How's That Post-Religious Society Working Out For You?

Two employees of a Domino's franchise burn down a neighboring Papa John's, the motive being to attract more business.

Two employees of an abortion clinic kill babies shortly after they were born. After all, according to their worldview the babies were not even human moments earlier.

A woman stabs her boyfriend for cheating at Monopoly.

A woman attacks her nephew for using her toilet paper.

A man firebombs Taco Bell because his chalupa didn't have enough meat.

A mother locks her two sons, ages 3 and 5, in a dog kennel.

A woman has sex with her prison-inmate boyfriend on a city bus, while another prison inmate holds her infant daughter.

Roving mobs of teenagers assault motorists in Peoria, Illinois.

What did you think would happen when people came to believe that self-gratification is the highest good? This is the message trumpeted from every "cultural" outlet we have today, whether it's television, movies, books, or music. You wanted a world without restraints or hang-ups, and now you've got it. Congratulations.

Work Can Be Fun

Sometimes I truly enjoy my work, such as when I finish writing an appellate brief like this:

The only way [appellant] can succeed in her quest to assert a common-law claim of bad faith against [appellee] for what occurred in 2001 is to repeal the doctrine of collateral estoppel and dispute a federal judgment holding that she did not assert such a claim as a matter of Montana law; to repeal the doctrine of res judicata and ignore a federal proceeding that disposed of all claims she brought or otherwise might have brought; to re-write the Montana Code and this Court’s precedent to enable the saving statute to overcome a final adjudication; and to broaden the reach of equity to encompass situations where a plaintiff simply neglected to make the best case she could. This quest has left in its wake a debris field of protean, contradictory arguments that [appellant] has pursued unsuccessfully since 2002 in Montana’s state and federal courts, obligating [appellee] to defend itself long after the tempest of litigation should have died down. It is [appellee] who warrants justice at long last, not [appellant], whose appeal lacks merit and must be denied.

Simple Pleasures

I wouldn't want you to think that everything on here is negative. Life, no matter how difficult it can be, is wonderful and something to be cherished. Whatever negativity or cynicism I give off is directly proportionate to my optimism and ideals, which generate a great deal of pain when shattered. As proof, here is a short list of things that make me glad to be alive.

The first time I kiss a woman.

When I wake up on Saturday morning and momentarily fear that I have to go to work, but then realize what day it is and sink back into bed.

On a related note, when I dream that I'm still in school and missed all my classes for the semester just before the final exam, but then wake up and feel liberated.

Puppies and kittens.

Watching a speed demon on the highway get boxed into a slow lane.

The year's first snowfall.

Trying out a new brewery.

When the lights go dim in a movie theater.

Learning a new word in Spanish.

Learning a new word in English.

The moment my workout routine is finished, and my brain is bathed in endorphins while my body is covered in sweat.

Thinking up a bizarre chess combination to win a game that was lost.

Making the final car payment.

Seeing parents take their child to his or her very first day of school.

When the court issues an order that quotes my motion almost verbatim.

Upsets of any kind, when the person who had no chance of winning does.

When one of my Spanish students gets it.

Christmas.

Finally remembering the name of an awesome song and downloading it.

Reading about a historical event from thousands of years ago that sounds exactly like something in the news yesterday.

The rumble of an oncoming train.

A late night conversation with a small circle of close friends.

When college basketball season finally ends and stops interfering with regular programming.

Hearing the media's and the other candidates' teeth grind whenever Ron Paul answers a question.

Interlude On Matters Economic

I will post another installment regarding human rights very soon, but first I'd like to share something else I once wrote that addresses at least some of the causes behind the global economic meltdown.

The International Monetary Fund And The World Bank

In conjunction with their expanding control over global trade by means of the WTO, the political class collaborates to control national currencies and public spending by means of two bureaucracies that have long outlived any usefulness that might have justified their creation: the International Monetary Fund (the “IMF”) and the International Bank For Reconstruction And Development (the “IBRD,” more commonly known as the “World Bank”).

Both of these entities are the brainchildren of the Allied Powers during the waning days of World War II, who met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to hammer out a system whereby wealthy nations would impose financial stability on what they saw as an intolerably turbulent world. Under the system they eventually settled upon, the IMF and the World Bank would establish their respective headquarters within a stone’s throw of each other in Washington, D.C., from which they would carry out interrelated yet distinct missions to elevate the dollar into the world’s primary means of exchange, quite literally the equivalent of gold. On the one hand, the IMF would labor to ensure that global currencies remained at “fixed” exchange rates decreed by the Bretton Woods Agreement: by lending dollars to governments worldwide, and by making all dollars exchangeable for U.S. gold at $35 per ounce, the IMF guaranteed that those governments possessed sufficient reserves of dollars and/or gold to prop up the artificial exchange rates notwithstanding the ebb and flow of currency demand. For its part, the World Bank would also lend money to foreign governments, but for the more targeted purpose of financing development projects within those nations (e.g., highways, dams, etc.).

Problems with this system become apparent in short order. The World Bank lends money to governments, not to private entities, which proves a most counterproductive method for fostering economic growth. Governments disburse such monies for reasons of patronage and political expediency, guaranteeing that corrupt insiders will receive the largesse, and accomplishing little to energize free-market innovation and competition. While this did not impair the World Bank’s ability to function, a congenital defect indeed plagued the IMF, whose avowed devotion to a fixed exchange rate and a gold standard stood in fatal opposition to each member nation’s cowardly avoidance of domestic gold standards. Nations the world over are addicted to printing surplus currency as a stealth tactic for raising revenue and paying off creditors, who receive their money before the inflationary effects of this counterfeiting can ripple through the economy and eat away at the savings of ordinary citizens. Politicians prefer this technique because the alternative – raising taxes – proves far too visible and disfavorable for doing business. A domestic gold standard would frustrate this chicanery, so nations have long since spurned the gold standard and opted for “fiat” currency that is backed by nothing more than a governmental promise to honor it. The United States itself switched to a full fiat currency when President Franklin Roosevelt took us off the gold standard during the New Deal. With the IMF now at its disposal, the United States could routinely print excess dollars and obligate other nations to expand their own currencies to maintain the mandated exchange rate, thereby masking the dollar’s own decreasing value. Like a boomerang, those excess dollars came back to haunt the United States because the dollar holders increasingly exercised their right to exchange the dollars for gold. Faced with rapidly vanishing gold reserves, President Nixon abolished the United States’ commitment to the international gold standard in 1971. Hence the very purpose of the IMF – maintaining fixed exchange rates pegged to gold – had vanished. Currencies now “floated” on the open market, and exchange rates among these currencies fluctuated wildly in response to the activities of international traders and currency speculators.

One would be a fool, of course, to entertain the notion that a bureaucracy would depart the scene along with its reason for existing. Consistent with all human experience, the IMF dug in its heels and strained to find (or fabricate) any plausible excuse for continuing forward – and it latched onto a sinister one indeed. Teaming up with the World Bank and some of America’s most prominent private banks, the IMF embarked on a scheme to keep the poor nations of the world in a state of financial crisis that would necessitate perpetual IMF assistance, and along with that assistance, conditions and controls that would forever enthrall those nations to the United States and to their own political rulers. Now off the gold standard, American banks found themselves awash in de-valued, surplus money that they would eagerly lend to foreign governments, such loans to finance development projects awarded to well-connected American companies. Corrupt and irresponsible foreign governments, of course, would borrow far more than they could ever hope to repay their American lenders, eventually falling into a crunch of dwindling dollar reserves. At this point the IMF comes to the rescue under the aegis of protecting the foreign currency’s value with an infusion of taxpayer-provided dollars that, rather conveniently, find their way into the pockets of the original lenders.

This international money-laundering system makes the World Bank and private lenders happy because they have a fail-safe method for making and collecting oversized loans. This makes the IMF happy because it appears to have an ongoing purpose for sucking taxpayer money away from its member nations. This makes major corporations happy because foreign governments can now afford to pay them princely sums to implement “development” projects. This makes Third-World politicians happy because they can continue to dispense money and favors to their friends. This makes Washington, D.C. happy because it showers taxpayer dollars around the globe with which to dictate other nations’ domestic policy via the IMF’s loan conditions.

The ones who feel unhappy are the very ones whom this system is purportedly designed to assist, namely the peoples of the developing world, since they endure the economic and political chaos wrought by perpetual indebtedness.

In 1994, for example, Mexico was in the process of defaulting on its enormous foreign loans when the IMF and the World Bank stepped in to help orchestrate a relief package of tens of billion dollars, money that provided relief only to the original lenders and did nothing to avert a serious recession in the Mexican economy. This sorry episode paved the way for a similar catastrophe in East Asia only a few years later, as lenders had absorbed the lesson that any unwise investment decisions they might make would be covered. Countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia had enjoyed several years of foreign-financed growth until they found themselves drowning in a sea of debt and unable to re-pay, touching off a collapse in the region’s currency values and stock prices. Once again, the IMF and company swooped down to the rescue, further demolishing any incentive for sound financial planning. And once again, the IMF’s actions did not avert the turmoil: hundreds of businesses collapsed; millions of people plunged into poverty; and civil unrest in Thailand and Indonesia led to the ouster of both countries’ heads of state. Not long thereafter, Argentina found itself in a similar ordeal resulting from years of obscenely large loans and prior IMF bailouts, touching off a wave of bank withdrawals and capital flight. Riots erupted when citizens learned that the government was freezing their bank accounts to prevent a total collapse, and Buenos Aires witnessed vandalism, fires, and clashes with police (leaving several people dead). The president declared a state of emergency, but he soon had no choice but to flee the country and leave an imploding government behind him – which soon announced that it was defaulting on its debt of several hundred billion dollars. One notable exception to the default was the IMF, which received from Argentina’s government a complete re-payment of its prior loans. Although the private lenders did not fare so well, the IMF went to bat for these partners in crime and criticized Argentina’s government for not fully re-paying them as well. As the oligarchs quibbled over details, thousands of newly-impoverished Argentines darkened the streets in search of sustenance.

In the final analysis, the World Bank and the IMF embody the worst aspects of crony capitalism on the world stage: the fusion of big business with big government in a conspiracy to protect their mutual interests at the expense of ours. With the recent meltdown in financial markets worldwide – a direct result of governmental distortions of the economy – the political class has spared no expense to bail out its well-heeled friends on Wall Street with taxpayer money, and they have also come forward with a proposal for even greater control over economic affairs than currently exists. Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, expressed his frustration at “a confusing mix of diffused accountability, regulatory competition, and a complex web of rules that create perverse incentives and leave huge opportunities for arbitrage and evasion.” To deal with this situation, he opined that “the Fed has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority, and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap.” Otherwise stated, Geithner (who recently became the Secretary of the Treasury) imagines that the Fed has a responsibility greater than the sum of its powers, so he wishes “to close the gap” between his imagination and the frustrating reality he confronts. Echoing these sinister sentiments, the U.N.’s 2008 World Economic And Social Survey proclaimed that “[m]arkets cannot be left to their own devices in respect of delivering appropriate and desired levels of economic security,” a conclusion that the IMF heartily concurred with in its own report. And more recently, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson openly proclaimed that American taxpayers should foot the bill to establish the federal government’s hegemony over foreign banks by bailing them out as well. When answering the question whether Americans really wanted to spend their tax dollars this way, Paulson had the gall to state the following:

That's a distinction without a difference to the American people. The key here is protecting the system. . . . We have a global financial system and we are talking very aggressively with other countries around the world and encouraging them to do similar things, and I believe a number of them will.

These statements leave no doubt as to the totalitarian mindset at play here: national boundaries mean nothing; governments should conspire to rule their own citizens as well as each other's; “financial stability” and the “appropriate levels of economic activity” on the world stage are to be determined by politicians, not by free people pursuing their own ends. We are witnessing the creation of a global New Deal that shreds the Constitution even more than previously imagined and will have no one to “bail it out” when it too goes bankrupt.

Human Rights -- Part I

There is righteous anger fueling the OWS movement, especially for young people who stayed on script and did the right thing only to find nothing to show for it (trust me, I know how infuriating that can be). As I mentioned in my previous post, the danger is that righteous anger will be channeled into unrighteous ends, as so often occurs when government commandeers language. And so it has with "human rights," a phrase percolating around the OWS-sphere that spells trouble.

This may sound confusing because no sane person would oppose human rights, and I certainly do not. Humans have rights. What we are dealing with, though, is the artificial and government-supplied definition of that term, which naturally is conducive to government power. As a result, the official term "human rights" poses perhaps the greatest threat to actual human rights.

I discussed this at length in something I wrote a few years ago. The chapter is too lengthy to re-print in one shot, so I will give a first installment here and follow up in later posts.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS HOAX

The appealing phrase “human rights” has taken root in the public consciousness as an unquestioned good, assuming its exalted place next to “civil rights,” “equality,” and “democracy.” What all of these slogans bear in common – apart from their effectiveness at shutting down rational debate – is that governments monopolize their definition and implementation, thereby fusing idealism with statism and advancing central control more speedily than otherwise possible. “Human rights” is a shibboleth that has proved especially handy in this regard because it delivers a pre-packaged (though nebulous) set of notions to every private citizen worldwide and encourages him to chisel away at his own nation’s institutions from within, thereby complementing the efforts of globalists from without. In so doing, “human rights” rips apart international law as a humble system prescribing the rights and duties of nations, beckoning us to rush into the arms of a supranational legal order that will dictate our rights and duties as individuals. Unsurprisingly, several treaties and U.N. declarations have cropped up over the past half-century that trumpet “human rights” and encourage bureaucrats to interfere in every nation’s domestic affairs. Also unsurprisingly, this interference has spread beyond obviously oppressive practices such as torture or genocide, and has begun prying into the most innocent of customs, even purely private conduct, whose only fault is non-conformity with prevailing elite opinion. Very few dare to question this state of affairs, which we must do if we wish to preserve our identity as an independent and sovereign people. At bottom, the cant of “human rights” is nothing more than a pernicious hoax.

First, human rights are far too precious and plentiful ever to be codified. As America’s Founders understood, any attempt to enumerate rights misplaces the burden onto the individual to prove what he is entitled to do, when it should be the government’s burden to prove what it is empowered to do. Our Bill of Rights faced strong resistance for this very reason, and even when adopted, it carried the reminder in the Ninth Amendment that the enumeration of rights must not be perceived as exhaustive. Modern treaties and resolutions purporting to list our rights lack any such saving grace and are a transparent ruse to entice us into selling ourselves short by accepting a fixed, finite bill of goods. Moreover, these modern instruments name a few paltry prohibitions on governmental power, fostering the deadly assumption that governments may do anything not prohibited. A more worthwhile endeavor might devote itself to listing the few things that governments can do, thus assuring that any power not listed may not be exercised. But the political class has no interest in any such undertaking, preferring instead to hammer out the few behaviors that we as individuals may indulge in, meanwhile congratulating itself as caring and compassionate. The very fact that governments, who pose the greatest threat to our rights, are collaborating to outline those rights should send chills down our spines.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. A look beneath the popular verbiage reveals that the content of these “human rights” treaties has little to do with securing individual freedom, and much more to do with subduing the individual under a fashionable form of leftism that calls for the redistribution of wealth and the silencing of unpopular viewpoints. Thus far, the United States has mounted at least some resistance to these fraudulent enterprises, either by refusing to ratify them or by adopting reservations that render them toothless upon ratification. Nonetheless, a great deal of “human rights” runoff has seeped into our domestic legal system and those of several other countries, and the drumbeat continues for the United States to discard its lingering objections once and for all.

For a taste of what qualifies as a “human rights” violation in modern parlance, consider the plight of Alphonse de Valk, a Canadian priest who dared to express opposition to homosexuality and to homosexual literature promulgated in elementary schools. An offended soul filed a complaint with the Alberta “Human Rights Tribunal,” which then ordered the priest to pay a fine; to issue an apology to the person who had filed the complaint; and to refrain from uttering similar opinions in the future. This blatant assault on religious freedom and freedom of speech is not unusual, and if we take a look at some of the most prominent “human rights” instruments in the world today, we discover just how scarce an honest conception of liberty is in the world today.

What Did I Just Say?

Take a glance at my last post, cogitate on it, and now look at this news story I just stumbled on. There must be a way I can make some money with these uncanny predictive skills.

Good News And Bad News

Protests are spreading across the United States. The good news is that people are waking up to the serious crisis we face. The bad news is that people are likely to call for greater governmental power and control to deal with the crisis -- the chants and slogans displayed in the video make that abundantly clear. Couple that with the federal government's unapologetic assassination of an American citizen, and you can see the writing on the wall.

More than two thousand years ago Plato observed that democracy always produces tyranny, and America's founders (who, unlike today's politicians, knew something of history) labored mightily to prevent democracy from taking root here. But it did, and most Americans now feel entitled to plunder each other at the ballot box. There is no way to save America as a geographic whole, for the barbarians are already within the gates. America as a "shining city on a hill" can survive only if a geographic portion and its people devote themselves to keeping it that way, and keeping out the hordes of liberty-destroyers who are Americans in name only.

Here We Go Again

The economy claims another victim, who makes a spectacle of killing himself. I predicted more of these in my recent post, Suicide Non-Solution, and it's unfortunate that I was right.

EDIT

The article mentions that the man was divorced with three daughters, so he was likely also a victim of the modern divorce industry. Granted, only he can be blamed for his death, but he was a victim before he died.

Highly Instructive

A youth football league has restricted a player from scoring too many touchdowns because he's just too damn good. While I feel sorry for the boy, it's better that he learn this lesson now. Excellence does not inspire people to try harder or achieve more; quite to the contrary, excellence breeds resentment and motivates people to attack you, either directly or through manipulation of the rules (the latter has become quite popular in the workplace and the political system, for it accommodates cowardice).

You have a choice in life, my young friend: be excellent, or be popular. I hope you choose to anger as many people as you can.

My Apologies

I used to think that Americans today take nothing seriously, but I must admit to being wrong. After studying the issue more closely, I have found that Americans take three things very seriously and will sacrifice all else to obtain them: money, sex, and entertainment. Sorry for being too quick to judge.