Monthly Archives: June 2011

This time in defense of economic freedom.

Via Tom Palmer:

“I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.” (Grossman, p. 99) He noted that “In people’s day-to-day struggle to live, in the extreme efforts workers put forth to earn an extra ruble through moonlighting, in the collective farmers’ battle for bread and potatoes as the one and only fruit of their labor, he [Ivan Grigoryevich] could sense more than the desire to live better, to fill one’s children’s stomachs and to clothe them. In the battle for the right to make shoes, to knit sweaters, in the struggle to plant what one wished, was manifested the natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature. He had seen this very same struggle in the people in camp. Freedom, it seemed, was immortal on both sides of the barbed wire.” (Grossman, p. 110)
– Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1986)

A while ago I posted a picture of Dean Martin reading The Drinking Man’s Diet. Today a copy of it arrived in my mail. Spoiler alert: It’s Awesome.

Someone, somewhere, mailed me a copy of the book. Thank you very much for such a thoughtful act.

Photo by Derek Paulson.

“[T]he whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

With that in mind, consider the following, from The Department of It Would Be Criminal and Tortious But For the Government Seal We Bear: Elderly woman asked to remove adult diaper during TSA search.

Take it away, TSA spokesperson:

“During any part of the process, if there is an alarm, then we have to resolve that alarm,” she said.

We have to. The process is sacrosanct. The alarm calls us and we respond, according to the process. Capiche?

Weber said she did not know whether her mother had triggered an alarm during the 45 minutes they were detained.

Hope Weber and Grannie got to the airport early!

She said her mother was first pulled aside into a glass-partitioned area and patted down. Then she was taken to another room to protect her privacy during a more extensive search, Weber said.

Because additional, “extensive” searches of diaper wearing American grandmothers, without even reasonable suspicion of criminality (much less the probable cause the Fourth Amendment requires) is process. See above for why process trumps the Bill of Rights. (Spoiler alert: It’s process!!)

Weber said she sat outside the room during the search.

She said security personnel then came out and told her they would need for her mother to remove her Depends diaper because it was soiled and was impeding their search.

And not even a soiled diaper will impede the search! The search must go on! Unimpeded, even by diapers!

Weber wheeled her mother into a bathroom, removed her diaper and returned. Her mother did not have another clean diaper with her, Weber said.

It must be terribly unpleasant to put a soiled diaper back on.

Weber said she wished there were less invasive search methods for an elderly person who is unable to walk through security gates.

TSA’s response? If wishes were horses beggars would ride. And If ifs were fifths we’d always be drunk.

“I don’t understand why they have to put them through that kind of procedure,” she said.

See above. It’s process. Process concocted and implemented by the Obama administration, no less. Process designed to ensure (wait for it)….

Koshetz said the procedures are the same for everyone to ensure national security.

National Security. NATIONAL SECURITY. !!!!

“TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability,” she said.

Under that logic they should screen every anus, vagina, stomach, and orifice that could possibly conceal even the smallest amount of weaponry or explosive material that could possibly endanger anyone.

Weber filed a complaint through Northwest Florida Regional’s website. She said she received a response from a Homeland Security representative at the airport on Tuesday and spoke to that person on the phone Wednesday.

The representative told her that personnel had followed procedures during the search, Weber said.

Therefore no wrongdoing could have occurred. Because the procedure is sacred and perfect. If you disagree you are Tea Party to me, so just shut up.

“Then I [Granny's daughter] thought, if you’re just following rules and regulations, then the rules and regulations need to be changed.”

In other words, hey TSA: take your Nuremberg defense and shove it.

Weber said she plans to file additional complaints next week.

“I’m not one to make waves, but dadgummit, this is wrong. People need to know. Next time it could be you.”

You’re too late. *Sniff* They already got me.

As my evolution towards anarcho capitalism continues I felt compelled to update my blogroll by subtracting the sites I no longer regularly visit and / or find compelling.

by Alex Fidel

Click here to download the new episode of my radio show-turned-podcast, Freethought. Guests are John Stahl, candidate for U.S. Congress (R, CA-50) and DuelingBarstools.com publician-in-chief Ryan Nohea Garcia. Plenty of good music, too. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

In AmConMag:

One wonders if 50 years from now, when researchers scan through old issues of The Washington Post and analyse its coverage of the current upheaval in the Arab Middle East they are going to chuckle as they try to figure out what those American pundits were smoking when they kept insisting that this year’s military coup in Egypt, the political unrest in Syria and Iraq, and the civil war in Yemen (and in Libya and Bahrain) were all a manifestation of an inexorable drive toward freedom and liberal democracy, including freedom of religion and women’s rights.

It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.

– Cato the Elder

Via

Not unlike America’s covert wars of the past, according to the New York Times:

“The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets, as officials worried that news of unilateral American operations could undermine Mr. Saleh’s tenuous grip on power.”

Nothing says Nobel Peace Prize like a covert war that everyone knows about.

Here:

From that ancient debris field, recall the almost forgotten run-up to the American invasion, the now-ridiculous threats about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell lying away his own and America’s prestige at the U.N., those “Mission-Accomplished” days when the Marines tore down Saddam’s statue and conquered Baghdad, the darker times as civil society imploded and Iraq devolved into civil war, the endless rounds of purple fingers for stage-managed elections that meant little, the Surge and the ugly stalemate that followed, fading to gray as President George W. Bush negotiated a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011 and the seeming end of his dreams of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

Now, with less than seven months left until that withdrawal moment, Washington debates whether to honor the agreement, or — if only we can get the Iraqi government to ask us to stay — to leave a decent-sized contingent of soldiers occupying some of the massive bases the Pentagon built hoping for permanent occupancy.

To the extent that any attention is paid to Iraq here in Snooki’s America, the debate over whether eight years of war entitles the U.S. military to some kind of Iraqi squatter’s rights is the story that will undoubtedly get most of the press in the coming months.

Bias and Truth: How Not to Raise the Discourse. Excerpts below, but read the whole thing.

Let’s stop and ask what kind of statement this is. Though it appears in a publication for academics, this is not a scholarly argument. Mr Alterman does not attempt to quantify in any systematic (or even unsystematic) way the combined effect of Scaife, Murdoch, Coors, and Koch money on public opinion. He attempts no fair accounting of the sources of left-wing money, and presents no evidence whatsoever for the implicit claim that right-wing money has had a greater effect on public opinion than left-wing money. Mr Alterman does not appear to rise even to the standards of ideological think-tankery. There are no footnotes to lend his argument a patina of pseudo-scholarly authority. This is speculative ideological just-so-storytelling. It could be true. I don’t claim that it isn’t, only that I doubt it. It could be true that once one fairly takes into account the combined effect of left-wing money in academia, media, and so forth, the left edges out the right in overall influence on public opinion. Maybe it’s a push. I don’t know, and neither does Mr Alterman. It’s the sort of thing you need actual evidence to speak intelligently about. Isn’t Mr Alterman the very thing he bemoans?…

Anyway, forget all that. I take the thrust of Mr Alterman’s argument to be this: the MSM is biased against the left and not to be trusted. So then who is to be trusted? Eric Alterman, I guess. He’s in luck. My sense of the political science literature is that the effect of this sort of thing is to decrease trust in the MSM and push media consumers more and more toward explicitly ideological sources of information, such as the Nation, where the already progressive reader will find Mr Alterman arguing that “Republicans are in thrall to liars and lunatics serving as a smoke screen for a conservative class war against the poor and middle class …” and cheer. No doubt this sort of thing offsets some of the influence of competing right-wing propaganda mongers, but I do doubt that this sort of thing otherwise improves the American public’s relationship to truth.

by Alex Fidel

I was planning on moving Freethought to Palomar College’s radio station, but that cannot be done until Spring 2012. So in the meantime, it will be strictly podcast only, of which you can download here. New episodes haven’t started yet, so be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates.

The first episode should have congressional candidate John Stahl (R, CA-50) as our guest, as well as El Dueling Barstool himself, Ryan Nohea Garcia. And instead of having a call-in line, you can submit questions related to music, politics, or anything you can think of or song requests to Twitter or Facebook.

For those unfamiliar with my show, listen to all our previous episodes from our Sonoma State University days here. It is half music, half talk. We talk from a libertarian perspective with a heavy dose of logic, reason, and humor, and we play all sorts of music, ranging from death metal to prog rock to Frank Zappa and everything in between so as to further our listeners’ musical horizons. Or more simply put- independent music, independent talk, independent minds.

We’ve also had on the show people like 2012 presidential candidate Gary Johnson; Howard Stern Show personality Richard Christy; Turtles/Frank Zappa/Flo & Eddie singer Howard Kaylan; Thomas E. Woods; Peter Schiff; Jimmy “Rent Is Too Damn High” McMillan; Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey author Ken Schoolland; and of course, Ryan Nohea Garcia.

At Reason:

People recovering from drug and alcohol addiction are fond of defining insanity as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. By that standard, American policy toward mind-altering substances looks awfully familiar. The nation tried Prohibition once, with alcohol. Result: abject failure, rampant organized crime, and little lasting effect on consumption or addiction. In fact, Prohibition actually encouraged the use of harder spirits, since bootleggers could smuggle more alcohol in a car full of liquor than a car full of beer.

Alcohol prohibition lasted only a few years. The war on drugs has lasted for decades, and for the most part has consisted of only one solution, over and over: criminalization and imprisonment. Nearly 2 million people are arrested each year for drug offenses and a half-million are currently serving time on drug charges. Yet when stiffer sentences fail to produce the desired results, drug prohibitionists insist the penalties just aren’t harsh enough. They resemble the carpenter who complained that he had cut a board three times and it was still too short.

Trying to solve the problem of addiction through incarceration is like trying to get rid of a cockroach infestation by turning on the lights. The temporary solution doesn’t address the underlying problem, which requires treatment. Sometimes locking a user up doesn’t even interrupt his using. Do a Google search on smuggling drugs into prison for an education on that front. If prohibition can’t keep narcotics out of prison cells, it won’t keep them out of playgrounds and office parks.

Below is a nail being hit squarely on its head:

Conservatives, who generally abhor government paternalism and consider freedom an unalloyed good, do not look nimble when they clumsily pirouette from denouncing ObamaCare and the food police to embracing life sentences for pot smokers.

Read the whole thing.

By Eddie Bravo, a guy I’d like to party with:

The one myth that is my mission to dispel is that if you want to get good at grappling for MMA, train with the gi. Hopefully one day people will see that it’s two different sports. It’s judo and it’s Greco.Even just no-gi jiu-jitsu on its own is WAAAYY different than MMA jiu-jitsu. The whole gi vs. no-gi debate should be done with. Forget about what I’ve always said about the gi and no-gi and all that stuff. Listen to the number one Gracie on the planet right now. The number one Gracie on the planet is Roger and he said it himself, that 80 percent of BJJ does not work in MMA. He said it. He said that. Think about what that means. If 80 percent of your system does not work in MMA, how does that system prepare you for MMA? There’s almost as much difference between no-gi jiu-jitsu and MMA jiu-jitsu as there is no-gi and gi jiu-jitsu.

In competitions like Abu Dhabi [Combat Club Submission Wrestling World Championships], all the top guys are going for leg locks and getting really, really good at doing leglocks. It used to be that if you did leglocks you were a traitor [to traditional BJJ]. That isn’t a theory. There’s no denying that. That’s the way it used to be. You were the enemy if you went for a leglock in a tournament , but now you see it all the time in Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi’s been around for almost 15 years and the no-gi grappling sport has evolved since that time into a leg lock game. Now all the top Brazilians aren’t only using leglocks in their games, that’s the main focus of their game and they’ve taken the whole leglock game to a whole other level. It’s beautiful. Guys like Rafael Mendes, [Rubens] Cobrinha [Charles], Caio Terra…What they’re bringing a high-tech Brazilian guard to the table with leglocks mixed in and they’ve taken it way beyond catch wrestling. That’s what it’s turned into. It’s a beautiful thing. But in MMA, we all know that leglocks are very, very dangerous. Leglocks are  a strong part of the no-gi circuit, but they don’t prepare you for MMA. The best leglock guy out there in MMA, no doubt, is Masakazu Imanari. He was crushing everybody with leglocks, but he hasn’t really gotten anybody with one in a long time and he hasn’t really gotten a major belt yet. It makes you question whether or not the leglock game is the way to go. There are so many good leglock guys out there, yet there aren’t any of them winning belts in MMA. Look at Dean Lister. He was known on the West Coast as one of the best leglock guys around. He never won an MMA fight with a leglock. It’s too risky. Gokor Chivichyan’s system is the same. You ask the top guys who trained under him like Manny Gamburyan and Karo Parisyan why they aren’t going for leglocks and they’ll tell you it’s too dangerous in MMA. Yeah leglocks happen in MMA and yeah they work, but when you sit back to apply a leglock, you’re leaving your opponent’s arms free and one punch can change the outcome of a fight. Our focus at 10th Planet is jiu-jitsu that works and doesn’t change even if you add a striking component to the competition.  That’s the clinching game and that’s the style that we focus on. It’s not the only style that should be played. We work in all the open styles as well like the Spiral Guard, De la Riva Guard – but the main focus is, and will always be jiu-jitsu so that you don’t get your head smashed in.

“To serve and protect / don’t look like that to me / but it’s the sweat from my back / it pays your salary / …. Why do we have to pay to be free?”

Here:

Isn’t it time that Governors and state Attorneys General stopped wasting our precious time and money playing these silly legal games, grow a spine, and actually fulfill the oath they took to support and defend the Constitution, including the Tenth Amendment? If the people of a state decide in their sovereign capacity that marijuana should be legal, for any reason, or no particular reason at all, then their representatives in state government need to tell the folks in Washington, D.C., in no uncertain terms, that they have no say in the matter.

This is the system of vertical checks and balances that the Constitution, as it was understood by those who ratified it, established. So when it comes to decisions that the Constitution clearly leaves to the states or to the people, the time is long overdue for those who claim to be our public servants on the state level, to quit begging Washington, D.C. for permission and to start doing a little more checking and balancing already!