Is Israel Weak For Negotiating To Free Prisoners Of War?

Family, Israel, Military, Pop-Culture, Terrorism, War

While the specter of the parents of returning POW Bowe Bergdahl babbling, sobbing and conveying encoded, incoherent messages to their son on national TV was inappropriate and undignified (although not atypical of the pornography of public grief in this country)—the fact that the soldier’s government has worked to get him released from Taliban captivity is entirely appropriate. It’s a good thing that, as Reuters reports, “Army Sergeant Bergdahl, held for nearly five years in Afghanistan, was freed in a deal with the Taliban brokered by the Qatari government. Five Taliban militants, described by Senator John McCain as the ‘hardest of the hard core,’ were released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and flown to Qatar.”

But not if you ask the usual suspects.

Nothing much has changed since, in 2004, the neoconservatives at National Review had “grumbled about Israel’s ‘lopsided prisoner exchanges’ over the years. One ‘sofa samurai,’ … noted the startling disparity of exchanging 5,500 Egyptian soldiers, following the Sinai campaign of 1956, ‘for the lives of the four Israeli soldiers captured in the fighting,’ and over 8,000 Egyptians, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in exchange for 240 Israeli soldiers.”

When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released 430 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in exchange for three dead Israelis and one live one, people worried, and for good reason. Many of the prisoners were said to be very dangerous men. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would probably have supported the Sharon swap. According to Dr. Ganor, Rabin said categorically that when military action to free hostages is not possible, ‘real negotiations should be held.’…

… President Bush sat bone idle, never lifting a bloodstained finger to haggle for his countrymen beheaded … Abandoning hostages as the Bush administration did as a matter of ‘principle’ is … not an option, at least not an ethical one. President Bush bears the mark of Cain for looking on as Americans continue to be butchered. …” (“AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS”)

“Bergdahl was flown to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for medical treatment,” reports Reuters. “After receiving care he would be transferred to another facility in San Antonio, Texas, U.S. defense officials said, without giving a date for his return to the United States.”

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SWAT That Drug-Using Baby

Drug War, Fascism, Private Property

Georgia police—in the service of the police state and the war on the individual’s natural right to ingest, inhale, inject and trade in substances—incinerate a sleeping baby, during one of their 3:00 AM no-knock, drug-enforcement raids on private property. Oops, wrong house. This too happens all too frequently in the course of doing the Lord’s work. What are ya gonna do?

At least that’s how the culprits have written-off the baby at whom they lobbed a flash grenade.

The thrust of the AP report is not the tragedy, futility and violative nature of police action and mission, but on the age of the victim: Police did not know children were inside. So if adults alone were similarly incinerated would that have been OK?

British Libertarian Vows To Unite Behind UKIP

Britain, Classical Liberalism, Elections, EU, Europe, libertarianism, Nationalism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness

In an interview with the German weekly Junge Freiheit, I ventured that,”Step one in reclaiming [European] national and individual sovereignty (the ultimate goal) is secession from the European union. Judging from their voting patterns, Europeans seem to grasp that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their national governments has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”

Of course, there is something fundamentally perverse about the idea of the British partaking in “European elections.” Come to think of it, the notion that each ostensibly sovereign European country belongs to this overarching suprastate and must obey it is equally abhorrent.

My comment about “voting patterns” has, nevertheless, been borne out.

“The overall result,” writes Sean Gabb of The Libertarian Alliance, “is a big increase in numbers for parties which are hostile to the EU goal of ‘ever closer union,’ and even to the existence of the EU in its present form or in any form at all. In Holland, the Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, came second. In France, the National Front, led by Marine le Pen, came first. The Danish People’s Party also came first, as did the Flemish separatist party in Belgium. In Hungary, the conservative party, Fidesz, came first, followed by Jobbik, which is describes as a national socialist party. In Greece, the leftists party Syriza (Euro-sceptic) came first, and the nationalist party Golden Dawn came third. In Finland and in Austria, Euro-sceptic parties did well, as they also did in Germany.”

Commentators and politicians are suspended between a rock and a hard-place, to use that cliche of in-betweeness. Do they diss the voter or do they revise their rejected positions? Some have just settled for the well-worn battle cry of “racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry.”

Back to Gabb: “The big winner of the [British] elections was the UK Independence Party, led by Nigel Farage.”

UKIP topped the poll, winning 27.5 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives, who are currently in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, came third—though this is largely because of a strong Labour performance in London, where native British are now a minority.[ Labour doubles its MEPs in London, BBC, May 28, 2014]. Significantly, the Liberal Democrats, the most pro-European of the main parties, were almost wiped out, losing all but one of their seats in the European Parliament.

UKIP must now be regarded as one of Britain’s major parties. This a huge achievement—and a useful reminder to depressed American patriots that new parties can succeed.

UKIP’s key policies: to leave the European Union, to end mass immigration, and to strip Political Correctness out of law and administration. … Whatever some people may think of UKIP, it is our best hope for pulling down the current order of things. I with enthusiasm, others with reluctance, have a duty to unite behind it. …

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Government Begat Government Which Begat More Government

Government, Intellectual Property Rights, Regulation, War

Myron Pauli on the malignant, metastatic cancer known as government.

Government Begat Government Which Begat Government
By Myron Robert Pauli

My friend at the Federal Trade Commission is assigned to fight “monopoly” in the field of laser eye surgery. The Food and Drug Administration approved ONLY “laser A” and “laser B” for doing eye surgery [of course, WHY did the FDA get to approve lasers and why should ONLY these two lasers be approved over other capable lasers???]. It seems that the Patent and Trademark Office then gave patents (e.g. virtual monopolies) to the companies holding these two lasers (something of which Jefferson and many libertarians disapprove). Then the FTC claimed that these two companies “colluded” in making a monopoly which was, in fact, created by the state power of the FDA and the PTO. In other words, the solution to government-created-problems is, of course, more government.

And then there is a recent article in The Atlantic for government reparations for black Americans – after all, one had government slave codes, government Fugitive Slave Laws, banishment of free blacks, franchise denial, Jim Crow Laws, racist FHA, racist Agriculture Department, racist zoning laws, racist licensing restrictions, racist closed shop laws. Social Security transfers money from black men [who die at age 65] to white/Asian women who live near 90 years. Reparations were given to wealthy widows of 9/11 stockbrokers [another obscenity]… and thus, government should now extract money from Vietnamese refugees in the form of taxes to compensate descendents of people victimized by government in 1850 … and government begat government.

Speaking of Vietnamese refugees, it was the government which sent millions of warfighters (many conscripted with the draft) to fight in senseless wars of nation building in Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan …. where these veterans return with chronic injuries, addictions, and mental problems. The solution, of course, is not to allow them to seek private health care but to dump them into a VA system [chronicled in the movie “Born on the Fourth of July”] which, being government, is an unaccountable, uncompetitive, sovereign monopoly. The solution to problems in the VA or the DC schools or public housing or Amtrak or anything is, naturally, to increase the budget. In the beginning, there was government … and government begat more government … which begat more government. If X fails, try 2X and 3X and 4X. American Dream Downpayment Act begat Housing Bubble begat Wall Street Bailout begat more Income Inequality … solution – more government, of course!

And if Bush#1 is bad, the solution is Clinton#1. If he seems bad, try Bush#2 followed by Obama#1 followed by either Clinton#2 or Bush#3. Plus ca change plus c’est le meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). Tired of the same old routine, folks, then try the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New Frontier, or the New Nixon. The new Messiah will solve the problems of the previous incompetent with “compassionate conservatism” or “hope and change” and “a more responsive government” and “more transparency” which amazingly always means: more laws, more arbitrary secretive government, more debt, more inflation, more drones, more spindoctors, and less liberty. As that noted ‘American-hating extremist’ Thomas Jefferson, observed: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

To Americans, most of whom have Orwellian memory holes, it has always been this way. Government has ALWAYS regulated X and Y and Z and provided for old people or college educations or health care or what not. I listen to the debate on voter ID – since you need a government ID to board a bus or have a drink, then you must have a photo ID to vote (can someone name which signers of the Declaration or the Constitution had photo ID’s ???). If photo ID’s are good enough for Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers, then they are good enough for everyone…. And so these arguments go … One loss of liberty leads to more. One actual terrorists leads to government reading all our mails and logging in all our phone calls. If government does A to us, then of course it should also do B and C and D …. – government begats government. And the people shout AMEN!

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.