Bring a Gun to School Day

I recently finished reading an advance copy of Bring a Gun to School Day, an outstanding debut novel (novella) from Darian Worden. I review it in this week’s edition of The Libertarian Enterprise:

Erik Shylding, like Holden Caulfield before him, is the perfect embodiment of the alienated male teen of his day. Of course, in Holden Caulfield’s day, a fascination with guns would have characterized him as a healthy, normal young man. Times have changed.

Erik Shylding likes guns a lot, which in itself would be enough to get him branded a weirdo by his teachers and peers. He also likes hardcore music and black clothing, has the wrong friends, and goes through his school days simmering with anger. In other words, he “resembles” a typical school shooter, such as the one who just committed the worst school shooting ever at the novel’s opening.

The faculty and students at Suburban Regional High School have pegged Erik as a ticking time bomb. In their infinite collectivist wisdom, they deal with this perceived threat through a combination of condescension, ostracism and police state tactics that could only make matters worse and would have seemed absurdly over-the-top a generation ago. Today they seem entirely believable, if no less outrageous.

Read the rest of my review here.

Bring a Gun to School Day goes on sale May 20, but you can place advance orders at Amazon.

Save the Last Lap Dance for Me

It looks like the end of the line for another cherished New York institution. If the thugs at the State Liquor Authority get their way, Scores adult entertainment club will soon go the way of CBGB and the automat.

Scores West already lost its liquor license last night, apparently, as the result of alleged backroom prostitution involving some of the dancers. (Hey, not everyone has the time to take a train to DC to hook up with prostitutes.) No prostitution is alleged at the original eastside Scores, but the same two managers’ names are on the liquor license at both locations. Once they lose their liquor license at one location, they become “prohibited persons” who are ineligible to hold any other liquor licenses.

I spent more than a few evenings at the original Scores in the early ’90s, until I grew tired of paying $10 for a bottle of Bud and having tits in my way when I’m trying to watch Monday Night Football. Still, it will be a sad day for New York City if and when Scores closes its doors for good. The Disneyfication of the Big Apple that began under Giuliani continues.

And whoever came up with with the lede “Thanks for the mammaries!” for the New York Post article deserves a Pulitzer Prize.

I Don’t Think We’re in Mayberry Anymore

The sheriff’s car sure has come a long way since the days of “The Andy Griffith Show.”

This was used in that massive raid/kidnapping of the folks with the unapproved religion in Texas last week.

Hat tip: Lew Rockwell

The Ron Paul Revolution lives!!

I just got this absolutely killer Ron Paul video from  www.HighTidepromo.com.

An Inconvenient Silence

March 5, 2008

Over 400 scientists, meteorologists, and climatologists gathered this week for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City. However, not much more than a couple dozen journalists attended, with even fewer news outlets covering the event. And the reason wasn’t yet another Super Tuesday presidential primary.

Aside from this winter being one of the coldest in modern history, these are the politically incorrect scientists who insist the debate isn’t over on global warming. The ones who still infuse the necessary skepticism before deciding a hypothesis, particularly one based on computer models, becomes a scientific fact. One would figure the media would’ve had a field day uncovering their inaccuracies, lambasting their biases, and questioning their doubts, nowadays tantamount to holocaust denial. But this time, they were let off easy. They were practically ignored.

Who are these scientists anyway? Corporate shills on big oil’s payroll who dismiss the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report without giving it a complete read? Hardly. They are some of the very scientists who not only helped write the IPCC reports, but were discredited and ridiculed for speaking out against their findings being misrepresented for political agendas. Scientists such as Paul Reiter from the World Health Organization, Robert Carter from the Marine Geophysical Laboratory in Australia, as well as John Coleman the founder of the Weather Channel, were among those voicing these concerns along with the thirty some odd errors behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and the unfounded alarmism the film has caused.

Given all the new data that is being constantly discovered by scientists such as John Christy, one of the original authors of the IPCC, many are realizing that carbon dioxide is far from the cause of global warming. Despite the heralded “hockey stick” graph, upon closer inspection CO2 does NOT precede rises in global temperature, but instead follows them. Also, CO2 makes up less than 5% of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor actually accounts for over 95%. It’s only a matter of time until someone in DC or the UN figures out how to calculate its commensurate tax.

And with world leaders such as Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, who knows all too well about authoritarian political gambits after living under the Soviet bloc in former Czechoslovakia, a whole other truth may soon become more apparent. Klaus spoke at the conference about his concern with the familiar silencing of freedom of expression by environmentalists who insist the debate is over. Freedoms which are becoming more and more inconvenient than the truth itself.

Iran: Do you really know what you are talking about?

Since Hillary Clinton and John McCain are both well-established Iran-baiters it might be a good idea for the rational humans among us to develop our thinking on Iran based on actual knowledge and understanding of the facts.  Somebody has to do it and in keeping with tradition the major party candidates are not up to the task.

So where should we look to understand the Iranian “problem” better. 

In the book department Scott Ritter, the former Iraq nuclear inspection chief, has written  Target Iran, which  reviews Iran’s nuclear program from the perspective of someone with first hand knowledge of the subject.  In All the Shah’s Men, Steven Kinzer details the CIA sponsored coup that ended democracy in Iran in 1952 and replaced it with the brutal Shah of Iran.

More recently,Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council has written Treacherous Alliance. This book describes the tangeled relationship among the US, Iran and Israel. Dr. Parsi was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden and earned his Doctorate at John Hopkins under (among others) Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew Brzezinski. I’d say that’s a pretty interesting and useful perspective to balance against that of two of our least favorite Senators.

The NIAC has also just launched a brand new blog. I suspect this will be an invaluable source of information and analysis that won’t appear in the mainstream media as well as a great place to make your comments and hopefully enrich the debate in a positive way. I doubt you will have that opportunity on Fox News.

Liberal Fascism

What is fascism?

Surprisingly, there is no shared definitive answer despite numerous books written on the subject. The word is mostly parroted by those who have the least idea of its meaning, let alone its history. Its ironic to hear it chidingly used by leaders such as Hugo Chavez who embody it’s meaning perhaps more so than George W Bush, its current poster boy.

Even George Orwell stated that fascism has no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. Which is why Jonah Goldberg, the author of the best-seller LIBERAL FASCISM sums up his own definition after an exhaustive research.

“Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.” Goldberg goes on to conclude “I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism”.

Goldberg’s arguments are eye-opening and on point. The biggest misconception being fascism is a phenomenon of the right as most people argue and believe it to be the polar opposite of communism. With political pundits such as Bill Maher stating fascism is “when corporations become the government”, it’s interesting to note how its originator, Benito Mussolini, was not only a devout socialist, but declared socialism was “bred into my very bones.”

The difference between Mussolini’s exploitation of socialism as opposed to Lenin’s was he believed it to be an “Italian” struggle, not a class struggle. He was seeking to rebuild a modern day Roman Empire, and understood that class-consciousness wasn’t as powerful as the call of the nation to achieve this goal.

It’s impossible for anyone under the age of 70 to remember when Mussolini was revered in the US. Members of Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust such as Rexford Tugwell said of Italian Fascism “It’s the cleanest, neatest most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” Much less do people want to remember the internment camps under FDR where hundreds of thousands of Japanese, German and Italian Americans were forced to relocate during WW II under the guise of the “common good”.

And if one fast forwards to our current presidential primaries and listens to candidates alluding to FDR and their “progressive” versions of a new New Deal, it’s eerie to think how fascism may rear its ugly head. Though this time in the form of “smiley-face” fascism as the book’s cover alludes to. “If there is ever a fascist take over in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors” writes Goldberg. “but with lawyers and social workers saying ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Naked Capitalism

By Ignacio Gutiérrez
February 18, 2008

Only in America can one earn a fortune for believing in themselves and their dream, be it standing in nothing but underwear briefs, cowboy boots and hat playing guitar in Times Square even through unforgiving weather for ten years and counting such as NYC’s own Naked Cowboy, Robert Burck.

“Everybody likes this story. It’s the American dream versus the sold-out America” says Burck. Hopefully he’ll win the $6 million dollar lawsuit filed against Mars Inc., the makers of M&M’s. They used his trademarked alter-ego in an ad displaying a blue M&M character in his indisputable likeness. Considering the amount of money, time and focus-group testing behind these multi-million dollar campaigns, it’s a wonder why no one from Mars Inc. or Chute Gerdeman, the advertising agency, bothered to contact Burck for permission to parody his character.

And it’s thanks to such short-sighted decisions made by top CEO’s and corporate management in boardrooms across the country that compel people to mistrust the very impetus behind the American dream – capitalism. Ask most people to define it, and you’ll hear some wildly disparate and inaccurate answers.

“It’s the art of making money”. “It’s every man for himself.” “It’s all about greed dude! Like, in that movie Wallstreet…”“It’s nothing but corporate corruption, and evil, and…and …global warming!!”

But its actual meaning is much less sinister. It’s simply an economic system that allows individuals the right to own property and create goods and services from that property in order to sell them for a profit within a free market. How it has become synonymous with consumerism, materialism, imperialism, fascism, corporate cronyism, and a multitude of other “isms” is one of the 20th and 21st centuries greatest misconceptions.

Considering our current economic woes, it’s imperative more people understand its infinite possibilities, as opposed to moralizing that it brings us these problems to begin with. The right to own, but most importantly, the right to create, has been the catalyst for the most effective , efficient and productive ways of solving society’s problems. Until people realize these crucial rights belong to them as much as any corporation, we’ll continue misguiding ourselves to experiment with other systems such as socialism, collectivism, communism and let alone totalitarianism, all proven to fail time and again for the simple reason they undermine the most important “ism” of all, individualism.

One has to admire the gumption of true individuals such as Burck who’ve taken destiny into their own hands, created their own jobs, and refused to depend on or demand government handouts that purport a supposed “common good”. He represents the cowboy in all of us, one whose nakedness is worth singing about.

Political Psychotherapy

It seems that the fervour surrounding today’s primaries may, and I repeat ‘may’, be all about a moment of personal expiation. This I believe is an existential moment in American history - a time for mass psychoanalytic catharsis, and an opportunity for racial redemption and exorcism of collective guilt. In that polling booth one may confront the demons of yore.

An Obama victory may be deemed a ‘victory’ for a collective State - be it divided into red or blue.. It is a moment that race baiters despise, a moment that may seemingly erase centuries of sordid inter-group relations.

Yes, a sound political agenda may have been advanced. What counts though is its Messenger, one, through an ineffable destiny may lead this ‘great’ nation in holding hands with a third world that has long passed the test of tribal, caste, and gender tolerance in electing a leader.

Foiled Again by the Board of Elections

Last August I submitted a Change of Enrollment form to the Board of Elections, indicating that I was switching my enrollment to <shudder> Republican just so I could vote for Ron Paul in today’s primary. I had been enrolled as “Other,” which was the closest the NYC BOE was capable of coming to complying with the court order to record Libertarian enrollments.

Anyway, I submitted the change way ahead of the October deadline, and you’d think they could handle something simple like enrolling me in one of the two major parties. But nooooo, I show up at my polling place today — the same polling place that I’ve used for the last three years — and my name wasn’t in the voter book, which means the stupid BOE bureaucrats didn’t yet have my change of enrollment listed. So I had to fill out an “Affidavit Ballot,” which will no doubt be duly counted shortly after the next ice age.

But I can’t really be too angry with the Board of Elections. To paraphrase Otter from Animal House,  I fucked up — I trusted them.

UPDATE: My wife changed her enrollment from Democrat to Republican in September — still way ahead of the October deadline — but they still had her listed as a Democrat this morning. So she had to use an Affidavit Ballot too. Grrrr!