From RR

• Cheney linked to concealment of CIA project.
• CIA lies.
• 2084: Justin Raimondo tries writing dystopian fiction.
• Palin wasn’t the answer.
• Donations from ‘the people’ didn’t help Obama win. What really happened is that the people who controlled the financial sector of the economy saw a massive train wreck about to happen and they needed someone malleable and ambitious enough to work with them to clean up the mess that would follow.
• Nukes: offence, defence...
• When ‘it’s OK because it’s part of my culture’ doesn’t cut it. Which goes back to the debate on defining and applying the do-no-harm principle. (In which I assume good old Anglo-American rule of law and anything injurious and non-consensual is out.) The trouble is the self-righteous left, just like the self-righteous right, would try to use this — and use state power — to shut down anything they find objectionable, like people and religions who teach the sexes are innate and gay marriage impossible. As opposed to the libertarian view: most vices are not crimes so live and let live.
• A reason to fear nationalising US health care. Goodbye, advances in technology and treatment.
• Can’t we all just get along? It reminds me: I’ve been to a lib-Prot blog with peace and stop-the-Iraq-war banners and been run off over gay weddings, which they’d talk about nonstop (see the bullet point two up from this); I’m always welcome at a conservative Protestant blog whose owner disagrees not only with my ecclesiology but with my politics from Palestine to Ron Paul.
• Hate-crime legislation would backfire. The answer is to revert to existing laws against murder, assault and battery, theft etc. (again the do-no-harm principle) and scrap the notion of thoughtcrime.
• US pols’ overspending tops $1 trillion.
• Germany: Demjanjuk indicted. I think the Israelis just want to save face.
• Thank the Lord for small mercies: McCain backs Obama on F-22 cuts.
• Alaska: Palin’s PAC raises nearly $1m. This seemingly populist phenom (dissatisfaction with the status quo) has potential if it can be persuaded away from red-state fascism to libertarianism.
• More Puerto Ricans live on the US mainland than in Puerto Rico.
• Promises, promises: Sotomayor says she’d be impartial. Given that she obviously buys into group identity politics over rule of law, I don’t think so.
• A very inconvenient truth. The climate-change scare as a power grab. Usually from the same class who wish the Wrong Sort of White People — their conservative Protestant cousins and Catholics — and Trig Palin would just go away. Again, as in medicine, if you want progress look to the market — and you keep/regain your freedom as well.

Labels: history, libertarianism, Palestine, politics, Russia