiating force,” or how you rent an apartment, register a car and go to work every day using someone else’s Social Security number without “initiating fraud.”

I’m further “not allowed” to cite the cost to taxpayers of illegal alien trespassers swarming our public schools and hospitals, lest I be accused of somehow “supporting” tax subsidies for schools and hospitals.

As it so happens, as a libertarian (not an anarchist) I do stand proudly and publicly against tax subsidies for schools and hospitals. People should pay their own way, and seek private charity if unable to do so. This would bring down costs for everyone. But that’s not enough for my young anarchist friends. Instead, I am apparently obliged to pretend these current, swelling tax burdens do not exist.

Perhaps this is an easier position to maintain if Mommy and Daddy still pay all your taxes, while allowing you to live in the basement, pounding your keyboard.

I do remember hearing my friend Jackie Casey, former head of the college Libertarians at the University of Arizona, regaling me with tales of how she would join her mother to visit rental properties the family owned south of Tucson.

Virtually every night, the human waves pouring north through the area would invade these residence units, using the sinks and other available surfaces for bodily activities which most of us reserve for actual toilets. Jackie and her mom would don elbow-length rubber gloves and go to work with their ammonia and bleach, cleaning up the human feces deposited by our noble wave of “harmless guest workers” who I’m “not allowed” to call trespassers because they “never initiative force or fraud” against anyone, merely going “where landlords and employers want them.” …

“Tara Cleveland was a lovely Las Vegas beauty pageant runner-up, an all-A student who wanted to go to law school and who sang at an annual “Spring Fling” employee party here at the Review-Journal 15 years ago. A short time later she was involved in a minor traffic accident in nearby North Las Vegas in which her car was struck by another car driven by two illegal Mexicans.

These two honored Latino guest workers immediately thought, “What would brave freedom fighters like George Washington and Nathan Hale have done, in these circumstances?” So, of course, they ran away.

Tara pursued and confronted the pair. At that point, channeling the spirits of brave patriots like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, these two south-of-the-border freedom fighters shot Tara Cleveland in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun, which had the predictable effect of killing her. They then stole her car and ran away again, eventually reaching Mexico.

It sure puts me in mind of the courage, the principles, the self-sacrifice of the men who risked their lives and their personal fortunes to fight the American Revolution, doesn’t it you?

One of the pair, Joseph Villezcas, was turned over by Mexican authorities in 2006, after they determined he was not actually a Mexican national. He was returned to Nevada and convicted of second-degree murder. But the other, now-33-year-old Fernando Garcia Valenzuela, received sanctuary in Mexico.

Clearly a genius on the order of Ben Franklin, freedom-fighter Valenzuela was not about to stay home, though. He was arrested in California in 1998 and 1999, though authorities there did not link him to the outstanding Las Vegas warrant, possibly because he used fake ID and a fake date of birth — while somehow still not “initiating force or fraud,” you understand.”…

[SNIP]

Read the complete column, “Letting the looters vote on who’s for lunch.”

This writer has argued that on certain “moral (and legal) matters, patriotic, freedom-loving Americans agree instinctively.” The right and righteous rage Suprynowicz expresses comports with the aforementioned observation.
It also reminds me of my sentiments in “José Medellín’s Dead; Cue The Mariachi Band.” To say nothing of my unabashed refusal, in the fractious Comments Section of a BAB debate (scroll down for the referenced exchange), to succumb to Tom Knapp’s egalitarianism-tainted brow-beating and admit that we are all essentially the same, and that—because all immigrants—libertarian scribe ilana mercer and her Ph.D., productive spouse were comparable in their combined contribution to this country to a scum, uneducated, illegal alien, Mexican drug dealer.

In its vim and verve, the Vin piece captures all that stuff. And it’s all good.

Update: Do me the courtesy of at least being vaguely acquainted with my position on immigration (gleaned from going through the Immigration Archive). My policy is not to quote distortions of my positions. I’ve never contended that “illegal immigration” is the country’s demise. Rather, mass immigration, legal and illegal, will indeed be the country’s undoing. I’m an immigration restrictionist for a reason. And those who’re not are rightly termed the “Treason Lobby.”

In response to the tired, so called argument to the effect that, “We have local criminals and welfare bums in the US,” I have countered again and again in articles and on the blog (only the other day) that,
“From the fact that taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals is morally wrong, why does it follow that extending it to millions of unviable non-nationals is economically and morally negligible? Or that it remotely comports with the libertarian goal of curtailing government growth? How is this stock-in-trade, truncated argument different from positing that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits (welfare-dependent nationals), repelling or arresting the next (welfare-dependent non-nationals) is unnecessary because the damage has already been done?”

If the leap is not too difficult, please apply this logic to local versus imported criminals, and please do not again inflict on me the vacuity of the non sequitur, “But, but, we have plenty local criminals in the country…”

So bloody what? The premise of that “argument” is: Importing more detritus is negligible to life and property (the robbed bank analogy), because, once some nationals steal property and snuff-out lives, then non-nationals ought to be allowed to have at these expendable resources.

The Debt Keeps Obamby Up At Night

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

The same economists who’ve insisted on billions in bailout and stimulus monies now say the country’s debt is unsustainable.

The same president who ballooned Bush’s bailouts, authorized astronomical outlays, deepened the socialization of the economy, and now carps about the need for more of the same—trillions in healthcare expenditure and crippling cap-and-trade costs—the same sod complains that the debt “keeps me awake at night.”

The same Counterfeiter-in-Chief, Ben Bernanke, who turned his snout up when Rep. Ron Paul questioned his sanity and the source of his authority, is now lecturing the numskulls in Congress that “Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.”

Only a few weeks back all these government gurus, and the pundits in their peanut gallery, insisted that digging America out of the financial grave is a long-term goal. For the short term, it’s stimulus time, baby. “Show me the fake money, shower me with cheap credit; and send me sailing on a ship of fools.”
(See “I.O.U.S.A.”)

Amidst reports that, at $11.5 trillion, “the overall debt is now slightly over 80% of the annual output of the entire U.S. economy, as measured by the gross domestic product,” that “this year’s deficit is now estimated at about $1.85 trillion,” that the nation’s full (unfunded) obligations stand at around $60 trillion, and that each one of us has been saddled with roughly $184,000 of state debt—Paul Krugmanites and their acolytes now tell us that, “We are on an utterly unsustainable fiscal course.”

Of course, we on BAB, and all fellow adherents of the Austrian school of economics, have been sounding the alarm for years and with the following caveat: we have only ever advocated allowing the economy to contract and purge the malinvestment poisons.

Do I need to remind you that the aforementioned criminals have refused to concede that a contraction was a good and necessary thing; that the same creeps are in the habit of pathologizing an economic downturn by using terms such as “deflation,” and calling for government to step in and pick up the slack by spending—measures that have resulted in what is a depression by any other name.

That’s called Voodoo economics (also Keynesianism.)

Throw these bums out, and that includes the “Republikeynesians”.