Thanks to the fine people at CATO, we now know why the department of education was serving a search warrant. They, along with the 30 other inspector generals were granted full police power by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. It isn’t clear how many of those organizations have taken advantage of this law, but it will be interesting to see if the Department of Labor, The Export-Import Bank of the US, or even the Tennessee Valley Authority will be serving search warrants SWAT style. Usually I’d laugh, but none of those are more ridiculous than the department of education arming themselves and busting down doors. thank goodness the department of education is leading the way in the fight against terrorism…
Category: freedom
This report has been going around the internet today detailing how a SWAT team broke down a guy’s door, handcuffed him, threw him and his three pre-teen children into a squad car for hours at a time, all in the name of an investigation into his estranged wife who doesn’t even live there any more. The initial reports said that the raid was about unpaid student loans, the Department of education has strongly denied this, claiming that they issue 30-35 search warrants a year for investigations into bribery, fraud, and embezzlement. Why any of those things would require a SWAT team is anyone’s guess. The fact that the department of education is arming themselves isn’t in question. Here’s an order for 27 short barreled shotguns for the apparently commando organization.
I understand that sometimes cops have to go after armed, dangerous people. But the department of education? What possible justification do they have for arming anyone? Never mind the commando tactics, what if one of the SWAT members tripped and set off his gun? What’s the point of endangering, humiliating, and scaring little kids for a possible bribery case?
This is an easy case to complain about, but there are more and more cases like this popping up. There is a clear trend in the militarization of police, with deadly results. Check out this map to see the body count of innocents, unarmed suspects, and even policemen. It also shows unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people. I’m assuming that the vast majority of these raids involve the “war on drugs,” one more reason to decriminalize drugs. Now we have to watch out for the department of education… Lovely.
Last night, I had not one, but two friends tell me they wanted to go back to Yemen… right now. As crazy as that sounds, I do understand where they are coming from. Despite the tribalism that is starting to rip Yemen apart, there is something special about the place that makes so many westerners want to go back. As I remember, those two friends were more than a little crazy and ready to get the hell out of Yemen the last time I saw them. Another friend came and saw me three times in Yemen, each time he said it would be his last. He has been back since. An Australian came to Sana’a as part of her sweep up Eastern Africa expecting to stay 3 weeks. She was there 6 months. I was more than a little crazy by the time I left too, but I miss it.
I hope that whatever has been kept under wraps for 30 years can be sorted out somewhat quickly. I am dead set against any American involvement in whatever is to come in Yemen. Some say that Al Queda is too dangerous to allow them to get a foothold in Yemen. I’ll point to their fearsome success of blowing up a guys underwear and the shipping ink cartridge “bombs.” Their attempts in Yemen were pretty pathetic, the running joke was that none of their plans were coming to fruition because none of them wanted to give up their cell phone to act as a detonator. Yes, they attempted to bomb the American embassy, but they didn’t get close and only managed to kill some Yemeni troops and a single, unlucky American. Their crowning moment happened in 2000 with the attack on the Cole. Yes, Americans were killed, but the damage could have been minimized if even basic security procedures were followed. When a missile cruiser is damaged at all and deaths occur from an attack from an inflatable boat, someone fell down on the job. The Unabomber was a far more effective terrorist and yet we didn’t need a single Tomahawk missile or special ops group to get him. All of the same things that are being said about Yemen were also said about Somalia. As it turns out, a chaotic situation is not conducive to world-wide terror plots. Too much energy and time is spent on maintaining local power and influence. The crazier it is in Yemen, the less likely Queda will be able to mount any attacks at all. Even if they did, their attempts in recent memory have been laughable.
More than any of that though, I don’t want us doing anything that gives Yemenis reason to hate us. It”s bad enough that we supported Salah all these years. We have to let them figure things out on their own and find their own balance. Raining missiles down on them or attacking them will not make us the good guys. Don’t give Queda recruiting fodder. I would like to go back one day, please don’t make the US the enemy.
From Dana Vachon at the Daily Beast:
“Osama bin Laden was already made an old fool by the Arab Spring. It was a million young bodies, their unsated creature needs, a generation of Arabs who were only 9 or 11 when 9/11 happened, that pushed the Middle East into modernity, in the end. It was taxi drivers and street vendors and people with no jobs. And they revealed bin Laden for what he always was, a trust fund brat peddling delusions of past grandeur as a cure for the present’s pains.”
So Tunisia started it, who knows when it will end. Egypt is rioting, Yemen is demonstrating, and Jordan is tense. Pop quiz, what do Saddam Hussain, Mubarak, Ben-Ali, Salah, and the Shah of Iran all have in common? That’s right, they are, or were wildly unpopular rulers that were supported by the US government. So far, Iran has been the worst case scenario as far as how they have responded to the US after the leader was deposed. Our befriending of Saddam was mostly due to the ongoing strife that supporting the Shah and the shenanigans that brought him into power brought on.
If Egypt does wrest control from Mubarak, some interesting things are going to be put into motion. Here’s another question, what are Egyptians supposed to think of a US government that just told them that they shouldn’t want to be out from under Mubarak? For the record, Biden really is an ass and should not be allowed to speak in public. Would it really surprise anyone if the general populace in Egypt does not trust the US after having propped up the instrument of their repression for 30 years?
The reasons why people don’t like the US are many and varied, but it can’t be denied that “A friend of my enemy is my enemy” enters into people’s thinking. I don’t know how many times people in Yemen asked me why my government, supposedly in the land of the free, continued to support some of the worst autocratic rulers in the world. I couldn’t really tell them the truth, that US politicians and policy wonks considered those rulers adequate for keeping the rabble under control. It would just confirm their suspicions. I heard a joke over there, it went like this:
George Bush convenes a press conference and announces that as part of the war on terror, 100,000 Arabs will be killed, and 1 doctor. A member of the press asks the president, “Mr. President, why are you going to kill one doctor?” Bush then leans over to Rice and says, “See, I told you that no one cares about Arabs…”
I have heard several variations on that joke. Sometimes it is one Israeli, sometimes it is one American. In all cases, it is clear that people are interested in the single person over the 100,000 arabs.
I’m glad to see that the Obama administration is following a more nuanced treatment of Mubarak, Biden notwithstanding. With any luck, good old Hosni will be convinced to depart and let Egypt get on with the political evolution that has been stunted for these 30 years. Will things get ugly and complicated in the middle east? Undoubtedly. Will the folks at State and the leaders in this government learn any lessons about planting time bombs in foreign governments? I’m sure they won’t. SIgh….
Categories
Why do you carry that around?
We were talking about rolling coin across out knuckles at work (don’t ask, I have no idea why we were talking about that),
so I pulled out my $5 Canadian Maple Leaf coin to try it. My manager immediately asked, “What’s that?” I showed her and explained that it is one ounce of silver. Sure, it has a value of 5 Canadian dollars printed on it, but the value of the silver at that point was a hair below 30 bucks. I had bought it 5 months earlier for around 18 bucks.
Her next question was, “Why do you carry that around?” The most basic answer is that I like it. There is something solid and reassuring about the size and weight. With a little more thought, I also like it as a conversation starter, and it had worked this time too. It gave me the opportunity to mention the difference between fiat currency and hard money. Don’t worry, I never go into too much detail, unless they are interested of course…
I also carry it around to remind myself of the difference between how the currency maker and the market value money. Everything varies in price over time, but paper money’s and regular coins’ values are changed by that country’s central bank primarily. The government can print whatever value it wants on silver, but they have zero control over the actual value. In an ideal world, no single group could hold sway over the value of our money, our store of value. This is as close as we can come to that right now. It’s good to be constantly reminded of that.
Categories
Grace in tragedy
“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”
That was said by John Green, father of the slain Christina Green. She was the 9 year old that got gunned down when that nutjob tried to kill a congresswoman. I love liberty, but this wouldn’t be what i was thinking if I were in his shoes… It’s sad that none of the pundits or politicians speaking about this incident sound nearly as measured and clear as John Green.
Much like when the armed forces were racially integrated by presidential decree, the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal will essentially force the armed forces, and by extension a large number of other Americans, to grow up… It turns out that people are different from one another, and that’s OK. At the same time, we are all more alike than different. That’s a lesson that needs to sink in deeply. Of course, once the military really understands that, it could undermine their willingness to kill folks. Maybe that’s what those generals meant when they worried about military effectiveness being compromised…
At some point, the realization that what people do in their own time doesn’t affect on duty performance will sink in, as will the realization that they have been working with homosexuals all along anyway. My prediction? This is a total non-event. This is a big deal precisely because it isn’t one. People want to serve in the military, who they love and are involved with has no bearing on military performance. Here’s hoping that this repeal will serve as a wake up call to people that want to cast gays and lesbians as being incompatible with decent living. Oh, AND IT”S ABOUT FREAKING TIME!!!!!!
While I don’t like to paint in such broad strokes, I do agree with this article. Power to the people indeed, free those markets!
Back in 2008, I wrote about my difficulty with the presidential candidates. I lamented that i couldn’t see much difference between the coke and Pepsi parties or who was running for president. I caught some flack for that but I think that history has borne me out. Spending is way up, that was expected, but Gitmo is still open, we’ve doubled down in Afghanistan, not only is habeas corpus still being denied in the “War on Terror” but now the administration is targeting US citizens for assassinations, drone attacks continue farther and farther away from combat areas, etc. We’re on the brink of the Fed ramping up the printing presses and the specter of awful inflation leading to a possible zombified economy kind of like Japan’s has been for this past decade. I would have fully expected all this from a republican administration too.
So if Democrats are going to act very similarly to republicans, what is the option? Most people simply held their noses and voted for the candidate that bothered them the least. Our current political climate is a direct consequence of that type of voting. Bush was so bad that he destroyed his party’s “brand” even among many that usually voted republican. Obama got many, many votes simply because he wasn’t Bush. The trouble is that those folks voted for a party that they didn’t agree with on a lot of things. The democrats took their convincing victories as backing their agenda instead of understanding that a big chunk of folks were voting against people moreso than voting for them. So the dems took advantage of their control and passed stuff that a big percentage of people that voted for them didn’t like. Outrage, anger, etc. have followed.
Here’s a startling idea, instead of voting against someone, why not vote for someone? That was my decision last election and it really freed me from guilt about my vote and angst over the two party system. My alternative was not to vote, and i didn’t like that idea. Instead, I found a party that is anti-war, pro gay rights, anti-war on drugs, and believes in well understood paths to prosperity. It also makes you promise that you will never use coercion to further political aims. You can read the full platform here. Stumping for my particular favorite party isn’t why I’m writing this. My main goal is to get people thinking about what they are actually voting for. It turns out that there are other parties that may more closely match your views of the world. If your views don’t match the big two parties, you do a great disservice in not making those views known. If you persist in voting for the big two, you will only embolden them to keep doing what they have done. The best way to voice your displeasure is to vote for someone that shares your view on the world. Peruse the list here and see if there’s a party out there that more closely matches your views and go out and vote!