“Gadhafi’s Son Claims Dad Wants a Role in Rebel Government.” In much the same way that I seek a date Kate Winslet. Indeed, I think my chances are better with Kate than Gadhafi’s are with the rebel government…
Gratuitous Image is Gratuitous.
Something From the Libyan Section of the “Not Bloodly Likely” File
August 31st, 2011Moammar Gadhafi’s Family Flees Libya for Algeria
August 29th, 2011I think this is a pretty big indication that Moammar won’t be sending out Muharram postcards from Tripoli this year. Gadhafi himself still seems to be playing the title role in Where’s Waldo, but him sending his family out of the country would tend to indicates that his prospects for regaining power are (thankfully) bleak.
Unless a hard-core Jihadi government takes over in Libya (possible, but it seems unlikely), the fall of Gadhafi must rank as good news for America, for the Libyan people, and, yes, President Obama. Putting aside questions of whether Gadhafi could have been toppled earlier (quite likely), whether Libya was the worst remaining Arab dictatorship (it wasn’t; Iran and Syria (clearly), as well as Saudi Arabia (arguably) are worse troublemakers and oppressors of their own people), and whether toppling Middle East dictatorships is a proper use of American power (there were many justifications of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 that weren’t applicable to Libya, but I can think of none that would apply to Libya that would not equally apply to Iraq), having Gadhafi gone is good news for everyone involved except the dictators own corrupt cronies (and the businessmen who profited from dealing with them), and there’s a significant chance that he wouldn’t have been toppled without the judicious application of American air power that Obama approved. It would be nice to see Gadhafi hung from a pole, or put on trial for crimes against his own people, but even having him merely deposed is a significant victory. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I Was On Vacation
August 22nd, 2011Anything happen while I was gone?
Surely no major activity could have happened in the Middle East, since that region is such a paragon of changeless stability.
More (hopefully) tomorrow…
Roundup of Reactions to Rick Perry’s Announcement
August 17th, 2011Despite Claims to the Contrary, Statistics Show That The Texas Economy Does, In Fact, Kick Ass
August 16th, 2011Despite what you’ve heard from liberal pundits, Texas really is leading the nation in job growth, according to the Political math blog
As you can see, Texas isn’t just the fastest growing… it’s growing over twice as fast as the second fastest state and three times as fast as the third. Given that Texas is (to borrow a technical term) f***ing huge, this growth is incredible.
People are flocking to Texas in massive numbers. This is speculative, but it *seems* that people are moving to Texas looking for jobs rather than moving to Texas for a job they already have lined up. This would explain why Texas is adding jobs faster than any other state but still has a relatively high unemployment rate.
They’re also high paying jobs: “Since the recession started hourly wages in Texas have increased at a 6th fastest pace in the nation.” And, if you subtract people who moved to the state, Texas has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.
For more anecdotal evidence, look at this piece from entrepreneur Erica Douglass about why she’s moving from California to Austin. The “Amazon Tax” was the final straw.
Erica, on behalf of free-market bloggers in the Greater Austin area, howdy! I think you’re going to like it here…
(Hat tips: Texas Iconoclast and Instapundit.)
Still More Riot Fallout
August 15th, 2011A few more reactions to the London riots:
First up is Peter Hitchens:
I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades.
The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.
Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake.
(Hat tip: John Derbyshire at NRO.)
Second is the indomitable Mark Steyn, who brings his usual pith to bear:
The news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western Civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too….The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in “stimulus” their entire lives….
One-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.
If you were born into such a household, you’ve been comprehensively “stimulated” into the dead-eyed zombies staggering about the streets this past week: pathetic inarticulate subhumans unable even to grunt the minimal monosyllables to BBC interviewers desperate to appease their pathologies. C’mon, we’re not asking much: just a word or two about how it’s all the fault of government “cuts” like the leftie columnists argue. And yet even that is beyond these baying beasts. The great-grandparents of these brutes stood alone against a Fascist Europe in that dark year after the fall of France in 1940. Their grandparents were raised in one of the most peaceful and crime-free nations on the planet. Were those Englishmen of the mid-20th century to be magically transplanted to London today, they’d assume they were in some fantastical remote galaxy. If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of “Lord Of The Flies” is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the northeast Atlantic. Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for nonspeaking parts in “Rise of The Planet Of The Apes.” And even that would likely be too much like hard work.
Third, the redoubtable Theodore Dalrymple weighs in again on the appalling state of British youth:
In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type…
If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?
The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.
The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.
Speaking of Dalrymple, the folks behind The Skeptical Doctor, a site dedicated to his writings, dropped me a line, and their site is well worth pursuing for those who can’t get enough Dalrymple, and for anyone interested in what lead the UK to it’s current state (among many other topics).
Remember, looters are “disenfranchised members of the working class” but Tea Party protesters are bigots.
Finally, in what may be vestigial traces of a spine, British courts have been ordered to ignore the usual sentencing guidelines and actually send rioters to jail.
Rick Perry Makes His Presidential Run Official
August 13th, 2011As expected, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he was running for President today.
Here’s the most complete video I could find of the announcement:
I have a lot of fish to fry today (and all this week, in fact), but I plan to have more on Perry’s candidacy later. Stay tuned…
Updated: The full text of Perry’s announcement speech. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
J. G. Ballard and the London Riots
August 13th, 2011You may know that I have another, non-political blog, mostly on topics like science fiction, book collecting, movies, etc. But every now and then a piece comes along that could fit on either blog, such as this Andrew Fox piece on J. G. Ballard’s works and the London riots.
Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip the veneer of civilization away. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…
Also, I must have missed this Theodore Dalrymple piece on Ballard.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Clayton E. Cramer on The Secret History of Guns
August 12th, 2011I recently linked to Adam Winkler’s Atlantic article “The Secret History of Guns,” which I found quite interesting, but noted that I was not well-versed enough in gun and gun control history to ascertain the piece’s accuracy.
So I went seeking the opinions of experts. I emailed several people instrumental in exposing the academic fraud behind Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America to ask for their assessments of the Winkler piece. I’m happy to say that Clayton E. Cramer, one of the first and most persistent critics of Bellesiles, has taken the time to respond to my query on the Winkler piece:
Here’s what I sent to Professor Winkler:
I guess the only substantial criticisms I would make of this article are:
“To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.”
I don’t think that’s a particularly accurate description of the position of “the gun lobby.” There are certainly extremists who believe that any regulation of any sort is unconstitutional and unacceptable, but I am not aware that NRA, for example, opposed bans on those convicted of violent felonies from having guns. Similarly, I am not aware that NRA has opposed bans on the mentally ill owning guns. There are differences of opinion about exactly where the lines separating crimes that should be firearm disqualifiers from those that should not. There are differences of opinion as to exactly what standard should be used for determining whether a mentally ill person should be disarmed. But that’s not the same as “all rights and no regulation.”
Similarly, much of the gun lobby’s opposition to particular regulations is pragmatic: it does not work for its intended purpose, but it does create a serious obstacle to law-abiding adults obtaining a gun. Again, that’s not the same as “all rights and no regulation.”
Your statement that NRA endorsed the National Firearms Act of 1934 is not a terribly accurate statement. The original law as introduced would have put handguns under the NFA requirements, and NRA was strongly opposed to that. It was because of NRA’s efforts that the focus of the law changed from concealable firearms and automatic weapons to automatic weapons and short-barreled long guns.
Also, while Frederick may not have considered the constitutional provisions when he testified, take a look at the Ways & Means Committee hearing transcripts; both the A-G and his assistant acknowledged that there was a legitimate Second Amendment question as to whether Congress could simply ban machine gun ownership–hence the elaborate tax stamp provision copied from the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1906.
I’d like to thank Mr. Cramer for taking the time to respond to my query and Mr. Winkler’s article. Mr. Cramer’s blog can be found here.
Loot a Store, Lose Your House
August 12th, 2011At least if it’s a taxpayer-subsidized flat in the UK.
In the first case of its kind, Daniel Sartain-Clarke, 18, and his mother have been served with an eviction notice as council bosses seek to turf them out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised flat.
Sartain-Clarke is charged with violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods from the Currys store at Clapham Junction, South London, on Monday night.
I think if the UK were to implement a policy that anyone caught looting would be kicked off all government benefits (the dole, housing, NHS, etc.) for life, I believe you’d see the last of rioting there for a very long time.