John Kerry Has This Ass Backwards

"We are beginning to behave like a poor nation," he added, saying some Americans do not perceive the connection between U.S. engagement abroad and the U.S. economy, their own jobs and wider U.S. interests."

Maybe the real problem for Kerry is that US citizens are starting to understand that involvement in foreign wars have undermined their interests in the form of:

• wealth loss through taxation to pay for the wars
• wealth loss through inflation created by Federal Reserve monetary expansion to help mask the taxation to pay for the wars
• the consolidation of political power by the corporations known as the military industrial complex
• the consolidation of information and news by the same corporations into a war propaganda cartel 
• and most of all the loss of life and mental and physical disabilities inflicted on our sons and daughters.  

Maybe he needs to elaborate exactly what he thinks American interests are, because all I can figure is he speaks of the interests of a small power elite that we just had to bail out with the biggest welfare program in the history of the world a few years back.... 

(Quote Reported in Zero Hedge)

ALL or only State Regulated?

"[My constituents are] willing to have that discussion about whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all," Turner said.
[emphasis mine]

So lawmakers are going to give us the freedom to enter marriage without the little trip to the court house to grovel before the state and pay our little fee to get married...but wait!!!  Michael Konopasek makes the big jump into the cesspool of fallacy by claiming that this would ban ALL [caps his] marriage in the state of Oklahoma.

Kiesel says prohibiting all marriage is new territory. In fact, the ACLU was unable to find an example of where a state has ever tried to ban all marriage.

Maybe Kiesel and Konopasek are ignorant of history and thus unable to find an example of unregulated marriage. If so they shouldn't feel too bad about it since all education in this country is somehow controlled by the state and these things aren't widely disseminated:


[From The Wikipedia]
For most of Western history, marriage was a private contract between two families. Until the 16th-century, Christian churches accepted the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s declarations. If two people claimed that they had exchanged marital vows—even without witnesses—the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

Some states in the US hold that public cohabitation can be sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. Marriage license application records from government authorities are widely available starting from the mid-19th century. Some are available dating from the 17th century in colonial America. Marriage licenses have been required since 1639 in Massachusetts, with their use gradually expanding to other jurisdictions.

So Oklahomans, led by their buddies in the media are clamoring to be held to standards more abject than those imposed by the Medieval Catholic Church. And to make matters worse, while scrolling through the comments on the News 9 site and Facebook, most of the pro-liberty comments have been scrubbed.....

( Lawmakers Consider Preventing ALL Marriage In Oklahoma )

American Civics 101

Take all of the issues that are important to the politically unconnected voters, put them in a list, and divide that list into two semi-coherent lists. Give one list to each party. These are your campaign promises. Lists can be tweaked by region.

Take all of the things the politically connected want to do to those voters, put them in a list, and divide that list into two semi-coherent lists. Give one list to each party. These are the things to compromise on once elected. Make sure to tie each item to some Chicken Little type of crisis to lead everyone right to the wolves.

Make sure to throw voters some random crumbs. Nothing feeds addictive behavior like random rewards....

A Word From Our Sponsor

Are you a business owner and worry that your customers might find a better product and drive you out of business? Or are you heavily invested in an unsustainable position? Don't worry because we're here to help! R & D Lobbying firm has just the solution you are looking for. A recent Supreme Court decision has made it legal for the Congress of the United States to mandate product purchases. This is possible because the Congress has the power to tax, and the fine for not purchasing your product can be considered a tax!!! Now by joining the worlds larges super pac you can let us lobby Congress, manipulate campaign fund raisers, smear honest candidates, to ensure that your products are mandated to your customers!!! Never worry if your product is obsolete again!!! No more endless sales pitches, No more leaving your future to the market with its "invisible hand." Now your fortunes can be protected by the worlds largest military and police/prison complex in the world!!! And if the full force of the US Government is not enough we can arrange for a full bail out of your enterprise!!!  Yes, we also have the largest system of fiat currency on the planet!!! So act now!!! Don't rely on the invisible hand when you can rely on drones and prisons!!!

* Offer not available in areas with an armed and informed populace.

A Straw Man Stuffed With Igorance.

Extreme Austrian Apriorism as the No True Scotsman Fallacy
By Jason Brennan

Brennan: “What do you think of behavioral economics that purports to show people often act irrationally in the market?”

Austrian Dude: “That doesn’t pose a problem for economics. Economics is a priori.”

Brennan: “But doesn’t it show that people don’t often act in the way your theory describes?”

Austrian Dude: “No. You see, there’s a difference between behavior and action. Action is defined as….[insert a summary of Mises's Human Action here]

Here is the missing summary:


“Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.”
-Mises

In short, extreme apriorism ends up being a version of the No True Scotsman Fallacy.

"The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man."
-Mises

I think the author of this post has a serious misunderstanding of this axiom. He also has a serious misunderstanding of the term “value free.”

Austrians don't have a view as to the objective rationality of a Human Action, only that the action taken by a human being satisfies some psychological goal. If a person is aiming to buy a tool to drive a nail is enticed by a good deal on a screwdriver and purchases that instead of a hammer, he has merely demonstrated that he values getting a bargain buying a tool more than his original goal of driving a nail. This is the "value free" nature of praxelogy, to observe human behavior and deduce the motivation.

To say this is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy is turning the facts on their head. The straw man here is "there’s a difference between behavior and action." The reality is that an Austrian would say there is no objective way to judge an action as "rational" but it is subjectively rationalized by the actor. In that light, all actions are rational. What we are actually saying is that you can't tell if a person is a Scotsman by how he acts because each individual Scotsman is capable of acting like every other human being in the world!!!

Instead, it leaves open, as an empirical question, whether actual human beings in the real world are better described by your a priori theory of human action or by behavioral economics. If your theory doesn’t account for actual human behavior very well, then it’s impotent to defend real life markets, and you shouldn’t advocate libertarianism in the real world on the basis of your Austrian economics.”

Judge for yourself, not only markets, but just about anything:

For example, let us have two men, A and B who are both faced with the choice of a lashing if they don't betray their conscience. A would rather take the lashing than betray his conscience. B betrays his conscience to avoid the lashing. We can say that praxelogically A held his own conscience at a higher value than his own body. B held avoiding physical pain in a higher value than betraying his own conscience. This observation is value free. We neither condemn A as foolish for taking a lashing or B as foolish for avoiding the lashing. However, it is as logical to conclude that such torturous methods as these are tantamount to cyanide for a civilized society being the use of brute force against an innocent persons free will.

The same would be true if we gave person A and B each $5 to go in a restaurant to order whatever they wished within that budget. Person A orders comfort food with little nutritional value and person B orders food with maximum nutritional value. We can conclude that person A was aiming at eating food that tasted good and person B was aiming at food that was good for his body. There is no objective way to judge which person made the correct choice. Both choices were correct as they both satisfied the ends the diners sought. We know A valued taste more than nutrition, but there is no objective way to compare the amount he valued taste over nutrition with B's value of nutrition over taste.

Free markets are based on voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. The state is the agency of coercion for social control. Civilization is marked by a society that can function spontaneously with the minimum amount of force and coercion. Therefore, if the end result to be attained is a maximum of civilized behavior, then the least amount of forceful intrusion into consensual exchange would seem the logical ideal to achieve this end. This is why Austrians tend to be Libertarian.

To enter the realm of ethics, allowing individuals to create their own meaning, follow their own goals, pursue their own happiness, and experience their own failures would seem to be the most just. This leads to a society where one can have what is one's own without infringing on what belongs to someone else, be it success or failure.

(Full Article)

PS I guess Brennan has redacted his original post, but I found a copy of the original here.

Nice start to the finish, but.....

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
Global Research
October 28, 2013

The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for crimes against humanity.

Should have ended it right there, but oh, no.....

Our intelligence community should be rebuilt from the ground up, with the goal of collecting and analyzing information.

 Back to where we started in the first place.... Why not back a little further to here: "The culture we lost — Secretary of State Henry Stimson refuses to endorse a code-breaking operation, saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”?"  That would be ideal.....


As for covert action, there are two moral options. The first one is to eliminate covert action completely.

Is there really any other option?  Wait for it, wait for it.....


But this gives jitters to people worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world.

Ok, so what do we get if we pander to Godwin's law?.....


So a second option is that we can place covert action under extensive and true democratic oversight. For example, a bipartisan Congressional Committee of 40 members could review and veto all aspects of CIA operations upon a majority or super-majority vote. 

Yeah, watch them rubber stamp it all, or worse yet, the minority leak it...lol


Which of these two options is best may be the subject of debate, but one thing is clear: like dictatorship, like monarchy, unaccountable covert operations should die like the dinosaurs they are.

Why can't aggression die like the vampire it is? Oh yeah, the lower classes have paid for all of this aggression!!!

The best option is to have a citizen's army for DEFENSE (D.E.F.E.N.S.E. -- the action of defending from or resisting attack. Not being the aggressor...) with a skeleton of officers under the direction of the President as offered by The Constitution......


(Full Article)

Agenda of Conservative Values Hidden in Plain Sight?

The secret conservative message of the “Duck Dynasty” beards

The bushy beards on "Duck Dynasty" are part of a long history of using facial hair to signify "traditional" values

Salon

Oh, the horror!!! 

Maybe you’re like me and you don’t have cable TV. Good for you. Tell yourself, like I do, that this makes you inherently intellectually superior to the millions of glow-box zombified American scarecrows who have nothing better to do with their lives than exist in an immobilized state guarding the TV from the nefarious corvids of real life. Or, you could be honest and, like me, admit that you can’t afford cable. But whether or not you have cable, there’s no way to escape the current American cultural juggernaut that is A&E’s “reality-based” show “Duck Dynasty.”

So basically, if this guy had his own cable service, he wouldn't have to watch cable at his buddy's house and be exposed to Duck Dynasty....

The 19th century was a period of vast changes during which the modern world as we know it was formed. Indeed, many of the cultural, political, and economic tropes that we acknowledge today were first articulated and solidified in the 19th century, and this includes beards and their relationship to manhood.

Does this imply that Karl Marx had a severe sexual bias? Since the solid logic of the Austrians hasn't been enough to demolish his economic ideas in the minds of the masses, could this be the new emotional appeal? "Well, I don't like Marxism because Marx was a sexist bigot, just look at his beard...."
Perhaps Abe Lincoln invaded the South to prove his manhood in a way his beard never could?

As Gold McBride writes, with vast social, political and economic change, women began to take a more active role in public life. This led to widespread male anxiety about gender roles, which in turn fueled the development of the idea of “separate spheres” of influence ... These distinctions included the realm of truly epic beard growth. Thus, in the 19th century, beards came to define a concept of manhood in a way that was unmistakably visual to better distinguish men from increasingly public women in an era when, Gold McBride observes, “traditional markers of masculinity were no longer stable or certain.”

I guess that applies to all those liberal hippies of the 1960's also? "Far from championing equality, hippie males in the 1960's sought to maintain their male dominance by growing epic beards. John Lennon, far from being the peaceful, loving person he was portrayed to be, was actually hell bent on creating a patriarchal society, as evidenced by his beard."

 culture is a process, and in the post-Civil War South, Southern culture was “an ongoing cycle of interaction” during which some Southerners constantly shaped, reshaped, and reformed Southern cultural identity to adapt older traditions to the demands of modern life.  

Is he lamenting that Southern culture is "an ongoing cycle of interaction" that is not centrally dictated by a group of elite 'betters?'

The show is consumed by a large segment of the American public that is fed up with what they perceive as the modern world’s assault on traditional values and religion.

Maybe they are mostly fed up with the loss of interaction and empowerment?

Just look at the hirsute Robertsons’ favorite things: they do manly activities like hunting, fishing, shooting guns and praising God.

That is really a veiled sexist comment. I know women that hunt, fish, shoot guns, and praise God as well as any man can.....Is he suggesting that the Robertsons dress in drag and watch Lifetime maybe?

 Hell, their entire business is built around the idea that men hunt to bring home food and take care of the family.

Is this a veiled attack on Lakota culture?

As Thomas DiLorenzo points out here, it is surprising "that Salon did not mention that Muslims associated with al Qaeda also have a beard culture associated with their traditional values."

I am sure Butler Shaffer isn't suggesting the author of the original Salon article is an anti-semite, is he?

(Full Article)