Sad and frightening

A bloody mess: Benazir Bhutto assassinated.

I've always had great respect for her, not least for the fact of her being the first woman to being in charge of an Islamic nation, as well as her liberalism and bravery. This is utterly fucked.

idiocy all around

Mike Huckabee thinks that bumblebees can't fly, and believes he is not a primate. And this idiot--yes, idiocy is the only word appropriate in this context--is running for US presidency? WTF??? (Thanks to Recursivity).

I must then, together with many other bloggers and scientists, call for a presidential debate on science and technology. We cannot have a person ignorant of the basic facts of the universe we live in, the planet we are stuck on, and the way of thinking that is helping us uncover these facts (i.e., science) in charge of the most powerful nation on the planet. This job carries an awesome responsibility and an incredibly dangerous amount of power; village idiots need not apply.

tom tomorrow rules

Yeah.

America, the beautiful

...or not? Tell me if it pisses you off as much as it does me; we seem to be stuck in some barbarous age, with no relief in sight:

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens.

We've never had much respect for international law, but this disdain for lawful ways of resolving problems has reached new heights under this administration. And they complain about other countries' disrespect for the international community, nevertheless! WTF?

The last gasps of social conservatism...

...we hope. In any case, being a friend of President Bush nowadays is not such a great idea if one wants to have any kind of a political future. In Australia, John Howard was "comprehensively defeated" on Saturday, with his defeat owing a lot to his stance on Kyoto treaty (no), on the war on terrorism (he is a close Bush ally and a personal friend) and on public health and education. In a somewhat snide (but welcome) remark, the winning Labor party stated that "Australia will remain a close ally of the United States, and Rudd [the new Prime Minister-elect] remains committed to the alliance..." but "...if there is a Democratic administration elected next year, to some extent they would become closer.”

The world just took a small step towards sanity; not all news are bad, apparently.

Morning Malaise

1.I certainly do not want to go to work today. however, Momokawa Pearl sake is a wonderful beverage.

2.The degradation of civil society continues apace. How could we have ever thought that something like this would be funny? But it is. Laughter in the dark, laughter through tears, indeed. Tom Tomorrow rules.

art worth some looking at....

A beautiful collection of images/posters/flyers for our times available here. Go check them out already.

An unholy Racket No 001: Epitaphs and Interferences

...And it's into the fucking fray:

1.Mollie Steimer, one of those incredible people who are hated by fascists and capitalists of all stripes and admired by those that care about liberty and justice for all, wrote once:

"We fought injustice in our humble way as best we could; and if the result was prison, hard labour, deportations and lots of suffering, well, this was something that every human being that fights for a better humanity has to expect."

A short biography at Wikipedia. She needs to be remembered, and one of the purposes of this blog will be to bring attention to mostly forgotten heroes like her.

2.The word sabotage comes from French "sabot", a kind of a wooden shoe—a clog—that French workers of the early Industrial revolution threw into the machine looms to disable them—to clog them. A wonderful word that has gathered more negative connotations over the years, sadly.

3.President Harding is generally considered to be the most inept of all that held the office occasionally associated with talent and intelligence. He had said, once: "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here", which statement elevates him far above the current resident. To the old Chinese curse of "may you live in interesting times", we can add "and may you live under exceptional rulers". Exceptionally awful, that is.

4.I am currently reading Peter Irons' A People's History of the Supreme Court and a wondeful book it is. Amongst big business stooges, racists and several brilliant people with whose political and judicial beliefs I disagree strongly (the racist Taney, rabid patriot Frankfurter, or the Four Horsemen of (laissez-faire) Apocalypse) there were quite a few justices of sheer genius and ethical fortitude. (Even now, there are at least two of those on the bench. No prizes for guessing who). In any case, here are some quotes that should be remembered:

"Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That in any rate is the theory of our Constitution."

–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, in his dissent in Abrams v. United States, 1919 (the case which resulted in the deportation of Mollie Steimer, among others, to the true bastion of liberty that was Bolshevik Russia at the time).

and

"The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections...If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can presribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

—Robert Jackson, writing for majority in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943

There shall be more; the above words precisely capture the reasons I am so interested in Constitutional law lately. There were giants in the world in those days.

5.I must sleep now, over and out...

Yet another dead horse begging to be flogged

Earlier, I had an opportunity to expres my dislike of von Mises' ideas. Now, after persevering for a further couple of weeks and reading a dozen or more of his essays, I have finally given up in disgust.

Some salient points:

a.Mises' insistence on the benevolent nature of laissez-faire would have been suspicious even back when he was writing the said essays: he must have been aware of the excesses of the American Gilded Age, which was, arguably, the closest this society has ever been to laissez-faire conditions. Now, with the inevitable result of the markets' being taken over by an authoritarian segment of the population (which continue to pay at least lip-service to Mises' ideas), it is ridiculous. (Mises' followers would insist that the conditions of true laissez-faire have never obtained; in that their thinking is curiously religious and close to the Marxian insistences that the true conditions for communism have never obtained. Both are right, to a degree; both are irrational).

b.Mises' deep inegalitarianism has nothing to do with anarchism, and is, really, deeply offensive to one like me who is a staunch believer in democracy and legal equality and, at least, an attempt to approximate political equality. (Social equality is something else entirely).

c.Mises' ignorance of ecology is, perhaps forgivable: he was writing before the science had really taken off. But certain warning signs were visible already: Carson's book was published during Mises' lifetime and he could have checked it out. But the overwhelming majority of economists (with the exceptions, as earlier noted, of Schumacher and Daly) are woefully ignorant of ecology and the concept of closed system most likely is meaningless to them. Mises' ignorance of biology and evolutionary theory (except for the useful--to him--canard of social darwinism) is less excusable. Modern synthesis was at full swing during the 40's and the 50's when a lot of these essays were produced, and he should not have been unaware of the evolutionary implications on human behaviour.

d.Finally, his attempts at metaphysics and ethical systems are--and I am not going to try to write a 200-page treatise on the subject--laughable.

Interestingly, while claiming the wrongness of Marxian and Keynesian ideas of economic development (I find much of interest in both, with quite a few reservations), Misesians are so completely blind to the failures of their own founder's philosophy that the whole Austrian school is revealed as a religious enterprise that it is.

Sorry. Well, not really. Utter shite. Even Engels is better....;)

A slight increase in gusher temperature

As usual, Jon Swift has the best POV on the attorney firing scandal. As usual, conservative blogs have the most ridiculous twaddle (i.e. Clinton/Reno fired all attorneys in 1993, Bush fired 7 now, what's the big deal? A: well, the big deal is, of course, that usually the incoming administration reappoints a whole bunch of civil servants, including, yes, federal prosecutors. That's part of the job. However, midterm firings that are motivated solely by political pursuits, allowed by a little-known provision of the most egregious document ever to be pushed through legislature (y'know, the Patriot Act--do read it, it'll make you better than almost any member of the Senate or the Congress, and, likely, more informed than Mr Bush himself, who obviously doesn't read that much: he once said that he couldn't remember what his favourite book was as a child, because, y'know, he just "wasn't that much into books"), and, basically, contingent upon the said attorneys' failure to pass the loyalty test to the administration, are a different beast entirely, neither donkey nor elephant, but more of an ebola virus. As (almost) everything this administration does, the whole things stinks of corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Amazing, really).