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With Havel & Hitchens gone, who now carries Orwell's torch?

Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens both died this week. They will both live on for a while though, because they each occupy a special place in my mind. They were both prominent fighters for human freedom against oppressive regimes. One, exorted the West with his intellect, wit and words to acknowledge its responsibility to fight for the ideals of freedom and against hypocrisy. The other was a politician, poet, playwright and philosopher who won a long fight with Soviet totalitarianism that will always inspire others. They were both in their own way heirs to the legacy of the contrarian genius of George Orwell, who helped define the 20th century's intellectual resistance to all forms of totalitarianism. Vaclav Havel  seems likely to go into the pantheon of our civilization's heroes of human freedom. In April 1975, after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring with tanks and installed a new puppet in power,  Havel (in Matt Welch's words )  " committed an act of

Family debts

US Someone recently emailed me this quite compelling explanation for why Standard & Poors downgraded US sovereign debt: • U.S. Tax revenue:  $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget:           $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt:             $1,650,000,000,000 • National debt:      $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut:      $38,500,000,000 Let's remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget: • Annual family income:                              $21,700 • Money the family spent:                           $38,200 • New debt on the credit card:                   $16,500 • Outstanding balance on the credit card:  $142,710 • Total budget cuts:                                         $385 Hey is someone reading my mail. EURO What we need now is for someone to do a similar thing with the Euro family debt . I'd like to see what Daddy Deutschland's debt position is if it stumps up for the debts of all its Euro children : Greece, Portugal and Ireland and its pr

Will the Carbon Tax enhance our economic freedom?

It seems that there are many benefits flowing to people who live in societies that value and encourage economic freedom  (lid dip to  Glenn Reynolds ).  A carbon tax seems inimical to more economic freedom. It raises the cost of energy. It requires a large and intrusive bureaucracy to collect and administer it. Business has more red tape to comply with. There are redistributions and reallocations of wealth that are susceptible to gaming. How can the risk of taking such backward steps in our economic freedoms be considered worth it for the seemingly very remote possibility that taxing carbon dioxide emissions might help slow global warming if other nations do it too? Especially whilst the rest of the world just looks on? Only people who put a nil or low value on economic freedom would be likely to treat such a trade-off as worthwhile. They do not seem to realise just what a valuable thing it is that they are imperilling with their fanciful hope of global climate salvation by intr

Taxing CO2 in Australia now is a really bad idea

If your objective is to save the planet, then this tax will  not help . If your objective is to create prosperity, then this tax  will help to impoverish us . Though if your objective is to increase the size and power of government, then this tax would have to be a winner. Here we are, yet again, accidentally having some easily accessible stuff that other nations are prepared to pay up for, and we decide it would be nice, in the name of helping Mother Earth, to deliberately make it more expensive for industries to set up or continue here. And we are going to make it more expensive now, before the rest of the world has done it too, to show the world how morally sophisticated we are, even when such sacrifice won't actually help the planet stay cool. Brave? Yes. Sensible? No. A carbon tax will inevitably cost us economically productive jobs. A carbon tax deliberately reduces our capacity to create wealth from using the most economically available resources to create goods a

Mad hatter bumps into ceiling at tea party

Whatever toxins may come along with it, the Tea Party movement has been a wonderful example of grass roots democracy in action in the flagship democracy. Citizens holding their overlords in government to account for their sense of entitlement and profligacy with the taxpayers' dime, is an empowering and encouraging prospect.  The Democrats former (and in many cases continuing) moral righteousness about Guantanamo, Global Warming, Iraq, Afghanistan and the well-being of workers, has not been met in office with any actions materially different from the previous Republican administration, even when the Dems controlled both the House and the Senate. Obamacare, the one possible legislative success of Obama's first 2 years, at the moment just looks like an even more gigantic bureaucratic fiscal snafu than usual, at a time when the US can least afford it. And America seems to have gone morally backwards in many areas under Obama, in spite of all the hope: more wars , more unemploye

25% of NSW now vote ALP: "a good outcome"

According to Labor electoral genius, House Government Whip,  former Minister of Defence and Federal member for the Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, this electoral result was " a good outcome ".  For once I find myself agreeing with this nepotistic, entitled, reality-challenged blowhard. Saturday's vote removing the Australian Labor Party from office in New South Wales was indeed a very good outcome for the people of this state. The bastards deserved everything the electorate gave them. They had become incapable of even understanding that being elected to government requires you, as a minimum, to believe in acting responsibly in the interests of the people you govern. It was not a victory of one view of what is in the best interests of the people over another such view, as is ordinarily the case in such battles in advanced democracies. It was more a crushing defeat of a party who didn't even know anymore that the interests of the people it governed mattered. The Union mo

Never fight a Land War in Asia ...

(... except when you have to ?) George Friedman in his peice at Stratfor wants this old and glib defeatist rubric (allegedly uttered by Douglas MacArthur to JFK and kinda quoted more recently in the movie " Princess Bride "), elevated to "a principle of U.S. foreign policy". It looks to me more like a thin and easy assertion of tactical rhetoric masquerading as grand strategy (how apt therefore that its source should be the egomaniacal MacArthur). The more compelling proposition is probably something more like: now that China is a real military threat to the US, a land war in Asia is more likely than ever to be a disaster. This is just a statement of the obvious. Friedman's (and MacArthur's) proposition however seems to wilfully elide some more important issues. Firstly, to publicly proclaim such a doctrine would be to unilaterally substantially weaken the US's ability to influence events in Asia. And that is just plain dumb. Secondly, it bespea

Govermentium

An inert but harmful and all pervasive heavy element consisting of constantly re-organising dense neutron clusters. It impedes, constricts and then suffocates almost everything it touches. It was  described in the literature in 2005, after observations of the automatonic responses of vast concentrations of peons combined with the recognition of the overwhelming atomic force of the moron.

Major Dick Winters has died.

Major Richard Winters of E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, passed away peacefully on 2 January 2011 He died in Pennsylvannia aged 92. He was a true leader and a hero . All who value the sacrifice and resolve of the generation who took on and defeated totalitarianism in the Second World War will mourn his passing. He is one of the finest representatives of that greatest generation. Most of us only knew him  through the magnificent TV mini-series " Band of Brothers " or the book of the same name on which it is based, which narrated the formation, training and actions of Easy Company in the 2nd World War. But we know him from there as the leader who 'hung tough' in the toughest of circumstances and showed us the true meaning and value of courage, loyalty and resourcefulness. I acknowledge my unbounded admiration for this man and celebrate his life as a testament to the lasting value of taking responsibility