Freedom from government jobs
Freedom and Whisky, one of my favorite blogs, had this post about the descent of Scotland into the abyss of socialism:

So while 39% of Lothian's current economic activity is in the state sector, only 38% of the jobs being advertised are not with the government. The percentage of advertised private vacancies is probably even less when we consider all those so-called charity jobs.

Apparently Margaret Thatcher wasn't able to hold off the forces of chaos forever. Well, we didn't really expect all that North Sea oil money to go to the benefit of those who put capital at risk to find and develop it, did we? I guess all the ambitious Scots got out. If Freedom and Whisky is any guide, though, some Scots still think the world is for winning, not whining. Ironically, my father came from Scotland in the Twenties and ended up working for the US government! But he was an officer in the Air Force, providing the one service that a state should arguably be engaged in.

I had to get in a crack about Reagan's Republican Senate majority on Captain's Quarters, in response to some of the commenters here:

Sure, Reagan had 53 or 54 Republican Senators for six of his eight years, although the House, which spends the money, was pretty heavily Democratic. That just shows how useless Republican Senators can be. A Republican President has to have at least 60 Senators on his side to compensate for the RINOs on spending issues. And that's pretty rare. In fact, it's never happened.

Hey, I even did some research! And one can quibble, in that the divisions between the parties were somewhat one-sided at times. But it's too difficult to figure out the percentages in every case when there were fewer than 100 senators, so I just let my comment stand. Interesting that some of the very earliest Senates had "Republicans" in them, but of course these weren't the same as the Party of Lincoln. Whigs and Free Soilers had much more interesting names!

Apropos of this post on Samizdata about identity theft, I opined:

Checking your credit card accounts on the internet should be reducing the scope and frequency of ID theft. I used to go over my account every thirty days, when the paper came. Nowadays I look at all my accounts at least every other day. If anything suspicious were to happen, I'd know it right away. And at least in the US maximum liability is really low if you catch problems right away. That has changed for the better. Debit cards are still a problem, though. And I do wish Wachovia would stop sending those credit card checks in the mail. Not that there's enough headroom in my cc accounts so I should worry much!

In response to this post on Dailypundit, I observed:

Uh oh. I'm agreeing with Quick and LT on this one. If they come for your cigarettes and you don't do anything it won't be long before they come for your guns. And then it's your butter. Now there's a slippery slope!
Odd, though. One reason some do-gooders don't want to push the $280 billion penalty is that they don't think it will be enough, that the smokers will just pay up. But then of course the govt. will come up with some other excuse to impose another, more drastic penalty. Why do we have that darn "no tobacco" clause in the Constitution, anyway? How did that get in there? And why didn't those evil tobacconists do something like put warning notices on every pack of cigarettes long ago?

I seem to be in a totally sarcastic mood today. Maybe because it was 52 degrees this morning, I saw my breath on my walk into work and I'm feeling great!

On Dailypundit, in response to a post about Bashir Assad possibly leaving power in Syria, in reference to the Interior Minister who was just found dead:

Russian missiles won't protect him from "committing suicide" with a gun equipped with a silencer.

and in response to Bill's comment defending the honor of Debkafile:

OTOH, "more reliable than the NYT" pretty much defines "damning with faint praise", non?

Then, in response to a statement about how Bush sycophants keep making excuses for him and that he really hasn't done anything effective against terror:

No, a major point of GWB's presidency is to protect America by defusing explosive totalitarianism, starting with the Taliban and Saddam and handling threats in descending order of seriousness. A caution. In 1973 it looked like Nixon would successfully get US forces out of Vietnam and establish links with China and pursue peace in the Middle East and combat inflation. Then, thanks to Congress and E. Howard Hunt's little group, it all fell apart. But until something like that happens to GWB, it would be difficult to call his presidency unsuccessful.

and

From the lack of effective attacks in the US in the last few years, one can deduce that the best way to protect oneself from terrorist attacks is to make sure such attacks have no good consequences for the terrorists. So far, Bush has done that. As to "moving the goalposts", I had no idea in 2000, when I did not vote, that I would vote for Bush in 2004 because I saw him as more able to deal with the problems than the Democrats. That was just barely enough to get me to vote in '04. I had no illusions. As of today, I expect much more from GWB than I did in 2000. So my goalposts are not closer but farther away. But, to beat the metaphor to death, I am also more confident than I was in 2004 that he will score enough points to prevail.

and moreover:

No, Bill, I don't think anyone can guarantee no attacks ever, never. What I worry about is that the terrorists aren't rational at all and that they don't care that all their butchery has gained them is the loss of two friendly regimes and disruption of their system. But then how do you explain the lack of attacks in the US? My best guess is that, wait for it, Bush scares them silly. Yep, they're afraid to attack us again lest we do something like nuking Mecca. So they attack Madrid and London and Istanbul and Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Bali and the Philippines. If that's true, Bush is indispensable in his present attitude. Ahh, that's good Koolaid!

Who knows where this argument ends?

I posted the following comment to this post on Bill Quick's Dailypundit blog:

Tell it to all the hard-working students who have been passed over in favor of lower-achieving affirmative-action "victims" and policemen and firemen who have to do their jobs and the jobs of the incompetent women "working" with them. This is not a new phenomenon with George W. Bush. The question is how does one best combat the new forms of racism, sexism and collectivism in general? Unfortunately the libertarian way does not work, gets no traction whatever. Neither does slamming Bush. So what other ideas WILL work, in the long run? Because that's what W has always been about, whether in the war on terror or in cutting budgets - the long run, when we're all dead but maybe, just maybe things will be better.

Because if libertarians have no idea how to achieve political goals, they might as well retreat into theorizing like me and the other objectivists, but they shouldn't criticize Bush for not being effective.

I posted the following comment at Dean Esmay's blog, in response to this post.

Hitchens reinforces the idea that AlQaeda isn't really interested in results, just in the struggle. What positive consequence resulted from 9/11 or 7/7 or any of the other examples for Wahhabism? Even the Madrid bombings can't be seen as having positive results if the point wasn't really Iraq but Andalusia. If anything, the War on Terror is reinvigorated every time a bomb goes off. So, as Hitchens says, the point for AlQaeda must not be to win in any conventional sense, but to continue until death the utterly futile struggle against rationality and the humane. Only by doing so will the likes of bin Laden and Zarqawi make themselves fit for paradise and enhance their reputation as holy warriors. Winning is for Turks, Mongols and Westerners. Losing gloriously is better in the long (very long!) run. Shades of Hitler in '45. No wonder they like Mein Kampf.

I posted this comment on this article on Angry in the Great White North:

"Maybe it's about time society stopped being colour-blind"?? The problem is that society isn't colour-blind and never has been. Black kids are allowed to get away with stuff that would never be tolerated from white kids. The justifications range from "well, they're oppressed, after all" to "What do you expect from THEM, anyway?" (that last one hardly ever stated outright, but always there as subtext.)

Maybe I am turning into Steve Sailer. This thought, though, is directly related to my year's experience as a detention counselor at a Florida juvenile detention center, featuring eighty to ninety percent black "kids" and my observations of the different expectations and standards applied to kids based on the color of their skins. Black kids routinely boasted of how many crimes they had got away with before getting busted. Cops routinely ignored most black crime. Let a white kid offend at all and he was in big trouble. One has to wonder at the cesspool of futile and stupid motives for such a policy, but one cannot doubt its reality.

The Bad news is that they're vicious buffoons. The good news is that they're buffoons.



The Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Roberts as reported by the AP expose the Democrats, especially Ted Kennedy, as clueless, incompetent and irresponsible beyond what even I realized. And that takes some doing, to make me even more aware of the true vacuousness of Kennedy, Biden, Schumer, Turban et al. Live and learn. This political system is dangerous. I'm beginning to think it's actively malignant, specifically with reference to me. Who, me, paranoid? But even if I'm not an intended target, I'm surely collateral damage.

Indictment

This photo in and of itself should be sufficient to indict the Mayor of New Orleans for malfeasance, corruption and incompetence. Yes, that idiot who tried to blame Bush like every other liberal, Did any students go to N.O. public schools on Monday? So, OK, Mr. Mayor - and School Superintendent and Police Chief - why weren't those buses used to get people out of New Orleans? Oh, I see, everybody was too busy looting, including the cops? Now I understand. And so should everyone else.

Rescued!

Fats Domino has apparently been rescued from the New Orleans disaster. OK, so now that's out of the way, how about getting everyone out and just nuking the place? The obvious parallel is Port Royal, the pirate city in Jamaica destroyed in 1692:

Once known as the 'Wickedest City on Earth,' Port Royal on the island of Jamaica was one of the largest towns in the English colonies during the late 17th century. It was a haven for privateers and pirates, such as the famed Sir Henry Morgan, due to its excellent geographic location in the middle of the Caribbean. From Port Royal, these buccaneers preyed upon and plundered the heavily laden treasure fleets departing from the Spanish Main.

Shortly before noon on 7 June 1692, 33 acres (66 percent) of the "storehouse and treasury of the West Indies" sank into Kingston Harbor in a disastrous earthquake. An estimated 2000 persons were killed in an instant. An additional 3000 citizens died of injuries and disease in the following days (Pawson and Buisseret 1975:121). Salvage and outright looting began almost immediately and continued off and on for years. A pocket watch, made ca. 1686 by Paul Blondel, a Frenchman living in the Netherlands, was recovered during Link's (1960:173) underwater excavations near Fort James. Its hands, frozen at 11:43 a.m., serve as an eerie reminder of the catastrophe.

Following the earthquake, Port Royal underwent a dramatic revival only to fall again when it was ravaged by fire in 1703. A total of 16 hurricanes between 1712 and 1951 have consistently smashed Jamaica, as have an additional six earthquakes between 1770 and 1956 (Cox 1984:Appendix B). Following a severe storm, a hurricane, and two earthquakes in 1722, Port Royal as it once was disappeared for the last time.

Maybe they could build a real sane city somewhere further inland.

Fats Domino is missing

The New Orleans songster, now 76 years old, has apparently gone missing. I wonder what happened to him. The last anyone saw of him he was at home in the Katrina-devastated section of the city. OK, I've got to say it, "Ain't that a shame?" I will keep track of any reports of his whereabouts. He could be a symbol of the revival of Sin City, that focus of evil of the Gulf Coast, or a sad token of its decline and disappearance. Sort of reminds one of Pompeii, gone never to return. How many cities have been alive, if corrupt and frustrating, one week and then gone forever the next? A thousand years from now will an archeologist digging through the ruins of what used to be New Orleans find a jolly skeleton in a porkpie hat surrounded by gold records?

Kassorla
I'm quite enthusiastic about the career and self-development advice contained in Irene Kassorla's book "Go For It". After all she's the "Shrink to the Stars" and that must be true because Merv Griffin said it. And my admiration is not diminished by the news that she gave psychological counseling to Monica Lewinsky after the traumatic events of the late 1990's. I note with approval that Monica never did run for office or protest against the liberation of Iraq. Which shows that someone put some sense into her. Overall, I'd have to say that Miss Lewinsky's effect was positive, at least as positive as Woodward and Bernstein's.

Boil, pot, boil!
CQ again has a daily step toward the truth in the Able-Danger-Gate story. Mary Jo White's participation is particularly interesting because she was appointed by the Clintons. But she apparently had an instinct for long-term self-preservation and for doing her job.

Does the system work?
Cap'n's Quarters, as usual, is one of the few out front on the Able Danger-gate story. Let's see if the new system (Blogs unearth a story, Fox brings it to the mass media, MSM derides and plays it down, blogs keep it alive, MSM finally caves) works to bring this story to everyone's attention and keep it going. It's only a hundred times bigger than the Joe Wilson moronism. The Sandy Burglar angle is only one of a hundred delicious penumbrae to AD-gate. Now if only Hillary could show up with some relevant printouts that had been "lost" for a few months. Wasn't Jamie Gorelick tight with Hill? Maybe that's just the way I want it to have been.

Ambassador Spyhusband is going to be speaking in Tallahassee sometime soon, BTW, but it will cost $25 to go and I am not going to contribute to further stoking of this non-story.

And didn't the NY Times try awfully hard to get out in front on this story? And where are they now? Something going on there. Maybe they just need a blog. Ahh. Fresh, spicy-smooth bloggy goodness.

So what?

I agree strongly with this column about steroid use in baseball. It pushes every libertarian button I've got:

The main argument against steroids and similar drugs is that they somehow screw with the "natural" abilities of players and disrupt the "level playing field." That is, they give "unfair" advantages to players willing to use them. That's why Commissioner Selig frets over the "integrity" of baseball. Steroids, goes this line of thought, turn an authentic competition into something less...real? But if any of that is true, why not ban, say, weight training or off-season workouts? Or special nutritional regimens that stop short of including certain banned supplements? What should be done about Lasik and other interventions that result in better than 20/20 vision? Or reconstructive surgeries that let pitchers throw faster than before undergoing the knife (just ask Chicago Cubs' hurler Kerry Wood)? All of these things muddy that wholly mythical level playing field.

Exactly. It's a sport, after all, not a religion. It's not like the z-car races, where they give each driver exactly the same car, tuned the same way and they have to use the same fuel. It's as though nature gave some drivers a two-cylinder Citroen and others a Ferrari. And that's ok. But if one of the Citroen drivers has an extra cup of coffee, oh, my! That's not "fair"! I hate that word.

HOW again?

Can someone tell me how taking tax money from taxpayers, filtering it through a federal bureaucracy with the expected deductions and giving it to construction companies, thereby making the money unavailable to the companies from which the taxes are taken, so they have fewer jobs to offer, and spending the money on construction jobs instead of the jobs the market would have dictated should be offered, how exactly does this procedure create jobs??

I found a forum for Ayn Rand fans here. It appears to be quite interesting. I left this comment, among others:

Rees-Mogg, in The Sovereign Individual, assumes that it is impossible to reform a large nation-state so that it protects individual liberties appropriately. He predicts that Internet technology will develop to the point that assets and privacy can be protected cheaply from anywhere in the world. He suggests that a number of mini-states will arise offering citizenship "packages" to wealthy or merely well-off sovereign individuals. He cites Hong Kong and Switzerland as examples of highly efficient, extremely prosperous regimes where an individual can now or soon will be able to purchase the protection he needs from the activities of the welfare/warfare nation-states that dominate the world.

I think he's right in that the project of coming up with a scheme to protect individual rights in a large democracy is a fool's quest. What's important is to develop a strategy to protect one's own interests, as one does not owe anything to others. If one could realize Galt's Gulch, why worry about the rest of the world reeling along on its merry destructive way?

Maybe I can construct my own mini-state somewhere near Trebizond/Trabzon.

Cloned appetizers

This article claims that Koreans are cloning dogs to be "companion animals"! Right. Companion to the kimchee and rice, I bet. I wonder if they've heard of "hush puppies"?

Tiny houses
I'm amazed at the variety of small affordable houses available, such as these. I love the pictures, but the words are all about "saving the planet" and "sustainability" and other stupid nonsense. Darn it, I want a cheap place to live that doesn't take a lot of cleaning and that is easy to heat and cool. Maybe when I get rich I'll add another, or maybe four of them around an atrium with a swimming pool. I am glad there are so many varieties. I also like the idea of trailering one of the itsy bitsies, although the peaked roofs on most of them would appear to make them dangerous to take on roads with overpasses. I wonder if my Peugeot 505 could drag one safely over the Rockies? Maybe one could come up with a peaked-roof tiny house with the loft attic arranged so that it could be folded down for traveling, like a tent trailer. I'm encouraged, anyway.

My latest obsession is with Trabzon, Turkey, where maybe someday I can buy a tiny house. Or maybe buy a boat and keep it in the harbor. Hmm, a houseboat. Now I'm thinking. Tiny house on the Black Sea, duplicating the Argo. Off to find the Golden Fleece and fight the Amazons. Metaphorically!