Bizarro World

Post-9/11: Life as a comic book

By J. Raimondo

We're living in a comic book world, where American superheroes confront an "Axis of Evil," and the Evil One (Lex Luthor?) is defeated but lives to fight another day. I hear that comics have fallen on hard times, and that today's sophisticated kids just can't be bothered (too much like reading), but, really, if it wasn't for my early infatuation with the world of DC Comics – Supermanespecially – the post-9/11 world would seem completely inexplicable. I remember one story-line that had Superman trapped in "Bizarro World" – another dimension, existing alongside our own, in which everything was weirdly skewed, perversely inverted: a parody of our own. As preparation for the world of 2002, I couldn't have had a better education, for what else are we to make of this story of the airline passenger facing 20 years for using the lavatory without permission….?

A FELONY URINATION

Richard Bizarro, who got up out of his seat to take a whiz, has become "the first person arrested under a new flight regulation adopted for the Olympics," Fox News reports. Bizarrely, he faces "up to 20 years in prison on charges of interfering with a flight crew." On a Delta airlines flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, Mr. Bizarro got out of his seat 25 minutes before landing, in violation of the 30-minute rule newly imposed on Salt Lake City flights by the Federal Aviation Administration as a precautionary measure during the Olympics. (The same rule is permanently in effect for all travelers to the Imperial City).

For this he's facing 20 years? Ah, but urination without authorization is just the beginning of his crimes: according to one of the witches disguised as flight attendants, Bizarro not only "ignored her orders" but also "stared at her for about a minute before returning to his seat." The Fox News story also ominously adds that Bizarro is "6-foot-2 and 220 pounds" – another crime, along with unauthorized staring, in the Bizarro World we're living in. Goodness gracious me, I'll be surprised if he doesn't get life without possibility of parole!

Oh, but here's my favorite part:

"Because of the incident, air marshals aboard the plane ordered all passengers to put their hands on their heads for the rest of the flight."

WELCOME TO BIZARRO WORLD

If this seems utterly inexplicable to you, then you don't understand the central organizing (or is that disorganizing) principle of Bizarro World. As the link above explains, this is:

"A planet where alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep, ugliness is beautiful and the world's greatest hero is a chalk- faced duplicate of Superman."

In the normal world – that is, the world prior to 9/11 – airlines competed for business, each one claiming to treat their customers like royalty. In the Bizarro World we landed in after 9/11, however, the airlines are competing to see which one is the meanest, and, from what I can see, the competition is positively cutthroat.

BOOK HIM!

The FBI claims that "the incident [what incident?] was seen by two of three undercover air marshals on board …One of the agents said he saw Bizarro give what appeared to be a 'thumbs up' to another passenger as he returned to his seat, prompting the marshals to take control of the cabin." Aha! Unauthorized hand signals! Give that man another 20 years!

HIJACKERS OR SKY MARSHALS? YOU DECIDE

Bizarro, for his part, told the Salt Lake Tribune that he thought the sky marshals were hijackers. When three men, "old enough to be his grandchildren," started yelling and demanding that everyone put their hands on their heads, "I believed I was witnessing a hijacking of our airplane," he said. Bizarro, in spite of his name, just doesn't get it: everything's changed, you dolt! Up is down. Down is up. Ugly is beautiful, and vice-versa. Sky marshals act like hijackers – makes sense to me….

A "Phyrrhic victory for America"

A progressive case for Obama's foreign policy greatness?

BY GLENN GREENWALD

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky today says that while President Obama "hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view" (he apparently hasn't read Steve Benen or Ezra Klein lately), the war in Libya highlights how "one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president."  Tomasky's argument is somewhat cautious and expressly contingent on unknown, future events, but is nonetheless revealing -- both in what it says and what it omits -- about how some influential progressives conceive of the Obama presidency.

First, I'm genuinely astounded at the pervasive willingness to view what has happened in Libya as some sort of grand triumph even though virtually none of the information needed to make that assessment is known yet, including: how many civilians have died, how much more bloodshed will there be, what will be needed to stabilize that country and, most of all, what type of regime will replace Gadaffi?  Does anyone know how many civilians have died in the NATO bombing of Tripoli and the ensuing battle?  Does anyone know who will dominate the subsequent regime?  Does it matter?  To understand how irrational and premature these celebrations are in the absence of that information, I urge everyone to read this brief though amazing compilation of U.S. media commentary from 2003 after U.S. forces entered Baghdad: in which The Liberal Media lavished Bush with intense praise for vanquishing Saddam, complained that Democrats were not giving the President the credit he deserved, and demanded that all those loser-war-opponents shamefully confess their error.  Sound familiar?

No matter how moved you are by joyous Libyans (just as one was presumably moved by joyous Iraqis); no matter how heinous you believe Gadaffi was (he certainly wasn't worse than Saddam); no matter how vast you believe the differences are between Libya and Iraq (and there are significant differences), this specific Iraq lesson cannot be evaded.  When foreign powers use military force to help remove a tyrannical regime that has ruled for decades, all sorts of chaos, violence, instability, and suffering -- along with a slew of unpredictable outcomes -- are inevitable. 

Tomasky acknowledges these uncertainties yet does not allow them to deter him, but that makes no sense: whether this war turns out to be wise or just cannot be known without knowing what it unleashes and what follows.  Just as nobody doubted that the U.S. could bring enough destruction to Iraq to destroy the Saddam regime, nobody doubted that NATO could do the same to Gadaffi; declaring the war in Libya a "success" now is no more warranted than declaring the Iraq War one in April, 2003.

Then there's the issue of illegality.  Tomasky pays lip service to this, dismissing as "ridiculous" Obama's claim that he did not need Congressional approval because the U.S. role in Libya didn't rise to the level of "hostilities." By that, Tomasky presumably means that Obama broke the law and violated the Constitution in how he prosecuted the war.  Isn't that rather obviously a hugely significant fact when assessing Obama's foreign policy?  The Atlantic's Conor Freidersdorf argues that no matter how great the outcome proves to be, Libya must be considered a "Phyrrhic victory for America" because:

Obama has violated the Constitution; he willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold; in all this, he undermined the rule of law and the balance of powers as set forth by the framers.

The liquidation of the kulaks

Is America a Force for Good in the World?

By Justin Raimondo 

With the “liberation” of Libya from the grip of Muammar Gadhafi, progressives like E. J. Dionne and other cheerleaders for this administration are hailing the joint US-NATO operation as a new model for American intervention – an exemplar of the “good” way to push our weight around on the international stage, as opposed to the “bad” way pursued by George W. Bush and the neoconservatives in Iraq. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the same triumphalist message being trumpeted by this administration’s supporters over Libya was uncritically broadcast by the “mainstream” media in the wake of “mission accomplished” in Iraq. 

That reality will soon intrude, and correct this “irrational exuberance” – as a certain Federal Reserve chairman would put it – is an absolute certainty. Indeed, a few skeptical voices are already being raised, notably Patrick Cockburn, reporting from Benghazi: 

“Any black African in Libya is open to summary arrest unless he can prove that he was not a member of Colonel Gadhafi’s forces… The rebels claim that many of Colonel Gadhafi’s soldiers were black African mercenaries. Amnesty International says these allegations are largely unproven and, from the beginning of the conflict, many of those arrested or, in some cases, executed by the rebels were undocumented laborers caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

“But there is no doubt that all black Africans are now under suspicion. The head of the militia in Faraj, a short bearded man in a brown robe named Issam, explained how well-prepared local insurgents had taken over the area on 19 August, telling Colonel Gadhafi’s supporters to hand over their weapons and stay at home. There was almost no resistance from the demoralized regime and few people had been arrested. Then Issam added, as an aside, that his men had also detained ‘tens of Africans whom we sent off to prison.’ He did not explain why they had been jailed.” 

Across “liberated” Libya, black Africans are being rounded up by the rebel forces, and often either summarily executed or else imprisoned. See here, here, and here for more disgusting evidence of the rebels’ anti-black campaign.  

Gadhafi reportedly hired African mercenaries to fight for his regime, and this is the ostensible reason why the rebels are rounding up blacks, but this explanation seems more like an excuse than an actual reason in view of the fact that there have been periodic anti-black riots in the country, notably in 2000.  

The idea that American imperialism could be a force for “good,” with a “progressive” president holding the reins, was never very convincing. But even I never expected to be confronted with the ultimate irony: the first African-American President appears to be responsible, in part, for a large scale anti-black pogrom. This is his signal foreign policy “accomplishment” – a mass lynching. 

We have truly entered Bizarro World. 

One could argue, however, that this is not the fault of the Obama administration, since it was their Libyan proxies, and not US troops, who committed that particular atrocity. We can still see the US as a force for “good” in the world, albeit not without morally complex anomalies to factor into the equation. Well, tell that to the people of Ishaqi, a village in Iraq, where  US troops recently conducted a raid: 

“Witnesses in the village of Ishaqi, just south of Tikrit, said Iraqi and American forces opened fire on civilians and threw grenades early Friday as they conducted the raid. The villagers said the forces were responding to gunfire from people in the village and then fired back, killing a 13-year-old boy and an off-duty police officer.” 

The American authorities are currently stonewalling, denying any responsibility for the deaths, and claiming it was an Iraqi operation – although they admit US forces entered the scene when “fighting broke out.” One has to wonder, however, how a 13-year-old boy and a police officer came to be the targets – are these the “terrorists” we’re supposedly fighting in Iraq, whose presence requires an extended American stay? 

It’s an irony that this latest incident – which has further complicated Washington’s efforts to persuade the Iraqis they need our continued presence – took place in Ishaqi, the scene of yet another infamous US atrocity in 2006. As Antiwar.com’s John Glaser was the first to report earlier this week: 

“As revealed by a State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last week, US forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed. The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006. 

Regime Uncertainty

Pirrong Debunks the Keynesian Debunking

By Robert Higgs

As the idea of regime uncertainty has gained ground in recent years as a partial explanation of the economy’s failure to recover quickly and fully, economists and others invested in Keynesian thinking have begun to strike back. One such Keynesian debunking of regime uncertainty was offered recently by Gary Burtless and seemingly endorsed by Mark Thoma. Now, Craig Pirrong, an economist at the University of Houston, has debunked Burtless’s arguments.

Pirrong uses options pricing theory to show why the Keynesians are missing the point of the regime uncertainty concept and why, even on their own terms, their arguments for disregarding regime uncertainty and simply pumping up aggregate demand are wrong.

To adapt a familiar saying:  first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they embrace the idea and claim that they had it first. We are now passing through Stage II.

Although I am pleased that the concept of regime uncertainty has come to be recognized in some quarters as an important part of our understanding the economy’s operation, I continue to be disconcerted that many of those who speak of it, including some of those who speak favorably of it, fail to understand its full scope. As I understand regime uncertainty, it has to do with widespread inability to form confident expectations about future private property rights in all of their dimensions. Private property rights specify the property owner’s rights to decide how property will be used, to accrue income from its uses, and to transfer these rights to others in various voluntary arrangements. Because the content of private property rights is complex, threats to such rights can arise from many different sources, including actions by legislators, administrators, prosecutors, judges, juries, and others (e.g., sit-down strikers, mobs).

Because of the great variety of ways in which government officials can threaten private property rights, the security of such rights turns not only on law “on the books,” but also to an important degree on the character of the government officials who administer and enforce the law. An important reason why regime uncertainty arose in the latter half of the 1930s, for example, had to do with the character of the advisers who had the greatest access to President Franklin Roosevelt at that time—people such as Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and others of their ilk. These people were known to hate businessmen and the private enterprise system; they believed in strict, pervasive regulation of the market system by—who would have guessed?—people such as themselves. So, as bad as the National Labor Relations Board was on paper, it was immensely worse (for employers) in practice. And so forth, across the full range of new regulatory powers created by New Deal legislation. In a similar way, the apparatchiki who run the federal regulatory leviathan today can only inspire apprehension on the part of investors and business executives. President Obama’s cadre of crony capitalists, which he drags out to show that “business is being fully considered,” in no way diminishes these worries.

Thus, regime uncertainty is a multifaceted and somewhat nuanced concept. Many economists don’t like it because it cannot be measured and compiled along with other standard macro variables in a convenient data base. But, as I have tried to show for fifteen years, various forms of empirical evidence can be and have been brought to bear to show that regime uncertainty is not simply a figment of the analyst’s imagination or an all-purpose club with which the Chamber of Commerce whacks the government’s every move to increase taxes or augment regulations. Anyone who actually manages a business or makes serious investment can readily understand the idea. Keynesian economists, who generally do not manage businesses or make serious investments, view the idea as merely something their ideological opponents toss out to obstruct the application of their “science” in policy making. It is good to have analysts such as Craig Pirrong showing that the Keynesian rejection of regime uncertainty has no firm foundation.

Moonbattery

The Regime Imposes Drunk Driver on Trucking Company

What happens when the most insane administration in American history implements the most insane piece of legislation (the Americans With Disabilities Act)?

This:

“Citing a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Obama administration is suing a trucking company for taking the keys away from an Arkansas driver and eventually firing him [for job abandonment] after he admitted he was battling alcohol abuse.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit this week arguing that Old Dominion Freight Line discriminated against Charles Grams by stripping him of his position and offering him a demotion…”

To discriminate means to fail to give a person of privileged status what they want. Charles Grams didn’t need to be black, homosexual, or Muslim to earn this precious status. He got it by being a drunk who drives. With the inmates running the asylum, this qualifies as a disability — the highest honor one can achieve under liberalism.

“The EEOC says alcoholism is a recognized disability under the ADA and that the company violated the law with its policy that bans any driver who admits alcohol abuse from driving again.

The EEOC wants the company to reinstate Grams and another affected driver to their previous positions and provide them with back pay, compensatory and punitive damages and compensation for lost benefits”

Unfortunately, when Grams or some other drunk causes a 20-car pile up while driving an Old Dominion truck, it won’t be the federal government that gets sued out of existence.

It isn’t easy to run a business in a country governed by the likes of our do-gooder rulers.

They don’t intend it to be.

Green illusions

Green "Jobs"

By Lisa Benson

More than a decade ago, Paul Gigot of the WSJ pointed out that "ethanol is produced by mixing corn with our tax dollars."  In that case, solar energy is produced by mixing sunlight with our tax dollars.

Get a government job

Social Security IS a Pyramid Scheme

By Mark Perry

Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme? Texas Governor Rick Perry says Yes, and calls it a "monstrous lie for younger people."  Cato Institute's Michael Tanner says Perry was being too kind, and writes:  "As with Ponzi’s scheme, when the number of new contributors dries up, it will become impossible to continue to pay the promised benefits." Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby says that's not the point, and points out that "Ponzi schemes are intended to defraud; Social Security was designed to be a social safety net for the old."

The debate will continue, but the facts in the graph above are crystal clear: the number of active workers per Social Security recipient is declining, and will continue to decline, and the Social Security system is clearly unsustainable.  Whether Social Security technically meets the technical definition of being a Ponzi scheme is less important than the fact that the current system has become a Pyramid scheme as the population ages.  We will eventually run out of money from active workers, and money from the "trust fund," to pay for the unfunded liabilities due to Social Security recipients.  

The Arab Spring

There has been an America Foreign Policy Coup

A stunning speech delivered in 2007 by General Wesley Clark. 

The uprisings in the middle east won't look so spontaneous after you hear this.