Rand Paul Manhandled

Homeland Security, Regulation, Relatives, Republicans, Rights, Ron Paul, Terrorism, The State

I far prefer Ron Paul’s strident response to the TSA’s assault on Rand Paul than the son’s watered-down words. To CNN’s Erin Burnett, Rand said, essentially, that the TSA folks were good people bogged down by inflexible rules. He followed up with special pleading.

It is not the first time special interests—House and Senate representatives, for example—suggest a system of sectional privileges and rights, based on professional need and proximity to power. Patrick Smith, the author of Salon’s “Ask the Pilot,” has implied that because of his professional position, he should be entitled to “preferential, alternative checkpoints for pilots.”

Such cloistered concerns typified a 2,000-strong, flight attendant’s union, which has been fielding tons of complaints from its members, who were, nevertheless, none too concerned for their customers, the manhandled passengers.

Noelle Nikpour, contributor to Mr. Sean Hannity’s Great American Panel, is another. Nikpour, a tedious Republican strategist who talks up a storm on that forum, extended her exquisite understanding of individual rights to … people like herself and her co-panelists. You know, important sorts who fly a lot; they ought to be able to acquire a permit that’ll exempt them from being screened afresh as they scurry to their important appointments.

Rand seems to have joined these special-case pleaders in asking for wavers for frequent fliers who’ve been willing to share more personal data with the goons of the TSA.

I prefer the Ron Paul presidential campaign’s “strongly worded statement Monday afternoon, blistering the TSA for its practices”:

“The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe,” it said.

To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question

America, Foreign Policy, Islam, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism

“To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question” is my new weekly column, now up on RT (the reason for the late posting was explained here). Here is an excerpt:

“It’s okay to kill ’em, but it’s not okay to pee on them once they’re dead.

This sums up the piss-poor discussion over the LiveLeak clips of “four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters.” According the New York Times, the videos, “posted on public video-sharing Web sites including YouTube, began ricocheting around international news Web sites on Wednesday,” January 11.

The urinators “are members of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, which completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to its base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.” They kicked off the wee odyssey in the northern part of Helmand Province.

Quick to distinguish themselves were the pro-pee pundits. For a ghastly moment, I was back in 2002, watching the anchorwomen of Fox News countdown to obliterating Iraq. How like watching bitches in heat that experience was!

The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley. The repartee of the two animated MTV characters, the products of Mike Judge’s genius (think “Idiocracy”), would go something like this:

Butthead: “Beavis, check this out. What’s better; to have a dude waste you or whiz on you, uh huh huh?” (Sound effects are here.)

Beavis: “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the whiz, Butthead, gimme the whiz, yeah, yeah.” (More grunting.)

As the Daily Mail noted, the dead Afghans may have been civilians or insurgents, we simply do not know. Whichever is the case, they would have, I wager, welcomed the kind of options even Beavis and Butthead are capable of entertaining.

For the truth about the people we are pissing on and pissing off in Afghanistan is quite simple. America’s indisputably brave soldiers have been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population. These Pashtuns disdain the central government we desperately want them to obey. So it goes: We help local groups believed to be patriotic, but, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate they despise. …

The complete column is “To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question”. Read it on RT. Do “Like” it on Facebook and Retweet it to Twitter.

“And Then There Were Four …”

Elections, Military, Republicans, Ron Paul

In choosing Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (40% of the vote), South Carolinian voters showed that they were unable to comprehend that Ron Paul’s message is pro-military. That confused me. If Ron Paul’s support among the military is as large as it is purported to be, why is it that a pro-military state did not warm to the congressman’s message (13%)? Is it because these voters perceive Paul as threatening to cut the Gordian knot or the umbilical cord that sustains them, even if their “jobs” involve fighting and dying for naught? What a shame.

Is it perhaps because soldiers are not nearly as moral as some would like you to believe? You can say that again.

Major Garrett credits Gingrich with uniting “economic, social and national security conservatives”:

Gingrich united all three in South Carolina and his double-digit victory there will go down in party lore as one of the historic snap-back moments for the conservative movement. It’s not as if conservatives didn’t have a voice in Iowa or New Hampshire. They did. But they came together in bigger numbers and with a greater sense of fulmination and rage at what they perceive is the establishment Republican tendency to dismiss or delegitimize conservatives in the nominating process. This grievance has burned with varying degrees of intensity in every nominating contest since 1964 and if it were ever to find its full expression, South Carolina would be the place.

I don’t see how on earth anyone can see Gingrich, the man who describes himself as “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican,” as a conservative.

When all is said and done, “there is no path to the nomination without Paul. All candidates are angling for Paul’s supporters,” seconds Doug Wead, senior adviser to the Paul campaign, who also ensures supporters that Paul is still angling for the nomination.

As National Journal sees it, “for Rep. Ron Paul, it’s all about the delegates. [I]f you win elections and win delegates, that’s the way you promote a cause,” confirmed Paul. “In his Saturday night speech, [Paul] said his campaign will push forward and concentrate on caucus states that award delegates proportionally, because that’s the name of the game.’”

Another Storm in a Tea Cup, Apparently

Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Government, Ilana Mercer, Media, Private Property, Regulation

This blog title replicates one written in 12.19.06. The repetitiveness reflects the lack of change in the media status of the people of the “provinces.” Thanks for asking, Robert, we are okay, having weathered a major ice storm that hit the Pacific Northwest. But we were without power for close to three days.

FoxNew reported only yesterday that “250,000 electric customers around Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia were without power Friday because of a winter storm that coated much of Washington state in ice, swelled Oregon rivers and brought the expectation of more flooding in both states with warmer temperatures and rain.”

Scratch that: Power went out on Thursday morning. By nighttime, the temperature inside my home had plunged to 52 degrees. Even though we have a generator (purchased after the 2006, first “Storm in a Tea Cup”), we were caught with practically no fuel, having listened—and heeded—the weather reports. No warnings were issued. If anything, our weather experts predicted a big thaw come Thursday.

However, cold air and an arctic north wind saw temperatures drop into the 20s across much of the region. Fluffy snow (20cm, at least), on which I had jogged happily a day before, was soon covered in a thick sheet of ice. All through the night we listened as clumps of the stuff fell from the giant ceder trees onto the house. Fortunately we had had the trees windsailed, so they seemed stable, but the weight of the ice saw big branches snap off like twigs.

We had been thinking of having a few trees felled, for safety. But, as you know, your property is not your own, and each such consideration demands a letter from an arborist and a hefty shakedown “baksheesh,” paid to the local goons at the municipality. Such regulation is probably responsible for loss of life.

Indeed, sadly, a falling tree killed an unknown neighbor, RIP: “The tree fell on a person backing an all-terrain vehicle out of a shed this morning near Issaquah, said King County said King County sheriff’s Sgt. Cindi West.”

This post reflects upon the stasis among the statists and media sycophants. And since any oscillation in the form of a learning curve is absent from the system called the state, local and federal, I will repeat the questions I posed after the 2006 storm in the Pacific Northwest:

Utilities are only nominally private and are heavily regulated. How have regulations affected their response times and, most crucially, the maintenance of the power grid?

The grid and power lines suffered mostly tree damage. In this part of the world, the trees everywhere are intertwined with the cable. Why? Why isn’t a wide tree-free swath maintained around these vital structures? Why are trees not chopped back?

I suspect the explanation lies in the self-defeating dementia of tree fetishists, and “Watermelon” legislation — green on the outside; red on the inside. However, as usual, the “Watermelon” worldview creates more havoc than it prevents. Because of wood fires, the usually pristine air in our part of the world resembles the air above the shanty town of Soweto. The resources and energy spent–and the lives lost–because of this mess are many times the cost or worth of a few thousand trees.

On a less personal note, this week’s WND column was an especially hot one, but there is no point in posting it to the blog now. I will, rather, post the column once it goes up on RT. My “paleolibertarian” column now features on the Russia Today broadcaster’s website. I ask all my BAB readers to “Recommend/Like” the RT column, each week, and retweet it. RT deserves your support for its support and interest in ideas other banal minds won’t touch, don’t you think?

And on a funny note: It was a struggle to keep our African parrots warm, but they settled into the routine. When T. Cup awoke this morning to warm, normal house temperatures and light levels, he demanded happily, in his old cute voice: “yummy-yummy.” And then he quickly comforted himself, “It’s coming, it’s coming.”

A recent image of T. Cup and his “mommy” is on the gallery. To view TC, wait for the page to upload all the images.