The Egyptian court sitting in judgment of former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak will oblige the masses. It’ll masquerade as a court of law, but this tribunal will more closely resemble the French Revolutionary Tribunal, meting justice mercilessly by popular demand.
The Washington Post describes a rather cruel spectacle: “The first day of the ousted president’s trial transfixed Egyptians across the country as they watched a man who had once commanded respect and fear lying on a hospital gurney inside a metal cage installed in a makeshift courtroom. … His two sons, Alaa and Gamal Mubarak, hovered over him, blocking the view of their father from television cameras and the court. Gamal Mubarak twice kissed his father and frequently leaned in to confer with him as his brother stood erect, holding the Koran in his hand.”
AND:
… most Egyptians seemed enthralled by the spectacle of the former president in a cage. Some replaced their Facebook profile photo with a screen grab of Mubarak lying on the gurney. Others voiced indignation that the trial would take longer than a day. His crimes were clear, they said. They pointed to his dyed jet-black hair and what they described as his smug manner, his arms often crossed behind his head, as evidence that his health was fine.
Look closely and this so-called ‘deal’ on the debt ceiling crisis is a triumph of sleight-of-hand over substance.
Sunday night it was, ‘We will cut a trillion dollars in the first 10 years.’ By this morning a trillion had become $917 billion, which means we lost $83 billion in cuts overnight. Makes you afraid to go to bed.
In the first three years of the Obama presidency, the deficits will total about $4.2 trillion. Cutting $917 billion over 10 years, or $91 billion a year, is chump change.
Then there’s the commission, another one. Remember the commission President Obama ordered to come up with answers to this stuff last year?
They did. Their report was full of a lot of good ideas. It was ignored by the president and Congress. But they want us to believe this commission will be different.
Baloney. There has been no attempt to address tax reform or entitlement reform. That will be left for ‘The Commission.’ My guess is they won’t touch it anymore than the current crop of folks tackled it. And without those two things, we are doomed.
Supposedly there will be triggers in the legislation that will require additional cuts totaling $1.4 trillion across the board if the committee and Congress cannot agree. Color me skeptical.
We are facing more than $61 trillion of unfunded liabilities from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other obligations – $61 trillion.
There is no money to meet those obligations and our government knows it. But they have the unmitigated gall to march out Sunday night as though they had found a cure for cancer and expect us to break down in uncontrolled adulation. They make me ill.”
[SNIP]
Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, via RT: “This colossal debt, 14 trillion or more, means that the country has been living on credit, which is really bad for one of the world’s leading economies. They live beyond their means, and put a part of their burden on the entire world’s economy.”
The state is in the business of death. State-subsidized Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are the intensive rearing facilities in which the animals we eat live wretched lives and die a grisly death. Yes, and I am the same libertarian who penned perhaps the only propertarian defense of Michael Vick (I & II), which so horrified Sean Hannity, that he had me on his radio show. I regret that.
JULIAN ROSE, writing for Quarterly Review, pens a piece titled “Who Owns the Food Chain.” Rose rightly inveighs against the “factory farming and agri-chemically dominated conglomerates that retain their stranglehold over around 90% of the Western world’s food chain.”
While I disagree with the way Rose frames the life-giving profit motive (smaller family farms must too pursue profits to feed us), he rightly denounces the putrid practices of the factory farms, aka CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, where animals are nothing but “units on a conveyor belt designed to extract the maximum amount of milk from the cheapest available high protein diet – a diet that will be laced with antibiotics and composed of genetically modified soya, maize and quite possibly nanotech feed components as supplementary ingredients.”
I recommend this thoughtful British magazine. Subscribe and read “Libya: a war of the womb: ilana mercer detects a uterine quality to US action in Libya.”
BACK TO THE ANIMALS. A careful philosopher named Jonathan Safran Foer has written the first philosophical treatise arguing against eating animals to have captured my attention because of its appeal to logic and fact. In “Eating Animals,” Safran Foer’s concludes: “We should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them. ‘In the way we now eat them’ denotes their utterly miserable lives in intensive rearing facilities – factory farms, aka CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation – and their horrific deaths at assembly line slaughterhouses.”
UPDATED I: Fred, please read the articles I wrote in defense of Vick to understand my perspective. (HERE & HERE.) I would never suggest any state regulation; just voluntary attrition. You can purchase “happy meat” at your local farm market.
My local farm market guarantees that their animals lived free and died unafraid. Yes, we own these sentient creatures, but we must husband them humanely.
UPDATE II (Aug. 1/2011): MONSANTO MONOPOLIST. Most libertarians have not awoken to the fact that big farma is antithetical to the free market VIA RT:
Nearly 300,000 organic farmers are filing suit against corporate agriculture giant Monsanto, who have in recent years squashed independent organic farms from coast to coast.
270,000 organic farmers filed a lawsuit in March 30 in an attempt to keep a portion of the world’s food supply organic. The plaintiffs in the case are members of around 60 family farms, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations.
Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the suit lashes out at Monsanto to keep their engineered Genuity® Roundup Ready® canola seed out of their farms. Organic agriculturalists say that corn, cotton, sugar beets and other crops of theirs have been contaminated by Monsanto‘s seed, and even though the contamination has been largely natural and unintended, Monsanto has been suing hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patent for incidentally using their product.
UPDATE III (9/12/023)::
‘Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight,’Albert Schweitzer.
The intensive farming of sentient creatures has no place in our world
It is devastating for animals, environment & our planet
Wow: Republican wizards have passed a bill in the lower chamber that will both raise the debt ceiling and slash spending! The marvels of modern semantics. Meantime, BHO is tweeting like a twit possessed, urging Americans to work their representatives over so that a deal can be struck, and a disaster averted. The disaster: a rise in the interest rates on all the stuff they have borrowed. BHO’s re-election hinges on happy spenders. (Even if it’s splashing out at the One Dollar Store.)
It’s remarkable what politicians putting pen to paper can achieve, isn’t it?
The marvels of an alternate reality notwithstanding, interest rates are long overdue for a correction. Political will is what’s keeping interest rates low or at zero, the premise being that buying and consuming is what generate economic growth. Keynesian crap, if you’d pardon my language. If interest rates rise, savers will be better rewarded. Capital for future investment can be accrued.
In his wonderfully learned book,The Failure of the ‘New Economics, Henry Hazlitt summed-up the essence of Keynes’ General Theory: “The great virtue is Consumption, extravagance, improvidence. The great vice is Saving, thrift, ‘financial prudence.'” Duly, Obama has vowed to make credit flow “the way it should.” Never mind that “all credit is debt,” and that, in Hazlitt’s words, “proposals for an increased volume of credit are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt.”
Nearly two hours after the House narrowly approved House Speaker John Boehner’s debt-ceiling bill, the Senate voted 59-41 to reject the speaker’s plan, leaving Congress no closer to reaching agreement before the August 2 default deadline.
The vote did not kill the Boehner bill itself, allowing it to be used as a vehicle for a later compromise.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared at an impasse late Friday on negotiations on a Senate bill to raise the debt ceiling. As a result, Reid introduced new language to tighten his original proposal in the hopes of gaining more Republican support on a cloture vote on his legislation expected early Sunday.
According to a memo from his office, Reid’s latest proposal would increase the deficit reduction over 10 years from $2.2 to $2.4 trillion, with a “dollar to dollar” increase in debt ceiling based on a proposal originally authored by McConnell to fast-track resolutions of disapproval to allow the president to raise the debt ceiling with the political liability falling on Democrats.
In his defense, Harry gets his meager savings by “winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which Republicans decry as budget gimmicks.”
I hope that every one of the already stale Tea-Party freshmen who refused to quit the wars to save some money is tossed out of office.
UPDATE (July 30): REEDS ALL. More mindless, insignificant tit-for-tat, via The New York Times:
The Republican-controlled House on Saturday dismissed a new proposal by Senate Democrats to end the fiscal crisis before the Senate even voted on it, deepening the ongoing federal budget stalemate.
In an effort to send a message to Senate leaders of both parties, the House voted 173 to 246 against the proposal by Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, to show it had no future in the House.
During a heated debate, Republicans and Democrats traded accusations over who would be responsible for a government default if no compromise was reached by next Tuesday, with Republicans defending the plan they sent to the Senate on Friday only to see it rejected almost immediately.
On Twitter, Speaker John A. Boehner called the Senate measure “DOA” and a “non-starter in the House.” Republicans also said the $2.5 trillion in savings in the measure were illusory
.
Here’s a budget I can begin to get behind. Over to the marvelous John Stossel:
The biggest budget busters are Medicare and Medicaid, and get this: the 400 subsidy programs run by HHS. Assuming I take just two-thirds of the Cato Institute’s suggested cuts, that saves $281 billion.
(See Cato’s cuts at www.downsizinggovernment.org.)
How about the Defense Department’s $721 billion? Much of that money could be saved if the administration just shrank the military’s (SET ITAL) mission (END ITAL) to its most important role: protecting us and our borders from those who wish us harm. Today, we have more than 50,000 soldiers in Germany, 30,000 in Japan and 9,000 in Britain. Those countries should pay for their own defense. Cato’s military cuts add up to $150 billion.
I’ve now cut enough to put us $2 billion in surplus!
Can we go further? My TV show’s guests thought so.
“Repeal ObamaCare,” syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock said.
Reason magazine editor Matt Welch wants to cut the Department of Homeland Security, “something that we did without 10 years ago.”
But don’t we need Homeland Security to keep us safe?
“We already have law enforcement in this country that pays attention to these things. This is a heavily bureaucratized organization.
“Cut the Commerce Department,” Mary O’Grady of The Wall Street Journal said. “If you take out the census work that it does, you would save $8 billion. And the rest of what it does is really just collect money for the president from business.”
As the bureaucrats complain about proposals to make tiny cuts, it’s good to remember that disciplined government could make cuts that get us to a surplus in one year. But even a timid Congress could make swift progress if it wanted to. If it just froze spending at today’s levels, it would almost balance the budget by 2017. If spending were limited to 1 percent growth each year, the budget would balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington would limit spending growth to about 2 percent a year, the red ink would almost disappear in 10 years.
As you see, the budget can be cut. Only politics stand in the way.
