Ray Bradbury said, ""

An Imperial Declaration of Rights

Go read the discussion of an "Imperial Declaration of Rights" at Little Green Colloquium. What started out as a request for help by an author in drafting the bill of rights of a limited government in a story, has become a quite detailed discussion on the enunciation of rights in a libertarian society.

Her premise:

An alternate-universe Terran Empire has arrived here, set up a small base in Antarctica, and one of the Empire's representatives is offering Imperial citizenship and protection to anyone willing to accept all the terms of the Imperial Declaration of Rights. Unless any country is willing to give up all forms of socialism and apply for membership in the Empire, only individuals may gain citizenship.

Here is her drafted Imperial Declaration of Rights:

Imperial Declaration of Rights

Article 1.

The right of Imperial Citizens and subjects not in custody for a crime to keep and bear any arms of their choice shall not be infringed.

Article 2.

 No jurisdiction may make any law establishing a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, so long as said religion causes no proximate harm to another sapient being.

Article 3.

No jurisdiction may make any law abridging freedom of individual or collective speech or expression, providing that exercise of said freedom causes no proximate harm to another being and is not a deliberate falsehood.

Article 4.

The right of the Empire’s people to assemble peaceably for any reason, and to petition their immediate jurisdiction for redress of grievances, may not be denied. If the immediate jurisdiction denies such redress, the petition may be appealed as necessary through higher jurisdictions until it is addressed and a remedy applied, or it is denied by the Sovereign or a Ranger.

Article 5.

The right of all Imperial Citizens and subjects to be secure and private in their persons, properties, effects, and papers and other records in whatever form, against intrusion shall not be violated without a warrant issued on probable cause and supported by oath or affirmation, clearly describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized.

Article 6.

 No person shall be put in jeopardy of penalty more than once for the same offense, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Article 7.

 Private property may not be taken for public use or controlled by other than the owner without compensation at twice the true market value.

Article 8.

 A. In all criminal or civil cases, the accused is entitled to a prompt and public trial; to be informed of the nature and cause of the action against à; to be confronted with the witnesses against à; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in à's defense; and to have the assistance of counsel in said defense. Facts in the case shall be determined by the most accurate means available.
B. In Imperial cases not involving a ruling noble, the trial shall be before Administrative Service judges if such are available within one standard week; otherwise, before the senior Imperial Marine or Navy officer available. In cases involving a ruling noble, said noble shall preside unless the accused requests the next senior noble to judge.

Article 9.

 Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party has been duly convicted, shall exist within the Empire.

Article 10.

 Aggregate taxes may not exceed five per cent of any jurisdiction’s gross product or ten percent of an individual’s income, must be easily visible to the ultimate individual payer, and may not involve taxation of property of any sort. A jurisdiction’s publicly owned resources must be utilized for essential services before taxation of any sort may be implemented.

Article 11.

Any questions about the interpretation of this Declaration not resolvable by reference to the Commentaries are to be decided by a Ranger or the Sovereign.

Join the discussion and tell her (if LGC will permit you to leave comments) where you see contradictions and vague terms.

I immediately have problems with the applicability and delimitation of the term "proximate harm," the apparent interchangeability of the terms "sapient beings" and "beings," the justification for and applicability of the "deliberate falsehood" clause in Article 3, the rigor and integrity of Article 7 against infringement, the rigor and integrity of the "most accurate means available" clause in Article 8, the wording of Article 10, the applicability and rigor of the "not resolvable" clause in Article 11 (which brings into question permissible construction), and (not to impugn her storytelling) the grounding of such a minarchical government in what appears to be an aristocratic monarchical order with no republican institutions.

More subtle problems appear in the expansive definition of "freedom," which is extended to include acts which violate the freedoms of others through "proximate harm," the absence of any textual definition of nobility and delegated powers of Rangers (how does a noble differ from a common Imperial citizen? Are Rangers a hereditary class granted supreme judicial review along with the Sovereign? Why do Rangers have the same power of veto and judicial review as the Sovereign?), the lack of enumerated exigent circumstances concerning the granting of warrants,  the apparent distinction between slavery and involuntary servitude,  the absence of any explicit statement regarding the permissible construction of the Declaration (perhaps this is in the Commentaries), and the lack of any clause enumerating penalties for Sovereigns and Rangers who transgress their powers.

Yet if this is representative of her writing, Heinlein has some serious competition.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 12, 2005 23:40 EST | Permalink | comments (12) |
books, economics, discoveries, libertarianism

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Hmmm...

Fiesty Republican Whore's blog got hacked and deleted by her ex.

Three days later, Andrew Sullivan's blog got hacked.

Is there something her ex hasn't told her?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 12, 2005 10:06 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
humor, blogging

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ROPMA

Notice the new sidebar counter posting the number of Peaceful Acts of Non-Violent Self-Striving^tm committed since 9/11? I found out about it through Travis Benning and his loyal army of enormous atomic super-ants. 

Click on it and scroll down a horrifying list of acts of Islamic tolerance in the past four years. If you have dial-up like I do, it'll take a while. You might want to go fetch yourself some coffee.

Read it and contemplate with what fervor the Left seeks to grant moral legitimacy to this Struggle Against Humiliation^tm. Take care to notice the usual gender, age, and religion of the victims. You can go here to add it to your blog.

Religion of Peace, my ass.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 11, 2005 23:45 EST | Permalink | comments |
islamomisia, discoveries

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Iconoclastic tuesday kittenblogging

Yeah, its a kitten. On a tuesday. Deal with it.



Punk.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 11, 2005 00:27 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
cats

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Who said this?

Guess who wrote this, and to which political party he belonged. Extra points if you can tell me which President he is quoting. Extra extra points if you can tell me how unlikely it is that anyone from his party nowadays would profess something remotely similar. No Google-fu!

I will post the answer in the comments.

“There are no necessary evils in Government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as heaven does its rains, shower its favours alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."

This is the language of our venerated President, and the passage deserves to be written in letters of gold, for neither in truth of sentiment or beauty of expression can it be surpassed. We choose it as our text for a few remarks on the true functions of Government.

The fundamental principle of all governments is the protection of person and property from domestic and foreign enemies; in other words, to defend the weak against the strong. By establishing the social feeling in a community, it was intended to counteract that selfish feeling, which, in its proper exercise, is the parent of all worldly good, and, in its excesses, the root of all evil. The functions of Government, when confined to their proper sphere of action, are therefore restricted to the making of general laws, uniform and universal in their operation, for these purposes, and for no other.

Governments have no right to interfere with the pursuits of individuals, as guarantied by those general laws, by offering encouragements and granting privileges to any particular class of industry, or any select bodies of men, inasmuch as all classes of industry and all men are equally important to the general welfare, and equally entitled to protection.

Whenever a Government assumes the power of discriminating between the different classes of the community, it becomes, in effect, the arbiter of their prosperity, and exercises a power not contemplated by any intelligent people in delegating their sovereignty to their rulers. It then becomes the great regulator of the profits of every species of industry, and reduces men from a dependence on their own exertions, to a dependence on the caprices of their Government. Governments possess no delegated right to tamper with individual industry a single hair’s-breadth beyond what is essential to protect the rights of person and property.

In the exercise of this power of intermeddling with the private pursuits and individual occupations of the citizen, a Government may at pleasure elevate one class and depress another; it may one day legislate exclusively for the farmer, the next for the mechanic, and the third for the manufacturer, who all thus become the mere puppets of legislative cobbling and tinkering, instead of independent citizens, relying on their own resources for their prosperity. It assumes the functions which belong alone to an overruling Providence, and affects to become the universal dispenser of good and evil.

This power of regulating—of increasing or diminishing the profits of labour and the value of property of all kinds and degrees, by direct legislation, in a great measure destroys the essential object of all civil compacts, which, as we said before, is to make the social a counterpoise to the selfish feeling. By thus operating directly on the latter, by offering one class a bounty and another a discouragement, they involve the selfish feeling in every struggle of party for the ascendancy, and give to the force of political rivalry all the bitterest excitement of personal interests conflicting with each other. Why is it that parties now exhibit excitement aggravated to a degree dangerous to the existence of the Union and to the peace of society? Is it not that by frequent exercises of partial legislation, almost every man’s personal interests have become deeply involved in the result of the contest? In common times, the strife of parties is the mere struggle of ambitious leaders for power; now they are deadly contests of the whole mass of the people, whose pecuniary interests are implicated in the event, because the Government has usurped and exercised the power of legislating on their private affairs. The selfish feeling has been so strongly called into action by this abuse of authority as almost to overpower the social feeling, which it should be the object of a good Government to foster by every means in its power.

No nation, knowingly and voluntarily, with its eyes open, ever delegated to its Government this enormous power, which places at its disposal the property, the industry, and the fruits of the industry, of the whole people. As a general rule, the prosperity of rational men depends on themselves. Their talents and their virtues shape their fortunes. They are therefore the best judges of their own affairs, and should be permitted to seek their own happiness in their own way, untrammelled by the capricious interference of legislative bungling, so long as they do not violate the equal rights of others, nor transgress the general laws for the security of person and property.

But modern refinements have introduced new principles in the science of Government. Our own Government, most especially, has assumed and exercised an authority over the people, not unlike that of weak and vacillating parents over their children, and with about the same degree of impartiality. One child becomes a favourite because he has made a fortune, and another because he has failed in the pursuit of that object; one because of its beauty, and another because of its deformity. Our Government has thus exercised the right of dispensing favours to one or another class of citizens at will; of directing its patronage first here and then there; of bestowing one day and taking back the next; of giving to the few and denying to the many; of investing wealth with new and exclusive privileges, and distributing, as it were at random, and with a capricious policy, in unequal portions, what it ought not to bestow, or what, if given away, should be equally the portion of all.

A government administered on such a system of policy may be called a Government of Equal Rights, but it is in its nature and essence a disguised despotism. It is the capricious dispenser of good and evil, without any restraint, except its own sovereign will. It holds in its hand the distribution of the goods of this world, and is consequently the uncontrolled master of the people.

Such was not the object of the Government of the United States, nor such the powers delegated to it by the people. The object was beyond doubt to protect the weak against the strong, by giving them an equal voice and equal rights in the state; not to make one portion stronger, the other weaker at pleasure, by crippling one or more classes of the community, or making them tributary to one alone. This is too great a power to entrust to Government. It was never given away by the people, and is not a right, but a usurpation.

Experience will show that this power has always been exercised under the influence and for the exclusive benefit of wealth. It was never wielded in behalf of the community. Whenever an exception is made to the general law of the land, founded on the principle of equal rights, it will always be found to be in favour of wealth. These immunities are never bestowed on the poor. They have no claim to a dispensation of exclusive benefits, and their only business is to “take care of the rich that the rich may take care of the poor.”

Thus it will be seen that the sole reliance of the labouring classes, who constitute a vast majority of every people on the earth, is the great principle of Equal Rights; that their only safeguard against oppression is a system of legislation which leaves all to the free exercise of their talents and industry, within the limits of the GENERAL LAW, and which, on no pretence of public good, bestows on any particular class of industry, or any particular body of men, rights or privileges not equally enjoyed by the great aggregate of the body politic.

Time will remedy the departures which have already been made from this sound republican system, if the people but jealously watch and indignantly frown on any future attempts to invade their equal rights, or appropriate to the few what belongs to all alike. To quote, in conclusion, the language of the great man, with whose admirable sentiment we commenced these remarks, “it is time to pause in our career—if we cannot at once, in justice to the interests vested under improvident legislation, make our government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, and against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many.”

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 10, 2005 22:08 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
politics, constitutionalism, trivia, libertarianism, best posts

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A Glimpse into Utopia

This monday morning, treat yourself to the new and improved official website of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.

While there, you can:

• Enjoy an enlightening history of the progressive Eden that is North Korea
  
• See the beautiful web design and aesthetically intuitive interface that only the loving labor of a communist dictatorship can create (notice the GIF pages!)
• Browse the enormous freedom-affirming and completely propaganda-free e-library arranged in simple alphabetic order
• Browse an appealing tourism gallery for those who like exclusive guided tours (notice the Creative Commons License!)
• Buy hand-crafted souvenirs
• And sign up to become a Friend of North Korea
  

With a website like this, you might be asking yourself, is there anything this sparkling jewel among nations can't do?

Gee, I wonder.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 10, 2005 01:17 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
satire, a glimpse into utopia, best posts

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100+ Banned Books Meme

(Via the lusty loose-legged Llamas)

Rules:

Bold what you've read completely.
Italic for partial reads.
Continue to ignore the rest.
(My own) Asterisk those you enjoy and comment where you see fit.

*#1 The Bible On my deathbed, I will not have finished it.
*#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
*#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
*#5 Arabian Nights
*#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
*#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
*#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer - Technically, no one has read it fully.
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
*#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
*#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
*#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
*#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
*#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
*#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce- Only enough to see that he was a drunken ass.
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
*#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
*#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee- forced to in school
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
*#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx 
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
*#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
*#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
*#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
*#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant- feared for my sanity after 10 pages
*#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
*#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X- forced to read a section in school
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
*#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
*#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
*#69 The Talmud- So far, only fragments of Pirkei Aboth and Seder Mo'ed through English translation.
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabinthia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck - forced to in school
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
*#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
*#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse- I hate Hesse, hate his style, and hate his subjects.
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
*#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess- one page in and I threw it down in disgust
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
*#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Show more>>

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 09, 2005 02:46 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
books, memery

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Wow

#523 in the TTLB Ecosystem.

The Bear (pbuh) said his divine intervention would shift rankings, but this is amazing.

Thank you, all who link to me.

Too many good blogs are now ranked below me. Expect more linky love. Lots of it.

I plan on dispensing so much linky love that if links were awkward pauses and gropes, I would be sexually harassing half my blogroll.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 08, 2005 02:35 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging

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Second rant against Miers *updated and refined*

Some conservatives who support Harriet Miers' nomination argue that the conservative opposition to her is motivated by a hypocritical wish to confirm a nominee based on desired results, and thus is engaging in the same legislating-from-the-bench behavior as Democrats.

For example, William Teach of The Pirate's Cove said,

This was a chance to make the Court what it should be: a neutral branch of the government that rules by the Constitution, rather then by their political affiliation and/or feelings. Rule of law.

Stating the general case, Beth of My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy said,

I suspect many of pining for an activist (results-oriented) nominee, despite proclamations to the contrary. Judicial activism isn’t confined solely to the left, y’know…there are just more of them. Despite the error of their ways, to their credit, at least they also don’t pretend to be “strict constructionists.

Both are partially right. Justices should not be confirmed on the expectation that they will expand the powers of government beyond the limits of the Constitution.

This expectation is inherent in the legal philosophy of the Left. In order to carry out any of their welfare or environmentalist schemes, the limits the Constitution imposes on the government must be neglected and purposely distorted to grant government new powers. Where this cannot be done through the amendment process and within representative legislature, it is done through the unelected judiciary.

The independent judiciary, given the function of defending the long-run self-interests and property rights of each citizen against encroachment by private coercion and the false lure of immediate political privilege, becomes the wielder of that same disregard of long-run interests and rights. Once divorced from the direct elective process to further shield the judiciary from the short-run privilege-seeking promises inherent in elections, the judiciary itself joins the legislature in promising immediate gains to some at the expense of future harm to all. The judiciary turns from applying isonomic law under which the rights of all before the court receive equal consideration and none can determine beforehand who will be specifically harmed or benefited by legislation;  to applying capricious law which targets some for gain and some for harm, and depends not on the equal consideration of rights but on the whim of the court. It is precisely this fluid law, divorced from rights and the long-term interests of all, that is essential to the liberal platform.

A liberal, by definition, must seek to nominate justices to the Supreme Court who will force the Constitution into yielding government new powers or retaining those already secured through past efforts. Nothing is gained for a liberal by nominating a justice to the Court who will roll government back toward its constitutional functions, who will consider long-run interests rather than immediate privileges. This judicial activism has for decades been a way for liberals to expand the powers of government without recourse to representative democracy and the check to universal plunder it represents.

Obviously, the Right is not immune to such expansion of government for the sake of immediate gain to some at the expense of harm to all. Many conservatives have embraced along with the Left, albeit for their own reasons, the formation of the FCC and Federal Reserve, anti-trust legislation, price and labor controls, welfare programs, environmentalist programs, zoning laws, and other exercises of power not granted by the Constitution. Witness John Sherman, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, John McCain, David Souter, and any Republican representative who has proposed pork projects.

Such conservatives, like liberals, must also neglect the boundaries the Constitution has placed on government. They too must seek to nominate justices who will force the Constitution into yielding and retaining the new powers they favor, granting privilege instead of equal consideration of future interests and rights. And to the degree their legal philosophy contradicts the Constitution and the will of the people, they must engage in judicial activism to accomplish their goals (it must be noted that unlike the Democrats, Republicans have usually been able to expand government directly through the legislature, without recourse to an unelected judiciary). It is this portion of the Right that William Teach and Beth rightly condemn for opposing any judicial activism except the kind they favor, especially when disguising it in strict-constructionist arguments. 

Yet there are other members of the Right who seek not to expand the powers of the government, but to reduce them to those the Constitution enumerates. This portion of the Right is variously composed of "Republitarians," Jeffersonian-Republicans, unreconstructed Jacksonian-Democrats, and classical liberal libertarians. These limited-government conservatives do not desire judicial activism of any stripe, but the judicial passivism of a judiciary bound to uphold the Constitution and the long-run self-interests of all citizens. Where a law exists which expresses powers not enumerated in the Constitution and which destroys isonomy, they want the Justice to vote it down. Where a law which falls within an enumerated power comes before the court, they want the Justice to vote so as to keep it within its defined sphere of power. The only result sought is that which is consonant with the limited government of isonomic law and protection of property rights created by the Founders whose concepts are expressed in the Constitution- and requires only the process of repeal and firm arguments capable of persuading other Justices against expansion beyond the original intent of the Founders whose concepts are expressed within the Constitution. It must be remembered that the Constitution does not express the concepts of all the Founders- the older Hamilton's support of centralized banking, is absent from the Constitution.

Limited-government conservatives oppose Miers in part because we believe there is no reason to expect her, based on her legal experience and qualifications, to argue forcefully and persuasively in the Court against the judicial activism of both parties. We oppose her precisely because we don't want to take the chance of supporting someone who will disregard the Constitution and isonomic law for the sake of either party's myopic promises of immediate gains.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 07, 2005 02:06 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
politics, constitutionalism, scotus

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In WWII, I would have been shot as a spy

I know nothing about sports. Absolutely nothing. If my life depended on proving my American citizenship by naming a World Series victory, I would name a football team and get a bullet in my head.

So, I am bewildered by all this baseballblogging. I only recognize it as baseballblogging, because some people put pictures in their posts and use the phrase "home run." Other than that, it's a meaningless hash of funny sounding names and numbers.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 06, 2005 23:14 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging, hick life, boredomblogging

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He finally said it!

Bush has finally acknowledged that the war on terror is a war against Islamic terror (transcript hat tip: Atlas Shrugs)

It is a brilliant speech. Although he still claims that Islam is an essentially peaceful religion that is only "hijacked" by a totalitarian death cult, he has for once clearly stated that this war is against Islamic totalitarianism:

Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics. [My emphasis]

Ok, so he doesn't understand or want to acknowledge that this idea of murderous jihad is not a distortion, and is exactly what the slaughtering illiterate schizophrenic pedophile meant when he said,

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. - The Koran 9:29

So he doesn't understand or want to acknowledge that the Reliance of the Fellow Traveller and Hadiths have for over a millenium meant totalitarian persecution and oppression of non-muslim ethnic groups and women.

So he doesn't understand or want to acknowledge that the core of Islam is terror.

But finally, he is not urging us to wage war against a faceless "ideology." Even hinting at the nature of the enemy, is a large step toward defeating him.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 06, 2005 10:38 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
news, islamomisia

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Scum.

A homeless man qua registered sex offender raped a 20-month old baby in a public library.

This piece of shit does not deserve to die painlessly. At least he will be brutally tortured and shived to death in prison.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 06, 2005 08:39 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
news, hateblogging

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Woo Hoo! Books!

I got these at the library today:

• C.G. Montefiore and H. Loewe's "A Rabbinic Anthology"
• Eli Wiesel's "Wise Men and Their Tales"
• The Antifederalist Papers, edited by Cecelia Kenyon
• Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street"
• Vol. 1 of "The Debate on the Constitution"
• David Landes' "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations"

Update 9:12 am:

Malkiel's book is worthless. Within the first ten pages he distorts Fisher's theory of time-preference, implies that economics is both mathematical and quantitative, gives credence to Keynes, and just plain pisses me off.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2005 18:07 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
books

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Damn hippies

Holmes over at Six Meat Buffet posted about a liberal site that shits all over a who's who list of sane bloggers and offers advice to hippies who wish to comment.

Almost every blog worth reading gets insulted. IMAO, LGF, Basil,  Ace, Atlas Shrugs, the Llama Butchers, Blackfive, Blogmeister, the Volokh Conspiracy, Captain's Quarters, Daily Pundit, Patterico, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller... you name it, they crap on it.

Every blog but mine. What the hell do I have to do to piss off more liberals?

I now yearn to get onto that list. If you want to get on that list too, we had better start being more offensive to Che-worshipping Jew-hating socialists.

For my part, I'm going to buy a cute little mouse, name it "Nelson Mandela," and let my kitten torment it. Hippy fools! They will all pay!

Update: Graumagus isn't on that list. I will have to try much harder than I thought.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2005 13:31 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
blogging, anti idiotarians, hateblogging

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Write hippyspeak and win a prize

Ace is holding a Bad Doubly-Pretentious Leftist Bullshit Poetry Slam. Come up with the worst juvenile anti-war Bush-hating hippy crap you can imagine and win a mumble-grumble for a prize!

My favorite contender:

Kan any one stop these
Kriminals in
Kontrol of the White House
Aren't there true patriots who will
Rise up and shout:
Love not war

Rise up my peace birds, free the
Oppressed who have been
Victimised by the
Evil Bushitlers!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2005 12:31 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, blogging, satire, discoveries

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First rant against Miers the Doughnut-Gatherer

Harriet Miers has advocated the creation of an International Criminal Court. (hat tip: Jeff Goldstein)

Article VI, clause 2, of our Constitution reads:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

This is a prima facie case against her ever having any position on the highest court in the land.

Anyone who thinks the Constitution should yield to the will of the Sharia-embracing dictator-appeasing genocide-abetting anti-Semitic bureaucratic fuckweasels on the UN, ought to be kept from the Supreme Court with attack dogs and pepper spray. Or at least a resounding Nay vote.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2005 01:27 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
politics, constitutionalism, scotus

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Paraphrased words of wisdom *Updated*

A government big enough to give you Wi-Fi, is a government big enough to take it away.

If government has the power to provide you with tax-funded internet pron, it has the power to condemn you to dirty magazines and voyeurism.


If you believe government should give you internet, then you must believe government should give you an income.

If you believe government should give you an income and online pron, you must believe that I should be taxed to pay for it.

If you believe I should be taxed to pay for your income and online pron, then you must believe I will not hunt you down and break your tax-funded laptop over your thieving head. 

The man who screams, "Give me Wi-Fi or give me death," better know which one I'm leaning toward.


Update 12:43 am: Pastorius of Cuanas commented:

You better get ready to start killin' because this is the wave of the future.

The cost on this ought to be very little. In fact, if the city has any brains at all, they ought to be able to negotiate a contract whereby the service is free [My emphasis].

Cities already bring you all sorts of advertising (billboards, bus shelters, bus advertising, stadiums, etc.) for free [my emphasis], so why not wireless service, which, after all, is only another means of delivering advertising.

I think your libertarian gland is kicked into hyperdrive. If you want to fight against government providing services, start by fighting aginst services which actually cost significant money, such as healthcare.

This wireless thing is great and, in fact, it's going to be a necessity to humanity in the future. It will be as necessary as stoplights, and you wouldn't fight against the government providing those, would you?

I responded thus:

I will make but three simple arguments.

1. There is no such thing as ANY FREE ECONOMIC GOOD. By definition, every good that is not a general condition of human welfare, is scarce and has alternative uses.

Quite clearly, the wires, microchips, silicon in those chips, copper or glass in those wires, labor of miners to extract those from the ground, the labor of steel manufacturers to produce machines to aid in mining, trucks and ships used to transport those materials, the labor of truckers and sailors, labor that goes into designing, erecting, and maintaining the system, the tools used, the electricity used, the land used, the seats in engineering college used, the professor's time spent teaching electrical engineering, the time spent teaching those professors, are all scarce and have alternative uses. This is their cost: their next most valuable alternative use. There is no escaping this. There is no escaping that since they must inevitably have costs associated with them, someone must pay those costs.

There is no escaping that if people do not voluntarily pay for those costs because they value the outcome more than other outcomes, government will force people to pay for those costs. And there is no escaping that if people do not voluntarily wish to pay those costs, some people are paying costs which lead them to choose that alternative use of goods which from their point of view is less valuable than other uses. Finally, there is no escaping that it is only through the pricing process of the market that costs are apportioned to the satisfaction of consumers' wants.

2. The citizens of San Francisco will be taxed to support the company that provides the internet access. They will say, with indignation, "why should I pay taxes so my neighbor can look at gangbangs, child pornography, and cum shots?" And this argument will be good. They shouldn't be forced to pay for the perversions of others.

 So, the city will try to limit the internet service. It will get the ISP to install censors to avert the very real problem of people being allowed to look at pornography on their neighbor's dimes. And from there it is easy to make the argument that for the sake of the children, other bad things should be censored.

 And it will be a good argument, because no one should be forced to pay for a little kid to enter into conversations with pedophiles trying to lure them, or look over online snuff films, or read manuals on how to build explosives, or listen to filthy lyrics, or read filthy ebooks...

Must I point out that where government takes upon itself to regulate communication, even in good intentions, it has never once refused to expand its powers of censorship to the utmost? Especially when it takes it upon itself to become the chief, or sole, supplier of information?

3. Perhaps the most simple argument of all: internet service is a product of people's effort. It would not exist without people applying their time and effort. Someone must mine the hills for glass and copper and silicon. Someone must transport it, refine it, process it, shape it, put it into the right configuration to transmit information, install it, maintain it, and continue to improve it.

Quite obviously, to claim that someone has a right to internet service, means to claim that someone has a right to some portion of the lives of all those people whose efforts go into making internet service providers.

Quite obviously, to claim that the right to internet service is a human right, and thus inalienable, is to claim that there is an unshakable right to the portions of those people's lives.

And quite obviously, to claim that this right is to be secured by government, which can only wield force, is to claim that all those people must be forced to produce internet service.

And still more obviously, to claim that one's wishes can only be satisfied by forcing others to work for one, is slavery.

And, to beat an already dead and rotten horse, by making the argument that people must be forced to satisfy this want, and would not do it voluntarily out of their own self interest, leads to the inevitable conclusion that no one would voluntarily aid themselves by satisfying the wants of others. And, to mount myself upon that poor rotten horse and attempt to ride it, so does voluntary cooperation disintegrate and everyone become every one else's slave.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 04, 2005 13:31 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
news, hateblogging, libertarianism

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With hat respectfully lowered to Laurence Simon

Ask the kitten: What do you think about Harriet Miers' SCOTUS nomination?



A pathetic waste of a political mandate. Bush could have nominated someone like Janice Rogers-Brown who would bring some righteous ass-kicking Originalist funk to the Court, and he went and nominated a crony who makes me look like an experienced jurist. Damn shame.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 03, 2005 11:22 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
politics, humor, cats, scotus

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A Glimpse into Utopia: Pierre Leroux and the "Circulus"

This monday's Glimpse Into Utopia is an exceedingly short excerpt from Yves Guyot's description of the wide-eyed Rabelaisian paradise envisioned by a Frenchman:

Pierre Leroux disputes with Owen the honour of having invented the word "Socialism." He had a hatred of eclectic philosophers and of economists, to whom he applied the supreme insult of "Malthusians." He claimed that, the annual produce of labour in France being nine thousand millions of francs, two hundred thousand families of landowners, capitalists, and financiers appropriated five milliards by the rent of land, interest on capital and taxes.

He worshipped one thing—the Triad or Number Three. Man is at the same time triple and single, exhibiting sensation, feeling and knowledge. Hence the division of the human race into three great classes, philosophers or men of knowledge; artists or warriors, or men of feeling, and industrial chiefs, or men of sensation. Hence also the castes of India and Egypt and of the Republic of Plato, except that these castes were not equal as they ought to be. Every human being has a right to a dwelling, sustenance, and clothing. The formula for the remuneration of all officials (and all citizens are such) is triple and single, to each according to his capacity, to each according to his labour, and to each according to his necessities. "Capacity remunerates itself by duties, and imposes duties. Labour completed remunerates itself by leisure. Necessity is satisfied by production, natural or artificial, artistic or scientific."

Pierre Leroux discovered the principle by virtue of which nature has established a constant relation between population and the means of subsistence. This is the Circulus. The digestion of each individual yields more than the equivalent of the amount of his nourishment. "A man who were to refuse to labour, would still have the right to live by placing himself under cover of the Circulus." Pierre Leroux put this agricultural theory into practice in Jersey, where he had taken refuge. Paul Meurice once told me that one day Mme. Victor Hugo and he paid Leroux a visit, when he entertained them with his hobby and, in order to add an experimental demonstration to what he was saying, he opened a cupboard in which were some bacon and other provisions. From this he took an enormous dish, in which a monumental element of the Circulus was taking its ease. Mme. Hugo put her handkerchief to her nostrils, and Paul Meurice, who was short-sighted, after having sufficiently ascertained the nature of the object presented to them, said quietly, "I thought you were waiting for its transformation to put it into the cupboard." Pierre Leroux replied with a fine gesture which was meant to embrace a whole Triad, but Mme. Victor Hugo and Paul Meurice made their escape without waiting for an explanation.

Mmmmm. A nutritious snack from the circle of life. Who said Baal worship is dead?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 03, 2005 07:40 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
culture of death, a glimpse into utopia

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New Steve, Don't Eat It!

Perhaps his best yet. You decide. Then go vomit.

Update 4:31 am: Maybe not?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 03, 2005 02:23 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
humor

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Semi-random late-night thoughts

Rashi explains that Genesis provides neither the order, nor the specific manner, of Creation. A little mishna makes the entire evolution/creationism issue fall flat.

As I said to Ogre, in a free market for education, evolution versus creationism would be the least of the issues parents would decide on for their children.

For starters: dismal "whole language learning" programs with nonsense content, short-lived Educationalist fads dreamed up in Schools of Education taught by the least qualified professors in academia to the least educated students in academia, pseudo-psychiatric "treatment" of behavior and unwanted beliefs, bureaucratic centralization of decision-making in the hands of the least educated furthest from those who know the most about the children, illogically-ordered math and science classes, multiculturalist moral-relativist "social studies," revisionist PC history, economics classes full of mathematical nonsense advocating prodigal consumption and government regulation, civics classes based entirely on the "General Welfare clause," the morality such biased exposure to history and law is intended to foster, and the dissolution of whatever value a certificate from such a degenerate institution of learning possesses.

Compared to this foul melange of modern liberalism, choosing a school based on what it teaches in a segment of biology class makes about as much sense as choosing a car based only on the diameter of its exhaust pipe. Do you really value evolution or creationism over the morality your school teaches your kid over the entire 12 years of school? Over the ability of the school to teach him that Hitler really was more evil than George Washington?

Incremental decision making through the market rather than lump-sum categorical decision making through politics. What a beauty.

Anyone who has seen "Survivor" must note the effort required to create a zero-sum society. Turning men into animals is a hard job.

Am I the only man who thinks Mary-Louise Parker is the most beautiful woman on tv nowadays? It might just be because I haven't yet heard her speak outside a role and never saw an episode of West Wing. Hearing actors expound their views tends to immediately destroy whatever interest they have. I like to believe she is not a moonbat.

Mrs. Piggy and Piglet are now banned in some areas of Britain because they may offend Muslims. I wonder why no one is bending over to accommodate the beliefs of Jews regarding pork. Maybe it's because Jews don't threaten to kill children. Or adorn their toddlers with homicide-bomb vests.

My kitten likes to sleep on the warmth of my cable box or laptop. I've made a little keyboard cover, but every now and then she knocks it off and I find her sleeping contentedly with an ominous window open proclaiming "Disconnect Z: drive?" or "Place Desktop in Recycle Bin?"

Think about how many Leftist rallies involve nude hippies. Why didn't it ever occur to our Founders to protest George III by inflating their scrotums and prancing around nude?  Maybe because they had no need to artificially enhance the size of their scrotums. Or more likely, because they weren't raving lunatics.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 03, 2005 01:43 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
hateblogging, boredomblogging

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Woo hoo! Books!

I got these books at a harvest festival yesterday:

• Herbert Spencer's "The Man versus the State," with introduction by Alfred Nock, my FIRST tangible copy of any of his books.
• "Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought," edited by W.F. Buckley and Charles Kesler, containing essays by F.A. Hayek, Alfred Nock, Thomas Sowell, Milt Friedman,  Norman Podhoretz, and others.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914"
• Dennis Prager's "Think a Second Time"
• Another copy of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" (1947 edition)
  
• Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice"
• Robert Aron's "The God of the Beginnings"
• Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel"
• Louis Gerstner Jr's "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround"
• "The Hugo Winners 2 vol. Anthology" edited by Isaac Asimov
• Will Durant "The Age of Faith: Medieval Civilization from Constantine to Dante"
• Harry Kemelman's "Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet"

I can't believe I finally found a tangible copy of a Herbert Spencer book. I thought they were all long ago out of print (though this one is a 1941 edition). I now have faith that I can replace all of my digital versions of his books with honest tangible books.

One odd thing about that book tent: there must have been over 50 hardcover copies of Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance." I'm betting that people brought his book thinking it was Tolstoy's "War and Peace," looked at the copyright info or the Hebrew epitaph, and decided to scrap it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 02, 2005 09:06 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
books, hick life

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I don't even have to fisk this!

One of the Kossacks left a soon-to-be-deleted turd in the blogosphere last night. (hat tip: Ace)

Let's see what this peaceful representative of the Reality-Based Community wants:

See, this is all useless. Not just everything we do in the world--and rest assured it is for 100,000 years from now, none of us and nothing we do will be remembered--but specifically on this site.

It's become more and more apparent to me over the past five years that all the activism and non-violent protesting in the world will do precisely squat.  When you're dealing with evil people who have no shame, the old rules of the game don't and, indeed, can't apply if you have any hope for success. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched, millions of letters have been written, tens of millions of votes cast, and hundreds of trillions of electrons expended pontificating on blogs...for nothing. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. Not unless it comes in the form of something akin to the French Revolution.

We need terror. We need horror. We need the streets running awash in rivers of blood of these thugs and criminals and zealots. Activism didn't prevent 60,000 deaths in Vietnam. All the activism of the Civil Rights era has gotten African Americans precisely nowhere. Segregation may not be the law of the land anymore, but it's still the de facto state of America.

So, this member of the reality-based community believes that a Jacobin Reign of Terror is necessary to liberate the country from the evil "criminals and zealots" of the Right. Terror will serve to advance the cause of liberating blacks from those still-extant 1950's style segregation and miscegenation laws. For the good of the many, there is no time to persuade people through the process of democratic elections.

Let's see how this rational and sane person views herself and the world:

My mental state is collapsing and deteriorating almost daily. It's so consistent you could practically graph it. My life is falling apart at an equally alarming rate, and yet I feel like doing nothing to salvage it. I feel like I'm standing at the bottom of one of the WTC towers, watching it come down on me, floor by floor, knowing I'll be blown to atoms, yet unable to move.

At least she is honest. Who does not daily compare the mess they make of their lives, to the victims of 9/11? Come on, show of hands...

Let's hear some psychoanalysis:

I've gone from cynicism to hatred to sadness in a few paragraphs. I'm a broken shell of what I used to be. Like Humpty Dumpty, I also doubt very seriously if I can ever be put back together.  I'm dissatisfied and miserable beyond measure and no amount of medication, therapy, or vacation seems able to change that. That's not the kind of person I want to be for you all.

If Prozac doesn't work, might I suggest a high-caliber lead slug? Or gravity therapy- off the roof a building?

She even inserts a caring postscript:

P.S. Visit as many Civil War battlefields as you can and maybe donate a little while you're there. They need all the help they can get and you'll be a better person for it. Really. Trust me. Would I lie?

No cognitive dissonance here.

now I'm a front page poster on My Left Wing.

You got that right.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 01, 2005 08:10 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
moonbats, fiskings

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Nice doggy!

Fiskings rarely get better than this. I mean, damn. This has got to be the best fisking of a Canuck I've ever seen.

Thanks Rottweiler. You eviscerate Canadian socialist idiots so we don't have to.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 01, 2005 01:31 EST | Permalink | comments |
moonbats, anti idiotarians, fiskings

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