Yesterday I held a colloquy with a braying jackass over New York Democratic Representative Charles Rangel’s plan to institute universal military conscription. Today Rangel is back, in an op-ed in the New York Times, insisting that he really means it, that he wasn’t just braying at random on CNN. Fine with me. I’m clipping and snipping, so see the original to wrangle this jackass unedited.

I believe that if we are going to send our children to war, the governing principle must be that of shared sacrifice.

Remember that ’sacrifice’ always means blood sacrifice. Politicians tell you the bald truth and you never listen.

Throughout much of our history, Americans have been asked to shoulder the burden of war equally.

Except for women, children, the elderly, the blind, the halt and the lame. And the children of the elites. And throughout the rest of our history, America has been defended by an all-volunteer military, which is what is in keeping with American principles.

Carrying out the administration’s policy toward Iraq will require long-term sacrifices by the American people, particularly those who have sons and daughters in the military.

They are volunteers. I wish every one of them peace and safety, but they made a choice to risk harm in pursuit of benefits for themselves and for their families. They are not conscripts.

Yet the Congress that voted overwhelmingly to allow the use of force in Iraq includes only one member who has a child in the enlisted ranks of the military–just a few more have children who are officers.

But a heck of a lot of kids in medical school, I’ll bet. Different people make different choices. This is liberty. The choices they make are influenced by their initial circumstances. This is an accretive consequence of liberty.

I believe that if those calling for war knew that their children were likely to be required to serve–and to be placed in harm’s way–there would be more caution and a greater willingness to work with the international community in dealing with Iraq.

Could be true, but it won’t happen. Children of CongressVermin ’serve’ as photographers, like Vietnam ‘veteran’ Al Gore. What will happen, what always happens, is that politicians will massively waste their ‘free’ conscripts. There is a monolith in Washington to testify to this fact.

A renewed draft will help bring a greater appreciation of the consequences of decisions to go to war.

I love that word ‘appreciation.’ It’s a favorite of educationists. It means sensory awareness without knowledge or understanding. Unfortunately for Rangel, history’s plain lesson, perhaps not ‘appreciated’ but well known, is that conscript armies make the decision to go to war that much easier to make. Cannon-fodder is the food of the warfare state.

Service in our nation’s armed forces is no longer a common experience.

Never was, thankfully.

A disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military…

Now we get to the real issue. I was sure this was what he was saying yesterday, but he didn’t come right out and say it. The implication is that the all-volunteer military, by being comprised of a “disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups,” is simultaneously racist and bad for defense. Both are false. The military is no more racist than is the National Football League, another place where poor young black males seek to reap the best available benefit from their initial circumstances. If ‘disproportion’ in the one is racist and not rational, then the same must be true for the other. And an army of volunteers, actively seeking benefits for themselves and for their families, is surely a better defense of American interests than a cadre of seething, resentful slaves.

…while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent.

And the implication here is that the anequalitarian distribution of self-selected volunteers for the military, for medical school and for the NFL is an injustice in se. Many poor young black males don’t have the money or the academic preparation to go to medical school. Most pre-med students don’t have the athletic ability to play pro football. So what? We are each of us free to choose our own careers, and in so doing, we provide secondary benefits to the society at large. Our only responsibility is to ourselves and to our families. Where the choice to act in our own behalf is usurped by force, we are slaves. The irony, from Rangel’s jackass point of view, is that enslaving a pre-med student in a conscript army will hurt poor young black males in two ways: By depriving them of military roles for which they would have volunteered but for which the medical student has better academic preparation. And by depriving them of two years or four years of the life-saving abilities of the physician that pre-med student will ultimately become. This is the broken-window fallacy, only Rangel is proposing to enrich us by breaking our skulls instead.

We need to return to the tradition of the citizen soldier–…

The citizen soldier was a volunteer. The story of Cincinnatus is fascinating and inspiring, but the point of the story is that the citizen soldier is a volunteer who fights when he must and then returns to his plow.

…–with alternative national service required for those who cannot serve because of physical limitations or reasons of conscience.

And there is the call for National Youth Slavery.

Those who would lead us into war…

Not you, thankfully, you jackass.

…have the obligation to support an all-out mobilization of Americans for the war effort,…

Not only are our children to be enslaved, our politicians are themselves obliged. Slavery is pernicious, ain’t it?

…including mandatory national service that asks something of us all.

It is important to understand that military conscription is a Trojan Horse. The real issue, for which Rangel is probably an unwitting stooge, is National Youth Slavery. The idea has been ‘trial-ballooned’ for years, by William F. Buckley, among others. And, of course, the people to be enslaved are not the ones who get to vote for their enslavement. Ironically, as with the other truly serious domestic policy issue, the incremental nationalization of medicine, the underlying concern is health care: Buckley and other dotards want to compel your children to change their bedpans. Acquiring ‘free’ conscript soldiers to be shredded overseas is pure gravy. “O brave new world That has such people in’t!”

But fear not, for the libertarians, civil and otherwise, understand that the true battle is to prevent John Poindexter from discovering that they wear mis-matched socks. What possible peril is posed by the enslavement of America’s young and her doctors, compared to Big Brother? Charles Rangel may be a jackass, but at least he’s a straightforward enemy of liberty. May god spare America’s freedom from her alleged friends…

I’m always amazed at the bizarre links some folks manage to dig up and present in these blogs,… well, now it’s my turn. I’m not sure how I stumbled across this, but a recent article by Jack Rain over at Strike the Root made mention of an article by “Lew Rockwell’s hit man J. H. Huebert”. I recalled that article and I thought it was a fair critique of a potentially destructive strategy of watering down the message in order to reach greater numbers, but this adds a new dimension,…

Via http://watch.pair.com/database2.html;

The Council for National Policy

Past/Present Officers & Prominent Member Profiles

Part III ~ N - Z

[…]

Mark Skousen - CNP Membership Roster (1984-85, 1988, 1996, 19990. Nephew of President of the Freeman Institute, Mormon Cleon Skousen. Mark Skousen’s eighth great-grandfather was Founding Father of the U.S., Freemason / Illuminist, Benjamin Franklin. [Mskousen.com] Mark Skousen is Editor-in-chief, Forecasts & Strategies, one of the largest invest/economic newsletters in the United States; columnist, Forbes; professor, economics and finance, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; contributor to the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, National Review, Reason, Human Events, Liberty, and The Journal of Economic Perspectives; writes a monthly column entitled “Economics on Trial” for The Freeman published by the Foundation for Economic Education; authored seventeen books on financial and economic topics, was a former economic analyst, Central Intelligence Agency.

The ‘former CIA’ bit is nothin’ next to the colorful bio of his uncle Cleon.

I’m *telling* you; when Hillary finally reveals herself to be a Reptoid, don’t forget that I told you that this show was going to get a whole lot weirder. Anti-Communists make strange bedfellows, eh?

Res ipse loquitur. (The thing–ahem–speaks for itself.)

A little while ago I was in a supermarket and the perky little clerk apologized to me for a device (a debit terminal!) that seemed to be malfunctioning. I said, “Don’t worry about it. I know it will work.” I confided to her that I could recall a time when things routinely did not work, when the electrical power, for example, failed regularly. By this she was amazed. I am 43 years old. To the elderly I seem young. To the very young I seem unimaginably old. But I am many, many technological generations older than that perky little clerk, old enough to remember when things just didn’t work. When the power went out not because a drunken driver rammed a substation but because physical components failed–wore out, to use an antique phrase. Power companies work now with devices for which the mean-time-between-failures is greater than the span of time between ice ages, but I can remember a time when we kept kerosene lamps and matches in every room, fully confident that the power would fail.

The fact that things are getting better and better–often overlooked, sometimes deliberately obscured–is brought to light in a column by William F. Buckley at townhall.com. Buckley in turn is citing a new book from The Cato Institute called It’s Getting Better All the Time: The 100 Greatest Trends of the Past 100 Years. Some of Buckley’s examples from the book:

In 1960, a 3-minute telephone call to San Francisco from New York cost $12.66. Today, $0.36. The life of a light bulb is four times what it was 10 years ago. Over the past 50 years, the rate of death from catastrophic accidents (accidents killing at least five people) has fallen about fourfold. The percentage of streams usable for fishing and swimming: in 1972, 36 percent; in 1994, 86 percent.

I pay $.04 a minute for long-distance, not $.12. The very-bright ‘warm’ fluorescent tubes in my son’s bathroom use less energy than a single dim lightbulb and they last for years and years. My wife, my son and I each have two very powerful computers, and the ones these replaced are gathering dust in the garage. The car I drive is twelve years old and has 132,000 miles on it. Drives like a dream, excellent gas mileage, no major component failures, and we’re debating whether to hang on to it to use as a ‘trainer’ for my son four years from now. Our cell phones are amazingly more capable than Gene Rodenberry’s fantasized ‘Star Trek’ communicators, and they look cooler, too. My wife is so much in love with her Handspring Visor PDA that soon our phones will be Handspring Treos–cell phone, Palm-OS PDA, pager with keyboard, and wireless internet browser and mail client–much more powerful than the ‘pocket computers’ in Niven and Pournelle’s ‘The Mote in God’s Eye.’ My son can make better-than-movie-theater-quality popcorn in three minutes and twenty seconds, having hit the pause button on his better-than-movie-quality electronic game system.

What makes all this remarkable is that we are not even close to being rich. We are simply fortunate enough to be alive at a time and in a country where everyone is awash in riches. And where every thing–if not absolutely everything–works just as designed.

…makes the mistake of taking Princess Asa to Camp Sunshine…

As a sound and measured item of calmly-reasoned-if-not-entirely-somnolent financial advice, Billy Beck offers this:

I’d like to see Walk Barefoot Across Hot-Coals And Broken-Glass checkout lines for debit-card users at high-volume retail establishments.

Me too, frankly. It would get me away from all those dirty-fingered, change-grubbing, never-quite-solvent-enough people who insist on paying with cash…

No, I don’t actually care. I haven’t touched cash by preference since 1995. I won’t go to movie theaters that don’t take debit cards, and I’ll only go to a fast-food joint on your clinking nickel. I can’t do Vegas without cash, and it is a measure of just how much I love Las Vegas that I am willing to go there even though it is a giant financial dinosaur. I know, without any room for doubt, that I am a lot faster with my debit card than people who are willing to touch currency–and I know I get a lot fewer respiratory ailments, as a bonus.

But: Each man to his own Saints. My wife insists on carrying cash. I don’t comprehend her reasons, but I am always happy to help her make her cash evaporate. Which is what cash does. Which is why I stopped carrying it. Whether I am fast at the debit terminal or slow, I know I am going to face my past when I review my account via (yes) on-line banking. Cash does for fiscal restraint what sneaking a Snickers bar does for a diet.

(As a side note, retailers by far prefer debit cards to any other method of payment. In order of preference, they like debit cards (instant redemption at no cost with no risk of fraud), checks (deferred redemption at no cost with a small risk of fraud), cash (instant redemption at no cost with a high risk of theft) and credit cards (deferred redemption at a 3% cost with a small risk of fraud).)

The interesting thing about all this, to me, is the extent to which the radical alarmism about The Cashless Society has proved wrong. It is surely true that John Poindexter (what a great name for The National Rectum-Sniffer!) of the (god help me!) Information Awareness Office can discover, should he choose, that I buy gas every ten days or so and rent cheesy comedies and challenging dramas from Blockbuster Video. But why would he want to? First, he could pretty much guess the damnably-dull damning truth about my financial life without having to check, whether I pay by debit card or cash. And second, the stuff I do that could get me locked up–perhaps even by such an ungainly thing as an Information Awareness Office–I do right here, right out in the open. Under a different president, say a certain bitchy non-blonde, I am one Google away from bread and water.

So be it. In the mean time, I will pay by debit card, paying by cash only when there is no alternative. Walking across Billy’s hot coals and broken glass can’t be fun, but at least I’ll know where my money went–even if John Poindexter knows it, too. And it’s got to be more sanitary than touching that filthy currency…

Taking just a moment from rendering production, I thought I would describe something that I would like to see:

I’d like to see Walk Barefoot Across Hot-Coals And Broken-Glass checkout lines for debit-card users at high-volume retail establishments.

Yes. Perhaps, then, the feeby little geeks who now fumble and flail their digital incompetence with numbers, plastic, and buttons would think long and hard about the “convenience” of it all. And even if they still wanted to go for it, they would not stop dead all human progress aspired to by those of us who are plain and simple enough to still do our business with cash, as we stand in line behind them and imagine bashing their mushy brains out with a five pound coffee can.

That’s what I’d like to see.

In defense of this almost-unbearably apposite political cartoon, cartoonist Doug Marlette avers:

Just as Christianity and Judaism and probably Zoroastrianism are distorted by murderous fanatics and zealots, so too is the religion of Islam.

This is interesting because all three faiths have been under continuous attack for centuries by the always ‘peaceful,’ always ‘tolerant’ Islam. So accepting is Islam of alternative points of view that Zoroastrianism was actually driven out of Persia. Marlette’s editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, Mary Ann Lindley, rises gamely to his defense:

At least 90 percent of the nearly 5,000 Muslims worldwide who have e-mailed me in the past few days were personally insulted yet not willing to personally condemn the Taliban, Osama bin Laden or militant Islam and their reign of terrorism.

How much more ringing this endorsement might have been, had the newspaper actually had the guts to run the cartoon. A reader’s letter, quoted in WorldNet Daily, makes the point better anyway:

“I have noticed outrage about the cartoon, but I have not noticed outrage from Muslims concerning the devastation and carnage that radical Islamists have caused,” wrote Rebecca Davis. “Their silence concerning radical groups from their own faith speaks louder than words.”

After all, how would Marlette expect anyone to ‘get it’ if the world had not had its fill and then some of ‘peaceful’ Islam? No one can satirize the unfamiliar.

All this controversy is made possible by the carrion-eaters of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. The cartoon, decried in thousands of emails from angry Muslims, did not appear at all in the Tallahassee Democrat, and it appeared only briefly, and only then by accident, on the Democrat’s web site. CAIR advises care not because American editors are insufficiently gutless, but because they are insufficiently cautious about their cornucopian surfeit of gutlessness. That we owe our awarenss of Marlette’s impudence to their imprudence is a travesty.

There were death threats, of course, and not just a few. But so far American Muslims have refrained from burning down the Democrat’s place of business, which puts them one-up on their Nigerian brethren. And–also of course–from the other target of the cartoon, the purportedly-Christian envioromaniacs who wonder “What would Jesus drive?” we have heard not a peep. That’s because, despite their mental infirmities, they know they live in the United States, a country that owes some part of its greatness to the impudent editorial cartoon. For the New Year, CAIR might resolve to discover America. Not the country, but rather the state-of-mind, a state-of-mind that is everything Islam is not.

Christmas and family and goofy new gadgets are fun for a while, but there are worlds left to conquer. For example, Rob Robertson offers a precise, detailed and fail-safe method by which unsightly naked people can prevent war, or at least eliminate lust.

The latter might actually work. As I intimated elsewhere with respect to cross-burning, nothing exceeds like excess. American males might not be quite so desperate to catch sight of a naked tit if they could never escape them, sightly or otherwise. The same sort of strategy seems to have worked for homosexuality. We might once have been shocked by ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’ Who can spare a gasp for the love that won’t shut the hell up?

Robertson speaks of “a conscript’s arm sticking out of the Iraqi sands,” and this of course is an error. Ours is an all-volunteer Army, and it is the commonest path to upward mobility of our black brethren. That by itself is beautiful, like something out of Kipling. More like something out of the never-written auto-biography of Gaius Marius, though, and that much is scary.

Marius, uncle to Gaius Julius Caesar, was the inventor of the modern Army. Where Rome had defended herself in the manner of the Greek polis, with citizen-soldiers who were land-holders first and soldiers only briefly, Marius hit upon the idea of recruiting from the penniless denizens of Rome, paying them wages for their ten-year enlistments, then conferring upon them grants of land when they mustered out. Sound familiar? Two or four years instead of ten, and tuition money instead of land, but it’s the same principle. Marius turned Rome from a city-state that had accidentally conquered Carthage into an unapologetic empire, and the land he granted to his vetereans was–ahem–conquered territory. His plan was that his retired legionnaires would spread Roman culture among the vanquished, and this worked as envisioned for a long, long time. And again, this is analagous to the modern American military, the upward-mobilizing mechanism of which is the transmission of middle-class values and virtues to volunteers who had been deprived in youth of these excellent survival tools. Kipling again, “Don’t get into doin’ things rather-more-or-less.”

The scary part is that Rome came to depend on hired volunteers and didn’t care too much where they came from. The troopers who fought the dreaded Germans were often themselves Germans, and not-too-terribly-Romanized Germans. This had unhappy consequences in the end. I mention this in the context of a certain scrupulous Muslim FBI agent who would not scruple to tape another Muslim.

May god help me if I am wrong to fear Muslims in the ranks of our all-volunteer military. I fear that not even the unsightliest of naked women can help us if I am right…

…and I don’t mean me. I’m still only half-way sold on this idea of spending more than ten minutes writing to a blog (a new dawning of freedom is here, thanks to the printing press/mimeograph/fax machine/Internet newsgroups/weblog!) but before I get down to the tasteless business of ’sharing my worldview’ I thought I’d pass on this paragraph from my latest read:

“The other day I went into a North Portland auto-parts store to return some pistons that didin’t fit the engine in my little Jap car. Two straight-arrow Beefy Guys were working behind the counter. While one Beefy Guy quietly leafed through the yellowing pages of a giant auto-parts catalog, the other one began doing the paperwork for my piston refund. As he pecked endless serial numbers on a weather-beaten keyboard, we started talking about the sad state of work in America. “You know where we’re headed?” he asked ominously, then answering before I could open my gob: “Corporate feudalism. You know what that is? The oligarchy, the elite, is going to squeeze us dry, giving us just enough to live on and no more.” I said nothing, momentarily startled that an auto-parts clerk was talking about oligarchies and feudalism. “Aww,” chimed in the other guy, “we wouldn’t want to say anything bad about corporations and government officials, would we?” In the span of fifteen seconds, I had witnessed more political discourse than I’d seen in years from TV or newspapers.

It’s always dangerous when workers start thinking. When guys who sell pistons for a living can see things more clearly than our sycophantic media yes-men, I’d say we’re in trouble.

The American working class is dead. What happens now?

- Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats

Maybe Claire’s timeline needs updating ,…

An interesting meaningful coincidence tonight; Goad makes mention several times of the effect of corporate greed on Appalachia, and especially West Virginia, which got me to wonderin’, “I wonder how Soja is these days.” Then during a check on the weather I note that the winner of some big lottery (Powerball, is it?) is from,… West Virginia. Huh. So, I decide to log on to the forum and note that the newest member is,… Mike Soja.

Just a coincidence, but a meaningful one.

Oh, and Billy,… I used to work with Steve Den Beste briefly in the early to mid 80’s at Analogic. I was an engineering technician with the ultrasound design group and Steve was a software engineer (probably busy churning out code to destroy our beautiful hardware,… ). At the time he was refered to as “Steve Den Beastly” as he was a bit, um, prickly in conversation at times. He definitely enjoyed using his mind and sharing his opinions quite vehemently. Haven’t really slogged through the issue there, but I can see the possibilities for mad-cap mayhem.

Oh, and about the winter salt on the roads, brother,… that’s why you have a Chevy in the first place, so’s you can ride around in the winter while the REAL car is up on blocks in the garage.

But you knew that.

Yes, it’s true: I’m still here. I have three days to complete the animation for Bryan’s upcoming telecom world tour production, and that means I might be seen here only rarely, if at all, in that period.

Yes: I’ve seen Steven Den Beste’s remarks on my remarks on his remarks. There is, in this, a very common and very old problem.

Yes: I note that Robertson has come up for air. Leave us hope it becomes a habit.

I’m off, now, to get some serious work done after yesterday’s marvelous time in a crowded house.

Man, the snow out there is nearly astonishing.

In The Trial of Lott, Lew Rockwell likens Trent Lott’s recent adventures to the trial of a political prisoner under Maoist Communism.

“No, there was one goal at the outset of Lott’s trial: extract a confession, an apology, and bring about what the Chinese communists called “rectification”: a visible sign that one accepts the reality of one’s ideological apostasy, and declares publicly that the regime is right and you are wrong. Anything short of that is regarded as a personal indictment and further evidence that you, as the enemy, must be vanquished. “

The obvious problem with this analysis is that Lott was nothing like a political prisoner in China, he was the majority leader in the Senate. He was one of the top leaders of the party in power. His political enemies didn’t have the power to extract confessions from him.

Rockwell is apparently one of those who wishes Lott made a princpled defense of himself. My first reaction is that there was no pricipled defense to be made, because Lott is not a man of principle. But if there was a principled defense to be made, Lott had every opportunity to make it and was in an ideal position to do so. Nobody could silence him. He wasn’t facing criminal charges, he wasn’t even in much danger of losing his seat.

The trial of a political prisoner? This is getting pretty melodramatic.