I’m going to post this in it’s entirety. You can find the full article at Lew Rockwell dot Com, but I believe it needs to be available in it’s entirety here as well, because I so strongly echo his sentiments.

Imagine that you are blindfolded and told that the food you are about to eat is ice cream. It turns out to be chicken liver. Or imagine that you think you are diving into warm water but instead it turns out to be near-freezing.

This is pretty much what it is like to be governed by Republicans, and there is no better case in point than George W. Bush. He, like all Republicans since the 1920s, campaigned as a shrink-the-government man. More incredibly to recall, he blasted the “nation-building” of Bill Clinton and insisted that the US needed a “humble” foreign policy.

What we got instead is, well, what we got, is the polar opposite. The man who wailed over Bill Clinton’s big government has made Clinton’s spending record look great by comparison. The guy who decried “nation-building” has decided that bombs and tanks are a great means to inspire a wholesale upheaval in the Gulf region.

What’s interesting here is what motivates big-government Republicanism. The party itself has no strong investment in the public sector as it currently stands, apart from the prison bureaucracy and the military. Most civil servants and teachers and postal workers support the Democrats, knowing full well who is buttering their bread. Republicans, essentially, see the public purse as something not to conserve but to rob and give to those who do vote Republican.

Thus is the government contracted out – and vastly so. Thus are religious charities eligible for public funding. Thus are private schools encouraged to get on the dole. Thus are industrialists eligible for every privilege one can imagine. Heck, if you are big enough and powerful enough, the Republicans might even start a war on your behalf. This gets very expensive indeed, even more expensive than old-fashioned, reformed-minded, repair-the-schools, renew-the-cities, make-the-government-work social democracy!

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If the only pre-requisite to being a toddler is toddling, then we have a toddler in our midst. As of Feb 18th Sophia can walk on her own. Not just take a few steps, but stand up in the middle of a room and walk for as long as she cares to. She’s quite pleased with herself and moreso her ability to access trouble at an ever increasing speed. We’ll have some more pictures up soon to document the occasion.

Categories: BJ, Sophia
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This weeks Top Gear featured the boys puchasing a sub $1k car and driving from Florida to New Orleans. Let’s stop and think about this for a moment: deep South, cheap cars, middle of Summer, and the most backwards area of the US. It ends up being a recipe for hilarity. I honestly feared for their lives as they were running from an angry mob of rednecks in Alabama.

I know some Americans might get a little bent out of shape because of the ribbing he gives us, but you have to remember Clarkson has nicknamed Hamster “Diana” because they both crashed at high speed, believes German auto makers fan-belts should last “for 1,000 years,” and is basically a loudmouth who happens to be absolutely hilarious. Despite criticism, they continue to film in the US and speak glowingly of the z06 and Ford GT. The point is that he was actually very nice considering the “southern hospitality” he received at that gas-station.

If you stop and think about it however, you would have received the same reception in other areas of the world depending on the slogans you painted on your co-presenters vehicles. Sure, in the deep south “Hillary for President, Man LOVE OK!!, NASCAR SUCKS, and Country Western Music Sucks,” might get you stoned and kicked out of a hick town, but I’m sure **** football club sucks, bugger the queen, and a picture of Mohammed would take care of a few other parts of the world.

On that note: fat stig was awesome, America is sue-happy, and America is fat with other industrialized nations catching up. We have high fructose corn-syrup on our side. Until we get rid of that, we’ll always be fat.

Categories: BJ, Entertainment
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I regularly read Orson Scott Card’s columns at the Ornery American and Hatrack River. I have fundamental differences with his beliefs on government and the Iraq war. I am fundamentally minarchist in nature, whereas Card seems to lie firmly in the Joseph Lieberman Democrat camp. If you don’t follow politics or political beliefs very much just know that we are, in essence, opposites.

You know… I had a long diatribe ready to refute individual points and point out the inconsistencies in his belief in the current war in Iraq, but I’m tired of fighting over table scraps and cliches thrown about by anyone in the political game. The modern search for a headline or website post title has cut the legs out from under anyone wishing to portray a true opinion on the current happenings in our world. I respect Card as a writer even though he has a penchant for controversy and is typically dismissive of anything that doesn’t fit within his viewpoint of literature or political thought. I just enjoy his stories.

Card on Iraq

He believes the war to be necessary. My current understanding of his beliefs is that the war should have happened no matter what. That freeing the “oppressed” people of Iraq was critical to the good of the United States. I can respect that opinion if given sufficient reasoning, however I find myself disagreeing with the fundamental understanding of the Islamic sects and their internal and external struggles. He purports that the Shia majority is the moderate voice of reason within the current nation of Iraq and seems to lay the current blame for the instability in the region on Sunnis, while throwing Iran and Syria into the pot to ensure the continuation of the western reform of Islam from the outside. There is a a huge problem with this.

Most current extreme thinking within Islam is of Shiite origin. Hizbollah is a Shiite organization. Ayatollahs are Shiite. Iran is Shiite. The hugely repressive thought within modern Islam is Shiite. The death squads in Iraq are Shiite not Sunni. Card, for some reason, thinks the Sunnis are to blame for the sectarian violence within Iraq. I’d like to know where he gets his news. He is fundamentally wrong on this point. They are fighting back, as only a minority can, but the push for full Shiite power is coming from those within Iraq and a supportive Iran. This is the situation we have created. Sadly, it seems that Iraq needed a monster to keep the Shia fundamentalists in check. We watched that monster die to a Shiite death squad.

Our only good reason for ousting Saddam Hussein was to destroy his WMD research and nuclear production facilities. A point that George Bush Senior makes clear in this lecture given to tufts university. There’s a problem, there weren’t any WMDs. Bush Sr, warned of setting up a hegemony within Iraq but that is the road we will have to cross if we want a stable peaceful Iraq. Good luck finding opposition to an Iran-Iraq coalition against the US with both governments having a majority Shiite leadership. There is no good answer. We have made fundamental errors with this war. We must pull out and prepare for the ensuing aftermath and oncoming storm of Islamic fundamentalism and possible war with an aligned Shiite Iran-Iraq. The only way to avoid this is to put a controlling regime into power that will force obeisance from the people of Iraq. This doesn’t have very much to do with Democracy and freedom.

That is the problem. We want them to be free, but the choices they make with their free will are choices for violence, terror, and war. There comes a time to say that we have made a mistake and we must prepare for the consequences of our mistake. It is time to pull out, prepare, and to streamline our military to face new type of war and a new type of warrior.

Categories: BJ, Philosophy etc
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