UKRAINE UPDATE: MORE OF THE SAME OLD SAME OLD
Well, all the usual eastern european nonsense seems to be taking root again as everyone jockeys for power and privilege.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt. But as far as I can tell, everything so far is just fighting over position at the trough.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 15:10:00 UTC
TABLE OF DEMOCIDE:
“the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder.”
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 10:01:00 UTC
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
The state collects:
(a) all our search requests
(b) all our communications
(c) all our financial transactions
(d) all our medical information
(e) all our weapon information
(f) all our travel information
(g) all our tax information
(h) all our title information (real property)
(i) all our marriage and divorce information.
(j) all our birth and death information
+ and insurance companies collect:
(k) all our risk information (our forecasts)
+ and private companies collect our:
(l) genetic information
IT MEANS WE ARE CATTLE.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 07:28:00 UTC
http://24tv.ua/home/showSingleNews.do?turchynov_dismisses_presidential_advisors&objectId=413772&lang=enEXAMPLE OF ENDEMIC CORRUPTION IN KIEV: “PRESIDENTIAL ADVISOR”
I lived in a very nice small hotel in downtown for a long time. And in the morning I’d go down for breakfast and sit on the veranda overlooking the street.
One of the frequent characters was a fellow who always seemed to meet foreigners and talk to them about doing business in Ukraine.
Eventually we moved mutual recognition, then to morning smiles, and I finally introduced myself. We spoke briefly. .He gave me his card. He was an “Advisor to the President”. Which seemed strange to me because he looked far more like a carpet salesman than anyone with deep knowledge of any kind of civil affairs.
Over time I gathered enough information by ‘accidental’ listening, to understand that he was a gatekeeper for foreign businesses in Ukraine. If you want to start a business, obtain credit, film a movie, or gain access to television and media, you could pay ‘fees’ for the his ‘service’.
His service involved collecting bribes on behalf of the president in exchange for ‘assistance’ in accomplishing your goals.
I haven’t seen him lately. I don’t remember his name. But I’m pretty sure that the list of ‘advisors’ is a lot longer than the official one.
Today, the parliament dismissed an whole list of ‘advisors’.
Story below.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 14:40:00 UTC
AN ARISTOCRATIC LIBERTARIAN CALL TO ARMS
Rothbard is using the urban ghetto as a model (Jewish religious) and Locke the genetically homogenous island as a model (English and Anglo-Empirical). A third model consists of tribes constantly competing for land and thus constantly at war over resources -the spears you mention: (German and Continental) model.
A fourth model is told to us by science: a consanguineous inbred band without distinction by the roles that we must evolve along with our means of production, and the rules necessary to facilitate that production.
None of these models addresses mans nature. All of them together, do tell us something:
The natural state of man is to adapt his family (reproductive organization), his rules of cooperation (property rights, norms, rituals and myths) to the continuous changes in the structure of production made possible by his technical advancements.
There exists no natural state of man, only natural properties of man. Arguments in favor of a state of man are bound to fail because they are based upon false assumptions.
The problem for any cooperative group remains constant: creating incentives both in favor of production and against free riding and parasitism. Since expansion of production in a division of knowledge and labor increases the opportunity for free riding and parasitism because of increasing anonymity of the participants the structure of production.
Rothbard, like Cantor, Freud and Marx, is but the author another pseudoscience and our failure to grasp it as such a measure of our seducability by cheap introspective empty verbalisms rather than expensive scientific investigations.
And I am going to drag libertarian philosophy out of the empty verbalism of ghetto pseudoscience and into the ratio scientific era – kicking and screaming if necessary. But then, given the enormous investments pseudoscientists have made in their pseudoscience I suspect that they will cling to their empty verbal pseudoscience as desperately as fortune tellers, astrologers, psychologists, marxists, and mathematical platonists.
–Leave no pseudoscientist standing. Liberty is too precious to trust to empty verbalism–
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 08:22:00 UTC
ALL SOCIETIES REQUIRE A DOMINANT MINORITY
Who is ours?
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 06:12:00 UTC
CONSERVATIVES SUCCEED WHERE LIBERTARIANS ALWAYS FAIL.
–“for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime soon. Even Wall Street’s rentier operations have been affected: After helping finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America’s Big Money is now regretting the Frankenstein’s monster it has created. Like children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off.”–
Well. Bill Moyers might not realize that some of us, people like me, started working the strategy of driving the state into credit default in 1980. It just took a while.
That said, conservatives understand power. That all human organization requires power – decision makers. Deciders. Whether monopoly or distributed.
For liberty to persist, those who desire it must use DISTRIBUTED POWER. We must CONSTANTLY pay the price of liberty. We cannot obtain it at a discount.
Power is expensive. Liberty is difficult to price because it is so expensive.
You can’t get liberty at a discount by claiming ‘it’s a right’.
That kind of nonsense is for children.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 00:28:00 UTC
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-uprising-we-can-break-protesters-legs-no-one-will-punish-us-the-law-is-on-our-side-9147903.html?loadcomments=true#7f9da0e79d38436da5ea885464fd05b0NONSENSE – PLEASE IGNORE THE TINFOIL HATS IN FRONT OF THE UNION JACK
I live in downtown Kiev. In the old city (Podol) There is no chaos here. I’ve been up in Maidan at the stage and it’s basically a cross between a keg party and a church ceremony now.
We couldn’t get western attention here for months, and then all of a sudden we lose a lot of people in one day, the media finds bread and circus for the peasantry, and the average western clown is an expert on events here.
Russians (and Ukrainians – prior to 1900 known as the Rusyas ), have a bravado bit of nonsense on the scale of Southern Italians. And western news media, always looking to make viewers feel morally and intellectually superior, take advantage of it.
When realistically, compare Kiev to Venezuela, and look at the body language of the protesters alone. These are gentle people tired of corruption. They just want freedom from an oppressive state.
Unless Russia walks into Donetsk with tanks, all will be boring and fine here.
They’ve asked for Volunteers to clean up the main square starting on March 1st and I’m sure we’ll all chip in and take care of it. And it will be a CIVIC PEOPLE who CARE ABOUT THEIR CULTURE, and who don’t expect the government to do anything to help, that will make it happen.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-24 12:45:00 UTC
UKRAINE : PUNISHMENT IS NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT – it’s housekeeping.
It’s all well and good to punish the old guard that preyed upon the people. On the other hand, retribution is not a strategy for fixing Ukraine. Nothing will be different. In fact, obsession with the past is merely a foolish or lazy person’s way of failing to deal with the future.
A new president and new parliament will do no good without reforming those aspects of life that directly affect the ability of Ukrainian people to prosper.
1. Reform the judiciary. Add the Jury system. Look at the court data. Hire Ukrainian expatriates from German and English legal systems to audit the judiciary and to determine likely areas of corruption. Although most english and german speaking legal firms in Kiev have written extensively on how to cure Ukrainian judges’ notorious disrespect for the rule of law. This only requires honest effort. There is no secret here. Corruption in the judiciary is an open secret that everyone knows – and most people in western countries understand how to fix.
2. Reform the Police on the Georgian or Russian model – pay the good one’s eliminate the others. Be merciless about reforming them. Any person can bring suit against an officer. Use citizen juries to try the police officers. If a policeman is fired by the jury, then he is permanently ineligible for service in any capacity in the government. This is sufficient incentive to protect the people from police corruption.
3. “Universal Legal Standing Against Corruption” Treat corruption (even your own) as a crime against your people,and punish all of it, from the most political cheat, to the simplest credit thief, as a threat to the future of Ukraine and its people.
4. Obtain the “universal right to bear arms” – it is the only source of freedom. Americans call this right “shall issue”. Meaning that the government must issue unless there is a reason not to. Do not settle for requiring a reason. Freedom from evil people in government is the only reason you need to bear arms. Ukraine is one of the only countries that understands the power of armed citizenry in securing its freedom from oppression. An armed society is not only a polite society but it is also a free society.
5. Commit to a 10 year television and education campaign on ‘truth, trust and elimination of corruption in all walks of life.’ This is, believe it or not, one of the most important things that you can do in a low trust society like Ukraine. (If I spoke the language I’d drive initiative for it myself.) Ukrainians in my opinion are the best and most good people in the world. But trust is a technology. It can be taught like any other technology. And Ukrainians’ need to understand how to use that technology, rather than rely on centuries of experience without trust.
GOOD ADVICE
1. Try to get younger people into office who do not have adult experience under the Soviet model. It is very hard to change our intuitions about what we learn in our youth.
2. Start teaching ‘rule of law’, ‘the common law’, commercial ethics, checkbook management, basic accounting, and basic economics to all students in all schools at an early age.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-24 06:30:00 UTC
CRIMEA
I get that Crimea has the best of both worlds if it stays part of Ukraine, but has Russia’s backing. In effect it gets to play the Black Sea version of Hong Kong. If brought back into Russia directly it would have less autonomy that it does as a ‘leased territory’.
(FWIW: stopping the Russians from taking over the Ottomans (the crimean war) was yet another stupid thing we did. Added to the list of many stupid things we did. Sigh…)
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-24 04:08:00 UTC