Psychopolitik 2.0

If you are a libertarian, go read this. NOW!! Multiple times until it soaks in your brain so deep the words fly around in your dreams and you go crazy from it. Logan Ferree has dealt authoritatively with the tendency among libertarian activists of — in misguided attempts at using appeal to history as an argument crutch — whitewashing the founding fathers and portraying the Constitution as if it were written by Murray Rothbard.

I know what you’re thinking: yeah, sometimes I mention the Constitution. Hell, I even capitalize the word. However, I don’t invoke it as an ideal. To me, it’s more of an indictment against the government that they don’t even bother to follow their own rules, yet they see fit to impose new ones on us. I’m talking standard breach of contract stuff here, no libertarian would’ve signed it anyway because of one simple thing that they don’t even hide from you in public government school: slavery. Our true intellectual ancestors weren’t the ones that left the legality of treating your fellow man like cattle solely on the basis of race sitting on the table for damn near a century, they’re the brave souls who at the time knew better and were NEVER afraid to say so. The tax resisters that said they wouldn’t provide a single cent to an entity that legitimized the breaking of an entire race of people. The ones that helped runaway slaves escape.

The ones that were opposing wars of expansion way back when the area under question was what we now call “Texas”.

For these people, blind worship was not an option. To maintain freedom, they couldn’t point at the Constitution, they had to go beyond. They were the “far-left” of the era. They heard the rhetoric about liberty and sought to correct the spots where the ones saying it contradicted themselves. When those people, the abolitionists, the tax resisters, the ones considered kooks by the establishment of the time said “freedom”, dammit, they MEANT it, and so do we.

Remember: you can’t truly learn from the past if you don’t admit the mistakes of it.

Re: the occupation of Iraq:

[…] the Democratic-controlled Congress could do what Democrats say a Democratic president would do: withdraw U.S. forces. A president could simply order that; Congress could defund military operations in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are, however, afraid to do that because they lack the courage of their (professed) conviction that Iraq would be made tranquil by withdrawal of U.S. forces. (emphasis mine)

Well whaddayaknow — a baldfaced lie. The view that no positive can be salvaged from the US presence in Iraq, a majority view of the US public and consequently at the least hinted among most democrats, has been warped into “withdrawal would turn Iraq into a mega-happy place!”. The reasonings behind that view, ranging from a cold-realist type ranking of sectarian bloodbath w/o US involvement as better than sectarian bloodbath w/ the US supporting the Shiites, to a belief that the few Iraqis who don’t support attacks on US troops are using them as an excuse to not bother rebuilding their country, to the moral “we’re violating their sovereignty, that needs to stop, period” view, all go *poof*, replaced with childish nonsense.

While I agree that there’s a lack of backbone thus far on withdrawal itself (congress approves wars, logically speaking they can un-approve them, Emperor Bush can go pound sand. Faster they realize this, the better), the portrayal of the reason for it is quite the hackjob.

So, who wrote this tripe? Ann Coulter? Mark Steyn? Cal Thomas? Nope! Twas George-freakin’-Will. With “thinker” right-wingers like him, who needs partisan hacks?

1) Funny WTF: Some minister in Miami who has a tattoo reading “666″ thinks he’s Jesus reborn. Oh, btw, people believe him and give him free shit because of it.

2) We’re-all-screwed WTF: Bush takes advantage of “Presidents Day” to compare himself with George Washington and say “war on ‘terror’ (including Iraq!), US revolution, same thing!”.

I’d like to know the thought process behind this move:

District-based XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and New York-based Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., which together control the emerging satellite subscription radio market, today announced that they plan to merge in a $13 billion deal.

Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius, would become chief executive of the new company, and Gary Parsons, the chairman of XM, would become chairman, the companies said. They also said they would retain operations both in New York, where Sirius rents space, and in Washington, where XM owns a building.

Such a merger would face significant regulatory scrutiny and questions about whether a monopoly was being created and would take months to complete. The companies hope to complete the merger by the end of the year.

“The commitment of the company is to have a significant, presence both in Washington D.C. and in New York City,” said Hugh Panero, currently chief executive of XM Satellite Radio.

No decision has been made on the eventual name of the company or on the location of the headquarters. Both subscriptions will be honored and then they will eventually be combined, the company said.

The two companies, neither of which is profitable, have been rumored to be in merger talks for months. Both face slumping subscriber growth rates. (emphasis mine)

…que?

I’ve got a theory as to why they aren’t profitable. Here goes: the type of people that wouldn’t be hesitant about paying for radio, no matter how sucky the free kind gets, are generally the same ones that are well-off enough (and/or dumb enough) to buy a new car these days, and both companies have made deals w/ car manufacturers to include it w/ their cars. Everyone else either is just fine with free radio, doesn’t think it’s worth the price despite how bad the regular kind is, or uses a CD or an mp3 player instead. If the prices got low enough, then some would come around to it, but they vastly overestimated how popular satellite radio would be — hence why they started by throwing gobs of money out for star power — so they can’t lower it; if anything, they wish they could raise it.

Monopoly? Of course it’s going to be one, for the simple fact that the average person, if they have content to provide, tends to not have the money to launch a freakin SATELLITE. In contrast, radio spectrum can be accessed by damn near anybody, which is why it takes FCC strong-arming to prevent everyone and their mother from having a radio station. The only way competition would be feasible in satellite radio would be if there were public-access satellites* where all anyone would have to do is send their signal to it and it’d go to whoever the hell wanted to hear it.

(* - Out of curiosity, I did a Google. Apparently there are some satellites for amateur radio use [some info is mentioned here], but from the sounds of it it’s not that effective.  Though, I’ll admit, I had a case of IARATS-syndrome** right away.

Anyone out there who knows more than I do about it [read: pretty much anybody], give a holler.)

(** - “I ain’t readin all that shit”)

I generally don’t think much of Obama, but he shouldn’t have had to do this:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is apologizing for saying the lives of the more than 3,000 U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war were “wasted.”

During his first campaign trip this weekend, the Illinois senator told a crowd in Iowa: “We now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

He immediately apologized on Sunday, saying the remark was “a slip of the tongue.”

During an appearance Monday in Nashua, N.H., he apologized again, telling reporters he meant to criticize the civilian leadership of the war, not those serving in the military.

“Slip of the tongue” my ass, that was the kind of unvarnished truth lacking from him until now.

Consider who joins the military — generally people who believe at least in the abstract that they would be fighting to defend the US. Not for “national strategic interest” (read: theft of resources and violation of sovereignty), nor to fight wars of “liberation” (read: interfere in the issues of people we know squat about and violate sovereignty), but to fight off legitimate threats to their country and their people. If you think you’re serving that purpose, get sent to Iraq — a nation that is not and was not a threat to the US — and you get killed, then in effect you died for a lie. You signed up to potentially sacrifice your life for the safety of your friends & family back home, and instead sacrifice it for some crackpot scheme cooked up by people who wouldn’t so much as piss on you if you were on fire, how else can it possibly be put to where it wouldn’t obscure the point?

Shame on whoever thought it offensive, and shame on him for taking it back.

Tits = ratings.
Case in point: the friggin “Situation Room” taking time out from important things to cover the croaking of a  certain human flotation device.  People who really give a shit have the “E!” channel for that, grow up…

Another mile marker passed on the road to nationalized healthcare:

Two once-implacable foes in the business world found common ground yesterday, at least for a few minutes, as they publicly pledged to work together for the first time to fix what they called the nation’s health-care crisis by 2012.

At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott sat at one end of a table and vowed to put aside differences to “drive this debate forward.” On the other end was Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and frequent Wal-Mart critic, declaring he had made a “tough choice” in the goal to improve coverage.

How this unlikely alliance came about illustrates the deepening concern that businesses, labor groups and lawmakers have over skyrocketing health-care costs. The issue has divided the nation’s largest retailer and the SEIU, which founded a group called Wal-Mart Watch that has harshly criticized the company’s wages and benefits. But yesterday they said they could come together under the broad umbrella of universal health care. And each realized it could not be achieved without the other’s help.

“That’s what makes it powerful,” Stern said in a phone interview. “It’s risky, and it’s right.”

Note the Statist-media spin here: A union corrupted by politics that thinks the answer to everything is the immediate infusion of Uncle Sam’s Cock joins forces with a corporate behemoth that realizes going along with a tide will shut people up, and it’s portrayed as “awww, how sweet!  They put aside their differences for the greater good!”.  Disgusting…

Like I said, “universal” healthcare will arrive as a sop to big business.

With blaming all our problems on immigrants being so popular as of late, you knew it’d happen: Supremacist groups, including the friggin Klan, are on the rise…

Question: how dumb do you have to be to say to yourself “hey, this hand sanitizer gel would make a GREAT substitute for liquor“?