The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Lesson in Efficient Dictatorship

Posted on | January 3, 2014 | 48 Comments

Try to imagine that frightening alternative universe in which a guerrilla army overthrows the federal government, or a cabal of dissident generals stages a military coup and, as a result, I became the charismatic Supreme Dictator of America. The first order of business for the McCainist junta, of course, would be the liquidation of all opposition, by the most brutal and terrifying methods.

From the standpoint of regime permanence, it would be insufficient merely to jail or exile opponents. No, the point of radical terror is to inspire fear, so that not only would no one dare oppose the regime, but also so that people will denounce any of their friends and neighbors whose loyalty to the New Totalitarian Order is believed to be less than 100 percent. Therefore, the regime must not only torture and execute leaders of the prohibited opposition, but must all unleash the intimidating force of violence against the families, friends and suspected sympathizers of the opposition leaders. Leniency can only be obtained by active and vocal support of the regime’s repressive measures.

Under totalitarian rule, no one can ever presume himself to be safe from the power of the regime, because the Supreme Leader’s power is so great that it can only be protected by ruthless men who, as they rise higher in the leadership cadre, inevitably begin to think of the possibility of seizing the top position for themselves. Occasionally, the Supreme Leader must make examples of such rivals:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful uncle was stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China’s ruling Communist Party.
Jang Song Thaek, who had been considered Kim’s second-in-command, was executed last month after being found guilty of “attempting to overthrow the state,” North Korea’s state-run news agency reported. . . .
Hong Kong-based pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported that Jang and his five closest aides were set upon by 120 hunting hounds which had been starved for five days.
Kim and his brother Kim Jong Chol supervised the one-hour ordeal along with 300 other officials, according to Wen Wei Po. The newspaper added that Jang and other aides were “completely eaten up.”

This is exactly how disloyalty would be punished after the totalitarian McCainist junta seizes absolute power. Once we had fed the faculty of Harvard University to a pack of ravenous dogs, perhaps the staff of the New York Times would get the message.

My enemies should be thankful that I favor limited government.

 

Category: North Korea

Lenient Drug Policy Yields Bad Result

Posted on | January 3, 2014 | 20 Comments

David Brooks confessed in a New York Times column that he was a high-school stoner, by way of arguing against the legalization of marijuana. One of his erstwhile dope buddies replied with a column recalling how they got away with it in Radnor, Illinois:

[H]ere all along I thought he quit because of that time we got pulled over by the Radnor cops in senior year right after we’d clambaked his Mom’s Vista Cruiser, and first thing the cop does after the smoke clears is look him right in his red, red eyes, and said, “I don’t suppose it would go over so good if I went over to 632 Haverford Road and told Mr and Mrs Brooks their boy was out here with his clique smoking pot.” I was so impressed with the way Dave pulled himself together then. He didn’t beg for mercy or fight with the cop. Somehow he knew exactly how to go all bar mitzvah boy, how to talk to authority, how to flatter and impress and toady, even stoned to the gills, like his inner Eddie Haskell was deeper down than the pot could get. And it worked. The cop let us go, told us we were lucky he knew Dave and that we were white kids from Radnor, and later on, at the pizza house taking care of our munchies, chattering and cackling over our good luck and trying to figure out how Dave and the cop knew each other, busting on him for being a narc, Dave was quiet and pale and barely touched his hoagie, and I think that was the last time he smoked pot, at least with us.

Brooks’s ex-buddy Gary Greenberg is pro-legalization, whereas I think his anecdote proves quite the opposite point: We need a drastic crackdown on teenage dopeheads because if we don’t put these freaks in prison, they might grow up to be David Brooks.

 


Category: David Brooks Fisking Day

In The Mailbox: 01.03.14

Posted on | January 3, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Leather Penguin: WABC Throws Down The Gauntlet In NYC Talk Radio War
Proof Positive: You Pays Your Money And You Takes Your Chances!
Doug Powers: Latest Scapegoats For Obamacare Disaster – “Southern White Radicals”
Twitchy: Actress Rose McGowan Witnesses “Knockout Game” Attack
Virginia Postrel: Two Cheers For First World Problems
Jeffrey Lord: Phil Robertson, American Hero


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Oregon Mother – I Can’t Afford #Obamacare For Myself, 1-Year-Old Son
American Thinker: Obama’s Other Big Lie
Blackfive: Not From The Duffle Blog – Admiral McRaven Wants An Iron Man Suit
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Happy Belated New Year Linkfest
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Don’t Worry, CAIR Is On The Case!
Jammie Wearing Fools: Michael Moore – Let’s Face It, Obamacare Is Awful
JustOneMinute: Obamacare’s War On Marriage, Oregon Edition
Pat Dollard: Marines Delay Female Fitness Test After Half Fail Pullup Test
Shot In The Dark: The Last Five Years Have Felt A Bit Like A Biblical Plague…
The Jawa Report: New Year, Same Ol’ Sh*t
The Lonely Conservative: Liberals Wish Death On Barbara Bush
This Ain’t Hell: USA Today – Cut Military Pensions
Megan McArdle: Another Problem Obamacare Won’t Solve – Health Costs


Live At Five will resume Monday.
In the meantime, deadline to submit links for the FMJRA is noon tomorrow, and the deadline for Rule 5 Sunday is midnight tomorrow.
DO IT.


Category: Linkagery

Florida: The Crazy State

Posted on | January 3, 2014 | 14 Comments

News from our national lunatic asylum:

A man who shot a trucker to death in 1992 but was judged to be criminally insane seemed nervous Saturday when stopped for speeding east of Gainesville, a deputy reported.
David Harris Dunaway, 58, was wanted by federal authorities, the deputy learned. A grand jury in Tampa had indicted him on a gun charge Dec. 18, alleging that he had a pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition, illegal for someone with Dunaway’s medical history.
But in a search of his green Honda van, the deputy found more — 36 guns, 4,629 rounds.

How many criminally insane people are running around loose in Florida? Well, Obama got 4,235,270 votes there in 2012.

 

Category: Crime, Florida

Matt Yglesias: Solving Non-Problems

Posted on | January 3, 2014 | 88 Comments

Slate.com has become a journalistic ghetto, an “Amateur Online Webzine Specializing in Hit-Trolling and Outrage-Fishing,” as Ace calls it, and their “business and economics correspondent” (?) Matt Yglesias gets in the spirit with a 415-word item under this headline:

Why Taxing the Rich Is Great

Yglesias quotes one sentence from a New York Times article:

Matt Hlavin, an entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a $165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle for his wife.

Yglesias then proceeds to argue — I’m sure you’re surprised — that it is a bad thing for Matt Hlavin to have three Mercedes.

That’s it. That’s all he’s got.

And when I say that Yglesias “argues” that it’s a bad thing for Hlavin to have three Mercedes, of course, I mean Yglesias just assumes this, and also assumes Slate.com’s readers share his contempt for Hlavin’s wealth and thus are eager to applaud Yglesias’s plan to expropriate and re-distribute Hlavin’s wealth:

[I]f you managed to give it to the truly needy in the United States, you’d create a huge surge in well-being. And of course if you were able to use it to reduce severe third-world poverty, the gains would be incredible. . . .
The kind of conspicuous consumption that drives people to buy a $165,000 S63 AMG is basically zero sum, whereas the kind of consumption that a family in the bottom half of the income distribution would finance with more money is not.

The assumptions embedded in Yglesias’s “argument” (which is not actually an argument at all) are enormous. He assumes, for example, that Hlavin and other wealthy people are fixed targets, whose economic behavior will not be modified by higher taxes. They’re supposed to keep earning at the same rate, no matter how steeply you increase the progressive taxes on their income. And, at a second degree of causation, Yglesias evidently never considers whether changes in the economic activity of the “rich” (however you define this) produced by higher taxation might also result in greater hardship for the poor.

The best anti-poverty program in the world is a job, after all, and if higher taxation of the rich results in less capital investment in business, there will be fewer jobs created. You can’t make capitalism work without capital, and Yglesias’s judgment that someone with three Mercedes has too much capital — too much wealth –requires a belief that excess wealth is an economic problem.

Why? Yglesias never adequately explains this. He simply assumes that Hlavin’s wealth is a problem and then proceeds to “solve” it, without any real consideration of obstacles to implementing his redistributionist policy, or the potential harms of such a policy:

 I’d say the taxation should focus on Hlavin’s consumption spending more than his income per se, and should be designed to especially hit activities with substantial environmental impacts. But the point is that taking the money Matt Hlavin is spending at the Mercedes dealership and giving it to other people is a huge winner.

Alternative proposal: If there were a tax on bullshit, Matt Yglesias could pay off the national debt by the end of the year.

 

Category: Economics

Gas Leak Suspected Cause of Minneapolis ‘Little Mogadishu’ Explosion, Fire

Posted on | January 2, 2014 | 54 Comments

Lee Stranahan pointed out that the Minneapolis neighborhood where there was an explosion and fire Wednesday is known as “Little Mogadishu” because of its largely Somali population. The building where the blast happened is next door to a mosque. Concern about a possible terror connection seems logical, but officials tell the Minneapolis Star-Tribune they believe the explosion was an accident:

Investigators believe that the fire that tore through a three-story apartment building in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood on New Year’s Day was caused by a natural gas leak, according to sources familiar with the probe.
While no final determination has been made, a source close to the law enforcement investigation said that it is believed that the initial explosion occurred at the ground level of the building.
Homeland Security personnel were on the scene in the aftermath of the fire that sent 14 people to hospitals, six in critical condition.
They were there to determine if there was anything suspicious about the explosion. But investigators believe that the description of a fireball and early evidence at the scene match what typically happens in a gas explosion, investigators believe, the source said.

(The involvement of DHS investigators shows how obvious it was to suspect this might have been a terror-related incident.)

In addition to trying to determine the cause, authorities searched the late-1800s building for the handful of residents still unaccounted for a day later. . . .
At least 14 people were injured, six critically in the explosion and fire about 8:15 a.m. Wednesday that destroyed an immigrant-owned grocery store and the 10 apartments above it in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. . . .
Family members and friends reported that three or four others known to have lived in the apartments have not been located and were feared dead. . . .
The building housed the Otanga grocery store. The apartments above it were apparently all occupied by single men, most of them East African immigrants, a resident said.

So far, then, this seems to be merely an accident.

 


Category: Minnesota

New Ads Target Senators: ‘It’s Time to Be Honest: ObamaCare Doesn’t Work’

Posted on | January 2, 2014 | 23 Comments

Three vulnerable incumbent Democrat senators are the targets of a new advertising campaign by Americans for Prosperity (AFP) that takes aim at the unpopular ObamaCare program. “It’s the ‘Lie of the Year,’ and Senator Shaheen kept telling it,” says the AFP ad targeting New Hampshire Sen. Jane Shaheen. “The truth is, thousands have already had their insurance canceled. Families are paying more for expensive health plans and facing hour-long drives just to see a doctor. . . . Tell Senator Shaheen: It’s time to be honest. ObamaCare doesn’t work.”

Similar ads are airing against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) and Sen. Kay Hagen (D-North Carolina) in a three-week campaign.

“President Obama repeatedly promised Americans that they could keep their current health care plans and doctors if they chose, but millions have found out the hard way that this was the Lie of the Year,” said AFP president Tim Phillips. “We’re putting pressure on senators who repeated that lie and doubled down on ObamaCare even as it became obvious that the law was hurting millions of Americans. The story of ObamaCare is one of less choice, rising premiums, and broken promises. AFP is committed to a long-term effort to stop this law.”

You can learn more at AmericansForProsperity.org or follow them on Twitter at @AFPhq.

 

Category: Health Care

In The Mailbox, 01.02.14

Posted on | January 2, 2014 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Syria – We Never Had Control
Doug Powers: Heh – Obama’s Pollster Suggests Reporters Avoid Citing Polling Data In 2014
Twitchy: Attention, Parents – It’s No Longer Safe To Let The Kids Stay Up To Watch The Ball Drop
Ann Coulter: The Anus Monologues


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Obama’s Philosophy Seeks To Destroy Life, Liberty, Property, And The Pursuit Of Happiness
American Thinker: The Roberts Trap Is Sprung
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Brain Escapes Open Mind
Don Surber: 2013 – The Year Of People Living Stupidly
Jammie Wearing Fools: Survey Shows Of NY Businesses Shows That Not A Single One Now Has Lower Obamacare Costs
JustOneMinute: When Your Name Is Your Destiny
Pat Dollard: Huckabee – Lindsey Graham Is “A Conservative Champion Of Peace Through Strength”
Protein Wisdom: 2014 Inaugural Fundraiser – Give, Don’t Give, Whatever
Shot In The Dark: Geneology
The Lonely Conservative: Hollywood – Capitalism For Me But Not For Thee!
This Ain’t Hell: The IG Gets One Right – And Gets Ignored


Category: Linkagery
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