Monthly Archives: October 2009

The Nobel Prize for not being unseemly like Bush

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More likely the Obama critics who believe that Obama won this award for not being George Bush are right as well. The problem the international community had with Bush wasn’t that he believed in war and the use of force, it was that he believed in the unilateral use of these things. Bush did not believe in the use of force as an expression of a whole society’s values, he believed in it as an expression of his own machismo.

He was like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, flying through history with a bomb between his legs, shouting “Yee, haw!” It wasn’t so much that this behavior was wrong, it was just unseemly. He was like the drunk at a Victorian tea party who during the soup course makes jokes about the hostess’s secret pregnancy in France. We Westerners, we just don’t do things like that. Decorum, sir, decorum!

How do we do things? We keep the troops in those faraway places like Afghanistan and Iraq, sure, but while we do that we make sure to extol things like tolerance and dialogue and the spirit of diplomacy. We make sure that the same people who were not involved in the decision-making process during the previous bombing runs under Bush are in the loop again, now and hopefully forever. We smile a lot and say nice things about the Geneva convention and the impropriety of torture and secret detention, the importance of the rule of international law. We make everybody feel better about how things are going to go from now on.

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies.

You see the difference? The Nobel committee sure did!

There’ve been some dumb Nobel Peace Prizes before. Giving one to Gorbachev in 1990, sandwiched right in between his invasions of Azerbaijan and Lithuania, comes immediately to mind. Giving one to Henry Kissinger, a man responsible for the bombings of millions of Indochinese (and who consistently favored the use of increased bombing runs to force the other side to the negotiating table) is another. The award to Arafat, Rabin and Peres likewise seems humorous to me. The Al Gore award, I don’t even want to go there. I went years thinking that the Al Gore prize was a joke someone was playing on me. I still can’t believe it really happened.

via Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – On the Nobel Prize for Occasional Peace – True/Slant.

This is a really great piece (follow the link and read the rest of it).  However, I disagree that Bush’s unilateralism should be psychologized as “machismo” or anything else.  In fact, I think unilateralism is what the US needs in the near future.  We need to unilaterally withdraw from NATO, UN, IMF and the whole alphabet soup of totalitarian international plunder and slaughter.

I’m not against the existence of international organizations in principle, but ours, in my opinion, are too tainted to be ever trusted.

Parents aren’t fools; and the Pols are only pushing harder

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As the first wave of swine flu vaccine crosses the country, more than a third of parents don’t want their kids vaccinated, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.

Some parents say they are concerned about side effects from the new vaccine — even though nothing serious has turned up in tests so far — while others say swine flu doesn’t amount to any greater health threat than seasonal flu.

Jackie Shea of Newtown, Conn., the mother of a 5-year-old boy named Emmett, says the vaccine is too new and too untested.

“I will not be first in line in October to get him vaccinated,” she said in an interview last month. “We’re talking about putting an unknown into him. I can’t do that.”

Read the rest: A third of parents oppose swine flu vaccine – Swine flu- msnbc.com.

The big delusion is that entrepreneurs want a free market.  Entrepreneurs want an exclusive opportunity.  For Big Pharma, that means getting the government to force drugs on the populace so they have mandatory customers.

Like the Nobel Peace Prize and the idea of houses as investments rather than depreciating assets, the reputation of our “Health and Welfare” corruptocrats is another bubble that may soon deflate.

The Republican Party has lost this memo since the days of Jefferson’s first administration.

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Is it necessary for me at this time of day to make a declaration of the principles of the Republican Party?… It is not necessary.  These Principles are on record… What are they?

  • Love of peace,
  • hatred of offensive war,
  • jealousy of the State Governments towards the General Government and of the influence of the Executive Government over the co-ordinate branches of that Government;
  • a dread of standing armies;
  • a loathing of public debt, taxes and exercises;
  • tenderness for the liberty of the citizen;
  • Jealousy, argus-eyed jealousy of the patronage of the President.

–John Randolph of Roanoke.

Let me say it again: I hate anti-immigration and “buy America” rhetoric

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Awhile back I was driving more and therefore listening to the radio more. Most of this post was written at that time and you could say it is sponsored by the nice gentleman so full of economic fallacies selling American cars in St. Louis who advertises heavily on the radio.

Immigration: Opposing politicians who tolerate or promote illegal aliens is understandable. Lawlessness is a problem, and I’m not too upset about other people being upset about it.  Then again, I remember watching a movie in the seventies that expected me to cheer for a family that made it out of East Germany on a home-made hot air balloon.  So breaking the law to cross the border to find prosperity (presumably this family’s quest wasn’t for West German welfare support) was not always so hard to sympathize with.

People come here and work for a living.  Feeling threatened by this is to turn the entire nation into one giant labor union is shameful.  I hear people actually and seriously comparing people who come here to find jobs to military invaders who need to be stopped by our own military.  I hate border fascism.

More importantly, sinful as I am, I love God’s law.

Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed (Exodus 23.12).

And I charged your judges at that time, “Hear the cases between your brothers, and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with him” (Deuteronomy 1.16).

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19.33, 34).

If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you (Leviticus 25.35).

For the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the LORD. One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you (Numbers 15.15, 16).

There is a problem when immigrants swamp “public” goods without paying for them.  But that is only a little bit worse than natives swamping “public” goods.  Public goods need to be privatized.  If welfare is seriously a reason some come to the US, then it serves us right for inventing such parasitic programs.  Frankly, virtually anyone you see who doesn’t work came from someone who at some point did work.  Someone had to teach a next generation to stop imitating the previous generation.  While I don’t deny there is personal guilt involved, it is not at the level that anyone has a right to characterize people as “lazy” or “freeloaders” or worse.

Unquestionably, unfunded mandates from Congress are becoming an unbearable burden to border states.  Personally, I think all illegal aliens should be given some cash and put on a bus for New England.  That might provide some more realistic policy.  There ain’t know such thing as a free lunch.  But the frustrations these problems cause should not be blamed on poor people trying to make a living.

From what I have read, characterizations of immigrants as pursuing free goodies are overblown.  People come here to work, and in doing so, even illegal aliens pay some taxes.  Of course, it is horrible that people who are wealthier and who can’t afford to live an “undocumented” life are unable to get into the country while other poor laborers get through, but the answer is to open our borders, not blame those who are worst off for trying to better themselves.

And then there is the plea and alleged moral imperative to “buy American.”  How am I supposed to be patriotic about a country that produces such bad products or produces them in such an inefficient manner that they have to plead on the basis of race or soil or shared suffering under the same federal apparatus as a basis for choosing those products?  If you are selling you are supposed to be selling something I need or that you can make me want and prefer to what others offer.  Any real custom of choosing on the basis of nationalism simply allows industries that aren’t as good as their foreign competitors to continue to be second-rate.  They should improve or close down so that investors and workers can find other industries where we can be superior to others.

It is amazing that people complain about our trade deficit and then say that it mandates protectionism.  Protectionism redistributes wealth from those who sell products in the international market to those who sell in the domestic market.  It guarantees that our trade deficits will only grow.  How can somone whose domestic expenses go up compete in an international market where there is no way to fix prices or get protection from competitors? The more we make the cost of living higher the US the less we are able to produce anything at an attractive price point abroad.

We’ve numbed ourselves to this basic reality because of the international money game.  Since dollars are the reserve currency of the world, there is an incentive for every other country to produce real goods to get our printed cash.  It has been an awesome racket for while it could last.  People slave long hours to make our flatscreen TVs while we consume goods and blame free trade for our manufacturing base going overseas.  But there is no free market without sound money–i.e. money is a real commodity, not a paper with a mark on it.  Our magic has run out and the world is waking up from the Federal Reserve’s enchantment.

Better adjust.  We’re about to learn the real world limitations on the imaginary concept of “superpower.”

“The Best Gun in the World” by Terence Gillespie

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The best gun in the world is the one you’ll have with you when you need it.

Seriously, the features of a gun you don’t have with you don’t matter.

Like most tools there’s an optimal gun for every task under the sun. The task here is to ensure you’ll always have it with you when you need it. This article will talk about the features of a gun tool that will get that job done. And yes, I have a specific make and model in mind.

  • If a gun is:
  • Too big
  • Too heavy
  • Too hard to shoot
  • Too dangerous to carry
  • Too hard to maintain
  • Feels awkward to carry, store or shoot
  • Does not fit your wardrobe
  • Does not fit your hand
  • Does not fit your lifestyle
  • Can’t handle most jobs you want it for
  • Misfires when dirty

. . . then you’re less likely to have it with you when you need it. All this and yet a gun should be comforting, not comfortable.

Read the rest at The Best Gun in the World by Terence Gillespie.

The analogy between national economic planning committees and legislatures

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I don’t think I ever properly explained this title to my last blog entry.

It is like this.  The economy is a complicated interaction of many many people making transactions.  Socialistic economic planning committees try to control this process and bring about desirable results.  Apart from the question as to whether the results are really desirable, the results are usually quite different from what was intended.  The economy is too big and too complicated to be controlled by directives from a national planning committee.

And something like this is also true of law.  The rule of law is not something that is provided by a certain governmental structure (i.e. a republic v. a democracy).  The rule of law is a societal custom.  It is preserved by a population that follows it and therefore passes it on to the next generation.  Legislatures try to improve on this situation by producing many new laws every year.  It simply drowns the society in coercive irrationality and almost never achieves the intended results.

Another analogy would be language.  We speak and preserve and transmit our language to the next generation without a central planning committee wielding the authority to tell us how to use words and which ones we should use.  Legislatures are like the geniuses who decided we should all speak Esperanto.

Legislatures are socialistic committes for laws

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Reading this excellent essay by Vern Poythress against copyright law (and intellectual property and patents, I assume) it strikes me how his arguments could be turned against all statutory law.

You shall appoint judges and officers in all your towns that the LORD your God is giving you, according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you. (Deuteronomy 16:18-20)

When does God ever appoint a legislature?

Never.

Whether you have a plurality of judges or one, they are judges, not legislatures.  The only other position is that of an executive, whether a committee or a king.  Someone may give orders for a community, but he never invents new laws in the way we think.

And we never ever hear of someone who does something that everyone knows is wrong, getting away with it because there is no law that has covered it yet.  Nor do I think we find any distinction between private law and civil law.

Who came up with the idea that we needed committees authorized to meet continuously to make new laws.  What brain thought that the one thing that would be in continual short supply and in continual need of increase was laws?

No wonder laws seem so divorced from ethics.  The existence of legislatures presupposes there are no rules of behavior until they are invented by parliamentary procedure.

Advice to pastoral candidates

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In light of our recent search for an Assistant Pastor at Main Street Pres. I want to offer some advice for candidates preparing to apply to churches for a pastoral ministry position.

I offer the following points in all humility and in no particular order, in the hope that someone out there might find them useful…

Read the rest at Advice to pastoral candidates « Letters from Mississippi.

David Booth and I offer some interaction in the comments.