A blast from my past
One of my favorite live sets of music ever: Disco Biscuits on New Years Eve 1999. Trancefusion to the max (right before they broke up for a few months).
Enjoy courtesy of the wonderful Internet Live Music Archive.
Best. Satire. Ever.
Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson
Via The Nation magazine.
Quote of the day
In short, the state does not protect legitimate property per se, it institutionalizes private property into a legal construct that generally benefits a small elite at everyone else's expense.
Taste the difference
It's official: there is no longer any need to belabor the distinction between capitalism and a free market. If you still choose to conflate the two, even after the events of this past year, you're simply dishonest.
Maybe this will make it easier for you to understand:
- A free market is where people compete or cooperate without resorting to force or fraud.
- Capitalism is what is happening right now.
Rhetoric Tip #1
If somebody responds to a point you made by (1) prefacing their response with "I have no idea what you're talking about," (2) going on to address precisely the point you were originally intending to make, then you can be sure that they probably did have some idea all along what you were talking about. Ooh, busted!
But that's ok - we all have our rhetorical tactics. And you two are still on my short list of favorite bloggers / libertarians.
And no good police state is complete without its propaganda wing
I just about threw my computer across the room when I read this article:
Twitter got a lot of attention from the various press outlets today for its value in following yesterdays rampage by anarchists and the response by police.
One aspect of the social networking service is getting less mention: Its being used to coordinate the violence.
You read that right: Twitter was used to coordinate the violence. Now, let's set aside the absurdity of this notion that anarchist violence even registered on the same chart as police violence. Maybe they're confused by incriminating messages, since they usually, you know, have sources for their reports?
Permission to correct the mistakes of government: denied.
McCain said:
My friends, if you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you're disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them.
Just don't join it's ranks from within the Republican party:
Today at the Republican National Convention, as the Ron Paul Delegates were taking a picture in front of the model White House inside the Convention Center, they were surrounded by Secret Service which proceeded to search the bags of all the delegates. They took any and everything related to Ron Paul including signs, buttons, videos, slim jims, cards, even books.
William Gillis speaks out
I cover A.L.L.y William Gillis's contribution to the RWC press conference at leftlibertarian.org:
William's willingness to personally speak out, not just against the brutal, self-destructive police state, but also as an unrepentant and bold advocate for anarchism at a time when adherents to that peaceful philosophy are being singled out as terrorists, is nothing short of heroic. We all owe William a debt of gratitude, for I've never felt more proud of my opposition to the criminals and serial sadists of the state as I did watching him speak.
Populist Conservatism Needs a Home
As we suffer through another day of empire worship in the twin cities, you should check out Bill Kauffman's speech on YouTube from the Rally for the Republic to see what real, heartfelt conservatism looks like. Here's Kauffman on a PBS show:
I'll talk about populism for a second as an example. It has a good side and a bad side. The goodpart of populism is when it's grounded in the particular. A Henry James' character had a line, "Patriotism, like charity, begins at home." A good populism is that, you know, William Jennings Bryan in his 'Cross of Gold" speech said, "Our is not a war of conquest; it is a war in defense of our homes, our families, our freedoms, our communities."
On the other hand, when you have a sort of a populism of rootless people -- that is, sort of, you know, deracinated operatives -- what you end up getting is, you know, scapegoating of immigrants or Jews or things like that, or you get an entirely phony and factitious populism of the Newt Gingrich sort. I think it's illustrative that Gingrich in graduate school is said to have responded to someone when asked, "Where are you from?" "I'm from nowhere." That's very dangerous. We need people who are from places, people who want to defend those places, and people whose politics and way of looking at the world comes from those places.
Conservatism may not be the label I apply to my own politics, but I must confess a deep admiration for such passion for particularism in the face of homogenous empire.
What's good for the goose
When I see convention delegates calling on the cops to stop deploying chemicals, shoving people, disabling vehicles, and otherwise acting dangerously and violently, I'll call on anarchists to stop doing the same. I do note that no video footage actually captures the attacks, though - so we're taking the establishment on their word on that one (and that usually works out well for the people!).
Thanks for the tip, Jack!
Some humor amid the fuming
Although the Monty Python skit resemblance is more than a function of the accents (the timing is amazing), this is an honest-to-God a believable portrayal of a typical politician here. Are these the people we need to worry about? Part of me feels like the way you deal with a police state is by ignoring the politicians, who after all never lift a finger to do anything, and attacking the apparatus: the police. Whether politically, legally, or extra-legally, it seems to me that if we've genuinely passed the point of no return, it's not the politicians we need to bring in line but the people who execute their will.
UPDATE: This is not a real interview. Hat tip to Roderick Long for the smooth catch. Serves me right for just parroting what a friend wrote in an email forward!
Country First, John McCain, USA USA USA
Absolutely hilarious - just when you think they can't get shallower than the Bush approach, they do. I mean, planning your chants out ahead of time?
By the way, there's excellent live coverage of the convention and the protests via streaming video at The Uptake, where I got the above tidbit.
Cops may yet come to regret their hostility
Over and over again, law enforcement demonstrates that they are not only interested in forcing their alien vision of "law and order" on the people they're supposed to "protect and serve", but that they are actively hostile and sadistic towards the protestors. We've seen this before, like in Miami's '06 FTAA protests:
The resentment has come out full force, now. On Democracy Now!, the arrested journalists told how the police would tighten restraints when detainees complained about how tight they were. The psychology of the human beings in law enforcement is becoming a serious menace and is being actively promoted in their training:
The police brutality that we've seen in Denver and St. Paul this week is the result of ongoing indoctrination of the police against protesters, especially any protesters of the left-wing stripe. Local police departments have been militarized to deal with protesters, with much of this militarization happening during the Clinton administration. After 9/11, local police were further turned into anti-terrorist organizations, with the effect that they see their work as fighting terrorists. Local police are also bringing home the terror tactics that the U.S. has been using in dozens of countries around the world for the past century.
The war on terror has escalated into an increased war on the "rabble" of America, most significantly protesters and anarchists. This doesn't surprise us, because the U.S. government has always been at war with dissidents of many kinds.
