So AOC thinks Venezuela is south of the equator. Probably thinks all South Americans are alike.

***

What's with Netanyahu's low-profile visit to the U, S. recently? Avoiding the long arm of the UN court? A great idea from Kathy A.: They're planning heavy-duty Iran action, but they don't trust their domestic electronic security.

***

What would happen to a farmer who polluted a waterway a fraction of the degree the government has polluted the Potomac?

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The president of a Florida insurance brokerage firm and the CEO of a marketing company were sentenced Wednesday to 20 years each in prison for leading a sprawling, $233 million Affordable Care Act fraud scheme

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Outrage. Surrender. Despair.

Overwhelming national and personal debt. Governments that can't prevent fires or rebuild after the damage. People who immigrate here because the filthy streets and rivers look just like home.

Growing evidence that what people do is ineffective and that government is a foolish backup plan.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitude that could arise in a nation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion. Once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.

Enervation eventually gives way to frustration, and then to rage, as soft despotism fails to achieve utopia. Then the people are left with a stark choice: a reversion to freedom, or the embrace of autocracy. As de Tocqueville concluded, “The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.”

Socialism and Free Association

On this day:
1755
French and Indian War: Braddock Expedition – British troops and colonial militiamen are ambushed and suffer a devastating defeat by French and Native American forces.
1815
Talleyrand becomes the first Prime Minister of France.
1821
470 prominent Cypriots, including Archbishop Kyprianos, are executed in response to Cypriot aid to the Greek War of Independence
1850
U.S. President Zachary Taylor dies, and Millard Fillmore becomes the 13th President of the United States.
1868
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing African Americans full citizenship and all persons in the United States due process of law.
1875
Outbreak of the Herzegovina Uprising against Ottoman rule, which would last until 1878 and have far-reaching implications throughout the Balkans
1944
World War II: Battle of Tali-Ihantala – Finland wins the Battle of Tali-Ihantala, the largest battle ever fought in northern Europe. The Red Army withdraws its troops from Ihantala and digs into defensive position, thus ending the Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive.
1958
Lituya Bay is hit by a mega-tsunami. The wave is recorded at 524 meters high, the largest in recorded history.
1962
The Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test is conducted by the United States of America.
1972
The Troubles: In Belfast, British Army snipers shoot five civilians dead in the Springhill Massacre.

***

Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder Oneil Cruz accepted an invitation Tuesday to compete in Monday's Home Run Derby in Atlanta.


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In the 1960s and 1970s, scientist Paul Ehrlich popularized the idea that the Earth was being threatened by what he described as a population bomb.

"No intelligent, patriotic American family should have more than two children, and preferably only one," Ehrlich said in a 1970 interview,  warning that crowded U.S. cities faced a "fatal disease — it's called overpopulation."

Prophecy is tougher than it looks.

***

After graduation, many top international students can extend their stays temporarily to work in their fields of study, boosting American companies. This opportunity comes through the Optional Practical Training program—which would end if Mr. Trump’s nominee for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, has his way. Such a move would threaten the ability to attract top international students and would jeopardize a talent pipeline for American business.--wsj


***

Socialism and Free Association

The drift towards tyranny is always with us; like gravity, there is always some man or idea spreading an attracting field. Energy is always necessary to prevent a people from being pulled into the tyrant's orbit.

Anne Applebaum, in Iron Curtain, details Stalin's dynastic efforts in Eastern Europe, first as a Nazi partner then as an independent totalitarian contractor. It contains some interesting observations on tyranny as practiced by real experts, first Hitler, then Stalin. Hidden in it is some practical advice for free people.

She references the historian Stuart Finkel, who had the startling observation that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. When Lenin launched the New Economic Plan in the 1920s, Applebaum notes, the "systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated." Similarly, in Poland under the Nazis, Germany's war aims were not completely military."The object of the German occupation of Poland," she writes, "had been to destroy Polish civilization." After signing a pact to divide up the region between them, both Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September 1939. Under Hitler, much of the country's upper class was executed or sent to concentration camps. Stalin recognized a master when he saw him. The Soviets committed Nazi-style mass murders, most infamously the Katyń Forest massacre, which saw 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war executed. "The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies," Applebaum writes. At the end of the war, there was almost literally nothing left of Warsaw.

After the war, the Soviets in Poland continued this broad cultural warfare. They attacked anti-Nazi groups(!), the Polish Boy Scouts, for example. Catholic Church groups were a high priority with their close-knit communities and their international connections. Some organizations were absorbed. The Polish Women's League, a group of earnest volunteers set up to feed refugees in train stations, was infiltrated by Soviet bureaucrats and turned into a mouthpiece for party dogma.

What Hitler and Stalin later did in Eastern Europe was not an attempt at a simple military victory. Both were attempting to destroy a people, to obliterate the social fabric, to deconstruct the very infrastructure that people used to live and work. Why? Because tyranny can be resisted by a people who see themselves as a people, as an entity. The nucleus of a "people" is hard to control.

Finkle's observation should not be forgotten: Free association is much more dangerous to tyranny than free enterprise.  

The Righteous

“Nominating Gabbard for director of national intelligence is the way to Putin’s heart, and it tells the world that America under Trump will be the Kremlin’s ally rather than an adversary,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and the author of “Strongmen,” a 2020 book about authoritarian leaders, wrote on Friday. “And so we would have a national security official who would potentially compromise our national security.”
So foreign nations do get a vote.

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Ukraine has fired US-made ATACMS missiles into Russia’s Bryansk region, Russia’s Defense Ministry said, in a major escalation on the 1,000th day of war.
The attack comes just two days after the Biden administration gave Kyiv the green light to use the longer-range American weapons against targets inside Russia.

***

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has said damage to two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea looks like an act of sabotage and a "hybrid action", without knowing who is to blame.

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The Righteous

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that faulty mail-in ballots can’t be counted during this year's Senate vote. This after the Democratic majority on the Bucks County election commission had decided to ignore a binding state Supreme Court ruling in an attempt to engineer the election of Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

The Bucks County Boards of Elections counted them anyway.

"People violate laws any time they want," Democratic Bucks County commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia said last week, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. "So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes."

But the court had already paid attention. It had already ruled against her. So they ruled against her again.

Laws are challenged in the courts all the time, but not by breaking them and seeing what happens. And while demonstrators will sometimes break a law--like assembly or trespassing restraints--it is to call attention to another, unrelated legal issue. 

But violating the law because you think your vision of the legal situation is better has one foot in tyranny, one in chaos. This is especially true in a nation whose very foundation rests on the confines built around the appropriate actions of its government.

This is not an outlier. Recall Biden and his response to the Supreme Court's ruling against his college loan forgiveness/transfer. “That didn’t stop me,” President Biden proudly declared after the Supreme Court blocked his $430 billion student loan write-off in 2023. It sure didn’t. After striking out in court with three debt forgiveness schemes, the Administration unveiled another.

This arrogant assumption of personal superiority over foundational law is the hallmark of the autocrat.

Soft Tyranny

                  Soft Tyranny

Lies and deceptions are the calling cards of the tyrant because human truth does not lead to tyranny. Tyranny is a logical step only when there is a distorted view of reality. And it is the tyrant who must create it.

But deception isn't always evil; sometimes it's just dumb.

‘Nonpharmaceutical Interventions’, ‘Targeted Layered Containments’, or, in the words of Dr. Fauci “public health measures,” are all euphemisms for lockdowns. 

Certainly, these phrases are created to make the unreasonable more palatable.

And this collection of non-sequiturs from AOC on the banning of the Olympic sprinter. “The criminalization and banning of cannabis is an instrument of racist and colonial policy. The IOC should reconsider its suspension of Ms. Richardson and any athletes penalized for cannabis use,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Friday. I don't care about their policy--although I'd rather see her run--but "racist and colonial policy?" Dizzyingly stupid.

National Socialists

                    National Socialists

There is a strange argument online over whether or not the Nazis were socialists.

They said they were socialists. Were they kidding?

Hitler said, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

Of course, people seeking power over others lie all the time but
the objections to the Nazis being socialists seem to be that they were really bad guys, as if a socialist could not be a racist or a bigot or a homicidal maniac. Apparently, socialism attracts people who are high-minded, noble people of good intentions and not people like Hitler--or Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Lenin, Gueverra, Trotsky, Mao--well, you know what I mean.

Philosophy and the KGB

 

                         Philosophy and the KGB

“There is no happiness in life,” Putin said in a press conference after discussions with Biden. “There is only a mirage on the horizon. So cherish that."

Was he just depressed after talking to Biden or is that how the leader of one of the nuclear powers thinks? Some countries have leaders that actually direct social thinking, or embody the social thought of the land. So Putin's view of life is nihilistic, hopeless, and without reward. Simple happiness is a fantasy. But the little people should cherish it when they are fortunate enough to come across it and be deceived.

So is he a spokesman for the Russian people? Or does he hope to infuse the Russian people with a depressing insight they have not yet realized?

The idea of hopeless, unhappy people who think that happiness is a self-deceiving placebo sitting around in the UN trying to make decisions for all of us sounds really great to me. 

Danse Macabre Has Rules

                                           Danse Macabre Has Rules

I have never met an advocate of government intervention who did not admit, inadvertently, his own capacity for commissariat functions. He always has a plan, to which others must submit, and his certainty that the plan will produce the contemplated results does not permit him to brook criticism. Always he is the fanatic. If you disagree with him it is not because you are in error; it is because you are sinful.--Chorodov

As the analogies to Salem rise, so do the comparisons to other episodes of bit-in-the-teeth government power. But tyranny is often a two-way street; the Inquisitor thinks his parishioners incapable of freedom--but so do his parishioners. 

From Heyward:

Some aren’t even hoping they can assert control over a crisis by converting to its religion. They’ll settle for just having some MEANING, some simplicity, a sense that the righteous will fare better than the unbelievers, that virtue will be rewarded while sin is punished.

That’s a very common impulse with the Church of Covid, since the Beautiful Theories were so very obviously wrong. There isn’t much left of the faith except the visceral communal satisfaction of hoping unbelievers will be punished for their blasphemies with sickness and death.

That sort of thing happens with all of the crisis religions, although not usually as quickly and obviously as with the Church of Covid. Look at the endless stream of movies about how the world became an apocalyptic hellscape because people didn’t believe in global warming.

The last resort of every crisis religion, the last thing that puts asses in the pews, is that addiction to misery porn, the collective hope that unbelievers will suffer someday, and everyone will admit the True Faith was right all along as Judgement Day crashes down upon them. 

After Socialism

There were military meetings this weekend analyzing the impact of the Virus on the morale of the military. The belief is that the popularity and publicity honoring medical and infrastructure people have had a proportionate decline in the honor and prestige of the military. I don't know if there is a way of documenting this. This is the Myth of the Zero Sum, that there is only so much of whatever, and when you don't have it, someone else has yours. It is a justification for envy. It allows competition for credit. We live in a world that sees honor in such short supply, it must be fought over

We are a culture developing a lot of Myths. The question is, why do we need them?

                                     After Socialism

Alan Charles Kors writing for the Atlas Society in 2003 “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?“ An old article but interesting because it is accurate and heartfelt:


No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them.
….

The record is truly plain. Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor. It was, at its best, the ability, through horror and servitude, to build Gary, Indiana once, without the good stuff, and without the ability even to maintain it.
…..

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.
…….

We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire “socialist experiment,” by contrast, ended in stasis; ethnic hatreds; the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal; and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison

The IRS and The No Big Deal Defense

The "no big deal" defense has returned, this time in reference to NSA and IRS improprieties. It has a noble history over the last years, particularly in the 1990's. It should be a fond meander down memory lane as we recall those charming times of gross abuse of personal information and trust, abuse that for some reason we all see as rare and without meaning.

During the Clinton administration a former bar bouncer, Craig M. Livingstone, was appointed to head the White House security office even though he was a political campaign operative without any law-enforcement experience. (He famously dressed people up as chickens to heckle George Bush in his reelection campaign.) While working in the White House in 1993, he obtained more than 900 confidential background files of major public and political figures, most of them prominent Republicans. This, of course, was illegal and potentially threatening; the misuse of such information is a constant concern in the republic. Mr. Freeh, the head of the FBI, issued a unusually strong statement saying the F.B.I. had been ''victimized,'' presumably by the White House.

Livingston was the center of a lot of difficulties in the Clinton White House, especially the rather peculiar drug problem that raised significant questions about leadership and competence, but the FBI incursion was an obvious threat to innocent, unwary citizens. The files were illegally obtained, open to anyone and huge gaps in recorded access to them lost. None the less, time passed and nothing happened.

Craig eventually moved on. No big deal.

representantion without taxation is tyranny

In 2006:
1. About 300 million citizens in the U.S.
2. 136 million tax returns
3. 93 million returns paid taxes.
4. Gov't revenues were 2.57 trillion dollars, 70% from individuals.
5. 1% of taxpayers paid 39.9% of the individual taxes (vs. 34.4% in 2003.)
6. The top 5% paid 60.1% of the individual taxes (vs. 54.4% in 2003.)
7. Top 10% paid 70.8% (vs. 65.8% in 2003.)
8. The top 25% paid 86.3% (vs. 83.9% in 2003.)
9. Top 50% paid 97% (vs. 96.5% in 2003.)
10.The bottom 50% of taxpayers, TAXPAYERS, paid 3% (vs. 3.5% in 2003.)
11.This election, 30% of voters will not pay any federal income tax this year.