Knight Of The Mind

Chopping At The Root

2005-04-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

The Confederate Yankee has noted an interesting and exciting development in the citizen's war against illegal aliens. The Minuteman Project is now going to California to seek out and pillory businesses that knowingly follow a policy of hiring illegal aliens to lower their labor rates. This puts The Minuteman in a whole new league.

The Minutemen are making hay while the sun shines. They are using their fifteen minutes of fame to score like a playoff NBA team. I am now even more convinced these guys are the legitimate article and are trying to make the US a better country.

Why? because they are smart about it.

How? By knowing what makes criminals commit crimes. Criminals commit crimes because it pays.

Who gets paid by illegal immigration? Organized crime lords and shady US business organizations. When MS-13 issued its fatwa aginst The Minutemen, they knew what they were talking about. The Minutemen have engaged a group of enterprising criminals and are now engaging the people who patronize their illegal business.

Larry Elder pointed out that The Minutemen had slowed the rate of illegal immigration across the Arizona border by 75%. These people get results. They get those results by being a whole lot smarter than they get credit for.

These dishonst companies that knowingly hire illegals should go ahead and underestimate The Minutemen. You'll end up the way Gray Davis did when he underestimated The California Recall Movement.

Should We Fear The Assassin's Mace?

2005-04-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

China has undoubtably upgraded their economy and their image as a world power. Has this upward trend also upgraded their ability to mount military expeditions beyond their national borders? Do the Chinese really want to fight the US?

Like many aspects of Chinese policy the answers have more than one side. Yes, the Chinese could hurt us very badly in the short term. They have 500 ballistic missiles and build 75 more each year. Also, they have the best and latest that the Russian defense industry can build. This has been advantageous to Russia because it helps them maintain these industries even when the Russian Government can't necessarily buy an economic order quantity of their wares.

The "no" side of the question relates to logisitical sustainability. The Chinese do not produce high quality metals themselves. They cannot build the types of rolled steel alloys necessary to armor tanks against KE missiles. They also depend heavily on imports to sustain what industries they have. China would have to win a major quickly. Otherwise, the Chinese might use themselves up early, like a poorly conditioned boxer, then, as Japan did in World War II, get nailed with the haymakers towards the end.

It seems increasingly likely that the more nationalistic elements of China's government and society would like to take the US down a notch or two. Like many other countries, they see the US presence abroad as a sign of our domination and their inability to prevent that domination. They resent our support for Taiwan and would like more than anything to reclaim the island in a way that utterly humiliates the United States.

This perhaps provides the normative underpinning to their new "Assassin's Mace" weaponry program. Based on a doctrine called "The Inferior Defeats The Superior" when roughly translated from Chinese, this doctrine calls for the Chinese military to develop a series of weapon systems that enable it to nuetralize the C4I advantages of a superior, more modern, military force so that the battle can occur on a lower technology battlefield.

While the Chinese may want to take over Taiwan, there still remain obstacles to this course of action not limited to the proximity of The US Navy. The Chinese may have upwards of 111 million people who have undergone military training at some time in their lives, but that doesn't mean they have enough airlift and sealift capability to make it to Taiwan.

Also, the Taiwanese own many more modern fighter aircraft and have far more experience in training their pilots how to fly them. Thus, even if they destroy the US Navy's C4I grid over Asia and fire enough cruise missiles and SRBMs to keep our surface fleet at bay, they may be losing the third dimension of the battlefield and thus not have what every attacking force absolutely needs; freedom of manuever.

China also suffers from some societal pressures that would possibly preempt prolonged military aggression on the part of it's government. By limiting the number of children families could legally create, the Chinese have given themsleves what Thomas P. M. Barnett describes as the "1-2-4 Problem." Here one Chinese young adult supports a mom, a dad and four hungry grand parents. It's an inverted monetary pyramid that makes the US Social Security system look almost sane and logical.

If too many of the "1's" get killed in a major war, China has a social problem that their fledgling modern economy may not be able to solve. However, this rests upon the benign assumption that the Chinese leaders care more about the welfare of their own people than they do about gaining international power and influence. Sometimes that's a safe assumption....

The bottom line remians that China will always remain a dangerous potential adversary. They will always want us out of Taiwan and will always want to pay back Japan for the Rape of Nanking and other heinous attrocities committed in The Second World War. Both of these goals are thwarted on a daily basis because the US has a lot of fire power stationed where the Chinese wish we would not meddle. This puts us in an inexorable competition with The Chinese that could easily turn just as bloody as it once did on The Korean Peninsula. Thus, if we were smart, we'd remain very afraid of The Assassin's Mace.

Update I: Vodkapundit offers the possibility that China's longterm strategic goal is the conquest of Japan.

Choreographed Temper-Tantrums.

2005-04-21T03:38:00.000-07:00

In reaction to the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope, a certain segment of the blogsphere has thrown a rather predictable, choreographed temper tantrum. Here we have America Blog.

Boy, It does sound like they are going to be installing "showers" and "ovens" at the Vatican.

I see people talking about the Rat Pope's homophobia, misogyny (did his doctoral thesis on St. Augustine!), intolerance, rigid hard-line attitudes, his almost blatant electioneering from the Vatican for Bush, his condemnation of other faiths and on and on and on and on.

Well, now it is time to turn attention to the Biblical admonitions against unclean menstruating women and a return to animal sacrifice.

The saddest part is that they only took 2 days to pick this guy. That means it was pretty unanimous. I can't wait to see what dark ages this takes us to.

Hail to the new Nazi Pope! Back to the Dark Ages!

Hile Pope Ratzinger .....no wonder so many people have left the catholic church....now they can try to strenthen their flock via 3rd world countries....

Well, that explainds the red, black and white robes......what a f***** up world....a Nazi Pope...

What can one expect from a filthy Nazi?

the catholic church has always trived on violence - any belief that it is a peaceful church is delusional.

This from a Nazi bastard wearing a dress - and no doubt with a past in child-molesting. Can we say projecting our sexual guilt on others, perhaps?

WHY WHY WHY anyone would belong to this Church is beyond me. Especially if you are gay OR a woman. It's almost like the gay Log Cabin Repubs. But worse.

The only way the Catholic Church will change is for people to wake up and see they are fools for following it or continuing to call themselves Catholic. Surely of the 60 million americans who do - only a handful actually follow it all to a T anyway. WAKE up SHEEPLE!

I guess he doesn't get called Holy Father - he'd prefer Mein Fuhrer.

Now that we have Pope Adolf 1, that should be more clear to everyone.

Here's a standout, even amongst this crowd- note the KKK spelling of Catholic, and advocating "nuking" the Vatican:

Maybe they're trying to incite the Religious War that every right winger has been waiting for for so long. The arrogance and insensitivity involved with putting a freak like this in charge of the kathlick church is sure to piss off a lot of people (Jews, WWII vets of all religions and nationalities). Perhaps someone will finally nuke vatican city after this brilliant move by 115 senile, out-of-touch old men (in dresses).

So why this screed of unadulterated hate speech from the 'compassionate, caring liberals'? They didn't get to intimidate The Vatican into selecting a Pope they approved of, so now they are going to throw their temper tantrum. It would be a more impressive show if this weren't so predictable.

Another Difference Between The People And The Elite

2005-04-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

The original Latin noun Pagan, Paganis had a far different definition in the era of The Roman Republic than it does today. The term originated in the days before Constantine decreed Rome a Christian Empire. The Pagans lived far a field from Rome and grew its food supply in orchards and grain fields. They were often looked down upon as stupid and ill-informed. The noun had a negative connotation to it; like calling somebody a peckerwood today.

Fast-forwarding to modern America gives us a totally different view. The modern zeitgeist concerning religion has been informed by the writings on Engels and Marx who describe religion as "the opiate of the masses."

While most well-educated people would admit that Marxism had severe shortcomings, this view of religion has taken hold with force amongst the self-selecting intellectual elite in modern America. This view of religion held by Marx, Nietzsche and many other Post-Enlightenment philosophers has made agnosticism, if not outright Christophobia, an unstated requirement to be admitted into this circle of intellectual brilliance. In essence, these people have come to feel they prove a certain toughness and superiority by casting religion aside and proving they don't need to walk with a crutch.

This puts them outside the intellectual and social realm of the rest of America. They respond to this the same way the supercilious elite of The Roman Republic responded to being surrounded by a bunch of back-woods illiterates who worshipped the tree-spirits. Rather than stopping to question the dissonance they experience from people who don't share their views on subjects such as abortion, euthanasia, or the basic decency of Pope John Paul II, they scoff at such things the way Sulla and his good old boy network would have laughed at the practitioners of Nature Worship in Pre-Imperial Gaul.

Or, they go strongly to the ad hominum and attempt to intimidate any who oppose their views into silence. Recently, The Drudge Retort, ran a story about John Paul II receiving nutrition through a tube in his nose during the last days of his coalescence. The comments were truly illuminating. Here's a sampling of what our enlightened elite had to say about the then mortally ill pontiff.

1) Time to let the old fart go....

All he can do is barely wave. He can not even give a sermon....

PULL THE TUBE!!!

2) No. Keeping him alive cripples the power of the Catholic church. Leave it.

3) Kinda like Ah gets new-trition from the rolled up hunerd dollar bills stuck up mah nose! SSnniiiiifff!! Ahhh! (signed GWBUSH)

Now these are the very deep thoughts of a group of people who consider themselves far superior to the rest of the human race. A self-selecting elite that finds itself increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country around them. Perhaps a few of these geniuses would wake up one morning and wonder how terrifically brilliant they really were if 7 out of 10 people lived a totally different life than they did and were basically glad of it. But they don't. When they don't blame it on others, a la John Edwards' "Two Americas Speech", they consider it an affirmation of their own superiority.

While I'm not sure Jack Kelly accurately predicts a 4th Great Awakening over the Terri Schiavo incident, there is a genuine philosophical need to define what constitutes a human being, and how that life should be valued. Engaging that debate without a biased understanding of Christian Theology regarding that subject could very well be like showing up to a gun fight with only a knife. Religion will inform the politics of tomorrow no matter what the elitists believe.

This may not presage the dreaded Rovian Theocracy that many on the left currently rail against. Jimmy Carter won the presidency with the strong support of religious voters and Bill Clinton didn't give those votes away without a fight. However, this is because both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton knew that they had to at least follow the example of Henry of Navarre and accept that maybe Paris was after all worth the mass.

Update I: Of the Mind puts the spotlight on a blogger who blames Pope John Paul II for the child molestation scandal. Read the post and judge for yourself. Honest criticism or shiek, Post-Modern Christophobia?

At The Bottom Of The Pyramid

2005-04-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

For about two months after I graduated from college, I went back home to my home town while I waited for my Army OBC reporting date. This was a fairly boring and uneventful two months except for one peculiarity. These two guys I knew but wasn't really buddy-buddy with in High School, I'll call them Huey and Louie, kept trying to get me interested in this phenominal opportunity.

This phenominal opportunity was something called "interactive marketing." This was the current euphemism for AMWAY. These guys had been duped into joining a pyramid scheme and now were looking for a way off the bottom. All of a sudden they noticed "Good Old Steve" was back in town and they both hoped to latch on to the sucker who would take them off the hook.

Needless to say, I had no real desire to sell scented soaps and Fruit Of The Loom underwear to 20 of my closest friends. It took me about two weeks to get rid of Huey and Louie and as far as I know, they still have that lifetime supply of mens underwear stashed in their parents' garage somewhere. However, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of younger Americans felt the same desperation with the US Government's very own federally funded pyramid scheme. Namely, Social Security.

A recent report by the Social Security Trustees, does nothing to asuage the sense that the generation of workers now aged 25 to 35, are the newest suckers with the garages full of scented soap and unmentionables. The excellent blog Cold Hearted Truth tells us that according to the Trustees, "benefits are scheduled, not garunteed." Run that one by your attorney for a smarm check.

An FAQ at the Social Secuity website (www.ssa.gov) gives us a more comprehensive, and even less reassuring, explanation of how SS will not work. The gory details follow below.

Q. I'm 35 years old. If nothing is done to improve Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?

A. Unless changes are made, at age 73 your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter from presently scheduled levels. See the 2004 Trustees Report

Q. I'm 25 years old. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?

A. Unless changes are made, when you reach age 63 in 2042, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you lived to be 100 years old in 2079 (which will be more common by then), your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 33 percent from today's scheduled levels. See the 2004 Trustees Report

Q. Should I count on Social Security for all my retirement income?

A. No. Social Security was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement. It is often said that a comfortable retirement is based on a "three-legged stool" of Social Security, pensions and savings. American workers should be saving for their retirement on a personal basis and through employer-sponsored or other retirement plans.

Thus, we have a pension system that promised more than it can deliver and based itself on a pyramid scheme. Thus, the older people who already contributed their whole working lives want to make sure they get what they feel they were promised.

For the younger people, these benefits weren't promised, they were scheduled. Like a minor league baseball game, these benefits can seemingly get unscheduled in a hurry the next time an older member of Congress feels like raiding the Social Security Trust Fund and leaving a risible IOU in the account instead.

Therefore, the taxes we younger members of the workforce pay for Social Security go into a lock-box. The benfits we are supposed to get back out are only "scheduled." America's so-called safety net has left it's younger generation at the base of a SCAMWAY pyramid. Social Security must be reformed and the sooner the better.

Wesley Clark: The Return Of The Barracks Emperor

2005-04-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

It's Very thoughful of Barracks Emperor Wesley Clark to advise the House of Representatives when it should hold hearings, and what they should be about. It shows a level of decorum and tact that catapulted him to such hieghts in last Winter's Presidential Primaries. He may have struck his guidon and retreated last year, but he has now returned to explain to us all how to deal with Iraq and Syria.

To whit, he has strongly reccommended we reassure both Iran and Syria that our intentions in Iraq will not cause either of them any harm. Except this would not be honest. Any action we take effects these countries. They have fundamentally organized themselves around opposing us and condemning our society and way of life. So if we are in Iraq, and we organize it to resemble the United States in any way, shape or fashion, we drop the gauntlet in front of the leadership in both of these nations. They can pick it up, or they can suffer the penalties that accrue to cowards.

While niether country can put armed formations against our Iraq force openly, they are currently using Fabian tactics in hopes that our population will demand our leadership to remove our forces from Iraq. This very well may work against the US. It has in the past.

However, reassuring two countries wo are selling weapons and providing logistical support to a guerrilla force bent on our destruction will not make these countries abate. It will enhance their belief in the effort they are engaged in. The rewards of cravenness then arrive in our inbox.

Thus, when Barracks Emperor Wastely Clark demands that the House of Representatives hold hearings about what we will do if Syria collapses, we should mail The General Emeritus a bottle of champagne and a party favor. Even if that's not what Denny Hastert would do if Syria tanked, it's what millions of other people would do in Lebannon, Isreal, Turkey, Jordan and without a doubt in Iraq as well.

Reassuring Bashir Assad of anything, is like telling the school bully who steals your lunch money that it doesn't bother you at all. It's as counterproductive and ineffective as Wesley Clark's last political campaign.

Quality Vs. Sanctity - Why Should I Get To Live?

2005-03-31T12:22:00.000-08:00

It didn't used to require a PhD in Philosophy to tell whether Peter Singer was a nutcase or a genius. The Associated Press reported Singer's comments:

"I do think that it is sometimes appropriate to kill a human infant," he said, adding that he does not believe a newborn has a right to life until it reaches some minimum level of consciousness."

"For me, the relevant question is, what makes it so seriously wrong to take a life?" Singer asked."Those of you who are not vegetarians are responsible for taking a life every time you eat. Species is no more relevant than race in making these judgments."

I won't persume credentials I haven't earned, but this humble man opines that Peter Singer is niether. He is evil. As evil as evil gets and meaner than the Balrog, who nearly dispatched Gandolf, deep underground, in The Mines of Moria.

Now that wasn't a particularly nuanced statement. In fact it was downright judgemental, if you ask me. That's also OK in my book. God issued me judgement, I use it. That makes me judgemental.

Not judgemental in the sense that Judge Greer was judgemental. I didn't just yank a feeding tube out of anyone's throat and let them dry out and expire like a beached suckerfish on La Playa Del Rio. That's not only judgemental, that's flat-out cold.

It also involves making a decision based on crappy information that is itself based on a graveman that does not stand the test of truth. Judge Greer has assumed away the sanctity of life. He's based his decision on the faulty assumption that he can scientifically determine the value of a human life and thereby terminate said life if it imposes a cost to society greater than it's benefit.

I'll proceed from a more fundamentally honest premise. I'd never just chuck the sanctity of life ona lark. I like the idea of other people holding my life sacred. After being stretchered off a rugby pitch and taken in for surgery once, I'm really fond of my life having sanctity and having doctors treat it with such. I appreciate those guys wholeheartedly.

People will say that I'm in favor of the sanctity of life because I'm in fear for my own skin. I'd answer the way Robert Dinero's character Sam did in the movie Ronin. I'd look at the guy like he was an idiot and state the obvious.

"It covers my body."

That's one objection to abolishing sanctity of life in favor of quality of life, now here's another one. Judge Greer attempts to convince us that he can measure the quality of Terri Schiavo's life. Again, I'll be more honest with you. I can't tell you the true, intrinsic value of a can of green beans.

If a were a dialectical materialist, I would add the value of the intrinsic materials to the skill of the labor endowed. If I were Milton Friedman, I'd ask what my nieghbor logically perceives this can of beans to be worth. If I were Confuscious, I'd take Beano first so that I wouldn't offend the others at the dinner table.

There you have it. Niether I, nor Hegel, nor Kierkagaard nor Judge Greer can tell you what a can of green beans should really be worth. We, as fallable human beings, are in no position whatsoever to stick a price tag on Terri Schiavo's forehead.

It really is that simple. I'm not a good enough Christian to claim God told me to protect Terri Schiavo. I'm not even close to being smart enough to tell you objectively that Terri Schiavo's life or even a can of green beans had a positive intrinsic value that does not depend a certain leap of faith.

But on this one, I'll swallow my agnosticism and the egoism that it entails. I want life to have a certain, inviolate sanctity. I want this because I want my life to be treated like it has an intrinsic value, and because, as an analyst and a person who spends his professional life calculating values, this is one analysis I'm utterly underqualified to perform and hope that I never have to pull the trigger on.

I'm not sure what scares me and p-ss-s me off more. Judge Greer deciding that Terri Schiavo should have been killed, someone deciding that Judge Greer was qualified to decide such a thing, or Judge Greer believing he had the normative prowess to make this decision.

Whether you live a life that is the perfect imitation of Christ or whether you behave like I used to on Saturday Night, monotheism is an excellent principal to leave intact. Let God evaluate the value of Terri Schiavo and hope that others will let him do the same in terms of the value of your existence as well.

Update I: Wizbang posts a picture gallery in memory of Terri Schiavo.

Update II: I don't totally buy into VodkaPundit's take on this, but I must admit, he really says it well.

Update III: Judge Birch not only represents everything I'm afraid of in a judiciary, he's also a sadistic little creep. If he didn't believe The Schiavos had a legal leg to stand on, he should have just rejected their appeal and called it a day.

Update IV: Sue Bob's Diary comments on the cruel and oppertunistic behavior of Judge Birch.

Update V: Chris "Meatwad" Matthews shows us why he's one of a kind. His brain stopped working long ago, Judge Greer, may we please stop feeding him?

LAPD Gets A Wake-Up Call (Thank MS-13)

2005-03-31T07:19:00.000-08:00

Just when I convince myself that it really is all going to heck in a handbasket. Just when it looks like no one has an ounce of sanity left in them at all. Something surprising happens that completely knocks me off kilter and forces me to reevaluate.

Today, finally, the LAPD has received a wake-up call on illegal immigration. Today, they finally realized that allowing a gang like MS-13 to operate out of the barrios of East LA could not coexist with their mission of upholding the law and protecting the peace.

Against a stark backdrop of growing violence and audacity from members of Mara Salvatruca - 13, the LAPD finally has woken up to the problem on their doorstep.

"The LAPD is working on language that would direct officers who see suspects they believe to be felons in the U.S. illegally to call their supervisors for a check with immigration officials, Assistant Police Chief George Gascon said. If a person is determined to be here illegally, federal authorities would seek an arrest warrant from a judge. At that point, LAPD officers could arrest the suspect.

The move comes several months after the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department changed its policy and began checking the immigration status of foreign-born inmates in County Jail and turning illegal immigrants over to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Additionally, the LAPD's Rampart Division has been working with immigration officials on a special task force designed to crack down on violent gangs whose members go back and forth from the U.S. to Central America." - LA Times

The spread of MS-13 to every corner of the US and throughout Central and South America particularly embarasses the LAPD. The first American outpost for these drug and weapon smugglers was 13th Street, which runs near Rampart Station. LA has become home to one of the first immigrant street gangs to legitimately become a terrorist organization since La Cosa Nostra.

While the LAPD has been under executive order not to cooperate with Federal Immigration Officials, MS-13 grew wealthy, grew strong, grew audacious and grew in stature. It even had business meetings with representatives from Al Quaida. When the local drug selling operation negotiates with Al Quaida, this problem cannot remain solely under local jurisdiction.

MS-13 elevated its profile even further in the ongoing issue over what is being done or not done to secure the US border between Mexico and Arizona. A group of US activists calling themselves "The Minuteman Project" recently announced it would assist the Border Patrol by standing watch over the border and calling in the police any time they spotted illegals.

The leadership of MS-13 resented their border being appropriated in this fashion and threatened them with violence. This led the Department of Homeland Security to send in 500 agents. MS-13's arrogance and shamelessly brazen contempt for the law have finally brought the immigration issue out of the dark.

It was a leader of MS-13 in LA who finally got the LAPD to take action.

"Senior LAPD officials have been talking about creating clearer guidelines for Special Order 40 for years. But the issue came to a head several months ago in Hollywood.A group of officers came face to face with a Mara Salvatrucha gang leader walking down the street, Capt. Mike Downing said.

The officers believed that the man had been deported after being convicted in a string of violent crimes a few years ago.There was a debate over what the officers could do. In the end, the LAPD decided to get immigration officials involved. Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the man had reentered the United States illegally and received a federal warrant for his arrest." - LA Times.

Sometimes people get drunk on power and totally overplay their hand. MS-13 had gotten away with murder and everything else for decades. They treated the US Border with open contempt and laughed at any concept of it as a deterrent to their evil. Now they've laughed too loudly, and maybe the law will finally begin to get enforced.

Whither North Korea? Nowhere good either way.

2005-03-31T05:37:00.000-08:00

Even the official name of North Korea suggests that things have gone badly off track and are mired in the ditch. On a really good day, I can spell Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Even on a great day, I'd never want to live there.

If a country's official name gets any longer or more bureaucratic than say, Los Estados Unidos de Mexico, a lot of things have probably gone terribly wrong in the State of Denmark, or anywhere else that happens to call itself a People's Republic. As if there was some other kind...

North Korea's problems begin with its climate and geography. According to the US Library of Congress,

"Topography: Approximately 80 percent of land area mountain ranges and uplands. All mountains on peninsula over 2,000 meters high are in North Korea.

Climate: Long, cold, dry winters; short, hot, humid summers. Approximately 60 percent of rainfall falls in June through September. "

To make a long analysis get to the point, the place is an agricultural failure waiting to happen. It takes good, competent managers to prevent this. Which brings us, regrettably, to the cretinous moorlocks currently in charge.

The US Library of Congress works for a bunch of congressmen. This requires them to develop the use of nuance and euphemism to the point where they can technically describe the North Korean government without resorting to profanity.

"Political System: Communist state under leadership of Kim Il Sung, general secretary of ruling Korean Workers' Party (KWP)and president of state, elected May 1990. Power centralized in hands of Kim Il Sung ("great leader"), son Kim Jong Il ("dear leader"), and select few holding positions on three-member Standing Committee of twenty-member Political Bureau (elected to five-year terms under 1992 revision of 1972 constitution; as of September 1992, thirteen full members; seven candidate members), inner council of 303-member KWP Central Committee (as of September 1992, 160 full members, 143 alternate members). Preeminence of party control (estimated 3 million members) unchallenged and as of mid-1993 no discernible signs of internal opposition to Kim Il Sung's absolute authority. Members of Supreme People's Assembly, unicameral legislature, also elected to five-year terms (as revision to 1972 constitution) in May 1990, with power to elect and recall authority of chairman, National Defense Commission, on president's recommendation; universal suffrage age seventeen. Constitution revised April 1992 at Supreme People's Assembly; text released in November 1992 by South Korean press. Nominally Marxist-Leninist in doctrine, but since mid-1970s, chuch'e, indigenous doctrine, promotes ideology of national self-reliance."

Or to put things more accurately and less euphemistically, they have a dictatorship that does not dictate well, quashes dissent after they screw up, fails to share anything with anyone in the country and then tells the nation's people to go practice an "ideology of national self-reliance." You'd think they were People's Republicans or something.

They are not. They are insane idiots. Their subjects eat less than 50% of what the World Health Organization suggests a healthy adult should. These people serve a government that hates The United States, and wishes us nothing but rampant colon cancer.

Perhaps, on a primal, carniverous level, this is a good thing. Except that it isn't, unless you're Judge Greer and find these people extraneous anyhow. North Korea's suffering will become a major problem for us.

Why? Because everyone's suffering becomes a major problem for us. We are the world, we always get stuck feeding the children. The rest of the planet despises us for that, but that will never stop them from begging.

Another reason why? 39% of the North Korean population undergoes at least semi-regular military training. Out of 22 million people, that equals lots of them. To put this less flippantly, they are a potential juggernaut, commanded by a leadership, that would expend their lives like a dot.com business enterprise would blow through its petty cash fund.

To make this situation even less pleasant, we're technically at war with this nation. It's the hairball in East Asia's digestive tract and it's stubborn and determined in a way that only the truly fanatic can be.

So how will this mess probably end? Not well. There are no winners. It's the ultimate sucker bet for anybody involved. So I rank what I perceive as probably outcomes in order of least pestilent to most tragic.

The North Korea government falls victim to it's own irrational stupidity. It fails and it's fuedalistic primates all purge one another. This is good because the hellfire never rains on Seoul and the Koreans can begin the awful rebuilding project. This is bad because China and South Korea end becoming the primary care givers for over 20 million people who haven't had a good, juicy Big Mac in over a decade. This is also bad because the US, Russia, Japan, S. Korea and China have a jump ball over who gets to play with North Korea's nukes. This, of course, assumes they find those nukes before they show up on E-Bay.
The South Koreans get tired of the US Army and kick us out with KIJ still running The Nuthouse to the North. According to a Pew Survey, 58% of South Koreans regretted the fact that the Iraquis didn't put up a better fight against the US Army. It's not like these people still consider us an ally. The immediate result would probably be massive military and diplomatic pressure from both North Korea and China on South Korea to fold its tent and join the Worker's Revolution. Pyongyang would come to rapidly rule a united Korea and the South Korean economy would work about as well as Cuba's or North Korea's. That is to say, the world would then have to feed 60 or so starving, miserable Koreans with over a 12 million man military and nuclear weapons, or else.
The North Koreans get desperate, hungry and invade S. Korea to steal what they can't grow. The carnage is awful. The entire Korean Peninsula gets returned to the 4th Century AD. China and Russia deploy millions of soldiers and tanks to seal their borders and stop refugees from crossing. The US and ROK Army probably win an exhaustive war that grinds about 3 or 4 million people into fertilizer. Maybe, a nuclear weapon gets used on Seoul or on a US base.

So the Korean Peninsula is the ultimate no win situation. Everyone plays what Coach Dean Smith termed "The Carolina Four-Corners" and hopes the other side runs out of time and fresh players off the bench. The entire fiasco perhaps lends credence to General MacArthur's poignant assertion. "There is no substitute for victory."

Mythology And Health Care Costs. Prices Don't Just Go Up.

2005-03-30T10:56:00.000-08:00

No one really likes it when a product increases at a price that's twice the rate of inflation. This quickly puts that product out of the reach of the average consumer. Predictably, the mourners will sing about how it is all unfair. This has been especially true in the case of health care costs.

Health care costs in this nation are going up at double the rate of inflation and now cost $600 billion a year or a debilitating 11.5% of our gross national product. By comparison, Canada spends 8.5% of its gross national product on health care; Japan 6.7% and Britain 6.2%.

By the year 2,000 it is estimated that if health care costs continue to rise at today's rates that we will be spend-ing 15% of our gross national product on health care and at that point even our big auto companies will break under the cost burden. If America's premier manufacturing companies will not be able to afford employee health care - who will? - Mike Westfall (1990)

Who can afford employee health care? The government. And that, Ladies and Germs, is the graveman of the problem. Health care is no longer retailed in this country, it's auctioned. Even worse than that, it's not just auctioned, it's auctioned via a rigged scheme. As long as that remains the case, you'd better look twice before crossing the busy thoroughfare.

Here's how health care came to be auctioned, rather than retailed. The people who paid for health care started out being, by and large, individual consumers. This put a ceiling on how much the drug companies, hospitals and physicians could bill. My vastly empty wallet was a sure fire cost control mechanism.

People then began to recognize that they could manage risk and pool funds. Several people with a small likelihood of requiring a procedure could gang up and easily pay for the cost of the one poor unlucky soul who needed it. The insurance policy and health plan were born.

Doctors and drug inventors, by their professional nature, are not stupid people. They quickly realized that if people had more money to buy a product, they could afford it even if it cost a whole bunch more. This happened in short order, and people once more became highly concerned that they could not afford the services of medical professionals, even with a health plan.

This situation became exacerbated further, because insurers and health plan coordinators could also manage risk by controlling who was allowed to kick into the pool. People who exhibited health characteristics that led to frequent or expensive demands on the money pool had to pay in more to join or were banned outright. They were still charged for health care as if they were part of a unified money pool. At this point, the health care market was now an auction market.

When a consumer could no longer afford to bid high enough for a scarce MRI or HIV drug, they lost. This is how auction markets work at Southerby's or anywhere else in the world in which they occur. This is not a problem at Southerby's, because no one is going to die if they don't have an original Renoir to hang in the drawing room. They may very well die soon if they don't have a check for colon cancer. Hence, a lot of people felt intense pain at having to participate in an auction to get health care.

Members of the government looked at this situation and saw that the people who would need certain health care services the most would not have them made available unless they were wealthy dillitantes. They then proceeded to pave the road to Stygian health care costs with the finest and most noble of intentions.

When the government entered the health care market, they became a unique consumer for two important reasons.

They could outbid anyone who moved. Their pot of money was The Federal Budget. The Federal Budget is profoundly resourced and has a level of credit that far outstrips the actual cash account that the IRS brings in each year. No matter how badly we bloat our deficit, it's still going to be a long, long time before The Federal Reserve actually issues a junk Treasury Bond.
The people setting the prices had the ability to collude via there lobbyists and convince this bidder to actually inflate it's bid. The AMA lobbied assiduously for the US Government to spend more on health care because of the high costs. The government bid higher, the medical professionals then jacked up the prices.
The recursion here doesn't take Einstein to figure out. You can see a very similar regression line with college tuitions and Pell Grants. What's the only humane solution? More Pell Grants. What happens when the government pumps in more liquidity? Higher tuition.

So what do many advocates of fixing this problem reccommend? National Health Care plans. Letting the government be the only payer for health care. This would constitute an unmitigated disaster on several levels.

The government would price health care where ever a lobbyist told them to. This would bear no legitimate relation to what the services cost. If they made health care too cheap, everyone would demand it at a larger level than necessary. This would flood hospitals with claims that at least quasi-hypochondriatic. Drugs, vaccinations and the time of highly skilled doctors would become too scarce.

The average patient would son have little or no chance of getting these services. This is why Canadian patients wait for months to get an MRI. Sure, it's a cheap MRI compared to the US, but that's why a few million other people are in line and that MRI scanner won't be available for another year or two.

If they price the health care too expensively, you'd have The Prescription Drug Panderation Act. It would wreck our budget and drive our Medicare Program several years closer to bankruptcy. It would hyper-inflate the cost of every prescription drug on the market even more than the current regime. It would sure suck out loud if The President and Congress wanted to saddle us with a really stupid bill like that one.

So that's how we get a leviathan-like government and no health care. We keep recruiting a richer designated payer for health care costs and then wonder why the product costs go up far faster than the level of value provided via the services. It's a prima-face example of how you wind up with something for nothing when greed and fear replace intellectual thought in the market place.

Doctors and drug makers will provide a certain level of value, no matter who pays for the service. The more cash gets pumped into that particular market, the more these people will vaccuum it off the table without increasing the value they provide.

Giving the whole thing over to the government or a big HMO won't fix it either. That will cause your prostate surgery to be priced by a cost accountant or a GS-13 Operations Research Analyst. I'd rather have my medical bill tallied up by someone who's done an operation or two.

The key to killing off greedy insurers, unethical Doctors and power-lusting government bureaucrats before they become parasites who live off our medical field is to end the hyperinflation. Cut off the money and you cut off the bad guys from their oxygen. When the average American goes to the pharmacist, there should be a single payer. The patient.

MS - 13 and The Permiable US Border

2005-03-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

It's not a banner day for any government when a group of its own citizens form a posse to guard it's national border and are publically threatened one of the world's largest drug smuggling operations. This has recently happened at a section of the US border near Tucson, Ariz.

The citizens preparing to set up a vigil on the border dub themselves "The Minuteman Project." In their manifesto, they state the following.

"This project is the result of our government failing to do its most basic duty: protecting each State in the Union against invasion (Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution). ..."

and furthermore,

"At the current rate of invasion the United States will be completely over run with ILLEGAL aliens by the year 2025...only 21 years away. ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the U.S. and will have made such inroads into the political and social systems that "they" will have more influence than our Constitution over how the U.S. is governed. The ugly consequence of an ignored U.S. Constitution is already taking place.

Future generations will inherit this mutated form of the United States of America, consisting of 100 different sub-nations, speaking 100 different languages, and promoting 100 different cultural agendas. That will certainly guarantee the death of this nation as a "melting pot". Instead, it will be tantamount to a sack of marbles...with each marble colliding with the other marbles, as each culture scrambles for dominance of its culture over all others.

The final result: political and social mayhem. "

To make things even more chaotic, a renowned Salvadoran drug smuggling cartel, Mara Salvatruca, or MS-13, as it is known on the streets, has threatened to inflict violence on these 'Minutemen'. Perhaps this is an effort to demonstrate to people exactly who really owns the Southern US Border.

Mara Salvatruca has deadly intent. They have spent years smuggling drugs and weapons over the Mexican Border and are in no mood to stop doing so. This is their lifeblood. The Minuteman Project threatens to hit them where they live.

According to World Net Daily,

"A leader of the violent, terror-connected Latin American gang Mara Salvatruchas, Ebner Anivel Rivera-Paz, has reportedly issued orders from federal prison to members of his international criminal organization to teach a lesson to a group of Americans taking border control into their own hands.
...
Lately, the gang has joined forces with former members of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, a radical terrorist group, and some U.S. intelligence sources say they may also be cooperating with Islamic terrorist groups – including al-Qaida. " - Hat-Tip Digger's Realm.

The US Border Patrol has announced a significant increase in resources to protect the Arizona section of the US Mexican border. What that means in real terms remains to be seen. What we know right now is the following.

The US Government has not put the necessary effort into controlling the border.
The citizens, particularly in Arizona, have become so sick of this that they are willing to toe the line of outright vigilantiism in order to restore basic civil order.
Gangs like MS-13 have so little respect for the US Government in general that they see no problem publically threatening The Minuteman Project with violence that will take place on US soil.

I can only hope that recent overtures towards putting more Border Patrol agents in Arizona are genuine. This is not a situation that the US government has adequately under control. It will get worse and perhaps quite violent if immediate action isn't taken. Perhaps Bill O' Rielly call for National Guard deployments to the border are not as outlandish as they may seem at first blush.

System Identification And The Future Of Humanity

2005-03-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

US Air Force Mathematician David Lee descibes the system identification problem below in The Cost Analyst's Companion.

"You're given an input F(t), and output g(t), predict the output h(t) of the system if given a new input."

This seemingly innoccous engineering problem metaphorically describes a lot of what has recently happened to the human condition. We have confused ourselves of what constitutes the creation of a human being , and therefore are no longer particularly certain if all of the outputs we could possibly classify as human beings are of equal value.

When we were still certain that we all became human beings the same way and that we all had certain rights and responsibilities that flowed from that state of being. As long as we kept that basic code straight, we were fine and could all just get along. Or as Thomas Jefferson put it -

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,..." - Declaration of Independence.

This statement inhered a large number of assumptions that not everyone in the country, or in the rest of the world, willing swalloed whole. Every time we deviated from it, we wound up with nothing but trouble. The 3/5ths Compromise, the Pro-Choice Movement, even The NAZI's in Germany all found ways to skirt this basic premise. However, prior to the Euthanasia Movement, all of these deviations from the principle laid out by Mr. Jefferson, had one common denominator.

Each of the the three situations where innocent human beings were either enslaved or killed involved a philosophical subterfuge. This involved taking groups of people, namely Africans, Jews and unborn infants, and classifying them as something other than human.

Prior to the Euthanasia Movement, an individual, defined specifically as a human being, had engage in totally despicable bahavior , e.g. to murder others, before anyone in society sanctioned their killing as a just process. What is happening in the case of Terry Schiavo, and what happened in the cases of everyone Jack Kervorkian "helped", is a new level of moral depravity.

Now we no longer have the same respect for humanity. It's as if the process by which humans are created can produce a different output than the one identified by Thomas Jefferson. When it comes to basic humanity, we no longer feel confident that we have the system identification of what being human is and what being human entails completely figured out. This could kill every one of us one day, really!

Update I - The Jawa Report suggests that another Founding Father has been totally left out of the equation during the ongoing 'Euthanasia' of Teri Schiavo.

Update II - Michelle Malkin reports that Terri Schiavo's Brother-In-Law has been quoted as saying that Terri's dehydration is just a "natural part of the dying process."

Oh, The Humanity!

2005-03-22T06:25:00.000-08:00

A woman named Terri Schiavo lies dehydrating in Florida. She is incapable of receiving nutrition through her mouth, and thus must be fed by a tube. Her husband claims that she wishes to die and be free, her parents say otherwise and both the husband and the immediate family are lawyered to the hilt. This has become yet another battleground in the war between so-called Pro Life and so-called Pro-Choice political advocacy groups.

In a recent poll on whether Terri should live or dehydrate, ABC News offered the following preamble to the main question.

" Schiavo suffered brain damage and has been on life support for 15 years. Doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. Her husband and her parents disagree about whether she would have wanted to be kept alive. Florida courts have sided with the husband and her feeding tube was removed on Friday."

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters posts that ABC News made her seem less well off to push an agenda. Namely,

"... she has never been on life support, she is simply getting food and water thru a tube. That is not "on life support." Further, while some doctors have said she had "no consciousness " others in the medical community disagree. "

Wizbang demands to know "If they are doing the right thing, why do they have to stretch the truth to defend their actions?" - H/T to Wizbang.

I demand to know how in the heck anyone would know whether Mr. Schiavo or the parents has this issue right at all? Also, for the unfortunate judges who have had this one dropped in their laps, how do they adjudicate this?

There are two possible ways to approach that conundrum. The first is to make a decision based on Utilitarian grounds, under the particular instances of this case. The judge could apply the decision and then walk away, announcing that a decision of this magnitude could only be correctly made on a case-by-case basis.

The other method would be an attempt on the part of the judge to write overarching legal guidance that would settle future controversies based on clear, legal interpretation. Given that this decision would potentially be used as a precedent anyhow, there is an argument over who wins the high ground of precedent.

Having a hard and fast rule to adjudicate these cases in the future would save a lot of grief and grievance later. What would be even better, would be an overarching legal standard of what constitutes a human being. This is ultimately what this fight is being waged over. We can't just cavalierly yank the plug out of a human being.

Nobody really wants an overarching standard of what constitutes a human being. That would cut too close to the quick. It would reveal way too much when unborn infants, and the chronically ill had to be retaxonimized for the next edition of the Biology Textbooks. That's ultimately what it has come to.

There are elements of modern society who want to be able to eschew their responsibilities to the living and not pay the penalty for it. These reponsibilities can be crushing, but they are towards a human being. At least they are, until we change the definition of what human is.

This is why we need to force the issue on the courts to decide whether there is such a thing as someone who is conceived of two human parents, but is not human. Making this battle take place in front of the cameras disallow this continued defining down of all of humanities.

If Scott Peterson Were A Smarter Criminal, Who Would He Be?

2005-03-21T09:08:00.000-08:00

According to BlueStateBase, Michael Schiavo didn't have the agonizing choice to make that he's currently getting salubrious credit for. In fact, his only problem with the situation is that Terri continues to breathe.

...first Michael Schiavo beats and strangles his wife Terri, leaves her lying unconscious on the floor until her family arrives to get her to the hospital.
Then Michael Schiavo sues the hospital for $20 million because he needs the money to get his poor wife therapy.
Then Michael Schiavo pockets the money, denies his wife the care he said she needed and finally, claims she really wants to die.
Michael Schiavo killed his wife Terri's cat, melted down her wedding ring and then took up with his girlfriend and lives with her today with their children.
Just take a gander at the sworn testimony of an attending nurse: Carla Sauer Iyer (affidavit* below) but let me save you some time and report a quote of Michael Schiavo's after visiting his still living wife: "When is that bitch gonna die?"

When is this poor woman going to die? Not yet! Thank you US Congress.

Why is Michael Schiavo so concerned? It's not over the pain. It's over what's left of the $20 million. The day after he won that judgement, he probably started wanting Terri taken off the machinery and planted somewhere six feet under.

Now, she just won't die. Michael Schiavo is watching his lawsuit swag melt away like the sands in an hourglass. He thought he'd won it all and hit the jackpot. He must have figured he could plant poor Terri, pocket the green and take up permanently with his newest rent-a-skank.

If I were truely a sadist, and was the judge in this case, I'd do the following.

Euthanize Terri Schiavo.
Charge Michjael Schiavo with murder.
Charge Michael Schiavo and all of his heirs for every legal hour billed, by every attorney involved, since this became an issue.

If Terri Schiavo were to pass peacefully in her sleep the day after Michael's booty ran out, justice would be served in a way that the euthanasianists will never understand. The woman is a human being, not a slogan generator, not a talking point, not a meal ticket for her dishonest, dirtbag of a husband.

Others Blogging this slow-motion homocide by a greedy husband follow below:

Ace of Spades , Boi From Troy , Of The Mind , Sue Bob's Diary , The American Mind, and Wizbang.

Oh, and just so you can hear what people say on behalf of a slow, agonizing execution by dehydration, here's Like Kryptonite To Logic, Himself, Oliver Willis

LASER EOD WAGON

2005-03-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

The US Army may be planning on trimming about 12,000 soldiers off of it's next rotation to Iraq, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a lot of emphasis. The most recent high-tech gadget to be earmarked for deployment is the ZUES.

The ZUES is a humvee with a powerful dual laser system. Combat engineers use it to do away with unexploed ordinance via thermal combustion. According to Defense Tech,

The system uses diesel fuel to create the laser beam, which focuses energy on the outer casing of the target, which heats up until it detonates, [triggering] a less violent explosion than if the explosive was activated, causing less damage to the surrounding area...

“Its power level and utility is new and is not for aerial targets, it’s for unexploded ordnance,” Dodgen said. “It is a system that works, and we certainly would like to use it whenever possible.”

So there you have it, less collateral damage and a more rapid disposal of unexploded bombs through technology. Onwards and upwards for new military technology.

Cozying Up To Iran? I wish I were Kidding!

2005-03-17T05:51:00.000-08:00

Who could possibly forget "America Held Hostage; Day 438!" Not me, I spent over a year of my young life hearing that on the news every day. Apparently, several of our prominent experts on foreign policy can.

Bill Clinton perhaps enhaled before he offered up this incite on the current regime in Iran.

Bill Clinton also seemed fuzzy about the true nature of tyranny, and thus was clueless about murderous theocratic Iran. Recently he cooed, "Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency" — as if theocrats there allow truly popular government. -From Victor Davis Hansen. (Jewish World Review)

Thomas P.M. Barnett offers up this gem of an observation.

WORK WITH ME ON THIS ONE. Iran getting the bomb could be the best thing that's ever happened to the Middle East peace process. .....

He then maps out how satorially elegant the emporer's new appeasement outfit would look...

I would send James Baker, our last good secretary of state, to Tehran as your special envoy with the following message: "We know you're getting the bomb, and we know there isn't much we can do about it right now unless we're willing to go up-tempo right up the gut. But frankly, there's other fish we want to fry, so here's the deal: You can have the bomb, and we'll take you off the Axis of Evil list, plus we'll re-establish diplomatic ties and open up trade. But in exchange, not only will you bail us out on Iraq first and foremost by ending your support of the insurgency, you'll also cut off your sponsorship of Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli terrorist groups, help us bully Syria out of Lebanon, finally recognize Israel, and join us in guaranteeing the deal on a permanent Palestinian state. You want to be recognized as the regional player of note. We're prepared to do that. But that's the price tag. Pay it now or get ready to rumble." -Thomas P.M. Barnett (Esquire Magazine).

Iran would just love to agree to that and I'm sure Mr. Baker is packing his travel bags as we speak. Mr. Barnett would also like to unload that Florida swamp condominium he owns the expensive time share in. If this is The Pentagon's new map, please don't hand it off to an over-eager 2nd LT.

Iran runs a thug regime. It will not negotiate with the US, because it would lose any claim to its legitimacy without us as an enemy. They are also about as likely to cut loose Syria and Hamas as they are to build a Holocaust Memorial Park.

That of course assumes the Iranian government controls Hamas as well as bankrolling it. That's quite a leap of faith and not a very safe one. Iran's government probably pays Hezbollah, Hamas and all the other assorted hudlums, vipers and churls a protection fee.

Last time out it was the US Embassy, tommorrow, it could be The Iranian National Assembly. The current PM of Iran probably gets that message at least once a month. Sometime near when the rent check is due. The Iranian regime governs with the permission of their terrorist guardians. This scenario is straight out of Plato's Republic.

Change Or Die

2005-03-16T05:09:00.000-08:00

Starting as far back as the mid 1980's, Mike Westfall and other union activists have noticed a change in how business gets done. Westfall begins one of his recent sermons against corporate America witht he following paragraph.

"The working American today faces a more complex and changing employment situation than has ever existed before in history. In many segments, for a variety of reasons, available work is shrinking while the number of those seeking work is increasing. Women, out of economic necessity, have been joining the labor market in record numbers. The baby boom generation has been swelling the workforce and a yearly new crop of inexperienced and unskilled high school graduates are demanding the availability of meaningful employment opportunities where they can make a contribution to the system and their own economic well being.

Presently this country has many alienated and demoralized young people who are at the peak of their health, energy and idealism, but are being lost to society forever because they can only find unstable, low paying, part-time jobs with little opportunity for advancement.

What really is at stake today isn't economics - it is the future of large segments of an entire generation of Americans."

A fairly typical set of opinions that you'll presently hear from leaders of labor and from political leaders from "Progressive" organizations. This could easily have come from Ralph Nader, with whom Mike Westfall has collaborated in the past.

That being said, the statement has an element of truth to it. A lot of young people who believed there would be a manufacturing job waiting for them upon entry into the workforce received a very rude shock upon graduation. This is not how the US economy works anymore.

In part, Caldwell acknowledges this himself in the statement below.

"But walk into any plant and you'll consistently find that direct labor represents only about 10% of total manufacturing costs. From studies in hundreds of U.S. plants, we know on average that 35% of costs are presently due to manufacturing overhead and 55% to purchase materials. ". We're approaching the point in our work when I don't even want to hear the term, "direct labor," on a project anymore. It just doesn't count-It's 10% of manufacturing costs and that's all the attention it's worth."

This statement attempts to cast aspersion on the business practice known as outsourcing. It attempts to minimalize the potential savings enjoyed by people who move corporate operations outside the US. What that very simple breakdown misses is two items.

First, when I buy someone else's materials, I'm paying for the direct labor used in processing them as a part of the price. When GM buys ready-made parts, it's paying for the labor involved in building them. Also, if the US has more expensive regulatory compliance fees than perhaps China or Mexico, GM also pays those fees everytime it buys an American material. So to say 55% of the money spent goes to materials is an innacuracy. 55% of the money goes to the price of materials which is adjusted upwards to account for the labor costs and fees of the part producer.

"It really does pit country against- country and worker against worker in a competitive effort to reduce all workers to the lowest common denominator. Many social scientists, in fact, are now condemning some of our American based multi-nationals for their treatment of foreign workers with low wages and poor working conditions, without really contributing to the economic well-being of these workers."

So what's new? American workers used to hold a monopoly on the skill sets required for heavy industry. This used to be the only country where the skills and capitol could easily meet up and form an organization. This is no longer true, so now workers compete to offer labor at the most affordable price.

They compete the way everyone who drives wishes oil producers had to compete. Corporations are now able to pay someone what the labor involved in heavy production is actually worth. The union premium and the scarcity premium are both eliminated.

So all of this puts an American Corporations in a bind. They can change or they can die. They can change in three ways.

They can ditch overpriced American labor and overly constrictive laws. This would make them pariahs and somewhat deservedly so. Being a pariah is not something Bernie Ebbers worries a whole lot about, so the outsourcing practice will continue until American and foreign labor rates are close enough to justify saving the transactions costs and risk premiums involved in outsourcing by relocating these factories back in the US.
They can stop wasting piles of money on perks and benefits. Ken Lay loses the jet, and all the programming nerds can forget their stock options, which are good things. You and I get screwed out of our pensions, which is not. If a corporation can hire enough competant workers to do the job without offering the benefits package, guess what action they will take?
They can apply for political relief in the forms of bans, tariffs and import quotas. If I don't have to use what happens to be banned, tariffed or limited by quota, this is pretty cool. If I don't sell any of the above, this is even more cool, because I don't lose my job. The second I do need anything on the banned, or tariffed list, I'm screwed. The second Bernie Ebbers or someone of his moral character wants something off this list, we'll have the same problems with our tariff laws that we now have with our War On Drugs. It will be totally unenforceable, and the rest of the world will hate us and laugh at us for trying.

In conclusion, we are all somewhat screwed and will all have to get by on less for the following reasons.

The rest of the world is now a heck of a lot more productive than it used to be, so we have lost our monopoly on productive industrial assets. The US will only remain the center of industrial production when it pays economically to leave it there.
The rest of the world sees our lifestyle and pretty much hates us for it. Don't expect a whole lot of sympathy from a bunch of Koreans earning $2.50 an hour when we gripe about losing factory jobs that pay $25.00 an hour.
The ability of corporations to offer generous benefits and meet prior obligations on workers' benefits is directly tied to the ability of these same corporations to continue their economic dominance in their field of endeavor. Strip away the dominance and the benefits go bye-bye. That pension you were promised back in the 1970's when most Koreans, Thais and Chinese were too illiterate to work in a factory is now financially unsupportable for the corporation or government entity that promised it to you. You will not receive most of it. Plan accordingly.

So there you have it. The new reality is not a particularly good one for the US economy. We will suck it up and deal with it, or we will die. It's not rocket science and its not anyone's fault any more than the law of gravity is someone's fault. We cannot expect the rest of the world to politely roll over and let us dominate industrial production so that we can continue to get paid upper middle class wages for what has traditionally always been working class work. As I said before, we have to change both our expectations and our ways of doing business or we will go the way of Bethlehem Steel. It's very simple, change or die.

Rule Sets - How We Civilize Ourselves

2005-03-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

I've recently slammed Thomas PM Barnett over his over his glib obsession with "locking in an alliance with China at today's rates." When he thinks, he sometimes only thinks in an act utilitarian fashion. However, he does think about interesting topics and often brings them to life in both his weblog and his journal; Rule Set Reset.

In one article in February's Edition, "Rules, Rule Sets and Social Systems," author Mark Safranski posits a theory of how civilizations stipulate rules and maintain order. He described four classes of rule sets that can be charted on two sets of axis to form a Cartesian Plain.

One a first axis, he describes rules as explicit or implicit. Explicit rules are written down and technical in nature. They are the stuff of law books and are enforced by referees, police officers or regulators of some sort. They give rise to The Guardians that Plato was afraid needed guarding themselves.

Implicit rules are less tangible and require a certain savvy and soul to intuit. They are traditions, customs and "the vibe" you sense around you. They get enforced by everyone, to a certain degree. You won't get ticketed for breaking one of these, but if no one wants to be around you, even your friends, then you've probably jumped outside these sometimes subtle social norms.

On another axis he lays out rules as either strong or weak. Strong rule sets hammer violators with a bad consequence that occurs with high probability. The expected value of any transgression small or large is substantially reduced. Weak rule sets either issue a slap on the wrist or punish in an unpredictable fashion.

This analysis allows Safranski to classify societal rules as being Totalitarian (Strong, Explicit), Individualistic (Weak, Explicit), Communal (Strong, Implicit) or Anarchic (Weak, Implicit). This makes for a convenient shorthand for dividing up the world's societies. You have the Core (Explicit, well-defined rule systems) and the Gap (Implicit, unclear rule systems). Or, if an analyst prefers, there are the Repressed (Strong, harsh rule systems) or the Free (Weak, laid back rule systems).

In my opinion, niether split really gives you an accurate taxonomy of what is really out there today. A third axis, possibly hinted at by Safranski when he described "buy -in", could and should be Compliance. This would vary between voluntary (most people generally accept these rules, punitive enforcement is not frequently needed to keep the populace in line), and Coerced (most people disobey, the second the authorities take a walk and only frequent, brutal punishments keep it going).

This would further subdivide Safransky's categories into a more accurate picture of what types of rule sets exist.

Totalitarian Rule Sets would become

a) Authoritarian (Strong, Explicit, Voluntary; e.g. Canon Law of The Roman Catholic Church) - a large number of people except being told exactly how things will work.

b) Tyrannical (Strong Explicit, Coerced; e.g. Modern China, Saudi Arabia) - a large number of people are held against their will.

Individualistic rule sets would become either

a) Libertarian (Weak, Explicit, Voluntary; e.g. The Modern US in many respects) - People are willing to accept a limited amount of authority and a larger amount of personnal responsibility.

b) Powerless (Weak, Explicit, Coerced; e.g. Fuedalism in 14th Century France) - This is the best of several poor choices. It doesn't work, no one likes it, other alternatives just don't exist accept for anarchy.

Communal Rule Sets would bifurcate into

a) Mutual (Strong, Implicit, Voluntary; e.g. Social norms and cultural traditions) - People are generally in agreement over "how things work".

b) Unavoidable (Strong, Implicit, Coerced; e.g. the caste structure in most societies, taboos) - Something that no one really likes, but that has to be worked out. People accept these unwritten rules, often against their wills, in service of a higher good.)

Anarchy would not bifurcate accept that possibly, if a Voluntary anarchy existed, it would last until people grew tired of it's deleterious effects.

By ignoring the will of the people to comply with a rule set, the author ignores a vital component in judging the vitality of a given rule set. If we ignore the coersive element rampant in many modern dictatorships, then Neville Chamberlain definitely should have "locked in Hitler at 1936 rates."

The Pot Calls The Kettle Genocidal

2005-03-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

A man who once served as a domestic terrorist for The Klu Klux Klan is not the sort of person who should go around comparing anyone's tactics to Adolf Hitler. Unless, perhaps he's drawing off of knowledge gleaned from personnal experience.

Senator Robert Byrd, who honed his leadership techniques in the KKK, seems to think hubris is a hip new martial arts craze, because this is exactly what he recently did on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

"Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side," the Democrat from West Virginia said. "Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

The Republicans and The Anti-Defamation League wasted no time in calling Senator Byrd on his hateful rhetoric.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership, said in a statement, "Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable."

ADL Director Abraham Foxman said: "It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party."

CNN reports that Senator Byrd trotted out a spokesman/lackey to clean up his rhetorical dogpile.

"Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority."

Republicans poured on harder at that juncture.

"With his knowledge of history and his own personal background as a KKK member, he should be ashamed for implying that his political opponents are using Nazi tactics," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Yes, Mr. Brooks indeed had a point there. The pot did indeed have the audacity to call the kennel genocidal.

Moving The Ball

2005-03-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

The word from President Bush's oponents on Social Security Reform is that he is running out of time to convince the public that Social Security needs fixing. They say this as President Bush prepares a sixty stop tour to tout his new initiative for improving the American pension system. This is not only spin on their part, but it is a sign of growing concern.

The New York Times took a poll on Social Security and misreported it's results in the following manner.

Reporting the poll's results, the Times said the survey showed that Americans "are increasingly resistant to [the president's] proposal to revamp Social Security and say they are uneasy with Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the retirement program." The paper also reported that, "The poll underscores just how little headway Mr. Bush has made in his effort to build popular support as his proposal for overhauling Social Security struggles to gain footing in Congress."

The poll ignored the fact that 68% of repondents felt the current system had troubles. It also ignored the result that 55% of these people felt that these problems justified immediate action.

This could be why even DNC Chairman Howard Dean admits that something needs to be done about Social Security. That something may or may not be the specific proposal outlined by President Bush. However, the so-called third rail is now an open point of political debate and discussion.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan added even greater impetous by stating that Social Security Reform was a key to avoiding longterm economic stagnation. This never would have happened in years past and is a sign that George W. Bush knows exactly how to move the ball towards his chosen goal post.

Update I: Boi From Troy has more detail on Alan Greenspan's Social Security remarks.

Update II: Cold Hearted Truth analyzes the New York TImes poll from a different perspective.

Update III: Right Voices chronicles one of Harry Reid's less congenial moments.

Is This Why They Call Him "Firebrand"?

2005-02-25T11:55:00.000-08:00

"Ward Churchill is a viciously anti-American demagogue. He has every right to free speech, and I support his free speech… We should give him free speech by not paying him.

You don’t need tenure in this country anyway. The idea that he would be oppressed without tenure is nonsense. There are 75 whacked-out foundations that would hire him for life. Dozens of Hollywood stars would hold fundraisers for him. His life will become a film by Michael Moore.

The question here, is ‘What obligation does society have to fund its own sickness?’

We ought to say to campuses, it’s over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you’re anti-American is grounds for dismissal."

Newt Gingrich unloads on Ward Churchill. Next time he should tell us how he really feels.

Jim Gereghty at NRO.Com thinks Ward Churchill could abolish tenure. I doubt it. Academia takes care of itself in a vicious manner. He will be drummed out of the fraternity and left to swing in the wind.

Meanwhile: Michelle Malkin details that Churchill takes his plagarism so seriously that he does it in more than just his writing.

And Furthermore: We get a dissenting view from a different academic who dislikes both Ward Churchill and Gingrich's idea.

There already exists a great deal of resentment towards universities in the public, and Churchill has become the poster child for that resentment. Still, I find it ulikely that there will actually be a major movement to utterly do away with tenure. Although I will note that there has been a diminution in the number of tenure-track jobs in recent years, and that fact has nothing to do with public pressure.

Setting aside the issue, for a moment of whether tenure is a good thing or not, I find Gingrich’s stance to be stunning. Yes, Ward Churchill has said, and will continue to say, hateful thing about the United States, yet how in the world does Mr. Gingrich propose operationalizing the concept of “anti-America” and thereby codifying it into law? And do we really even want to do such a thing? Do we want to unleash a witch hunt in our universities to weed out those who don’t think and speak “the right way"? To what end? What will we, as society, gain from such a process? - Steve Taylor.

- Once more TKS on NRO.

This Land Was Your Land, But Now It's My Land...

2005-02-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

Eminent Domain has become way too eminent. It's also now exercising way too much domain. The various layers of government in The United States are taking possession of entirely too much land that should be in the hands of private individuals. It has to be stopped somewhere.

Unrestrained eminent domain harms both citizens and the government in two vital ways. It obviously harms citizens whose land is taken. That's immediate and in the victim's face. The person once had land and now to paraphrase an old Jethro Tull Song "Farm On The Freeway," they just have a check and broken down pickup truck.

They say they gave me compensation...
That's not what I'm chasing. I was a rich man before yesterday.
And what do I want with a million dollars and a pickup truck? - Off of Crest Of A Knave.

The problem here also runs far deeper, for the individual in question. A number of our rights as citizens have far less power when we do not own the land we sleep on. Try aguing the 5th Amendment over a search of your property, if the government owns the land you live on. It's not a daunting task for a government agency to ask an allied government agency for a search warrant. A ban on religion in the public square is far worse when the public square is almost every parcel of land within the dominion. (Nevada, for example.)

Another problem occurs when the state owns all of this land, has to service it, and discovers there isn't any revenue coming in off their land taxes because they already own just about everything in site. Or, the people that own private property, within the domain of a government entity, are not wealthy enough to support that government in the style which it has become accustomed to.

This touched off a Supreme Court case over land siezures in New London, CT. Here, the municipal government of New London tried to buy up low income housing for the purpose of moving in rich corporation that would pay more taxes. It was throwing it's citizens out into the street to improve the municipal tax rate. Let's hope they can fight City Hall. Here's a discussion of the legal technicalities involved.

It was against this backdrop that Ohio Libertarian Chairman, Robert Butler, took to a lectern to decry the avaricious leviathon our rulership had become. He first described the justifications used by municipal governments in eminent domain land grabs.

"Butler said that the government's first step in exercising eminent domain is having property condemned or declared "blighted." Property that does not meet certain criteria laid down by local government can receive this designation.

He said homes in Lakewood were declared blighted for having only one bathroom or having an unpaved driveway. "Its scary to think about," Butler said. "

He also described how these governments were defrauding the Public Good clause of these eminent domain laws.

"The way the government improves the neighborhood is by taking your house away and giving it to someone else," Butler said.

The Chairman of The Ohio University Libertarians decried this as problematic for two reasons.

Corbett argued that there are "no incentives for (private corporations) to use the land responsibly" once they have been given a "free tab by the government."

In other words, eminent domain is an ever-flowing font of contractor waste, fraud, and abuse on the taxpayer bar tab. Mr. Corbett further elaborated.

The fight against eminent-domain abuses, Corbett continued, has elements of class struggle. "It's poor people that are going to lose their homes," he said. "There's definitely class components in the argument."

So not only does The People's money get wasted, but it gets wasted in a process that empowers the government to totally screw the most destitute and defenseless people in society. Does it really surprise anyone that The Sheriff of Nottingham was a public official and that Robin of Loxley gave to the poor as a member of the private sector until he could marry and claim his inheritance?

This Libertarian Party leader is out in the sticks speaking to college students and is the only person fighting the good fight on this. Where are GOP Congressmen and Senators who came to power as signators to The Contract With America.

He's trying to accomplish what the party now in power promised us in order to get elected. It's time for the GOP to return to its base on this issue and fight for the individual rights of our people. The Rockefeller Republican model of a more efficient welfare state is not a free America. It's time for Tom DeLay, Lindsay Graham and several other powerful and more economically Libertarian members of the GOP caucus to start pounding this issue.

Update I: Boi From Troy Demonstrates that West Hollywood is not immune from municipal interdiction of property rights.

Update II: C-Pol covers the New London, CT land grab.

Update III: The Blog Of The Mind, enjoyable, but not related to my blog in any way, has also taken up this issue on behalf of the oppressed in New London, CT.

More Of A Quisling Than A Churchill

2005-02-24T06:21:00.000-08:00

How does one truly become a media darling in the Postmodern Academic World?

For Richard Feynman, this involved genuine brilliance and a knack for self-promotion. He redefined quantumelectrodynamics, helped build the atomic bomb and then still had the energy to hit the lecture circuit and sell his discipline.

For others, less talented, they have to do something really loud and stupid. That will carry someone pretty far before the world gets told the emporer really has no clothes. The developers of "Cold Fusion" at the University of Utah had us all admiring their sartorial elegance for about 15 minutes.

For those with no ability whatsoever, academia proves a barren ground, unless, of course, you really hate the United States and actively root for a lot of its citizens to die a horrible death. Then George Soros, or one of his puppet organizations, opens the funding floodgates for you.

Ward Churchill became a loud and strident activist for terrorism against The United States. Not just an apologist, not just a milquetoast, whitebread, wet-pantied, liberal sympathizer. An outright advocate, rooting for the Hamas Team the way a Good Catholic Roots for Notre Dame. He's on tape firing up the troops in seattle.

(Here, Here, Here, and Here) - Michelle Malkin reader Anthony J.

This gibberish, this hatred of his own land, this unrepentant desire to see all of us "Little Eichmans" burn in the fires of Gahenna, doesn't come on the cheap. It takes a certain level of funding and support to really stab your country in the back. A whole network of committed "Little Zunigas," ready to stand up and say "screw them!" anytime an American dies by the hands of a terrorist.

Like the end of a program on PBS, this delightful entertainment is brought to you by the following sponsors:

Gustavus Myers Center, which is in turn funded by....

NAACP
The Urban League
The Ford Foundation
The Public Welfare Foundation

and amazingly enough, B'Nai Brith International.

Please keep this in mind if you are ever handed a CFC form or are solicited for a tax-deductible contribution.

The Bizarre World Of The Neosinophile

2005-02-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

Thomas P. M. Barnett sat on a panel I attended during a business conference last week in Williamsburg, Va. The man served our country well for years at The Pentagon and has an active mind, a glib turn of phrase and the ability to make an entire room of bored convention attendees laugh at some of his remarks and gasp at others. He was enpaneled with two stodgy DC careerists and stole the entire 90 minutes with off-the-cuff blandishments such as:

-- "The bigger a mess Iraq becomes, the more it unsettles the Middle East. This is turning out better than George W. Bush could have hoped for."

--"The modern DOD analyst has a chance to really screw up the world for the next 50 years."

--"The Department of Homeland Security will end up being the Department of Agriculture of the 21st Century. I guess the current administration looked at what happened in the former USSR and decided centralization was a good model."

These are all paraphrases, but they sum up the bomb-throwing tone of his thought-provoking, amusing and interesting remarks. It also made me read his blog and try to figure out roughly what made Barnett tick. This was where I came away disappointed.

Barnett seems enamoured with an old economic chestnut known as Growth Pole Theory. This theory posits that urban areas reduce the transactions costs on economic activity and therefore encourage more of it. This, in turn, sucks more people into the city, and therefore brings them into contact with the world and makes them more civilized and urbane. This theory works in some cases, and fails in others.

Barnett, no doubt, rode The Metro to Pentagon Station at taxpayer expense rather than sitting in his car during an August rush hour on 495. He also never set foot in East Hollywood any further downhill from Griffith Park than Santa Monica Boulevard. Cities have the potential of providing convenience and socialization, and they have the reality of economic dislocation, sky-high costs of living, crack houses and homeless people.

Barnett then takes the partially errant Growth Pole Theory and attempts to apply it to the current geopolitical situation. He does this through the popular framework of a model that divides the world into a Gap and a Core. The Core lives in cities, chats on the internet and has interconnected with the rest of the world via globalization. These Core nations have enjoyed all the benefits of modern travel, information technology and commerce because of their proximity to these urban growth poles that made it affordable for them to taste this luxury.

The Gap, on the other hand, lives out there in the sticks. They are the people on the other side of the modern Hadrian's Wall of geopolitical alliances. They cannot address modernization and refuse to acknowledge its risks. Thus they are forced somehow to behave like The Unabomber or Osauma Bin Ladin.

Where this leads Barnett off the tracks of reasoned thought is on the subject of China. He sees China emerging from the Gap and entering the Core. He sees strong economic growth and reads where things are manufactured when he shops at Target or Wal Mart. This leads Barnett to uncritically label China as the success story of the 21st Century.

Barnett accurately captures the fact that China has made itself a lot better off and more civilized than it was during Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward. What he missed was the context in which the governing class of The Chinese Military was allowing this to happen.

Growth and modernization in a moral vaccuum do not lead to decency or make a nation someone the US should make a trusted ally. This is where I part company from Barnett and his Core epistomology of geopolitical thought. If there is such a thing as a Core group of modern nations, it should require some core standards of decency and decorum before they roll out the welcome mat to anyone who can jump start a national economy. Hitler and Pinochet both accomplished that to a certain degree. Niether could claim rightfully enroll their governments as decent global citizens.

China reached a critical juncture in the late 20th Century. They could not remain a backwards nation and expect to survive or even mange to feed their population. Their efforts at economic modernization via central planning had failed and they needed to import at least some of the powerful trademarks of liberal democracies such as the US, Japan and the nations of Modern Europe. The Chinese Military Oligrchy wanted the cash, the gadgets and the culture. They did not want the free thinking and dissent that came coupled with Western Style Democracy.

This lead to a crisis when a group of students demonstrated for a more open society in Tienamin Square. The Chinese could have listened to these people, and at least tried to negotiate a few of their demands and throw them a bone or two. Except that they couldn't afford to. The entire system in China smacks of Fuedal privaledge; like any failed marxist state, it was an aristocracy of pull.

Who got what and who knew what could not be decided domestically by market systems. Beijing and Shanghai may meet every definition Barnett and other Growth Pole Theorists offer for an urban core. However, the society in which they exist still rigorously enfrces a gap and refuses to let the vast majority of it's population leave that gap. No matter whether the economy is agricultural, industrial or information-based, no Fuedal manor operates for long sans its surfs.

China will have to internally collapse and combust before it is ready to join the modern world as anything other than a predator state. They claim to fear US intentions in Asia, but their government desperately needs that fear. Nearly as much as Kim Il Jung in North Korea.

Hitler would never have made it longer than two years as Chancellor of Germany without the Anchluss and The Juden. The Chinese oligarchy would gone down in widespread anarchy and bloodshed without the same nationalistic fight against an enemy. They are not ready to join us in any sort of alliance, we are entirely too useful and vital an enemy to them. This is where the Neosinofiles such as Barnett egregiously miss the point of modern Facist China.

Swallower Arguments: The Ideological Closed Loop

2005-02-23T05:41:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has ever sat through a time share sales pitch, in order to get the two free tickets at the other end of the rainbow, almost understands the exquisite pain experienced by John Derbyshire, at a recent leftist teach-in about diversity. Why an individual intelligent enough to author Prime Obsession would sit through that twaddle is a topic for another day. Today, I'll focus on why these "teaching sessions" are such a hands-on history lesson in 14th Century Dentistry.

Peter Wood wrote on diversity fetishism. He opined that "(diversity studies) is a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it." I feel this is true and can also be assumed over a much larger domain of liberal thought and belief without any significant loss of generality. In other words, you have to buy into liberalism on an emotional level or not at all.

Now that works for a lot of otherwise intelligent people, but not enough to muster the popular groundswell required to ascend to power in a representative democracy that offers anything close to universal suffrage. To make the illogical seem orderly, you have to warp the reality the reveals its flaws. To convince people that purple is really yellow or blue instead, for example, you have to do something to screw up their vision. Maybe give them glasses with funky, shaded lenses.

The logical equivalent of glasses with the weird colored lenses is an argument waged on preempted categories. That is, you make a participant in the argument agree to certain ground rules and suppositions that make the outcome of the discussion a foregone conclusion. This constitutes what's called a swallower argument. It's an argument that can't be debunked because the participants have to accept a set of unproven, a priori condiditons to entry that make disagreeing illegal to the rules of the game.

For example, no one in his right mind would buy into the environmental movement and it's ideology without first proceeding from the premise that modern industry did more harm through it's pollution than it did good through its production, philanthropy or job creation. Reject that initial ground rule, and there is no logical justification to reject the premise that environmental regulation should only occur after a cost benefit analysis establishes that the regulations do more good than harm.

Another famous chestnut is the argument that the rich are unduly compensated and should therefore be taxed more in order to share the wealth. This could make some sense on its own merits, but does not become an emotional teeth-clincher that turns out the populist with pitch forks until the apriori assumption is made that every dollar that rich person makes means less welfare for those who aren't just as rich as him. Class warfare does not work if we step back and examine whether or not this wealth was stolen or earned and whether or not people entered into a bargain with this person to enrich him.

P. J. O'Rourke skillfully eviscerated this argument by describing it has "The Dominoes Pizza" view of political economy. Where if one guy gets too many slices, everyone else has to feed their family on a bunch of old, stale crusts. Logical examination renders this conceit ludicrous. Rail Baron Cornelious Vanderbilt may have been an utter Type A, Yuppie Scum, Tyrannosaurus Rex from Hell, but every time a grain wholesaler was able to ship the contents of a silo to market before it spoiled so that every farmer in town got a better price on their grain, the entire community served by that railroad was better off precisely because Vanderbilt was an egomaniacal, driven, uber-jerk would refused to take "no" for an answer.

Thus it is with much of what the cult-like hard left believes. There is no logical discussion allowed of whether standards are fair, fetuses are alive, wealth is good, or society just. Believe any of these things and you're disqualified from the discussion. The swallower argument doesn't work and the hard core of the left doesn't want you around. There are some forms of diversity that just weird these people out.