Privatize Aviation Sector And Say Goodbye To State Sequester

Business, Debt, Private Property, Regulation, The State

If all aspects of the airline industry, “curb-to-curb,” were truly private, as they ought to be, we wouldn’t chafe about whether pilots should carry guns or not, whether granny and grandpa from the prairie ought to endure patdowns, or whether air traffic controllers should be furloughed because central planners have run out of other people’s money, to paraphrase the late Mrs. Thatcher.

Meanwhile, back on terra firma, it’s hell for the faithful who believe Big Brother will deliver them from want—and from A to B. Via The Guardian:

Republican and Democratic leaders are working on draft legislation that would protect aviation from the estimated $87bn across-the-board spending cuts.
Furloughs forced on air traffic control staff have seen flights cancelled and many others delayed. FlightStats reported that on Thursday alone, up to mid-afternoon, 107 flights had been cancelled and 3,387 delayed. The sequester cuts are being implemented by the Federal Aviation Administration, after Republicans and Democrats failed to agree on a budget plan. Although the sequester began on 1 March, the cuts have been slow to take effect; the flight disruption is now highly visible and it is set to become worse from 15 June, when dozens of control towers are set to close.

UPDATE II: It Takes A Village Idiot: The Latest On Hillary Clinton’s Culpability In Benghazi

Democracy, Feminism, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Homeland Security, Intelligence, The State

Today came confirmation, in the form of a promised comprehensive progress report on Benghazi, of what I had prognosticated back in November, 2012.

“In the fullness of time … it will transpire that the woman who crack[ed] the whip at Foggy Bottom had decided to leave the U.S. embassy in Libya undefended.
The open community center [Hillary Clinton] was running there was meant to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a success. (Recall, Libya was a war of the womb, a product of the romantic minds of three women who fantasized about an Arab awakening. This estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids began, as in Greek mythology, with the Gorgon sisters. Medusa’s posse included Samantha Power, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They helped Hillary devise the casus belli for the war.)”

It takes a village idiot, and state immunity, to run an “open community center” in a country you’ve turned into Jihad Central.

Released today and reported by Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin, the Benghazi report, which will likely be ignored by most media, is so fresh and damning—that it is still unavailable online.

I will post a link as soon as one becomes available. Send one if you have one.

UPDATE I: Via Fox News: “Report: WH Altered Benghazi Talking Points to Protect State Department”:

Researchers for five Republican-controlled House committees have come out with a scathing indictment of the Obama administration’s response to the September 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.
Jennifer Griffin reports that the 46-page progress report concludes that the administration’s response was a concerted attempt to insulate the Department of State from blame following the attack.

“Findings in the report include”:

“Prior to the Benghazi attacks, State Department officials in Libya made repeated requests for additional security that were denied in Washington despite ample documentation of the threat posed by violent extremist militias.”
“Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton.”
“In the days following the attacks, White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department.”

UPDATE II: Text of the “Interim Progress Report,” with thanks to Mr. Love on Facebook.

UPDATED: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Recognize No Evil (But Rationalize It)

America, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Homeland Security, Private Property, Reason, Terrorism, The State

The specter of residents of the suburb of Watertown, in the Greater Boston area, being forcibly turned out of their homes and stared down by SWAT teams is not likely to disturb your average American. Said the great Roman statesman Cicero: “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.”

Perpetual children, Americas don’t know squat about their constitution, its philosophical origins, and why the framers, who were sophisticated thinkers, put certain provisions in place.

Of those Americans who vaguely compute something about a Fourth Amendment—“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”—most still believe that blatant violations of these sacred protections are probably justified, and visited only on “terrorists.”

In other words, if an authority figure violates the Fourth Amendment—you average, pliant American will simply surmise that it’s likely OK.

In addition, liberty as it was codified by the founding generation demands a rational mind. Being both childish and sentimental in the extreme, Americans shun rational thought. It thus becomes impossible to think clearly about liberty.

This isn’t it:

MORE.

UPDATE (4/26): Locked-down Bostonians rationalize tyranny:

Where is the outrage that the Powers That Are in Boston essentially made prisoners of an entire city? On what grounds and by what authority does any municipal government presume to place every citizen of a major United States city on house arrest? In the afterglow of the successful capture of the remaining Boston Marathon bombing suspect, alleged Islamist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the people celebrating in the streets that Tsarnaev was taken alive (ironically, only because the “lockdown” was lifted and the property owner in whose boat Tsarnaev was hiding could finally go outside and check his yard) ought to be asking themselves what they have to be happy about. They are beta testers of the New Freedom, which looks a lot like the Old Oppression. At whim, your government may order you to remain in your home, and if you dare disobey, they will point guns at you, essentially threatening to murder you.

Speak To Race In The Case Of Ria Van Straaten, Or Forever Hold Your Peace

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Without addressing the racial angle, the story about the cruel trick played on 87-year-old South African pensioner Ria van Straaten is meaningless. If you’ve reported (as has The Raw Story), shared or provided commentary sans racial context as to how this frail, legally blind elderly Afrikaner was forced to sing for her meager supper, by ANC black state officials—you should speak up now or forever hold your peace.

In other words, shut up if honesty is not your journalistic policy.

Of course, the heroic South African journalist Adriana Stuijt has never made this mistake. As is her custom, she fearlessly reports the unvarnished facts. “[B]lack-state officials laughed uproariously as the old white woman sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in a trembling voice.” The “frail elderly Afrikaner woman, Ria van Straaten, 87, [was] forced to ‘sing for her R1200 pension’ over [a] PA-system at [a] government-agency in Newcastle, 2013-04-10, … before they would hand over her R1200 old-age pension.”

On doesn’t expect much by way of politically unpalatable honestly from The Huffington Post, MSN.COM, or UPI.

Ignorant invertebrates all.

To the libertarians, however, who take feeble intellectual refuge in merely implicating and condemning the abstract entity of the state I say: “grow a backbone.”

The endemic evil of the state is a necessary but insufficient explanation for the joy black affirmative appointees take in socking it to whites in post-apartheid South Africa, a place where full-on racial hatred is a state religion.

Add the sweltering heat to the dangers of a sadistically, racist bureaucracy—and claiming a pension at the social security office is a dangerous excursion for old, white South Africans.