Between ObamaCare, the IRS, the VA, and now the EPA, it’s been a bad year for cheerleaders of big government. Which means a good year for liberty. We’ll see what it means in November.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Note Glenn’s quoting of Pournelle’s law of bureaucracies:
…the strongest priority of most bureaucracies is the welfare of the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats it employs, not whatever the bureaucracy is actually supposed to be doing.
I often say that there are a lot of good people at NASA, and there are. But they are trapped in a similar system.
This all misses the real point, which is that exploration is a means to an end. As long as we imagine it’s just a search for knowledge, we can’t possibly justify the insane amount of money (for so little activity) that NASA spends on human spaceflight.
That these events represent an unconnected string of unfortunate events — all of which just so happen to benefit the Left and its IRS allies while hurting conservatives and IRS critics — beggars belief. Add to that mix the willful dishonesty, the staged press rollout, complete with planted questions, intended to preempt questions about the internal investigation and its results, the naked lie that the wrongdoing was limited to a few nobodies in Cincinnati — the only way to believe that story is to desire very deeply to believe it.
The alternative and much more likely — undeniable, to my mind — explanation is that the Internal Revenue Service is engaged in an active and ongoing criminal conspiracy to misappropriate federal resources for political purposes, to use its investigatory powers, including the threat of criminal prosecution, for purposes of political repression, and to actively mislead Congress and the public about the issue; that the Justice Department is turning a blind eye to these very serious crimes for political purposes and is therefore complicit in the cover-up; that these crimes were encouraged if not outright suborned by Senate Democrats; and that the White House is at the very least passively complicit, refusing to lift so much as a presidential pinkie as the IRS runs amok.
The Nook version is now available. The last frontier is iTunes, which is a PITA for me because Apple insists on my having an Apple device to set up an account and upload it to their store. I think I can set up an iTunes account if I fire up my Windows laptop, but not sure how to do the book upload.
The article concerns the anti-Semitism of Heidegger, and how the publication of recent texts the philosopher intended to be the capstone of his output reveals that he didn’t have the easy, lazy cultural anti-Semitism of the era, but really, really thought hard on how the Jews were putting the stick to the decent noble Volk. Not just any kind of Jews, though: worldwide jewry! It’s the richest kind.
..Anything that starts out with “Russia and America are the same” is the product of a mind so high in the clouds it cannot tell the different between red and black ants. But while Russia did indeed have “unrestricted organization of the average man,” an inevitable consequence of the state’s politicization of the entire society, you could say Germany under Hitler had a smattering as well. Or a gerschmatturung, to use Heidegger’s word. Just kidding; he doesn’t. But the article is full of German words intended to set off a Concept, as though expressing a concept in a train-wreck of consonants makes it important. I suppose the point is to be accurate, use the terms the author uses so there can be no misunderstanding. But for my part that would require anything close to comprehension, and I cannot grasp a lot of what Heidegger is talking about, perhaps because there seems to be no point in understanding what he’s saying.
Philosophy isn’t useless, but some philosophers are. Or worse than.
This proposal doesn’t go far enough. We need to do it to the entire federal government. Roosevelt recognized the dangers of public-employee unions. They’ve been destroying the country for decades, though.