By Brooks
The Rule of Law?
“Connected by leadership”
Milo Yiannopoulos
M.Y. is rude, crude and explicitly true. Sure, his message could be delivered in a sanitized non-blue format, perhaps appealing to more conservative audiences. But why bother? Those audiences already understand the paucities of the Left. Anyone who’s been to a comedy club will recognize Yiannopoulus’ edgy method. And given that most Leftists lack the necessary DNA to laugh at themselves, Yiannopoulus’ comic acerbic style seems fitting to the enormity of the task–skewering a decades-entrenched protected set of holier-than-thou Leftists.
Comparative advantage
Consider two sets of shops.
This set in Denver: http://elbertcounty.net/blog/2012/04/14/things-change/
This set in Shanghai: http://elbertcounty.net/blog/2012/06/08/on-1-block-of-fujian-road/
A place has an economic comparative advantage if its opportunity costs for providing a good or service are greater than the opportunity costs for providing that good or service in another place.
Put less obtusely, a place has a comparative advantage for a given good or service if it can be produced for less cost in that place, than in another place.
People who are allowed to trade freely with each other can utilize their comparative advantages to provide the least cost goods to each other, and thereby maximize their combined wealth.
Maximizing wealth of the people ought to be the primary goal of any government involved with regulating or controlling international trade.
Obviously, our government has not been interested in maximizing the wealth of its citizens for some time. Various social, political, and government revenue objectives have long been put first. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will try to remedy that situation.
But what do you do about a people who would rather get high than make things? For Trump to succeed at making America great again, Americans are going to have to want to do something more than get stoned.
Dreams on MLK day
On this MLK holiday, I have dreams too:
. . .that another more violent, more outrageous, expression of Leftist or Islamic rage will not happen.
. . .that the Left will learn the history of German national socialism’s policy details, and how most modern Leftist demands of government have ancestry in national socialist programs, tried and failed, almost a century ago.
. . .that the Left will realize that national socialism and communism are, in proven effect, indistinguishable totalitarian systems, and that both inexorably lead to mass slaughter of their own citizens.
. . .that the Left will learn that our American constitutional system is based on volitional consent, and that militancy and the projection of force are repugnant to our value system and our way of life.
. . .that the totalitarian Left will end its marriage of convenience with political Islam.
. . .that civilization will return to America and render the hardening of our society, infrastructure, law enforcement, and systems that became necessary to prevent random political, religious and criminal harm, obsolete.
With due respect to the memory of MLK, we have bigger problems to dream about solutions for than race.
America has been had
President Trump, whatever else you do, you must get the Muslim Brotherhood OUT of our government, military and federal agencies.
http://unconstrainedanalytics.org/resources/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263921/our-catastrophic-failure-jihad-denial-daniel-greenfield
El Paso windmills
a bonanza of federal spending to cut
Seems like a good place to cut spending => where the Feds are just giving away money.
https://www.cfda.gov/
The pdf download to describe these programs is 3,277 pages long.
https://www.cfda.gov/downloads/CFDA_2015.pdf
Public Cyber Security
The most far reaching issue to surface in the recent election was raised by the Wikileaks disclosures. Not one of the documents they released to the public has been disputed or shown to be a forgery.
This mechanism pulled the covers off the communications of public officials to reveal unethical, criminal, fraudulent, self-dealing, graft, and corruption, by the scolds who, even today after all the disclosures, continue to lecture the rest of the country on a host of issues in order to lasso some future votes.
Imagine what’s in the communications of the rest of the political class. I’m sure some of it’s ethical, public spirited, selfless, and lives up to the highest expectations of the electorate. Just as I’m sure the character of the Clinton camp disclosures is not unique.
Wikileaks showed us what the Founders knew very well—the corrupting influence of power. They designed our system to frustrate this ubiquitous feature of human nature by creating a Constitution of limitations on government power, complete with a rigorous amendment mechanism to change that Constitution. They didn’t want it tampered with lightly, and they certainly didn’t want unelected judges to be able to effectively modify it with case decisions.
So, our government invests billions to keep the communications of public officials secret, and at the same time, to de-cloak the secret communications of citizens. If the secret communications of public officials could be relied upon to be ethical, public spirited, selfless, genuine, and in good faith, such expenditures might be justified.
But that is not human nature, not when the Founders wrote the system, and not now, thank you Ms. Clinton for reminding us. We must not lose sight of this important lesson.
Moreover, since it’s been shown that government communications can be used to hide the self-dealing of public officials from the purifying sunlight of disclosure, the goal of government cyber security must encompass this reality.
Public security without public accountability is a license to steal from the public treasuries of governments all over the world. This is a much bigger issue than who won the election and what their rhetoric promises.
The fabric of our constitutionally limited system has been breached. Securing the breach is a bandaid that may scab over the lesion, but not cure the underlying disease—because it’s human nature and incurable!
The answer that the Founders came up with was to not trust the government to cure itself. Their system created a tension of balancing interests to keep the various power centers in check.
Public cyber security introduced the ability for public officials to create new power centers not anticipated, or subject to balancing, by traditional constitutional devices.
So, how do we allow our government officials to keep bona fide secrets, while at the same time, not provide communications shelter for public official malfeasance? In other words, how do we fix what is happening right now?
That’s the most important issue we should be discussing after this election. We have a constitutional crisis already. This noise about the electoral college and the legitimacy of candidates is a sideshow.
the futility of debating the Left
“A perennial misapprehension distorts virtually all discussions about the competing merits of socialism and [classical] liberalism: Socialists like to imagine that liberalism is an ideology. Reared on ideology themselves, they cannot imagine that any other form of intellectual activity exists, so they constantly detect in others the same propensity toward abstract and moralistic systematizing by which they themselves are possessed. Socialists are convinced that opposing doctrines are an inverted imitation of their own, and these opposing doctrines must likewise be promising absolute perfection, albeit by a different route. And liberals, reflexively compliant as always, have too frequently accepted this grossly mistaken view of their own position.
If a liberal asserts, “In practice, the market seems to be a less inefficient means of allocating resources than top-down, planned distribution,” a socialist will immediately shoot back, “The market is not a solution to every problem.” Of course not. Who has ever maintained such an absurdity? But since socialism was conceived in the delusion of being able to resolve every problem, its partisans project the same ambition onto their opponents. Fortunately, not everyone shares their megalomania. Liberals have never aimed to build a perfect society. They are content to compare the various types of society that exist or have existed, and to draw appropriate conclusions from studying those that have functioned the least badly. But many liberals, hypnotized by the socialists’ moral imperialism, fall into the trap of debating on the socialists’ terms.
…
Liberalism has never been an ideology, by which I mean a theory based on a priori concepts; nor is it an unchanging dogma divorced from the course of events and outcomes. It is merely a set of observations on facts.
…
Contemporary socialists—“light” totalitarians in mindset and vocabulary—go wrong when they imagine that liberals are busily planning the perfect society, the best that is possible in the world, but of opposite sign to their own. Therein lies the essential futility of post-Communist debate.”
Jean-Francois Revel, Last Exit To Utopia
idle threats
Democrats & media : an “unholy alliance”
Jill Duvall echoes national Democrat behavior => morphs electoral defeat into media spokesperson for the majority vote she didn’t get…
buyer’s remorse
political climate change
The election made it okay to disengage from the Left. What a relief to just walk away from screaming social justice warriors, in-your-face diversity police, marching millennial militants, and all those attempting to divide, dissolve, and destroy American exceptionalism and Constitution-abiding Americans.
To be sure, the last 8 years of Leftist forceful projections of their menu of self interests down America’s collective throat have been a bit of a slog. And since the Left keep attempting to delegitimize everything about the election they just lost, it appears they won’t be embracing reason and reality any time soon.
Still, the election gave us the real measure of things – free markets, limited government, low taxes, freedom, growth, and constructive behavior.
Now I can turn off the Left’s propaganda and stop enabling that ridiculous fringe by granting them the credibility of serious argument. Turns out they were never really serious about America or any of the phony multicultural ideals they claim to uphold. Even today they keep showing that when they don’t get their way they go animalistic.
Well, our free country allows the Left to express their petulant diversity and me-first social justice within civil limits. But the recent vote reminded us that no one has to chase that hot mess around to try to make sense of it. Sense can never be made from nonsense.
The Left spent their moral capital – showed everyone what selfish children hide inside those hideous masks.
Maybe some day they’ll grow up. It could happen. Until then I am free from having to take them seriously.
post privacy
It seems like the world has quietly slipped into a technological status that is post privacy. The 4th Am. protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures, but as that constitutional protection has been re-litigated over time, it turns out the definition of what is reasonable is contextual to current technology. As technology expands, the domain of a reasonable expectation of privacy shrinks. This shifting context is, intrinsically, neither good nor bad. It’s just a fact of technological advancement.
The Clintons recently discovered, much to their chagrin, that their reliance upon the privacy of their unsecured email server was a mistake. Despite their attempts to scrub their email record from the servers they owned, at some point their email traffic went through an internet tunnel that allowed their communications to be copied and saved by persons unknown.
As it turned out, those persons evidently became offended over the unethical Clinton’s documented behavior, and released those emails to the public in time for the American electorate to vote in a more fully informed manner. Subsequently the majority of Americans did the right thing and voted against the pair.
An argument certainly exists about whether this diminished expectation of privacy should hinge on the discretion of unknown parties who come to possess ostensibly private communications.
But extensive systems of encryption and decryption exist precisely because the internet is a known system of public communications channels. The information highway is open to all traffic. Someone listening at any number of junctures will be able to see and copy unencrypted traffic that flies by with very little effort.
Moreover, from the Snowdon disclosures the public now knows of numerous devices and software programs that monitor the internet and continuously capture all communications therein. And many formerly secure encryption methods still in use have been defeated.
All of this leads to a prudent conclusion that the great majority of internet users probably have no reasonable expectation of online privacy. The 4th Am. became somewhat obsolete.
Shifting gears slightly, it appears that the same prudential concern extends for smartphone users. And as smartphone sensors advance – some now do 3D digitizing of nearby physical surroundings – many of us will soon carry around data collection tools that can be remotely controlled to capture audio, video, GPS position, owner biometric and legal information, local 3D matrix data, friend and associate contacts and email addresses, histories of our communications through various social media and browsing tools, even records of our travels.
We line up to buy the latest and greatest of these devices because they do so much. And much if not all of what they do can be exploited on the internet without our awareness. The digital map of our entire existence is constantly built, refreshed, saved, and viewed. We are data origin points and we produce tons of data.
Taking things a step further, predictive artificial intelligence engines exist to use this data and issue alarms when the signals indicate the potential for alarming events to occur. Who reads these alarms, in what public agencies, what anticipatory machineries get switched on when the signs come in, these questions and others like them are probably worth exploring.
Goodnight Obama
repudiating the Left
We had an election November 8th which repudiated Democrat policies on immigration, economics, political Islam, encroaching federalism, regulatory repression, health insurance, domestic energy, military execution and preparedness, international trade, taxation, media propaganda, political environmentalism, entitlement growth, and the list goes on…
Our President and his party seem in deep denial about the depth of this repudiation. In fact to hear them tell it, all of their policies, and they themselves, were somehow affirmed on November 8th! So, now they’re busy redefining reality to fit this purported affirmation.
Part of their strategy involves promoting domestic civil unrest because bad news sells more easily than good – to suck up the intellectual energy of the country and redirect it back on to their agenda. Despite the country having repudiated their world view, they’ve doubled down on their world view.
In classic cult behavior, they’re reinforcing their boundary positions to occupy outsiders with skirmishes and prevent the inner sanctum of liberal mythologies from exposure to the purifying sunlight of objective scrutiny about the outcomes that never materialize under Leftism.
Non Leftists must continue to offer cleansing prescriptions of free markets, reduced federalism, elimination of autocratic regulation, individual responsibility, and removing government from our free lives, to name a few.
A Leftist future in no way contributes to the pursuit of happiness in America. The Left depend on strife, division, intervention, autocracy, and suppression. Leftist leadership comfortably promotes these destructive vectors for the greater good.
We’ve just had 8 years of discovery about who’s greater good concerns them most, and we’ve had enough of the self interest of Leftist leaders. It’s time our government re-established conditions for citizens to re-assume responsibility for their own self interests. We know best what we need and must do.
It’s apparent the Left, the progenitors of government against the people, will fight us every step of the way, for the greater good of course.
when you care enough, there’s….
self inflicted psychosis
Psychosis refers to an abnormal condition of the mind described as involving a “
The following by Author unknown –
“Friends, I’m taking a break after this. I’ve had all I can stomach for now of the accusations, the condescension, the lies, the never-ending lectures about the despair and pain and hurt feelings we caused by electing Donald Trump instead of the most corrupt and dishonest candidate in American political history.
Let me explain to you what really just happened here. For eight painful, miserable years progressives ran wild. You said we were getting fundamentally transformed, and boy did you mean it. Your messianic President literally told us, I won, get in the back and don’t talk. For eight years you really got to jam it down America’s throat. Those of you who are young have never really known another world, where your every demand wasn’t enacted by a cool President, and your enemies weren’t punished at your whim.
The public strongly opposed Obamacare. No matter. Democrats cheated on the rules and passed it on a straight party vote anyway.
You got judges to redefine marriage, and told us we had no say in the matter. But that wasn’t enough. Then you targeted small business wedding service providers, and gleefully punished them, and drove them out of business for sticking to the same position that Barack Obama held until 2012, and Hillary held until 2013. Once he flipped, everyone else became a bigot. A “homophobe.” You really got to hit people with that one. There was no point to your targeting of these Christian business owners beyond targeting them for destruction. And you destroyed them.
You didn’t care about their pain. You didn’t care about their ability to feed their families. You didn’t care about their rights or their freedom of conscience. Bigots, they’re bigots! I actually had close friends who told me they would favor punishing me in the same way.
Then we moved on to the “transgender” agenda. Obama signed a couple of executive orders, and suddenly the federal government said our daughters would have to share restrooms and locker rooms with boys who suffer from the psychological disorder of feeling like they are or want to be girls. Again, we mere fellow citizens had no say in the matter. He gave the orders, signed them, and we are to obey. You didn’t care about our pain or distress or that of our daughters. You called us bigots. You called our children bigots.
You decided we won’t have borders or an actual country anymore, and that we won’t enforce even the weak immigration laws we have. Why? Because Democrats decided it would provide them a permanent majority of new citizens prone to vote for socialism. We fellow citizens again had no say in the matter. Not ten years ago, Democrats had the same position Donald Trump has now, but you again called us bigots. And racists, xenophobes, etc. Deplorables and irredeemables.
You didn’t care about our pain or distress. You didn’t even seem to care about the pain of Kate Steinle as she was murdered by an illegal alien sheltered by a “sanctuary city,” or her family’s pain. Anyone who objected was a bigot! When Donald Trump said it was wrong, you went into a rage.
We’ve also suffered through the crusade of political correctness and left-wing orthodoxy in our workplaces. You got people fired and disciplined. You intimidated and threatened people who supported protection of marriage. You dismissed their pain. They were bigots, after all.
We’ve endured the same ordeals in schools, colleges, and universities. We’ve been continuously insulted, mocked, and slandered in entertainment and news media. Inflicting pain is the purpose, not an unintended consequence.
All year long, we’ve had to listen to you call us fascists and Nazis, while your side is beating people, rioting, blocking highways, and disrupting meetings — literally Brownshirt tactics. Hell, your candidate and party literally paid thugs to disrupt our rallies and speeches, and you still support her!
I could go on. I haven’t even talked about economics, the sacrifice of prosperity or even solvency to socialist and “egalitarian” dreams.
But you get the picture. We’ve now had an election. The rest of us finally had a chance to be heard. And most of the country said a resounding “No” to all that. To the pain and distress YOU have been inflicting on us, and the rest of the country. That’s all that’s happened here. You had a run. You bullied and abused power to get your way. And you thought it was going to last forever, that it was the arc of history, that you were enlightened, and that the rest of us were just stupid deplorables.
I’m sorry Barack Obama used his masterful demagogical skills to lead you into believing that your reign of terror was everlasting and your enemies were history’s losers. But now we’ve voted your party out. We said no, you’re not ruling us this way any longer.
You thought nothing of the pain you caused for the last eight years. In fact, you thought we had it coming. We were on the “wrong side of history” and expected to “die out” and disappear. Yes, I’ve actually been told that, many times. You should have thought about pain back when your party was dishing it out, for real, to your delight. Right now, we are three days after the election, Donald Trump hasn’t done a thing to you, and your riots and hysterical reactions will accomplish nothing.”