Vox Popoli

Franger writes: Vox your article makes the simple and flawed assumption that since you are a ‘christian’ libertarian, the left does not share your views, and neither does GWB, therefore GWB is left and it is stupid of the left not to realise this. But GWB’s governance is not of the left, it is crony capitalism. As a left/liberal I can realise that GWB doesn’t conform to the ideals of many of his own supporters, but that doesn’t put him in my camp.

I’m glad to hear that the American Left no longer supports a vast increase in federal spending and central government power. It’s wonderful that they are not interested in establishing new federal entitlements. I’m pleased to hear that they abjure the handing over of national sovereignty inherent in LOST. I think it’s great that they are no longer interested in having the US act as the military arm of the pretenders to global governance known as the United Nations. Oh, wait, they do support all that, don’t they….

Granted, the tax cuts aren’t a left/liberal’s cup of tea, but even the secular socialist saint John Maynard believed that taxes should be cut as spending is ramped up in times of economic slowdown. Personally, I suspect that if George Delano would declare that he doesn’t really believe in all that Jesus nonsense and start making overtures to the baby-killing crowd, the left would warm to him in a heartbeat. The far-left only doesn’t like the Iraqi occupation because it is the US who is nominally doing the occupying. Once Iraq gets turned over to the global centralists, they’ll argue that we should be funding it down to our last tax dollar.

And left-liberals are warming to George Bush. They call themselves 9/11 Democrats. They support big government AND war. Gee, that’s a new political paradigm.

Had a good time conversing with the NA crew. I’m a little surprised that there is still such a strong bent in favor of nation-building among the conservative crowd, especially considering that very few conservatives supported the concept in Bosnia when Clinton was leading the charge. I’m not opposed to the goal of expanding freedom and liberty around the world, I’m just extremely pessimistic about the likelihood of success as well as the opportunity cost. This is one of those areas where the Law of Unintended Consequences is almost guaranteed to bite you in the posterior in some manner you’d never considered.

We were more in accord on the women in the military issue, although I’m not sure that some of the guys had really thought about it all that much. Three callers this time, two opposing my view on nation-building and a Navy Persian Gulf vet offering anecdotal support for my contention that women don’t belong in the military.

I’m looking forward to the next time.

One season, 38 games, no defeats. Incredible. And I’m pleased to no end that my favorite player, Dennis Bergkamp, should turn out to be the hero of the final game. Sure, it’s not the Treble, but being the first team to go undefeated in the Premiership since 1889 is an astounding feat of sporting prowess.

2004 Arsenal

26 wins

12 draws

00 losses

73 goals for

26 goals against

From The Nation: Interviews with an array of conservative thinkers and policy-makers reveal a rising disquiet on these matters among people who have spent most of their lives proudly identifying with the Republican Party and the philosophy for which they’ve long assumed it stood. At the root of their discomfort is a feeling not that the Bush Administration is too conservative but that it has forsaken the guiding principles of conservatism–prudence, caution, restraint–to pursue an agenda that is messianic and radical. To these dissenters, it is an agenda that seems less a fulfillment of classic conservative principles than an exercise in hubris reminiscent of the ideological excesses of another era, the 1960s, only with the shoe on the other party’s foot.

You won’t often hear me praising The Nation, but this article by Eyel Press, entitled “Even Conservatives Are Wondering: Is Bush One of Us?” is one well worth reading. I tend to be an early bird and left the GOP years ago, and I fully expect many, many Republicans to join me in exiting the party as it transforms itself into a ruling strong government institution.

It is not uncommon that one’s opponents have a clearer view of one than one does oneself. This article should seriously trouble anyone who still clings to the hope that the president is a conservative. The problem isn’t just that the administration’s agenda is messianic and radical, but that it is a left-leaning messianic and radical agenda. The fact that much of the left doesn’t recognize this only demonstrates how deeply stupid most of it is.

DS writes of Wednesday: What’s your opinion? Today looked like a close well below 10,000 and the 200 day MA. Then off like a rocket. Hadn’t seen that pattern for a while. Perfect straight line. Almost like a computer was doing the buying.

Ah yes, one powerful sign that the rally has lost its steam is that the Plunge Protection Team begins to poke its nose into the markets. While their actions last summer were successful in prolonging new life into the rally – in coordination with the newly low rates – any activity on their part tends to be a nice set up for shorts as we saw on Thursday afternoon and Friday. There is no PPT, officially, but there is certainly a Working Group on Financial Markets. I don’t think they have any hope of staving off a decline, not now, but they can hope to let the air out in an orderly manner.

Mike Hartman of Financial Sense Online wrote: The Working Group on Financial Markets was created for a reason, and I believe we saw one of them yesterday. The Dow looked like it was headed for a 300-point meltdown day, but that couldn’t be allowed to happen for a few reasons. For one, it could have jeopardized our already fragile economic recovery. Second, we are in an election year and third, the U.S. Treasury was right in the middle of their three-day auction to get some badly needed cash to pay back old debt and to finance the growing federal deficit.

Just in case you’ve been wondering what he’s been up to, this recent press release makes it pretty clear that he’s been busy playing video games on this thing.Vector processing and massively parallel processing capabilities in a single architecture – Combat Mission would absolutely fly on that thing!

Which reminds me, I’m going to need to fire up Wing Commander – the first one – once I get that Mitsubishi projector I’m thinking about. It’s amazing how there haven’t been many great games in the lasat few years considering how much better the graphics have gotten.

From the Onion:Your choice of reading material for the bus is very important. Displaying Harry Potter books could get you mugged, but no one f—- with a guy reading “Surviving The Imminent Nuclear Holocaust.”

Not that I’m a survivalist or anything, but this does remind me of a conversation with Big Chilly one afternoon many moons ago in the Digital Ghetto. Now, keep in mind that while we did have some storage space in the house, it was entirely occupied by the Mad Scientist’s extensive botany project. Big Chilly came into my room – which was essentially lined with bookshelves packed double and triple deep – and asked if I still had that old .38 revolver that my Dad had given me when I was a kid.

I was sitting on my bed, so I said yeah, reached over to my left, tipped three paperbacks forward, unloaded the cylinder and handed it to him. He looked at me a little strangely, then asked if I kept my Glock handy too. I reached over to my right, tipped two hardcovers forward and pulled out the Glock. At that point, he glanced up at the ceiling fan and asked suspiciously: “If I put my hand up there, what will I find? And where’s the SKS and the AR-15, anyway? You can’t tell me you’ve got them in a bookcase.”

“Dude, look under the bed.”

Iraq’s feared Abu Ghraib jail was one big sex romp – sometimes by candlelight with an audience watching, U.S. troops said yesterday. Sex and alcohol were commonplace, and soldiers frequently set up candlelit rooms for voyeuristic sex shows, said a soldier who served at the notorious prison. “There were lots of affairs. There was all kinds of adultery and alcoholism and all kinds of crap going on,” said Dave Bischel, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police unit, who returned home from Abu Ghraib last month.

It will be interesting to see if the mainstream media will run with this aspect of the story. Possibly not, since the only conclusion is that women have no place in the military. I don’t think that they’ll be able to avoid it, though, anymore than the Pentagon could sweep the abuse pictures under the rug.

I agree with VDH. The notion that Rumsfeld should resign over Abu Ghraib is absolutely absurd. I think that the Secretary of Defense has done yeoman’s work in what I consider to be an impossible task, and although I believe the Iraqi occupation is doomed to ultimate failure, I have not forgotten the brilliant campaigns that conquered Afghanistan and Iraq in an amazingly short period of time.

Where Rumsfeld has been weak is in the areas not historically central to his responsibilities. As he admitted, he hasn’t “been focused on the war of ideas, to be honest with you.” That single comment reveals why he has not recognized the impossibility of the task he and the administration are undertaking. The secretary is an intelligent man, and as it becomes increasingly clear that semiotics count more than soldiers in this particular conflict, he will adjust his thinking accordingly.

The occupation will fail, but it will fail less disastrously and with less cost to the United States in prestige and blood if Donald Rumsfeld is in charge. If nothing else, I suspect he is a man who will recognize when the situation becomes impossible and have the courage to change course.

The United Nations’ decades-old scheme to set up an international authority to tax Americans at the same time they take control of over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface — the Law of the Sea Treaty — is getting a lot of attention in Washington. That attention is what we fought to achieve, and it is exactly what the internationalists behind Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) wanted to avoid. They hoped to sneak this flawed treaty through the Senate while no one was looking.Since our last update, March 16, 2004, both the Senate Committee on Armed Services and the House Committee on International Relations have held hearings on LOST.

Congressman Ron Paul and 13 of his House colleagues sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pointing out threats to American sovereignty and national security problems contained in this “terribly flawed treaty.” The Bookings Institution sponsored a briefing.The gloves are off! Pro-LOST forces are fighting back with display ads in Capitol Hill newspapers urging ratification of LOST. Pro-LOST lobbyists have picked up their pace in the halls of Congress. House members who favor LOST have circulated a letter urging quick ratification by the Senate, and the pro-U.N. Citizens for Global Solutions (formerly known as the World Federalist Society) is pushing hard for ratification.Hearing first hand what the pro-LOST forces said in their formal presentations, as well as overhearing some “off-the-record” comments, I can tell you that they are not happy. They expected the Senate to have quietly ratified LOST by now. They never expected Americans who live outside Washington’s Beltway to know what was going on and get in their way….

Those same Senate sources have asked us to continue urging our U.S. senators to oppose ratification as a countermeasure to the pro-LOST campaign.Learn why, as Steve Forbes recently wrote, “Sensible senators should strangle this resurrected beast.” Then, take action to counter the pro-LOST propaganda.

I have an idea. How about simply throw LOST, the UN and the Senators who support both into the sea. It seems a good place for them. I’m thinking somewhere in the Marianas Trench.