UPDATED: Russians Voted; The West Objects (The Two-Party Fraud)

America, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Russia, The West, UN

Russians voted. International monitors approved the rambunctious process as the fairest so far. Having failed in egging on a “successful,” “color-coded or plant-based revolution” in Russia, the know-it-all, monolithic media of the West have expressed the standard contempt about Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming majority, calling the victory a “stolen election.” Way to go.

Russians, a naturally nationalistic people, like the hardcore Putin, and do not apprecaite the NATO attempt to “demote it, weaken it geopolitically or undermine its defensive potential.”

UPDATE: THE TWO-PARTY FRAUD. In “The Cannibal In Chronicles” post, I recommended Tom Fleming’s “Daily Mail Blog” (which I cannot link to directly because of some code in the “British” link that throws IlanaMercer/com’s home page). About the West vs. Russia, Fleming writes this:

Everyone knew that Putin was going to win, and even anti-Putin pollsters admitted he would get at least 60% of the vote, which would be a landslide in an American election. But, cry the pundits, Putin has the support of the peasantry. The smart people in the cities who can watch the BBC and read the New York Times–the people who really count in any country–they are holding spontaneous anti-Putin demonstrations. Pro-Putin demonstrators are either state employees doing a job or mere yokels. In other words, Russia=the USA, where only rubes and crazies would support Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul.
The pundits, long in advance, were also predicting corruption and irregularities, as they always do whenever the the US regime disapproves of election results. The fall-back position is that Putin and his cronies rigged the election in advance by restricting the pool of candidates. …
merican elections have never been clean. Nevertheless, the sauce for the Russian goose cannot be ladled on the American gander. This is especially clear in the case of the charge that Putin’s party rigged the election in advance by restricting the pool of candidates. Here in America, we call this manoeuvre the primary system.
In our two-party party state, ballot access for third party candidates is very restricted. After all, only Democrats and Republicans were involved in writing federal and state election laws. There is no mention political parties in the Constitution, and while two political coalitions emerged very early–the faction of Hamilton versus the faction of Jefferson–they did not function as political parties in the later sense. There were no chairmen, party lines, or caucuses to enforce discipline on independent-minded members of Congress or state legislatures.

Read on by clicking “Tom Fleming Daily Mail Blog” on Barely a Blog’s Blogroll.

UPDATED: Talking Truth Until You’re Blue In the Face

Debt, Economy, Education, Political Economy, Propaganda, War

Freedom’s real warriors labor with little support (and by “true” warriors I do not mean the Republican TV circus animals and tele-tarts who get face time and popular love in excess of their worth). Economist Robert Higgs laments “the bitter disappointment of seeing the [invaluable] research and writing [he has] carried out over more than forty years prove to have been completely in vain.” He wonders whether perhaps his mother ought to have strangled him in the crib, to spare him the bitter disappointment:

For all of the good I’ve done in correcting people’s understanding of what happened to the U.S. economy during World War and what lessons one might justifiably draw from that experience about, say, the scientific validity of the Keynesian model or its related fiscal-policy implications, I might just as well have held my breath and turned blue. Here we are in June 2011, and millions of Americans are being presented with the purest potion of economic misinformation one can imagine, an account in no way superior to those the young Keynesians were peddling so confidently in 1944, when I was born. …
When I began to teach U.S. economic history at the University of Washington in the late 1960s, I quickly realized that this tale of the wartime “Keynesian miracle” could not withstand critical scrutiny once one went beyond the barest account of it in terms of the elementary Keynesian model and the standard government macro measures, such as GDP, the consumer price index, and the rate of civilian unemployment. Almost immediately I saw that unemployment had disappeared during the war not because of the beautiful workings of a Keynesian multiplier, but entirely because about 20 percent of the labor force was forced, directly or indirectly, into the armed forces and a comparable number of employees set to work in factories, shipyards, and other facilities turning out war-related “goods” the government purchased only after forcing the public to pay for them sooner (via wartime taxes and inflation) or later (via repayment of wartime borrowing). Thus, the great wartime “boom” consisted entirely of (1) some people’s mass engagement in wreaking death and destruction and (2) other people’s employment in producing supplies for these warriors after the government’s military labor drain, turning out ”goods” never valued by consumers or private producers in voluntary transactions, but rather ordered by government functionaries and priced completely arbitrarily in a command-and-control economy. In no sense was the alleged ”wartime prosperity” comparable to real, normal prosperity. The pervasive regimentation, rationing, price controls, direct government resource allocations, and forbidden forms of production (e.g., civilian automobiles) should have served as a tip-off.

READ “World War II: Still Being Touted as the Quintessential Keynesian Miracle.”

UPDATE (March 5): “WARTIME SOCIALISM”: “… what politician would not warmly welcome an economist who, with the aid of indecipherable econometrics, legitimizes immoral power and property grabs? This is why the anti-free market central planning advocated by the late John Maynard Keynes has been embraced with renewed verve…”

The Cannibal In Chronicles By Clyde Wilson

Affirmative Action, Colonialism, Free Markets, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

Clyde Wilson has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South favorably in the March 2012 print Issue of Chronicles, A Magazine of American Culture. Writes Professor Wilson:

“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom of speech and press is the possibility, however small, that a lonely voice telling an unwanted truth might be heard. Such a speaker requires intellectual courage—the rarest of all forms of courage. The feisty, independent-minded libertarian columnist Ilana Mercer has that courage—in spades—as she chronicles the drawn-out murder of civilization in her native South Africa. She not only describes what is happening, she tells us how it came about and what it means. This is one libertarian who knows that the market is wonderful, but it is not everything. …”

CONGRATULATIONS ARE in order to Chronicles’ peerless editor, Tom Fleming, for his “Daily Mail Blog,” which you can follow from Barely a Blog’s Blogroll.

UPDATED: Rush Limbaugh Pimps Principles (& No One Understands RIGHTS from Wrongs!)

Conservatism, Constitution, Feminism, Gender, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Republicans

In the proud history of conservative serial stupidity, Rush Limbaugh’s latest faux pas takes the cake. An issue concerning constitutional principles fell into his large lap. But the conservative movement’s self-aggrandizing, insufferably pompous Mouth, pimped it.

A privileged Georgetown University law school student named Sandra Fluke was permitted to make the case before a “nonofficial congressional committee” as to why the state should compel the insurance industry to provide sisters with birth-control pills. (Some committee members were in tears listening to this cloistered cow tell of women turning away from the pharmacy counter for lack of funds. Go to the Republic of Biafra for a taste of deprivation, Fluke!)

This flaccid fool was supremely repulsive in her perverse conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” were the responsibility of other taxpayer. Fluke is a testament to the destructive role of women in our politics, forever petitioning to expand the power of the state at the expense of individual rights. (Read a corrective about natural rights, here.)

Recall, Limbaugh once launched a sneering assault on a deformed Michael J. Fox, aping Fox’s Parkinson’s-induced spasms, instead of critiquing Fox for petitioning Congress for unconstitutional favors, just like Fluke.

When it came to Fluke, Limbaugh flunked as badly. He began thus:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”

Limbaugh then said, “ok, so she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled.” “Round-heeled” is an old-fashioned term for promiscuity.

This is entertaining, but besides the point.

But here is where the middle-aged, so-called conservative loses it, sounding like a lusty old voyeur:

“So Miss Fluke, if we are going to … pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Game. Set. Match, Sandra Fluke. Limbaugh not only lost the argument to this inconsequential woman, but he also helped anoint a future Democratic, feminist, front-woman and leader.

Conservatives have a hard time with first principles; perhaps they don’t have any. Thus, they can never win an argument with a liberal, for all they have in their intellectual arsenal is a Benthamite utilitarianism (except that Jeremy Bentham was really smart).

Why are conservatives Addicted to That Rush?

UPDATE (March 3): No One Understands RIGHTS from Wrongs! Your point is not the point either, Robert Glisson. The point is that conservatives and liberals alike do not have any mandate to promote responsibility vis-a-vis the legislator. The Fluke female can screw herself silly; quit preaching to her! People are sick and tired of conservatives in their bedroom and liberals in all the other rooms. The only point here is that no taxpayer, coerced by Congress, should be compelled to pay for Fluke’s personal choices, good or bad. I give up on anyone understanding what a natural right means. I do, however, get why people are Addicted to that Rush, who is not “more often right than wrong,” but is both insufferably self-righteous and wrong.