Be Afraid: The Proof is in the Putin

America, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Government

The following is an excerpt from “Be Afraid: The Proof is in the Putin,” my new, WND.COM column:

“Left and right, the cable commentariat is currently engaged in a cut-and-thrust over the use of strong words in politics. In particular, does ‘terrorism’ describe the initial reluctance of some tea partiers to support the US government’s set-in stone spending?

Lost in this silly squabble is the following: ‘the second coming of the Republican revolution,’ as Politico.com dubbed the tea party contingent on Capitol Hill, failed to defuse the threat of the debt. Only 28 tea-party freshmen voted against the ballyhooed “Budget Control Act Amendment.”

Listen to the words of one wily politician whose country’s central bank holds almost 40 percent of dollars as reserve currency. Vladimir Putin’s response to the debt compromise was pitch-perfect, given the stakes stateside and beyond. This via RT and Press TV, respectively:

‘The current deal struck by US lawmakers will not solve the underlying issues. 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 country is … shifting the weight of responsibility on other countries and in a way acting as a parasite.’

Having impressed themselves no end, the lawmakers who came up with the “Budget Control Act Amendment” don’t impress Putin much.

So what was the deceptive deal that was endorsed by 59 of the already stale tea-party freshmen, and got enthusiastic whoops from many among mainstream media’s menagerie of morons? …”

The complete column is “Be Afraid: The Proof is in the Putin.”

If you are interested in syndicating my weekly, WND column, kindly email me for details at ilana@ilanamercer.com. “Return to Reason“ is WorldNetDaily’s longest standing, exclusive libertarian column.

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An Egyptian Revolutionary Tribunal?

Democracy, Islam, Justice, Law, Middle East

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.

Jack Cafferty Uncaged

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Media, Republicans

No wonder CNN uncages Jack Cafferty for only a few carefully monitored minutes every day. The old boy still has more testosterone than Dona Lemon and Anderson Cooper combined. (But then so does Soledad O’Brien.) FROM CNN’s Jack Cafferty:

“The government is selling snake oil – again.

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.”

UPDATE III (9/12/023): “Who Owns The Food Chain?” @ Quarterly Review (Monsanto Monopolist)

Britain, Business, Capitalism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Free Markets, Justice, Private Property, Technology

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.

Karen De Coster, for example, writes a lot about “food freedom” and equates “true conservationism” with a rejection of the cruel “anti-nature destructiveness of monoculture.”

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

Via “Compassion in World Farming,” by Philip Lymbery