RedStateEclectic

Civil Forfeiture

A hearty "Good Luck" to the Caswells as they head into court next week:

We’ve discussed the nation’s civil forfeiture problems in the past. The drug war is such a window of opportunity for government, as is any war. No one knows where a leak will occur until one sees the drip. No one feels the power of a flood until the waters rise.

The Food Police

Joel Salatin gives a fantastic picture of the problems we face at the mercy of big agriculture.

"We have taken our Western, Greco Roman, reductionist, linear, compartmentalized, fragmentized, systematized, disconnected, individualized, parts-oriented kind-of-thinking to an unbelievable philosophical apartheid." - Joel Salatin

“The only reason that [big ag] is able to enjoy its position at the top is because they’re protected from competition at the bottom.” – Joel Salatin

October Surprises, Nixon and Reagan

Robert Parry reports on the two biggies, being the Vietnam War and the Iran Hostage affair, and how both sides maneuvered the chess pieces.

The Russian Report contradicted the task force’s findings. As described by the Russians, the 1980 hostage negotiations boiled down to a competition between the Carter administration and the Reagan campaign offering the Iranians different deals if the hostages were either released before the election to help Carter or held until after the election to benefit Reagan.

The Iranians “discussed a possible step-by-step normalization of Iranian-American relations [and] the provision of support for President Carter in the election campaign via the release of American hostages,” according to the U.S. Embassy’s classified translation of the Russian report.

Meanwhile, the Republicans were making their own overtures, the Russian Report said. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the report said. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”

At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the Russian Report said. “In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”

Both the Reagan-Bush Republicans and the Carter Democrats “started from the proposition that Imam Khomeini, having announced a policy of ‘neither the West nor the East,’ and cursing the ‘American devil,’ imperialism and Zionism, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means,” the Russian Report said.

Full story.

Everything’s political, folks; especially when two rapacious party machines are vying for the ultimate brass ring. Soldiers, hostages… pawns in the angular game. What’s worse is how foreign politicians play us for the political instrument we are due to our “exceptional” intervention around the globe.

Soziale Marktwirtschaft

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... is the German term for "the third way", a concept based on the idea that entrepreneurs and capitalism are intrinsically evil, of necessity markets bring about socially destructive results, and government's manifold wise interventions are needed to engender what possibly can be good about a market economy.

The term social market economy (soziale Marktwirtschaft) was not actually coined by Ludwig Erhard, however by popular myth it is associated with his name to such an extent that people like to think that even Erhard felt and thought like the economically illiterate social democrat that best represents the average well-(state-)educated German.

However Peter Klein reports:

Hayek, interviewed in 1983 by Encounter:

Hayek: “I regard ‘social justice’ as a nonsensical term….”

Interviewer: “But do we have the concept of the ‘social market economy’?”

Hayek: “May I tell you the story of when I last spoke to Dr. Ludwig Erhard? We were alone for a moment, and he turned to me and said, ‘I hope you don’t misunderstand me when I speak of a social market economy (Sozialen Marktwirtschaft). I mean by that that the market economy as such is social, not that it needs to be made social. . . .’ If you had to make the market economy ‘social,’ . . . you can justify every demand that cannot be reconciled with having the market determine prices and incomes. There’s no better way of destroying the market economy than with the concept of ‘social justice.’”

Source.

The Political Asymmetry of Truth and Falsehood

The below quote

… is from pages 44-45 of William Easterly’s marvelous 2006 book, The White Man’s Burden:

There is now a regular cycle in the literature on foreign aid and growth. Someone will survey the evidence and find that foreign aid does not produce growth. There will be some to-and-fro in the literature, in the course of which a few studies will find a positive effect of aid on growth. Foreign aid agencies will then seize upon the positive effect, usually focusing on only one study, and will publicize it widely. Researchers will examine the one positive result more carefully and find that it is spurious.  Then there will be more to-and-fro in the literature, and a new twist will be discovered under which aid has a positive effect on growth. Aid agencies will seize on this result again, and the cycle will begin all over again.

Source.

 

 See also my Asymmetry of Disinformation.

Winter

When I looked out of the window this morning, my garden was covered in (in, by or with? - I guess all three work) snow.

Germans are experiencing a severe bout of "global warming": An outbreak of cold weather has already in October, for the first time in decades, brought close to -6° temperatures and a thick (up to 20cm) snow cover to large areas of the country. 

"This is something that happens only once in 30 or 40 years", according to meteorologist Christoph Hartmann from the German weather service. "It is the kind of weather that you experience probably only once in your lifetime", Hartmann told the newspaper Die Welt.

Source.

Treated Like No. 2

I sure can relate to this picture:

Health Care - An Introduction

Part 1

 

Part 2

 

Part 3

 

Part 4

 

Part 5

 

Part 6

 

See also Reading List on Health Care and Getting Fit- 

Oil

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I have always argued in this blog that waging war to secure oil does not make sense. Those who do it nonetheless succumb to an illusion, or they are using a pretext to justify a war to be fought for (many) other reasons.

In No War for Oil, Ivan Eland shows, it is much cheaper, and indeed operationally more sensible and feasible to buy oil on the market than to fight for it.

I use the occasion to create a list of links to some of the posts that I have written on the subject-matter of oil.

War on Oil - Unfounded Cliché,

Oil and Energy Independence ...,

War on Oil - What You See and What You Do Not See,

Libya - Is It the Oil?

The Myth Junkie Society,

The Obsolete Economics of Peak Oil,

Peak Oil ...

The Courage to Think - More Julian Simon.

 

Fatter and Fatter

I’d say there’s a trend here:

Personally? I blame global warming.