It Is Time To Repeal AUMF

Obama is taking heavy criticism from conservative circles for proposing that the 2001 authorization for use of military force be repealed.

In this case, I am bemused to find myself siding with Obama. The "War on Terror" has been going on for nearly 12 years. Longer than any actual traditional war in the nation's history.

The AUMF is simply a way for Congress to side-step its oversight responsibility. Were it repealed, Congress would have to, once again, take an active role in authorizing uses of military force on a case-by-case basis. How is that a bad thing?

The AUMF is a huge, open-ended grant of executive power, with minimal oversight. It's the kind of thing of which any real conservative or libertarian should be wary.

We are far beyond the point where we were in 2001, where we were worried about a specific active threat. In the modern world, there will always be threats and occurrences of terrorism. Ceding massive power to the executive branch because of that is dangerous. Our system is strong enough and nimble enough to respond to threats without that. The executive already has broad Constitutional latitude, and authority under the War Powers Act, to deal with imminent threats: nobody is going to complain if the President sends in a military unit to capture a van full explosives on the way to the Capitol mall, or takes out an incoming missile, but this broad, on-going shadow war needs to be brought back under Congressional oversight.

We managed to conduct the entire Cold War without any such open-ended executive grant of power.

Congress is complaining because they'd once again have to be accountable and involved in national security. That would help bring our entire foreign policy and security state back into perspective.

Another good step would be to repeal the Patriot Act. That's another expedient without which we managed to secure this nation for more than 200 years. I'm sure we could struggle along without it. I was never one of those people who was hysterical about the Patriot Act -- it's both less dangerous than its detractors say and far more dangerous than its proponents make it out to be. But what it is, is unnecessary. And we should be very, very wary of unnecessary grants of executive power. They are incompatible with a free nation.

Gin & Tonic: Gin. And Tonic. How Can You Make That Complicated?

In Gin, Tonic and a Dash of Restraint, the New York Times (and apparently a lot of hip bartenders) way overthink Gin & Tonic:

"Cata offers a staggering array of gin and tonics: 25 at last count, although the list keeps growing and evolving."

Twenty-five? Really?

1. Some decent gin.
2. Some tonic water.
3. Mix to taste.

If you're getting any fancier than that, congratulations, you're pretentious.

New York Times And Its Love of Big Government

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Celebrating Inequality: Inequality and the Modern Culture of Celebrity, the author writes:

"One virtue of those hated things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing."

But aren't we, today, learning what a false view that is? Aren't many of the present scandals due to the fact that bureaucracy is inherently corrupt? It donates its largess unequally, using loopholes, exceptions and waivers. The rules that apply to the common man do not apply to celebrities and the well-connected. The voices of those whose words meet official approval are enabled over the voices of dissenters.

The NYT's enduring faith in the benevolence and impartiality of bureaucracy has never seemed more misguided than it does today.

Another Case of Government Incompetence

A mysterious vortex opens up on a public street and the government refuses to investigate it! Shameful!

The Corporation As Tyrant

I've been watching the series Continuum on Netflix the past couple days.

The time travel, police drama and action aspects are fun, but every time I'm forced to think about the political assumptions in the series, I have to shake my head in disbelief and frustration.

The concept is that sometime in the near future, the governments of the earth became so ineffective and debt-ridden that they had to be bailed out by corporations. The corporations then took over the government and imposed a repressive fascist state.

The economic and historical ignorance on display here is so great that I feel daunted to even address it. I know that there are plenty of leftists who think that something like this is plausible, but I hesitate to even delve into discussion with them because it essentially means educating them on extremely basic principles of world history, economics and human nature. And that's even more tedious than it sounds with an unreceptive student who is convinced of the rightness of his beliefes.

Suffice it to say, for the not aggressively ignorant:

There have only been a couple brief times in human history that a corporation has acted as a government (probably in part because the "corporation" is a relatively new concept) and in neither case did corporate control result in a government that was notably repressive for its time period. The next closest thing was probably the very merchant-centric Republic of Venice, which was, arguably, one of the more enlightened societies of the post-Roman world.

The idea of corporate control breeding fascism is almost entirely a fictional, Hollywood construct. In fact, in the actual fascist states of the 20th century: Italy under Mussolini (the originator of Fascism), and Nazi Germany (a socialist state generally classified as fascist), far from the corporations taking over and controlling the government, the government suborned the corporations to serve government ends. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini could in any sense be classified as corporate stooges. Both were populist leaders.

The idea that if the board of directors at AT&T got its hands on the reins of power it would even want to turn the U.S. into a fascist state is ... well ... bizarre. And it's not at all clear how such a thing could happen in the first place.

Continuum's "corporations bailed out the government" story is ludicrous on its face. The amount of debt the U.S. (and other governments world-wide) is racking up dwarfs the gross revenues of the largest world coporations. Plus, the government controls the money supply. I'm not even sure what "bailing out the government" means. The U.S. government already is trillions of dollars in debt to corporations, citizens and foreign governments. The idea that some huge infusion of non-existent and probably worthless money from some corporations would be rewarded with control of the political system is, just really, really strange. We have many, many examples of what happens when government gets themselves in that deep. We really could only wish that something as benign as a corporate rescue could happen. What usually happens is utter economic collapse, and the corporations don't fare much better than anyone else, as they're among the ones raided to try to keep the ship of state afloat a bit longer.

Of course, even in Continuum, they may be trying to be fair-handed. It's the anti-corporatocracy group Liber8 that is made up of ruthless monsters that kill innocents with no hesitation. The cop serving the corporation, and what little we see of her world, seems to live a comfortable, prosperous existence and be a moral, caring person. We're told that freedom of speech and assembly is gone, but we're not really allowed to see it (at least so far -- I'm in episode 3). So maybe corporate government is a great thing (likely closer to the truth), or maybe they'll try to demonstrate and explain the downsides of corporate rule more in subsequent episodes.

This Sting Sounds Incredibly Sketchy To Me

Undercover cops are selling iPhones on the street to get people to stop buying stolen iPhones.

Since the iPhones aren't actually stolen, the people aren't actually buying stolen iPhones. All you're proving them guilty of is that they would buy a stolen iPhone.

Do we have cops going around selling oregano as marijuana and arresting people for that?

Don't cops have anything better to do than bait people into buying faux-stolen iPhones?

How about catching the people who steal and sell iPhones? Such people are probably already career criminals, likely to be guilty of stealing many other things. Seems far more important to get them off the street than the comparatively harmless buyers.

The Smallest Minority: May Victims of Communism Day

A must-read:

The Smallest Minority: May Victims of Communism Day

"the total number of victims of Communism - that is, the domestic victims of their own governments - in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20^th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million. "

...

"The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20^th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better."