V

This is a great post from Lew's Blog this morning (if you've seen V for Vendetta)

Life imitating art?

Posted by Ryan W. McMaken at 11:37 PM

Who picked the color scheme for the Blair rally?

It seems familiar...

I guess the set designer didn't see V for Vendetta...or did he?

I'm so glad they magnified his giant ranting head to 100 times its normal size.

Lew's Latest

"Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat: U.S. Intelligence Assessment Is Said to Find a Rise in Global Islamic Radicalism." It's nice to see the MSM catching up with what Libertarians have been saying for the last 5 years.

...the stated policy of the Bush administration, just before bombing Iraq's cities and overthrowing its Sunni government, was to bring freedom, democracy, and pluralistic happiness to the country.

Five years later, the puppet government in Baghdad is still in a bunker, tanks patrol streets, there are curfews and speech controls, major parts of the country have effectively seceded, the water is dirty and disease ridden, electricity is still off, migration out increases exponentially, tribal war is routine, American soldiers' heads are blown off if they so much as poke them out of the foxhole, and religious and ethnic hatreds grow.

Students of government can hardly be surprised that a government program ends up creating the very opposite of what it purported to accomplish. Welfare increases poverty, the minimum wage boosts unemployment, prohibition promotes the banned behavior, and, just as we would expect once we understand the logic, the war on terror has created and encouraged the rise of more terrorism and the ideology that backs it.

F the Fed

The Liberty Dollar is finally blowing up. So much so that the US Mint has issued a warning. This is great news, they are scared to death of us and our real money (silver & gold). See NORFEDs response. USA Today covered the Liberty Dollar story as well.

Computer Running Slowly?

Read this article and take the following free steps:

download AVG anti-virus

download Spybot anti-spyware

download the Firefox browser, I never ever use Internet Explorer (it's for beginners)

download Zone Alarm firewall

delete any unnecessary programs

Now you're all set, happy surfin' dude.

My 9/11 Post

Pondering Surrender by Anthony Gregory

Five years ago, Americans, all horrified by the terrorist attacks, tended to have two different ideas about the underlying cause and the appropriate response.

One was to blame the attacks on terrorists who simply hated our freedom. "Freedom itself was attacked," said President George W. Bush. "And freedom will be defended." The president soon led the country into war and pushed through a series of new measures to consolidate the national government’s police powers at home. The answer to 9/11 was more militarism and more government. As time went on, the pro-war crowd became more adamant that it was American liberty that drew the terrorists’ ire, and that, indeed, the U.S. had not been active enough in its foreign policy before 9/11. Bush said upon his re-inauguration that the attacks came after "years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical."

The other reaction on 9/11, the minority one, was to regard the attacks primarily as a response to years of belligerent U.S. foreign policy. The main target was not America’s freedom, its commerce, its tolerant culture, but rather its arrogant imperialism in the Middle East, its coziness with secular dictators, its cavalier bombing campaigns, its troops stationed in the midst of other countries, its sanctions through the UN that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Only those who had some idea of what the U.S. government had been doing abroad – sadly, a small percentage of Americans – tended to think that this was the root problem that should or even could be addressed by the U.S. government...

Compulsory Unemployment...

The minimum wage that is. It doesn't create jobs, it only outlaws them. Lew explains:

The truth is that most (politicians) are economic ignoramuses, proposing bad law that not only fails to achieve its aims, but actually ends up spreading human suffering.

A case in point is the minimum wage. Once you strip away the rhetoric, a minimum wage law simply outlaws work below some state-mandated wage floor. Furthermore, a business that hires a person who is less productive than the minimum can be fined and shut down, and a worker who dares price his services too low will be forced to stop.

That is the long and short of it. Now, ask yourself: how can poor working people be made better off by laws that restrict their options? It is an absurdity. Poor people and young workers and the old and the disabled have few economic tools at their disposal. One of them is the freedom to lower the price of their labor. The minimum wage makes that impossible. If he wants to compete with more experienced or capable workers by lowering his price, he will be clubbed over the head.

To support the minimum wage is to wear your economic ignorance on your sleeve. Why should anyone who does be trusted with any power at all?

Alternative Procedures & Extrajudicial Killings

So what they must do now is simply break down all notions of law and morality, destroy the notions of justice and honor. They must make up down and turn black to white: Torture is not bad, it's not a crime; torture is good, it keeps us safe. You want to be safe, don't you? You want your children to be safe, don't you? Then we must use these "alternative procedures." And to keep us safe, the president must be able to do anything he pleases, without hindrance from the "pre-9/11 mindset" of the Constitution: he can spy on us, he can imprison us without charges, he can hold us indefinitely, he can even murder us in "extrajudicial killings" without arrest, trial, jury – or warning. What's wrong with that, if it keeps your family safe? Do you want your children to die? Because that's what will happen if you oppose the president!

Happiness

Who is happier: Liberals or Conservatives asks Brad Edmonds from LRC.

People who are more educated, who make more money, who live in the South, who feel that life gives them what they put into it rather than what they're "entitled" to, are happier because they believe it's their responsibility to earn happiness; when we have such a belief, we act on it. Those with less education, those with less income, members of government-favored unions and their sympathizers who live in the frozen North, those who feel the government should guarantee their income and their freedom from unpleasant conversations (and people and ideas) feel as though the things that provide happiness are out of their control.

Dear Rummy

by Eric Margolis

I know the President’s new buzzword is "Islamofascist." It focus-groups well in the Bible Belt and Miami. But I’m deeply disappointed you would stoop to such cheap, insulting, Dr. Goebbels-style propaganda.

As an educated man, you know fascism is a phenomena of western industrial states in which racists and militarists join hands with conservative parties and the military industrial complex to form the fascist, corporate state.

Fascism is unknown in the Muslim World. Mussolini and Hitler were Christians. The real closet fascists are in North America. "Islamofacist" is as meaningless as that favored term of anti-Semites, "Judeo-Nazi."

Brainless slogans like "stay the course," and "we won’t cut and run" bring applause at Legion conventions, but they are a recipe for military defeat. It was precisely Hitler’s monomaniacal refusal to allow his 6^th Army to retreat from encirclement at Stalingrad that brought Germany its greatest defeat.

Your $300 billion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going nowhere. As a Vietnam-era vet who enlisted in wartime to serve his country, I can tell you that pulling out of Vietnam, however painful and humiliating at the time, was also absolutely the right decision.

By refusing to withdraw from the lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what you are doing is sacrificing soldier’s lives, and $6.5–7 billion a month, to save the skins of your political masters who lack the courage and patriotism to admit the failure of their foolish imperial dreams.

Forget WWII and face facts. The US is not fighting Hitler, George Bush is no Winston Churchill, and Muslims are not Nazis in turbans.