The Exercise of Vital Powers

If God had meant us to fly he would have given us large brains whereby we could
discover and understand concepts such as lift, thrust, pitch and yaw.

Oh wait…..

From http://www.vegenergy.com :

“Retail Biodiesel Filling Point now available in Atlanta. We currently are
selling B100 for $3.00/gallon - Wednesdays from 6-8pm.
Our retaail point iis now located at 1996 DeKalb Ave.
This is near the Lake Claire area, near Arizona St. and LeFrance Street.
Please call Robert Del Bueno, at (404)219-9709 for more details. ”

Wow! I can pay more and have crappy service. I mean seriously, a two hour window
each week when you can fill up. WTF?

(As seen on the woot forums link)

Transterrestrial Musings has an interesting thread on the decline of Reason Magazine (I still subscribe but don’t find time to read it often), the LP and their anti-war stances. Some select comments (read the whole thread) :

Rand Simberg responding to “Definitional Disagreement’

What do you call a libertarian in favor of foreign invasion of a country that was not involved in attacks on the country the libertarian lives in?

I’d call him or her a libertarian who would have let the Nazis and Soviets carve up Europe, since they had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.

What if that country happened to decouple its oil from the US dollar a couple years before said invasion, yet this libertarian buys the WMD or grave threat argument pushed by the administration?

I’d call that particular libertarian an irrational conspiracy-mongering nutcase.

Peter Saint-Andre points out: “Libertarians are ideologues (I know; I was once one of them). While it’s pleasant to drink deeply from theory, being under the influence of philosophy usually leads to practical fecklessness. The antidote: read lots of history. Modern freedom emerged not because of philosophy but because of the historical experience of certain peoples in northwestern Europe”

Elias Israel:

More than “splintered” the Libertarian Party, the response to 9/11 has utterly demolished it.

As an LP state chair of many years, and a candidate for national LP chairman when 9/11 took place, I witnessed the debacle first-hand.

The LP is a party with almost complete focus on a particular domestic agenda. So much so that all foreign problems are recast as domestic ones. To the LP, every question of public policy boils down to whether it’s acceptable to make citizens pay the costs in taxes. Unsurprisingly, the LP’s answer is virtually always ‘no’.

Many of us, myself included, realized after 9/11 that this is an inadequate frame for world events. I don’t enjoy paying taxes any more than anyone else, but one has to realize after a time that there are worse things to fear.

Unfortunately, the LP as a whole was and is run by people who came from a more rigid anti-war stance. They have a peculiar myopia that causes nearby miscreants to loom much larger in their vision than foreign monsters.

Most of the people with money and influence have left the party, or been bodily tossed out. A graph of donations to the LP tells the tale– the peak reached in 2001 just before the attacks stands like a mountain over the comparatively barren valley that followed.

I have not changed in my view that in the years ahead, the new primary dynamic in public policy will be between “libertarian” and “traditionalist” axes instead of “liberal” and “conservative.”

But the LP has failed to take on the mantle of one of those wings by siding with what the people want — a robust defense of Liberty in the face of a complex world– so now it falls to others to try to fashion it. Perhaps the GOP will split into those two camps if the Democrats weaken much, much further.

In the meantime, I am without a party, like many others.

ScrappleFace is funny.

Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who last week struck a Capitol Hill police officer while running a security check point, would be allowed to remain in Congress under the terms of a new immigration reform bill. Even though she entered the Capitol illegally, the bill would treat McKinney as a guest lawmaker until the next Congressional election. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist defended this latest compromise measure saying, “the state of Georgia needs Cynthia McKinney to do the work that, apparently, no legal American citizen is willing to do.”

Rumsfeld Scoffs at Attack Speculation Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scoffed at suggestions that U.S. military planners are preparing a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“That’s just wild speculation,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “I have no specific plans in my hands at this very moment to hit their nuclear facility at 33.3 degrees North latitude, 51.55 degrees East longitude. We have not decided to penetrate that location with a 4,637 pound GBU-28 laser-guided bunker-buster bomb carrying 630 pounds of high explosive, and capable of cutting through 100 feet of earth or 20 feet of concrete before detonation.”

“So,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, “let’s stop the irresponsible speculation and focus on a peaceful negotiated settlement, shall we?”

You can find it here

(2006-04-19) — A growing movement of retired and active-duty U.S. military officers, angry at the mismanagement, arrogance and even deception that have hampered U.S. efforts to secure peace and democracy in Iraq, have begun quietly calling for the resignation of top leaders they blame for the difficulties.

“I believe that it’s time for them to step down,” said one unnamed retired three-star general. “The editors of The New York Times and Washington Post and the news producers at CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC should resign effective immediately.”

“They’ve formed a tight cabal that focuses only on news that reinforces their neo-journ ideology,” said another unnamed general. “Despite the urgent need for actual reporting from Iraq, they have failed to put enough boots on the ground in country.” read the rest

Interesting thing I didn’t hear mentioned in the media reports about the DHS
Press Guy busted for soliciting a minor. He was a civil servant - not a political
appointee. He worked for Time Magazine prior to working for the Federal
Government and was fired for downloading porn at work. He is also a Democrat
based on his
voter registration.

Based on my somewhat limited knowledge of how these background checks work, I
don’t think they would have caught this. The reasons for this termination from
AOL-TimeWarner were probably not disclosed for legal liability reasons (although
the Govt could change that by statute if it wants). I’m pretty sure trolling for
a persons UseNet/MySpace/LJ/Chatroom posts isn’t part of a standard background
check. As for the OPM interviews of family, friends and neighbors - even if they
suspected something people aren’t gonna want to toss the pedophile label around
without some form of proof (i.e. a “He touched my daughter” kinda thing).

Once in a great while does a new idea present itself that triggers a re-evaluation of my fundamental beliefs. did it once. Zell Miller did it and now Lee Harris has done it with his article on Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology

The basic premise of this idea is that most of our efforts to understand 9-11 are flawed. From our more rational point of view we try and see 9-11 as an act of Clausewitzian War (Clausewitz defined war as “politics by other means”). So while we look for the causes and strategy behind the 9-11 attacks, we do so thinking Al Qaeda is like the Imperial Japanese trying to bomb Perl Harbor and force us to submit to their hegemony of the Pacific.

According to Lee Harris, Al Qaeda is not trying to conduct politics by other means. They are acting out a fantasy ideology for themselves. The United States and the West are just the antagonists in their pageant. A fantasy ideology is a set of “political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy.” It is why Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, why Tim McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of a federal office building in Oklahoma and why Hitler diverted much needed rail traffic away from the war effort to exterminate the enemy in his fantasy ideology. These were not means to an end, but ends in and of themselves.

The author describes a friend in college who was going to protest the Vietnam War:

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have
been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

I’ve seen this type of thing before. It is the Modus Operandi of the Libertarian Party. My experience is that a majority of LP activists are not interested in conducting politics. They want to act out their fantasy. Their tactics aren’t designed to bring popular opinion into conformance with their views. Their goal is be the revolutionary.

Take for example the 2004 Libertarian Presidential Nominee. Here was an unemployed computer programmer. He didn’t have a driver’s license and hadn’t filed his tax returns in several years. These are not attributes that would endear him to the general public. But that didn’t matter to the convention delegates. They voted for him, not in a rational Clausewitzian fashion, but in acting out their own fantasy ideology of standing up to the Government.

Another example was his “arrest” at the Presidential Debates. This was a pure example of acting out a fantasy. To have had a Clausewitzian effect he would never have issues a press release before hand. It defeated any tactical purpose the arrest would have had, namely to generate press coverage for the campaign.

Now to be fair to the LP, not everyone in that organization is trying to live out their fantasy of being the noble resistance. And both the right and left sides of the political spectrum have their own groups acting out their fantasies. Operation Rescue and the Animal Liberation Front are good examples.

Those who disengage from reality to act out their fantasy ideologies are dangerous to themselves and their cause. Al Qaeda’s actions on 9-11 toppled two Islamic governments and caused a third (Libya) to rennounce its war with the West. Rational people looking to affect change try to distance themselves from the likes of McVeigh, Operation Rescue and the ALF movement. While the opposition uses those groups as a basis for an ad hominem attack. With friends like that you don’t need enemies.

…but I didn’t speak up for I wasn’t a ninja.

This photo, taken by a student’s camera phone, shows ATF officials pinning down
Jeremiah Ransom in front of Snelling dining hall. He was coming from a pirate vs.
ninja event at the Wesley Foundation and was not arrested. (Kathleen
Ruark | The Red & Black)

Glad to see the BATF has reformed itself since the massacre at Waco.