The only pledge of allegiance that a free man should ever make

I've been watching some of the HBO series True Blood.
I think the first season was great, the second season was "Meh", and it's gone downhill from there. 

In the "reality" of the series, vampires have come out of hiding, and some of them are trying to live openly among the non-dead.  They also have a somewhat medieval political system, with their own kings and queens of different areas.  Louisiana has a queen and Mississippi has a king, I think. 

Some of the characters have renounced their loyalty to the queen of, say, North Dakota, and pledged their loyalty to the king of Mississippi.  In the reality of the series, its something taken very seriously.  The vampire who revokes his pledge becomes a non-person to his former comrades. 

Watching that series has gotten me thinking about the current silliness with pledges, loyalty oaths, "Under God", and all the rest.  We routinely say pledges to political systems and lines of latitude and longitude, vowing our unending loyalty and dedication, kinda like we check off the "I Agree" box on a new software license. 

Honor the Texas flag;
I pledge allegiance to thee,
Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.  

If you've pledged your allegiance to the Texas flag, does this mean you can never move to North Carolina without renouncing your loyalty to Rick Perry and Texas and the land between the Gulf Of Mexico and the Red River?   

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."  

I've been to about a half-dozen Tea Party and 9-12 meetings that begin with the pledge to the U.S. flag.  A couple of the participants usually get downright misty-eyed while reciting their loyalty oath and vowing their undying devotion to our organization of states.    After the pledge, someone stands up and starts talking about whether Texas should secede.

Lord have mercy, it makes me insane.  People, let's continue to pledge our loyalty to Bush/Obama and all their unholy works, or let's decline to do so.    Here's what one of our founding fathers had to say about loyalty to governments, flags, kings and rulers:  

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.  

It gets better:  

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Well said, Mr. Jefferson.  Well said. 

With that in mind, here's the only vow of loyalty that a non-sheep should ever make to his government. 

"I pledge that if you government clowns keep screwing up, I'm either going to leave this place, or do my best to seriously mess up your lives, with liberty and justice for all." 

It makes me crazy.  Go here for a similar rant with a different angle.    That's all I've got.  Just wanted to point out that we're all very, very strange. 

Fox News to cancel Freedom Watch !!

Fox Business News Network has announced plans to cancel Judge John Napolitano's Freedom Watch program. 

This is not a good thing. 

With the exception of John Stossel's show, there is no other program on TV devoted to Libertarian issues, and Stossel's program suffers from the same problem as this blog.....How many times and how many ways can you prove that the government is totally screwed before you get tired of the project?  How many wars?  How much debt?  How many drug war prisoners?   How many insane giveways to insiders?  How many illiterate and innumerate high school graduates?  How many generation of a family have to be on welfare?  What is it going to take?   

You've got the Welfare/Warfare Statists on Castro News Network and MSDNC.  You've got the Warfare/Welfare Statists on Fox News.    Napolitano is passionately anti-corporate welfare, anti-military industrial complex, anti-drug war, and anti-nanny state.  He found a home for several years on Fox Business, and has spent the last few months exposing the fundamental silliness of the Mewts and Santorum. 
 
Well, that explains the parent Fox network cancellation, doesn't it? 

Here's a video of someone discussing the issue with Wayne Allyn Root, the Las Vegas Libertarian oddsmaker.  (John Spivey and I once had a pleasant evening drinking most of the beer that was iced down in Root's hotel suite bathtub.) 

Fox Business has the right to broadcast whatever they choose to broadcast. (Some might say they have some responsibility to show some diverse viewpoints because of government licensing of the airwaves, but that's another conversation for another time.)

However, customers of the network's advertisers, and the suits who sell advertising for Fox need to know that some viewers aren't happy with this decision. Here are the people to contact:

FOX News Digital
Digital Media Sales
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 22 Floor
New York, NY 10036
(212) 301-5473

Fox Business Network
John McCann
VP, Advertising Sales, FBN
(212) 301-5009

Direct Response/Paid Programming Sales
Lisa Bortolato
Director, Direct Response
(212) 301-5418

Political and Issue Advertising
Digital Media Sales
John McCann
VP, Political Advertising Fox News Networks
(212) 301-5009

Email Fox Business at:
advertise@foxbusiness.com

Why the Republicans shouldn't change the time of their debate

Somebody has scheduled The Teleprompter Jesus to make a very, very, very important jobs speech on Wednesday, September 7.  Obama is going to roll out his new plan to create jobs.  Very, very important. 

By accident or by design, this speech clashes with the Republican Primary debate to be held on the same date. 

Republican Speaker John Boehner, who apparently has the imagination of a potted plant, has actually asked The Teleprompter Programmers to schedule Obama's speech for a different time !!!!

The Republicans shouldn't dare push for a different time for Obama to read his jobs speech.  Opportunities like this one are rare.   

Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, came very close to the best solution.  Carney suggested that the Republicans postpone their debate by an hour. 

Close, but not quite good enough. 

Here's what the Republican Party oughta do.  (I'm in the shipping and freight industry, and that qualifies me to make these suggestions.....)

The Obama jobs speech should be allowed to roll, uninterupted, on a mega-screen onstage at The Reagan Library, somewhere to the left or right of the debaters.  Let Obama's speech play for about 5 minutes.  This will allow Obama's programmers to blame Bush, blame the earthquake, blame what all he inherited, blame the Japanese Nuke Meltdown, blame the moon for being in the cusp between Virgo and Libra, and all of the usual Barackaganda that we've come to know and love.  None of that mess deserves a rebuttal any longer.   

When those 5 minutes of Presidential Throat-Clearing have run their course, each candidate for the Republican nomination will be handed a remote control that will allow him or her to freeze Obama's speech for 45 seconds.  Whoever hits "pause" first would get 45 seconds to destroy whatever Statist lunacy our president has proposed.  Green Jobs, another stimulus, tax credits for behaving nicely, indebting unborn fetuses, investing in education, or whatever.  Rip it to shreds.  If someone wants to take a whack at, say, borrowing more money from China, he too can hit the pause button. 

The video could be programmed to ration one minute of Obama's Keynesian fantasies to every three minutes of Republican attempts at rebuttal, no matter how many candidates have hit the pause button.  After all, it's gotta end sometime.  I don't believe any responses but Ron Paul's would be worth listening to, but it would be some great freakin' television.  And if The Programmers know that the words they'll put in Obama's mouth are going to be ravaged in real time, it could possibly save the nation a few trillion dollars.  Who knows what could happen? 

One other question about this debate.... Why is the Lamestream Media's favorite Republican, Jon Huntsman, allowed to participate, while New Mexico's Libertarianish former governor Gary Johnson not allowed onstage? 

The in-depth analysis you deserve

Blaise Pascal on the mini-series "Lost"

Here's the secret to the mini-series "Lost", compliments of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape.  Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

Quoted in Karen Armstrong's A Short History Of Myth, pg. 127. 
A fresh coat of Whitening to VampE for bringing this to my attention. 

Are pickup trucks racist? A Socratic Dialogue between Keith Olbermann and Newsweek's Howard Fineman

FINEMAN: Maybe not in Massachusetts, but maybe in some places, there are codes, there are images, ah, you know, there are pickup trucks, uh, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.
OLBERMANN: What were the Scott Brown ads, though? Every one of the Scott Brown ads had him in a pickup truck.
FINEMAN: That’s why I mentioned pickup trucks. I mean, my mind goes back to Fred Thompson down in Tennessee.

A coat of Whitening to Hot Air for the transcript on this one. I'm new to Keith Olbermann. I get almost all of my news from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Real Clear Politics, and Instapundit. (Along with a range of weekly reads from The Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, etc., just to try to understand the mindset.)

It wasn't until I watched some MSNBC coverage of the recent Massachusetts election that I saw Olbermann and Rachel Maddow in action. I was amazed. Seriously. I couldn't believe it. Every statement from the left was taken at face value. Every now and then Chris Matthews would try to bring in a comment from the world of reality, and he usually failed.

I'll admit it: I watched MSNBC for a while last night. It's like discovering a fairly sophisticated world where they haven't invented the wheel yet.

I might as well sound off on this one, since everyone else already has. This is from the Huffington Post:

On Monday, Olbermann described Brown as "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees." Later on, Olberman added "sexist" to his list of accusations against Brown.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Let me address these one at a time. The "tea-bagger" line is in itself a homophobic slur. So to call someone a "homophobic" "tea-bagger" tells us as much about the accuser as the accused. It's like being dumb enough to call someone a "Bigoted Wetback".

"Irresponsible"? I don't see it. Brown once cussed at a high school assembly, and stated that one of his daughters was "available". I used to cuss at high school assemblies. I have a daughter roughly the same age as Brown's. If there's a young man out there who wants to take over her tuition at A&M, I can put in a good word for you.

"Racist"? He questioned Obama's parentage. That doesn't make him a racist.

"Reactionary"? We're up to 12 trillion in debt. He got elected BECAUSE he was reactionary. Please hurry up and understand this.

"Ex Nude Model"? Yeah, Scott Brown took off his clothes for Cosmo. And your point is? He'll soon be whoring for the Republicans. That's the usual career path in the political prostitution industry, isn't it?

"Sexist"? and "Supporter of Violence Against Women"? Someone in the Ted Kennedy seat could be sexist and a supporter of violence against women?

John Stossel's new show on FoxBusiness

Thanks to the miracle of Tivo, I was able to watch John Stossel's first show on FoxBusiness last night. (Stossel recently left ABC because he wasn't allowed any airtime to cut through the Statist fog surrounding that network.)

I've read Stossel's stuff online and in print for a couple of years now, but this was my first chance to see him on the tube. Overall, I was impressed.

The program, simply entitled "Stossel", had an unfortunate infomercial quality that I hope they can eventually tone down a bit.

The topic was climatechange.

His featured guest was Jerry Taylor, an energy researcher for The Cato Institute - probably the best of the Libertarian think-tanks, and therefore one of humanity's greatest treasures. Taylor took nothing but hostile questions from the studio audience, and handled them with ease, conceding some points, but asking the questioners to look beyond the basic goals of any energy regulation.

Assume that the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change's numbers are 100% correct. One hundred and seventy thousand people died last year because of man-made changes to our weather. Even if you assume that that number is accurate (it isn't), here's some numbers that are accurate:

3 million people died last year because of poor indoor air quality. That's what happens when your only fuel and heating source is human and animal manure.

Here's another accurate number, one that I've never seen anyone contradict....Mrs. Sepulchre is always reminding us that 25,000 people will die today because of malnutrition, most of them children.

Around two billion people are barely hanging on to existence. What's going to happen to them if the idjits in Copenhagen succeed in taking over the energy industry? We can't merely legislate lower carbon emissions and expect energy costs to remain the same, or expect the 2 billion mentioned above to ever claw their way out of poverty. The #1 mistake the Climate Alarmists are making is to assume that they can intervene without making the cure far worse than the disease.

The next guest was the dude in Arizona who gave Stossel a $6,000.00 golf cart. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying. YOU gave John Stossel a $6,000.00 golf cart.

Since the golf cart has zero carbon emissions, they qualify as an electric vehicle under one of the green energy scams. Stossel had to pay for the golf cart up front, but gets it all back on his taxes.

The golf cart dealer tried to defend the program based on the fact that most of us do our running around for trips that are less than 8-10 miles.

He didn't mention the carbon emissions of energy plants - coal burning, heat emitting, etc. energy plants. Once again, the alarmists can't look past the first stage of their energy programs. The golf cart is "green", therefore it is good. Pay no attention to the carbon emissions produced by charging the batteries.

The last guest was Stephen Dubner, co-author of the new Freakonomics book. Dubner sent the alarmists into a frothing rage a few months ago, when he and Steven Levitt publicized a proposal to spew some sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through a massive garden hose. Climate engineers came up with the proposal a few years ago, after noticing that the earth cools significantly after volcanoes erupt.

This would only cost a few hundred million dollars per year. It would be simple. And there would be little or no opportunities for any Graft For Greenies programs.

Therefore, Dubner and Levitt were branded as heretics. Dubner took a few questions, mostly about acid rain from sulfur dioxide. He handled them with ease. (When's the last time you heard anything about acid rain, the former Panic Of The Decade?)

Overall, I really liked the show, and I hope Stossel can get some ratings. Every question from the audience was from someone disagreeing with the guest. Who knows, it could've all been scripted. At least it was a fair script.

The Goode Family

I don't watch much TV, but I'll try to remember to get this on TIVO from now on.

Director Mike Judge’s new animated television series “The Goode Family” is a send-up of a clan of environmentalists who live by the words “What would Al Gore do?” Gerald and Helen Goode want nothing more than to minimize their carbon footprint. They feed their dog, Che, only veggies (much to the pet’s dismay) and Mr. Goode dutifully separates sheets of toilet paper when his wife accidentally buys two-ply. And, of course, the family drives a hybrid.

If you don't laugh out loud when Mike Judge explains the character of the teenaged son, you're taking yourself waaaaay too seriously.


The bumpersticker at the 2:00 mark would last about 2:00 minutes in Texas.



Looks goode. I mean, good.

A fresh coat of Whitening to Instapundit for the links.