Vox Popoli

…but homeschooling parents might abuse their children!

Three high school wrestlers face expulsion based on accusations they hog-tied a learning-disabled teammate and zapped him with a grill igniter. Officials call it a hazing prank that went too far. None of the boys were arrested but Volusia County’s sheriff’s office filed felony complaints with prosecutors, seeking felony charges of aggravated battery and false imprisonment.

School officials said two hazing incidents occurred in a wrestling practice room at the high school Tuesday.

Volusia County Sheriff’s Department offers the following account of the incident:

“According to witnesses, the victim — a 17-year-old wrestler — was tackled to the ground by team members while inside the wrestling room, hogtied with a jump rope and then shocked 20 or more

times with an igniter device.”

Not to mention:

A 10-year-old boy has been suspended from a Pompano Beach elementary school amid allegations he raped an 8-year-old classmate. The alleged attack happened last Friday at Sanders Park Elementary School. A school spokesman said an investigation began Monday and the decision was made Wednesday to suspend the boy.

Counseling is available to both the boy and girl.

Well, as long as counseling is available, I’m sure everything will be okay. Here’s the main point. Abusive parents will ALWAYS have access to their children. Abusive teachers and schoolmates won’t if you homeschool. I don’t intend to go through the mathematics of how many more potentially abusive relationships one is likely to enjoy in a public schooled career versus a homeschooled one, but I’m quite sure that it is several orders of magnitude higher.

Anna Quindlen laments the declining opportunity to murder children in Mississippi:

There is only a single abortion clinic in Mississippi. Once there were seven. There are nearly 3 million people living in the state. No other state with only one abortion clinic has as many residents. Mississippi has enacted every restriction on abortion possible within the limits set by the Supreme Court.

I think this offers evidence that the supposedly pro-choice Libertarian position is an EFFECTIVELY pro-life one. The number of abortions that will be eliminated simply by allowing the states to exercise their sovereign rights will be significant.

And if the “blue” states wish to follow Europe into death by depopulation, there’s upside on that side of the equation too. The “blue” staters can’t breed their way into power, so they have to steal the children produced by others through the brainwashing provided by the public schools.

While I’m not exactly bullish on America, the three positive strains I see currently active are as follows:

1. Gun control is manifestly acknowledged to be a losing political issue. Stealth regulation is now the more immediate concern.

2. The homeschooling movement is growing literally every day. Christian 30-somethings are starting to ask their peers with surprise: “you’re NOT planning to homeschool?” Secular parents are beginning to take note, and critical mass may be reached within ten years.

3. The more left-liberal people become, the less they reproduce. No evolutionary dead-end is likely to remain dominant for long.

From the New York Times:

On bitterwaitress.com, the most popular page is an annotated database of people who give bad tips (defined on the site as “any gratuity under 17 percent for service which one’s peers would judge as adequate or better”)

If that’s the determining factor, count me in as a proud “bad tipper”. Seventeen percent is absolutely ridiculous… the Almighty himself only expects ten. It seems strange that as service has gotten worse and worse over the years, expectations of compensation for it have nearly doubled.

From the Drudge Report:

Because of the estimated fourteen days required to count votes due to the unexpectedly high voter turnout in this weekend’s Iraqi elections, computerless voting stations in Iraq were provided 415 vote-counting machines from Diebold Election Systems. The so-called “black box” machines are considered by some to be unreliable because they do not leave a paper trail.

In an unexpected development, George W. Bush was determined to have won precincts in the predominantly Sunni Anbar province of western Iraq, the Saladin district of east Baghdad and the Shiite cities of Qadasiya and Amara. Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell could not be reached for comment, but Mark Radke, the company’s Director of Marketing, suggested that while it was possible many Iraqis had written in the name of the U.S. President, who is not a candidate for the Iraqi parliament, it was more likely that some machines had not been reprogrammed following the 2004 American presidential election.

Well, isn’t that intriguing….

Another proposed Vox book bites the dust. Just a week after the revelation of three conservative media whores on the federal payroll, MEDIA WHORES was canceled, sight unseen, by the publisher only six weeks after being signed. I’m told that the book wasn’t calculated to sell well enough to justify the marketing dollars required to push it; apparently people interested in politics are much more likely to buy books about how college professors are liberal and how those dirty, dirty Japs should be kept in concentration camps.

It’s annoying, to be sure, but it’s not a big deal. I had no desire to jump through the publicity hoops in the first place and I had no idea how I was going to find the time to play talking head for a month this fall. I’ll probably just post the first few chapters on voxday.net as an ebook in the next week or so.

One thing that is a relief is that I was never completely comfortable with the notion of holding my fire when it comes to the right’s media whores as the publisher demanded, especially after the affaire d’Armstrong et al. If people want to take the Altermans, Krugmans, O’Reillys and Malkins of the world at their word, then so be it. I never will.

Michelle Malkin claims to want a debate:

What a ridiculous and gutlessly underhanded stunt. During the speech, students noticed Robinson darting in and out of the ballroom. After my event, Robinson was in the back of the room kibbitzing with a Japanese American man who had come in protest and who had politely asked me a few questions about the book. I walked back and introduced myself to Robinson, and asked why he didn’t think to let me know of his visit or suggest to his sponsors that we debate. It would have been the fair and intellectually honest thing to do (and as a leader of the so-called Historians Committee for Fairness, Robinson ought to know something about fairness).

Right, now she wants a debate…. It’s particularly amusing to read this, given that she doesn’t know the first thing about intellectual honesty. What a shameless pseudo-intellectual prostitute!

And as a gutless wonder, Malkin certainly knows something about gutlessness.

I’ve gotten at least five emails arguing that clearly all of my assertions are to be doubted, because Adolf Hitler did not come to power by a process that was in any way democratic. This is wildly ahistorical, as a brief perusal of the six parliamentary elections that took place in Germany between May 1924 and March 1933 demonstrate rather clearly.

During this time, none of the twelve parties active at the time won a majority in the 418-seat Reichstag, so every government was a parliamentary coalition.

The number of Reichstag seats won by the Nazi party, 1924 – 1933:

May 1924 – 032 seats, sixth-place

Dec 1924 – 014 seats, ninth-place

May 1928 – 012 seats, ninth-place

Jul 1930 – 107 seats, second-place

Sep 1932 – 230 seats, first-place (38 percent)

Nov 1932 – 196 seats, first-place (34 percent)

Mar 1932 – 288 seats, first-place (45 percent)

Hitler did not win the presidential election of April 1932, but he did win 13,418,051 votes despite having become a German citizen only one month before. However, not only did he lead his party to electoral victory three times, but also became Chancellor within the rules of the democratic Weimar system, an arrangement settled between the leading parties that placed Hitler and two other Nazis in the eleven-member Cabinet.

Jonah Goldberg writes on NRO:

Daily Kos posted this excerpt from a 1967 New York Times article:

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :

Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3– United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Me: And the guy’s point is….what, exactly? That we were right to abandon our Vietnamese allies? That we should do the same to Iraqis? That the left wing of his party hasn’t been moved by the democratic aspirations of those facing totalitarianism for four decades? Or maybe his point is to illustrate that the only foreign policy prism he and his kind can see through is Vietnam, even though the two conflicts have exactly nothing in common — save their ability to elicit incoherent rage and bad historical analogies from the left.

This is just willful blindness. The guy’s point – OBVIOUSLY – is that getting caught up in voter turnouts and drawing massive, long-term conclusions from them is likely to be wildly erroneous. The fact that the 83 percent reported then is even higher than the almost surely exaggerated 72 percent figure that was bandied about two days ago makes the democratic triumphalism look even more silly.

A willingness to show up at the polls says precisely nothing about whether a people are willing to fight and defend their own freedom. The Iraqis aside, I’m not even sure that’s true of the American people any more.

I’m sure this will come as a shock to some:

In the case Schulz v. IRS, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled:

… absent an effort to seek enforcement through a federal court, IRS summonses apply no force to taxpayers, and no consequence whatever can befall a taxpayer who refuses, ignores, or otherwise does not comply with an IRS summons until that summons is backed by a federal court order. … [A taxpayer] cannot be held in contempt, arrested, detained, or otherwise punished for refusing to comply with the original IRS summons, no matter the taxpayer’s reasons, or lack of reasons for so refusing.

Bob Schulz, the plaintiff, is head of We the People, an organization that has taken separate legal action against the federal government for its failure to answer a “petition for redress of grievances” regarding the income tax. Though the court affirmed a lower court decision in favor of the IRS, saying Schulz’s motion to quash an IRS summons lacked “subject matter,” it used the ruling as a means to clarify the agency’s power under 26 U.S.C. Section 7604.

It’s a charade, people. It always has been. The problem is that the agency has no trouble getting the employers, banks and county clerks to do its dirty business for it. The fact that 90 percent of what the IRS does is illegal doesn’t matter to most people, since everyone in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is too scared to stand on their rights under the law.

I wonder how fast the black robes will move to overturn this ruling? They can’t be bothered to deal with genuinely Constitutional issues, but I imagine that they’ll lose no time in manufacturing an imperative government interest to pave over this little legal obstruction.

Typical tax ruling:

“Prove that you didn’t shoot the man murdered at 50th and Broadway on January 31st at 10 AM.”

“Well, you see, I was out of the country at the time. Here’s my boarding passes. Here’s 50 affadavits from the people in my tour group proving that I was with them viewing Etruscan ruins at that very time. Here’s the police testimony of five witnesses stating that the description of the shooter is a black man eight inches taller than me and 100 pounds heavier. I’m a white woman, by the way. With blonde hair.”

“The evidence is frivolous and cannot be allowed into court. Guilty!”

JP reveals some interesting thoughts:

You seem to be under some misapprehensions. I presume they are not willful blindness…

1) Acknowleding the situation in Sunni areas, where a minority of baathists still work for a return to power by violent means and makes the will of the people somewhat unclear, is a mark of mature reflection and temperance. The alternatives (“fuck ’em if they can’t make a vote” or “declare the whole enterprise illegimate because a minority of people are holding hostage a majority of the, at best, lukewarm on democracy after losing power”) are not desirable.

I’m not blind to anything. Quite to the contrary, I think it is the democratic triumphalists who are blind to the almost complete irrelevance of the voting turnout. Elections are held in tyrannies across the world every single year. Voting is not freedom. “Mature reflection and temperance” here serves as a euphemism for the admission that neither democracy nor representative democracy are being practiced in Iraq, they are instead being used as a cover for tribal power games.

JP doesn’t seem to see the illogic required to assert that a system is free and democratic while the overseeing authorities, on the sole basis of their military force, compensate those who don’t participate.

2) The ‘formula being sought’ to keep Allawi as Prime Minister isn’t sinister: it’s the way politics are done in a multi-party system. Sharon’s Likud party, for instance, is only 33% of the vote – he has to build a coalition. It’s what they do, use the right yardstick when evaluating them. The reason this works is that the parties frequently have more in common than different. Allawi is reasonably respected by all factions, and working to keep him on is like working to make Bill Frist the majority leader. In fact, the Shiite have some fairly good reasons to keep Allawi as head – a lot of it has to do with PR.

Garbage. I’ve lived for years in countries with parliamentary governments. The Sharon analogy is a poor one; you’ll note that Shas and the religious parties which serve as Likud’s junior partners never hold the prime ministership. There are times when a parliamentary system with two powerful parties will settle on a minor party member as a compromise candidate, but that clearly isn’t the case in Iraq – assuming that the pre-election polls are reasonably correct – and the Shiite list holds a near-majority.

3) Sistani isn’t the ‘leader’ of the URI – he’s the spiritual guide. That’s the equivelent of saying Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are the leaders of the Republicans.

JP’s analogies are going from bad to ridiculous. First, the “spiritual leader” of Islamic parties usually is the leader. Sistani is the man with whom the USA is negotiating with, the fact that he is a cleric doesn’t change that. Neither Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell lead a coherent faction within the Republican Party nor are they even of the same Christian denomination as the president. JP would be almost as accurate to compare them with the self-disenfranchised Sunni Muslims as with the Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

4) Iraq is and was a much more secular place than you give it credit for. Your arguments are very much like saying ‘Christian Evangelicals are taking over the government’. It speaks more to the biases of the observer than the observed. Iraqi Shiite parties are really not interested in an Iranian-style government. Certainly, there are wackjobs there, just like here, but there seem to be moderate voices getting in play. From those Shia I happen to know, it seems a lot of them are ‘friday Moslems’ (just like here, and ‘Sunday Christians’). It’s pretty natural.

I’d consider taking this argument more seriously if Iran didn’t appear to be so enthusiastic about Sistani, and the USA so apprehensive. Especially if he hadn’t been a longtime associate of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The fact that his list appears likely to win big in the elections, but his name hasn’t been trumpeted from the cable news shows indicates the likelihood that Washington knows he’s probably going to be trouble.

5) “Fear” is the wrong word, I think, but the Founding Fathers recognized that direct democracy is amenable to demogogues and breads-and-circuses. A democratic republic, with the restraint of enumerated constitutional powers, where you can throw out the people that suck without the entire system collapsing, is the thing that most works. Now, if only our courts and government practiced that restraint. (As an aside, I _do_ think the Iraqis have shown excellent restraint in this process.)

I used to believe it worked. I don’t believe so anymore. All things have a lifespan, and while it’s difficult to say what the lifespan of a constitutional democratic republic is, I’m quite sure we’ve exceeded it. Perhaps if Jeb Bush wins the presidency in 2008, more people will begin to share my disdain for the process.