Secession!

A New Strategy For Liberty - Part 2: Secession in Three Easy Steps

Once you accept that the Progressive power structure includes the media, universities, and bureaucracy, you can understand that voting doesn't make sense. Conservatives and libertarians don't control the government to any extent. You laugh at Charlie Brown trying to kick the football...why do you act like Charlie Brown?

I cannot think of a conservative victory over the past 80 years. Reagan was just a reaction to a particularly rapid shift to the left, but even during his time the government expanded and conservatives ceded cultural ground.

The first step is to understand that voting isn't working. If you can get that far, then you open yourself to a whole new range of possible actions. We the people have power, not because we vote, but because we have inalienable rights given to us by God. It's our choice whether we use our rights and exercise our power, or turn those rights and power over to the government with our vote.

It's your choice.

Leftism Revealed

Your organization is fraudulent and corrupt. You accept taxpayer money and teach people how to cheat on their taxes. You encourage child prostitution and illegal immigration. Your response is:

"O'Keefe and Giles try to make it sound as if they concocted their sordid video scheme on a whim - as if they had no major backers," Kettenring said. "ACORN's lawsuit will smoke out the true motives and conservative money behind these attacks on a community organization that works to better the lives of ordinary Americans every day."

And we wonder why communists aren't as universally reviled as the Nazis, why we can still find morons wearing Che t-shirts. It's the motives! Child prostitution, murdering millions of people, anti-Semitism, violence, etc. is all OK as long as you do it for the right reasons!

ACORN helps the community rape children, evade taxes and violate God knows how many laws. But Obama worked there, and they support Obama, so they are good. It's all good.

Conservatives Never Win

It's true that massive, deadly arachnids in this family are found in the fossil record. It's also true that they've been shrinking steadily for the last 30 million years. You might well be face-to-face with a living fossil. Anything can happen. But first, look without your reading glasses. I suspect you may have the magnification set too high.

Take an example: where was gay marriage in 1979? The era of Anita Bryant and the Briggs Amendment? Of the Hard Hat Riot? Dear progressive, you can hardly admit that progress hasn't happened - by your own definition.

But this means your cause is going forward and your foe's is going backward, which means you are attacking and he is retreating. So shouldn't it be the spider who's afraid of you, not you who's afraid of the spider? I know I am beating a dead horse here. But you probably have friends who haven't seen the light yet, dear reactionary. Try this one out on them.

UR GI 9a

Take Physical Delivery of Gold!

Great comment by Gordon Gekko on Zero Hedge:

So it is NOT ENOUGH that the US Government LOOTS us via both EXCESSIVE direct taxation and inflation of the money supply. It has now set upon us these CRIMINAL gangs dressed in the garbs of "respectable" Wall Street firms - providing them unlimited monies and backstopping all their losses for the SOLE objective of PILLAGING the little guy in every way, shape and form. I have just one question for you all - how much more of this NONSENSE are you willing to take? If you have had enough (although this may seem "tin-foil-hatted" to those of you not in the know), start taking delivery of PHYSICAL Gold IMMEDIATELY and END this paper money scam. It is the most peaceful, effective and efficient way to end this orgy of corruption and crime (of course there are many other things that you can do as well, but this is the LEAST you can do). Fiat money is the source of all their power and all your problems. No amount of law enforcement, prosecutions, etc. will cure this disease unless we attack the problem at the root. I assure you - NOTHING can and will be rectified unless we reform our monetary system.

The post itself is about how Goldman Sachs and other firms use computers to profit from volatility, taking money away from retail and institutional investors. Note that Goldman and many of these firms are part of the Federal Reserve system, thus they benefit from the creation of new money (which costs you in the form of inflation), they receive taxpayer bailouts (which costs you in taxes), the set-up leads to volatility, which their programs exploit (which costs you in the market).

If instead of holding paper dollars or savings in a bank account, you transform the savings into physical assets such as gold, silver, platinum, etc., then money is drained from the system and it moves in reverse. The banks will lose at every step of the way, and your precious metal holdings will increase in value as the prices of stocks and other assets depreciate.

It's your choice whether you support a system impoverishing the American people or whether you will take a simple step to oppose it. Two sites that sell gold and precious metals for low markups are:

California Numismatic Investments
Only Gold

Massachusetts lets retards vote?

Several influential U.S. House Democrats have filed a bill that would require the government to tap the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to counter rising oil prices.

Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. and Peter Welch, D-Vt., said their legislation would direct the Department of Energy to sell 70 million barrels of more expensive light, sweet crude and replace it with cheaper heavy crude.

These men have just exposed themselves as economic morons. If I lived in Markey's district, I'd be ashamed and worried that everyone in America (excepting the districts of these two other disgraces) thinks I too am a retard for electing such a total idiot. Obviously, there's some amount of brain damage or well below normal IQ that results in the election of these idiots to Congress. Perhaps it is a gerrymandered district for special people.

If you think that's harsh, just read the common sense, obvious answers for why these men are absolute morons. This fails on multiple levels.

McArdle, Obama Voter and Supposed Libertarian

Paragraphs such as this one, written in a post about California's fiscal crisis, shows how someone of her thinking could vote for Obama, rather than no one or a third party:

I am not under the illusion that this will be fun. For starters, the rest of you sitting smugly out there in your snug homes, preparing to enjoy the spectacle, should prepare to enjoy the higher taxes you're going to pay as a result. Your states and municipalities will pay higher interest on their bonds if California is allowed to default. Also, the default is going to result in a great deal of personal misery, more than a little of which is going to end up on the books of Federal unemployment insurance and other such programs.

Let me break this down in the simplest of terms. Government is inefficient. There are many Democrats and not a few Republicans who want big government and don't care about inefficiency. However, a lot of taxpayers in both parties, some moderate to Blue Dog Democrats, plus the more economically inclined conservatives, understand the cost of government.

The current financial and political system, as it exists up until recently, was one in which interest rates were artificially low and governments were protected from bankruptcy. Low interest for government debt hid the inefficiency of government spending. If the interest rate on municipal and state debt increases, it will reduce (since this is government, economically stupid but politically sound decisions won't go away) the most inefficient spending.

Higher interest rates on government debt aren't a bug, they're a feature.

Democraphobia in China

And not from the communists, but the Confucians.
The Confucian Party

They point out that China’s most fertile intellectual period was the Warring States era (476 to 221 B.C.) , when scholars like Mencius could openly criticize rulers for their immoral deeds and put forward political alternatives. My Confucian friends have criticized the government’s clumsy attempts to shut down debate about Charter 08, a manifesto published in 2008 which urged the Communist Party to abandon monopoly rule and establish a multiparty system of government.

But the same scholars were severely critical of the content of the charter, saying that it echoes 20th century efforts by Chinese liberals to seek complete Westernization as the solution to China’s problems. In fact, even liberal scholars like Qin Hui, China’s most influential social critic, openly criticized the charter’s substance. Had the government not interfered with the charter, it might have died a natural death.

For the Confucians, any long-lasting and stable political reform must be rooted in China’s own traditions. So should we view them as narrow nationalists? Quite the opposite. Jiang Qing, a leading exponent of the new Confucianism, explicitly criticizes the idea of state sovereignty, saying that sovereignty lies with “heaven” rather than the state. He argues for a democratic institution that would offer more opportunities for political participation, while criticizing democracy for being too narrowly focused on the interests of the current generation of voters.

Jiang proposes another political institution designed to represent non-voters whose interests are typically neglected in democratic states, such as foreigners, future generations and ancestors. Is democracy really the best way to protect future victims of global warming, he asks?

Confucian intellectuals have also put forward ideas for educational reform. Communism is dead as a unifying myth that can sustain the Chinese people, they argue, so what does China stand for now? Here’s where Confucian values become relevant. There are currently thousands of educational experiments to promote such Confucian values as harmony and compassion.
Tsinghua University, the university that trains much of China’s elite (and where I teach), may be leading the way. It has recently made the “four Confucian classics” compulsory reading for a group of undergraduate students in the humanities. Written over 2,000 years ago, the books will effectively replace some of the compulsory courses in Marxist-Leninism. In the traditional mode, students will memorize the texts before engaging in critical interpretation.

Today, such efforts to revive tradition really grab intellectuals . According to a recent survey of Chinese political attitudes by Duke University’s Tianjian Shi, China has become more traditional in its political orientation as it has developed economically. Reacting to the materialism that has accompanied rapid modernization, many intellectuals are turning to traditions like Confucianism that emphasize social responsibility.

Those looking for another explosion of political demonstrations like Tiananmen are likely to be disappointed. At the conference in Qufu, the Confucian critics were careful to tell government officials that they favor change on a stable basis.

If the Confucians get their way, political change will come slowly and peacefully. Since Deng Xiaoping opened the doors to economic reform over 30 years ago, various economic experiments have been carried out at different levels of government, with the central government taking what works and implementing the reforms in the whole country. That’s also likely to be the model for educational and political reform over the next 30 years. It may be starting right now in towns like Qufu.

Down With Democracy

Peter Thiel responds to a Patri Friedman essay:

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom

Politics is not the answer, but I might allow a solution. Once freedom loving people understand that we need to move beyond politics and into action, the possibility opens up that the political system will be forced to compromise. Politics may still be a dead end, but by abandoning politics, one makes it possible for politics to solve the problem.

Hat tip to Scarecrow 2012.

You Represent Power and Greed

Senator Specter

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the state, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

Obama is a little bit Special Olympics

Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals

Technically, reality is an obstacle to Obama's goals. But hey, it's the NYTimes. Why attack them when they could be bankrupt in a month?