Southern Bread Blog

I saw this question tweeted out a while back and jotted it down to blog about some time:

Do “states rights” supporters object to “counties rights” taking priority over “states rights”?

–Some guy on Twitter

The concept of “states rights” as a technical term, is an issue that comes solely from adherence to the wording of the constitution and the explanation of the structure of the constitution in the Federalist Papers and other early commentary. The constitution assigned the states (through the process of Senatorial assignment and the amendment process) to be a check against the Federal government’s natural momentum toward apprehending more power to itself. The internal governmental structure of the states themselves is beyond the scope of the constitution. The twitter’ers question is therefore technically non-sensical.

However, he/she is making a larger point, I think, about whether or not the concept itself should be carried right on down the chain to the most local level. Should a home owner’s association’s laws trump the city’s? Should the city’s trump the county’s? These are fair questions. And, I think the answer is absolutely yes, as long as the question is phrased correctly. As stated, it still doesn’t make sense since state’s rights doesn’t entail states “taking priority” over the Federal government. It’s not that simple.

State’s rights means simply that whenever there is an issue not explicitly enumerated in the constitution as being a Federal issue, the state is the ultimate authority. I don’t see any reason why that shouldn’t flow right on down to the lowest levels. Why shouldn’t it? The best politician is the one who’s closest to you – the one you can go knock on his door and ask him why he just voted for such and such. The more local the lawmaker, the better.

Here’s something I, and probably you, didn’t know: The British used concentration camps in South Africa more than 30 years prior to Germany or Soviet Russia. This was during the second Boer War:

During the later stages of the Second Boer War, the British pursued the policy of rounding up and isolating the Boer civilian population in concentration camps, one of the earliest uses of this method by modern powers. The wives and children of Boer guerrillas were sent to these camps, which had poor hygiene and little food (due to attacks by Boer guerrillas on supply trains). Many of the children in these camps died, as did some of the adults.

–Wikipedia, Boer Wars

And America has a nice little pre-Nazi, pre-Soviet concentration camp record of it’s own:

The earliest of these camps may have been those set up in the United States for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s; however, the term originated in the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) and by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).[6]

The English term “concentration camp” grew in prominence during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when they were operated by the British in South Africa.[6][7]

There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children.

–Wikipedia, Concentration camps

The always great Thomas DiLorenzo chronicles the “civil war” as the beginnings of the modern American warfare State. And since warfare and welfare are inseperable, you could simply call it the beginnings of the modern American State. You should listen to this, especially if you’re a Southerner. We in the South still hold attitudes and beliefs about many things that are traceable back to the brutality of the war and reconstruction. But, if you don’t know the real history of the events, they are impossible to trace.

The Genesis of the American Warfare State: 1861-1890:

The typical government schooled 9 year old will spend 2 years learning multiplication and division. A 13 year old could learn both in about 15 minutes. And, the younger you start, the more futile it is.

Here’s a recent example from an unschooling mailing list my wife subscribes to:

My oldest son took some classes at our community college and took a math placement test. They had three remedial courses before college algebra (which many degrees require). Basic math started with simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Then there was beginning algebra and intermediate algebra. That’s it! So even if your child learned NO math during his years with you and decided he wanted to do something that required it, he would be three semesters from college algebra. That is three semesters to learn ALL the math learned between K-12. I think you can safely put that on their shoulders. It is their job to learn. It is your job to support them, help them, offer ideas and suggestions, give them choices, and affirm their decisions.

I just got this email from Amazon about another price drop for their EC2 (cloud computing) service:

We are excited to announce a reduction in Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache prices. Reserved Instance prices will decrease by up to 37% for Amazon EC2 and by up to 42% for Amazon RDS across all regions…

…

Today’s price drop represents the 19th price drop for AWS, and we are delighted to continue to pass along savings to you as we innovate and drive down our costs.

If you aren’t familiar with cloud computing, you’ll need to know that Amazon is the dominant player in that market. They do things that no other cloud service offers, like elastic block storage and community instance images. There are other cloud hosts out there like Rackspace. But Amazon has no real direct competition when you compare apples to apples.

So, without direct competitors, wouldn’t you think that Amazon would exploit that fact and keep prices high? Why have they dropped prices 19 times over the life of the service? It’s because not all competition is external to a company. Some competition is internal. And not all external competition are direct product competitors. Those are common misconceptions. A proper understanding of competition requires correctly defining the term. Here’s the correct definition as it’s been understood to history: “…competition is viewed as a dynamic rivalrous process of firms struggling with each other over the expansion of their market shares.” [ref]

Firms don’t just compete with each other. They also compete with the market itself. They compete with every other potential choice a consumer would make on where to spend their money. In a truly free market, it’s the constant struggle of each company to lower their prices continually, so as to stimulate new customers to buy their products that previously had been sitting on the sideline. Every entrepreneur understands this from day one.

Many entrepreneurs start businesses in markets that are unique and have no direct competitors. But they still know that they have to bring prices in line with more and more consumers in order to expand their share of the market.

My wife sends me fantastic quotes all the time from her research. Lately her focus has been on researching “unschooling.” It’s a whale of a subject, but also a treasure trove of information about how we really learn things. It’s definitely a red pill.

What do people need? People need what they use. And they learn what they need by using it.

The things they don’t use are the things they don’t need.

What most people don’t understand about learning is that you don’t need to understand something in order to use it. You learn how to use it as a side effect of using it.

Think about how kids learn English. They have no clue how to use English when they’re born. In fact they don’t even know what language is. But they find bits and pieces of English — and other tools like pointing — useful to get what they need. Saying “ook” gets them milk more efficiently than crying. So, as they use “ook” and get feedback — like Mom saying “Oh, you want some milk?” — they get better at English as a side effect. We don’t need to explain the proper rules of English to them before they start using it. English is just there and they pick up the parts that look useful for what they want to get. They don’t even need to use English properly. But properly does come along as a side effect of using English. As they use English they find ways that work better to get what they want.

Learning works that way for math and science and history.

But those subjects — like English — aren’t actually things to learn. They’re tools to help you do something else. You don’t need to know the right way to use a tool to use it. You just use it to get something else. How well the project turns out gives you feedback on using the tools better.

My daughter asks how long until Daddy gets home. We use math as a tool to figure that out. The point isn’t the math. The point is finding out “how long until.” Math is a tool we use to figure out “how long until.” Using math and being exposed to math is a side effect of wanting to know “how long until.”

A hammer is a tool, not the point. The point is to build a bird house. How well the nails go in gives us feedback on how to build the house better and, as a side effect, how to use a hammer better. But the point is never the hammer. It’s always what you’re using the hammer to make.

JoyfullyRejoycing.com

Other than No Agenda, the only podcast I never miss is Security Now. Since I’m a SysAdmin, I really need to keep up to date on security news and that’s the show for it. The most recent episode had a lively (not lively enough) debate between Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson arguing for and against third-party cookies, respectively. The only problem was that they both totally missed the point.

Leo’s position: Advertising is how the internet is monetized. You get free stuff (like Gmail, Facebook, YouTube) so you should expect advertising. And you should expect targeted ads (made possible by tracking), since those are more valuable to you and to the site owners. Therefore, tracking cookies are ok.

Steve’s position: Advertising doesn’t need cookies to work. They can glean enough information from the source IP address and the referrer headers to make proper impression calculations. And, although he didn’t say this (because he’s too nice of a guy), the implication is that tracking is therefore simply greedy.

Both of these positions miss the real point, which is: Being tracked as part of advertising isn’t unique to the internet(think grocery store discount cards), but being tracked at the discretion of the product owner without your consent is.

If the grocery store offers me a discount card, I can refuse it. It also only works at that chain of stores. But, the issue with internet tracking is that you’re getting tracked by site owners choosing to use free services, which is beyond your control. If you go to a blog like this one, and I choose to serve you ads (which I never will), you’re now going to get tracked by that advertiser wherever you go within their ad network. You never had a choice. You never even knew it was happening. And you can’t know before-hand which sites are ad supported and which are not until you visit them. And then you’re tracked just for visiting.

It’s like having the grocery store manager hiding up in the rafters and silently shooting you with an RFID tracking chip as soon as you walk in the door.

And that’s just the advertising side. The other part is analytics services like google-analytics. It’s hard to find a site these days that doesn’t use google-analytics. That means Google has a record of your travels across the web, just by virtue of those site owners choosing to use that service. Again, it’s all beyond your control.

You can act, as Leo did, as if it’s tin-foil hat to think that these companies like Double-Click care about the habits of individual persons. But, what happens when you find yourself in the cross-hairs of an overzealous child services worker. Busy-bodies turn in people for bogus reasons all of the time. Would you want that social worker subpeonaing your web history from Google so they could fish around for something to make a case out of? Almost any website you visit could be pulled out of context and turned into something “troubling.” What about that time you went to WebMD and did a search for “child has a rash on his kneck”? Did you follow that up with a doctor visit? If you didn’t, then maybe that’s negligence. See how this works?

Tracking is not necessary for internet advertising. It might be necessary for really good internet advertising. But, what kind of argument is that? Think of how much better ads would be if the ad companies could have your credit card purchase logs, your credit report and all of your medical records too. Wouldn’t that be awesome!

Ok, continuing from where we left off last…

3. Actors (Controlling their image)

Another area of information manipulation is the shaping of the image of the various actors involved in a war. These “actors” will fall into two categories that we can then subdivide into two classes.

The first category will be personifications of countries. When we speak of America, or Germany, or Iraq, often times we’re using the reference as a sort of anthropomorphism, as if the country itself were a person with all of the amalgamated qualities of it’s entire people and leadership as it’s personality. This is childish.

The next category would be individual persons of repute. The usual suspects would be Presidents, Secretaries and Ministers of War/Defense, Congressmen, military commanders and generals, etc. At any time during a war these folks will need to be either demonized or deified according to the need of the moment.

Now, both of these classes of actors will fall into one of two simple categories: the allies or the axis. The good guys or the bad guys. Cowboys or Indians. To quote from George W. Bush: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” And, within this framework, the Allies will always be portrayed in a good light while the axis will be protrayed negatively. We are influenced to believe that there are bad countries and good countries, as well as bad guys and good guys. This bad and good is somehow supposed to tell us the whole story. And that story is supposed to have always existed in that form. Enemies have always been enemies. Friends have always been friends. Anyone that begins to parse the details and dig deeper into history is labeled as a conspiracy theorist.

I think the easiest way to demonstrate the way this all works is with an example showing the bad/good paradigm. Let’s look at “good” and “bad” countries first:

• Germany (Bad)

  No other country demonstrates the bad/good fiction better than Germany. The truth of World War I is that England entered the war in an attempt to halt further growth of the German empire, which was geting large enough to challenge it’s own empire. Germany didn’t do anything during the war that any other country didn’t do. Yet at the Treaty of Versailles, the allies forced Germany to declare itself the sole cause of World War I. As a result, Germany was treated as a “guilty nation” and subjected to absolutely vicious treaty terms. The treaty destroyed their economy and paved the way for Nazism to rise.

• Russia (Bad)

  The European theater of World War II began with Germany and Russia jointly invading Poland in 1939. This was the beginning of a plan called the Moscow-Ribbentrop pact that had been forged in secret between the two countries. They had basically drawn a map of Western Europe and divided up European states amongst themselves. But, somehow Russia was, and is, given a free pass. They became an ally. Germany became an enemy. Even though Stalin had already killed 10 million of his own people by the time the war started, they were treated as an equal to England and the U.S. They were labeled a “good guy” for the purposes of war.

• England (Good)

  The fact that England actually started bombing Germany first is not very widely known. England bombed the German city of Emden in March 1940. Germany wouldn’t make it’s first bombing on England until August of that same year. Yet we are repeatedly made to believe that Germany struck England first. The truth is that England had made a pact with Poland to defend it if it was attacked. And they did. They struck Germany a few months after Germany invaded Poland. Hitler stated repeatedly that he did not want war with England. But England forced his hand with repeated bombings.

Now let’s look a couple of examples of “good” and “bad” individual actors.

• Joseph Stalin (Good)

  F.D.R. called him “Uncle Joe”. You know, like that crazy uncle we all have that is a genocidal dictator. By the time Hitler fired up his first gas chamber, Stalin had already killed 10 million of his own people. But, for reasons of British and American empirical design, he was called “ally” while Hitler was the “axis”. When the war ended, Stalin was handed Eastern Europe on a silver platter while Hitler lay dead outside his bunker. The end result? Communism would reign in Eastern Europe for the next 50 years.

• Muammar Gaddafi (Both)

  Is there a better poster child of narrative shaping in the modern era than Gaddafi? Here’s a guy that was demonized as a terrorist for decades, then when he publicly says he’s going to drop his weapons program, Bush, Blaire and Cheney switch gears and call him “our important ally in the war against terror.” Then, turning on a dime, the Obama administration labels him a bad guy again, overthrows his country, hunts him down and shoots him. And, if you ask any regular Joe on the street what Gaddafi did to deserve it, they would have no clue. Actually, Gaddafi himself evidently didn’t know either. When the Western powers needed an arab enemy they painted him as such. And, when they needed the appearance of arab allies, they reversed course and painted him as a “good” guy.

The point of all this is that you can never know who is truly bad or truly good from thousands of miles away when all of your information is being funneled through a complex propaganda machine. And labeling entire countries as good or bad is nonsensical.

As the ground war winds down, or comes to a close, the propaganda will inevitably change direction. It will turn toward establishing the “official” history of the war. We’ll explore this next time.

I am pro-life across the board. I always have been. The thought of ripping a child apart and sucking it out of it’s mother gives me the same feeling as seeing children blown to bits by war. It’s absolutely horrible. It’s a billboard for human depravity.

That’s out of the way now.

My question to pro-lifers is: what’s the end game? What exactly are you wanting to accomplish with the pro-life movement?

Do you want abortion doctors convicted of murder? That would seem like a logical conclusion. But, I don’t see that being pushed.

Do you want it simply made illegal? If so, then on what basis is it an illegal action? Because the basis for it’s illegality determines what type of punishment is going to be tied to it. Again, I don’t see that discussion.

Do you want the women who have abortions to be convicted? If so, convicted of what? Murder? I haven’t seen an answer to that.

Do you want it to be a constitutional amendment? Because if it’s not, then it’s a state issue. And you don’t seem to want that.

Questions like these don’t seem to be generating any answers because the abortion issue has been so thoroughly politicized that it has morphed into something new that’s hard to nail down. The morality questions haven’t changed, but the politics have cause the whole argument to lose it’s framing. In a way, when you strip a question like this down to only it’s moral components, you’re left with an end that has no means.

So what’s the answer? Depoliticizing the argument. Abortion can’t be fought as an “issue” any more. There’s only one way to eliminate abortion, and that’s in the heart of yourself and your children. It’s not laws that will keep my daughter out of the abortion room. It’s me. It’s what I teach her. It’s her moral vision. It will never be a law that will keep any woman out of that room. It will always be what’s inside them that will make the choice. Government doesn’t help. Like with everything else, it just muddies the water with empty rhetoric.

Congress hasn’t declared a war since 1941, but hundreds of thousands of war dead since then prove that laws are meaningless. Making something illegal doesn’t stop it. The thing that stops sin and crime is what’s inside a man’s heart, not what a group of people I’ve never met before write down on some paper.

I’m pro-life to my core, but I also see the futility of modern law. We can’t look to government for any kind of redress or to mete out justice of any kind. They aren’t in the justice business any more. I choose liberty instead. And I’ll fight my battle in the heart, not in the court room.

This is the book that Ron Paul said people should read when he was being being grilled by three state Attorney’s General on Fox News. I knew Bastiat as an economist, but hadn’t known that he did any general work on political economy, so I picked this book for our 2012 reading list. It was a joy to read.

When Bastiat speaks of “the Law”, he is referring not to any one particular law, but to the system of codes, rules and regulations that we are to live by as imposed on us by a government. Government is force. And the rules it forces you to obey, taken as a whole, are “the Law.” This is the subject of the book.

His premise is simple, and he repeats it often: “The law is justice.” It’s not anything else. The appropriate use of law is the protection of life, property and liberty. Because these things preceded the law, the law will always be metaphysically subordinate to them. When the law steps outside of that narrow vision, it creates injustice, in violation of it’s nature. This is his argument in a nutshell. He starts this way:

We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

..

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.

–Frederic Bastiat, The Law

He goes on to define property as that which is obtained by labor, and plunder as that which is taken by force from the labor of others. The main thrust being that if an individual can’t, by law, do a certain thing, then government (the will of many individuals) can’t do that thing either. In this context, taxation is “legal plunder”, war is legal murder, etc.

What does he say about the state of post-civil war America?

…look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues — and only two — that have always endangered the public peace.

What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.

Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.

It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime — a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World — should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States — where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs — what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?

–Frederic Bastiat, The Law

Ron Paul was right. This is a truly great book. There are a million quotes I could paste in here. Too many. It will, at the very least, give you a better understanding of Ron Paul’s own philosophy of government.