When you have big government, you have big bilking.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Highly Creative Living
Eighteen principles, from Justine Musk (yes, Elon’s ex).
[Update, late evening]
I would belatedly point out that Justine Musk is a more-than-admirable person in her own right, independently of her prior relationships, and my apologies for any implication otherwise.
Paul F. Dietz
Has anyone heard from him recently (i.e., in the last couple years)?
[Evening update]
OK, look, folks. I’m not stupid. I’ve done searches. I’m asking people who actually know him, and might know what’s up.
Nixon’s Imperial Presidency
Has Barack Obama achieved it?
He’s certainly gotten away with a lot of things that no Republican ever would, including all the lies and broken promises.
The Books
Where are they? We’ve got (perhaps literally) a ton of them, which are a pain to move, but we haven’t been acquiring many lately.
Competition
Is it always good?
We Need A Waiting Period
…not for guns. For laws.
Just Tell Men That Rape Is Wrong
A dispatch from a sane planet.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not directly related, but it’s pretty nutty as well:
The question, in a nutshell, is simple: Does it violate the Equal Protection Clause to prohibit race-conscious admissions? Ironic, isn’t it?
The frightening thing is that there are no doubt some “justices” who will think it does.
The Eighteenth Brumaire
…Obama is not a communist, even in the twentieth century meaning of the term. Communism is about state ownership of the means of production. The Obama administration does not seek ownership. In fact, where it acquired ownership through the bailout, the administration now works to divest itself. What Obama is building is a large government bureaucracy whose expanding limbs find their way into every facet of human existence, a government that does not own the means of production but controls them by increased and oppressive regulation and taxation. Obama’s political inspiration is more likely to be Mussolini or Peron, even Hugo Chavez, than Lenin or Stalin.
As I’ve long noted, the difference is pretty much transparent to the serfuser.
Mike Bloomberg
…yer honor, your job is to manage the city government, to make sure the snow gets shoveled and the trash gets picked up, not to lecture the rest of us and use the power of City Hall to impose your particular life-style choices on everybody else. But that’s what happens when conservatives let the Left seize the narrative and promote governmental mission creep. Once government “addresses” a problem by throwing taxpayer money at it, it’s only a short hop to government claiming — as Bloomberg does in the clip — that because government spends money on a “problem,” it now has the right to dictate personal behavior. Sheer genius, really.
By now, the notion that government from the feds on down has the “right” to interfere in every aspect of American life is well-established and nearly unquestioned. Two generations of red-diaper babies have grown up with visions of the Frankfurt School dancing in their heads; they’ve adapted Marxist tactics to the capitalist system in the furtherance of their world-view — George Soros, take a bow — but their goal remains the same: power, disguised as “compassion.”
The collapse of free societies doesn’t start with the Vandals’ assault on the gates of Rome. It starts with “reasonable” restrictions on freedom, “carve-outs” and “exemptions” to constitutional principles, “temporary” taxes and suspensions of civil liberties — all designed to inure the public to the destruction of bedrock guarantees ( i.e. “Congress shall make no law…”) in the name of what’s good for them.
If Jonah does another edition of his book
[Update late morning]
Opposition to Mike Bloomberg on guns has nothing to do with defending our civil rights. No, it’s because we’re anti-Semitic:
According to MSNBC contributors Mike Barnicle and Al Sharpton, opposition to New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control push is partly the result of anti-Semitism. “Let’s get down to it, Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, there’s a level of anti-Semitism in this thing directed towards Bloomberg,” Barnicle argued on Morning Joe, “It’s out there.” “No doubt about that,” Sharpton responded.
“If he was not a big-city Jewish man and was from another ethnic group, in some parts, I think it would be different,” Sharpton continued.
Note that that this is the same Al Sharpton who incited riots against Orthodox Jews with anti-Semitic code words. I’ll never understand why any television outlet would give this race-baiting ass-clown a venue for his idiotic opinions.