Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

Jobs

• Stop job-killing tax hikes — Grade: A. (It’s a start, but better to abolish taxes.)
• Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income — Grade: A. (Ditto.)
• Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit — Grade: C.  (How about no new regulations period? Better yet, repeal all existing ones.)
• Repeal small business mandates in the new health care law. — Grade: A.

Cutting Spending

• Repeal and replace health care reform law — Grade: Unknown, probably B or lower. (Replace with what?)
• Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone) — Grade: B.  (Should roll back more.)
• Establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending going forward — Grade: B, maybe C.  (How strict? Will these caps be lifted periodically like the national debt ceiling?)
• Cancel all future TARP payments and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — Grade: Unknown, no higher than a B. (Reform Fannie and Freddie how? Better to abolish them.)

Reforming Congress

• Will require that every bill have a citation of constitutional authority — Grade: C. (Won’t stop Constitutional-but-still-bad bills, and the Constitution is a “living” document anyway.)
• Give members at least 3 days to read bills before a vote — Grade: C.  (Little impact; they still won’t read them.)

Defense

• Provide resources to troops — Grade: F. (Get troops out of foreign countries. Cut the military and intelligence budgets.)
• Fund missile defense — Grade: F. (Worthless boondoggle.)
• Enforce sanctions in Iran — Grade: F.  (Act of war.)

Overall: F. The military provisions outweigh the good things. How about ending the War on Drugs, rolling back the surveillance and police state, and ending aggression against immigrants? In any case, put not your faith in campaign promises.

I think I’m being generous. What do you think? How would you grade the Republicans’ Pledge to America?

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Maybe it’s because we have the best ‘bread and circuses‘ money can buy and plenty of fiat money with which to buy it. Or maybe it’s because the court intellectuals all sing variations on the same discordant statist song. Or maybe it’s because we all learn the same myths and dogmas and untruths in state indoctrination camps called public schools, if we learn anything at all. Or maybe it’s because most of us lack the moral courage to inconvenience ourselves by standing up for what is right. I think it is some combination of these and other causes. In any event, most Americans seem to be a-okay with the evils of statism — at least so long as their man is in power.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

The Obama Administration gets away with “fulfilling” Obama’s promise to end US combat operations in Iraq by removing the last (officially-labeled) combat brigade from the country, yet 50,000 troops will remain until (supposedly) 2011. These 50,000 troops make up 7 “Advise and Assist” Brigades, which are brigade combat teams like the one that just left but with special training, and 2 combat aviation brigades. “The troops are officially there to assist and advise the Iraqi government, but will carry weapons to defend themselves and will join Iraqi troops on missions if requested.”

After 2011, the “military” presence in Iraq is supposed to be “limited to several dozen to several hundred officers in an embassy office who would help the Iraqis purchase and field new American military equipment,” but military officers are saying that “5,000 to 10,000 troops might [still] be needed.”

Meanwhile, “the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000.” Can we really still call security personnel ‘civilians’ or ‘private security’ anymore when they’re working for the state in foreign lands, particularly in a combat zone? They’re mercenaries, troops that are conveniently not part of the official US military. The NYT reporter couldn’t help calling them “a small army of contractors.”

The US is building military bases, fortified compounds, outposts, and the largest “embassy” in the world in Iraq. Iraqi politicians still haven’t been able to come to an agreement and form a government after the last elections, making Iraq vulnerable to a coup if the Iraqi military leadership get too frustrated by the ineffectual, in-fighting politicians. The US empire will not be completely out of there anytime soon.

But hey, “we” won…right?

~*~

Update: Less than a week after the official end of combat operations in Iraq, US troops were involved in a combat operation in Iraq.Go figure. 12 people died and dozens were wounded in an assault by heavily-armed militants against an Iraqi military headquarters,in the center of Baghdad no less.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.

Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.

In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps — GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Scott Blasken got this shot from his office window Tuesday morning after Greenpeace unfurled a banner from the Calgary Tower.

Hey, I’m all in favor of separating oil and state. But that means no strategic oil reserves; no taxes, including carbon taxes; no cap-and-trade; no regulations; no moratoriums or bans on offshore or other drilling; no special protections of any kind, including caps on liability for actual damages to private property caused by oil companies;¹ no eminent domain (ab)use; and no mercantilistic and imperialistic wars to make the world safe for domestic consumption of foreign oil. But somehow I don’t expect all of this is what the Greenpeace activists confusedly mean by “separate oil and state.” Alas and alack.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

1. I’m not talking about limited liability for shareholders here. I’m referring to caps like the $75 million liability cap that has received so much attention in the wake of the BP oil spill, enacted in 1990 as part of the Oil Pollution Act following the Exxon Valdez spill. ↩

I love Noah Shachtman’s analysis of the propagandistic publicity poster by Northrop Grumman, the maker of the Army’s latest war toy:

God smiles when the Army spends a half-billion dollars on spy blimps the size of a football field. I believe that’s the message Northrop Grumman is trying to convey in this illustration. . .

The first airship is supposed to be inflated around 10 months from now. Eight months later, the Army hopes to have the first LEMV flying over Afghanistan. On that day, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and the cherubs will sing as the unblinking eye begins looking for Taliban.

God bless America indeed.

The Unblinking Eyes of Sauron are intended for use over foreign soil. But with the increasing militarization of US borders and police, I wonder how long until they or their successors are deployed over our own heads? looking for brown-skinned interlopers, pot growers, and terrorists under every rock.

I’m reminded of a couple of pieces by heavy metal bands, though these work just as well for spy satellites. The first is a creepy intro, “An Eye Is Upon You,” by Powerman 5000 for their album Tonight the Stars Revolt! And the second is “Electric Eye” by one of my favorite bands, Judas Priest (their compilation album Metal Works is a good place to start).

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Music video and lyrics below:

Lyrics

We request to negotiate
We come to you unarmed
We desire to communicate
You cannot do us harm

They want sacrifice
They hatch schemes and ask me to follow their path to the afterlife

I’ve got an appetite
For nice things and pipe dreams that my enemies could be blasted by

New metaphors
View that are better for you can’t survive if I’m your competitor

Rise together or fight separate wars
I pray I’m never forced to be a predator

Spectres spectate
We wont last
They glad to hate
When gladiators
Breathe their last
Scream en masse
When the dreams do clash
Like the swords in the wars
Let me bleed on that
But they feed on that
Say we need strong backs
Call us weak
If we don’t redeem contracts
But the feast wont last
When this beast attacks
The sons and the fathers
Will be free at last

This is love this is not treason

They see sharks in the estuary
They claim the arc’s Bartholomew’s
They say war is necessary
But we say war is child abuse

We’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers
We’d rather make our children White Flag Warriors

Core-to-core
Were the ones
We’ve been waiting for
We hold steady
Steadier than stevedores
Not tevias or matadors
On matters of what came before
Forgive the debts
To settle scores
Test the mettle
Either ore
Whats your plan got to do with me
If the bell tolls let freedom ring
And find new ways if we must be King
Instead of leading the young to our suffering

We pass testaments down scream back at heaven
For testing us like Wednesdays at eleven
Wanna recruit and train us to act evilly?
Save it for the shooting range and smack DVDs
Won’t study war no more this millennium
It’s never again to me or anyone
So think harder when you refer to us
Rather make our children martyrs than murderers

They shell dwellings to quell the shelling
They lift taboos to seduce the cowards
They say we’re too yellow-bellied
But we say we’re the new superpower

We seek waivers to not be liable
We claim to speak for a higher truth
We stand opposed to the homicidal
We tell you you’re fireproof

***

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

…because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

Benford does report some remarks by Clarke I do agree with, however. For example: “for the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

And here’s another: “exact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Finally, here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of statism: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.”

Update: In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford adds two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good ideal all along!”

There is a profound truth in that dictum. It identifies shared characteristics of statist politics and war: anti-social conflict, some imposing their will on others, destruction and redistribution of wealth, etc. When statist political means fail to have the desired result and recourse is made to naked war, the true character of both the aggressors and the statist political process is revealed.

But I think that von Clausewitz got it backwards; the observation would have been more profound and true had he written instead: “Statist politics is the continuation of war by other means.”

Ballots replace bullets within the democratic state but conflict persists with special interest groups vying for the reins of power so that they can use the perceived legitimacy of the state to impose their will on each other. Beneath the sophisms that grant the state legitimacy there lies the same threat or use of initiatory violence that is present in war. Open war is traded for the illusion of peace.

Update 12/11/07: Might this quote from Ronald Reagan touch upon a similar insight? “Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

~*~

Update: Revised version at The Libertarian Standard.

Another downside to the class was that I had to do an empirical, quantitative research paper. So I did the paper on the democratic peace thesis. I “tested” the thesis at the system level of analysis, meaning that I tested for the effects of the percentage of democracies in the international system on three types of war: inter-state war, intra-state war, and extra-state war. The idea was that if democracies are not supposed to go to war with each other, then a higher percentage of democracies in the international system should be correlated with a lower incidence of war.

I found virtually zero support for the democratic peace thesis and even found some support against it. In a number of the models, the percentage of democracy in the international system was positively and significantly correlated with the incidence of intra-state (i.e., civil and secessionist) wars.

Of course, war here is measured according to the coding rules established by the Correlates of War Project as conflict that results in at least 1,000 battle deaths. My dataset ranged from 1816-1997.

I’m not at all surprised by the results. Joanne Gowa, in Ballots and Bullets, argued that the democratic peace was an artifact of the Cold War; it appeared to be true only because Western, capitalist, democratic nations had a shared security interest against the Soviet Union. My professor, David Sobek, though he argues that Gowa’s book suffers from methodological deficiencies, improved on Gowa’s methods in an as yet unpublished paper and was surprised to find her results confirmed.

Again, while I am wary about making any definitive claims based on empirical, quantitative evidence regarding social phenomena, the evidence against the democratic peace thesis is continuing to grow. And, more importantly, this empirical evidence is supported by strong theoretical arguments.

My own paper can be found here.