The first war the US fought in the Middle East was in 1801. This was also the first time the US sent its military overseas. The enemy were pirates based in Tripoli, in what is now Libya. It began when the pirates began attacking US ships and taking the crews hostage. They did this because the US government refused to pay tribute for safe passage. At the time, every other nation, including powerful ones like Britain and France, was paying tribute to these pirates.
US ships sailed to Tripoli and bombarded the city. During this time, one ship ran aground and was captured. It was later burned in a commando raid by US marines to prevent the pirates from using it. This raid is the origin of the words “to the shores of Tripoli” in the US Marine Corps hymn.
William Eaton (1764-1811)
After this incident, the US government began a long series of negotiations with the pirate government, led by a man named Yusuf Karamanli. He was a Pasha, or military governor, of the Islamic Ottoman Empire which controlled the area. At the same time, an American army officer and diplomat named Willam Eaton worked to overthrow Yusuf. Yusuf had gained power by overthrowing his brother Hamet. Eaton’s plan was to help Hamet regain the throne and then Hamet would release the American hostages and sign a treaty with the US.
Eaton and Hamet raised an army and marched on Derna, Yusuf’s capital city. With help from the US navy, they captured the city after a bloody battle and forced Yusuf to flee. A few months later, the US government announced that it had signed a treaty with Yusuf which freed the US hostages in exchange for a large ransom. Eaton was recalled and Hamet was forced into exile again. Eaton drank himself to an early death out of bitterness at the outcome.
But on a positive note, the war made a strong impact on public memory, and the US never again waged a fruitless war in the Middle East.
Behind every great man is an even greater woman and inside every modern day Progressive woman is a confused maladjusted teenager running out of ways to rebel against the patriarchy as most have already dyed their hair bright unnatural colors and have facial piercings.
[caption Not Required]
The election of the chauvanistic Donald Trump over the the ultimate feminist candidate Hillary Clinton induced a madness in these modern womyn. So they came together, mustering their collective intellect to devise plans to take down the ultimate patriarchal symbol… by making vagina hats and marching, dressing up in vagina costumes and marching, and now for the ultimate tantrum, they go on strike! Take that childcare and service industries!
The major problem with today’s women’s strike is that they aren’t inconveniencing men, they are inconveniencing their fellow women. As mothers are the main providers of childcare, not men, and with schools and other childcare facilities closed, it is women who are forced to stay home and care for the kiddos, not the men. Their plan, as with all their other poorly thought out plans, denies reality.
While women dominate the childcare industry and make a slight majority in the service and hospitality/leisure industry, men are busy keeping civilization afloat. Which leads me to the thought experiment, imagine A Day Without A Man. Imagine a day in which all men went on strike. Imagine a day without agriculture, mining, transportation, utilities, and construction. Civilization would come to a halt.
How your car is made.How your food gets harvested.
So keep that in mind, you brave, strong ladies. As you drive to your protest (72% of American auto manufacturing is done by men), gas up on your way (80% of oil extraction is done by men, and 80% of petroleum refining is as well), take a plane to get there (78% of aircraft and parts manufacturing is done by men, while 63% of all air transportation jobs are performed by men), take the train (>99% of rail manufacturing is performed by men and 90% of all rail transportation workers are men) or walk (91% of all concrete and asphalt manufacture is done by men), there were probably men involved in getting you there. I won’t even go too far into the rest of your little holiday, though I am sure you’ll eat (76% of crop production is by men, as is 73% of animal production and >99% of commercial fishing), you’ll go to the bathroom in one of those port-a-johns (70% of plastics production is done by men, and 85% of sewage treatment workers are men) and you’ll call someone on your iPhone to virtue signal (70% of electronics manufacturing is done by men).*
Sometimes stereotypes are true.
And if you decide not to march but would rather take the day off and treat yourself to that cool new hairstyle in neon pink or get a mani-pedi, go for it! Just pray to God that the 92% of hairstylists that are women or the 75% of nail salon employees that are also female didn’t have the same idea as you today.*
Where else would “alimentiveness” be? Huh, smart-ass?
Agent DEEP COVER closed the door behind her with a soft click and approached the toupee vault in stockinged feet. She shook a small aerosol can and sprayed it in the air in front of her, revealing a tangle of laser beams. She contorted her body to duck between them, spraying periodically to keep them visible. When she finally made it to the vault, she pulled out her phone.
“Door,” she texted. There was a rushing sound in her ears as she waited. She didn’t understand why they didn’t send the code of the vault earlier.
“Door,” she texted again. She waved a small ultraviolet flashlight over the keypad. Only a few keys were smeared with greasy fingerprints. She snorted in disgust.
“Door,” she texted again. She counted silently in her head. After nine seconds, her phone vibrated.
“36-24-36,” they finally answered.
“Goddammit,” she muttered. She punched in Donald’s childish code and the vault shuddered and began to open.
In the soft, buttery glow of recessed lights, MAGA Prime sat on his tiny throne Donald had built for him.
“Holy fucking shit, who the fuck is that?” the hat squealed.
“How the fuck should I know?” the hair snapped.
Agent DEEP COVER grabbed MAGA Prime and stuffed him into a thick plastic envelope.
“Help!” he screamed, “Secret Service! Donald! Dracula Hooker!”
“Put my friend down, bitch!” the hair said, rising up menacingly on enraged tendrils.
Agent DEEP COVER ignored the hair and slipped the thick envelope into a large interior pocket of her jacket. The hair could hear the hat still raving, even through the thick plastic, “I’m going to die in here! I can’t breathe! I’m going to kill you all!”
“I’ll get help,” the hair screamed, “Just hold on.”
Agent DEEP COVER took out another small aerosol can and sprayed a thick blob of pink spray-paint on the hair. Smiling to herself, she closed the vault door back but left it unlocked to avoid rearming the lasers.
Walking briskly, but not so fast as to trigger suspicion, she made her way to the basement of the White House, and into the old Cold War bunker system. THE DEEP STATE had built the bunker system and made themselves hidden spaces within for their own dark purposes.
Agent DEEP COVER passed through rings and rings of security until finally she brought out the struggling hat and sat it before the heads of THE DEEP STATE.
Wednesday, baby! Halfway to the weekend. And I bet even money the first half of your week has gone better than the people at the CIA. Unless one of you works for the CIA. Which I wouldn’t doubt, you sneaky infiltrating bastards… But I digress.
Now let me get back to the job at hand: providing you with a heaping helping of links to warm your belly and set you off on your midweek adventures satisfied. Unless you’re a Cuban hobo(ette). Of course, you can’t access the internet down there anyway.
Here’s a heartwarming story out of Cuba for all of those fans of the Castro regime that fly their private jets there to extol the virtues of that tropical paradise.
This is the real Cuba for retirees
And I leave you with this little ditty. Enjoy it as much as I will, children of the 80’s (and anybody else that enjoys great music from people with shitty political beliefs). Or if that’s not your thing, here’s another song with the same name from a great movie.
There’s an old joke about the world’s thinnest book: Great Jewish Athletes. To be fair, it’s actually the second thinnest, the thinnest being Jewish Physicists Before Einstein. In any case, since SP and I are both excited about the looming start of the new MLB season, I thought I’d kick off Jewsday Tuesday with an appreciation of the two greatest Jews to ever grace the roster of a major league baseball team. And I rate them both by their performance on the field and their delightfulness as human beings.
Check shoes for flames
First, right handed pitcher Myron “Moe” Drabowsky. Moe was born in Poland, then escaped in 1938 as the Nazis were closing in (this is serious Jew-cred). His early MLB career was undistinguished, bouncing from team to team for seven years before landing at the Baltimore Orioles, just in time for the magic 1966 season. From the bullpen, he managed a 2.81 ERA, a 6-0 record, and 98 strikeouts in 96 innings pitched, a pretty impressive record. But that was nothing compared to what happened in the World Series. The Orioles were underdogs against the mighty Dodgers (this was the era of Don Drysdale, that other Jew pitcher Sandy Koufax, Maury Wills…), and started Dave McNally in Game 1. After the Orioles took a 4-1 lead, in the third inning, McNally loaded the bases with none out. Drabowsky came in, allowed only one run in that inning, and struck out 11 on his way to finishing the game with a save. At one point, he struck out six in a row.
Over the next two seasons, Moe’s ERA was under 2.00, and even after being snatched by the Royals in the expansion draft, his ERA hovered around a respectable 3.00 for the next couple of years.
OK, the dude could pitch. But that wasn’t really why he was the greatest Jewish ballplayer ever. The real reason was the hotfoot. Yes, that old gag where a flammable object (usually a matchstick) in inserted into the victim’s shoe, then set alight. When it burns down…. OUCH. Moe was the undisputed king of the hotfoot, and took every opportunity to torture any reporter or team-mate who wasn’t paying close attention to his feet. He reputedly gave hundreds of hotfoots (hotfeet?) over the course of his career. No word on whether he recited the traditional “vitzivanu l’hadlik ner” prayer. In a Baltimore Sun interview, Moe recalled, “I’d go to some discomfort to satisfy a practical joke. In Detroit, before a game, I crawled under a tarp behind the bench in the Tigers bullpen, through ants and maggots, and waited until the guys stood up for the national anthem. Then I slid my hand out, lit several matches and waited for the screams.” The pinnacle of his achievements in this domain was successfully igniting the feet of then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
His oeuvre was not limited to pedal pyrolysis- he also had a fondness for unexpected snakes, using them mercilessly on snake-fearful team-mates like Charlie Lau and Luis Aparicio. The former was an elaborate prank; “Once, while Charlie was asleep in a golf cart [in the bullpen], I got this one-half-inch pipe, 20 feet long, and draped one end of it over his left shoulder,” Drabowsky once told Baltimore Sun. “In the other end, I placed a 3-foot brown snake. Five minutes later, the snake pops out the other end of the pipe just as Charlie was waking up. He went ballistic with both arms and legs moving at the same time.” His best known prank, though, was calling the bullpen phone, imitating Earl Weaver, and getting relief pitchers warming up. Weaver couldn’t figure out why this was happening, called the bullpen, and yelled, “What the FUCK are you doing, sit them down!” After a few minutes, Moe called the bullpen again, imitated Weaver, and… well, you know.
Moe was a treasure and a credit to the Jewish people.
One half of a left fielder
John Lowenstein was born in 1947 in Wolf Point, MT, a difficult time and place to be a Jewish child. He played for the Orioles some years later in an odd and interesting role: platoon left fielder. Weaver skillfully alternated him with Gary Roenicke in left field, so that the combined left fielder had 37 homers and a .290 batting average (Lowenstein’s contribution was hitting .320). He was a decent fielder, fine hitter, and always useful in clutch situations; memorably, in Game 1 of the 1979 playoffs, he belted a walk-off home run in the 10th inning against the Angels. He also had a marvelous mustache, possibly inspiring John Stossel.
Fittingly, Lowenstein was also a delightful flake and jokester. He practiced his swing by destroying birthday cakes with his bat, using a fungo technique. He was popular with the press, always being a great source of quotes. “Sure I screwed up that sacrifice bunt, but look at it this way. I’m a better bunter than a billion Chinese.”
Because of his use in a platoon, he never got the accolades or attention that full time players did. Nonetheless, a Jewish ballplayer is rare enough that the Baltimore Jewish Times interviewed him about his history. He talked about going to Hebrew school, his devotion early on, his admiration for his rabbi, and the pride he took in his Bar Mitzvah. The Jewish Times was delighted and ran the interview as a feature.
When there’s Lowenstein, there’s a punchline: he actually wasn’t Jewish. He was so amused by the presumption, he improvised the entire story on the spot.
Some fun and exciting times around the Internets today.
First, our commentariat is having a lot of fun in the logo contest that ends a week from tomorrow. We have now seen ALL of the permutations of a certain other brand’s logo and letterhead. And laughed at each one. Now come up with something we can use or Sloopy wins by default. And not even Sloopy wants that.
Sloopy and perhaps others will have some in depth coverage, but in case the Afternoon Links is your first stop after slithering out from under your rock, Wikileaks has reopened the war on the US Intelligence Community and they don’t seem to be losing. Nor does freedom seem to be winning. The Russian hacking of Hillary’s emails just became “Russian” hacking.
“How many Presidents were in the KKK?” Google to fix wrong results to their “one true answer” feature. After correctly identifying President Woodrow Wilson as a racist, Google is backpedaling.
In which Ezra Klein of Vox and I agree on something. The absolute shittiness of the GOP Obamacare-Lite bill, which seems to have been written by the various states’ Bureaus of Insurance Regulation to keep said agencies in business.
Sorry, we’ll just rent it to you and increase the monthly payment on an annual basis.
I could take a few different paths to back up my claim that property taxes are the most evil form of taxes, but I’ll stick with the angry rant. There is no topic that gets me hotter under the collar than property taxes, and I’m flummoxed when so-called libertarians are pro-property taxes. I’m not big into purity tests for libertarians, but I may just make an exception for the Georgists.
Instead of doing a comparative analysis of different types of taxes, I’m going to explain why land is no different than any other sort of personal property in the realm of justifying taxation, and I’m also going to explain why land is different from other property in the realm of personal liberty. Perhaps if I can be persuasive in showing that there is no good reason to single out real property for a possession tax and there is plenty of good reason to single out real property for protection from government, I can make a decent case for deep-sixing property taxes.
The Marxist Fallacy of Labor as Value
Cutting to the chase, the single most glaring flaw of Georgism is that it’s predicated on the labor theory of value. It ignores the value of capital, the value of ingenuity with regard to capital, and the value of taking on risk. In a simplistic Georgist view, we can somehow separate the value obtained through labor from the value inherent in a product. See, to the Georgist, sand is sand, and it’s owned by the community. If you bag it up and sell it, you’re only entitled to be compensated for the service of bagging it. If you melt it into glass, we somehow have to separate out the value of the sand from the value of the glass, and the value of the sand goes to the government to be used to the benefit of the community. Of course, like any other crypto-communist solution, the Georgist government is going to have to appoint omniscient superhumans to staff the boards and councils used to determine exactly how much of the $100 for the glass pane is for the communal sand and how much is for the transformation to glass. Nevermind the fact that the guy buying the pane of glass wouldn’t have even paid a penny for the untransformed sand. You know, because he needs a pane of glass, not a sandbox. Nevermind, also, the next-door neighbor who wouldn’t pay a penny for the pane of glass, but would pay $20 for the untransformed sand.
Tearing this down to its most basic, Georgist economics suffers from the same misconception as socialism, that there is a “true price” for a good, and that the “true price” reflects some “true input value” of capital and some “true transformative value” of the labor put into the capital.
Can’t Quite Describe It
Much like the ubiquitous water weenie, it’s near impossible to grab hold of the difference between land and land-derived goods in the Georgist philosophy. What makes land community owned but my coffee table mine? This is where the stupidity of the property tax shines through. See, if the coffee table is 100% mine, then I had to have, at some point, paid the community for the portion of natural resources (trees) that were used to build my table. Assuming that a sales tax was this theoretical payment, it still makes no sense that I must pay a yearly remittance on my land. The TOP MEN have decreed that 6% of my table was community owned, and I paid 6% tax to purchase the table. However, property tax is infinite taxation. It is countably infinite, but it is infinite nonetheless. If I were to own the land forever, I would pay property taxes forever. If it worked like the table, a property owner would be allowed to pay a one-time fee to the community for the value of the underlying natural resources (standard “there’s no such thing as true value” disclaimers apply), and then own the property sans encumbrance.
The fact that property tax is infinite taxation leads to one of two conclusions. Either 1) natural resources are infinitely valuable and labor sullies that infinite value (a premise that can be dismissed without discussion); or 2) something magical happens when you transform natural resources that makes them no longer property of the community. Even if we were to accept the second premise, it still does not explain why improved land is still subject to property tax. Like the water weenie, any coherent classification of what is subject to property tax seems to slip through our hands.
Property Ownership as Deprivation of the Community’s Right
The single most unconvincing portion of Georgism is this pervasive hostility to private ownership of natural resources. This concept that the “community” owns the land and all value inherent therein. This neo-feudalist idea that the modern Crown grants the modern peasant a tenancy on the land to make public good come from the land is antiquated and hostile to natural rights theory. It amazes me to see so many otherwise brilliant libertarian thinkers fall hook, line, and sinker for this magical thinking that bestows upon the government special rights and privileges made up wholecloth, rather than granted from its constituents. Basic application of the NAP says that 5 guys with guns and badges can’t do anything that 5 guys with guns and torches can’t do. Similarly, the “community” (or society or the government or whatever name we give a collection of people) does not have a claim to the property unless members of the community, in the aggregate, have at least that same claim to the property. If no other person has a legitimate claim to the property, then who could? God? Gaia? The government is ill equipped to adjudicate ownership conflicts between man and God (much good it would do, anyway).
I have found no convincing philosophical argument establishing a communal right to land. In fact, most Georgists seem to shift to a more utilitarian mode of argumentation when this comes up.
Property Taxes: the Original Penaltax
I see that my rant is running long and getting incoherent, so I’ll quickly wrap it up. Property taxes are a tax on inaction, much like the O-care penaltax. Broadening that out, if government were truly a product of a Social Contract, and that contract were to be said, with a straight face, to be voluntary, there would need to be some course of action able to be taken to openly reject said Social Contract. No action is more clearly a refutation of society and the Social Contract than hermitage, and the modern equivalent: homesteading. A self-confinement to one’s dwelling, self-sufficiency, nearly non-existent use of the community assets. One’s dwelling is their retreat from the “community.” Furthermore, it is a mandatory part of human existence. People can exist without incomes, without commerce, without vices. However, even the homeless have a cardboard box and a sleeping bag. To tax one’s dwelling is to reach into that last corner of their life untouched by the “community” and say “we still own you, even when you try to get away.”
Appeals to fairness be damned. Ones right to property ownership is not subject to some balancing test against the desires of the community. Either land can be owned outright, or we are slaves captured by a do-gooding master.
Sorry for the sloppy article. I may address property taxes as payment for community services in the comments, but needless to say, I think it is just petty rationalization. Selling one’s soul to the Devil isn’t less Hellish just because they got a few trinkets in return.
So fusion, you say, is like the wayward little brother of fission – full of promise for a clean energy future but just needs a little help and guidance from the government to get on his feet. We should all help our little brothers right? Let me tell you about my little brother. He’ll show up to the party late and talk a big game but, then drink too much and promptly pass out in the shower with the water running. Once people get the water damage bills they’re reluctant to invite him back. I don’t know about you, but my little brother is an idiot – and fusion power is the idiot little brother of fission. It promises the world and talks a big game but then utterly fails to deliver, passing out in a shower of research dollars too drunk to make it to work in the morning. I’m not saying that it will never work but effectively you’re trying to contain a tiny sun and, from a thermodynamic perspective, the more energy you demand from it the less it wants to work. If the objective is a carbon-free alternative energy future I want a solution that doesn’t involve my great-grandchildren becoming physicists.
Thorium!
If you’re serious, and I mean really serious, about solving the primary energy/carbon problem then there is only one winner and it isn’t fusion, wind, wave, solar, hydro, or geothermal. Sorry Hippies, it’s good ol’ baby killin’ fission that fixes Mother Earth. Wait! I see you readying your empty bottles of patchouli, so before you throw them up here or drench me in bong-water let me walk that back just a little. The atomic fission I’m referring to isn’t baby killing or actually related in any way to the fission which gave us Megadeth, i.e. the kind most of us know and love. It’s special. Different. So radical that Nixon killed it. Why? Because he couldn’t turn it into a weapon, man.
Just ask Alvin Weinberg about Thorium-232 and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Except you can’t because he’s dead. The Atomic Energy Commission killed him, probably with Nixon’s help. And then they got Clinton to hide the body. What, my hat? You can’t read it in the back? Its mesh backed and has “Miller High Life” embroidered on the front, and no, a tin-foil lining would be inelegant so stop interrupting. Nixon did actually kill the program, the AEC fired Weinberg to shut him up, and Clinton buried everything when he terminated all funding for advanced nuclear research in this country.
Let’s do a thought experiment. I want you to imagine an America where the cost of energy is decoupled from the global price of oil. Imagine that the gas you pump into your car is so pure that it doesn’t need a catalytic converter. Imagine that same gasoline is made from seawater and is therefore carbon neutral. Imagine carbon neutral plastics, lubricants, sealants, solvents, fertilizers, oils and generally the materials which make up the modern world. Imagine a machine that could pull all the carbon we’ve put in the air back in the ground. What does that world look like? That was the dream Alvin Weinberg had about Thorium-232 when he designed the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment – The Thorium Dream. Now do you want on this ride?
A lifetime supply
I’m mainlining straight truth and Kirk Sorenson is my Kid Charlemagne. He found Weinberg’s body decaying in some cellar at Oak Ridge National Lab and has been spreading the gospel to anybody who’ll listen. Right now that’s the Chinese and Indian governments and they’re throwing billions at Thorium Molten Salt Reactors because they actually work. America invented this technology and, for reasons to maddening to dive into in a short article, abandoned then effectively forgot it ever existed. America is a land of dreamers, thinkers, builders, and doers – aren’t we? Surely someone around here with money and vision would want to reap the benefits of our previous research. I mean, we worked out the bulk of this stuff on the taxpayer dime back in the 60’s, so, naturally, the Chinese and Indians are asking our labs for help. We’re just giving itall away on the gamble they’ll share their breakthroughs with us. We can step up our game or we can stumble drunkenly into a future defined by other countries where people are willing to take risks and dream big.
This is going to suck all the air out of the news for a while, and I’m predicting it will cause several heads to explode on both “sides” of American politics, let alone the impact it will have on the Deep State bureaucrats who think they are above the law.
What you will read in the Washington Post, however, is that the reason the GOP has their strongest footing ever in government is because of racism. It even goes so far as to lament that in some places under 20% of whites (gasp) voted for Obama in 2008. No breakdown or justification was offered for the much higher %age of blacks that voted for Obama in the same election. Nope, just “research” that proves a lower %age of whites voting Republican in the south is racist. Enjoy the derp.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep set to star in a new Pentagon Papers movie that will be directed by Steven Speilberg. You may remember Spielberg as the director of such fantastic films as the Indiana Jones trilogy, “1941”, “Schindler’s List”, “Jurassic Park” and especially “Jaws”. Or you can be a dick and say everything he did sucked because he was attached to “Always” and “War Of The Worlds.” Either way, if you haven’t seen “Jaws”, you should.
The look one deserves if one hasn’t seen Jaws
Those are the links. Now its time for me to walk away and get on with the rest of my day. I see a zoo in my immediate future. And three kids that all want to go in a different direction. Wish me luck.
Much like the ubiquitous water weenie, it’s near impossible to grab hold of the difference between land and land-derived goods in the Georgist philosophy. What makes land community owned but my coffee table mine? This is where the stupidity of the property tax shines through. See, if the coffee table is 100% mine, then I had to have, at some point, paid the community for the portion of natural resources (trees) that were used to build my table. Assuming that a sales tax was this theoretical payment, it still makes no sense that I must pay a yearly remittance on my land. The TOP MEN have decreed that 6% of my table was community owned, and I paid 6% tax to purchase the table. However, property tax is infinite taxation. It is countably infinite, but it is infinite nonetheless. If I were to own the land forever, I would pay property taxes forever. If it worked like the table, a property owner would be allowed to pay a one-time fee to the community for the value of the underlying natural resources (standard “there’s no such thing as true value” disclaimers apply), and then own the property sans encumbrance.
