The New Clarion

Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!

“Supermarket Cashier Becomes German Anti-Capitalist Hero”

The Epoch Times is a New York based newspaper that specializes in news on China, although it covers US and international news other than China as well. A lot of their stories have to do with the persecution of Falun Gong in China, which leads me to believe that the newspaper is owned or controlled by people friendly to the Falun Gong movement. I don’t know much about Falun Gong, but I think we’ve all seen stories of the Chinese government trying to suppress that movement. The Epoch Times and Falun Gong both appear to be anti-communist. Judging from the newspaper, though, this doesn’t mean they are capitalists. They seem to be on the collectivist side of the coin themselves.

At any rate, there was a story in The Epoch Times the other day claiming that 50 million Chinese have quit the Communist Party in recent years. I don’t know how accurate the figure is, but it sounds encouraging.

Beneath the media censorship and Internet blockades of China, a movement is spreading like wildfire with the potential to put an end to the ruling communist regime.

The Tuidang or “Quit the Party” movement has seen a wave of Chinese withdrawing their memberships from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliated organizations. This month the number of withdrawals exceeded 50 million.

Is the Chinese Communist government in trouble? Protests are a common occurrance. The Party is losing members. Falun Gong, ostensibly a meditation discipline, seems to me at least to be an organization that people join to express defiance of the communist government. If the Communist government is going to fall one day in the not too distant future, it would seem that Falun Gong will have had a lot to do with its demise.

Perhaps we should give some attention to this movement, to divine what the next Chinese government will be like. Would a non-communist Chinese government still want to annex Taiwan? Would it even be a bad thing, if the government is non-militaristic? Would Taiwan willingly annex itself to such a government?

Robert Tracinski makes an interesting point:

I have been wondering whether Barack Obama will turn out to be another Jimmy Carter or another Franklin Roosevelt. The least bad option is Carter: a leader whose policies are disastrous for the economy and for US foreign policy, but who ends up being rejected by the American people and voted out of office after only one term–as opposed to a leader like FDR, whose policies are also disastrous, but who ends up being loved by the American people nonetheless and voted back into office.

After viewing Obama’s speech last night, I am forced to conclude that he has the makings of another FDR.

I have an uncle who was a child during the Great Depression. He worshipped FDR then. He kept an FDR scrapbook, in which he lovingly saved newspaper clippings about his hero.

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In my day job I heard syndicated morning show host Tom Joyner say, “I’m just a DJ, but I don’t understand how tax cuts will stimulate jobs.”

This is the statist mentality. It’s the same mentality that thought the west was doomed when the Soviet Union announced their five-year plan for the economy. They had a plan. All we had was economic anarchy.

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The Feb 24th Detroit News caries an Associated Press article by Randolph E. Schmid titled “Panel: Climate threat worse than thought”. It says that:

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the risk of increased severe weather would rise with a global average temperature increase of between 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit and 3.6 degrees above 1990 levels. The National Climatic Data Center reports that global temperatures have risen 0.22 degree since 1990.”

This 2 tenths of a degree since 1990 is part of a 7 tenths of one degree Celsius rise since 1900. Nothing to get excited about since climate always warms during an interglacial. But this article is pure scare mongering.
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Every time we read about the HR1, the government spending and Democrat reelection bill, people find new things in it that no one knew about. “Tyranny by stealth” has become the Democrat motto.

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I’ve always loved listening to Rick Santelli, of CNBC.  He’s the closest thing to a capitalist I’ve ever seen on any business show on television.  Today Drudge linked to a video clip of Rick that shows just why I love listening to him.

He talks about the Founding Fathers turning over in their graves over what’s going on in government today, and suggests he might helm a Chicago Tea Party on Lake Michigan.  What a breath of fresh air.

In researching African development for my entry on Ethiopia, I came across a startling fact about a neighboring country that I had never encountered before.

When one thinks of Somalia, one thinks of pirates, the civil war (and Clinton’s disastrous humanitarian intervention in 1993), extreme poverty, and anarchy. From the perspective of the Western democracies, Somalia’s situation is untenable and incomprehensible: it lacks a central government.

The remarkable fact that I mentioned earlier is that it’s doing as well as or better than ever. The dictatorship of Siad Barre was of a Stalinist, socialist bent so it’s not a particularly high threshold to meet, but conventional wisdom—at least among international aid types—is that the more state the better. According to their notions, Somalia should be utter chaos where life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

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I don’t normally watch The Daily Show, but I caught part of an episode by accident today. In it, Jon Stewart was grilling a former Republican congressman about his opposition to Obama’s massive “bailout.”

Stewart had this Republican on the ropes because he was able to control the language of their discussion and this hapless Republican didn’t recognize what was going on. Stewart criticized him for being “pro-free market” while at the same time being in favor of “regulation” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Showing how much we can trust Republicans, the man’s only response was that he was in fact in favor of “regulation.”

Peeling back this dishonest language, the plain fact is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government entities. (The former congressman even said as much earlier in the discussion!) They are most emphatically NOT representative of “the free market,” and a desire to reign in the government’s entities – Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae – is absolutely not in any way a “regulation of the free market.” It is entirely the opposite.

But this utterly despicable Orwellian switcheroo of terms went completely unopposed. Therefore, “regulation of the free market” was allowed to be framed as the agreed solution to the crisis, and concurrently, the problem was implicitly allowed to be blamed on an “unregulated free market.” This is, again, a complete and utter lie, as both men knew that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were the government and not the free market.

Jon Stewart is far from alone in his use of this deception. I’ve heard it used by congressmen, newsmen, and even ordinary people since the beginning of this latest mortgage brouhaha. But it is incorrect, backwards, and, for those who know better, dishonest.

The truth is the exact opposite of what the “regulation” cheerleaders would have us believe: the crisis was caused by overbearing government entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which distorted the markets and went wild dumping billions into foolishness. The failure was of these government entities and not in any way a “free market.” What the government failed to “regulate” was not “free markets,” but rather, itself. But because the term “regulate” is traditionally used to refer to government controls, these shysters are playing a shell game of words in which they “solve” a failure of government entities by calling for more government controls on private business.

So if you ever hear anyone use the term “regulation” in this way, be sure to set them straight. Because with it, they can control – and completely reverse – the entire meaning of recent events.

-Inspector

Robert Tracinski’s TIA Daily links to a column by Betsy McCaughey that reveals Tom Daschle’s attempt to socialize medicine in America by quietly slipping his plan into the “stimulus bill.”

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

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If you think the religious right is bad — and it is — get a load of the religious left. Brian McLaren unites religion and environmentalism in an assault on capitalism. The fit makes perfect sense by the premises of both ideologies, for each disdains the materialism and greed of this world. The logic of the religious left is more internally coherent than that of the religious right, although neither corresponds to reality.

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Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!

“You Might as Well Face It: You’re Addicted to Success”

As America descends into fascism, we have seen milestones in the last decade that mark our decline. Al Gore’s flouting of the voting process, a pillar of our freedom, was a marker. The rise in violent demonstrations by “anarchists,” compassionate conservatism, a permanent war of American sacrifice abroad, , bailouts and the de facto nationalization of corporations that take government money, Obama’s cult of personality, and the media’s loss of objectivity are all markers.

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The birth of octuplets to a single mother of six children caused a significant stir in the United States. Outrage boiled over when it was discovered that she was on welfare and unemployed. Bloggers and talk show radio callers second-guessed the choices she’s made in her life, questioning the wisdom of her fertility treatments, her parenting skills, and even diagnosing her presumed psychological problems. Anything in her life was fair game for comment and discussion.

Meanwhile on the other coast, Barack Obama was assailing executive compensation on Wall Street. He described the bonuses executives received as “shameful” and renewed his finger wagging at the bank that dared to buy a corporate jet. His outrage over these incidents led him to limit executive salaries at financial institutions accepting bailout money to $500,000 per year. (And some would have him go further still.) {via}

These two incidents are normally private issues. If a woman wants to have a litter of babies, it’s her option so long as she does not mistreat them. Similarly, companies pay their CEOs whatever they want without having to answer to anyone but the shareholders. Ostensibly, however, Nadya Suleman and Bank of America have given up that power by accepting money from the government. It’s a doctrine used to justify meddling in areas as diverse as family planning, highway construction, and education. Seemingly, few contest this strings-attached notion.

To my mind, it is all a red herring. Rather than quibbling about the specific decisions that a Board of Directors made, we should be questioning why the federal government is taking our money to give to any companies at all. Instead of arguing that a salary cap would hinder CEO retention and recruitment, we must get the government out of the market entirely. Hesitation about interfering in the employment contract didn’t last much longer than Lochner and is enshrined in current minimum wage laws. So the real issue to address isn’t one of micromanagement, but the idea of management as such.

Welfare, whether corporate or personal (in the case of Miss Suleman), eliminates the negative half of the right to liberty. The underlying principle is that you can do whatever you think it takes to succeed in life but you’re on your own if you were wrong. The sooner we get this principle ensconced anew into our system, the sooner the Sulemans and Geithners of the world can stop impinging (and infringing) on our lives and our pursuit of happiness.

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh revealed an ugliness inside the modern conservative. He was filled with as much emotional intensity as I have ever heard from him as he railed about how the right would have its revenge on the left.

We’re going to treat them the same way they have been treating us for years.  We are going to subject them to the same things they have subjected us to, and we are going to have a big and strong and powerful government to wield against them because they’re in the process of building it.  And we’re going to win it back one day, and when we win this country back, and this government back, we are going to deploy government against them the way they have been deploying it against us, and let them find out what it’s like, and they’re not going to be able to stop it, because they will not have a power base anywhere that will let them stop it.

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Paul Hsieh has an interesting commentary on President Obama’s embrace of something called “libertarian paternalism.” Obama appointed Cass Sunstein, who authored this concept, as a senior regulatory official in his administration. The concept says that government should “nudge” us with coercive measures to do “good things” such as eating better foods, saving for retirement, encouraging our children to do their homework, etc.

The nudges involve handing back our tax money to us in the form of credits or deductions, or even paying us for performance, again using the tax money already taken from us. The “nudge” may also be more direct, such as New York City’s ban on the use of trans fats in restaurants.

All of this is for our “good.” But who determines this good? Answer: Cass Sunstein or sundry other regulatory officials who make it their life’s work determining what is good for me, or even President Obama himself. Accepted in this premise is that the judgment of these individuals must forcefully supplant my own judgment about my own life. I am not permitted to make my own decisions on topics that these officials have determined are worthy of their attention.

These nudges come at the expense of my personal liberty. A society where people are nudged about is one where individual rights are absent. That is the society we are being nudged to accept.

As Mr. Sunstein and his cohort of regulators, led by the regulator-in-chief, President Obama, prescribe and proscribe in the minutest detail how we are to live our lives, don’t be fooled by confusing phrases such as “libertarian paternalism,” or by the broad smile of President Obama as he appoints Mr. Sunstein to take on his duties. “Libertarian” is seemingly based on “liberty”; “paternalism” derives from the Latin word for “father.” There is nothing “fatherly” in government ordering adult Americans about; we are not children. Moreover, liberty cannot exist where government is telling us what to do. These terms are meant to confuse. In such confusion, government power is rationalized and expanded. It is a tactic that has been used by dictators throughout history.

In George Orwell’s fictional 1984, the dictator “Big Brother” said, “Freedom is slavery.” In the same oxymoronic manner, “Liberty is paternalism.”

Don’t be fooled.

*****

Posted from Galileo Blogs.

Looking at the latest to come from the Divine Being in the White House, Obama wants to move control of the Census from the Commerce Department to the White House. We can’t have all those eggheads trained in statistics working on something of political importance. If there is one thing Obama understands, it is consolidating power.

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This is a guest post by Joseph Kellard, a journalist and commentator living in New York. You can visit his blogs at josephkellard.blogspot.com and theamericanindividualist.blogspot.com.

On Saturday I was enticed to the Nassau County Museum of Art for the exhibit: “Poetic Journey: Hudson River Paintings from the Grey Collection.” (The next day, the New York Times gave it a well-deserved positive review: “For Serene Transport, Hudson River School Paintings.”)

I enjoy some paintings from this school, particularly those of Albert Bierstadt, for their panoramic landscapes of valleys and mountains and their stylized recreation of nature, especially their brilliant colors and sharp contrasts between light and dark (e.g. The Oregon Trail). When men appear in these paintings, I view them mainly as a means for the artist to accentuate the vast landscapes and to lend them some perspective.

Unfortunately, my positive experience at the exhibit was undercut, slightly, by some of the descriptions of the paintings (which, I was told, are usually written by the curator):

The Trout Pool by T. Worthington Whittredge, 1870

“… The man fishing in the background is symbolic of the smallness of humanity compared to the grandeur of nature. The fisherman seems so inconsequential next to the enormous trees and beautiful, glittering steam that he almost vanishes into the wilderness.”

View of Yosemite Valley by Thomas Hill, 1887

“ … On the left-hand side, there is a man riding a horse, but he almost blends into the earth, which conveys the smallness of humanity against the rising cliffs and the great, never ending expanse of nature.”

Here I was reminded of the passage from The Fountainhead when Dominique asks Wynand if he’d never felt how small he was when looking at the ocean:

“Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes.”

At the exhibit, the curator described another landscape, Sunset by George Inness, 1878-79, as follows:

“ … There are no people in this image, though in the background there is a building with smoke of the increasing human presence and the negative impact industrialization has on the Earth’s natural resources.”

Perhaps, the curator recognizes that the smoke stack represents man’s “magnificent capacity” to conquer nature, thus demonstrating how inconsequential nature is next to man’s rational mind.

At the blog We Stand Firm, Diana and Paul Hsieh, Lin Zinser and Ari Armstrong are doing a great job of fighting against socialized medicine. Friday’s Feb 6th post is about an article by Greg Scandlen of the Heartland Institute on the subject of mandatory health insurance and how it’s wrong in theory and practice.

In the same vein, JunkfoodScience looks at the disaster that is socialized medicine in Japan and how people are being rejected by hospitals who can’t handle them because they’re understaffed and have no beds. As you read this keep in mind that our leaders want this for you and me. It’s titled “A Tragic Casualty” and here’s a short quote:

“A troubling comment was made by Health Minister Yoichi Masuzoe, who “told a parliamentary committee last year that the rising number of elderly patients hospitalized for months was taking up space that could be used to treat emergency cases.”

What the world is watching is a form of supply rationing.”

All forms of socialized medicine will result in rationing.

Still regarding health care, Stella at Reason Pharm correctly takes the Associated Press to task for its misplaced praise of government regulators. More evidence that the press worships government.

Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan is the latest Democrat to call for bringing back the Fairness Doctrine in radio broadcasting.

I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else — I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves. I mean, our new president has talked rightly about accountability and transparency. You know, that we all have to step up and be responsible. And, I think in this case, there needs to be some accountability and standards put in place.

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