I read a suggestion that a better name for ‘libertarians’–by which is meant in this context the ultra-right, gun-loving, fantasising about living in a log-cabin variety, not left-libertarians, syndicalists and so forth–is ‘the mean rich’. Add ‘racists’ and ‘hypocrites’ to the list. The UK Libertarian Party sets out its stall:

We believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, and freedom from government–on all issues at all times.

But what’s this?

The totally free movement of people into the UK is not practical whilst we have a large welfare state and other countries are themselves not broadly Libertarian in nature. In line with the Rule of Law, a transparent, consistent points-based system is one of the key measures that we are proposing.

All issues at all times … except if you are Nigerian or Polish, in which case we have a different set of rules. And surely, if the ‘Libertarian Party’ had it’s greasy palms on the levers of power there would be no welfare state … cats and dogs would live in harmony … and ‘Libertarian Party’ members would crawl out of their pits at 05.00 to pick lettuces.

Thanks: Pooter and Andrew R

Jarama Valley — put yer heedphones on and/or turn yer soond up!

This post is by Mr Michael Weiss — who asks can I… “post this at trots for me… i can’t fucking work the
wordpress gizmo on my computer cause it’s fucked.” Anything to oblige…

How well I can remember whining back in 2004 that I’d never stand a chance to unhorse the beetle-browed Democratic incumbent state assemblyman in my Queens district without a juicy sex scandal to draw attention to myself in all the usual borough rags. One of these had already attributed all my quotes to my opponent — his name was Michael Cohen, so I guess they figured one Jew named after God’s right-hand man was just as smart as any other. To extend slightly the Biblical imagery, I was running as a sacrificial lamb because the New York State Assembly has a 99% incumbent re-election rate and my opponent, much like Raul Castro or Dimitry Medvedev, didn’t even bother to campaign against me. Still, I had to scare up a proper political platform to ensure my loss wasn’t such a frightful embarrassment, and so I did. I chose what every candidate running for New York state government of either party runs on every year: overhauling the little banana republican regime that presides in Albany. A large part of this overhaul consists of “ethics reform” for all the little banana republicans.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer was elected overwhelmingly in 2006 on his promise to finally bring transparency and efficiency to New York, a promise brokered on his glamorous Wall Street-busting successes as state attorney general. Well, it didn’t take long for his administration to plow right over public expectations. First came the disclosure last year that members of his staff had been spying on Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and using tax-payer dollars to do so. (More distressing to New Yorkers with a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Bruno is that they didn’t turn up anything good on him.) Spitzer took a fall, then rebounded, owing, I suspect, to his lantern-jawed, comic book hero visage which you just want to believe in, damn it. Now comes word that he was involved in a prostitution ring. (Batman never paid for chicks.) His career in politics is effectively over today.

The New York Times just posted this story to its website and Drudge and Fox News have gone all woo-woo in their inimitable ways:

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Which of course doesn’t prove anything except that Spitzer was likely getting fucked by someone who isn’t his wife for $5,500. That’s how much the Emperors Club charges for its finest ladies per hour, and everything the Spitz would have us believe about him suggests he’s no compromising, part-time lover.

NBC is also reporting that cell phone records are the damning evidence that makes this a no-spin situation.

The Emperors Club website is down now. If it stays that way permanently, a balanced budget and the end to the Rockefeller drug laws can’t be far behind.

In coordination with MoveOn.org and other anti-war activists (sic) who are mounting a $20 million ad campaign to tie the war in Iraq to the slowing U.S. economy, Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz has authored a book declaring that the cost of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion in 2007 valued dollars. This is up from his 2006 estimate that the war would cost between $1 trillion to $2 trillion. He also puts the cost to Britain of the Iraq war through 2010 at approximately $40 billion – twice the amount previously estimated.

Stiglitz doesn’t, of course, ever claim to tackle the question of what, if any benefits, ’set off’ the costs of Iraq. As His Dudeness points out, the real choice in Iraq was between the removal of Saddam Hussein or the continued coexistence with his regime. The continued containment of Saddam had its own costs that Stiglitz and other idiots blithely ignore. Hitchens here names a few of them:

[T]he costs of enforcing the no-fly zones for an indefinite future, the costs of maintaining rather questionable United Nations sanctions on a crumbling regional economy and society, the costs of extinguishing the huge fires set by Saddam Hussein in the Kuwaiti oil-fields, the costs of future fights picked by him and the cost of cleaning up after the genocidal and aggressive adventures which were his government’s raison d’etre.

That the costs of putting an end to this nightmare were underestimated by one side in the argument seems to me to be obviously, if trivially, true. (The opposing side has never, to my knowledge, come up with a “costing” for the continued life of the bankrupt Baathist system, and the Bilmes/Stiglitz analysis doesn’t even touch the point.) Does this mean that we can only do one form of accounting? I would argue that this is not necessarily so.

In the area of Iraq that was liberated from Saddam Hussein’s control the earliest — the Kurdish provinces in the northeast part of the country — all objective observers seem to agree that an unprecedented prosperity has replaced what was once an unimaginable wasteland of misery. With their head-start of liberation beginning in 1992, the Kurds (who still have no refineries and little infrastructure) have nonetheless set an example for the rest of the region as well as of the country. And fresh prospecting has shown us that enormous new fields of oil, from the Sunni province of Anbar to the areas around Basra and Baghdad and Kirkuk, are becoming available to make every Iraqi as potentially rich as a Saudi or Bahraini or Qatari can now hope to be.

Furthermore, the development of these so-called “super-fields” can, first, abolish the previous system whereby Sunni dictatorship had to be exerted over the oil-bearing Shiite and Kurdish districts and, second, gradually undercut the regional duopoly currently exerted in the oil markets by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Do our celebrated economists care to put a price on that outcome?

Of the military cost I would simply want to make the same point in a different way: that the most important factors are unquantifiable, or at least unquantifiable by this sort of actuarial shorthand. A few years ago, we had armed forces that were quite able to remove a ramshackle yet horrific government in Kabul or Baghdad but were quite unprepared to tackle the much more agonizing and tenacious enemies — a Baathist/Al Quaeda alliance, or a Pakistani Pushtun/Bin Laden coalition — that had partly emerged under those ex-governments’ shadows. Now, after infinite labor, we have armed forces who have learned in practice how to smash Islamist terrorism on the battlefield, and also how to isolate and discredit it in the slums and the villages. This is what we needed in the first place and still need, as it happens, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and will also need in the future. It’s not that Bilmes and Stiglitz don’t present an alternative accounting process here: it’s more that they seem entirely unaware of the whole calculation.

Innocent as they are on the above points, they become positively childlike as they go on. Think how many candy-canes and vacations I could have if it were not for the space program, or the cost of carrier-groups or special forces or — I don’t know — Black Hawk helicopters. (If you think I am being unkind or frivolous, see if you can detect the thread of reasoning that connects Iraq expenditures with the crisis in the mortgage system.) There are days when I think that the money raised by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might have been better spent on the alleviation of poverty, but I can still tell an apple from an orange and am not hopelessly stuck on the zero-sum fixation. Once again, the economic “experts” turn out to know the price of some things but not the value of anything.

Only kidding. Silly old bat.

All over the intertubes now but worth a post I reckon…

I really wonder at times what sort of a society the yanks have — for fuck’s sake — you are walking your dog, putting out your bins, or whatever, and a charver asks you for a fucking ciggie or some shit like that — you then blow their fucking brains out with a machine gun.

Wish I had one.

Normally I just tell charvers to fuck off — I don’t fucking machine gun the fuckers to death (although that would be nice as well).

As I’ve grown older I’ve become much more ambivalent about gun ownership but there’s zero fucking reason why any private citizen should own these kooky assault weapons.

You should be able to bring down the wife with a single shot from your .38. surely?