The failure of communism should have been, after all, not just a turning point in geo-political power – the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact – but in modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy, about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power. Where was the discussion, the trenchant analysis, or the fundamental debate about how and why the collectivist solutions failed, which should have been so pervasive that it would have percolated down from the educated classes to the bright 18-year-olds? Fascism is so thoroughly (and, of course, rightly) repudiated that even the use of the word as a casual slur is considered slanderous, while communism, which enslaved more people for longer (and also committed mass murder), is regarded with almost sentimental condescension.

Is this because it was originally thought to be idealistic and well-intentioned? If so, then that in itself is a reason for examining its failure very closely. We need to know why a system that began with the desire to free people from their chains ended by imprisoning them behind a wall. Certainly we have had some great works of investigation into the Soviet gulags and the practices of the East German Stasi, but judging by our present political discourse, I think it is safe to say that the basic fallacies of the state socialist system have not really permeated through to public consciousness.

The answer to your question is because leftists are subversive idiots who want not a society of equals, but a means to take from those who have acquired wealth and success. That communism didn’t survive, or that its tenets worked to murder tens of millions of individuals doesn’t prove that it failed in the eyes of leftists. In fact, to many these things are a proof of success.

An insulin pump mistaken for a gun at LAX led officials to delay boarding and screening Friday morning at Terminal 4 as airport authorities searched for a woman who they thought had a weapon, law enforcement sources said.

We’d be safer with fucking kindergartners protecting us.

The Senate passed a sweeping new ethics bill on Thursday that would ban insider trading by members of Congress and require prompt disclosure of stock transactions by lawmakers and by thousands of officials in the executive branch of government.

Whether this is an “ethics bill” or not is questionable (can placing themselves on the same level as regular folk be seen as some sort of huge ethics victory?), but I’ll take it.

That was among the worst things I think I’ve ever seen in Congress. You took a whole series of statements out of context, with no context. … There is a whole bunch of things that I could say about what you just did, and maybe this is the way you do things, you know, in Idaho or wherever you’re from. But understand something. What I’ve done — I’m proud of the work that I’ve done as attorney general of the United States. And looked at fairly– I think that I’ve done, you know, a pretty good job. Have I been perfect? No. Have I made mistakes? Yes. Do I treat the members of this committee with respect? I always hope that I do. And what you have just done is, if nothing else, disrespectful. And if you don’t like me, that’s one thing, but you should respect the fact that I hold an office that is deserving of respect. And, you know, maybe you’re new to this committee. I don’t know. I don’t know how long you’ve been here. But my hope would be that, you know, we can get beyond that kind of interaction, that kind of treatment of a witness, whether it’s me or somebody else, because I think in some ways what you did was fundamentally unfair, just not right.

Respect me! I know that I’m here because it seems awfully clear that I royally fucked up in Fast and Furious and that it has cost many people their lives, but dammit, I have a title, and I deserve respect! In fact, I DEMAND it!

Shut the fuck up, you thin skinned idiot. Grow a pair and take responsibility for your utter lack of responsible oversight rather than deflect it via accusations of incivility. I don’t know how you fuckers in DC do shit, but when I fuck up, I go to jail, and respect is about the last thing I’m granted by anyone in the system.

A Salinas City Councilwoman will not face charges after someone stole a high power assault rifle from her home, Salinas Police said Wednesday.

According to Salinas Police, on January 24th, someone stole the weapon and $700 worth of jewelry from the home of Gloria DeLaRosa on the 700 block of St Michael Way. Because California Penal Code 30605(a) prohibits possession of an assault rifle in the State of California, Salinas Police Detectives and agents from the Bureaus of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) conducted an investigation.

The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office elected not to file charges against any persons involved based on the evidence available at this time.

Gee. A member of government not being subjected to the same rule of law that you or I would be. How fucking original.

First, why should reducing income inequality be a worthy goal? If we are concerned about the poor, then we should focus (as Rawls famously does) on improving their lot in absolute terms, regardless of the effect of such improvement on the gap between them and the rich. Again, this is common currency in academic circles, but I don’t hear anyone in our public debate making the point.

Second, conceding for the sake of argument that reduction of inequality is a worthy goal, why would increased taxes achieve that? I want to hear economists on this, but it seems pretty obvious to me that tax increases cannot reduce inequality unless we also eliminate corporate welfare and other forms of unjustified and unproductive public spending. Moreover, surely a concern with the public debt animates the call for higher taxes. Exactly how will servicing the debt reduce inequality? For higher taxes to reduce inequality, taxes should be used to transfer wealth to the poor, not to the likes of Solyndra (I’m ignoring here the dynamic counterproductive effects of wealth transfers.). Yet, if the President gets his way, it is at least dubious that this is what will occur in the current political and economic climate.

Exactly right. I’ve said it before that any idea that an effective way to deal with poverty is via taxing the rich is nothing short of envy. It’s not based on a philosophy that sympathizes with the poor, but is rooted in a desire to have what the rich have. Were their focus on helping the poor, it wouldn’t necessarily, as Obama and movements like Occupy insist, mean closing the income gap between the rich and poor; raising the standard of living for the poor would be seen as a good in itself regardless of whether it closes any gap in wealth. In a complex economy which constantly allocates wealth based on billions of consensual transactions between consenting parties, helping the poor raise their standard of living, and closing a gap in supposed inequality are completely separate issues.

Anyone who is under the impression that universities are concerned with free speech is a fool. They will claim to be champions of free speech until someone wants to say something with which The Enlightened Ones™ have philosophical issues. Then they simply create “free speech zones”, areas, generally tucked away where few people pass, reserved for people to speak their mind to their heart’s content. And here I was thinking that the whole breadth of this great country was a free speech zone.

It all goes back to the leftist mistrust of the free market. Though generally associated with economic transactions, the “market” is much larger than that. It affects everything, and everything that happens in society happens within the market. What is and what isn’t acceptable speech is also something that is ultimately determined by the market over time. What rules like anti-free speech rules demonstrate is that some are unable to accept that people in society are perfectly capable of coming to conclusions about the acceptability of speech, and the social punishments that result from engaging in such speech, in a far more comprehensive manner than some committee bent on forming their perfect little utopia. If the university is doing its job, and by looking at what universities have often produced I have my doubts, students would slam the fuck out of anyone who would dare say that the holocaust is made up by a conspiracy of Jews determined to rule the world, using their intellect, without need of administrative rule making. I myself, during my duties as a composition professor at the University of Kentucky, saw students effectively beating down nonsense without the need for any outside direction. When a student would interject in to a conversation something idiotic, such as the idea that homosexuals ought not be able to get married because the government would be deprived of tax money due to their newfound ability to file as married, other students stepped in without so much as a giggle from me or anyone else who knows the utter stupidity in that idea. But leftists don’t believe in the wisdom of the market, and think themselves, or those they appoint for the task, more capable of defining good and bad than an entire society of people who wish nothing more than to go about their day, politely engaging others without outside interference to tell them exactly how they can and cannot do it.

The ACLU yesterday filed a lawsuit against various agencies of the Obama administration — the Justice and Defense Departments and the CIA — over their refusal to disclose any information about the assassination of American citizens. In October, the ACLU filed a FOIA request demanding disclosure of the most basic information about the CIA’s killing of 3 American citizens in Yemen: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan, killed by missiles fired by a U.S. drone in September, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, killed by another drone attack two weeks later.

The ACLU’s FOIA request sought merely to learn the legal and factual basis for these killings — meaning: tell us what legal theories you’ve adopted to secretly target U.S. citizens for execution, and what factual basis did you have to launch these specific strikes? The DOJ and CIA responded not only by refusing to provide any of this information, but refused even to confirm if any of the requested documents exist; in other words, as the ACLU put it yesterday, “these agencies are saying the targeted killing program is so secret that they can’t even acknowledge that it exists.” That refusal is what prompted yesterday’s lawsuit (in December, the New York Times also sued the Obama administration after it failed to produce DOJ legal memoranda “justifying” the assassination program in response to a FOIA request from reporters Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, but the ACLU’s lawsuit seeks disclosure of both the legal and factual bases for these executions).

And this is AFTER President Obama bloviated triumphantly about killing an American citizen extra-judiciously on THE FUCKING JAY LENO SHOW.