The Anger of Compassion

Tucker Carlson: Gay or Democrat?

Quick: what was the name of Barbra Streisand's fourth album?

If you can answer that question, or so we're told, then you know what you are. And it's time you came out of the closet.* **

Barbra Streisand, of course, is known for being popular among gays and for being a generous donor to many liberal causes and politicians.

I wonder if Tucker Carlson, boy conservative, can answer that question, though...after all, he seems to have higher regard for Ms Streisand than for a former Playmate:

Here‘s a believe it or not story. Talented foreigners around the world are flashing their skills to get into this country, of course. But very few have the assets of Argentine bombshell Dorismar. The former “Playboy” playmate was rounded up by immigration authorities and deported with her husband on January 5 after living illegally in Miami for five years.

Now her attorney is trying to get the calendar pinup back into this country by classifying her as, quote, “an alien of extraordinary ability.”

Tucker Carlson was joined by Dorismar‘s attorney, Michael Feldenkrais, to discuss this quest for special immigration status.

FELDENKRAIS: In reality it‘s not a matter of her having a cute butt and somebody having a bad butt. But the reality is there is a classification for people who have risen to the level where she has in the scenario of...
CARLSON: Risen to the level. She stars in “Latinas gone Crazy.” Now, no offense. I haven‘t actually seen the video. But I mean, it‘s not like—I mean, she‘s not Barbra Streisand. You know what I mean? “Latinas Gone Crazy.” Do we need more “Latinas Gone Crazy” actresses in this nation, truly?

Not to brag, but this is no problem at all. Attorney Feldenkrais would like Dorismar and her husband to be able to re-enter the US, while apparently there are sinister forces among the feds who are happy deporting them both to Argentina. Insoluble, right? This is all in a day's work for the Anger of Compassion full-time staff:

1. Rescind the deportation order. Nobody's going to Argentina.

2. Grant Dorismar immediate United States citizenship.

3. Her next project: "Latinas Gone Crazy at the Kennedy Center."

4. Deport the husband to Cuba.

5. Tucker Carlson's next gig: playing the Conservative Commentator character for the Village People.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Something in my little proposal for everyone, don't you think? Playmate video available, too, at the story.

*It was Color Me Barbra.

** I had to look it up.

Henry Hazlitt, call your office...

...and get Frederic Bastiat on that conference call.

Via Hit & Run, I found this horrible poll, at MSNBC.com.

To the question, "Do you think oil companies are price gouging?" The responses were as follows (at the time I read it):

3% answered that they weren't sure

6% responded, "No, that's the way a free market economy works"

and a whopping 92% cast a vote for "Yes, Big Oil is taking advantage of energy consumers."

To the question, "Do that many Americans really have no idea at all where their pharmaceuticals, cable television, Tommy Hilfiger gear, and iPods come from?" must come the answer: "No, they do not. All necessities and luxuries alike drop down from the sky while Big Bad Business is ripping off the American consumer."

Diana Hsieh wrote about The Poor Poor a few days back, and I had occasion to meditate upon an item she quoted from the Christian Science Monitor:

"In terms of the items people have ... it amazes me the number of people who are at or near the poverty line that have color TVs, cable, washer, dryer, microwave," says Michael Cosgrove, an economist at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. That's not to ignore the hardships of poverty, he adds, "but the conveniences they have are in fact pretty good."

And just what brought it to mind? Well, in Texas, you understand, we no longer have food stamps. It's not that we no longer subsidize groceries for the needy. We do. It's just that we no longer have the food stamps themselves. Instead, we have these white credit card lookalikes with a red, white, and blue silhouette map of Texas on 'em: swipe it through the machine and you, the user, are good to go as your "Lone Star Card" is read. If the machine reads it properly the first time, that is. Otherwise I get to stand behind you and wait while the cashier enters your info manually. Ultimately, of course, I also get to pay for your groceries with my Texas taxes.

What chapped my ass even beyond the basics, though, was the behavior of the last woman I saw using one of these cards: while the cashier was industriously entering the necessary information manually, the Lone Star Card user was happily chatting away to someone I couldn't see, chatting merrily away on her cell phone.

That's your American poor. That's who Big Oil is "gouging."

Lamest Classical Music Marketing

Or, most tiresome. Least informative. Least useful. Most irrelevant. Take your pick.

I refer to the habit of styling Mozart's Concerto No. 21 in C Major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 467 as the "Elvira Madigan."

Mozart's symphonies, operas, and chamber music are recorded and sold and performed around the world to this day. In that, his music differs quite a bit from Elvira Madigan, because, ladies and gentlemen, nobody has ever seen Elvira Madigan, at least not since its 1967 release. It was an "art house" movie back then, I am told. Award-winning.

"Award-winning." Forty years ago. I rest my case.

Mozart at the Margin

I don't think so. There is nothing marginal about Mozart.

Tyler Cowen opines on Mozart here. He includes, as a category, the "most overrated Mozart." In this our celebration of Mozart's 250th whatever, what, pray tell, does the good doctor feel is the most overrated of the Mozartian ouevre?

Most overrated Mozart: The Violin concerti and then the Requiem. Contrary to cliche, Suessmayr ruined the ending. The Clarinet Concerto was once wonderful, but it has been overexposed in muzak, Nordstrom, and overpriced faux Italian restaurants.

The violin concerti? The Clarinet Concerto? Now, gentle readers, do you see why I am not an ardent defender of the death penalty? In fact, I would contribute to Tyler Cowen's appeal myself: he is, after all, entitled to his opinion...however misleading.

It is important that you get this.

If Mozart's Clarinet Concerto was "once wonderful," dear readers, it is wonderful still. That means now. You may obtain nice versions of it here, together with his oboe and bassoon concertos and here, together with his horn concertos number 1 and 4.

By this time you are no doubt asking whether it is at all possible for Tyler Cowen to redeem himself. The delightful (we speak of Mozart, after all) answer is that not only is it possible, but done:

Most underrated Mozart: The violin and piano sonatas, and the short, comic vocal pieces. Try also the Piano and Wind Quintet, K. 452, the Clarinet Trio, K. 498, the Piano Quartets (with George Szell as pianist), and the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581.

Although the idea of "underrated Mozart" strikes me as being somewhat in the same vein as "square circle" or "chocolate I don't like," I have to agree with Cowen's suggestions here. All of them. Go forth and listen.

Except...except that...look, let's have it out: someone is going to ask, "Craig? Aren't you an American? Didn't you once own a vinyl record of Benny Goodman playing some of the Mozart clarinet pieces, to include that very concerto over which you and Tyler Cowen disagree?"

I did indeed, and you can obtain a CD of Goodman's take on the Clarinet Concerto and the Clarinet Quintet here.

"About as popular as Morris dancing..."

...if, perhaps, not as useful.

David Smith of The Observer informs us that poetry may be dying in the UK:

Daisy Goodwin, the TV presenter dubbed the Nigella Lawson of poetry, has warned that the art form of Shakespeare and Keats is dying and set to become as quaint as morris dancing.

As sales of poetry plunge, Goodwin, whose BBC shows feature actors reciting verse, fears it will become extinct from the national culture. 'It will be like morris dancing: really interesting to people who do it, and incomprehensible and slightly annoying to people who don't.

'Twenty years ago everyone could name a Larkin or a Betjeman poem and had read them. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find anybody who could name a poem by any of the top 10 poets today. It's an endangered species.'

Hmmm...I know that I need to revisit Milton this year, and Homer and Shakespeare, too. But then, I'm 46, so I'm perhaps the older reader referred to in the story. And I won't be purchasing the poems I want to read or re-read, as I already have them in the house.

But...but...it's difficult not to blame the poets themselves (and the "knowledgeable" critics). I'm not arguing for "roses are red, violets are blue" here: most of Shakespeare doesn't rhyme, nor does most of Milton. They both employed blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Rhyme wasn't used in Latin poetry at all. But speaking as one who once was, in fact, an English major, I have to say that this has been going on for a long time now, to the point where poets have created the same situation as their analagous practitioners in "modern" art.

That there are talented people struggling away at poetry to this day cannot be doubted. The desire to read poetry for enjoyment will never, I think, be extinct, nor shall the desire to compose it. And your work needn't rhyme in order to be real poetry. No question there, either. But if it neither rhymes nor scans, and you insist on calling it poetry...well, the burden of proof is on you, not on your readers.

Browsing your phone book

Many of remember the Timex/Sinclair, a computer you could get for about a hundred bucks. Okay, so computers are getting smaller and smaller and more powerfuller, too, and so is their software.

Including browsers:

Oslo, Norway - January 24, 2006 - Opera Software today announced the worldwide release of Opera Mini, the full Web browser that runs on almost every mobile phone, including low- and mid-end handsets. Today's global launch follows the trials of Opera Mini in the Nordics and in Germany during the fall of 2005, which resulted in a user base of over one million people. Opera Mini is available free of charge via WAP download, or for a small fee via SMS.

Go to http://mini.opera.com for more information and download instructions.

"With Opera Mini most people can start surfing the Web with the mobile phone they have today," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "We are proud to be the first to offer full, mobile Web browsing to the majority of the world's mobile phone users."

(Hat tip: MacMegasite)

Making a list, checking it twice...

Pat Robertson has "the credibility of Miss Cleo." If you like that sort of thing, you'll probably enjoy many of the entries on The Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005. Here's another sample:

23. Jennifer Wilbanks

Charges: Wasting the entire nation’s time and attention without actually being abducted and killed. The "Runaway Bride" fiasco marks a new low point in modern news, an episode in which the media devoted more attention to a single fruitcake than the rest of the damned world, discovered her to be simply an inconsiderate flake, and continued their shameless round-the-clock coverage of her unabated for many days afterward, compulsively playing 10 seconds of towel-headed perp walk footage over and over and over again, as world events were left to take care of themselves. This bug-eyed bitch and her doormat fiancée, after all, were important—right?

Exhibit A: Even if she were actually abducted and killed, it wouldn’t have merited 1/1000th the coverage she got in the first day of this speculation orgy.

Sentence: Actually abducted and killed.

The Wilbanks coverage actually says far more about media coverage (and editorial decisions) than it does about Miss Wilbanks herself, but there you go.

Also making appearances are Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, Geraldo Rivera, and, as mentioned above, Pat Robertson.

(Hat tip: Dustbury)

Enemies of the Revolution

I could not believe the utter cluelessness of what I read at FrontPageMag.com this morning: the teaser under the headline "We Have No Peace Process" reads: "A violent, totalitarian jihad group comes to power in the Palestinian parliament."

Hello? Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization. But are they not taking control from the PLO -- the fucking PLO -- those warm and fuzzy moppets who created modern airline hijacking, fomented civil war in Jordan, and then helped destroy Lebanon and provoke the Israeli invasion of that country? Isn't it that PLO?

Better'n forty years ago Ayn Rand gave a lecture she called "Conservatism: An Obituary." It's available in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

The Hamas electoral victory, and the reactions to it, bring to mind this comment from the lecture:

It is obvious that with this sort of theoretical equipment and with an unbroken record of defeats, concessions, compromises, and betrayals in practice, today's "conservatives" are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country's uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.

Sound familiar? Remind you of this? Or this?

Stalin and Trotsky fought for control of the late 1920s Soviet Union. The particular identity of the ultimate victor made no difference to those who lived under Soviet tyranny. Similarly, the Gang of Four were no better and no worse than Chairman Mao himself (though they did enjoy worse PR). One could be forgiven for assuming that Ayn Rand predicted Fatah's loss to Hamas, way back in '61:

When men share the same basic premise, it is the most consistent ones who win.

Won't be long now...

Is it a barometer of the spread of Objectivism throughout the culture (including the anarcho-libertarians), or is it just that many people understandably wish to get closer to the beautiful women who read this blog?

Undoubtedly both, and in the spirit of Ockham's Razor we shall entertain no other explanations. But the happy Catholic, Rothbardian, anarchistic folk at LewRockwell.com have picked up and posted two articles upon which Your Humble Correspondent has previously commented.

Cultural ascendancy is good.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg at The Corner picks up on it, too.

Don't Delay the Gratification

All who appreciate good food will be fortified by the new issue of The Gilded Fork, which contains Suzanne Podhaizer's article, Christmas Cocoa," 'cause, like, there's only 333 shopping days until Christmas.

Oral vs. Injectable..?

The WorldNetDaily headline for this story reads: "Oral sex hot topic at school board."

Okay, I'll, er, bite: Where is it not a hot topic?

Four Things Everyone Wants to Know About Me

Four jobs that you have had in your life:
HAWK missile system repair technician
warehouse manager
writer/trainer
chief peon at a counterintelligence team

Four movies that you could watch over and over:
The Birdcage
Midnight Run
The Eagle Has Landed
My Favorite Year

Four places that you've lived:
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Alexandria, Egypt
Clearwater, Florida
El Paso, Texas

Four TV shows you love to watch:
Yes, Minister
CSI: Miami
Soldier, Soldier
Stuff the White Rabbit
Firefly (okay, that makes five...but I haven't seen the two previous shows in years)

Four places you've been on vacation:
Norco, California
Tel Aviv, Israel
Cairo, Egypt
vacation?

Four of your favorite foods:
filet mignon (hamburgers, too)
chocolate
scrambled eggs
beer (get real: if it has caloric value, it's food)

Four sites I visit daily:
Testosterone Nation
Arts and Letters Daily
msn.com
Arts - The New York Times

Four Bloggers I'm tagging:
Diana Hsieh
Ian Hamet
The Happy Curmudgeon
Marion the wannabe Librarian

(Forgot the hat tip to Taters 'n Gravy)

Myself Likes This Guy's Point

Jeremy Clarkson, on abusing the Queen's English, begins with:

Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet....

and runs with it from there. His particular examples have more to do with life in the UK than the US, although one can imagine relevant parallel examples. But then...then he hits it out of the park:

And what’s with all the reflexive pronoun abuse? I’ve written about this before but it’s getting worse. Reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and the object of a sentence are the same person or thing. Like “I dress myself”. You cannot therefore say “please contact myself”. Because it makes you look like an imbecile.

If you send a letter to a client saying “my team and me look forward to meeting with yourself next Wednesday”, be prepared for some disappointment. Because if I were the client I’d come to your office all right. Then I’d stand on your desk and relieve myself.

I’m not a grammar freak — I can eat, shoot and then take it or leave it — but when someone says “myself” instead of “me” I find it more offensive than if they’d said “spastic wog”.

Ugh. And he's so very, very right. Let me be clear here: Marine Corps and Army officers, this means you. Stop it. Just...stop it.

(Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily)

Sir John Cowperthwaite, 1916-2006

Brian Micklethwaite has a question for you:

Which British individual has done the most good for the world during the last half century or more since the Second World War? I nominate Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, who died last Saturday.

By applying laissez faire ideology to Hong Kong with greater inflexibility than anyone else was at that time even attempting, anywhere, he became, in Patrick Crozier's words, the father of Hong Kong's economic boom.

And that, if you think about it, makes Cowperthwaite the grandfather of the Chinese economic boom.

Without the shining example of Hong Kong, and the economically benign influence that Hong Kong has for a long time now had on nearby places still governed by Beijing, who knows what economic – and political – state China would be in now?

Indeed. Good point, Brian, and, so far as a Yank may do so, I second that nomination. But how was it all done? According to Cowperthwaite's Telegraph obituary,

Cowperthwaite himself called his approach "positive non-intervention". Personal taxes were kept at a maximum of 15 per cent; government borrowing was wholly unacceptable; there were no tariffs or subsidies. Red tape was so reduced that a new company could be registered with a one-page form.

Cowperthwaite believed that government should concern itself with only minimal intervention on behalf of the most needy, and should not interfere in business. In his first budget speech he said: "In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralised decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."
....Cowperthwaite summed up his part in the colony's success over the decade with some modesty: "I did very little. All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it."

The measure of that success was a 50 per cent rise in real wages, and a two-thirds fall in the number of households in acute poverty. Exports rose by 14 per cent a year, as Hong Kong evolved from a trading post to a major regional hub and manufacturing base.

The period 1961-1971 will not be remembered as a high point for free-market economics. In the US, we had Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The Brits trudged along under Prime Ministers Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, and Heath. The poor bastards in China had Chairman Mao.

But Hong Kong had John Cowperthwaite.

A laissez-fairist among the Sir Humphreys. Imagine that.

Yours, Mine, and "Ours"

From David Crowder's bylined story in the El Paso Times:

City Council approved a measure Tuesday to spend as much as $50,000 to include arroyos in an overall consultant study of how and where to preserve open space in El Paso.

Preserving arroyos has been a two-year debate at City Hall that has yet to result in any formal policies or strategies, largely because of the legal problems posed by trying to restrict the development of private property.

Well, I'll be damned...you know, if there are "legal problems posed by trying to restrict the development of private property," then maybe the city shouldn't be trying to restrict the development of private property?

"If there's one thing we learned, it is that analytical data is no help" in determining the value of an arroyo to the community, the city's Director of Development Services, Alan Shubert, said of an effort to create a matrix to rank the importance of arroyos.

He proposed establishing options to allow the city to buy properties, offer development incentives to protect arroyos, work with the Public Service Board on a protection policy and involve El Pasoans in the policy formation.

Maybe I can help Mr. Shubert and the City Council: hey, guys, the "community" is people. That's it. Any property's value is determined either by why someone wants to keep that property, or by what someone else is willing to pay for it -- if the original owner accepts that offer.

That's it. That's all you need to know about involving El Pasoans in policy formations, all you need to know about incentives, all you need to know about "the value of an arroyo to the community." If it's valuable to you -- you the individual -- then offer to buy it. Period.

I'm oversimplifying, of course. My solution is simplistic and Neanderthal and unrealistic, and if I had my shortsighted way, the entire planet would be paved. There would be houses and duplexes and apartment complexes and condos all over the beautiful, natural arroyos, so we can't afford to allow individuals to do what they like with the property they own. No, we have to do something about man's greed.

Well, how greedy is it to expropriate something that's not yours, for your own benefit -- even if that benefit is non-material? There are signs around El Paso as I write this, signs which read "Save Our Arroyos." By restricting or preventing the development of property, the arroyo activists are effectively stealing that property, in order to make themselves feel good about having done something.

I'll give you "simplistic": I don't own an arroyo. Those who do should do whatever they like with that property, and the City Council be damned.

I'll give you "simplistic": valuing the community over the individual results in the individual being crushed. Whether it's eminent domain or the next Five-Year Plan or the Great Leap Forward...or saving "our" arroyos.

Communities don't act. Individuals do. Let the individual breathe, and act on his own judgment. If his action is "shortsighted," he pays the price. If not, he benefits -- and so does everyone else.

Pave the planet. Asphalt the arroyos.

Yes, self-acceptance is a virtue

Oh, I can definitely accept being described this way:

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!

You've got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You're sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you're expensive and high-maintenance, but you're worth it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

¿Como se llama, güero?

An online poll conducted by the El Paso Times

Are you bothered by people who speak Spanish in stores, restaurants and government offices in El Paso?
58.5%
No. El Paso is a thoroughly bilingual city. People should not be offended by people who speak Spanish in public.
41.4%
Yes. El Paso is an American city and people should speak English in public places.

Well, I'm no statistician, but 41.4 % is an awful lot of people to be saying that others "should" behave in a certain way. Or refrain from behaving that way, as the case may be.

Look, I realize that the United States is an English-speaking nation, and that that's been to the benefit of the United States. I'm not a Spanish speaker myself, and I think it's pretty damn rude for a group of which I'm a part to break into a discussion in Spanish. It just is.

But damn, look at a map. Look where El Paso is. My house, to take just one example, is closer to Juarez than it is to Austin or Houston or Dallas. Hell, I'm closer to the Mexico border than I am to the New Mexico border.

I guess it's just too much of a mental shift to get folks to just leave people alone. But I'm not talking about changing anyone's habits. You don't want to speak English, fine. You don't want to speak Spanish, fine. But what is, is.

More Armed Feds

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

A provision in the "Patriot Act" creates a new federal police force with power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.

Go to House Report 109-333 USA PATRIOT IMPROVEMENT AND REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005 and check it out for yourself. Sec. 605 reads:

"There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the ’United States Secret Service Uniformed Division’."

This new federal police force is "subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security."

The new police are empowered to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony."

The new police are assigned a variety of jurisdictions, including "an event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance" (SENS).

"A special event of national significance" is neither defined nor does it require the presence of a "protected person" such as the president in order to trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the police themselves, can place the SENS designation on any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an event, the new federal police are empowered to keep out and to arrest people at their discretion.

The language conveys enormous discretionary and arbitrary powers. What is "an offense against the United States"? What are "reasonable grounds"?

Before you evaluate whether Roberts' fears are justified, ask yourself: how many federal police forces do we have already? The FBI? The DEA? The Secret Service itself? U.S. Marshals?

Who, indeed, were the goons who snatched Elian Gonzalez a few years back? How many other agencies arm their people with such submachine guns?

It is extremely difficult to hold even local police forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a federal police protected by Homeland Security and the president?

You can mock the slippery slope argument all you like...but if you are approaching an 11% grade, you'd better have some damn good brakes.

UPDATE:
Via Glenn Reynolds, I learn that Dr. Roberts' claims have been "fact-checked" by Stuart Buck. Just so. They have, and I yield the point to Mr. Buck: much of what is proposed in this bill already exists. That's quite true.

Still, I stand by my "slippery slope" argument, which I think is quite relevant here. We already have quite a number of militarized federal police forces, a few of which have murdered people -- the FBI at Ruby Ridge, ATF/FBI at Waco, and someone from "Justice" who kidnapped Elian Gonzalez in Miami. This deserves more scrutiny than just "fact-checking" and "oh, we're already doing this."

No Cash Accepted

An American cowboy or prospector could walk into a saloon, toss a gold dollar onto the bar, and tell the barkeep, "Gimme a shot of Red Eye." It wasn't so long ago, really, but you don't want to try that kind of all-American, individualist crap in Buffalo, New York:

Southtowns businessman Daniel Buczek said he has had "no trouble" using Liberty silver dollars to buy coffee, oil filters for his car and other items at a number of area businesses.

But when someone in his family tried to use them to buy beer at a Buffalo Sabres game, Buczek and his son wound up in trouble with the law.

Buczek, 55, and Shane Buczek, 34, both of Derby, are believed to be the first people to be charged in this region for trying to make purchases with the Liberty dollar, a privately minted $20 coin.

That's right, charged with trying to buy something with a silver coin. "Charged with" trying to exchange one value for another.

According to police, the Buczeks were arrested after they tried to buy beer with $20 Liberties from "numerous" vendors at the Dec. 26 Sabres game against the New York Islanders at HSBC Arena.

Acting on a complaint filed by a security officer at the game, Buffalo police charged the two men with felony counts of criminal possession of a forged instrument and criminal impersonation. A misdemeanor count of harassment was also filed.

I think I have an idea from which quarter the "harassment" came...

"We did send an agent to question [the Buczeks], but we determined this was not a counterfeiting case," said Michael C. Bryant, special agent in charge of the Buffalo Secret Service office. "Counterfeiting is when someone illegally makes a copy of actual U.S. currency."

Liberties are not made by the government, are not legal tender and "the U.S. Treasury Department does not approve of it," said Michael J. White, a spokesman for the U.S. Mint.

No business is required to accept Liberties, White said, but he added there is no law preventing businesses from accepting Liberties for goods and services, if they choose to do so.

Okay, so it's not a case of counterfeiting. There's no question of fraud involved, and no coercion. So what is Buffalo's heartache with use of these silver coins? It's not as if people don't want them:

"About 20 of my regular customers use them. They pay me with silver, and they accept silver as change," said Daniel Hyman, owner of the Red Apple convenience store on Route 78 in Strykersville. "With inflation and government deficits, I see more and more people who don't trust paper anymore. Eventually, I hope the banks will accept Liberties for deposits."

"We take it at par with dollars," said Shawn Clawges, owner of Opener's Grille, a restaurant on Seneca Street in East Aurora. "They're a pretty coin, and they're backed by silver. It's a commodity that's going up in value, unlike the U.S. dollar."

Yes, heaven help us if we allow adults to structure or conduct transactions the way they want to. You never know when some anti-social bastard might come up with something dastardly like penicillin or futures contracts or software. Hell, they may even try to sell it.

And if you allow them to get away with that, why, they may just demand payment in silver.

Republicans: A Godsend to the Left

"The political left in America," writes Patrick Chisholm of csmonitor.com, "is emerging victorious."

No, this isn't about the damage that Jack Abramoff's mischief has done to the political right. Nor is it about President Bush's lousy poll numbers. And it doesn't refer to Democrats' recent win of two governorships.

It's about something much deeper; namely, that the era of big government is far from over. Trends are decidedly in favor of that quintessential leftist goal: massive redistribution of wealth.

Republicans' capture of both Congress and the White House was, understandably, a demoralizing blow to the left. But the latter can take solace that "Republican" is no longer synonymous with spending restraint, free markets, and other ideals of the political right.

It sure as hell isn't. Chisholm's story isn't pleasant news, but it's also not news. It was Richard Nixon, remember, who gave us the Environmental Protection Agency; Ronald Reagan who bequeathed TEFRA, or tax "reform," and, together with Alan Greenspan, put Social Security on life support instead of allowing it to die a decent death; and most recently, a Republican administration agitated for and the leadership of a Republican-dominated Congress twisted arms to pass the lovely prescription drug "benefit":

The prescription drug benefit was another victory for the redistributionists. While it is true that the left wants even more spent on that program, Republican efforts have netted an additional $1.2 trillion being redistributed over the next 10 years.

Certain trends have been favoring the left for the past several decades. In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government's budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget, or about $1.4 trillion per year. Measured according to this, the US government's main function now is redistribution: taking money from one segment of the population and giving it to another segment. In a few decades, transfer payments are expected to make up more than 75 percent of federal government spending.

Chisholm is not sanguine about the future, but I'd like to point out to him and to anyone else listening that this situation is much worse than he thinks. It is the commonly-accepted belief of the era, contra Mises, that there actually is a moral and practical "third way" between capitalism and socialism. It's even worse than that, actually, because we're in a culture which sees such redistributions are simply the right thing to do. Capitalism and altruism, as has been noted before, are not compatible. Do you expect to see much discussion of this during the upcoming goatgrab election of a new House Majority Leader?

Right. Let me advise against holding your breath.

Evan Mecham, call your office

No, not that office.

What's going on in my near-neighbor state and former home?

Arizonans are a quirky bunch with a history of electing governors who don't give a shit what Arizona voters think aren't afraid to be courageous leaders. The latest is Janet Napolitano, who knows what's good for everyone else:

Today, Arizona Governor Janet “I am Governor, Hear Me Roar” Napolitano vetoed HB 2004, a bill that would have provided corporate income tax breaks to corporations contributing to student tuition organizations designed to finance private school educations for children of low-income families.

I liked this bill and the way it addressed privatization of education by encouraging its funding by those who arguably benefit the most from quality education: businesses who hire the graduates of our schools. Like school vouchers, it potentially leveled the playing field of access to private schools by providing a funding source for low-income families who could otherwise not afford private schooling. It began to attack one of the largest problems (and source of problems) in the US – the state’s near monopoly on education, and the inability of parents to choose the type of education their children will receive. Taxpayers would benefit – every student who leaves the public education system is one less student the taxpayers need to bankroll.

This bill was a rare one – seemingly everybody wins. The taxpayers save money. Businesses can elevate the education of future employees. Parents can choose their kids’ schools. Kids can get a better education. Low-income kids could have access to private schools.

“Napolitano’s veto letter for the new tuition tax credit bill stated that its passage was premature because the measure should be considered anew as part of work on the next state budget, spokeswoman Jeanine L’Ecuyer said Wednesday.” (AZ Central Article)

As Benway points out, J No's statement is pert near content-free, and the guy he quotes as approving the governor's measure, Mike McClellan, presents three arguments, all of them weak. But he wonders if it can't, after all, be explained:

Could it be that some extremely influential, well-funded leftist group opposes the very notion of the widespread emergence of private schools? Here’s a hint: consider the effect on teacher’s unions when private schools no longer need to hire union members or teachers who meet artificial union standards for teachers.

Such reflexive statists dislike the idea of private schools, all right, but they don't dislike all private schools. They'll try like hell to get into Juilliard, for example, or Stanford, or Yale Law. They sure like sending their kids to such places when they can. But private K-12 education? Oh my, no.

Tuesday's vintage will go splendidly with the Camembert

Hold it! Researchers have concluded that fats are strong in flavor?

Scientists have found that, when sampling a fine claret or expensive burgundy, the last foodstuff it should be paired with is cheese. The study, which submitted the tastebuds of 11 drinkers to eight cheeses combined with cheap and expensive wines, found the cheese always masked the flavours of a pricey vintage.

Where the tasters would have expected to hold forth on the berry and oak flavours of a full-bodied cabernet sauvignon or the light tannins of a pinot noir, it was found they were indistinguishable from a bottle of plonk.

New Scientist magazine said that the strongest-flavoured cheeses - stilton and gorgonzola - overwhelmed the flavours of wine more than milder products such as mozzarella. But the American researchers found all the cheeses reduced the flavours and aromas of wine, regardless of cost, exploding the myth that a fine cheese can be enhanced by a perfect wine.

Seems the writer is indulging in a slight case of If A, therefore B; B; therefore A here, but never mind. What grabbed my attention was the scientific/culinary conclusion:

The researchers think that molecules of fat in the cheese may coat the mouth and deaden perceptions of other flavours.

Now, I'm no Craig Claiborne, but I always understood that to be the reaon we cooked with fats in the first place. Are scientists now telling us that the reason we do something actually stands to, er, reason?

Somebody better tell Jennifer.

The Jackson Five, 450 Volts, and One Hundred Thousand Pounds Sterling

Ever heard of the Milgram Experiment from 1961?

You probably have, but let's recap: Stanley Milgram placed experimental subjects (Yale students) in a situation where he had them believing that they were inflicting potentially lethal jolts of electricity on other subjects when questions on a fake quiz were answered incorrectly. As I recall (at ease, it was from reading: I was two years old in 1961), more than fifty percent of the subjects were willing to inflict the lethal voltages on a fellow human being simply because a guy in a white lab coat told them to.

And, like me, you've probably taken the time to wonder how anyone could have become Leopold or Loeb, or been a Treblinka camp guard, or a torturer in the Lubyanka. I still wonder about that: what do you have to tell yourself, what do you have to do to yourself, in order to go there?

So: can a motivational speaker convince middle-management types at his seminar to hit the Bank of England for one hundred thousand pounds cash?

No?

Watch this.

Republican Principles and Other Urban Legends

Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, gunning for House Majority Leader, in today's Wall Street Journal:

We need sunshine in the earmark process, and an end to secret, backroom deals. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total number of earmarks in 2005 was nearly 14,000--compared with only 1,439 in 1995. Earmarked money is often spent without the oversight and consideration in the regular appropriations process, so waste, abuse or even fraud is more likely. Congress should base decisions on what is good for America, not what is good for the lobbyist friends of a few.

Time was, George Wallace could complain that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two major parties. But 14,000 earmarks...now, that's a lot of dimes.

The piece continues, boilerplate, bilge, yadda yadda, until we get to the prize:

"I do not need a poll or questionnaire to tell me what Republicans stand for."

Not to worry, Mr. Shadegg. Nobody else does, either.

Music Criticism and Nuclear Diplomacy

As an inveterate though perhaps not veteran culture blogger, I should point your way to this: Charles Hill reports that someone ended up at his blog, Dustbury, while looking for an MP3 of the infamous John Cage classic 4' 33".

Well, of course: the dynamic range of that piece is better suited for digital rendering than for any measly old tape.

As a younger culture blogger, I attempted to wrestle with the appeal of this piece:

I am a classical guitarist. I'm very concerned about enlarging the guitar repertoire. I was warned about transcribing 4'33" for the guitar: I was told that I'd be laboring in obscurity and in vain, that the guitar just wasn't the appropriate instrument for that work, that no one would ever hear it.

But no, this Cage masterpiece had to be rendered for the guitar. So I've spent years on the effort. It's been difficult, it's been frustrating...for example, getting the rhythm just right is crucial to this piece. Especially the rests.

But I was inspired by, among others, the great Segovia, who transcribed so much Bach for the guitar; by John Cage himself, of course. By Marcel Marceau.

You know, Varese and Stockhausen groped toward this--but John Cage found perfection, pure form. I'm intimidated every time I play this piece on my guitar. But I'm inspired as well.

So I persevered, and it's been worth every bit of effort. Now, I'm proud of my transcription of 4'33". Listening to it on the guitar, I think you'll find yourself wondering if the guitar hadn't been Cage's original choice of instrument all along. And I play it all the time: it's become, without doubt, the strongest piece in my repertoire. Now it's available for all guitarists, everywhere.

But I'm always thinking, always wondering...so it occurred to me that maybe 4' 33" could be used to introduce Iranian President Ahmadinejad to western music!.

Of course, maybe Ahmadinejad has indeed heard Cage's music, and maybe that's why western music is banned.

And why they want nukes.

"A right, once relinquished....will unfailingly be exploited..."

Christopher Hitchens, enthusiastic War on Terror supporter, has aligned himself with the ACLU lawsuit against the NSA domestic surveillance. His own words:

Statement - Christopher Hitchens, NSA Lawsuit Client

Although I am named in this suit on my own behalf, I am motivated to join it by concerns well beyond my own. I have been frankly appalled by the discrepant and contradictory positions taken by the Administration in this matter. First, the entire existence of the NSA's monitoring was a secret, and its very disclosure denounced as a threat to national security.

Then it was argued that Congress had already implicitly granted the power to conduct warrantless surveillance on the territory of the United States, which seemed to make the reason for the original secrecy more rather than less mysterious. (I think we may take it for granted that our deadly enemies understand that their communications may be intercepted.)

This makes it critically important that we establish an understood line, and test the cases in which it may or may not be crossed.

Let me give a very direct instance of what I mean. We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of "national security" however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.

We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration's own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.

The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons. It is therefore of the first importance that we demarcate, clearly and immediately, the areas in which our government may or may not treat us as potential enemies.

(Hat tip: Matt Welch at Hit&Run)

Butterfly vs. Wheel, Reprised

Can the House of Lords stand up to the coming surveillance state in Britain? Investment advisor, op-ed columnist, bestselling author, and peer, Lord Rees-Mogg (formerly Sir William Rees-Mogg) is no stranger to arguing in favor of individual liberty against the state. In the late 1960s, as an editor of the Times, he wrote the famous "breaking a butterfly against the wheel" editorial as members of the Rolling Stones were prosecuted for drug possession. With no credible pro-liberty opposition party in Parliament, the House of Lords may be all that Britons have left:

Many of these new interventions could partly be justified in terms of counter-terrorism, but they still invaded the liberties of the citizen. For instance, Britain has four million CCTV cameras, which gives the UK a quarter of the world’s cameras to photograph 1 per cent of the world’s population. Phone taps are now going to be extended, for the first time, to MPs; and therefore to their constituents. There are universal taps on the internet, which may be passed on to foreign intelligence agencies. All of these new powers can give counter-terrorism benefits, but they can also be used for intrusions not connected with terrorism, or even with crime.

Tomorrow the House of Lords will return to the worrying Bill that authorises identity cards. Many people suppose that identity cards are an anti-terrorist measure; the security services know that they are not effective in that role. The main question tomorrow will be their cost. The Government used to pretend they would cost £100 each; the London School of Economics estimates that the cost will be £500 a head, or £28 billion in all. I worry more about the central register than I do about the cards themselves. This will be held on a supercomputer that will contain more than 50 pieces of information about each cardholder, including biometric information. This could easily develop, as some people think it should, into a collected register of information held by government departments, including criminal, tax and health records. I certainly don’t want to be compelled to spend £500 to give the Government a complete picture of my private existence.

In Parliament, particularly in the House of Lords, there is a growing reaction against such social control. Most of us think policemen should not be turned into busybodies, warning people not even to discuss adoption by homosexual couples; arresting them for any trivial offence; threatening smokers and publicans; and galloping after fox-hunters. We resent this on behalf of the public, but we also resent it on behalf of the police.

That last point is pretty significant. Just as with the military or any other otherwise-legitimate function of government, if the police -- in Britain or anywhere else -- are put to contemptible tasks, soon we'll be left with nothing but contemptible police. We're on the way there, and it looks like we're in a race with the Brits.

UPDATE: Peter Briffa doesn't, perhaps, expect salvation from his political "leaders:"

Tuesday, January 10

Alice Thomson analyses all the bright young things from all our major parties who are, in the not too distant future, going to make our lives such fun:

"They are moderate and decent. Most of the members of these sets are young family men (usually called David, Ed or Nick), who are happy changing nappies and taking their children to swimming classes. They wear jeans rather than ties, listen to their iPods as they cycle to work and have working wives who are violinists, play in bands or are fashion designers.
Their heroes are Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis as well as Nye Bevan and Winston Churchill. They are all well educated, with beautiful manners, and are always articulate".

In other words, they are scum.

Awesome.

UPDATE: As passed on by Brian Doherty at Hit&Run, the House of Lords swatted back Britain's national ID card legislation. As I understand it, legislation is not dead just because the House of Lords sends it back to Commons or the Cabinet or what have you...but, let's let Matthew Tempest of The Guardian Unlimited give us the head's up:

The government tonight suffered a damaging blow in its bid to introduce identity cards, with the Lords voting to force ministers into revealing the complete projected costs of the scheme before it can become law.
Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers, backed by at least some Labour ones, inflicted a 237 to 156 defeat on the government over the measure, a majority of 81.

Although peers have admitted they cannot defeat the government bill in full, since it was a government manifesto commitment, insisting on the publication of the of all detailed costings will further exacerbate the row over the cards.

Cool.

Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, the civil liberties pressure group, said today: "This bill is as expensive to our rights and freedom as to our wallets."

The Game

Okay, so Diana introduced us to the best blonde joke ever. With a strong sense of community, I offer this game, courtesy of a fellow El Paso blogger, via Out of Lascaux.

Enjoy!

Malaysia: Sharia or Civil Law?

I tell you, some folks just don't know when they have it good. While adherents of the Religion of Peace are busy building societies based on tolerance and acceptance, the world is full of malcontents agitating for civil law and other such foolishness. It seems that the latest whiners are in Malaysia:

KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysia's minorities are banding together to put up a united front against what they fear is a steady encroachment of Sharia (Islamic law) into their lives.

Unsettled by the decision of a court last month that it had no jurisdiction in Islamic matters and that a non-Muslim had no remedy under common law, the minorities, led by moderate leaders, are putting up stiff resistance.

Observers say the resistance has placed the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi in a delicate position because it needs to balance the competing demands from the majority Muslims. While non-Muslims want common law and the secular constitution of Malaysia preserved and protected, Muslims demand a society based on Sharia.

Non-Muslims have "no remedy under common law." What's the problem?

In Malaysia, a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction has been building up among the country's minority communities against fundamentalists pushing the Islamic way into many matters - from banking and halal food to family matters, education and personal issues such as religious conversion.

In effect, two parallel societies - Muslim and non-Muslim - have gradually replaced what was a pluralistic, secular Malaysian society based on common law that was the legacy British colonials handed over upon independence in 1957.

Indigenous Malays, nearly all of whom follow Islam, constitute 60% of Malaysia's 24 million population, while Chinese, who are mostly Buddhists, make up 30% and the largely Hindu Indians another 8%. There are smaller racial groups such as Eurasians.

Malay is the official language and Islam the official religion but the constitution guarantees freedom of worship, although this provision, according to the minorities, has been gradually and systematically eroded.

The last straw was the forced burial last month of a 36-year-old soldier and mountaineer, M Moorthy, as a Muslim, over the protest of his Hindu wife. Judge Mohamed Raus Sharif ruled that his civil court had no jurisdiction to hear an application by S Kaliammal that her husband was Hindu.

Sharif refused to alter an ex parte judgment, obtained from a Sharia court by the Islamic Affairs Department Sharia, that deemed that the dead man had converted to Islam - in effect telling non-Muslims that they have no remedy in such cases.

Outrageous, that some forty percent of the country refuses to accept its dhimmitude. Next thing you know they'll be wanting beauty pageants and western music and nudity during marital sex and other such filth. Ungrateful bastards.

The Malay National Force (TERAS), a Malay non-government organization, said in a statement that Article 121 (1A) provided specific guarantees that the civil court will not interfere in Islamic matters.

"The Sharia court should not be seen as an institution that denies justice to non-Muslims. On the contrary, if its laws are fully applied, there is an assurance of better justice here compared to civil laws, which are the heritage of British colonial rule," said TERAS president Mohamad Azmi Abdul Hamid.

Well there you have it. The British legal tradition, featuring such abuses as habeus corpus and trial by jury, is clearly inferior to the justice systems of, just to take some examples, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and post-Soviet Afghanistan.

A nice, mellow portrait of the Creator can be found here. Sensitive rendering. As for the whiners in Malaysia, let's just paraphrase Marie Antoinette and say, "Let them eat grapes."

Roosevelts and Capitalism

David Beito is asking the question: "Did Roosevelt save capitalism?"

I don't buy it. I have yet to see any evidence that the U.S. was ever on the verge of revolution either before or after the rise of FDR. In 1932, for example, the Communists and the Socialists (primary indicators of radical or revolutionary sentiment on the left) scored between them a measly 2.5 percent of the vote. They did not elect a single member to Congress.

In 1932, FDR campaigned on a platform that differed little from that Al Smith in 1928 or, for that matter, his opponent Herbert Hoover. While he vaguely promised an undefined New Deal, he just as often attacked Hoover as a spendthrift. Politicians who promised retrenchment and low taxes, such as Governor Harry G. Leslie of Indiana, were often just as popular at the polls as those who promised more government.

Good points, and they deserve to be made because the "he saved capitalism" claim gets tossed around all the time. Chris Mathews once used the phrase on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show, and Liddy, an alleged defender of freedom and capitalism, didn't contradict him. We need to get this one filed with the Choking Doberman, Alligators in the Sewers, and other urban legends.

Might be more appropriate, though, to ask how much capitalism was left for Roosevelt to save or to destroy. His immediate predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was quite the active meddler and interventionist (Beito points out that FDR attacked Hoover as a spendthrift). There's also that matter of a previous President Roosevelt, who enjoyed his own reputation as a trust-buster.

The Mozart Effect... on Curators

This story is pretty cool:

A manuscript in the fleet, restless hand of the teenage Mozart, which was cut in two and sold off separately by his financially embarrassed widow after his death, has been brought back together by the British Library. The find comes just short of the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth on January 27.

The single sheet of music was produced by Mozart when he was 17. At the time he was visiting Vienna to be touted by his father, Leopold, for a job as a court musician - unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

Neat.

As for what the music consists of:

The minuet comes from the period when Mozart was transforming himself from a pianistic child prodigy into a serious composer, and is associated with his second group of six string quartets, K168-73, though it was eventually discarded in the final version of the set.

The cadenzas are slightly different: one is for a concerto by a different composer, the now virtually forgotten Ignaz von Beecke. The second was for a concerto Mozart had written six years earlier, aged 11 - the "Pastiche" concerto, assembled from other composers' works.

Hmmm...might I suggest the premier performance be scheduled for Iran?

Martha Stewart Got Lucky...

...she crossed federal agents, yes, but wasn't executed for it. Rigoberto Alpizar didn't enjoy such luck.

"What," asks Charley Reese, "is the duty of air marshals?"

It is to prevent terrorists from taking over an airplane. How can a man who is unarmed and not even on the airplane take it over? Alpizar, who suffered from manic-depression, got into a panic while returning from a missionary trip to Ecuador. He got up from his seat and bolted for the door, went out it and was running down the jetway toward the terminal.
This occurred shortly after he boarded the plane, which was still sitting on the tarmac with the jetway connected to it.
His wife, who was running after him and telling the passengers he was sick, was stopped and forced into a seat. The two air marshals, who for no known reason decided to pursue him, followed him into the jetway and shot him to death.
Their story is that he said something about a bomb and reached for his backpack. I say that is bull, a story they concocted to cover up a bad shoot. The passengers whose interviews I've seen said they didn't hear any talk of a bomb. Because he was not on the airplane, the Miami police are investigating, and I hope they do a thorough and transparent job of it.
There was no reason for the two undercover air marshals even to involve themselves. It is not a federal crime to want to get off an airplane. There was nothing in his behavior that would indicate he was anything but what he was, an ordinary passenger who wanted to get off the airplane. They should not have followed him off the airplane. They should not have shot him. And the gutless politicians and bureaucrats who rushed on television – long before they could possibly know any of the facts – to excuse the air marshals ought to be ashamed. It shows clearly where their loyalties lie – with the government, not with the people.

I'm a little bit late to the party on this, but I don't want to see this story die...or be whitewashed. Not that I really expect anything else.

Imposing Preferences, American Style

Walter Williams:

I fear that too many Americans have contempt for the principles of liberty and opt for solutions that employ the political arena to forcibly impose their wills on others. If that's the preferred game, then those Americans shouldn't whine when others employ the same tactic to impose their wills.

Yes, as Williams writes, force and the imposition of will is indeed the name of the game. In America's Great War -- of interest groups -- known as the mixed economy, we have some recent casualties:
American liquor stores doing business in the American city of Oakland, California are being vandalized by Muslim thugs because they are liquor stores. The solutions offered? Local and state officials as well as the police are looking into doing something about...the liquor stores. Not the thugs. The stores.

Officials in Mississippi have fired the local public defender, possibly because he's too effective in defending his clients.

Ralph Nader's Public PestsCitizen has managed to ban a drug which makes people's lives livable.

Congresscritters, apparently not satisfied with serial re-election at Politburo levels of incumbency, have made it illegal to anonymously "annoy" them.

Don't forget Arizona's Governor J No, who wants you to register like a sex offender or agent of a foreign power for the privilege of buying Sudafed.

Of course, we still have the traditional line-up of blue laws, taxes, eminent domain seizures, regulations, forfeitures, and no-knock raids/warrant servings that we've had for years. As Williams quotes David Hume, "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."

I've called for a return of traditional American values before -- starting with tarring and feathering.

New from the Religion of Peace

If not, exactly, advice on getting a piece...

An Egyptian cleric has issued a fatwa flying in the face of reality on this earth. Yeah, I know, nothing newsworthy there. But in this one, he claimed that "nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates a marriage." Take a moment to recover from that one.

Not everyone agrees with that, though: another worthy figure claims that "Nothing is prohibited during marital sex, except of course sodomy."

What about using your left hand?

No mention of impudent penises.

Politically Correct Vandalism

Some Californians are hoping for more blue laws.

Successful businesses, providng legal products desired by their customers, are "blights" on their communities. Of course, they could also be "pressing problems" or "nuisances." Activists are urging that the matter be referred to, among others, the police.

Those are the terms "community leaders" are using in Oakland, California, to describe -- not meth labs, not crack houses, not brothels and not even the two houses of the California legislature -- but liquor stores. Now, I'm sure you wouldn't have guessed this at all, but driving the most recent reign of terror activism are religious zealots, in this case Muslims. Yeah, you're shocked.

Does the phrase "faith and force" ring a bell?

Before going on to describe the legitimate political agitation, consisting of arson, kidnapping, and smashing of property, the AP writer, Justin M. Norton, begins his story with the words, "They weren't your ordinary thugs."

Yes, Mr. Norton, they were.

Equipped with attitude

Or maybe: "equipment with attitude."

Just got spam for "impudent penis enlargement."

"Impudent penis." Not sure how they found out...

Rush is Right....Not

Heard Rush Limbaugh yesterday. To paraphrase a forgotten commentator from over a decade ago, I probably disagree with half of everything Limbaugh says -- but compared to the rest of American media figures, it's a refreshing half. Anyway, I haven't listened to him in years, so I was deliberately tuning in to hear him. What I heard was something on which ol' Rush is...well, apparently not an expert.

Limbaugh was criticizing the media for being in lockstep, in terms of vocabulary, as to the way they reported the 11,000-plus close on the Dow Jones Industrial Average the other day. The word he zeroed in on was "psychological," and he was right: in the clips he played, the word was used again and again. It was a "psychological milestone," it had "psychological meaning," and so forth. Now, I'm far from disagreeing with Rush about the groupthink all too often exhibited by American mainstream media, but this ain't it. In fact, in this case the mainstream media is right and Limbaugh is wrong.

First of all, not all investors care about market indexes and averages: those known as fundamentalists, such as John Templeton and Warren Buffett, do not and never did. Opposed to the market fundamentalists are the technicians, practitioners of technical analysis. If you remember the Elves from the old Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, you know who I mean. Technicians don't care much for earnings, market share, dividends, and whatnot...but boy, do they like charts, ratios, and figures.

Who are they? Many of them have written books: Stan Weinstein, one of Rukeyser's Elves, is one; famous gold bug James Dines is another, as is former market hot shot Joe Granville; John Murphy has written what many consider to be the modern classic on the topic, and appears as a market commentator on television; Gainesville, Georgia's Robert Prechter keeps the flame of Elliott Wave analysis alive, and the grand old classic, Edwards and Magee, is still kicking around. All of these guys will tell you (and do, in their books, especially Granville and Prechter) that technical indicators are psychological indicators: their only value is to provide hints as to what other investors, in the aggregate, are thinking.

Whether a chart should be linear or logarithmic or point-and-figure, multi-year or intra-day, the intent is the same: to come up with some sort of visually useful guage of what people, in the aggregate, are doing, because what they do is based on what they think and feel (this is especially, indeed explicitly, the case with Elliott Wave theory). That's psychology, Rush. What else would a technical, or timing, indicator be other than psychological? Would Limbaugh claim that there's some deeper meaning to an index number, such meaning to be arrived at through, say, numerology? Or maybe gematria, or the Bible Code?

Oh, that's right: Rush is a proud Republican.

Never mind.

How Do You Say "Deep Doo-Doo" in Mandarin?

Apparently, American students are going to find out. Including kindergartners -- courtesy of, among others, the Department of Defense.

I read this story at Inside Higher Ed, and, uh, well, I do have a comment or two...

Under the plan, President Bush will request $114 million in the 2007 fiscal year, with approximately 75 percent of that amount coming through the State and Education Departments, for the National Security Language Initiative, and the Department of Defense would allocate more than $750 million during the 2007 to 2011 fiscal years to groom skilled personnel in languages deemed critical.

First of all, any post-Nixon use of the term "national security" is automatically suspect. Period, and no apology for that. As evidence, I offer Presidents Bill Clinton and (anyone named) George Bush. Ditto the terms "broad-based" and "initiative," the latter not being a characteristic usually encouraged by anyone in government employ, unless it's to fuck up something that already works.

The president said that his administration’s short-term international strategy is to “stay on the offense,” providing troops, intelligence officers and diplomats with “all the tools necessary to succeed.”
“That’s what people in this country expect of our government,” said Bush. “They expect us to be wise about how we use our resources, and a good use of resources is to promote this language initiative in K through 12, in our universities.”

Yeah...the feds taking the initiative in K through 12 education, as well as universities. Like we don't already have enough problems.

The president then went on to allude to his proposed guest worker program:

Bush also said that “a good use of resources is to encourage foreign language speakers from important regions of the world to come here and teach us how to speak their language.”

Now, if this were true, there would be a whole lot of Anglos in this country speaking Spanish a lot better than they do at present. As it is we already have plenty of private citizens coming here on their own initiative -- citizens of Mexico and Guatemala, but citizens they are -- and I don't know that Americans, by and large, are any less monolingual than we've always been. Unless President Bush agrees with former senator Tom Daschle's famous claim that "you can't professionalize unless you federalize." Now there's a guarantee of effectiveness.

This one puzzled me a bit, too:

Department of State officials stressed the need to have more people master “critical” languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Farsi. Officials, noting that fewer than 2 percent of American students currently study any of the target languages, said that they are critical to national security and cultural understanding.

Rice noted that the “country made a huge intellectual investment in winning the Cold War” and said that in recent years America has not made similar investments, especially surrounding the teaching of critical languages. She added that the countries where the critical languages are spoken “will define the 21st century. Nothing is more important than being able to converse with them in their native tongue.”

So our esteemed Secretary of State believes that speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, and Farsi are going to "define the 21st century," does she? While I have no wish to trivialize those languages or those who speak them, I would take exception to that word "define." Spoken by hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Britain, and India, it is English which will "define" the 21st century, if it can be said that any language will define it.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the effort aimed at high school and college students will fail. As I see it, it's a matter of motivation. You can use French to pick up girls. Spanish, too. And German. Girls in miniskirts or in tight jeans on the streets of Paris or Lyons, of Juarez or Madrid, of Berlin or Munich. And girls who appreciate a guy's linguistic efforts may just, shall we say, respond with by showing that appreciation.

But Arabic and Farsi are different. Try your language skills on some abaya-clad cutie on the streets of Jeddah or Riyadh or Tehran and you run the risk of having your head cut off. At that point, being able to say "deep doo-doo" in the native language will probably not be enough to do you any good.

Smackdown II: Beethoven vs Bigots

Lee Harris writes:

The President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to ban all Western music from his nation's state radio and TV stations. The website of the Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, of which Ahmadinejad is the head, explained that "blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required."

Ahmadinejad isn’t just banning Eminem, Fifty Cent, and Arnold Schönberg’s Moses und Aron, which might be reasonable; nor banning the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Weber, which would be positively commendable. No, Ahmadinejad is banning Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (obviously); Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; the wonderful songs of Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Jerome Kern. Also forbidden are Handel’s endlessly diverting Concerti Grossi, Opus 6, Gabriel Fauré’s chamber music, Eric Clapton’s guitar, and Anton Bruckner’s vast cathedrals of sound.

Equally outlawed are Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, along with The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and the complete works of Lully, Couperin, and Rameau. No more will the music of Verdi, Tupac, and Petula Clark be heard in the land of the Islamic faithful. None of the feet of the true believers will tap to rap or dance to the ballets of Tschaikovsky. No one will sway to the beguiling Cole Porter when he begins the beguine; no one will be hypnotized by Ravel’s Bolero. Out with Puccini, out with Irving Berlin -- who will care about the tear-jerking fate of Madame Butterfly, or the much happier one of the Annie who got her gun? No one in Iran will be allowed to.

Now, it's true that some people are bored by classical music. Some people hate show tunes. And The Rolling Stones may be past their prime -- hell, they may even suck when they perform at this year's Super Bowl -- but banning them? Banning it all? This truly is motivated by willful, flat-earth ignorance. Daniel Pipes gives us an example from an earlier Iranian leader, of whom you may have heard:

Ayatollah Khomeini had similar views, as he explained to an Italian journalist:
Khomeini: Music dulls the mind, because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs. Your music I mean. Usually your music has not exalted the spirit, it puts it to sleep. And it destructs [sic] our youth who become poisoned by it, and then they no longer care about their country.
Oriana Fallaci: Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?
Khomeini: I do not know these names.

Got that? "I do not know these names." Khomeini lived in Paris for what, twenty years, and he doesn't recognize the names Bach, Beethoven, Verdi? Not any specific music, mind you, but not even their names. Pipes goes on to contrast Iran with Japan:

European classical music has shed its foreign quality in Japan, becoming fully indigenous. In this, Japan resembles the United States, another country which has imported nearly all of its classical music. Just as Americans have adapted the music to their own tastes and customs -- playing the 1812 Overture on the 4th of July, for example -- so have the Japanese. Thus does Beethoven's Ninth Symphony serve as the anthem of the Christmas and New Year's season. Not only do the country's leading orchestras play the symphony over and over again during December, but gigantic choruses (numbering up to 10,000 participants) rehearse for months before bellowing out the Ode to Joy in public performances.

Wow. I have to say, I lived in Japan for a year and I don't recall that sort of thing. Maybe it simply wasn't done on the island of Okinawa -- although the very first time I ever heard a compact disc player was in an Okinawan shop, and it was playing a Beethoven symphony (the Fifth).

But that gives me an idea: why not borrow that custom from the Japanese and make it our own? From the day after Thanksgiving, through Christmas and Boxing Day, let's be hearing some Beethoven. The Ninth Symphony, just as the Japanese do. Especially in any areas near Iranian embassies or consulates. Hell, let's extend it to the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which was just celebrated within the last few days.

Hmmm....and on Revolution Day, February 11... why, I think I may have just the song to suggest for President Ahmadinejad...

Whatever. As Lee Harris says, "Beethoven's Ninth can never really be heard for the last time."

Let The Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council do its worst; it can never hope to erase either Beethoven’s sublime melody or the poetry of humanitarianism with which it will forever be associated. As long as men can hum to themselves, it will continue to stir men’s souls and to elevate them above all the pettiness that divides us. It will remain long after Ahmadinejad has become merely a footnote in the history of our dark and troubled times.

Smackdown: Bridget B vs. J No

The bodacious Bridget B of http:Arizona Watch opines on the, er, prudence and effectiveness of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano. Apparently the good governor wishes to maintain a database of people wicked enough to purchase Sudafed within the confines of the Grand Canyon State -- but Bridget believes that quite a canyon indeed exists between the governor's rationales and reality.

So J.No in her infinite wisdom is implementing her very own ‘domestic spying program’ in an effort to apprehend Arizona meth producers – of OUNCE quantities. A tiny sum when compared to the primary source of methamphetamines and drugs in Arizona and around the U.S. – major labs run by well-organized and powerful cartels, and the like, in California, Mexico, and Canada. Logical isn’t it to place a costly burden on Arizona businesses to deter ounce quantities of (illegal) drugs?

Will Rogers once remarked that the income tax had created more liars than golf...so the War on Drugs is creating more Big Government lovers among conservatives and "liberals" than even World War II.

"J No." Gotta love that one.