We Like the Little Guy!

So say the liberals

Garbage.

In 1937, New York, full of liberalism’s itch to regulate everything, knew, just knew, how many taxicab permits there should be. For 70 years the number (about 12,000) has not been significantly changed, so rising prices have been powerless to create new suppliers of taxi services. Under this government-created scarcity, a permit (“medallion”) now costs about $500,000. Most people wealthy enough to buy medallions do not drive cabs, any more than plantation owners picked cotton. They lease their medallions at exorbitant rates to people such as Paucar who drive, often for less than $15 an hour, for long days.

There are examples of this all over the nation. Regulated interior designers, hairdressers, beauticians. Rent control. Price fixing. All because some elites, including many conservatives, think they know better how to run the world than the people who live in.

At least, that’s what they say.

What Is Acceptable

Over at Right-Thinking, I’ve gotten this in response to opposing torture:

So, there is NO WAY to get information from a prisoner. Drugs? Thats torture, because it’s against his/her will. Asking nicely? No, that’s torture, because you think of the prisoner as an idiot and it insults him/her. And as we all know insulting a prisoner (a naked women in the room with a muslim) is torture. Just having a muslim prisoner being questioned by an inferior infidel is humiliating to said muslim, and humiliation is torture. Offering a cup of coffee and not tea to a muslim prisoner is torture. An interrogator eating a ham sandwich in front of a muslim prisoner is torture. All these don’t even have to do with muslims, and can be turned around by anyone looking to be a victim.

I’m sick of this ad hominem bullshit. If I say that water-boarding and sleep deprivation are torture, I therefore think that anything is torture. I’m a namby-pamby flower-sniffing, tree-hugging liberal who just thinks we should give all terror suspects blow jobs.

Why is it so hard for people to wrap your their minds around the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable means of interrogation? Anything that threatens or inflicts physical pain or fear of death is, by the definition listed in our treaties and our laws, torture. Anything that doesn’t is acceptable. We don’t go have to go all culture-sensitivity patrol but can still be effective.

Read this excerpt from the Army Field Manual on effective interrogation techniques. Thinks like simple questioning, “good cop bad cop”, incentives, rapid-fire questions, yellling, appeal to family, appeal to ego. None of these are considered torture. Just because you don’t waterboard someone doesn’t mean you become a wuss.

Now these techniques – which involve nothing more than a patient interrogator, sound wimpy don’t they? “Oh Mike”, you say, “You pussy! That won’t work. That’s just namby-pamby liberal bullshit. We need to beat ‘em up!”

But you know what? We found them effective for two hundred years. The Soviet Union used these techniques when they wanted information, not breaking. The Israelis use them all the time. And cops use them in our own country so effectively that the vast majority of crimes are solved by uncoerced confession.

There is a difference between interrogation and torture. And I’m sick and tired of the Orwellian Newspeak that blurs the line between the two.

Impeach Cheney

How repulsive is Dick Cheney? Sullivan’s been documenting his support for reckless war on Iran. Now he’s slamming Geneva at West Point.

“Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States,” the Vice President said in the Saturday morning speech. “Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.”

I am so fucking sick of this line of reasoning. “Al-Quaeda doesn’t observe Geneva, why should we?”

Why? Because we’re better than they are!. The British and Hessians were brutal in their occupation during the War of Independence; Washington insisted on humane treatment. The South had Andersonville; Lincoln had reasonable prisons. The Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese tortured our people; we didn’t. Douglas MacArthur specifically instructed his soldiers to treat POW’s with honor. Because he wanted them to know that ciitizens of a Democracy were better, that their leaders were lying to them about how Americans tortured all prisoners. He defined America by a bright moral standard.

The Right is always railing against moral relativism. Liberals and Libertarians are supposed to be a threat to the very fiber of the nation because we tolerate gays, question drug prohibition and oppose abortion criminalization. But now they want us to define our morality relative to Al-Quaeda. What kind of broken is your moral compass when gay marriage is a threat to our national integrity but torture is OK?

Dick Cheney can define his moral compass by Al-Quaeda. I’ll define mine by George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Douglas MacArthur.

Gore Again

Sullivan thinks that Gore is a man of reason and common sense.

Yeah, right. Gore is saying the seas are going to rise a meter in the next decade and it will make droughts and crop yields worse in America.

FACT 1. There is not one shred of evidence in the refereed scientific literature speaking of a three-foot increase in sea level in ten years. The best estimates from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range from 0.8 to 1.7 INCHES.

FACT 2. There is no trend towards increasing drought area in the United States that is related to planetary warming. We have good data on drought area back to 1895. The correlation between the area of the U.S. under drought and planetary temperature is statistically ZERO.

FACT 3. As the mean planetary temperature has warmed since 1975, U.S. crop yields have INCREASED significantly, just as they did during the period of cooling from 1945 through 1975, or during the warming from 1910 to 1945.

Al Gore is what he has always been. A pseudo-intellectual trying to sound smarter than he is. He makes some good points on the stupidity of the current Administration — it’s hard not to these days. But people of reason do not engage in panic-mongering. Whether it’s the President authorizing torture or a self-opinionated would-be president hyping climate change.

Freak Out!

Ha! I knew people were getting too bent out of shape over the Muslim poll:

A reader writes:

What hasn’t been talked about much in the just released Pew poll is that, while 47 percent consider themselves Muslim first and American second, 42 percent consider themselves Christian first and American second.

And while 43 percent of American Muslims think mosques/churches should express views on political/social issues, 54 percent of American Christians think likewise.

I certainly hope America has enough genius to assimilate those Christians, too.

Another adds:

Clearly, there are troubling aspects to the poll, the suicide bombing response in particular. However, when it comes to issues of governance and influence there are parallels. A Pew poll from August 24, 2006 yielded the following: “(S)ix-in-ten white evangelical Protestants say that the Bible should be the guiding principle in making laws when it conflicts with the will of the people.”

From the same 2006 poll, 67 percent of those polled believe “the U.S. is a Christian nation.”

I would also add that 5% of Muslim liking Al-Quaeda is nothing to panic over. You can get 5% of people to agree to anything. And while it’s a concern that 20% of Muslims think suicide bombings are OK, I wonder what percentage of Christians think bombing abortion clinics or stoning gays is OK.

It is distressing that only 25% of Muslims accept the truth of 9/11. But then again, many Americans won’t accept the truth about JFK. What else do I have to say? People are stupid, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, idiocy is universal.

Drop

Traffic on this site just dropped dramatically. Having posted about it, I will probably now see the traffic go right back up to new heights. But hopefully, the registration and askimet implementation are having an effect. The spammers can’t post here, for now.

Bravo!

When I was a grad student, Chris used to talk a lot of smack about Joe Paterno. According to him, JoePa wasn’t just a great coach, he was a great man.

Damn him. It’s all true.

This is easily the greatest punishment in recent collegiate history, an absolutely diabolical, telling, high-impact bit of discipline that should remind one and all that what Paterno has been doing out in State College, Pa., all these years is more than just win 363 football games, including 20 the past two seasons.

In a coaching business so full of phonies who talk character only to bend the rules, who consider the definition of discipline a player’s weight-room attendance, who wouldn’t dare pull something like this because it might hurt recruiting, here’s Joe Pa, four decades on the job and not giving a damn.

Except about what’s right.

You paying attention, Bobby Bowden? If wonder if the NCAA will step in and put a stop to this. It will make the slimeballs who run most of the big programs look bad.

Linkorama

I’m working on two big posts on immigration. In the meantime….

  • Why I’m sometimes embarassed to life in Texas.
  • Yeah, right. I call BS.

    In a recent study, sociologist Diane Felmee found only a third of women said looks were the first thing that attracted them to a man. Most preferred a sense of humour or financial and career success.

    This has never been my experience. And I mean ever. I have known precisely one woman in my life who preferred geeky men. She was also my first girlfriend (and eventually moved on to better looking ones).

    No, these are women who want to have their cake and eat it, too. When they’re young, they want to have sex with hot men. And now that they’re older, they want to settle down with the other ones. And the plain or ugly men are supposed to settle for never having a wild and crazy youth. Garbage.

  • Johns Stossel breaks out the nun-chucks on ethanol. If you’ve read my blog (cue crickets chirping), you know how I feel about this boondoggle. On this blog, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
  • The Cost

    A lot of Right-Wing chatter will center on Heritage’s report that illegal immigrants are costing the nation $89 billion a year.

    Here’s what they’re ignorning. This has little do with illegals and everything to do with the de facto welfare state. Unless you are earning at least $50,000 in this country (and half of us aren’t), you are getting more in government services than you are paying for. It’s called the progressive tax.

    But only a fool, only an idiot, only a reactionary moron would say that the best thing to do would be to get rid of the low-wage workers. That’s the tricky thing about economics. The numbers don’t tell the story. Without all the low-wage earners, the economy ceases to function. The low-wage guys picking oranges, building houses and sweeping floors enable the millionaire farmers, home-builders and stock brokers that really pay the bills in this country.

    Remember, it wasn’t the lowest third of their economy that the Golgafrinchans disposed of.

    Update: Something else I thought of. Illegal immigration is a generational thing. The current generation of illegals are low-skill workers. But their children, better-educated, english-speaking and Americanized, are going to move up the socioeconomic ladder quickly.

    All waves of immigrants have started out poor. It’s the children they bring here — children we need to keep our Medicare and Social Security ponzi schemes afloat — that really benefit the nation.

    Astronomy, Sports, Mathematical Malpractice, Whatever Else Pops Into My Head