Month: July 2002

Liberal Columnist Calls on Hamas to Stop Terrorism. “I ask the intelligent among you: ‘Do your religion and your moral conscience permit you to brainwash the Palestinian youth whose lives you risk with such nonsense?’ How can you allow your strategy to be based on a hallucinatory reading of Jewish theology? Isn’t this theological reading of the issue of the Palestinian people what created its tragedies? [Because of such theology,] Haj Amin Al-Husseini collaborated with Hitler and rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937 to partition Palestine, with 20% going to the Jews and 80% to Palestine. Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…you rejected Clinton’s proposal, which gave your people 96-97% of the West Bank, citing the religious ruling that you rejected it because it was an American-Jewish conspiracy against the Palestinian people…” [The Middle East Media Research Institute]

An interesting bit of history in this paragraph. I wasn’t aware the Arabs had collaborated with Hitler to reject a partition of Palestine that would have given them much more than the UN plan.

DaveNet: Our Deal with Salon.   [Scripting News]

It looks like the cost is the same as when you buy Radio directly from UserLand. The only difference I can see is that the space is provided by Salon. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t quite get the point.

Feds Charge 5 in Missionary’s Death [AP World News]

Why is the US government still indicting foreign citizens for crimes committed in foreign countries? As long as this nonsense of applying US laws to the rest of the world continues, the government sounds rather hypocritical in its opposition to the International Criminal Court.

In any case, if the Feds want to put terrorists on trial for murdering a US missionary, this case should have precedence. There were even US citizens involved as conspirators.

Democracy. I found myself thinkning (as I often do) “good, if people vote for statism they deserve to get it – good and hard”. However, the divine right of the 51% (democracy) is (as all libertarians know) quite immoral. There is no reason why those who vote against statism should suffer because of the people who vote for it.

Take the example of California. When I rub my hands with glee (which I do) at the latest example of California statism (“jolly good, the reckoning is brought forword and the collapse of California will be a warning to the rest of the nation to repent…”) I am overlooking a few important points.

Firstly the innocent (those who vote against the increase in government spending and regulations) suffer at least as much (most likely rather more) than the guilty. And secondly there is no reason to suppose that people in other areas will understand that the suffering is caused by the statism. [Samizdata.net]

As a resident of California, I can safely say that even the majority of people in this area don’t understand. Most Californians are perfectly willing to accept the line fed them by the media, which endlessly tells us that the problems were caused by the failure of deregulation and by evil out-of-state corporations. Never mind that we never had deregulation.

The blame directed at corporations is focused on those headquartered in other states, since they aren’t as likely to have lots of employees voting in California elections. That’s why Enron was the designated scapegoat–it’s located in Texas, which has the added advantage of being the state liberals love to hate.

Nobody ever mentions government agencies such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which made a huge amount of money buying power at subsidized rates from big government agencies in other states and selling it at market price here. Strangely enough, all that money the supposedly non-profit government agency made never resulted in lower electric bills. In fact, I have no idea where it all went.

Apple to open retail store in LA: The Grove [The Macintosh News Network]

This one is located fairly close to my apartment, and I’ve never been to an Apple Store before, so I might go there this weekend to take a look.

Making Your Bad Tunes Sound Good. The amazing technical capabilities of music software like Reason, Acid and Pro Tools brings professional music tools within the reach of even the most marginal of musical talents. By Mark McClusky. [Wired News]

Pro Tools is the standard for the people I’ve talked to in the music industry here in LA. It’s very important these days, since many professional musicians (Britney Spears, for example) have marginal musical talents.

Inflation continues to fall as buyers keep the pressure up on sellers.   This also means that a 3-4% wage increase this year and a 10% increase in housing prices will have a major impact on real personal income and wealth.  Another three years of this and we will have replicated the gains in real personal wealth over the last two decades (for most Americans — this is in contrast to the rapid stock market driven gains over the last 20 years for the nation’s wealthiest individuals).  Nice.
[John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

There are some problems with this theory. The most glaring is that he’s treating inflation as synonymous with some vague statistic about consumer prices. In fact, inflation is an increase in the supply of money–this may lead to an increase in prices, or it may not, depending on other factors. The US has been inflating its money supply for years without prices going up much, because we send the money overseas to pay for import goods. That can only work as long as overseas sellers are willing to accept the dollars (or have no choice).

The housing price increase is the result of another bubble. The Federal Reserve is still inflating the money supply, but now instead of the money going into smoke-and-mirror “dot com” stocks, it’s going into real estate. This is bad for anyone buying a house now, because when the bubble bursts, they’ll be stuck with a house worth less than what they paid for it, but their mortgage payments will reflect the inflated price.

To me, that’s even worse than losing money buying lottery tickets disguised as stocks. At least you can just accept your loss and move on, instead of being stuck either making excessive payments for 30 years on a house or else going through the hassle of selling it at a loss.

Anarchists, Who Cares Which Wing?. Patrick K Martin at The Libertarian Enterprise –

Anarchists, Who Cares Which Wing? – Why Mr. Martin believes that
anarchy won’t work. [tle] [End the War on Freedom]

His reasoning is that anarchy won’t work because it depends on people behaving rationally, and there are people who are incapable of reason–he uses Christian Fundamentalists and Liberals as examples. While he’s right that such people exists, I believe he’s missed the point about what that means.

Irrational people do indeed exist, and as long as governments exist, they will be used by these people to further their own twisted agendas. That’s how we end up with schools that teach “creationism” and “guns are evil.” The whole point of anarchy is that such lunatics can’t use the massive force of the government to impose their agendas.

British Report Blames Rifle Problem. The government has come under pressure to scrap the modified SA80-A2 rifle after troops reported it had misfired and jammed during anti-terrorist operations.

[…]

According to The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, the report blamed the problems on soldiers not cleaning and maintaining the weapon properly. [FirearmNews.com]

This sounds exactly like what happened when the M16 was first issued, and got many American soldiers killed by jamming in battle. The US government tried to blame the solderis then, too, but eventually were forced to admit there were problems with the rifle and the issued ammunition. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same sort of thing is going on with the SA80A2.

Israelis Back Down on Deporting Kin [AP World News]

Headline aside, what actually happened was that the Israeli Attorney General determined that deporting relatives of exploding Arabs was illegal. I don’t see how it would have helped, anyway. They would only have been “deported” to Gaza, thus shifting where the terrorists were concentrated. What’s the point of that?

The Israelis don’t really have the option of really deporting people, since not a single Arab country will accept Palestinian refugees.