Another country heard from . . .

In reaction to this post on Bernardine Dohrn, Obama fan and the celebrator of Charlie Manson's fork in the stomach of the pregnant Sharon Tate:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this. Bernadine is certainly a hundred times smarter than anyone in the gun totin' militia gang. She's exactly right that you lot get a free pass with your armed rallies that blacks would not get--just because you're white and rightwing. One only hopes that the limits of the tolerance of white lunatics are close to being reached and the government will soon start reacting to you guys as you deserve to be reacted to.

November 7, 2010 12:35 PM

Moral decay and political economy.

From the Global Guerrillas e-newsletter:

JOURNAL: Moral Decay?

Posted: 11 Oct 2010 02:37 PM PDT

Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires/civilizations collapse. The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic/financial system, is a good example of moral decay at work.

Why is this market failing? It's being gutted -- from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level -- because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one. What shift? Our previous moral system featured trust, loyalty, reputation, responsibility, belief, fairness, etc. While these features were sometimes in short supply, on the whole it provided us with an underlying and nearly costless structure to our social and economic interactions.

Our new moral system is that of the dominant global marketplace. This new system emphasizes transactional, short-term interactions rather than long-term relationships. All interactions are intensely legalistic, as in: nothing is assumed except what is spelled out in the contract. Goodness is solely based on transactional success and therefore anything goes, as long as you don't get punished for it.

In this moral system, every social and economic interaction becomes increasingly costly due to a need to contractually defend yourself against cheating, fraud, and theft. Worse, when legalistic punishment is absent/lax, rampant looting and fraud occurs.

Given the costs and dangers of moral decay, it's not hard to see why it can cause a complex empire/civilization to collapse.

And from the Volokh Conspiracy we have this.

The Political Economy of the Roman Republic

Ilya Somin • November 5, 2010 2:27 am

One of my longstanding interests is the political economy of ancient Greece and Rome. Former VC-er Eric Posner has an excellent new article on the political economy of the Roman Republic:

The constitution of the Roman Republic featured a system of checks and balances that would eventually influence the American founders, yet it had very different characteristics from the system of separation of powers that the founders created. The Roman senate gave advice but did not legislate; the people voted directly on bills and appointments in popular assemblies; and a group of magistrates, led by a pair of consuls, proposed bills, brought prosecutions, served as judges, led military forces, and performed other governmental functions. This paper analyzes the Roman constitution from the perspective of agency theory, and argues that the extensive checks and balances, which were intended to prevent the recurrence of monarchy, may have gone too far. Suitable for an earlier period in which the population was small and the political class was homogeneous, the constitution proved unworkable when Rome acquired a vast, diverse empire. The lessons of Roman constitutionalism for the American constitution are also discussed.

Eric makes many interesting points, and I learned a lot from the paper. But I disagree with the bottom-line conclusion that the Roman Republic failed because it had too many checks and balances, which led to paralysis and gridlock. Even in its last, most dysfunctional century, the Republic repeatedly vanquished powerful foes, including monarchs such as Mithridates of Pontus, Eric’s argument that monarchy was a more efficient form of government during this period notwithstanding. The Republic also undertook various important new domestic policy initiatives, including expanding the citizenship and granting land to enormous numbers of military veterans. This is not the sign of a polity paralyzed by gridlock.

On balance, I tend to agree with the more conventional view that the Republic failed not because of gridlock, but because of agency problems: the Senate and people gradually lost control of the larger and larger military forces needed to defend their growing empire. These forces were increasingly more loyal to their immediate commanders than to the state. As a result, unscrupulous generals such as Marius, Sulla, and ultimately Caesar could use “their” troops to seize power. This problem probably could not be easily solved in a large empire during an era when communications were difficult and slow and the central government could not readily control far-flung standing armies. Indeed, the same problem eventually played a decisive role in bringing down the empire that replaced the republic.

Because I am unpersuaded by the paper’s explanation for the collapse of the Roman Republic, I am also skeptical of the claim that the lesson for the modern United States is that we need fewer checks and balances than we have. Like the Roman Republic, we actually have a fairly strong record of outperforming rival states with more unitary governments (both dictatorships and parliamentary democracies). In some areas, my fear is that we need more checks and balances rather than fewer, in part because we too have some serious agency problems — albeit not as severe as those of the Romans.

Despite this disagreement, I think this is a great paper, and well worth your time if you are at all interested in the subject. And for those who absolutely can’t get enough of ancient political economy, there is my shorter piece on democracy and political knowledge in ancient Athens, and this post I wrote about whether we should revive the Athenian Council of 500.

"An ugly chain of events."

In 2002, when the word "deflation" began appearing in the business news, Bernanke gave a speech about deflation. In that speech, he mentioned that the government in a fiat money system owns the physical means of creating money. Control of the means of production for money implies that the government can always avoid deflation by simply issuing more money. He said "The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost." (He referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman about using a "helicopter drop" of money into the economy to fight deflation.) Bernanke's critics have since referred to him as "Helicopter Ben" or to his "helicopter printing press." -- Wikipedia.

"Helicopter Ben" flies again.


The last time Ben flies his helicopter it is going to look like this.

Got rice, beans, ammo and militia?

Pavlovian dog "Only One" reacts violently to a peaceable armed citizen just as he has been conditioned to do.

For Immediate Release:

Minneapolis Police Spokesman Under Criminal Investigation

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (November 05, 2010) - Sergeant William Palmer, the Minneapolis Police Department Spokesman, is under investigation for assaulting Joel Rosenberg, a local self-defense activist, in the waiting room of the office of Timothy Dolan, Minneapolis Police Chief. this afternoon, at approximately 130PM.

Rosenberg and his wife, Felicia Herman, had arrived at the office by previous arrangement with the suspect, Palmer, to examine the first of several Minnesota Government Data Practices Act responses that Rosenberg has submitted to the MPD and the City of Minneapolis. In addition to his responsibilities as police spokesman, Palmer is also the MPD's Data Practices Officer.

When Rosenberg removed his jacket, revealing one of the two lawfully-carried handguns on his person, Palmer leaped at him, laid hands on him without lawful authority or Rosenberg's consent, and removed one of Rosenberg's pistols, "sweeping," or momentarily pointing it, at Rosenberg as he moved to unload it.

"Palmer did not commit a further assault by patting me down," Rosenberg said. "If he did, he probably would have found the snubnose revolver in my right pocket, and threatened me with that, too." Rosenberg smiled. "He took one of my knives, too, but missed two others."

Palmer admitted, in front of Rosenberg, two witnesses, and a video camera, that he had done so out of a belief that it was somehow unlawful for Rosenberg, a permit holder, firearms instructor and the author of Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota, to carry in Minneapolis City Hall, and threatened Rosenberg with the loss of his carry permit -- something that Palmer has neither the authority to threaten nor to do -- and with arrest.

Rosenberg responded, "I will not resist arrest, sir," and attempted to advise Palmer that Minnesota Statute 624.714 not only permits Rosenberg to carry his firearm there, but that Subd. 23 of that statute says (emphasis added):

No sheriff, police chief, governmental unit, government official, government employee, or other person or body acting under color of law or governmental authority may change, modify, or supplement these criteria or procedures, or limit the exercise of a permit to carry.

"It's really very simple," Rosenberg explained. "Bill had no right to touch me at all, much less grab my gun, much less point it at me, even momentarily. I expect that the HennCo Sheriff's Office will investigate, and act according to both the facts and the law."

"And that's not the only crime Bill committed today, in that act. He really needs to obey the law that he is sworn to enforce and uphold. Whatever that was today, it was not 'To Protect' nor 'To Serve.' It's not for him to make up the law as he goes along."

Rosenberg immediately proceeded to the office of the Hennepin County Sheriff, where he filed a criminal complaint with Detective Bill Gottwaldt, who has promised Rosenberg a fair and impartial investigation.

"I'd expect nothing less, and nothing more, from the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department," Rosenberg said.

"As the public documents on the MPD that I've received show, though, as well as today's incident, I have to expect a lot less from the MPD."

Contact: Joel Rosenberg
joelr@twincitiescarry.com
(612) 293-5635

Hitler reacts to the 2010 election -- poorly.

I think this is called "projection." Convicted terrorist pot calls the Tea Party/Restore the Constitution china black.

“Dig It! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly! Wild!” -- Bernardine Dohrn comments about the Charles Manson-led “Sharon Tate – LaBianca Murders” at the December 1969 Weatherman “War Council” meeting in Flint, MI.

World Net Daily reports:

A former leader of a '70s protest group responsible for bombing the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations and other targets is worried that "racist, armed, hostile, crazy-making" tea parties pose an "unspeakable" threat to America.

Bernardine Dohrn, who with her husband William Ayers were leaders of the communist revolutionary Weather Underground, had been tied to so many acts of protest violence in the '70s that she was placed on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List and was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America."

Her association with Barack Obama notably led to Sarah Palin's famous comment during the 2008 presidential campaign that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists."

Dohrn, however, told an Indian news and views website that she's concerned about a new breed of protesters, the tea partiers, whom she describes as "a hard right emerging, an armed, new hard right with massive control of media."

"It's racist, it's armed, it's hostile, it's unspeakable," she said. "White people armed, demanding an end to this president – it's very crazy-producing."

Mark of "The Beast."

I kid you not.

More evidence (as if any were needed) of the gelding of the Brits.

"Army cadets banned from carrying rifles on Remembrance Day parade because it 'glamorises' weapons." What's next for a headline in the Daily Mail? "Open fly in Trafalgar Square terrorizes lesbians, all male Britons ordered to report for gelding." ??????

Praxis Request: Tarp Shelters and Components for specific purpose.

Folks,

Rupert left this comment to this post from January.

Since it would likely be over-looked without my putting it in a more prominent spot, here ya go, Rupert:

rupert said...

I am looking to buy a tarp to use as a shelter for a trip across France in May/June (so not so extreme I hope). I have seen a very reasonably priced tarp from Thailand in camouflage aviation ripstop nylon, 3x2m and weighing 420g - so 70gm2, waterproof with silver back. Do you think this would be suitable? And poles - would lightweight 45g fishing poles extendable 38-197cm be any use? Appreciate any advice on these and what might be better.
November 6, 2010 7:15 AM

CONFLATION ALERT. "Waco Jim" Cavanaugh, Congressional Perjuror Par Excellence, and Southern Preposterous Lie Center make a movie.

Perverts at TSA either get to ogle your private parts or fondle them. Your choice.

And remember, TSA is the dumping ground for lousy ATF agents.

Another one bites the dust. Pay no attention to the impotent gun cop bureaucrat behind the curtain.

New ATF Chief Counsel's Office Dropped Case Logo.

I just can't wait for the next oversight hearing.

Beans, rice, ammunition.

Now. It's later than you think.

Obama gets advice -- Have some FBI-sponsored agents provocateur go blow something up again. Andreas Carl Strassmeier call your office.

Andreas Carl Strassmeier, FBI provocateur inside the Aryan Republican Army and the Oklahoma City Bombing conspiracy.

Dem pollster: What Obama really needs is an Oklahoma City moment.

Mark Knoller of CBS asks the $64 Million dollar question.

Folks,

I saw this yesterday and was astounded by the question finally being asked in the White House press room.

Knoller: When he (Obama) says he wants to work on the people’s business, which people is he talking about -- the people that elected Rand Paul and Marco Rubio or the people that reelected Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?

MR. GIBBS: Well, what they have in common is they’re Americans.

Knoller: That’s about it. (Laughter.) Well, I mean, they have irreconcilable differences, don’t they?

MR. GIBBS: You know, the President spent a lot of time traveling around the country, and I think he always said that there were -- we tend to put people in boxes and all that sort of stuff on television and everybody disagrees on this and everybody disagrees on that.

I think that -- I haven’t been in a room with those leaders, per se, but I bet if people listen long enough they’d find things that they agree on. They’d find things that they could work on.

Is everybody’s -- is the solution that everybody brings to the beginning of that meeting going to be what we all walk out with? Probably not. It’s going to take some give-and-take on each side. That’s the way we’re likely to make progress.

I don’t -- again, I don’t think there’s anything in this country that would have you believe that the message that people took away from this campaign was gridlock, more arguing, more bickering, more partisan, more not working together -- I don’t -- people ran against the way this town works. And to go back to the way it’s always operated would be the wrong message.

Knoller: On the Republican side, it seems they ran against give-and-take, compromise. They don’t want gridlock, either. They want you to surrender.

MR. GIBBS: And wasn’t that largely the message -- wasn’t that what they said drove them to run for office because somehow that happened on the other side? Again, I think that’s an incongruence that is maybe a subtlety that’s lost during the back-and-forth of a political campaign. But you don’t make progress -- and you’re certainly not going to make progress in a divided government saying, my way or the highway. You’re going to end up with a lot more of what drove people away from having faith in both parties and in their government.

And I don’t think that’s what the American people want to see. I don’t think they want to see an endless recitation of last week’s battles, because we have problems that we haven’t faced and that we haven’t dealt with and that we know if we don’t are going to put us at a competitive economic advantage [sic] as it relates to the rest of the world. And I know that’s not what -- the President doesn’t want to see that, and I think you have a good number of Republicans that believe that, too, Mark.

Uh, huh. Forget Gibbs' talking around the subject, Knoller has put his finger on the $64 million question. Are we one country or two?

I think we'll find out shortly.

Mike
III

Pentagon denies 34 ship fleet to guard Obama.

But they're still stripping the coconuts from the trees.

"I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy -- some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier -- in support of the president's trip to Asia," Morrell said.

"That's just comical. Nothing close to that is being done," he said.

Obama's Fuehrer bunker complex already well developed.

Portable tunnels and they're stripping the coconuts from the trees, lest his royal head gets conked.

Another scary dude to the ATF Chief Counsel's Office.

Boo!

New House Judiciary Chairman to Obama: Prepare for Investigations

Veteran Congressman will head influential House Judiciary Committee

By Jim Forsyth
Thursday, November 4, 2010

The San Antonio Congressman who is in line to become chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee is promising 'a number of investigations and oversight committee actions' which he vows will 'hold the administration accountable,’ 1200 WOAI news reports.

Veteran Republican Lamar Smith, a Yale graduate and social conservative who grew up in the brush country of south Texas which is now transit point for illegal immigrants and drugs, said in a news conference that a number of issues will come into the sights of his committee when he takes the chairmanship in January, from cracking down on child pornography to taking the Obama Administration to task for failing to do enough to protect the southern border.

Smith says it is his Constitutional duty.

"Part of that checks and balances is in fact holding the administration accountable, is in fact insisting on more transparency, is insisting on more honesty, and getting the facts," Smith said. "Right now, because of the one party monopoly, the Administration has been able to dodge any kind of supervision, any kind of oversight committee action, and they refuse to testify, and that is no longer acceptable."

Smith, 63, says he says he has spoken to Speaker-designate John Boehner and has been told that he will move to the chairmanship of the committee. He has been ranking Republican on the committee for four years, and also headed the House Ethics Committee during the previous Republican majority.

Smith repeatedly attacked what he called the 'one party control' which has allowed the Administration and majority Democrats to ramrod their position on key issues like health care and border security through Congress.

"Right now, we've had one party control all aspects of our government, and the result of that is that the American people have only gotten one side of a lot of issues," he said.

One thing that Democrats openly expressed their concern about is the ability of Republicans like Smith, chairmen of key House committees, to use the Majority's subpoena power to compel testimony on a whole host of issues. Smith says their concerns were justified.

"There are going to be a number of investigations or oversight committee actions, trying to get to the facts," he promised.

Smith cited national security and the threat of terrorism will be a key area that the Judiciary Committee plans to take action quickly, and said border security, an issue always close to Smith's heart, will also take top billing.

"We need to have better national security and border security. We need to know who is coming across the border, why they are coming across illegally. We need to reduce the huge amount of drug smuggling and immigrant smuggling."

Smith said that reform of the 14th Amendment, which grants automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants who are born in the U.S., is also an issue his committee may take up under his chairmanship. The 14th Amendment is a hot button issue for conservatives who call for restricting immigration.

He said adding 'meaningful' lawsuit reform will also be a top priority.

"I think we are going to be able to reform and amend the health care bill," he said. "We are not going to be able to repeal it, because the president would veto any repeal. But we can go back and make some changes and improvements. We need to reduce health care costs, and we need medical liability reform, and make sure we can stop the number of frivolous lawsuits."

Smith promised to 'use subpoena power if necessary' to 'call on Administration officials to get to the truth and get to the facts.'

What's Next in the Political Arena? How about "Keep Your Oath!" Rallies?

The One Hundred Twelfth United States Congress is the next meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It is scheduled to meet in Washington, D.C. from January 3, 2011 to January 3, 2013, during what will be the third and fourth years of Barack Obama's presidency. Senators elected to regular terms in 2006 will be in the last two years of those terms during this Congress. -- Wikipedia.

I received over the electronic transom an idea that I certainly think is worthy. If you do as well, why not forward it to every Tea Party, Libertarian and Second Amendment activist you know?

Mike
III

"Keep Your Oath" Rallies

The GOP has taken the House of Representatives and many state houses across the country. Most of us who have worked so hard to elect these people think that now we can rest until next year.

Unfortunately, the lobbyists and party machines don't think that way. They spent yesterday figuring out the legislative lay of the land and they are spending today and every day after this sidling up to these new representative's of the popular will, trying to turn them to their purposes, just like they did with the last bunch.

So, what we have to do is get off our butts and remind them early who put them in power. From the day that they are sworn in, we should remind them just who it is they are working for and what principles got them elected.

Therefore, on the day that they take their oaths, we ought to be outside every state legislature and senate, every governor's swearing in ceremony, and of course, the big one in Washington DC with signs that say "Keep Your Oath!" and "We'll be watching!" We should carry effigies of politicians, covered in tar and feathers, wearing signs around their necks saying "I violated my oath to the Constitution."

Each state is a bit different so you will have to do some research on the dates and the process. For example, here in Alabama, the newly elected can take the oath of office in private or public ceremonies in their districts before the legislature meets. They must forward proof of these oaths to the State House or Senate. They are again sworn in a mass ceremony on the first day of the convening of the Legislature, in Alabama's case that is January 11th, 2011. Members who have not sworn at home and provided proof, and who miss the mass ceremony, must take the oath in the Clerk's office the next day or they will not be allowed to take their seats. The Governor-elect takes his oath in a separate public ceremony on the 17th of January, 2011.

If you agree with this, please forward it across the Internet and by your Tea Party or Libertarian phone trees.

Our work is not done. We need to remind them:

"Keep Your Oath!"

"Or else!"

When the zombies come, these people will surely be eaten. What a hoot.