Monthly Archives: May 2007

Civil Liberties, Law and Order, Politics

More Good News

The United States Constitution is one of the crown jewels of our civilization. Two hundred years have passed and we’ve barely needed to ammend it. It was radical for its time and is still radical today in its vision of basic human liberty. I think Reagan put it best when he said that most countries’ constitutions give the people rights and priveleges from their benign government. Ours, on the other hand, says that we the people will allow the government to do the following things.

I supported the GOP for a long time because of their devotion to Constitutional law. They were the only ones out there who stood for states’ rights and the second ammendment, property rights and the takings clause. But the seeds of destruction were there. They had already countenanced the erosion of civil liberties in our insane War on Drugs. And now it has come to full flower in the War on Terror.

How pathetic is it that the Democrats are now the defenders of liberty. They are trying to restore habeas corpus and that moonbat Pelosi is threatening to sue Bush over signing statements. I would love to see SCOTUS put the rule of law down on the signing statements, although I suspect the present court will unfortunately defer to the executive and enshrine this upending of the balance of powers in precedent.

Still, how sad has the GOP gotten when the Democrats are more protective of our liberty.

Lee at Right-Thinking said it best: Bush had made true everything Democrats have ever said about Republicans.

Pathetic.

Politics, War on Terror

Busted!

So how long is it going to be until some Right-Wing pundit gives Bush’s excesses credit for busting the Fort Dix plot.

Keep in mind throught the Memestorm to follow: it was busted by an average American being alerted, not by tapping random phones and taking immigrants’ DNA; the investigators would have, given the evidence presented, had no problems acquiring warrants and phone taps to investigate these goons.

Also, how stupid do you have to be to a) plan to attack an army base in a country filled with unprotected targets; b) give someone a video of your preparations to convert to DVD?

Politics, Science and Edumacation

Shaddap!

Yeah, teachers at public schools want parents to be involved.

Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.

School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.

The key phrase in that paragraph is “union contracts”. Five to one this fired teacher had failed to genuflect to the Union in some way. Was probably making the other teachers look bad. I’m reminded of Jaime Escalente, a situation in which the teachers’ union decided that keeping latino kids pig-ignorant was worth getting rid of a trouble-maker.

Of course, the parents’ and students’ opinions don’t matter. They never will so long as the system is a government monopoly. It’s about the special interests — bureaucrats and unions. That’s all that matters.

The more time goes on, the more I find myself agreeing with Neal Boortz’s extremism. Big Education — that ugly intersection of teachers’ unions and politicians — may be a greater threat to our future than Al-Quaeda.

Yeah, I said it. I have far more fear of my kids growing up ignorant and out of work than their being killed by a terrorist.

The worst thing is that we’ve got millions of dedicated teachers out there trapped in this broken Soviet-style system. Is anyone going to speak for them? Does anyone care? Teachers love their unions. And they fail to realize that these unions are destroying their chance to make a difference.

Law and Order, Politics, Taxes and Spending

IRS Worship

Cato takes apart an NYT piece on the IRS.

I have never understood the Left’s worship of the IRS. I remember in ’95 when the GOP was having hearings on IRS abuses, the derision among Lefties, the cartoon that said, “What’s next? Hearing on bad service in restaurants? Ho ho ho!” Maybe it’s because they hate they rich. Maybe it’s because they worship government power.

But we have here an agency that is incredibly abusive of its power; that has the (unconstitutional, no matter what SCOTUS says) power to seize your property without charging you with a crime; an agency that used to post “Catch Seizure Fever!” posters on its walls and evaluated its agents by how much property they’d seized; an agency that didn’t want to discipline agents who went poking around the finances of their neighbors and celebrities. I have personally experiencde the abuse of this agency and, if my blog were read by more than two people, I’d hesitate to post on this for fear of reprisal. James Bovard once estimated that this agency, at is worst under the Dems, took more money away from Americans falsley and by intimidation than all forms of property theft combined.

And, to kick the Lefties again, the IRS is known to target the middle class quite heavily, since they have enough money to be worth seizing but not enough to fight them in court.

Yeah, I get emotional about it. People who’ve seen the nasty side of the IRS tend to. My accountant, a sweet southern lady; my grandfather, a kindly man so respected hundreds turned up at his short-notice funeral; my former Congressman John Linder, as mild-mannered a man as you’ll meet — all these people could or can be brought to rage by the mere mention of the IRS.

Yet all the NYT can do is repeat fictional claims about the amount of money we’re losing to offshore tax “havens”. And the Dems are going to have a hearing where the IRS will get to bitch and moan without restraint. Nowhere in the puff piece, and I expect nowhere in the hearing, is there mention of why people are moving money offshore: because of our insanely high corporate tax rate, rising marginal tax rates and an insanely complex tax system that the IRS itself does not understand but can get you jailed if you break it.

End rant.

News, Politics

Light Blogging

Must have exhausted by gallbladder with last week’s diatribes. I’ve got a lot on my mind, so I’ll just link to this great post over at Right-Thinking about the dirty tricks the Dems might use on Fred Thompson.

Of course, the GOP taught them everything they now with last year’s despicable Jim Webb shenanigans.

On another note, the morning show on KLBJ predicted the French lefties would riot over Sarkozy’s election. Looks like they were right. Didn’t take long, did it?

'Culture'

Children of Men

I just saw Children of Men and it easily one of my top movies of 2006. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Clive Owen is always good. Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of the best young actors around — he was outstanding in Serenity. And Alfonso Cuaron is amazingly talented. His directing was the standout in the Harry Potter series. (I have yet to see Pan’s Labyrinth; but I’m not sure how this film lost the Cinematography Oscar. And giving the editing Oscar to Departed was a crime).

It’s kind of interesting, the wave of Mexican and Mexican-American directors who are coming to dominate the film scene these days. Cuaron, Inarritu and del Toro have more talent and imagination that most of Hollywood put together. Throw in the genius down the street from me, Robert Rodriguez, and you’ve got a movement. Roger Ebert, in his review of The Cell (a movie that was interesting and imaginative, if nothing else) commented:

Tarsem is an Indian, like M. Night Shyamalan of “The Sixth Sense,” and comes from a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side. In the 1970s, Pauline Kael wrote that the most interesting directors were Altman, Scorsese and Coppola because they were Catholics whose imaginations were enriched by the church of pre-Vatican II, while most other Americans were growing up on Eisenhower’s bland platitudes. Now our whole culture has been tamed by marketing and branding, and mass entertainment has been dumbed down. Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?

I think Ebert was on to something. White America seems very bogged down in the bland. But it’s not just India that’s throwing new life into cinema.

So what’s next, once America has infested Mexico and India with its bland of blah? The Middle East, probably.

'Culture', Sports

An Accident Waiting To Happen

I’m a huge baseball fan and the world was shaken recently by the death of Josh Hancock of the St. Louis Cards. The second I heard about it, I said, “two to one he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.” My dad’s a trauma surgeon and I’ve seen first-hand the difference that a seat belt can make. It is so dramatic that it over-rides my usual Libertarian leaning so that I absolutely support seat belt laws.

(Again, if we lived in a pitiless society that let brain-damaged quads die, opposing seat belt laws would be fine. But we don’t. Thank God we don’t.)

Anyway, now we find out that Josh Hancock was not only not wearing a seat belt, but was drunk, possibly high, speeding and chatting on the cell phone. Under those circumstances, I’m merely grateful he didn’t take anyone else with him.

It’s a horrible tragedy to see anyone under the age of 70 die these days. And I’m not saying, “oh, he deserved it!”. No one does. I just hope that all the mourning baseball players, fans and sports twerps will use this as an example, an inspiration to not drink and drive, to stay off the cell phone, to keep the speed down and, above all else, to realize they are not indestructible and buckle their fucking seat belts!.

Professional athletes, it seems, are particularly vulnerable to thinking themselves invulnerable. How many more stories do we need of promising young athletes destroying themselves with recreational drugs, alcohol, steroids, car racing (Sue and I used to always be able to tell with Ravens practice ended in Owings Mills — fifteen sports cars would race to downtown Baltimore). Yes, the pressures athletes live under are unthinkable. But this has to stop.

As I said in the wake of the VT massacre, the best way to honor the dead is to live for them. Let’s hope a few baseball players start buckling up. Let’s hope everyone does.

Religion, Science and Edumacation

The Dog Is Dead, Part II

Thinking a bit more about my diatribe on atheistic fundamentalism, the thing that creates bloodshed, horror and oppression in our world is not religion — as ably demonstrated by atheistic mass-murderers like Mao. What creates suffering is dogma, the absolute conviction that one is correct and all others are wrong. Dogma certaintly plays a part in religion, but it is not unique to it. Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot were plenty dogmatic on, respectively, culture, economics, race and all three.

What we are seeing in the vilification of all religion and the pronouncement that the religious are objectively disordered while the areligious are enlightened is something truly frightning — dogmatic atheism. I’m not saying Richard Dawkins will be loading people into boxcars anytime soon (he’d call ’em a taxi). I’m saying the intellectual process is one guaranteed to produce stupidity from otherwise smart people.

On a related note, the dogmatic atheists often use the oft-quoted by usually misquoted and misunderstood Occam’s Razor to “prove” that religion is silly.

Occam’s Razor is a useful tool in the “did terrorists fly planes into buildings or did George Bush [insert insanely complicated conspiracy theory here]” sense. But it is a blunt instrument and not a fantastic one at that. The theory of evolution and our understanding of physical cosmology are insanely complex. To be honest, Occam’s Razor favors the religious.