Vox Popoli

If anyone’s up for a brief voice-over IP chat, I’d like to do a few tests with Skype later today. Download it from SKYPE.COM and do a search for voxday sometime after 3 PM. Thanks.

I’m not jealous of Ben Shapiro’s success with his new book, BRAINWASHED. I’m quite pleased that WND has another hit on their hands, and I’m happy that they’re going to do well with it. I have to admit, however, that I’m more than a little puzzled by the whole thing.

You may recall that WND Books rejected my book MURDER because the notion that governments have a strong tendency to kill their own people was, in the words of one executive, preposterous. MM-kay…. That was actually the third book proposal they rejected, which is why I’ve abandoned any plans to write non-fiction for the time being. Personally, I thought that SCREWING THEMSELVES, a book on how women sabotage their lives and relationships from a male perspective, would have been an interesting and controversial read, but I now have serious doubts about my ability to understand the book-buying crowd.

You see, I can’t imagine why anyone would buy BRAINWASHED. Not because Ben isn’t a good writer, but its premise is on the order of proving that water is wet or the sky is blue. But then, BIAS did pretty well too, so clearly, this sort of thing sells. Look for my next book, OXGYEN, devoted to explaining its vital importance to humanity and the global economy.

While most of the journalists, like many Americans, describe themselves as “moderate,” a far higher number are “liberal” than in the general population. At national organizations (which includes print, TV and radio), the numbers break down like this: 34% liberal, 7% conservative. At local outlets: 23% liberal, 12% conservative. At Web sites: 27% call themselves liberals, 13% conservatives. This contrasts with the self-assessment of the general public: 20% liberal, 33% conservative.

There’s an easy explanation for these errant estimations of the general public. Since everyone is watching Fox and no one is watching MSNBC or PBS, how is anyone supposed to know that those networks are chock full of liberals? And, of course, anyone with half a brain knows that the vast majority of the 59 percent of journalists who call themselves moderates are liberals, (in the modern leftist sense), as well.

It’s interesting. My column is almost always one of the three most popular on WND for the week, and yet UPS has not yet been successful in selling it to mainstream newspapers. This isn’t surprising, as it’s been a struggle for them to sell Ann Coulter to the op/ed pages, and she’s by far the best-selling, most popular political writer in America. This only goes to show that whatever the editors are interested in, it isn’t selling their product. This makes a degree of sense, though, because what good socialist is interested in dirty profit expropriated from the overloaded backs of the proletariat.

So, it’s not easy. Big deal. We improvise, adapt and overcome.

Joseph Farah writes on WND: For more than 200 years, Americans have operated under the constitutionally protected principle that citizens have the right to defend themselves by bearing arms. Yet, right now, the United States is leading an effort to disarm the Iraqi populace – leaving them at the mercy of groups and individuals who will never willingly give up their guns or a future government that will rule over the people by force.

If we are trying to bring freedom to the Iraqi people, why are we attempting to disarm the populace and establish a strong central government? How are they supposed to defend themselves against a future Hussein or Iranian invasion if they are helpless? And if it’s such a good idea there, conservatives, do you support doing the same here as well?

RC asks: While I like the idea of money being tied to specie, I fail to grasp a few things. First, if money were tied to silver and/or gold, then it would seem that the only way to “make money” would be in the mining business and all other businesses don’t make money but merely push it around. Second, if people create things that are worth more, such as Adam Smith’s classic example of creating pins from steel, but no gold is involved, how is the additional worth measured and factored in to the money supply? It would seem that if you have more and more worth/value being created, but a constant amount of dollars/pesos/yen, it would seem you would go ever downwards in a deflationary spiral. Help my unbelief!

You are confusing worth with price. The primary advantage of a metal-based monetary system, such as the gold standard, is that the money supply will only increase at approximately the rate of normal economic growth, around 3-4 percent. This is a real limit on money creation, since it is a lot of work to mine metal. As the economy grows, (in your terms, additional worth is created), the money supply grows with it.

Deflation, in a normal economy, is not a real problem for anyone except banks. In fact, it is only a much-feared problem in a paper-based economy where the moral hazard of constant inflation has created a vast overhang of debt. In that case, (the situation we’re in), deflation makes it impossible to continue the game since borrowers will not be able to repay debts in less valuable future dollars.

For example, the deflationary period between 1839-1843 saw a supposedly catastrophic drop in the money supply of 34 percent, causing almost a quarter of American banks to fail. However, during those four years, there was an increase in consumption of 21 percent and real GDP of 16 percent – 4 percent annual growth.

The 1879-1889 period of deflation is generally considered to be a period of hard economic times by clueless economists who only look at the 30 percent drop in the money supply and ignore the fact that real wages rose 23 percent and GDP almost doubled – an explosive rate of growth. So, when you hear that deflation is a horrific evil, it’s important to keep in mind that what is bad for the banks is not necessarily bad for the average worker, and vice-versa.

I strongly recommend A HISTORY OF MONEY AND BANKING IN THE UNITED STATES: the Colonial era to World War II, by Murray Rothbard, to anyone interested in these matters. It is available at the Mises Institute.

Accusing top Pentagon officials of “dereliction of duty,” retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni says staying the course in Iraq isn’t a reasonable option. “The course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it’s time to change course a little bit or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course…. There has been poor strategic thinking in this…poor operational planning and execution on the ground,” says Zinni, who served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000.

You may recall that I have criticized the poor strategic thinking for some time now. I don’t expect anyone to pay a great deal of attention to what I have to say on military matters, but one would think that a commanding general’s opinion might at least be taken into account. Staying the course is not a reasonable option, and only someone almost wholly ignorant of the situation would recommend it. Significant expansion into global warfare and retreat into constitutional isolationism are the two primary alternatives. I tend to favor the latter, not out of any pacificist inclination, but because I do not trust the motivations and long-term goals of those who would be leading the former.

I wonder how Mowbray will go about defending his poor neoconservative friends this time? It’s an admirable instinct – to defend your friends – but here’s hoping he won’t have to start impugning false racist motivations to the general this time.

It’s a simple matter of mathematics. This was written about the time I left the industry, and according to my friends still in games, it’s only gotten much, much worse now that PC game sales are declining.

Their existence, and virtually every problem they address-–divorce, custody, child abuse, child-support enforcement, even juvenile crime—revolve around one overriding principle: removing the father from the family. If fathers remained with their families, family courts would have little reason to exist, since the problems that they handle seldom appear in intact families. While mothers also fall afoul of family court judges, it is fathers against whom their enmity is largely directed, because fathers are their principal rivals.

The judges’ contempt for both fathers and constitutional rights was openly expressed by New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell. Speaking to his colleagues during a training seminar in 1994, he said: “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating. Throw him out on the street, give him the clothes on his back and tell him, “See ya around.” . . .We don’t have to worry about their rights.”

Why are men so restrained about this obscenity? With all the unemployed Russian and Colombian gangsters willing to knock off judges for less than $500, I’m surprised there’s a family court judge in the country willing to rule against a father whose wife has unilaterally decided to split the family.

“Gee, honey, I sure am sorry to hear they have to reschedule and find a new judge again….”

Space Bunny and I took the BBC’s Test the Nation quiz yesterday. Didn’t do too badly, beating everyone in the actual TV audience – the highest score there was 143 – although not as well as Emma Patterson of Wokengham. It was probably the most difficult test of this sort that I’ve ever taken thanks to the time limitations, but it was fun.

Michael Ledeen, one of the war-on-method’s foremost neocon proponents, writes: Second, our defeat in Fallujah. I had hoped that the tactic of enlisting Sunni leaders to assist in the defeat of the jihadis would accelerate the terrorists’ defeat and enable us to round them up and clean out the city. But it turns out that it wasn’t a tactic at all; it was a strategic retreat. Today, throughout the region, everybody knows that the bad guys outlasted us. We were forced out. The Sunni generals (the first of which, unforgivably, was one of Saddam’s henchmen) just told everyone to cool it for a while, and the bad guys are now reorganizing for the next assault. Instead of smashing the terrorists, we set ourselves up for more casualties.

Worse yet, some of the crackpot realists in our military and their exhausted civilian commanders in State and Defense, have convinced themselves that this is the way to go, and they are now whispering to one another that we should adopt “the Fallujah model” in future engagements. If that holds, then we have lost. Because it means that we have surrendered the initiative to the terrorists and will not destroy them in future engagements. That adds up to actively encouraging the enemy to attack us.

Defeat in Fallujah. How veddy interesting. And here the administration sycophants had been talking about how the retreat from Fallujah was really just a demonstration of a clever new strategy. Furthermore, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the Abu Ghraib hijinks were not any part of a systematic intelligence-gathering program, but a short period of undisciplined craziness.

Keep this in mind as I continue to write about the impossibility of nation-building, and the sycophants continue to vociferously support it, right up until the time that President Bush declares Mission Accomplished II. Hopefully, this time he’ll have the wisdom to bring the troops home. I note that even hard core nuke-them-all ass-kickers like Bane have come around to my way of thinking vis-a-vis the administration’s martial prowess.

Ledeen continues: All of this is the inevitable result of the fundamental misunderstanding of the war against the terror masters. It is a regional war, not a war limited to a single country. Since we refuse to admit this, we are unable to design an effective strategy to win.

Ledeen’s only error here is that he, like the adminstration, refuses to admit to the global scale of the clash of civilizations. But otherwise, he might well be echoing my article of Clauswitzian criticism of the war effort.

Michael Rubin adds: The situation in Iraq today is dire. Bremer has embarked on a policy which is as damaging in the region as the Abu Ghraib scandal. Across the region, Arabs and Iranians point to the raid on Chalabi’s house to show that friendship with America is futile; the United States cannot be an ally and should never be trusted. Democracy is not about crushing peaceful dissent. Across the region, Iraqis and Arabs juxtapose Bush rhetoric and implementation.

Want one more reason that the Iraqi Occupation will fail miserably? Bremer is not only no MacArthur, he is yet another State Department disaster. He’s not really a disaster, though. It only looks that way if you make the mistaking of assuming that State is on America’s side, and not the UN’s, as is more accurately the case. As for a juxtaposition of Bushian rhetoric and implementation, those disappointed Iraqis and Arabs might have done well to consult with conservative Republicans as to the wisdom of putting faith in the president’s words.