Tag: politics

Tiananmen Spring

You may recall I was more than a little dubious about the “Arab Spring” being trumpeted by Middle East experts such as Thomas Friedman:

A security operation to clear protesters camped out on the streets of
Cairo since President Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the military last
month has left at least 40 people died. The Egyptian Interior Ministry says 200 people have been arrested,
including 50 in the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in in Nasr City and 150 at the
Nahda Square sit-in in Giza.

By mid-morning, state television reported that security forces had finished breaking up the sit-in there. Bulldozers were said to have been used to uproot the camps. The Interior Ministry said security forces had “total control” over
Nahda Square, and that “police forces had managed to remove most of the
tents” in the area. Security forces had blocked all access to the
protest camp.


Sources on the ground told Al Jazeera of at least 40 fatalities,
while the Muslim Brotherhood said at least 300 people had been killed,
with more than 5,000 others injured.

Democracy is not a viable alternative for any society that is not both fully civilized and homogenous.  It used to work for the USA and the UK.  It still works in Japan. It has never really worked on the continent of Europe. It is not a societal panacea and it should never come as a surprise when the imposition of a democratic system leads directly to violence and political turmoil.

Remember, civil war is nothing more than extreme politics.

Spot the false assumption

CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent changes his mind about the evils of marijuana and its medical inutility

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

Assuming that the government does anything for scientific reasons, common sense reasons, or simply in the national interest is almost always going to turn out to be wrong.  Don’t do it.

Marijuana should be legalized. So should every other illegal recreational drug. The cost of banning them is simply far too high.  It is time to end Prohibition 2.0.

The dismay of the white liberal

As Brown America waxes in influence, its longtime white liberal allies are dismayed to discover that the minorities they championed never actually gave a damn about the liberal principles they espoused:

Here’s the Daily Kos founder on the Snowden revelations:

I
don’t give a shit. Seriously, I just don’t care. NSA spying is bad! So
is stop and frisk. So is splitting up families by deporting children to
countries they’ve never been to and don’t speak the language. So is
harassing American muslims.

Government overreach
is bad. But to act like having the government track who you call is the
height of government abuse is a very white privileged view of the
privacy issue.

But as for Greenwald and Snowden? Seriously, I don’t give two shits.

Please,
Mr. Moulitsas, tell us, what is the proper, non-privileged,
multi-cultural view of the “privacy issue”? Is it one that stays within
the confines of what’s allowed by the Democratic Party? Is it one that
is relevant to the war on women, or voting rights, or immigration, but
ignores the collapse of the rule of law and the justice system (which is
far from a “white privileged” issue)?

Of course a
Mr. Moulitsas doesn’t give a damn about privileged whites such as
Greenwald and Snowden.  They are not of his clan or a minority in a
similar position. Imagine how shocked the white liberals are going to be
when they find out their erstwhile allies don’t give a damn about the
equality, the environment, abortion, women’s rights, or any of the
Left’s other sacred causes.  They never did, they merely went through
the motions and mouthed all the right words in order to ensure
themselves a place at the table.

The two-party system
based on ideology is totally foreign to most non-Americans, who are
accustomed to interest-based politics.  Now that minorities, real ethnic
minorities, make up a significant part of the Democratic party, it
should come as no surprise that they are beginning to reveal the true
nature of their politics.  Because of this, don’t be surprised when La
Raza becomes an effective third party in California and begins to
compete directly with the Democrats.

It’s not treason, it’s just free trade

So, the threat from al-Qaeda is so great that Americans have to give up all their civil liberties, while at the same time, al-Qaeda is being subsidized by the U.S. government:

Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing “due process rights” as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending.

The U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office has declined to act in 43 such cases, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said today in a letter accompanying a quarterly report to Congress.

“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,” Sopko said.

But even that is less apparently treasonous than the US government directly supplying al-Qaeda, with whom it is supposedly at war, with heavy weaponry.  At this point, it looks as if Obama’s chief legacy will be having been the greatest gun salesman, both foreign and domestic, of all time.

It’s enough to almost make me wish I’d voted for him.

Congress exempt from Obamacare

Just in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear that Obamacare is going to wreck American health care, the executive branch has given the congressional branch an exemption from the law:

The White House has approved a deal that will exempt members of Congress and their staff from some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, Politico reported late Thursday. Under the law, popularly referred to as Obamacare, lawmakers and their aides were required to source health insurance “created” by the law or offered through one of its exchanges, and without the subsidies they currently enjoy, the members of Congress would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year, the report said. However, the Office of Personnel Management now plans to rule that the government can continue to make a contribution to the health-care premiums of the lawmakers and their staff, it said, citing unnamed congressional sources and a White House official.

Their shamelessness simply knows no bounds.  None.  Cicero was right; democracy does lead inevitably to aristocracy. The fact that we presently have an aristocracy of connections and influence rather than an aristocracy of blood only means that it will be another generation or three before the latter is made institutional.

Not so much alpha

A few folks asked me where I figured Carlos Danger ranked on the socio-sexual hierarchy.  For various reasons, I concluded that despite his ambition, fame, and political power, he was most likely a gamma male .  Now we have definitive photographic proof confirming my initial diagnosis, as to the left can be seen a picture of the “beautiful young lady” with whom Mr. Danger was texting risque images.

I, for one, had no idea that Lena Dunham was so interested in politics.  Or that Carlos Danger was so passionate about marine biology.

That’s reassuring

The USG declares it will not torture or kill Edward Snowden:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter to the Russian minister of justice assuring the Russian government that the U.S. will not seek the death penalty for National Security Agency leak source Edward Snowden if he is returned to the U.S. Seeking to push back on assertions Snowden made in his request for temporary asylum in Russia, Holder also said in the letter that the U.S. will not torture Snowden.

Of course, this IS the same government that said it wasn’t spying on the entire world’s email and telephone calls. And Eric Holder isn’t exactly the most trustworthy member of that government.

The “necessity” of limiting free speech

Well, I did warn you this sort of thing wasn’t limited to the SFWA, after all.  What a pity it didn’t occur to conservatives a few decades ago that all the free speech they found unpalatable could simply be limited out of “necessity”.

For the past few years speech has moved online, leading to fierce
debates about its regulation. Most recently, feminists have led the
charge to purge Facebook of misogyny that clearly violates its hate
speech code. Facebook took a small step two weeks ago, creating a
feature that will remove ads from pages deemed “controversial.” But such
a move is half-hearted; Facebook and other social networking websites
should not tolerate hate speech and, in the absence of a government
mandate, adopt a European model of expunging offensive material.

Stricter regulation of Internet speech will not be popular with the
libertarian-minded citizens of the United States, but it’s necessary….

American free speech jurisprudence relies upon the assumption that
speech is merely the extension of a thought, and not an action. If we
consider it an action, then saying that we should combat hate speech
with more positive speech is an absurd proposition; the speech has
already done the harm, and no amount of support will defray the victim’s
impression that they are not truly secure in this society. We don’t
simply tell the victim of a robbery, “Hey, it’s okay, there are lots of
other people who aren’t going to rob you.” Similarly, it isn’t
incredibly useful to tell someone who has just had their
race/gender/sexuality defamed, “There are a lot of other nice people out
there.” 

Of course, under this logic, if the law simply considers being black, or Jewish, or homosexual an action, then such actions can be criminalized.  After all, “to be” is a verb, and verbs denote action, so therefore there is no justification for not criminalizing anyone who happens to be anything considered undesirable by the majority.  And since when is an “impression that [one is] truly secure in this society” the basis for Constitutional jurisprudence?

As this reasoning shows, progressives are not merely short-sighted, they are downright delusional.  This is pure rhetoric presented as dialectic; at absolutely no point does the argument hold up to even a cursory rational analysis.

Needless to say, if imposed impartially, such a standard would affect the groups claiming to need protection more than anyone, as many of them regularly engage in the group libel of men, whites, and the religious.  The assault on free speech is just another faux equalitarian stalking horse.

Dancing around the obvious

It’s interesting to see the mainstream press delicately dancing around something that all of them have heard about for years in their coverage of Weinergate II: Carlos Danger:

It’s also time to declare a moratorium on the line that Huma Abedin
is the smartest, shrewdest, most level-headed and glamorous asset the
Democratic Party has, and if she’s OK with Anthony, we should be, too.
Clearly, there is something very wrong with Abedin — whether it’s simply
that she shares her husband’s vaulting ambition or that she has a
pathological need to be publicly humiliated, something’s up. When The
New York Times is calling for you to take your sad assemblage of sexual
compulsions out the door, you should consider that a wake-up call. Silda
may have stood by Eliot, but even she never opened her mouth in his
defense.

Abedin took the good-wife act one step further at
Tuesday’s press conference, admitting her collusion in this new lie: “We
discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor,” she
said. So clearly, as Abedin sat for these joint interviews in which
Weiner claimed to be a changed man, she knew that wasn’t the truth, and
was happy to lie to a public that had been nothing but sympathetic
toward poor, brilliant Huma, saddled with such a dud. Perhaps they’re a
better match than we knew.

Something very wrong with Abedin… something’s up.  I wonder what that something might be that would cause a wife to be totally indifferent to her freakshow husband spending his evenings tweeting pictures of his genitalia to younger women.  Whatever could it possibly be?

I still recall the look of utter panic on Sean Hannity’s face when Gennifer Flowers came out and said something to the effect of “everyone in Little Rock knows Hilary is a lesbian” on his show.  If I recall correctly, they went right to commercials.

Carlos Danger for President

I have to say, I like the cut of his jib. We’ve already got the idiocracy, now all we need is the leader with the insane and unfounded confidence of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.  And I say Carlos Danger, aka C. Anthony’s Weiner, may be just that man.

When the first texts were revealed two years ago, Mr. Weiner lied about
it, saying he had been the victim of hackers. Then he owned up,
tearfully abandoned his office and retreated into private life. Then he
was back, telling the world that therapy and his wife’s forgiveness had
turned him around and that he was ready to begin a new chapter. That
turned out to be the mayor’s race, which he entered in May. What he did
not say then, and what voters did not realize until Tuesday, was that
his resignation had not been the end of his sexual misconduct.

The timing here matters, as it would for any politician who violates the
public’s trust and then asks to have it back. Things are different now,
he insists. “This behavior is behind me,” he said again on Tuesday. He
suggested that people should have known that his sexting was an
unresolved problem well into 2012.

That’s ridiculous and speaks to a familiar but repellent pattern of misleading and evasion.

To the contrary, I say a ridiculous candidate is ideally suited for an American democracy that knowingly re-elected Bill Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Barry Soebarkah. Carlos Danger would be the perfect president to lead America into its final collapse.  As the economy contracts and interracial violence erupts from Florida to California, the citizenry would be cheered and inspired by frequent press conferences featuring the presidential weiner. 

Why should the New York Times be perturbed by what Carlos Danger does with his dongle?  After all, his wife clearly doesn’t care what he does with it so long as he keeps it away from her.

Carlos Danger in 2016!