This morning in Keene, NH, freedom activist Dave Ridley was arrested. Although I don’t have much information available at this time, it appears that he was arrested for attempting to perform his Constitutionally protected journalistic duties in the courtroom at the trial of marijuana activist Andrew Carroll. More information will be available from Free Keene and Free Talk Live as the story develops.
As a resident of New Hampshire who depends on Boston when I need to fly, it chagrins me to hear that the city of Boston is aiming to purposefully make Logan a non-functioning airport via carbon fees. It already bothered me to think that I’d need to do business in the communist haven of Massachusetts if I needed to travel, but this is ridiculous.
“It should not be inexpensive to park at convenient facilities in the middle of Logan Airport,” Aloisi said. “We need people to understand that there are better ways to get to Logan.”
I can’t help but ask myself why, if the facilities in the middle of Logan are so convenient, are the other methods of transportation “better”? Personally, I like convenience. When I have to drive two hours (each way) from my home to pick up a friend or relative at Logan, I don’t want to be punished for doing business in the Commonwealth of Taxachusets by being charged $2.00 to offset my carbon parking footprint. And I don’t want to park miles away and take a bus in. That isn’t better to me.
I also feel obligated to point out that although liberal enviro-fascists would have you believe that it’s effective to offset your carbon footprint, in this case it’s probably worse for the environment to offset than not to offset. Why is that? Capitalism. The airlines are having a hard time making ends meet due to a shaky economy. Piling on more fees and taxes will keep some consumers out of the friendly skies, which cuts into airline profit margins. Flying half empty airplanes is less fuel efficient than flying full planes. Cutting back on the number of flights will help, but it will also cut back on the number of tickets available for sale, and again cut back on profit margins. If the airlines can’t break even, let alone make a profit, they can’t replace old and highly polluting airplanes with newer, safer, cleaner planes. They can’t fund research into newer and more efficient technologies.
Offsetting the carbon used to drive to the airport may well be the straw that pissed the camel off enough to quit flying out of Logan. That’s great news for the passenger that was booked to sit next to a camel on an airplane, but bad news for the airlines, the city of Boston and the economy of the US as a whole. If the goal here is to create less pollution, they might as well just shut the airport down entirely. It won’t matter to me either way because from now on, I’ll be flying out of Hartford.
In this day and age, the word “irony” has lost it’s value as a lexical item. It’s misused in popular culture and by all but the best educated scholars. No, rain on your wedding day isn’t ironic. That’s just crappy weather. Snow on your global warming protest day (during which you’re probably planning to prance around Washington with a bunch of signs that are really bad for the environment), however, is ironic. It’s also exactly what the liberal enviro-fascists who put America’s first true blue socialist president since Kennedy in office deserve for trying to force their agenda on the rest of us.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the warm, fuzzy, sort of vague notion of “the environment” as much as the next guy. I just happen to have paid enough attention to the Discovery Channel when I was like 12 years old to know that “global warming” is a bunch of bull. For one thing, the climate of the Earth was far hotter millions of years ago than it is today, but I don’t see anybody screaming about humans causing global cooling since the day our species first diverged from some kind of monkey and learned to walk upright. The long term trend towards global cooling can be easily explained by phenomena such as the Earth’s atmosphere thinning since the planet’s early days, the earth slowly but surely moving away from the Sun and the Sun slowly cooling. During this long trend towards global cooling, the Earth has had some periods of relative warm temperatures and some periods of relative cold temperatures. A few years of slight warming is nothing to worry about and a cold, snowy winter this year is proof that it’s all cyclical. The information that’s always cited about the polar ice caps may or may not be true (Nick, can you help me out here?). I do know that glaciers like the one in Glacier National Park are melting, but shouldn’t we expect that thousands of years after the end of the last major ice age?
Let’s face it–enviro-fascism isn’t good for much other than forcing decent people to comply with retarded regulations and red tape. Oh, and demonstrating the real meaning of the word “irony” at the expense of a bunch of misguided hippies.
Related Posts
Obama’s Climate Czar Literally a Socialist
Logan to Become Unfeasible as Means of Transportation
I was stumbling the internet today and came across an editorial from the San Fransisco Chronicle which, beleive it or not, actually makes the case that perhaps it’s time for the United States to grow up and get over their silly War on a Plant. It’s well written and I give kudos to the newspaper and the writer for having the balls to publish this in a mainstream media source. It takes a lot of guts in the current political climate to make your true feelings on the illegality of marijuana known. The following line, in particular, made me small. Way to go!
So, in the interest of a little taboo candor, I’m just going to throw editorial caution to the wind and write what lots of us thought - but were afraid to say - when we heard about Phelps. Ready? Here goes: America’s drug policy is idiotic.
There is a push on the part of some politicians to institute a national service program that would make all young people serve in whatever capacity the government approves. I’ve heard the pitch being made that the government should give young people the “opportunity” to serve their country, but this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. First off, volunteerism should focus on helping your fellow man, not the government of whatever nation state you happen to inhabit. Secondly government programs like the Peace Corps already exist, so there are plenty of opportunities for young people to work for government bureaucracies if that’s what they wish to do.
I have no problem with charitable giving of time and money to help improve the health, education, and general cleanliness of a neighborhood. In fact voluntary community service is in my opinion one of the most noble things that Americans do with their free time, and they already do it. Every day American volunteers participate in Big Brothers Big Sisters, their local volunteer fire department, food banks, toys for tots, and thousands of other efforts to help those in need around them.
All of this doesn’t change the fact that mandatory civilian service is no less repugnant than a military draft. What is so reprehensible about conscription is that it presupposes that the state essentially owns you and can force you to labor for them. They get to decide how many months or years of labor you must render to the state, and this is incompatible with the notion of individual liberty in a free society. It also takes all the joy out of the idea of community service. Someone who is forced to serve is not a volunteer motivated by the better parts of human nature, but rather a peon who goes through the required motions to avoid jail or the loss of government privileges.
The notion that the people owe a debt of service to the ruling class is a very ancient one that should have died along with the feudal notion of the divine right of kings. The people should be free to contribute to society in the way that they feel is best. A young person working hard to build a career is not only improving their own station, but rendering some kind of service to their employer and the customers of that employer. They should not be forced to pick up litter for 20 hours a week if they feel that their time is better spent becoming a more productive member of society through building a career.
The idea that people owe a debt of service to a government which already demands a large portion of their income, and which has incurred so much debt in the name of the people as to endanger their future prosperity is an absurd one. The American people have shown themselves to be very charitable and generous with their time despite the high taxes that they pay to support bloated bureaucracies that are supposed to be addressing the problems that are tackled by volunteers.
Encouraging people to volunteer to help solve social problems is a great idea, but national service seeks to make people servants of the state, rather than volunteers giving freely of their time and money.
Barack Obama has appointed former EPA administrator Carol Browner as his adviser on energy and climate change, the so called ‘climate czar’. Browner was listed as one of 14 leaders on the website of Socialist International, supposedly working for “a sustainable world society”. The people at SI are died in the wool Marxists who believe in an international dictatorship of the proletariat. What did you expect? The secret Muslim charge was just a neocon smear tactic, but Obama is more of an avowed socialist than a secret one, and the fact is that socialist leaning politicians have been behind the big push to get alarmist global warming views into the mainstream.
I am scared for this country when we have a president filling his cabinet with reds, and the youth seem to be behind it because the previous president was perceived as something of a power hungry control freak. Bush was a very bad president and a very bad man IMO, and there was some validity to labeling him a ‘fascist’, although to seems to me there is far more validity in labeling Obama a socialist or Marxist even in this early stage of the game.
For those of you who think that socialism is the answer to global warming, I hope you are paying attention to all the news out there, and not just what’s spoon fed to you. If you think the arctic will become ice free in the next couple of years, you may have missed this report about sea ice being at the same levels in December 2008 as the were in December 1979. You may also have missed the fact that Antarctic sea ice has been on the increase over the last couple of decades. Those who would like to turn America into a socialist state may need to find a new justification, and it is my sincere hope that they will continue to be exposed for the anti-constitutional subversives that they are and fail in their mission.
In the United States, it has not been politically popular to criticize the state of Israel for the tactics it uses against the Palestinians, no matter how deplorable those tactics are. After all, we are led to believe that all the blame for the unrest in the middle east lies with Islamic extremist groups like Hamas, and that to criticize Israel is to side with these radicals. The fact of the matter is that many thousands of innocent displaced people are trapped in Palestine under a state of military siege. Israel has taken a hard line over the years and has been reluctant to compromise on issues like Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. Israel does not hesitate to use overwhelming force to settle these disputes. The recent violence in the region has finally led some Americans to become vocal critics of the way that Israel treats the Palestinians.
The modern State of Israel was born in 1948 as a homeland for the Jewish people who had been persecuted and nearly exterminated completely in Europe just a couple years earlier. One of the reasons that people will use as a justification for the foundation of Isreal as a “Jewish state” is the fact that it was the historical homeland of the Jewish people before the diaspora, and that the land was promised to them by God. That sounds nice, but what about the fact that before Israel was chartered as a Jewish majority state, Arab Muslims were the majority of the population and had been for centuries? There is an extremist ideology on the Israeli side called Zionism and it is nothing short of militaristic nationalism tinged with tones of religiosity and in my opinion it is not much more enlightened than the Jihadist ideology.
I believe that the state of Israel does have a right to exist, and that both sides need to compromise and forgive and forget if there is ever going to be something like peace in this part of the world. A good first step would be for Israel to acknowledge the fact that there is some similarity between the horrible conditions in the Palestinian “refugee camps” and the ghettos and camps to which Jews were subjected in Europe. That isn’t to say that Israel is pursuing a campaign of extermination like the Nazi’s, but it is to say that a nation founded by holocaust survivors should be more sensitive to the plight of an oppressed population. The phrase “never again” should mean never again to any people, not just “never again” to the Jewish people. Certainly there are many Israelis who disagree with their country’s treatment of the Palestinians. There are many good people on both sides who just want to find a way to live in peace and dignity with those on the other side.
Some American readers may agree with me but are asking how this is any of our business. Why should we be involved in what is obviously a long running fight over the holy land. My opinion is that the US government should not be involved, but it is. The United States gives billions in aide to the state of Israel every year, and cooperates with the Israeli military in areas like training and logistics. The US government been a party to this conflict for decades and because of this, many people in the world see the US as endorsing Israel’s methods in the current conflict. Usually you’ll hear the Secretary of State make the obligatory call for restraint on the part of Israel, but regardless of what Israel does in this offensive it knows it can rely on continued financial aide from the United States. Personally, I oppose foreign aide in general, because it does mean that US tax dollars flow into foreign conflicts around the globe. I think that withdrawing our aide from not only Israel, but other middle eastern states like Egypt who receives almost as much as Israel, would be a good place to start. Israel has a right to self defense in my opinion, but it should not be subsidized by American tax payer money.
Some people will make the allegation that simply by criticizing Israel in this article, I am somehow anti-semitic. Indeed I did make mention of a “Jewish state” which is what the state of Israel declares itself to be, but that doesn’t mean that I harbor any dislike of the Jewish people. Israel is a nation state, and the opinions of it’s citizens are not homogeneous. In the same way that not all Americans supported the War in Iraq, not all Israeli’s support the occupation. It’s also important to remember that not all Israeli citizens are Jewish. There are a lot of Muslims and non-Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who hold Israeli citizenship, and not all Jews are Israelis. There are also many Jews in the US, Europe and around the world who are not Israeli citizens. I’m not trying to place blame on the Jews or for that matter the Muslims or Christians. There has been too much stereotyping and groupthink on this issue, and that is precisely what keeps the conflict going. Both sides need to recognize that there are individuals in the opposing camp. It’s more difficult to conduct a suicide bombing or an air strike when you see the targets as individual people and not Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, or Muslims.
In my opinion, this is an example of how government and political power create animosity and fuel conflict. I believe that this is a fundamentally political conflict that has used religion as tool to inspire bigotry on both sides. There was relative peace in this region before the question of political status entered into the debate. I’ve included this video to illustrate that there are even rabbis who are critical of the way the State of Israel has conducted itself. As a disclaimer this Rabbi is calling for the dismantlement of the state of Israel, which I do not support.
I hope that the readers of Happily Oblivious are enjoying the first day of a brand new year, or at least not suffering too bad from all the booze they had last night.
I hope that 2009 will be a better year than 2008, but I’m not certain that will be the case. I’ve heard a lot of people expressing optimism that the economy will get better and I have to say that I still think 2009 will be at least as bad as 2008 as a whole. People should still try to be optimistic about their prospects over the next year though. I’m personally happy about the way that my year is starting off, and I think that I’ll be doing a lot better financially than I was last year. Just because the big economic picture looks bad does not mean that you as an individual are doomed to do poorly. A large part of your financial well being is still up to you.
It’s very easy to get demotivated when you read the news these days. If you’re sweating over whether or not you’ll have a job, just remember that even with a high unemployment rate of 10%, that means that 9 in 10 folks in the job market are still employed. If you have lost your job or lost your house in the last year, then try to look at this as a new start. The same thing happened to folks during previous downturns, like the 1930’s depression, but those who didn’t give up were often able to make back the wealth they had lost when things got a little better.
Best Wishes,
Nick
I ran across this article that came out several months ago and it caught me off guard. I spend a lot of time blogging and doing activism to promote freedom and liberty, but even I was under the impression that chattel slavery had essentially been wiped out. However as I write this there are people being held in true bondage. I’m not talking about women who voluntarily go into prostitution or even third world workers who make a dollar a day in poor working conditions of their own free will. These people may not be in good situations but they own their own bodies and have the freedom to choose what they will do when they wake up in the morning. I am talking about human beings who are considered property by their fellow man.
Although the year is 2008 there are still men and women who are forced to work for nothing but food, water, and something resembling shelter. Worse yet their are children who are born into a state of bondage and are forced into hard labor or sex work from a very early age. While many slaves live in Africa, Asia, or other far off places there are nations near the United States where slavery is common, like Haiti with an estimated 300,000 child slaves. There is also the fact that while relatively uncommon, there are slaves in the United States. Sometimes immigrants are brought to the US and forced to work off their “debt” to the traffickers who brought them. Many times the debts that are used to justify bondage are simply fictional, or in many parts of the world they were small debts incurred generations ago but are applied to the children and grandchildren of the debtor.
My point in writing this is to make people aware of the fact that slavery is not just an evil of the past. It is a blight on humanity today, and that the solution lies with caring people not governments. I certainly believe that slavery should be illegal, but the fact is that there are already many laws against slavery. New laws and declarations are unlikely to be much more effective than those of the past. I have no problem prosecuting traffickers, but I think that a more effective approach is for organizations to educate, empower, and when practical rescue slaves. It doesn’t require an effort on the part of everyone in the world. Just a handful of caring and dedicated people can help make a huge difference.
With the inauguration of a new president just weeks away and the expected draw down of US combat forces in Iraq over the next couple of years, many Americans seem to be mistakenly under the impression that the US is coming back to a peacetime footing. The United States has been on a war footing since the end of world war two, and that isn’t likely to change in the near term future.
While many voices on the antiwar left have become unusually quiet with the sweeping Democratic victory this November, there are still some people out there reminding Americans that we’ve been in Afghanistan for almost 8 years and the number of US troops there is set to rise by about 20,000. Pat Buchanan has a lot of views with which I disagree, but he has been a consistent voice against interventionism and imperialism on the part of the United States. He points out that the Taliban is resurgent with violence on the rise, and an increasing part of the country is now under the control of groups hostile to the United States and its NATO partners.
Unlike some of the more zealously antiwar members of the libertarian movement, I personally supported the invasion of Afghanistan. I wish that the Congress had gone through the correct constitutional procedure by issuing a formal declaration of war, but I felt that the ruling Taliban was actively harboring and aiding terrorists engaged in combat against the United States. My views on the initial military action haven’t changed. I think that had it not been for some bungling, Bin Laden could have been killed or captured and much more damage could have been done to Al-Qaeda and their supporters. But that opportunity was largely blown by the fact that the US didn’t commit very many troops or act quickly enough to prevent many terrorists from fleeing to Pakistan or other neighboring states.
Eight years of occupation and nation building have done little to bring stable democratic or classically liberal institutions to Afghanistan. It remains a largely tribal land that is a few centuries behind the modern era. As a westerner who values human life, liberty and dignity, I find the religiously justified oppression of Afghans repugnant, but that doesn’t mean that the US led occupation is helping to end tyranny there. Afghans have always defeated foreign occupations since the end of Alexander the Great’s conquest. Many Afghans who may sympathize with reforms are still more motivated by their sense of nationalism to oppose the US invasion. Civilian casualties radicalize people who would otherwise see the Taliban as a greater threat than western forces, and as these new fighters are targeted for bombing more women and children die, and so the cycle continues with yet more insurgents taking up arms.
Afghanistan was a pit for the blood and treasure of the Soviet Union during their failed occupation of that country. No matter how much more noble one thinks the motives of the United States, it faces the same fate if it continues in Afghanistan and other nations abroad. As the US economy sours and tent cities pop up in major metro areas here at home, is it really wise to be fighting an open ended war in central Asia? Can we really afford to maintain military bases in Korea, Germany, Japan, Cuba and the other corners of the world where we park a large chunk of our military capabilities? My answer is no.