Osama: 1, America: 0

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

What was/is a greater danger to the republic of blessed memory: the (now-dead) Osama bin Laden, or the state apparatus installed in his honor? You tell me.

In July of 2010, the Congressional Research Service estimated that “the United States had spent more than $1 trillion on wars since the September 11, 2001.” That was in 2010.

For all the din being made over the opportunity to cut back on so-called counter-terrorism efforts now that bin Laden is dead—you and I know that’s never going to happen.

Since 9/11, our overlords who art in DC have doubled the defense budget, adding a Department of Homeland Security that took us from passing through a metal detector in our travels to genital manipulation and irradiation.

The police state perfected under the now fully rehabilitated “W,” and perpetuated under Obama his successor, is considered a co-equal branch of government. Your Fourth Amendment rights come with multiplying exclusionary clauses, not least that an agent of the state has the right to treat those who still travel (I try not to) like meat in a meatpacking factory.

The budget allotted to the repugnant TSA agents comes to $6.3 billion annually. According to Randall Holcombe of the Independent Institute, “The damage al Qaeda’s attack caused when it destroyed the World Trade Center was about $10 billion.”

In her familiar smarmy style, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow waxed nostalgic about the pre-9/11 era. She managed some valid points: “Ten years ago, before 9/11, the U.S. defense budget was half the size that it is now.

Ten years ago, before 9/11, there was no Department of Homeland Security. Had someone suggested that there ought to be one, you probably would have teased them for using a weird word like homeland.

Ten years ago before 9/11, you walked through a metal detector to get through an airplane, sure, but this was the kind of thing you‘d only do maybe on a third date. Sometimes on your flight, even the pilots would keep the cockpit door open and you could see them work and you could see the world fly by through their windshield if you peered down the aisle.

… Before 9/11, the U.S. legal history of torture was of our government prosecuting people for that. Wartime was no excuse. [Really?]

Before 9/11, the National Security Agency having access to everybody‘s emails and phone calls and texts and bank records and everything would have been a scandal.

Before 9/11, we did not have a new militarized intelligence bureaucracy that ‘The Washington Post’ described as an additional 1,271 government organizations, 1,931 private companies and an estimated 854,000 people holding top secret security clearances.

Before 9/11, no one in politics and private life talked about Article III Courts. Courted called for under the Constitution because those were just what courts were. We didn‘t have anything but Article III courts. Why would we?

Before 9/11, we didn‘t drop bombs using flying robots.

Before 9/11, we had not lost 3,000 people in Lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Before 9/11, we did not have 2.2 million Americans who are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and we did not have the national promise to do right by them as a country in respecting their service.

Before 9/11, we had not lost more than 6,000 of those veterans in our post-9/11 wars before U.S. forces finally founder and killed Osama bin Laden.

If you were a kid when 9/11 happened, it may be hard to imagine our country without all of these things in place.

If you were an adult when 9/11 happened, you probably never could have believed this is how we would have chosen to spend the decade after.”

Assange Dishes About Facebook

Business, Constitution, Government, Intelligence, Law, Technology, The State

In an interview with RT (Russia Today) Julian Assange claimed that Facebook “in particular, is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.”

“Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.”

More than anything else Assange’s statement about the overweening nature of the American state. Most businesses capitulate for fear of prosecution.

UPDATE V: Atavism On the Streets of America (THE UNIT)

Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, John McCain, Justice, Middle East, Military, Terrorism, The State, War

Today Barack Obama just about guaranteed his reelection by offering up the blood, guts and gore Americans seem to crave. Like Bush before him, the president and his advisers know that to keep the American people tuned-out, they have to keep them turned-on. Killing and carnage turns too many Americans on; makes them like animals in perpetual estrous (on heat). It’s just the way it is.

I wager it’s quite possible that the body of the slain Osama bin Laden will be put on display, much as the Bush administration proudly exhibited the horribly mutilated bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons.

Some Americans streamed into the streets of the Capital and gathered at Ground Zero, New York, in jubilation over the bin Laden kill, much as the Arab Street erupts after their Americans or Israeli enemies are murdered. (To their credit, I have not seen Israelis throng to Rabin Square to celebrate similar occurrences, although I’ve seen them form human chains from Tel-Aviv to Haifa to stop a war.)

How different are we from our Arab adversaries? Not much, or so it would seem. That vulgarist Geraldo Rivera surrounded himself with hysterical reptilian brains—students who were behaving as on a spring break. Or in a fashion that would do any primitive tribe proud.

Except that a primitive tribe generally wages war only on imminent enemies, and confines the battle to the home front. Had such a precision operation been undertaken and achieved after 9/11, without wasting trillions of dollars, destroying at least two countries along the way, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, to say nothing of the American economy, the travel industry, on and on—it would be worth celebrating. But not now.

And not in this manner. A civilized people doesn’t dance in the streets in celebration of the enemy’s death; barbarians do.

First to die today at the hands of NATO (purportedly “Danish airmen possibly in an F16 bomber”) were members of the Gaddafi family, when their compound was hit on the weekend. The Libyan government reported that Gaddafi’s “second youngest son, 29-year old Saif al-Arab, and three grandchildren under 12” were murdered. What had they done to anybody?

Nevertheless, barbarism booster John McCain rattled his old bones in a jolly jig, with nary a thought for the kids killed:

“We should be taking out his command and control. If he is killed or injured because of that, that’s fine.”

UPDATE I: TOO LATE FOR PAC MEN OF THE UNIVERSE. Nobody disputes that OBL needed killing. It ought to have been done by precision pac men: highly select, special-ops soldiers, and not by lumbering standing armies that scooped up in their dragnet entire countries and economies (ours). The state can’t do anything right. I said as much in 2002. I made recommendations against the “military’s clodhopper’s traipse around the world” in “Facing the Onslaught of Jihad”:

Professional killers get high on blood and can be put to good use as the Pac-Men of the universe. Paid by contract, the mercenary is far more motivated than a poorly paid soldier.
GI Joe, moreover, has little incentive to avoid killing civilians. Punishment for carelessness is infrequent and responsibility for mishaps is collectivized. Litigating against the employees of an all-powerful superpower can be Kafkaesque. Ultimately, the people who pay for the soldier’s excesses are the taxpayers.
The mercenary contractor, on the other hand, will incur liability for “collateral damage,” the euphemism for killing innocents. For the mercenary, stray bullets mean strained budgets. Above all, like any private contractor, mercenaries are paid in full only on delivering the Bin properly Laden with goods.

UPDATE II: HE WENT DOWN FIRING: “U.S. official says Osama bin Laden went down firing at the Navy SEALs who stormed his compound.” OBL refused to surrender.

UPDATE III: STORY CHANGES. Now the custodians of the allowable information claim that OBL “Hid Behind One of His Wives During Firefight.” This is just a wild guess: The stories will vary depending on the circumstances and the politician weaving the yarn. I also hazard that the general direction will to demean the enemy.

I can offer a historic perspective on the enemy’s evolving courage. During the Six-Day War, in 1967, Egyptians were often mocked in Israel for their cowardice. Piles of shoes were left in the desert, as the Egyptian soldiers fled from the Israelis. They removed their shoes and ran. (Google seems to have scrubbed these famous images from their search.) But that has changed. The Jihadis are cowards in as much as their “military” strategy is to go after defenseless civilians. But are they cowards in death? I doubt it.

UPDATE IV: MURDER IN LIBYA. “There were no obvious signs of military command and control facilities, but there were signs that the buildings were being used as a residence,” reports the Star Tribune. “In a kitchen, rice, pasta, fish and stuffed peppers were on a stove, with a wall clock stopped at 8:08 p.m., the time of the attack. In the building, which took a direct hit, women’s dresses were buried in the concrete debris.”

No wonder “U.S., British and Italian embassies were attacked and burned by angry mobs in the Libyan capital Sunday, hours after a NATO airstrike was reported to have killed one of Moammar Gadhafi’s sons and three of his grandchildren.”

UPDATE V: THE UNIT. I can see how the operation executed by “the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru,” will make for a good episode of “The Unit.” Yes, I confess; I watch it. It’s one of the more tolerable action drama series on TV, because it features … action, good acting, and very few women pretending to be as strong or as capable on the battle field as men. I’m allergic to those. (If there is a skinny, annoying fem, weighing 80 pounds, and chasing bad guys in stilettos, I change the channel.) Although “The Unit” has elements of “Jack Bauer: Federal Zombie,” which I simply hated, beggars can’t be choosy.

UPDATED: Monarchy Vs. Mobocracy (“Albion’s Seed”)

Ancient History, Britain, Bush, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, The West

Trashing the British monarchy is an unfortunate, liberal (not in the classical tradition) impulse, prevalent in the US. Never mind that the British monarchy is purely titular. This American instinct mirrors the deracinated nature of American society, epitomized by the neoconservative creed. Strategically, Americans are taught, in state-run schools, that they form part of a propositional nation, united by abstract ideas, rather than by ties to history, heroes, language, literature, traditions.

In truth, America was founded on both. There was the Lockean philosophy of individual rights. But this philosophy, as the American Founders understood, didn’t magically materialize, or come into existence by osmosis. “Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated. Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism.”

The fathers of this nation, moreover, loved the American people; they did not delegitimize their ancestry and history by calling them eternal immigrants. John Jay conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what their descendants are taught.

To denounce the monarchy, as some libertarians have done, with reference to that 18th Century Che Guevara, Thomas Paine, is radical alright, but it is also nihilistic. Paine sympathized with the Jacobins—the philosophical progenitors of today’s neoconservatives—and he lauded the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious “Revolution in France.”

Pat Buchanan, in one historically rich column, provides an interesting juxtaposition between king and a despot far worse:

“Louis XVI let the mob lead him away from Versailles, which he never saw again. When artillery captain Bonaparte asked one of the late king’s ministers why Louis had not used his cannons, the minister is said to have replied, ‘The king of France does not use artillery on his own people.'”

In his seminal book, Democracy: the God that Failed, master of praxeology Hans-Hermann Hoppe provides ample support—historical and analytical—for his thesis which is this: If forced to choose between the mob (democracy) or the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent.

“[I]n light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly,” writes Hoppe.

“From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.”

… democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten. Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state.

MORE.

[SNIP]

The democratically elected ruler has no real stake in the territory he trashes for the duration of his office. (Besides, Court Historians and assorted hagiographers will re-write history for him.) It was no mere act of symbolism for the Clintons to have trashed the White House on the eve of their departure.

The Queen of England might be a member of the much-maligned landed aristocracy, but she has acquitted herself as a natural aristocrat would—Elizabeth II has lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class. (It was a sad day when she capitulated to the mob and to the cult of the Dodo Diana.) The queen has been working quietly (and apparently thanklessly) for the English people for over half a century. According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Windsor was 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated. Still in her teens, Elizabeth II joined the military, “where she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.”

It looks as though William, her grandson, has more of a sense of duty (not my kind, but nevertheless a patriotism his countrymen may appreciate) than most members of the pampered American political dynasties. Did any one of the atrocious Bush girls do anything worthwhile over and above preach for daddy’s wars and promote Obama’s healthCare?

But to reiterate, the monarch in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. has far more powers, and uses them far more destructively, than does the monarch across the pond.

UPDATE (May 1): To the ahistoric contention below that American freedoms originate exclusively in … The Netherlands: I guess that the historian David Hackett Fischer, author of Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, got it completely wrong. Ridiculous too is the contention, moreover, made by the letter writer (I never publish untruths about my written opinions) that I was an Anglophile for stating that historic fact. There is a chapter in my forthcoming book titled “The Anglo-America Australian Axis of Evil.” Yes, that’s the writing of an incorrigible Anglophile!